Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Russia Presents Test for Obama

Russia Presents Test for Obama. By Michael A. Fletcher and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post, Sunday, July 5, 2009

President Obama is scheduled to leave Washington tonight on a week-long trip that will help determine whether his personal popularity and fresh policy approaches can yield concrete results on difficult issues including arms control, missile defense and nuclear nonproliferation.

After seeking support for U.S. policies from allies in Europe and appealing for a new relationship with the Muslim world in Cairo on previous trips, Obama arrives in Moscow tomorrow for his first foray into high-profile, nuts-and-bolts negotiations with the leader of a nation that might be deemed an unfriendly rival.

On Wednesday, Obama will travel to L'Aquila, Italy, where he will meet with leaders of the world's major industrial powers. Climate change and the continued shaky global economy are expected to dominate the agenda. He is also to meet with Pope Benedict XVI.

On Friday, Obama will go to Ghana, where he is expected to highlight that nation's burgeoning democratic tradition and to deliver a speech on his administration's goals for the developing world.

Shortly after taking office, the Obama administration made clear that it wants to "reset" relations between the United States and Russia, which had deteriorated under President George W. Bush. During Obama's first meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in London in April, the two agreed to a broad statement of cooperation on numerous issues.

Both the White House and the Kremlin hope to build on that with a summit in Moscow, and agreements on subjects including Afghanistan and nuclear proliferation are expected to be unveiled. But fundamental differences remain on key issues that have strained U.S.-Russian relations.

Medvedev wants U.S. pledges to scrap a missile defense system in Eastern Europe and to rule out military alliances with the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine. Obama wants Russia to back tough sanctions against Iran if diplomatic efforts to curb its nuclear program fail. Neither president has indicated any willingness to yield.

"We're not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense," said Michael McFaul, special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs. "We're going to define our national interests, and by that I also mean the interests of our allies in Europe with reference to these two particular questions."

Sergei Prikhodko, Medvedev's chief foreign policy adviser, struck a similar tone. "Saying that it will be easy to move forward would mean deluding ourselves," he told reporters. "The domestic agendas of both leaders and their agendas in dealings with allies do not always coincide. Sometimes, they contradict each other directly or indirectly. But the question is . . . whether we want to expand mutual understanding or focus on defending our own positions on sensitive issues."

Obama is scheduled to meet on Tuesday with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whom analysts called the preeminent power in Russian politics. Obama told the Associated Press last week that the former Russian president must move beyond a Cold War approach to relations with the United States.

The willingness of Obama and Medvedev to compromise will be tested when they discuss a treaty to replace the landmark START I nuclear arms control pact, which expires in December.

The United States and Russia control more than 90 percent of the world's nuclear weapons. After three months of talks, negotiators have agreed to modest reductions below the limits of 1,700 to 2,200 warheads established by the 2002 Treaty of Moscow. But they remain deadlocked on how to count and limit the number of "delivery systems," or missiles and heavy bombers, that each nation can keep.

Medvedev publicly declared two weeks ago that no treaty is possible unless "the United States lifts Russia's concerns" about its plans to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Obama has not decided what to do about the system, said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to discuss internal deliberations publicly.

The United States is reviewing other options for missile defense and has tried unsuccessfully to engage the Kremlin on the issue, he said. "We're serious about cooperation on missile defense with the Russians," he said. "But the sense is the Russians are still nervous and don't trust us."

Russian officials have publicly endorsed the idea of cooperation on missile defense, but have called on Obama to abandon the Polish-Czech plan first and emphasized they want to be included from the ground up, beginning with joint assessment of threats. The two sides have discussed opening a Moscow-based joint data exchange center.

Obama hopes to gain Russian cooperation on other topics, including energy efficiency and climate change. Russia is one of the world's largest energy producers, but it is also a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, behind the United States and China, according to the Center for American Progress.

The summit is expected to produce a deal allowing the United States to ship weapons to Afghanistan through Russia. The two sides may also agree to share intelligence and fight Afghanistan drug trafficking. Officials said the sides are also working to revive a pact on civilian nuclear energy cooperation that the Bush administration suspended after Russia's war last year with Georgia, and to strengthen military ties, also downgraded after the war.

Some business deals, including one involving Boeing, are also expected, analysts said, but they could be overshadowed by disappointment over Putin's decision to withdraw Russia's application for World Trade Organization membership last month.

Obama also is scheduled to deliver a speech in Moscow in which aides say he will try to dispel the feeling in Russia that America's self-interest lies in a weak Russia.

"This is not 1974. This is not just where we go do an arms control agreement with the Soviets, but that we have a multidimensional relationship with the Russian government and with the Russian people," McFaul said.

Pan reported from Moscow. Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan contributed to this report.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The West must reaffirm its support for Georgia

Russia Is Back on the Warpath. By CATHY YOUNG
The West must reaffirm its support for Georgia.
The Wall Street Journal, Jul 02, 2009, p A11
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124649267530483121.html

With President Barack Obama's trip to Moscow on Monday, you might expect Russia to avoid stirring up any trouble. Yet the Russian media are now abuzz with speculation about a new war in Georgia, and some Western analysts are voicing similar concerns. The idea seems insane. Nonetheless, the risk is real.

One danger sign is persistent talk of so-called Georgian aggression against the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Russia recognized as independent states after the war last August. "Georgia is rattling its weapons . . . and has not given up on attempts to solve its territorial problems by any means," Gen. Nikolai Makarov, who commanded Russian troops in Georgia in 2008, told the Novosti news agency on June 17. Similar warnings have been aired repeatedly by the state-controlled media.

Independent Russian commentators, such as columnist Andrei Piontkovsky, note that this has the feel of a propaganda campaign to prepare the public for a second war. Most recently, Moscow has trotted out a Georgian defector, Lt. Alik D. Bzhania, who claims that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "intends to restart the war."

Yet Russia is the one currently engaged in large-scale military exercises in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and adjacent regions. Russia has also kicked out international observers from the area. On June 15, Moscow vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution renewing the mandate of U.N. monitors in Abkhazia because it mentioned an earlier resolution affirming Georgia's territorial integrity. Negotiations to extend the mission of monitors for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have broken down thanks to Russian obstruction. Now, 225 European Union monitors are the only international presence on the disputed borders.

The expulsion of neutral observers seems odd if Russia is worried about Georgian aggression. But it makes sense if Russia is planning an attack.

What would the Kremlin gain? A crushing victory in Georgia would depose the hated Mr. Saakashvili, give Russia control of vital transit routes for additional energy resources that could weaken its hold on the European oil and gas markets, humiliate the U.S., and distract Russians from their economic woes. Mr. Piontkovsky also believes the war drive comes from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is anxious to reassert himself as supreme leader.

Still, the costs would be tremendous. Last year the Kremlin repaired some of the damage to its relations with Europe and the U.S. by portraying the invasion of Georgia as a response to a unique crisis, not part of an imperial strategy. Another war would cripple Russia's quest for respectability in the civilized world, including its vanity project of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

And after the patriotic fervor wears off, domestic discontent would likely follow. Moreover, Russia would almost certainly find itself mired in a long guerilla war. This would further destabilize a region where Russia's own provinces, Ingushetia and Dagestan, are plagued by violent turmoil.

Given all this, a war seems unlikely. What's more probable is that Russia will seek to destabilize Georgia without military action. This saber-rattling may be meant to boost Georgian opposition to Mr. Saakashvili.

Still, Moscow's actions are not always rational. If the pro-war faction believes that the Western response to an assault on Georgia would be weak and half-hearted, it could be emboldened. In a June 25 column on the EJ.ru Web site, Russian journalist Yulia Latynina writes that the probability of the war "depends solely on the Kremlin's capacity to convince itself that it can convince the world that the war is its enemies' fault."

That is why it's essential for the United States and the EU to respond now -- by increasing their non-military presence in Georgia, expressing a strong commitment to Georgian sovereignty, and reminding Russia of the consequences of aggression. Such a statement from President Obama in Moscow would go a long way toward preventing the possibility of another tragedy.

Ms. Young is a columnist for RealClearPolitics.com and the author of "Growing Up in Moscow" (Ticknor & Fields, 1989).

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Views from India: Why Manmohan Singh is in Yekaterinburg?

Talking Heads: Why Manmohan Singh is in Yekaterinburg? By P. Stobdan
IDSA, June 16, 2009

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is attending a slew of Russian hosted high profile meetings including those of the SCO and BRIC in Yekaterinburg which would be viewed keenly by most international watchers. The SCO, keenly nurtured by Russia and China as an exclusive nucleus, had hitherto excluded those with observer status from its core deliberations. The forum became popular as an embryonic counterpoise to the United States after 2005 when it bluntly issued a quit notice to the US from Central Asia and decided to salvage an assortment of autocrats being ostracized by the West. Since then, even Iran has been seeking shelter under the SCO auspices.

Why has Russia changed the summit format this time around to include Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia in the core deliberations? While it reflects the changing international realignment, the spin now emerging clearly indicates that Russia is counter-strategizing to deal with global issues or at the least it is unwilling to concede the challenges being posed by NATO. The rift with the trans-Atlantic alliance continues as Moscow has rejected the idea of exerting pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme in exchange for the US abandoning its planned missile defense system in Eastern Europe. For its part, NATO has not abandoned its quest to bring Ukraine and Georgia within its fold. The standoff over Georgia also continues.

It is also clear that Russia’s showdown with Georgia has changed the rules of the game. Moscow had lost diplomatic face not only in Europe but also in Asia. Many of Russia’s friends including SCO members were incensed by its adventurism towards former-republics, including the way in which it had been using gas as an instrument for arm-twisting. China and the Central Asian states were wary of Russia’s action and as such they did not endorse Moscow’s call for recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossestia during the last SCO summit in Dushanbe. The adroit Chinese were certainly not keen to pick a fight at the risk of ruining relations with the West. Moscow has also perhaps realized that it is fast losing influence in the Eurasian space, especially given that the global meltdown has made Central Asian states more dependent on China. The former Soviet republics are relying more on Chinese driven institutions than moribund organization led by Russia. Unlike Russia, China has showed no inclination for prematurely confronting the West. Instead, it was cautious about admitting Iran into the SCO as a full member and may have moderated Central Asian behavior to the chagrin of Moscow.

