Fledgling Democracies

The Snow Leopard, in this case, signifies South Ossetia, about which Joshua Kucera writes in Slate’s feature called Dispatches: Notes From Different Corners of the World. So far, Kucera has posted four installments in a series on the former Soviet Union, and they prove a really fascinating glimpse into the world of shoddy spies, propaganda and other facets of life in South Ossetia, Azerbaijan and beyond.

Global Voices Online reports that bloggers in Uzbekistan have spent the last couple weeks questioning the logic of its leaders, whose over-the-top zeal for change is seen by some as cause for alarm.

The new government in the former Soviet republic has renamed streets and squares, dismantled monuments, changed the alphabet and even adjusted the calendar to cleanse it if of celebrations linked to Soviet times.

One blogger on neweurasia.net sees it this way:

I look at the calendar and I’m really surprised to see the governments trying to change the history and eradicate the memory of the past… The Labor Day, May 1, that used to be widely celebrated [in Soviet times], is totally forgotten in the country. However, those citizens, who lived during the Soviet time, still remember this day…

It’s an interesting quandary: at what point does well-intentioned change start to resemble unhealthy denial of a country’s difficult history?

Yesterday I posed several questions to James Goldgeier, a Russia - U.S. relations expert and professor of political science and international politics at George Washington University. James is also Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He’s written extensively on international relations and has co-authored several books, including Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War and America Between the Wars: from 11/9 to 9/11.

Click below for audio.
James Goldgeier audio

Interview Transcript:

Jim Goldgeier is professor of political science and international politics at George Washington University and he’s also Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. I asked Jim how Russia has managed to make itself an international presence again, and just how much of that has to do, in large part, with the posturing of the Putin administration.

Well I think President Putin was very successful in recasting the situation, making a claim for Russia’s position in world affairs. Now he was certainly helped dramatically by the huge rise in energy prices. That has made a huge difference, you know, when Boris Yeltsin was president of Russia the price of oil was $11 a barrel.

Unfortunately for Russia, there’s still huge potential question marks: this is not the Soviet Union again, it doesn’t have an ideology that people worldwide are interested in, it doesn’t have a military that can project very far, it has severe demographic problems. So there are lots of reasons why Russia isn’t as much of a major power as it might look given the optics that have been created by President Putin.

Is it safe to say that perhaps the most volatile situation for Russia at the moment is the conflict with Georgia?

Yeah, the Russia-Georgia situation is very dangerous, and you have two regions within Georgia that are part of what are called, in that part of the world, frozen conflicts, that is conflicts that aren’t resolved, two secessionist regions that Georgia does not want to see become independent. It’s not clear what Russia really wants other than to maintain conflict there as a way of undermining the Georgian government, and it’s all caught up now in the question of whether or not Georgia can move on the path of an increasingly Westward orientation at least with respect, for example, to joining NATO.

What do you expect US-Russia relations to look like under new administrations in both countries?

You know a lot I think depends on who the new president of the U.S. is. Certainly John McCain’s rhetoric about Russia is quite dramatic. John McCain really has been talking about his antipathy for the authoritarianism that has developed in Russia. John McCain, for example, has suggested that Russia should be kicked out of the G8 group of eight advanced countries. We don’t really know too much about President Obama’s strategies regarding Russia, you know, if he were president. I think, probably as a democratic president, he would have to take some stance on the questions of human rights and democracy in Russia so at the end of the day, perhaps a McCain or an Obama wouldn’t be that far apart as president.

Do you expect the new president, Medvedev, will have any real autonomy with Putin as prime minister? To what extent is he likely to defer to Putin?

Well we don’t know yet. It’s a very bizarre setup; having these two at the top. It doesn’t seem like it would be very stable for very long. You really do need one leader. I think we have to go on the assumption that Putin is still the leader. I mean he created Medvedev and put Medvedev in this presidency, and I think until we see otherwise we have to assume Putin is still calling the shots in Russia.

And finally, the very restrictive law passed in 2006 to regulate NGOs in the country, what effect has that had?

Well the big fear within Russia, especially after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine back in 2004, was you know could something like that happen in Russia, could you have people, sort of civil society out on the streets protesting the rigging of an election and the Russian government since the Orange Revolution has tried to do everything it can to make sure that you wouldn’t have that kind of scenario within Russia.

You know, one of the arguments Russia made was that it was external involvement in Ukraine that had helped promote the development of Ukrainian civil society and I think that you know, it has had a chilling effect. There are still outside western organizations that operate within Russia and I think we’ll continue to see that but everybody knows that the political space is much more constricted and contracted than it was certainly in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin when Western groups were welcomed within Russia.

Thanks so much for taking these questions, you’ve been really helpful.

Good, great to talk with you.

What’s a world leader without a video crush? Though I’d hate to think somewhere a McCain girl is hard at work on her YouTube submission.

