Russia's springtime
Last week's swearing in of Dmitri Medvedev as Russian president was but the most visible sign of a new mood in Moscow, the Russian Spring, writes Anouar Abdel-Malek
"The mood's good. Spring is here, even if it's raining. It's a new season. It's nice!" So commented Dmitri Medvedev on the Russian presidential elections. When he was elected president of the Russian Federation last March analysis was confused by rumours, with commentators and experts moving between stunned surprise and perplexed attempts to divine the signs.
Would Medvedev be another version of Putin? If not, what was the meaning of his announcement that he would appoint Putin as prime minister? Was the Russian system of government on the verge of a double-headed executive? Was it conceivable that the president-elect would depart from the Tsarist legacy passed down since the founding of Russia in the 11th century and relinquish his broad power over the affairs of this former superpower that stretches over a vast tract of land from Eastern Europe to the Pacific and that, under Putin, had begun to stage its return to the front rank of nations?
Since Medvedev's swearing in as president, the experts, or at least the serious ones, have posed another set of questions about the challenges he will face as he takes over the reins.
First, will Russia be able to sustain the economic boom it is now enjoying only eight years after the departure of President Yeltsin, who nearly succeeded in the task the West had chosen him for -- to put an end to Russian might following the dismantling of the former Soviet Union?
That Putin led his country to economic recovery against all the odds is beyond a doubt. The facts speak for themselves. Within two weeks of Putin's re-election as president in 2004, the West struck back. NATO annexed the three former Soviet Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, while continuing masked economic sanctions against Russia under the guise of that old Cold War relic, the Jackson-Vanik amendment. Nevertheless, according to experts at Goldman Sachs Russian economic production has increased by 27 per cent a year since 2000, with net annual growth in GDP of 7 per cent. Moscow has been able to pay back its foreign debt and stockpile a reserve of US$250 billion. Per capita income has doubled and now exceeds US$400 a month.
Russia is the largest natural gas exporting nation and the second largest petroleum exporting nation after Saudi Arabia. It has vast petroleum reserves in the south around the Caspian Sea, as well as in Russian south-west Asia. Oil and gas production have climbed from 12.7 per cent of GDP in 1999 to 31.6 per cent in 2007, by which point oil and gas accounted for 80 per cent of total exports. The economic boom has also triggered a massive consumerist wave, making Russia the sixth largest importer in Europe.
Looking at the Russian economy today, one can not help but be amazed, all the more so when one looks back at the ravages of the neo-liberal era under Yeltsin when it was commandeered by notorious Jewish mafias led by such figures as Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Potanin, Fridman, Chodorkowsky and Abramowic, until Putin disbanded them. By 1997, the national higher education budget had shrunk to a twelfth of what it had been in 1990. The number of teachers has dropped by about two thirds, the general education budget to 3.7 per cent of national income and teachers' salaries to 30 per cent less than the average salary of their fellow government employees.
In addition, only 15 per cent of higher education institutes managed to maintain the high standards they had had in the days of the former Soviet Union. Declining standards led to declining student performance and to deterioration in other areas, notably the press. Argumenty i Fakty, for example, the famous weekly that in 1989 had a circulation of 32 million, today has a circulation of three million.
Second, what can be done to reverse Russia's ominous demographic trends?
When Yeltsin took power, Russia had a population of 150 million. However, the male death rate climbed by 32 per cent between 1990 and 1994, and by 2003 the population had dropped by five million, or at a rate of 57,000 per year. According to official statistics, if the current trend continues, the population will plummet to just over 100 million by 2050. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, communicable diseases spread while, under Yeltsin, public health allocations plummeted to five per cent of the national budget.
The population decline in Russia is unprecedented in industrial nations, according to Patricio Marquez, the World Bank's Lead Health Specialist on Europe and Central Asia. In his report "Dying Too Young (in the Russian Federation)," Marquez cites some alarming statistics. The average life expectancy of males is now less than 60 years (it had been 67 in 1985 and 63 in 1900). This is 16 years less than the average life expectancy for males in Western Europe and 14 per cent less than the average life expectancy for females in Russia today. Marquez adds that only 50 per cent of Russian males currently 18 years old can expect to reach the age of retirement, compared to 90 per cent in Britain.
According to the WHO, alcohol and smoking cause 1.2 million deaths a year, or about half the total annual mortality rate. In 2007, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development cautioned that Russia's currently 90 million strong labour force will plunge to 75 million in 2020.
Third, what are the ramifications of these demographic trends on defence and military industrial policy?
