Russia should chart own political reform

WASHINGTON — Isn’t it time we just left Russia alone?

Isn’t it time we stopped trying to stuff an unpalatable “democracy” down the Russians’ throats and left them to stew in their beloved vodka?

Sure, Vladimir Putin and his party, United Russia, won a quintessentially dirty election early this month. Sure, opposition leaders were thrown in jail, voting was rigged, and Putin’s “landslide” was utterly predictable and utterly duplicitous.

But you have to hand it to youthful-looking, athletic Vladimir! I’m originally from Chicago, where we know how to stage an election and keep ourselves in power forever, but the Russian “KGB president” has outdone even us at our wiliest.

So the stories about the authoritarian Putin are clearly true. (Some wags are calling his post-Gorbachev and post-Yeltsin period of rule a “transition to autocracy.”) He has just announced that Dmitry Medvedev, the pro-Western liberal who has been Kremlin chief of staff, will be his candidate to become Russia’s next president in March. That means Putin can then become prime minister, awaiting his turn to come back as president.

But does that mean that we should get all upset with the Russians again as they approach this new era? That we should set up more anti-ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic (supposedly against Iran, but perceived as threatening by Russia) and excoriate them on the world stage? It does not.

In fact, though such ideas are anathema to Washington, we ought to look at Russia pragmatically and see that Putin has actually transformed the country economically, if not politically. Then we ought to take a deep breath and opt for a “time-out” on aggressive American foreign policy.

In case we Americans don’t remember, after the Soviet Union collapsed officially in 1991, American economists and developmentalists such as Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard — and the U.S. government — intervened on many levels to “democratize” Russia. The idea of giving out “shares” in the big state factories to workers — which ended only with the entire state in the hands of greedy Russian oligarchs and the people further impoverished — was essentially an American one. Our first “Iraq” disaster!

Profound resentment

Indeed, it is the memory of this time — and our preaching about Russia and democracy — that led directly to the profound resentment of all things Western sweeping the country today.

But whether we like it or not, the fact remains that when KGB maven Putin took over from the two early “democratizers,” Russia suddenly changed.

When I was last in Russia three years ago, I asked the head of the American Chamber of Commerce if there was any notable commercial activity outside of the soaring oil industry. “No,” he said. The growing wealth was all oil, gas and minerals — and thus constituted a wealth that could not truly build a stable middle-class society in Russia.

And today? Putin’s blend of political autocracy (he rules supreme through his network of KGB officer-cronies) and economic reform (oil is king, but now for the first time, small- and medium-sized businesses are growing) is working.

A paradigm-shattering new book by longtime Russia scholar Anders Aslund, “Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed,” tells the largely unrevealed story.

Russia has surged over the last nine years with an average annual expansion of 6.7 percent growth, the book relates, having at the same time accumulated the world’s third-largest holdings of foreign currency. In addition to its overwhelming oil income, Russia now has a total of 9 million business firms, which means one enterprise per 16 people, or approximately as many as in Western European countries.

Above all, Aslund reports — and this is the amazing part — “Russia is swiftly becoming a middle-class society with a middle class of at least 20 to 25 percent of the population.” The percentage of Russian college-age youth that pursues higher education has nearly doubled, from 25 percent in 1989 to 47 percent in 2005. And 84 percent of farmland is now privately owned.

The great reformer president from 1985 to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, also argued after the election early this month to give Putin a chance. And why not? The Russians are doing development a different way — so what? In fact, they’re doing it in the way most of the recently successful developed countries (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Oman, Tunisia, etc.) have done it. Economic reform first, political reform second.

Universal Press Syndicate