It is against the backdrop of this trend of Russia losing economic, political and cultural attractiveness vis-à-vis China that we should see Moscow’s attempt to bring India fully into the Eurasian space. Another reliable partner is Russia’s old trusted ally - Mongolia. India’s inclusion is also linked to the global financial crisis. Both Russia and China have been attempting to evolve a fresh financial architecture, including a proposal for a new global currency to replace the dollar as a way to preempt another financial meltdown. Russia hopes that Brazil, India and China would join hands as part of the BRIC forum to push the idea further.

The SCO meeting would be significant especially since it is being held against the backdrop of the new American Af-Pak Plan and Obama’s attempt to muster the support of regional powers to make his Afghan policy a success. The SCO, under Russia’s presidency, has been talking about Afghanistan more seriously than before mainly because the focus of geopolitics has shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan – Russia’s traditional backyard. In fact, the high profile March 2009 Conference in Moscow clearly set the stage for the SCO to play a stepped-up role, when it announced a roadmap to deal with increasing security concerns emanating from Afghanistan. It called for comprehensive cooperation against terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime. The Russians suspect that the global economic downturn may have had an impact on the Taliban as well and thus strengthen the drugs trade. But SCO efforts are being hampered by the NATO presence in Afghanistan. The Russians claim that Afghan opium production increased 44 times after NATO and US troops were deployed in the region and since the withdrawal of Russian border guards from Tajik-Afghan border in 2005.

Moscow has shown willingness to provide transit routes for NATO shipment across Russia and Central Asia to Afghanistan. But this is being downplayed by the US which prefers to rely upon Pakistani supply routes. Attempts would be made by the SCO to bring Afghanistan within its fold this time. As the US intends to deal with and not confront the Taliban, Moscow fears that there will be a power vacuum in Afghanistan upsetting the existing balance. Some SCO declarations may come as music to Indian ears, since they would be a contrast to the NATO’s military approach and are likely to insist upon Pakistan stopping terrorism emanating from its soil. For New Delhi, the SCO may provide a useful platform to counter the negative fallout for Indian interests emerging from the Af-Pak plan. India had earlier pushed for a policy that integrates development projects in Afghanistan with security initiatives and has also insisted that there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Taliban.

It is also likely that Russia is once again trying to use its leverage to soften India with regard to ongoing tension with Pakistan. Putin made a failed attempt earlier to bring together Vajpayee and Musharraf at a similar summit held in Almaty in 2002. Vajpayee did not relent.

The SCO carries a range of ambitious goals under its charter as letter of intent, including the development of an energy club, an inter-bank consortium, and cultural centres to set up an SCO university. But all in all, its strength is slightly exaggerated. The grouping suffers from nebulous internal contradictions. Everyone plays a game under the SCO template. There are internal discords and competing interests. Behind the SCO façade both China and Russia are competing for energy deals with Central Asian states. And like in Africa, Chinese firms are buying resource mines by befriending the region’s corrupt regimes, and in the process is fuelling corruption and undermining a host of environmental and labour standards.

The importance of India is occasionally aired by the SCO members, but in reality Russians and Central Asians only pay lip service while China effectively scuttles anything positive involving India in the Eurasian space. Decades of Indian efforts for an energy deal with Central Asian states remain frustrated. Except on security issues there is little that India can achieve in the SCO. The danger is that though the SCO is not a military block, it is increasingly getting securitized due to stepped-up co-operation to fight terrorism through intelligence consultations and large-scale military exercises. Many have dubbed it as an Asian NATO.

There is nothing wrong in Manmohan Singh attending the Yekaterinburg meeting even if it is a low diplomatic parade. It is also alright if the Prime Minister wants to dispel the myth that he only cares for Washington. In any event, India stands to gain by being courted by other centres of power rather than placing all its eggs in the American basket.

Prof. P. Stobdan is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Group of Friends of the UN Secretary General on the UN Observer Mission in Georgia Resolution

Joint Statement by the Group of Friends of the UN Secretary General on the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia Resolution
Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of the Spokesman
US State Dept, Washington, DC, Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:35:10 -0500


Following is the text of a Joint Statement by the Spokespersons of the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and France as members of the Group of Friends of the UN Secretary General.

Begin Text:

We deeply regret Russia’s decision to veto a resolution on the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), which has resulted in the termination of the Security Council mandate for the Mission after 15 years of valuable service providing military transparency on the ground, promoting the human rights of the local population, and seeking to create conditions for the voluntary, safe, and dignified return of internally displaced persons and refugees. We note that Russia had twice accepted a reference to UNSCR 1808 since the August conflict, in resolutions 1839 and 1866. The closure of the UN mission, like that of the OSCE mission, is a setback to international efforts to resolve this conflict.

We call on all parties with forces on the ground to exercise the utmost restraint and to abide by the August 12 and September 8 ceasefire agreements. We call on all participants in the Geneva talks to commit themselves to continuing efforts to find a peaceful and political resolution to the conflict and to alleviate the plight of refugees and IDPs. We reaffirm our firm support for the European Union Monitoring Mission.

We also reiterate our strong support for Georgia's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.
###

PRN: 2009/602

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Putinism's Piranha Stage: Russia's prime minister turns on his loyal friends

Putinism's Piranha Stage. By BRET STEPHENS
Russia's prime minister turns on his loyal friends.
WSJ, Jun 09, 2009

Time was when Oleg Deripaska was Vladimir Putin's best pet. The Russian metals magnate, a skiing buddy of Mr. Putin, was supposed to be the money behind Russia's 2014 Olympic dream. He was big on "patriotic" activities like supporting the Bolshoi. And he had taken the lesson of the ghosts of oligarchs past, which was never to question Mr. Putin's methods, much less his grip on power.

So what was Mr. Deripaska doing last week in the crummy little town of Pikalyovo, 130 miles from St. Petersburg, being led around one of his cement factories by a fire-breathing Mr. Putin, who likened the tycoon to a "cockroach" on Russian national TV?

"You have made thousands of people hostage to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism -- or maybe simply your trivial greed," Mr. Putin berated Mr. Deripaska, before forcing him to pay all outstanding wages and sign a contract for the factory. "Where is the social responsibility of business?" Following which the Russian prime minister was greeted by cheers from the grateful workers.

Welcome to the third stage of Putinism. In Stage One, Mr. Putin played the role of the determined technocratic modernizer who wanted to do nothing more than impose the rule of law on a young democracy spinning into anarchy. This stage ended in October 2003, with the arrest and subsequent conviction and imprisonment of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on dubious charges of tax evasion and fraud.

In Stage Two, Mr. Putin dispensed with the technocratic mien and, Bonaparte-like, effectively crowned himself czar, surrounded by a new breed of loyal oligarchs and ex-KGB cronies. They generously help themselves to other people's investments, foreign energy companies especially. This stage lasted as long as the rise in energy prices, culminating with last year's invasion of Georgia.

Now we're at Stage Three, in which Mr. Putin morphs into Hugo Chávez, as high-handed as before but with a populist twist. This is the stage in which guys like Mr. Deripaska allow themselves to be publicly humiliated by Mr. Putin, thinking they're taking one for the team when, in fact, they're taking it in the neck.

Here you must be thinking: It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Mr. Deripaska rose out of the so-called Aluminum Wars of the 1990s, in which battles for corporate control were waged at a price of dozens of lives. He was once denied a U.S. entry visa "amid concerns about the accuracy of statements he made" to the FBI, according to a 2007 story in this newspaper. (Bob Dole's law firm later resolved the problem for him.) Last year, Mr. Deripaska dismissed issues of press freedoms and democracy as so much humbug, while insisting that "it is a wrong representation of Russia that everything is conducted through the Kremlin. We have a very liberal economy. You can do what you want."

Whoops. Since offering that sage comment, the Russian economy has tanked, unemployment has jumped, the flow of credit has seized up, and Mr. Deripaska has lost about 90% of his previously estimated worth. Small factory towns like Pikalyovo have become the locus of potential civil unrest. In December, riot police had to be flown from Moscow to Vladivostok to deal with protests there. Last week's protest caused a traffic jam stretching a couple hundred miles.

Barring an improbable surge in commodity prices, it's only going to get worse. And while Mr. Putin can play the hero in Pikalyovo, he won't be able to do it for hundreds of other similarly situated towns, even if he winds up hounding Mr. Deripaska and friends into bankruptcy.
So what comes next? Conceivably, Mr. Putin could allow Mr. Deripaska and other oligarchs to rationalize their businesses through a combination of sales and closures. That's about as likely as the Obama administration choosing not to run GM.

More likely, Mr. Putin will try to harness anti-oligarch sentiments by expropriating their assets, keeping the factories running, and getting the state to purchase their output with increasingly worthless rubles. Inflation in Russia is already at 14%; he might gamble that Russians will put up with a spell of hyperinflation until the global economy recovers or a Middle East crisis sends oil prices soaring. (Look for Russia to play an especially unhelpful role vis-à-vis Iran.)

That's the system by which the Soviet Union carried on decade after dreary decade, the only difference being that the old Soviet leadership was sustained by sealed borders, a huge army, foreign adventurism, ideological confidence, and a massive apparatus of fear. Russia probably won't go that way, but don't discount the possibility.