Given Russia's far-flung borders -- the most extensive in the world -- the population needs to be concentrated in the border regions, especially in the eastern provinces in Siberia along the Pacific. For these reason, increasing attention will have to be paid to furnishing defence facilities with the appropriate levels of skills and labour. And, indeed, the Russian leadership since Putin has devoted considerable efforts in this direction. While on the subject of the future of Russian defence policy, Moscow's most pressing challenge now is to improve military technology, especially in the conventional equipment needed by its navy and air force and with particular focus on missile manufacture.
WE SHOULD WELCOME the election of Dmitri Medvedev as Russian president particularly because of the history that Egypt and Russia have shared since the end of World War II. Through the two countries' joint efforts, the Aswan High Dam was built, Egypt's heavy and medium- weight industries were constructed, and Egypt's military was armed and trained. Had it not been for the Soviet Union, Egypt would not have been able to overcome the disaster of the June 1967 war, or prepare for the victory of October 1973. Egypt, as a civilisation, a people and a nation, can never forget the debt of gratitude it owes to Russia, regardless of the changes that have brought the collapse of the bipolar geopolitical order and affected our current foreign policy orientation.
Perhaps the best way we can express our gratitude is to study the circumstances of Russia today, for these form an indispensable guide to the course the newly elected president will take. Of one thing we can be certain as he sets out to lead his country forward, and that is that the forces of imperialist hegemony, centring around the US- NATO and world Zionist axis, will scramble to sap Russia of its strength, diminish its resources and distort its national drive, even as our friend, ally and partner begins a new phase in shaping a new global order.
What will Russia in the age of President Medvedev be like? Can we discern features of the Russian Spring from his career up to the present and his statements during the electoral campaigns earlier this year?
One is struck first by the fact that the young president belongs to a different professional class to Russia's other officials. I stress professional class, because Medvedev, along with his colleagues, aides and friends, belongs to the same class as the outgoing President Putin. All are members of the middle class (in the conventional sense of the term), which is to say they are neither working class nor from that class of nouveaux riches which proliferated in the wake of the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
Medvedev was born into a family of university teachers. His father was a history professor and his mother a professor of Russian language and literature in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia's second capital and home to the middle class that formed the core of the intellectual culture in this most liberal of Soviet cities. As a young man, he developed an interest in law, became a fan of rock music, and, at 23, decided to be baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church. In order to earn some extra income, he took a job in construction. In 1982, he enrolled in the Department of Law at the University of Leningrad. One of his professors was Anatoly Sobchak, who would later become one of Putin's mentors and who in 1991 became the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. In 1990, Medvedev obtained a PhD in law, after which he began his public career.
His career started on two tracks: politics and business. He was an advisor to the St. Petersburg municipality's property division, then founded two small companies, and then was advisor to various insurance firms and forestry management companies. The crowning year on the business track of his career came when President Putin appointed him chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom, which held the core assets of Yukos Oil, then controlled by Russian Jewish billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Today, the largest Russian company, Gazprom controls the Russian gas empire, which is to say that by 2001 Medvedev had risen to a key position at the summit of the national economy during a crucial period of economic recovery.
Two years later in October 2003, Medvedev replaced Alexander Voloshin as presidential chief- of-staff. While in the presidential administration, he avoided both powerful camps in the Kremlin: the security service officials (known as the "siloviki") and the Yeltsin-era old guard. Two years after that in November 2005, Putin appointed Medvedev as his first deputy prime minister. In this latter capacity, the then 40-year-old politician focused on domestic development, with particular attention to health, education, housing and agriculture. However, with a budget of only a few million dollars, he was not in a position to make a profound impact on the sectors that impact most directly on the quality of life and human security concerns of the Russian people.
Medvedev's meteoric rise soon led him to be nominated for the presidency. As the campaign season kicked off earlier this year, the youthful candidate delivered several speeches which, taken together, give indications of his political philosophy. One of the most important principles he stressed was freedom. Freedom, he said, was always better than the absence of freedom, the truth of which is borne out by experience. "I am speaking, here, of freedom in all its manifestations: personal freedom, economic freedom and, finally, freedom of expression," Medvedev explained. "Freedom is inseparable from the practical recognition by all of the supremacy of the rule of law."
Medvedev was trained as a lawyer, and he was precise in his choice of terms. Freedom is intrinsically connected with law, he said, implying that freedom can only be realised in a climate different to that fostered by the Yeltsin regime, which was saturated with what Medvedev referred to as "legal nihilism." This was the rule of powerful groups that had used their wealth to lever themselves into positions from which they could assert political sway. Medvedev appealed for judicial reform, in order to create a true and effective separation between the judiciary and the executive and legislative authorities.