Russia celebrated Victory Day yesterday with a military parade through Red Square, and the NY Times coverage of the event focuses on the wonderful paradoxes the spectacle provided, as Soviet-era symbolism was trotted out to march for a Russia determined to modernize.

The reporter does a great job setting the scene, and also provides useful background info, but the last several paragraphs absolutely make the story. Warning: gentle mockery of the physical condition of Russian soldiers (and their equipment) follows.

But the parade, broadcast on television here as a national triumph, also offered sights of the mixed condition of the once vaunted armed forces under Kremlin command. Several of the infantry units, including marine and airborne units, were staffed with lean and fit young men who marched with bearing and precision. Others included troops who appeared to be in only fair condition, and several of the officers leading formations past the two Russian leaders were visibly overweight.

The United States expressed no alarm over the parade. Russia has become a leading global arms exporter again, but its wares are almost all items designed decades ago. A Pentagon spokesman, echoing a view common among military analysts, had characterized the planned military review as a hollow show of dated gear bearing fresh coats of paint.

‘If they wish to take out their old equipment and take it for a spin and check it out,’ said the spokesman, Geoff Morrell, ‘they’re more than welcome to do so.’

The Prague Watchdog has a really intriguing interview with former journalist Timur Aliyev, who has joined the (pro-Moscow) administration of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, regarded by many as a ruthless war criminal.

Aliyev’s situation, and the subsequent interview, are confounding since he advocated an independent Chechnya for many years. The interviewer takes him to task for accepting a position with the very regime that seeks to quell the independence movement using all means of brutality, and presses him to explain what could’ve prompted such a change of heart.

Aliyev’s responses are disheartening for anyone with some faith in the power of NGOs. He said:

And for about one and a half years now my own experience has been telling me that at present it’s impossible to change anything in the situation that has developed both in Chechnya and in Russia as a whole if one remains within the sector of non-governmental organizations. In other words, that sector is a resource with limited possibilities, and its impact on society and the power of government tends towards zero. I’ve long believed that it has exhausted itself, and about a year and a half ago I started to think about finding new and more effective methods of influencing public life and the state.

There’s more:

I’ve been associating with our [NGO] activists for quite a long time, I know them well, have worked in that sector myself. In the people who concentrate there I never saw a desire to influence anything – and not only that, but even an idea that might make such social forces and organizations necessary.

Many simply used the NGOs as a platform to promote their own personal careers, and working with such people made it difficult to achieve results of any kind.

Ouch.

In what could be a bad sign of things to come as Dmitry Medvedev settles in as President, the State Department revealed yesterday that Russia has expelled two Americans from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, though they offered no public explanation as to why.

From the International Herald Tribune: “No one at the State Department would speculate about the reasons for the expulsions, although the United States has reportedly expelled a handful of Russians in recent years in little-noted diplomatic dust-ups.”

RIA Novosti (Russian News & Information Agency) political commentator Maxim Krans offers an interesting commentary on a recent World Public Opinion poll that found 44 percent of Russians believe the authorities have the right to control the media to preserve stability, while 69 percent consider Russia’s press to be free. Pollsters even found a significant number of respondents who believe the country’s media has too much freedom.

The United States’ plans to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic have come under fire from former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who doesn’t buy Washington’s justification that its intent is only to counter threats from the likes of Iran.

From the AFP story: “The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently,” he told the Daily Telegraph in an interview conducted in Paris. “Every US president has to have a war.”

There was no mention of Gorbachev’s thoughts on the perceived anti-democratic measures Putin, et al have taken.

Moscow is preparing to inaugurate incoming president Dmitry Medvedev in a ceremony at Red Square Wednesday.

[Medvedev is the subject of a great photo essay on the Discovery Institute's Real Russia Project blog. Take a look - really nice shots.]

This Moscow Times story has a rundown on what the inaugaration ceremony and Victory Day parade (scheduled for Friday) will consist of.

Interesting tidbits:

• “Once Medvedev has assumed his duties, one of his first acts as president is expected to be the appointment of his old boss, Vladimir Putin, to the position of prime minister.”

• “One diplomat who plans to attend is outgoing U.S. Ambassador William Burns, according to a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman. Last week, Burns had his confirmation hearings for his appointment as undersecretary of state for political affairs — the No. 3 job in the U.S. State Department — and he is holding his going-away party Tuesday night. By chance, Burns’ attendance at the inauguration will be one of his last acts as ambassador to Russia.”

• “Georgia has no plans to snub its invitation to the ceremony, despite rising tensions with Moscow over the breakaway republic of Abkhazia, a senior Georgian diplomat said. ‘We are a normal government, and we do not need to resort to this kind of protest,’ Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze told Interfax on Friday. ‘There are plenty of other ways to express protest, unease, dissatisfaction and demands.’”

• “Intermittent showers have been forecast for Wednesday, but planes armed with special chemicals are ready to stop rain from spoiling the ceremony, as well as Friday’s Victory Day parade.”