In college I knew a guy who stocked his fish tank with goldfish and piranhas. First the piranhas ate the goldfish. It was horrible to watch. Then he stopped feeding the piranhas, so they ate each other. This was more interesting since there was no fish to feel sorry for. Finally one piranha was left. I don't remember my classmate restocking the tank. The champion piranha starved. This is the theory and logic of third-stage Putinism.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

WaPo: Once again Russia amasses troops and stages provocations

Another Summer in Georgia. WaPo Editorial
Once again Russia amasses troops and stages provocations.
Thursday, June 4, 2009

A YEAR AGO, Russian military maneuvers and provocations of the former Soviet republic of Georgia caused a couple of astute observers to predict that Moscow was laying the groundwork for a military invasion of its democratic and pro-Western neighbor. The warnings were laughed off -- until Russian forces poured across Georgia's borders on the night of Aug. 7, routing the Georgian army and driving thousands of ethnic Georgians from two breakaway provinces. Ten months later, with another summer approaching, Russia is once again mounting provocations on the ground and in diplomatic forums; once again it has scheduled a large military training exercise for July in the region bordering Georgia.

Could Vladimir Putin be contemplating another military operation to finish off the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili -- whom Mr. Putin once vowed to "hang by his balls"? Once again, the scenario is easy to dismiss: The Russian leadership, after all, is engaged in an effort to "reset" relations with the United States; it is seeking support in Europe for discussions on a new "security architecture." Another fight with Georgia could blow up both efforts.

Still, the facts are these: Russia, in open violation of the cease-fire deal Mr. Putin made with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has never withdrawn its troops to pre-war positions. Instead it has reinforced its units in Georgia and has between 5,000 and 7,500 soldiers in the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which Moscow now treats as independent states. There are frequent incidents in the border areas, and Russia recently refused to renew the mandate of an international observer mission that had been deployed in and around South Ossetia.

If hostilities were renewed, Georgia wouldn't have much chance to defend itself. Its defense minister says that the country has not been able to replace much of the equipment lost in the last war. The Obama administration, which is hoping to complete the outlines of a new strategic arms agreement with Russia by the time of a July summit meeting, hasn't supplied the Georgian government with the air defenses or anti-tank weapons it would need to resist another Russian assault.

Mr. Saakashvili's best defense, of course, remains political support from the United States, the European Union and NATO. So far, at least, White House rhetoric in support of Georgian independence has remained firm. The sometimes-impulsive Georgian leader has helped himself with his patient and tolerant management of opposition demonstrations that have disrupted Tbilisi for nearly two months; he needs to be as skillful in sidestepping provocations along the frontier, so as to avoid providing the Kremlin with an excuse for intervention. But a peaceful summer in Georgia will also require firmness from Mr. Obama: He must leave no doubt that another Russian advance in Georgia would be devastating for U.S.-Russian relations.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

The match that lit Germany's radicals was a Stasi spy - Karl-Heinz Kurras

Ghosts of the '60s in Germany. WSJ Editorial
The match that lit Germany's radicals was a Stasi spy.
WSJ, May 28, 2009

The past can never be predicted, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to the German left. Two years ago, we learned that Nobel Laureate Günter Grass -- the literary scourge of all things fascist, especially America -- had himself been a member of the Waffen SS. Now comes another zinger that casts the radical political and social upheavals of the late 1960s in new and revealing light.

The historical surprise concerns a turning point whose ripple effects were felt in Europe and beyond. On June 2, 1967, a West German policeman fatally shot an unarmed, 26-year-old literature student in the back of his head during a demonstration in West Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran. Benno Ohnesorg became "the left wing's first martyr" (per the weekly Der Spiegel). His dying moments captured in a famous news photograph, Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.

To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the "fascist cop" at the service of a capitalist, pro-American "latent fascist state." "The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one," the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.

Now all that's being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don't say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany's transformative events.

Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. "Should I be ashamed of that or something?" He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, "What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn't change anything." Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination -- albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.

To answer his last question, this revelation matters. It belies yet again the claims of the '68 hard left, passed on to our times as anti-globalization riots, that a free market and liberal democracy are somehow "fascistic." This brand of intolerance is at core prone to violence. The true, ruthless heirs to National Socialism and the Gestapo were the East German regime and the Stasi, the Soviets and the KGB. And in turn, some of the terrorist groups that emerged from the radicalization of the 1960s.

Present in Berlin that June day in 1967 were Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, who went on to found the "Baader-Meinhof Gang," aka the Red Army Faction. From 1968 until 1991, the RAF carried out dozens of kidnappings, bombing and murders -- all to fight the "roots of capitalism" and a "resurgent Nazi state." As 1968 historian Paul Berman notes, the most famous terrorist organization born in this era was the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The analogue in the U.S. became the Weather Underground.

Some '68ers grew up and peeled away. Others took time to see its dark side. An early reveille came at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when PLO gunmen aided by a leftist German group, the Revolutionary Cells, took hostage and killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. The 1974 publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" was another. So was Pol Pot, the Vietnamese boat people; the list goes on.

Historical amnesia makes us vulnerable to repeating mistakes. Particularly in an America, where many quickly forgot the lessons of the Cold War and of 9/11. More than most nations, Germans are condemned to a living history. That turns up the kinds of surprises that force a hard re-examination of the past and the present.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The Arms-Control Dinosaurs Are Back. Why invite Russia to veto the nuclear progress we've been making on our own?

The Arms-Control Dinosaurs Are Back. By Marc A Thiessen
Why invite Russia to veto the nuclear progress we've been making on our own?
WSJ, May 19, 2009

When John Bolton served in the State Department during the Bush administration, he often walked the halls of Foggy Bottom wearing his trademark dinosaur ties -- a self-deprecating nod to those who thought his political views somewhat Jurassic. Today other dinosaurs have replaced him. The aging arms controllers who once haggled with Soviet officials are staging a comeback in the Obama administration.

This week in Moscow they'll pick up where they left off nearly two decades ago, sitting across the table from their Russian counterparts negotiating a renewal of the 1991 U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start). One of the U.S. negotiators, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller, refers to herself as a "Sputnik baby." She told the Washington Post after initial talks in New York earlier this month: "We've all been looking around and chuckling and saying 'We're all over 50.'"

President Barack Obama's goal of "a world without nuclear weapons" notwithstanding, the State Department is reportedly scrambling to staff its arms-control bureau because so many arms-control experts have retired and there's no one coming up in the ranks to replace them. Apparently not many young policy wonks are aware that cutting nuclear deals with Moscow is again the fast track to a high-flying diplomatic career.

The Obama revival of arms control comes at an odd moment. The past eight years have seen the fewest arms-control negotiations in a generation and some of the deepest nuclear weapons reductions in history. Thanks to the work of the Bush administration, the U.S. nuclear stockpile is now one-quarter the size it was at the end of the Cold War -- the lowest level since the Eisenhower administration. When George W. Bush took office, the U.S. had more than 6,000 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads. Today, that number has been reduced to less than 2,200. The U.S. had originally planned to reach this milestone on Dec. 31, 2012, but instead met its goal this February.

How did the U.S. achieve such dramatic reductions so quickly? Answer: By abandoning traditional arms control. When Mr. Bush took office, he decided not to engage in lengthy, adversarial negotiations with Russia in which both sides kept thousands of weapons they did not need as bargaining chips. He did not establish standing negotiating teams in Geneva with armies of arms-control experts doing battle over every colon and comma. If he had done so, the two sides would probably still be negotiating today.

Instead, Mr. Bush simply announced his intention to reduce the U.S.'s operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads by some two-thirds and invited Russia to do the same. President Vladimir Putin accepted his offer. These unilateral reductions were then codified in the 2002 Moscow Treaty, a three-page pact that took just six months to negotiate. By contrast, the Start treaty signed by President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev -- and now being revived by the Obama team -- is 700-pages long and took nine years to negotiate.

Even as he enacted massive reductions in nuclear weapons, George W. Bush took other actions to reduce nuclear dangers. His administration launched the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which secured more than 600 vulnerable nuclear sites around the world and helped convert 57 nuclear reactors in 32 countries from highly-enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium, removing enough weapons-grade material from countries around the world for more than 40 nuclear bombs.

With G-8 leaders, Mr. Bush launched the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction -- a $20 billion international effort to secure and dispose of nuclear and fissile materials and help former weapons scientists find new lines of work. The U.S. and Russia launched the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, a coalition of 75 nations that is working to stop the illicit spread of nuclear materials. The U.S. and Russia also launched the Bratislava Initiative, which has secured nearly 150 Russian sites containing nuclear warheads and hundreds of metric tons of weapons-quality material.

Despite this record of achievement, the arms controllers see the Bush era as a dark age from which they must rescue the world. They are intent on reviving the antiquated and adversarial approach to arms reductions. As serious negotiations begin, Russia will use these negotiations on arms reductions as leverage to get the U.S. to give up its planned deployment of ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Unlike Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik, it is not clear that Mr. Obama would walk away from a deal to preserve these vital defenses.

In addition to a new Start treaty, the Obama administration also reportedly plans to press the Senate to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a fatally flawed agreement that was rejected by the Senate in 1999 because it would undermine reliability of our nuclear stockpile. Instead of pressing the Senate to act on the CTBT, the administration should be calling on Congress to restore the funding it eliminated last year for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, which would allow us to develop new warheads without the need for nuclear testing and thus ensure the reliability of America's nuclear deterrent.

Mr. Obama will visit Moscow in July where he and President Dmitry Medvedev will discuss progress on their stated goal to "move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations." Bringing back Cold War-era arms-control negotiations is a strange way to do so. In the 21st century, arms-control agreements are as antiquated as cave drawings. We no longer need pieces of parchment and armies of arms-control aficionados to achieve deep reductions in nuclear weapons. This fact is lost on the Sputnik babies now inhabiting the State Department.