In his campaign, Medvedev also focused on the comprehensive injection of new life into civil affairs. As successful as Putin had been in steering the country's economic and political recovery over the previous eight years, the presidential candidate chose a different course for his thinking. His political philosophy, thus, did not echo Putin's refrain of "sovereign democracy," whereby Russian democracy needed to rise on a secure foundation of Russian interests, and in a July 2007 interview he explained his reservations on this score.
"I still don't like the term 'sovereign democracy'," he explained. "In my opinion as a lawyer, playing up one feature of a fully-fledged democracy -- namely the supremacy of the state authorities within the country and their independence [from influences] outside the country -- is excessive and even harmful."
Instead of sweeping ideological slogans, Medvedev prefers to focus on the lives of the little people, especially as these are related to the economy. Corruption and bureaucratic negligence, inefficiency and arrogance are the most dangerous threats to a healthy business climate, he has explained, arguing for the need for radical change in the philosophy and attitudes governing the red tape needed to establish and run new businesses. The new ideology, he insists, needs to be formulated in such a way as to open realistic opportunities for the growth of small businesses which today are drowning in a swamp of official indifference and "commissions."
How is it possible to reconcile this forceful advocacy of the rule of law and judicial and administrative reform with Medvedev's role as the head of the largest and most powerful economic institution in Russia today? And how can the newly elected Russian president and heir to the great Soviet Union reconcile his insistence on protecting and encouraging small business and caring for the health, education and housing of the people with his determination to steer the Russian economy, with its complex relations with the global economy and the European sector of the global economy in particular, towards more open markets?
Under the current system in Russia, the government places state officials in key positions on the boards of major corporations, and this is a fundamental difference between Russia's and China's ways of steering the public sector. In China, an expert in the appropriate field of science and technology who also enjoys a senior position in the Communist Party is appointed to head public-sector businesses. This is not the way things have been done in Russia since 1991.
For one thing, there is no longer a Communist Party to lead society, and the role of the party has been usurped by senior technocrats appointed by the president who owe their loyalty solely to the executive, as there is no party to call them to account on the basis of socialist principles or the principles of any other ideology. As a result, the Russian economic hierarchy is made up of executive appointees, as opposed to individuals drawn from a political class having a range of scientific and professional expertise. This means that the Russian economy is at risk of stagnation, all the more so in view of the demographic plight that is threatening to explode into a national security crisis. Medvedev is clearly aware of this predicament, and, in the absence of a party vanguard, he has chosen a middle course: "I believe there is no reason why state officials should sit on most of the boards of our economic institutions. In fact, they should be replaced by truly independent directors appointed by the state to achieve its goals."
AFTER THIS EXAMINATION of President Medvedev's statements regarding domestic policy, there remains the matter of his foreign policy. This will proceed from the platform created by Putin, the former president having broken the back of the campaign to destroy Russia and having reconstructed a state and society equipped to face a tempestuous age of pre-emptive warfare.
However, in taking over the task of steering his country through these treacherous global times, especially in a time of stagnation, Medvedev will need much more than the diplomatic finesse and cost-benefit analyses on whose basis countries of the world today conduct their international relations.
I have devoted much time to studying the historical dimensions of the Russian question, feeling it important to fill certain gaps in the knowledge imposed on us by successive generations of western colonialism. These gaps have caused us to view the West as consisting of Britain and France, as if Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and their extensions in Latin America were "outsiders." In general the true shape of the world is still all too vague in the minds of many Egyptians, and a closer familiarity with how the world came to be as it is, with its various components and degrees of diversity, can only enhance our ability to participate in shaping the world of tomorrow.
So, what is this Russia at whose helm Medvedev now stands?
To take just the historical and geopolitical facts, the Russian Federation was so named in 1991 following the collapse of the former Soviet Union. It consists of a western segment in Eastern Europe, which has remained outside the sphere of western Catholic and Protestant Christianity since the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in Kiev (currently the capital of the Ukraine) and the adoption of Russian as the official language. All this took place between 880 and 1015 CE. As a result, since the 11th century Russia has stood outside what is conventionally viewed as the Western European world and as a centre of Eastern Orthodoxy, which extends through Bulgaria, Greece, Constantinople until 1492, and branched out of Egypt in the 3rd century into the Levant and southwards into Africa.
Western Europe, with its armies, technologies, industries and other means of modernisation, has continuously pushed at Russia since the age of Peter the Great. Although its most important source of food lay in the south, where the earth is fertile and the climate moderate, Imperial Russia expanded eastward towards the Pacific, assimilating Asian peoples and cultures through a series of conquests and treaties, the epic story of which finds echoes in the nation's music, opera and cinema.
The national music produced by the major Russian composers, the epic novels of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, and the cinematic epics of Eisenstein tell of a nation or, more precisely, an empire of diverse peoples and cultures that fused into the medley that is now the Russian nation. And around this hover the ambitions of the great powers and the new powers hoping for a share in the enormous natural wealth of the vast Russian continent. Russia has no natural borders and no mountains or seas to protect it, unlike France, Spain, England and, not least, the US, Russia's peer in continental expansion. Its political and strategic borders have always been vulnerable to waves of invasion. National security, therefore, is the key to its survival.
Russian society in the post-Soviet age needs to find ways to hold together against the winds of disintegration. Hardly had the Soviet Union recovered from the unparalleled loss of human life in World War II then it faced the wave of fragmentation that led to the Yeltsin era. Clearly the first priority following the ravages of that era was to rebuild the Russian state. That is the mission, indeed the miracle, that Putin accomplished, his aims being to reconstruct the state, to establish a solid economic and technological base, and to set into motion a cultural-moral revival springing from the heart of the nation.
However, national reconstruction still faces major challenges. In Siberia, millions of immigrants are needed in order to capitalise on the resources of this vast region, and millions of farmers, craftsmen and administrators are needed to develop those portions that border on China, Mongolia and Central Asia adjacent to the Indian subcontinent. How else to rise to this challenge than to reach an understanding with the peoples of the Islamic south and the peoples of China, in order to ensure Russian sovereignty over its territory and the joint development of the Asian region as a whole? This great national challenge will determine the prospects of a harmonious future for the whole of the Russian Federation.
Russian national revival also faces perils abroad, especially after Bush's declaration of a pre-emptive war against the future under the banner of the "War on Terrorism," a policy opposed by a record 81 per cent of the American people. Closer to home, the three Baltic states that once formed part of the Soviet Union are currently home to NATO bases and combat units facing the Russian border. And while Moscow established the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1993 to the south in order to sustain smooth relations with the other former Soviet republics, the Americans quickly moved to undermine this effort and succeeded in pushing NATO into former Soviet territories, effectively surrounding Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
This process is continuing today, even if NATO recently backed down from its bid to annex the Ukraine and Georgia largely due to objections lodged by Germany, France, Spain and Italy. The Ukraine is the cradle of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian language; Georgia is the birthplace of Stalin, conqueror of Hitler's armies in the greatest battles of World War II. On the other hand, at its recent meeting in Bucharest (April 2008), NATO approved the installation of a missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic. The ostensible purpose of this is to protect Europe from Iran (!), but everyone knows that its true purpose is to spy on Russia.
One could describe Russia's relationship with its external environment as having reverted to a Cold War intensity, with the US today allied with the Ukraine, Georgia and some former members of the Warsaw Pact (Poland and the Czech Republic) against it. At the same time, however, Russia's economic relations with Germany have deepened, focusing on the major oil pipeline that will reach northern Germany from Russia in 2010 and extend from there to other countries in Western Europe. Other Western European countries, notably France, Italy and Spain, also remain on friendly terms with Russia, from which Europe imports a quarter of its gas and oil.
Yet, in spite of the improvement in Russia's relations with Europe, most European governments, many right-wing ruling parties, and a large portion of the media are strongly influenced by the Zionist lobby and oppose the re- emergence of a strong Russian state, especially one that seeks to reassert itself as a superpower.
However, the world today, the emerging new world, is no longer confined to the global order that prevailed from the 16th century to World War II. Instead, the new world is coalescing around new centres and axes. Since the days of the former Soviet Union, the Russian leadership has realised that the civilisational East (or the South, as economists call it) is its major partner. It was out of this realisation that the Primakov's policies stemmed, named after a graduate in Oriental Studies who went on to become Russian foreign minister and prime minister in the post- Soviet era.
Primakov's project was to build the Russian future around a central axis in the emerging world order consisting of Russia, China and India. It was based on the fact that Russia is China's strategic partner in the leadership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and heir to the strategic alliance between the Kremlin and post- independence India. Moreover, India, the heart of southern Asia, is China's partner in the race to be in the global economic vanguard, and China is the emerging global superpower in spite of all Washington's attempts to forestall this by instigating upheavals in Tibet.
It is on this axis that the most important developments are taking place in the shaping of the new world, and this is the focal point for the mobilisation of the largest-ever economic, human and moral energies.
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