Mr. Thiessen served as chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In 2002, he traveled to Russia with Mr. Rumsfeld for the negotiations of the Moscow Treaty.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Putin vs. the Truth

Putin vs. the Truth. By Orlando Figes
The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009


Review of:
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia. By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co., 335 pp., $26.00

Vietnam is buying six Russian Kilo class submarines

A Six Pack For Vietnam
Strategy Page, April 29, 2009

Vietnam is buying six Russian Kilo class submarines, for $300 million each. The Kilos weigh 2,300 tons (surface displacement), have six torpedo tubes and a crew of 57. They are quiet, and can travel about 700 kilometers under water at a quiet speed of about five kilometers an hour. Kilos carry 18 torpedoes or SS-N-27 anti-ship missiles (with a range of 300 kilometers and launched underwater from the torpedo tubes.) The combination of quietness and cruise missiles makes Kilo very dangerous to surface ships. North Korea, China and Iran have also bought Kilos. Considering the low price, it appears that the Vietnamese boats do not have AIP (Air Independent Propulsion), which allows non-nuclear boats to stay underwater for weeks at a time.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

North Korea in International Limelight over its Space Development Programme

North Korea in International Limelight over its Space Development Programme. By Rajaram Panda and Pranamita Baruah
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, April 2, 2009

North East Asia’s fragile peace is being threatened by North Korea’s planned launch between 4 and 8 April over Japanese territory of a communication satellite. The US and its allies suspect the planned satellite launch to be a long-range ballistic missile test. The prevailing uneasy peace is accentuated by the fact that both a ballistic missile and a satellite launcher operate on very similar technology. According to Dennis Blair, Director of US National Intelligence, the technology for a space launch “is indistinguishable from an intercontinental ballistic missile.” If the “three stage space-launch vehicle works,” it could technically reach the US mainland. Consequently, the reactions from the US and its allies have been strong.

There has remained a lurking suspicion that North Korea and Iran have joined together to build missiles. That Iran has made rapid strides in missile technology is an established fact. But whether the collaboration between the two countries includes warheads or other nuclear work remains shrouded in mystery. But given the behaviour of the two countries over the years, it is difficult to disbelieve that both Iran and North Korea are not cooperating in such activity.

North Korea already possesses the Taepo Dong-2 with ICBM potential (striking range of 5500 kilometres or greater). It may be recalled that Pyongyang’s August 1998 test firing of a Taepo Dong-2 into the Sea of Japan had panicked American friends and allies in East Asia. It is a different matter that the test failed 40 seconds into its launch. However, it propelled North Korean engineers to make substantial modifications in the missile’s design. The advanced version of Taepo Dong-2 is supposed to have a minimum striking range of 6,700 kilometres (4100 miles), capable of striking the US west coast.

Despite its precarious economic problems, Pyongyang has never felt shy of demonstrating its defence capabilities by upgrading its missile development systems continuously. It has built a ballistic missile arsenal capable of hitting not only Japan and South Korea but also the west coast of the US. In total, North Korea deploys around 750 ballistic missiles, including between 600-800 SCUDs, 150-200 No Dongs, 10-20 Taepo Dong-1, and a few Taepo Dong-2s.

Pyongyang has not halted its nuclear programme despite the denuclearisation deal that it struck at the Six Party talks in February 2007. It is suspected that Pyongyang is aiming to produce nuclear payloads for its ballistic missiles. It is also feared that Pyongyang’s missile development programme is projected towards developing a nuclear warhead sophisticated enough for delivery aboard a space-bound rocket. In the event of Pyongyang achieving that capability, it would be in a position to detonate a nuclear warhead in space. The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) emanating from such a detonation would have frightening repercussions, especially for unhardened satellites. A space launch would advance Pyongyang’s missile programme, enabling it to produce more accurate and powerful ballistic missiles capable of terrorizing not only Seoul and Tokyo but also Los Angeles and San Francisco.

With a view to deterring and intercepting missiles from the North, South Korea has announced its own plans to complete a missile defence system by 2012. Japan too has affirmed its commitment to acquire a multi-layered system after the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002 and North Korea left the NPT regime in 2003. If North Korea does not retract from its ballistic missiles test programme, the US, Japan and South Korea are likely like to keep their missile defence options open.

There already exist the necessary mechanisms through international legal instruments to deter North Korea from upgrading its missile development capability. United Nations Security Council resolution 1718 (2006) prohibits Pyongyang from conducting any ballistic missile activity. North Korea is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit, in the moon or elsewhere in space. However, it has asserted its right to engage in a peaceful space programme. The state-run Korean Central New Agency said “preparations for launching experimental communications satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 by means of delivery rocket Unha-2 are now making brisk headway” at a launch site in Hwadae Country in the northeast. The statement called the upcoming launch “a giant stride forward” for the country’s space programme.

North Korea finds fault with the US and Japan, claiming that these two countries have already launched their own satellites and therefore have no moral right to prevent it from doing the same. It further warns Washington and Tokyo that if they deny Pyongyang the right to use space for peaceful purposes, it would not only be discriminatory but also not in keeping with ‘spirit of mutual respect and equality’ of the 2005 disarmament pact. Pyongyang further warns that any sanctions that the UN, US and its allies might impose on it would “deprive the Six-Party talks of any ground to exist or their meaning.” Meanwhile, North Korea has asserted that it would regard any attempt to shoot down its rocket as an unprovoked Act of War and retaliate with prompt strikes on the US mainland, Japan and South Korea.

The international community is aghast at Pyongyang’s obduracy. Japan has decided to call for an emergency meeting of the UNSC if the launch takes place. In the event of the North’s missile firing, Japan will urge the UNSC to take immediate action regardless of how other UN members would react, as it would be directly exposed to an immediate missile threat. Japan has warned that it will shoot down a missile or any debris if it threatens to hit Japanese territory.

Japan debated between two possible options in response to a missile launch by North Korea: to ask the cabinet to take an instant decision after a missile launch or to give military approval in advance to shoot it down, and finally decided to exercise the second option by issuing an advanced order to the Self Defence Forces on March 27 to use the Patriot missile defence system to destroy any missile or debris that shows signs of falling toward Japan. Japan, however, does not want to strike a North Korean rocket unless it appears to pose a direct threat, in the event of a mishap that could send an errant missile or debris flying toward the country.

Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso has already obtained the support of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Both Japan and Britain have agreed to take the issue to the UNSC to discuss possible punitive action if Pyongyang goes ahead with the launch. As a pre-emptive measure, Japan has deployed three Aegis destroyers, two of which are fitted with anti-missile missiles, around Japan and Patriot guided-missile units at select locations in Japan. The US Seventh Fleet has been deployed around Japan. US cruisers and destroyers based at Yokosuka also reportedly have the capability to launch guided missiles against ballistic missiles. Five Aegis destroyers of the US Navy modified for ballistic missile defence have already left Yokosuka and other Japanese ports on March 30. They are expected to detect and track the North Korean rocket passing over northeastern Japan if the launch goes according to plan.

South Korea is worried over the heightened tensions on the Peninsula and President Lee Dang-hee has appealed for restraint. Seoul has also alleged that Pyongyang’s long-range rocket launch clearly violates UNSC resolution 1718. It has described Pyongyang’s planned rocket launch as a ‘serious challenge and provocation’ to regional security. North Korea, however, has ramped up its anti-Lee rhetoric, warning that the Koreas are headed for a military clash.

Russia too has joined the chorus of nations expressing concern over the upcoming launch. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin said that the launch would lead to increased tensions in the region and urged Pyongyang to refrain from it. As regards China, a traditional ally and a major donor for impoverished North Korea and UNSC permanent member, it has not publicly urged Pyongyang to halt the launch. However, both China and Russia have notified the Obama administration that North Korea has a legitimate right to launch a satellite. The perceived tacit support from China and Russia might embolden North Korea not to rethink its planned space satellite launch.

It appears that the uneasy peace in the North East Asian region stemming from Pyongyang’s intransigence is likely to continue for some more time to come. If North Korea is to be trusted about its intentions for the communication satellite launch programme, it would serve the interests of the country. If, however, Pyongyang has other covert intentions, it will have to face the reactions from its neighbours and the US.

Dr. Rajaram Panda is Senior Fellow, and Pranamita Baruah is Research Assistant, at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb

Drunken Nation: Russia's Depopulation Bomb. By Nicholas Eberstadt
AEI, Thursday, April 2, 2009

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has suffered a rapid and tragic decline in population. For a modern and so-called "emerging" economy, this is more than a human crisis; it is a human resources crisis.

A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism--that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past--but rather of depopulation--a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing.

Since 1992, Russia's human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in Russia, to diminish the prospects for Russian economic development, and to affect Russia's potential influence on the world stage in the years ahead.

Russia has faced this problem at other times during the last century. The first bout of depopulation lasted from 1917 to 1923, and was caused by the upheavals that transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. The next drop took place between 1933 and 1934, when the country's population fell by nearly 2 million--or almost 2 percent--as a result of Stalin's war against the "kulaks" in his forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. And then, between 1941 and 1946, Russia's population plummeted by more than 13 million through the cataclysms and catastrophes of World War II.

The current Russian depopulation--which began in 1992 and shows no signs of abating--was, like the previous episodes, also precipitated by events of momentous political significance: the final dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of Communist Party rule. But it differs in three important respects. First, it is by far the longest period of population decline in modern Russian history, having persisted for over twice as long as the decline that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, and well over three times as long as the terrifying depopulation Russia experienced during and immediately after World War II.

Second, unlike all the previous depopulations in Russia, this one has been taking place under what are, within the Russian context, basically orderly social and political circumstances. Terror and war are not the engines for the depopulation Russia is experiencing today, as they have been in the past.

And finally, whereas Russia's previous depopulations resulted from wild and terrible social paroxysms, they were also clearly temporary in nature. The current crisis, on the other hand, is proceeding gradually and routinely, and thus it is impossible to predict when, or whether, it will finally come to an end.

A comparison dramatizes what is happening in Russia. Between 1976 and 1991, the last sixteen years of Soviet power, the country recorded 36 million births. In the sixteen post-Communist years of 1992–2007, there were just 22.3 million, a drop in childbearing of nearly 40 percent from one era to the next. On the other side of the life cycle, a total of 24.6 million deaths were recorded between 1976 and 1991, while in the first sixteen years of the post-Communist period the Russian Federation tallied 34.7 million deaths, a rise of just over 40 percent. The symmetry is striking: in the last sixteen years of the Communist era, births exceeded deaths in Russia by 11.4 million; in the first sixteen years of the post-Soviet era, deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million.

The Russian Federation is by no means the only country to have registered population decline during the past two decades. In fact, 11 of the 19 countries making up Western Europe reported some annual population declines during the Cold War era. On the whole, however, these population dips tended to be brief and slight in magnitude. (Italy's "depopulation," for example, was limited to just one year--1986--and entailed a decline of fewer than 4,000 persons.) Moreover, the population declines in these cases were primarily a consequence of migration trends: either emigration abroad in search of opportunity (Ireland, Portugal), or release of foreign "guest workers" during recessions or cyclical downturns in the domestic economy (most of the rest). Only in a few Western European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom) did negative natural increase ever feature as a contributing factor in a year-on-year population decline. In all but Germany, such bouts of negative natural increase proved to be temporary and relatively muffled.

So where, given these daunting facts, is the Russian Federation headed demographically in the years and decades ahead? Two of the world's leading demographic institutions--the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the U.S. Bureau of the Census--have tried to answer this question by a series of projections based upon what their analysts believe to be plausible assumptions about Russia's future fertility, mortality, and migration patterns.

Both organizations' projections trace a continuing downward course for the Russian Federation's population over the generation ahead. As of mid-year 2005, Russia's estimated population was around 143 million. UNPD projections for the year 2025 range from a high of about 136 million to a low of about 121 million; for the year 2030, they range from 133 million to 115 million. The Census Bureau's projections for the Russian Federation's population in 2025 and 2030 are 128 million and 124 million, respectively.

If these projections turn out to be relatively accurate--admittedly, a big "if" for any long-range demographic projection--the Russian Federation will have experienced over thirty years of continuous demographic decline by 2025, and the better part of four decades of depopulation by 2030. Russia's population would then have dropped by about 20 million between 1990 and 2025, and Russia would have fallen from the world's sixth to the twelfth most populous country. In relative terms, that would amount to almost as dramatic a demographic drop as the one Russia suffered during World War II. In absolute terms, it would actually be somewhat greater in magnitude.

Strikingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Moscow's leadership is advancing into this uncertain terrain not only with insouciance but with highly ambitious goals. In late 2007, for example, the Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and maintaining an average annual pace of economic growth in the decades ahead on the order of nearly 7 percent a year: on this path, according to Russian officials, GDP will quadruple in the next two decades, and the Russian Federation will emerge as the world's fifth largest economy by 2020.

But history offers no examples of a society that has demonstrated sustained material advance in the face of long-term population decline. It seems highly unlikely that such an ambitious agenda can be achieved in the face of Russia's current demographic crisis. Sooner or later, Russian leadership will have to acknowledge that these daunting long-term developments are shrinking their country's social and political potential.

Marxist theory famously envisioned the "withering away" of the state upon the full attainment of Communism. That utopia never arrived in the USSR (or anywhere else for that matter). But with the collapse of Soviet rule, Russia has seen a pervasive and profound change in childbearing patterns and living arrangements--what might be described as a "withering away" of the family itself.

In the postwar Soviet era, Russia's so-called "total fertility rate" (TFR), which calculates the number of births a typical woman would be expected to have during childbearing years, exceeded 2.0--and in the early years of the Gorbachev era, Russia's total fertility rate temporarily exceeded 2.2. After 1989, though, it fell far below 2.0 with no signs as yet of any recovery. Russia's post-Communist TFR hit its low--perhaps we should say its low to date--in 1999, when it was 1.17. By 2005, the total fertility rate in the Russian Federation was up to about 1.3--but this still represented a collapse of about two-fifths from the peak level in the Gorbachev years.

In the late 1980s, near the end of the Communist era, there were just a handful of European countries (most of them under Communist rule) with higher fertility rates than Russia's. By 2005, the last year for which authoritative data is available, there were only a few European societies (perhaps ironically, most of them ex-Communist) with lower rates.

What accounts for the Russian Federation's low levels of fertility? Some observers point to poor health conditions. And indeed, as we will see, Russia's overall health situation today is truly woeful. This is especially true of its reproductive health.

A consortium headed by the World Health Organization estimated that for 2005 a woman's risk of death in childbirth in Russia was over six times higher than in Germany or Switzerland. Moreover, mortality levels for women in their twenties (the decade in which childbearing is concentrated in contemporary Russia) have been rising, not falling, in recent decades.

But Russia's low fertility patterns are not due to any extraordinary inability of Russian women to conceive, but rather to the strong and growing tendency among childbearing women to have no more than two children--and perhaps increasingly not more than one. The new evident limits on family size in Russia, in turn, suggest a sea change in the country's norms concerning family formation.

In 1980, fewer than one Russian newborn in nine was reportedly born out of wedlock. By 2005, the country's illegitimacy ratio was approaching 30 percent--almost a tripling in just twenty years. Marriage is not only less common in Russia today than in the recent past; it is also markedly less stable. In 2005, the total number of marriages celebrated in Russia was down by nearly one-fourth from 1980 (a fairly typical Brezhnev-period year for marriages). On the other hand, the total number of divorces recognized in Russia has been on an erratic rise over the past generation, from under 400 divorces per 1,000 marriages in 1980 to a peak of over 800 in 2002.

In 1990, the end of the Gorbachev era, marriage was still the norm, and while divorce was very common, a distinct majority of Russian Federation women (60 percent) could expect to have entered into a first marriage and still remain in that marriage by age 50. A few years later, in 1996, the picture was already radically different: barely a third of Russia's women (34 percent) were getting married and staying in that same marriage until age 50.

Since the end of the Soviet era, young women in Russia are opting for cohabitation before and, to a striking extent, instead of marriage. In the early 1980s, about 15 percent of women had been in consensual unions by age 25; twenty years later, the proportion was 45 percent. Many fewer of those once-cohabiting young women, moreover, seem to be moving into marital unions nowadays. Whereas roughly a generation earlier, fully half of cohabiters were married within a year, today less than a third are.

Is Russia's post-Communist plunge in births the consequence of a "demographic shock," or the result of what some Russian experts call a "quiet revolution" in patterns of family formation? At the moment, it is possible to see elements of both in the Russian Federation's unfolding fertility trends. Demographic shocks tend by nature to be transient; demographic transitions or "revolutions," considerably less so. But this much is clear: to date, no European society that has embarked upon the same demographic transition as Russia's--declining marriage rates with rising divorce; the spread of cohabitation as alternative to marriage; delayed age at marriage and sub-replacement fertility regimens--has reverted to more "traditional" family patterns and higher levels of completed family size. There is no reason to think that in Russia it will be any different.

There are many ramifications of the dramatic decline in population in Russia, but three in particular bear heavily on the country's prospective development and national security.

First, when Western European nations reached the level of 30 percent illegitimate births that Russia has now attained, their levels of per capita output were all dramatically higher--three times higher in France, Austria, and Britain, and higher than that in countries such as Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

This means that Russia's mothers and their children will be afforded far fewer of the social protections that their counterparts could count on in Western Europe's more generous welfare states.

A second and related point pertains to "investment" in children. According to prevailing tenets of Western economic thought, a decline in fertility--to the extent that it occurs under conditions of orderly progress, and as a consequence of parental volition--should mean a better material environment for newborns and children because a shift to smaller desired family size, all else being equal, signifies an increase in parents' expected commitments to each child's education, nutrition, health care, and the like.

Yet in post-Communist Russia, there are unambiguous indications of a worsening of social well-being for a significant proportion of the country's children—in effect, a disinvestment in children in the face of a pronounced downward shift in national fertility patterns.

School enrollment is sharply lower for primary-school-age children--99 percent in 1991 versus 91 percent in 2004. And the number of abandoned children is sharply higher. According to official statistics, as of 2004 over 400,000 Russian children below 18 years of age were in "residential care." This means that roughly 1 child in 70 was in a children's home, orphanage, or state boarding school. Russia is also home to a large and possibly growing contingent of street children whose numbers could well exceed those under institutional care. According to Human Rights Watch, over 100,000 children in Russia have been abandoned by their parents each year since 1996. If accurate, this number, compared to the annual tally of births for the Russian Federation, which averaged about 1.4 million a year for the 1996–2007 period, would suggest that in excess of 7 percent of Russia's children are being discarded by their parents in this new era of steep sub-replacement fertility.

A third implication of the past decade and a half of sharply lower birth levels in Russia will be a drop-off in the country's working-age population, and an acceleration of the tempo of population aging in the period immediately ahead. Barring only a steady and massive in-migration, Russia's potential labor pool will shrink markedly over the coming decade and a half and continue to diminish thereafter.

In addition to its daunting fertility decline, Russia's public health losses today are of a scale akin to what might be expected from a devastating war. Since the end of the Communist era, in fact, "excess mortality" has cost Russia hundreds of thousands of lives every year.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an increase in mortality rates for key elements of the Soviet population. But Russia's health patterns did not correct course with the collapse of the USSR, as many experts assumed they would. In fact, in the first decade and a half of its post-Communist history the country's health conditions actually became worse. Life expectancy in the Russian Federation is actually lower today than it was a half century ago in the late 1950s. In fact, the country has pioneered a unique new profile of mass debilitation and foreshortened life previously unknown in all of human history.

Like the urbanized and literate societies in Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of deaths in Russia today accrue from chronic rather than infectious diseases: heart disease, cancers, strokes, and the like. But in the rest of the developed world, death rates from these chronic diseases are low, relatively stable, and declining regularly over time. In the Russian Federation, by contrast, overall mortality levels are high, manifestly unstable, and rising.

The single clearest and most comprehensible summary measure of a population's mortality prospects is its estimated expectation of life at birth. Russia's trends in the late 1950s and early 1960s were rising briskly. In the five years between 1959 and 1964, for instance, life expectancy increased by more than two years. But then, inexplicably, overall health progress in Russia came to a sudden and spectacular halt. Over that 18-year period that roughly coincides with the Brezhnev era, Russia's life expectancy not only stagnated, but actually fell by about a year and a half.

These losses were recovered during the Gorbachev period, but even at its pinnacle in 1986 and 1987, overall life expectancy for Russia was only marginally higher than it had been in 1964, never actually managing to cross the symbolic 70-year threshold. With the end of Communism, moreover, life expectancy went into erratic decline, plummeting a frightful four years between 1992 and 1994, recovering somewhat through 1998, but then again spiraling downward. In 2006--the most recent year for which we have such data--overall Russian life expectancy at birth was over three years lower than it had been in 1964.

The situation for Russian males has been particularly woeful. In the immediate postwar era, life expectancy for men was somewhat lower than in other developed countries--but this differential might partly be attributed to the special hardships of World War II and the evils of Stalinism. By the early 1960s, the male life expectancy gap between Russia and the more developed regions narrowed somewhat--but then life expectancy for Russian men entered into a prolonged and agonizing decline, while continued improvements characterized most of the rest of the world. By 2005, male life expectancy at birth was fully fifteen years lower in the Russian Federation than in Western Europe. It was also five years below the global average for male life expectancy, and three years below the average for the less developed regions (whose levels it had exceeded, in the early 1950s, by fully two decades). Put another way, male life expectancy in 2006 was about two and a half years lower under Putin than it had been in 1959, under Khrushchev.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base for 2007, Russia ranked 164 out of 226 globally in overall life expectancy. Russia is below Bolivia, South America's poorest (and least healthy) country and lower than Iraq and India, but somewhat higher than Pakistan. For females, the Russian Federation life expectancy will not be as high as in Nicaragua, Morocco, or Egypt. For males, it will be in the same league as that of Cambodia, Ghana, and Eritrea.

In the face of today's exceptionally elevated mortality levels for Russia's young adults, it is no wonder that an unspecified proportion of the country's would-be mothers and fathers respond by opting for fewer offspring than they would otherwise desire. To a degree not generally appreciated, Russia's current fertility crisis is a consequence of its mortality crisis.

How did Russia's mortality level, which was nearly 38 percent higher than Western Europe's in 1980, skyrocket to an astonishing 135 percent higher in 2006? What role did communicable and infectious disease play in this fateful health regression and mortality deterioration?

By any reading, the situation in Russia today sounds awful. The Russian Federation is afflicted with a serious HIV/AIDS epidemic; according to UNAIDS, as of 2008 somewhere around 1 million Russians were living with the virus. (Russia's HIV nexus appears to be closely associated with a burgeoning phenomenon of local drug use, with sex trafficking and other forms of prostitution or "commercial sex," and with other practices and mores relating to extramarital sex.) Russia also faces a related and evidently growing burden of tuberculosis. As of 2008, according to World Health Organization estimates, Russia was experiencing about 150,000 new TB infections a year. To make matters worse, almost half of Russia's treated tubercular cases over the past decade have been the variant known as extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB).

Yet, dismaying as these statistics are, the picture looks even worse when we consider cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality trends.

By the late 1960s, the epidemic upsurge of CVD mortality in Western industrial societies that immediately followed World War II had peaked. From the mid-1970s onward, age-standardized death rates from diseases of the circulatory system steadily declined in Western Europe. In Russia, by stark contrast, CVD mortality in 1980 was well over 50 percent higher than it had been in "old" EU states as of 1970, and the Russian population may well have been suffering the very highest incidence of mortality from diseases of the circulatory system that had ever been visited on a national population in the entire course of human history.

Over the subsequent decades, unfortunately, the level of CVD mortality in the Russian Federation veered even further upward. By 2006, Russia's CVD mortality rate, standardizing for population structure, was an almost unbelievable 3.8 times higher than the population-weighted level reported for Western Europe.

Scarcely less alarming was Russia's mortality rate from "external causes"--non-communicable deaths from injuries of various origins. The tale here is broadly similar to the story of CVD: impossibly high levels of death in a society that otherwise does not exhibit signs of backwardness.

In Western Europe, age-standardized mortality from injury and poisoning, as tabulated by the World Health Organization, fell by almost half between 1970 and 2006. In Russia, on the other hand, deaths from injuries and poisoning, which had been 2.5 times higher than in Western Europe in 1980, were up to 5.3 times higher as of 2006.

A broadly negative relationship was evident between mortality from injuries and per capita income. In other Western countries in 2002, an increase of 10 percent in per capita GDP was associated with a drop of about 2 points in injury deaths per 100,000 population. Yet Russia's toll of deaths is nearly three times higher than would be predicted by its GDP. No literate and urban society in the modern world faces a risk of deaths from injuries comparable to the one that Russia experiences.

Russia's patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. To go by its level of mortality injury alone, Russia looks not like an emerging middle-income market economy at peace, but rather like an impoverished sub-Saharan conflict or post-conflict society.

Taken together, then, deaths from cardiovascular disease and from injuries and poisoning have evidently been the main drivers of modern Russia's strange upsurge in premature mortality and its broad, prolonged retrogression in public health conditions. One final factor that is intimately associated with both of these causes of mortality is alcohol abuse.

Unlike drinking patterns prevalent in, say, Mediterranean regions--where wine is regarded as an elixir for enhancing conversation over meals and other social gatherings, and where public drunkenness carries an embarrassing stigma--mind-numbing, stupefying binge drinking of hard spirits is an accepted norm in Russia and greatly increases the danger of fatal injury through falls, traffic accidents, violent confrontations, homicide, suicide, and so on. Further, extreme binge drinking (especially of hard spirits) is associated with stress on the cardiovascular system and heightened risk of CVD mortality.

How many Russians are actually drinkers, and how heavily do they actually drink? Officially, Russia classifies some 7 million out of roughly 120 million persons over 15 years of age, or roughly 6 percent of its adult population, as heavy drinkers. But the numbers are surely higher than this. According to data compiled by the World Health Organization, as of 2003 Russia was Europe's heaviest per capita spirits consumer; its reported hard liquor consumption was over four times as high as Portugal's, three times that of Germany or Spain, and over two and a half times higher than that of France.

Yet even these numbers may substantially understate hard spirit use in Russia, since the WHO figures follow only the retail sale of hard liquor. But samogon--home-brew, or "moonshine"--is, according to some Russian researchers, a huge component of the country's overall intake. Professor Alexander Nemstov, perhaps Russia's leading specialist in this area, argues that Russia's adult population--women as well as men--puts down the equivalent of a bottle of vodka per week.

From the epidemiological standpoint, local-level studies have offered fairly chilling proof that alcohol is a direct factor in premature mortality. One forensic investigation of blood alcohol content by a medical examiner's office in a city in the Urals, for example, indicated that over 40 percent of the younger male decedents evaluated had probably been alcohol-impaired or severely intoxicated at the time of death--including one quarter of the deaths from heart disease and over half of those from accidents or injuries. But medical and epidemiological studies have also demonstrated that, in addition to its many deaths from consumption of ordinary alcohol, Russia also suffers a grisly toll from alcohol poisoning, as the country's drinkers, in their desperate quest for intoxication, down not only sometimes severely impure samogon, but also perfumes, alcohol-based medicines, cleaning solutions, and other deadly liquids. Death rates from such alcohol poisoning appear to be at least one hundred times higher in Russia than the United States--this despite the fact that the retail price in Russia today is lower for a liter of vodka than a liter of milk.

Josef Stalin is said to have coldly joked that one death was a tragedy, while one million deaths was just a statistic. This comment seems to apply to post-Communist Russia as well to Stalin's own deranged regime. For the better part of a generation, Russia has suffered something akin to wartime population losses during year after year of peacetime political order. In the United Nations Development Program's annually tabulated "Human Development Index," which uses health as well as economic data to measure a country's living standards as they affect quality of life, Russia was number 73 out of 179. A country of virtually universal literacy and quite respectable general educational attainment, with a scientific cadre that mastered nuclear fission over half a century ago and launches orbital spacecraft and interplanetary probes today, finds itself ranked on this metric between Mauritius and Ecuador.

In the modern era, population decline itself need not be a cause for acute economic alarm. Italy, Germany, and Japan are among the societies where signs of incipient population decline are being registered nowadays: all of these are affluent countries, and all can anticipate continuing improvements in their respective levels of prosperity (albeit at a slower tempo than some might prefer). Depopulation with Russian characteristics--population decline powered by an explosive upsurge of illness and mortality--is altogether more forbidding in its economic implications, not only forcing down popular well-being today, but also placing unforgiving constraints on economic productivity and growth for tomorrow.

As we have already seen, it is Russia's death crisis that accounts for the entirety of the country's population decline over the past decade and a half. The upsurge of illness and mortality, furthermore, has been disproportionately concentrated among men and women of working age--meaning that Russia's labor force has been shrinking more rapidly than the population overall.
Health is a critical and central element in the complex quantity that economists have termed "human capital." In the contemporary international economy, one additional year of life expectancy at birth is associated with an increase in per capita output of about 8 percent. A decade of lost life expectancy improvement would correspond to the loss of a doubling of per capita income. By this standard, Russia's economic as well as its demographic future is in jeopardy.

It is not obvious that Russia will be able to recover rapidly from its health katastroika. There is an enormous amount of "negative health momentum" in the Russian situation today: with younger brothers facing worse survival prospects than older brothers, older brothers facing worse survival prospects than their fathers, and so on. Severely foreshortened adult life spans can shift the cost-benefit calculus for investments in training and higher education dramatically. On today's mortality patterns, a Swiss man at 20 has about an 87 percent chance of making it to a notional retirement age of 65. His Russian counterpart at age 20 has less than even odds of reaching 65. Harsh excess mortality levels impose real and powerful disincentives for the mass acquisition of the technical skills that are a key to wealth generation in the modern world. Thus Russia's health crisis may be even more generally subversive of human capital, and more powerfully corrosive of human resources, than might appear to be the case at first glance.

Putin's Kremlin made a fateful bet that natural resources--oil, gas, and other extractive saleable commodities--would be the springboard for the restoration of Moscow's influence as a great power on the world stage. In this gamble, Russian authorities have mainly ignored the nation's human resource crisis. During the boom years--Russia's per capita income roughly doubled between 1998 and 2007--the country's death rate barely budged. Very much worse may lie ahead. How Russia's still-unfolding demographic disaster will affect the country's domestic political situation--and its international security posture--are questions that remain to be answered.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.

Monday, March 30, 2009

WaPo on Russia: Mr. Obama isn't contemplating change solely on the part of the US

Russia's Reset. WaPo Editorial
Mr. Obama isn't contemplating change solely on the part of the United States.
WaPo, Monday, March 30, 2009; A16

WITH A FIRST presidential meeting set for this week between Barack Obama and Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, it appears that the two sides may have different ideas of what to expect from the "reset" in relations that the Obama administration has promised.

The Russian view seems to be that the resetting has to come primarily from the Americans. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov furthered that impression in an interview with the Financial Times last week. "Practically on any problematic issue which we inherited from the past eight years, I understand the Obama administration is undertaking a review which we welcome," Mr. Lavrov said. Russian officials appear to hope that such a review will mean less U.S. pressure to form a united front against Iran's development of a nuclear weapon and, above all, acceptance of a Russian "sphere of influence" over countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact -- what Mr. Medvedev has called "a region of privileged interest."

Indications from Washington, recently reinforced by Mr. Obama, suggest that his administration does not share this view of a one-sided need for change. The administration is hoping for improved relations across a range of issues, including Iran, Afghanistan, and fighting terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons. It will be more willing than the Bush administration to engage in arms control talks, especially to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires at the end of this year. But Mr. Obama has given no signs of being less alarmed than was President George W. Bush about Iran's nuclear program and certainly has shown no willingness to acquiesce in the "privileged" position that Mr. Medvedev claims over his neighbors.

On the contrary, at the same time that Vice President Biden introduced the "reset" concept, in a speech in February in Munich, he also repudiated the concept of spheres of influence. And after meeting with the secretary general of NATO last Wednesday, Mr. Obama reiterated the point. "My administration is seeking a reset of the relationship with Russia," the president said, "but . . . we are going to continue to abide by the central belief that countries who seek and aspire to join NATO are able to join NATO." The message: Georgia and Ukraine, former Soviet republics, should be free to form and join alliances as they choose, notwithstanding Russia's vitriolic objections.

The administration believes, in other words, that it can develop constructive relations with Russia without sacrificing the interests of Russia's neighbors. Whether such a reset will be acceptable to Mr. Medvedev or to Russia's de facto top ruler, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, remains to be seen.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Russia Test Fires Cruise Missiles From Planes - Reports

Russia Test Fires Cruise Missiles From Planes - Reports
Mar 19, 2009 14:12

MOSCOW (AFP)--Russian Tupolev bombers Thursday successfully test-fired cruise missiles in the country's far-northern Vorkuta region, Interfax and Ria Novosti news agencies reported.

"The last two bombers returned a few minutes ago to their permanent base after launching the missiles. In all six long-range bombers took part," in the exercise, said air force spokesman Vladimir Drik.

Tu-95Mc and Tu-160 bombers were involved in the mission, "the first time missiles of this type were fired this year by long-range bombers," he said.

03-19-09 1412ET

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Russia's Dependence on Food Imports and the Economic Crisis

"Oil-for-Food" When Oil Is Down (and the Ruble Is Weak). By Leon Aron
Russia's Dependence on Food Imports and the Economic Crisis
AEI, Mar 17, 2009

[Full article w/notes in the link above]

Although it contains millions of acres of some of the world's most fertile soil and has implemented the world's largest land privatization reform, Russia imports food in amounts that are inordinately high for a country of its size and per-capita GDP. The reliance on imported meat and poultry is especially large. Already under strain from rampant inflation, a very significant proportion of Russia's population will find its access to food further diminished by deep depreciation of the ruble as well as such inevitable consequences of the crisis as unemployment and still higher inflation. While widespread hunger is not likely, the constraints on food consumption could add yet another perilous dimension to a political crisis that is bound to unfold alongside the economic one.

Russia inherited from the Soviet Union a failed state-owned agriculture: backward, wasteful, and utterly unable to motivate the workers. Every fourth kolkhoz (collective farm) or sovkhoz (state farm)[1]--6,500 out of 26,000--lost money, often for decades.[2] Their overall debt approached 140 billion rubles, or over 15 percent of the Soviet Union's GDP.[3] Despite "free" (that is, state-owned) land, low salaries, and billions of rubles in state assistance, kolkhozes and sovkhozes were so inefficient that their output, especially meat, required enormous price subsidies and ration coupons to make them accessible to the majority of Russians. Half of the money the Soviet state raised through its single largest source of internal revenue--the so-called turnover tax, levied against the total monetary value of the goods produced--was spent on food subsidies, up to 50 billion rubles a year.[4]

Every fall, tens of thousands of city dwellers--workers and engineers, surgeons and lawyers, college students and art critics--were dispatched, sometimes for several weeks, to local collective farms to dig potatoes. Still, an estimated 60-70 percent of the potatoes were left in the ground to be snowed over and plowed under the next spring.[5] In just three months in 1988, nearly eight hundred thousand tons of potatoes, fruits, and vegetables "rotted away."[6] Around 20 percent of the annual grain yield was also lost every year: left unharvested in the fields, spilled by trucks on the way to the elevators, and allowed to rot in uncovered heaps under rain and snow. Beginning in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union bought increasingly large amounts of wheat abroad, reaching 30 million tons in 1987.[7]

By President Boris Yeltsin's decrees in the 1990s, most collective farms were turned, at least nominally, into joint-stock companies, and 12 million of their workers became shareholders and, thus, landowners. Although fierce resistance by the leftist parliament between 1995 and 1999 prevented Yeltsin from privatizing agricultural land, the last free parliamentary election in December 1999 resulted in a proreform legislature, which, on June 15, 2001, passed the Land Code, allowing for the first time the sale of land.[8] Although the code did not mention agricultural land specifically, soon collective farm workers' shares in land could be sold, rented, used as mortgage collateral, and passed on to heirs.


Enforcement, Values, and Demography

The reform's enforcement was not effective. In most cases, collective farms' "red directors" were left in control of the land and equipment (tractors, seed, and harvesters) necessary for the peasants' livelihoods.[9] The plots of land to which their shares entitled farm workers were badly demarcated, and it was up to former kolkhoz-sovkhoz authorities to decide who owned what. Needless to say, those seeking to strike out on their own were given far from the finest land, equipment, and livestock. In some regions, authorities openly violated the laws, allowing only the leasing of land but not its purchase.[10]

As with other areas of the economy, the Putin presidency (2000-2008) brought about more red tape and "bureaucratization of the land privatization process."[11] For those outside the nexus of power and property--another hallmark of Putinism at every administrative level--navigating the complexities of acquiring or selling land without paying thousands of rubles in bribes became virtually impossible. Always starved for capital, the new private farmers found most banks unwilling to accept land and equipment as collateral for loans. Farmers also complained of being pressured to pay otkaty (kickbacks) to the banks of as much as 10 percent of the loan amounts--and "even that [was] sometimes not enough," as one of them recently told a Russian sociologist.[12] With no perceptible improvement in infrastructure, rural roads continued to turn into impassable mud rivers at the worst times--spring sowing and fall harvesting and storage--further driving up the costs and the risks of independent farming.

Yet, as usual, the decisive factors in the slow and uneven progress of Russia's post-Soviet agriculture were people's values and aspirations. Unlike in Eastern Europe or China, no living memory of private farming remains in the Russian village. It has been almost eight decades since the murderous "collectivization" of 1929-33, when millions of the most hardworking, enterprising, and successful peasants and their entire families were arrested and sent into exile, and many were starved and worked to death. Millions more died in the man-made famine of 1932-33. The human capital was further depleted by the almost half-century exodus to the cities by the young and, more often than not, most ambitious and intelligent men and women since the end of the kolkhoz serfdom in the 1960s. (The peasants were issued domestic passports that enabled them to travel around the country and were no longer required to obtain written permission by the local authorities to leave the village.)

An overwhelming majority of those still on the farm today appear content to be salaried employees while, as in the Soviet days, cultivating in their spare time tiny plots (listed as "household farms" by the Federal Service for State Statistics) and "leasing" their shares of land to their "agricultural organization"--often for a nominal fee in rubles, a few sacks of grain, hay for a cow, or a few hours of a tractor driver's time to plow the plot for potatoes. Only 5 percent of former collective farm workers have chosen to claim their shares in land and become private farmers. By 2006, they and former city dwellers who had bought or leased land for private farming owned less than 10 percent of the 120 million hectares (almost 300 million acres) that were eligible for privatization.[13]


"Organizations," "Household Farms," and "Capitalists"

With the barely refurbished kolkhozes and sovkhozes controlling four-fifths of the arable land,[14] the structure of agricultural production looks very much like it did in Soviet times: these "agricultural organizations" produce over three-quarters of the country's grain, nearly half of its beef and poultry, and half of its milk and eggs. Millions of "household farms," described by a Russian expert as "less than half a hectare of land [about an acre and a quarter] and one or two cows," turn out the other half of its meat, poultry, and milk, as well as almost all of its potatoes (Russia's "second bread") and over 75 percent of its vegetables.[15]

The only significant contribution made by those whom Russian sociologists call "capitalists" or "Western-style" farmers--designated as the owners of "private (peasant) farms" in the official statistics, they are the closest Russia has come to modern commercial agriculture--is in grain (20 percent), sunflower seeds used for Russia's most popular vegetable oil (29 percent), and sugar beets (11 percent).[16] It seems hardly a coincidence that these products are among the few in which the output in 2007 exceeded that of 1992.[17] It is also largely because of these farmers--whose land could run into hundreds or even thousands of hectares, who use "highly productive" modern technology, and who employ up to several dozen workers[18]--that Russia went from the world's largest importer of grain in the 1970s and 1980s to one of the top ten exporters, selling abroad, on average, around 12 million tons of grain a year.[19] As to overall agricultural output, the "capitalist" share thus far has not exceeded 6 percent.[20]

Another source of modernization, spurred by the spike in grain prices over the past few years, has been urban investors who bought up individual shares from the peasants and in that way took over entire "agricultural organizations," mostly in the extrafertile chernozyom ("black earth") regions of Belgorod, Oryol, Rostov, Stavropol, and Krasnodar. Often, these "agribusinesses" are "vertically integrated"[21] into the banking and industrial empires of the national or regional oligarchs, whose coffers, in the absence of modern banking and financial structures, are still by far the main source of venture capital in Russia. Helped by very propitious weather, the steady progress of the "capitalists" and the "agribusinesses" combined to make Russia's 2008 grain harvest of 113 million tons the largest in post-Soviet history and the first one to exceed the 1992 yield of 107 million tons.

Outside of grain, however, Russian agriculture cannot compete with the ultra-efficient, mechanized, computerized, and heavily state-subsidized European and U.S. private farms in either quality or quantity. The gap is especially dramatic in animal husbandry, in which Russia is still behind its 1992 production levels of meat and poultry (by 33 percent), milk (32 percent), and eggs (12 percent).[22] Under the state National Priority Project on agriculture, launched in 2006 and extended to run from 2008 to 2012, tens of billions of rubles are to be spent to speed up the emergence of modern commercial farming by facilitating farmers' access to long-term credit, modern equipment, and fertilizers; attracting young professionals to the rural areas by helping them obtain loans for home-building; and providing state support for breeding high-quality livestock and fish, among other goals.[23]

Yet, even if they were not mired in corruption and incompetence like most of the grandiose state endeavors of the Putin era, these objectives of the National Priority Project do not include--critics say for political reasons--many other urgent tasks like affordable gasification of the countryside (in early 2008, Gazprom charged 100,000-120,000 rubles, or approximately $4,000-$5,000, to hook up a farm or private home); efforts to spur competition in the purchasing, processing, and sale of agricultural products, which are increasingly monopolized; and greater foreign investment.[24]


Inordinately Large Imports

These structural deficiencies help explain Russia's inordinate dependence on imported food. In early 2007, 45 percent of all food consumed in Russia was imported (compared to 20 percent in 2004), including 30 percent of meat (beef and pork) and nearly 40 percent of poultry.[25] In larger cities, according to Putin, 70-85 percent of food for sale came from abroad.[26]

Such reliance on foreign food is most unusual for a country of Russia's per-capita GDP and, even more so, its land area, which encompasses 9 percent of the world's arable acreage, 40 percent of which is exceptionally fertile "black earth."[27] With a per-capita GDP of $14,000 (in purchasing power parity), Russia imported twenty-two kilos (forty-eight pounds) of meat and poultry per capita, worth $35 in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available).[28] By comparison, geographically and historically proximate Poland, with a per-capita GDP of $15,330[29] and about the same level of agricultural development (although far behind Russia in size of arable land and fertility), imported nine kilos (twenty pounds) and $21 worth of meat and poultry per capita, or 40 and 60 percent, respectively, of Russia's amounts. Russia's per-capita consumption of imported butter and its cost exceeded Poland's by factors of 3 and 1.6, respectively.[30] (Compared to the other three members of the emergent group of industrial giants, known as BRIC, among which Russia is proud to count itself, Russia's general dependence on foreign-manufactured consumer goods, including food, is staggering: whereas China and India import only "tiny" amounts and Brazil 9 percent, 28 percent of Russia's consumer goods are from abroad.[31]) Since these data were collected in 2007, food imports have continued to soar: in January-June 2008, those of meat and poultry grew year-on-year by 44 percent and of milk by 21 percent; sugar and vegetable oil were 2.8 times and 1.9 times higher, respectively.[32]
Inflation

Even at the height of the oil boom in the first half of 2008--when record oil prices steadily pushed the ruble upward, despite the Central Bank's efforts to depress the national currency in order to increase profits from commodity exports--the growth of food prices far outstripped the already high overall inflation; while the latter reached 13 percent in 2008, the cost of the "basket" of "essential" food items increased by 18 percent.[33]

The basket's composite, however, does not tell the whole story. Throughout 2008, the prices for many individual items grew astonishingly quickly. For instance, the price of vegetable oil went up almost 5 percent in March and almost 9 percent in April.[34] Also in April, the price of bread skyrocketed, with St. Petersburg's price increasing the sharpest--almost 24 percent.[35]

One cause of the high food prices--expensive oil--Russia shared with the rest of the world as the commodity pushed up the cost of main agricultural inputs: fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fuel for tractors and combines.[36] Yet it cannot account for the prices of staples having grown more quickly in Russia than in Europe--as much as four times the European rate in the first five months of 2008.[37] Government policies and the business environment provide much of the rest of the explanation.

The effects of the centralization and interpenetration of political power and private property, so characteristic of Putin's presidency, have been no less conspicuous in agricultural production than they have been, for instance, in oil production, car-making, or aeronautics. The outcomes have been similar as well: the already mentioned, and growing, monopolization of wholesale trade, food processing, farm services, and equipment leasing; the erosion or elimination of competition; unfairly low purchasing prices for the farmers; and price fixing and collusion between buyers and distributors of food.[38] The monopolization has been blamed for the spiraling prices by commentators across the political spectrum, including Putin himself.[39] One of the many examples cited was the continuing growth in the retail price of milk when its wholesale price decreased by half in the spring of 2008.[40]

Another boost to inflation was a freeze on the prices of staples imposed by the government in the run-up to the December 2007 parliamentary elections. The results were predictable: a drop in the production of such staples as bread, sugar, and vegetable oil; a continuing increase in the prices despite the freeze; and an inflationary spike after the freeze was formally lifted on May 1, 2008.[41]

To curry favor with domestic producers and to punish the United States for criticizing Russia's August 2008 incursion into Georgia, the Russian government announced that it would be reviewing the agreed-upon import quotas on chicken parts, three-quarters of which--almost 900,000 tons--came from the United States.[42] (Russia is the largest foreign market for U.S. poultry.) Three months later, the minister of agriculture, Alexey Gordeev, announced that the import would be cut in 2009 by 300,000 tons, or almost a quarter of the amount that was to be delivered that year in accordance with the existing contracts, which stipulated the annual increase of 40,000 tons. In the end, the quota for poultry imports from the United States was decreased by 180,000 tons and duty on imports above the quota increased up to 95 percent.[43] The reaction of the experts was unanimous: because these imports offer Russian consumers something for which there is huge demand and that the national producers cannot supply at the same prices in the foreseeable future, the reduction in the imports can lead only to shortages and price increases.[44]


Straining Food Accessibility to a Breaking Point?

Last June, the average share of food in the overall cost of the basket of basic consumer goods was 36 percent--or between 1.5 and 2.4 times higher than in Europe, where it ranged between 15 and 25 percent. At the same time, half of the respondents in a national survey supported the issuance of "food cards" (similar to food stamps in the United States) to help the poor cope with the inflation, and 28 percent said that they themselves would use such cards.[45] In November, a poll found that 37 percent of Russian families had money enough to cover only food.[46]

In the meantime, inflation has shown no sign of abating in the new year. In the first three weeks of January 2009, consumer goods prices grew by 1.2 percent, while in only a week (between January 13 and 16), staples such as beef, chicken, milk, rye bread, and tea went up by between 0.4 and 0.7 percent and sugar by 3.9 percent.[47] From the end of January to the beginning of February, 75 percent of the respondents in a national poll named inflation among the most troubling issues facing the country.[48] (The second most frequently mentioned problem was the increase in unemployment, cited by 57 percent.) The rise in prices also has led among the difficulties for which the respondents "faulted" the government (41 percent of those surveyed), while the government's other biggest setback, the inability to "overcome the economic problems," was mentioned by 28 percent.[49]

In addition to such inevitable consequences as unemployment and the general diminution of household purchasing power, access to food will be severely hampered in 2009 by the sharply declining value of the ruble, which could place food imports outside the reach of tens of millions of Russians. At its peak in July 2008, the ruble traded at 23.9 to a U.S. dollar; a dollar was worth 35.65 rubles at the beginning of March 2009--a 49 percent decrease.

If the financial crash of 1998 is to serve as an example, widespread hunger is not likely. Import substitution quickly made up for the substantial dependence on foreign food,[50] which became too expensive after the ruble was sharply devalued. Together with similar developments in other consumer goods and industrial sectors, import substitution laid the foundation for Russia's economic expansion from 1999 to 2007.

Yet, some leading independent Russian experts are uncertain about the applicability of the 1998-99 experience after "years of the enormously heavy administrative pressure" have largely put an end to the growth of small businesses, whose situation, as Putin himself admitted, was "awful."[51] Would-be businessmen ("former engineers, designers, and bureaucrats"[52]), who created businesses and jobs (and fed the nation) after the 1998 crisis, today might be less capable (or willing) to take the risk.

Gloomier scenarios have sprung up to account for this potential structural handicap. In one such hypothetical development, in a small to medium-sized Russian city of the kind in which most Russians live, supermarkets are closed and only the "most elemental" products--bread, groats, cheap sausage, and milk--are available at kiosk-like "trading points" or sold by old women on the streets.[53] As the situation continues to deteriorate and people grow desperate, the local administration, which used to rely on the Kremlin's "vertical of power" for any decision, waits for orders from Moscow. No directives are forthcoming, and spontaneous demonstrations break out.[54]

One hopes that such versions of events will not come to pass. Still, superimposed on the already substantial inflation in food prices, Russia's inordinate dependence on imported food may yet become an explosive issue when the economic crisis and the falling oil prices increase unemployment and further weaken the ruble. Alongside other key economic and political certainties of Putinism, the "oil-for-food" structure is very likely to deteriorate rapidly and even collapse.

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at AEI.

The author is grateful to AEI research assistant Kara Flook and associate editor Laura Drinkwine for their help in editing and producing this essay.