Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2004

Moscow's Mussolini

By ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

Mr. Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, is the
author, most recently, of "The Choice: Global Domination or Global
Leadership" (Basic Books, 2004).

Thou art so pitiful,
Poor, and so sorrowful,
Yet of great treasure full,
Mighty, all-powerful,
Russia, my Mother!

Citing these stirring words of the poet Nekrasov, Vladimir I. Lenin, the
new dictator of Russia, published on March 12, 1918, his reasons for
moving Russia's seat of government from St. Petersburg (Petrograd) to
Moscow. Amid the chaos, confusion, and violence of those revolutionary
days, Lenin, having just five days earlier entrenched himself in the
Kremlin, proclaimed:

"Russia will become mighty and abundant if she abandons all dejection
and all phrase-making, if, with clenched teeth, she musters all her
forces and strains every nerve and muscle. . . . work with might and
main to establish discipline and self-discipline, consolidate everywhere
organization, order, efficiency, and the harmonious co-operation of all
the forces of the people, introduce comprehensive accounting of and
control over production and distribution -- such is the way to build up
military might and socialist might."

Moscow -- which centuries earlier had been the capital of Ivan the
Terrible but was demoted to the status of a provincial town when Peter
the Great opened a window to Europe by constructing St. Petersburg as
his new capital -- thus once again became Russia's epicenter. And so it
remains to this day, with Lenin's slogans eerily anticipating Vladimir
Putin's recent justification for centralized power.

It is important to recognize that to the Russians the Kremlin is more
than just the seat of government. It epitomizes the centralizing
tradition of the Russian autocracy. It is a tradition that is fearful of
any regional autonomy, of any genuine decentralization, a tradition that
fosters the chauvinist paranoia that political pluralism will almost
inevitably precipitate the breakup of Russia itself. That mentality
fitted well into the Stalinist notions of central planning, and it fit
well into the bureaucratic mentality of the KGB with its ethic of
suspicion and hierarchic discipline. For products of the KGB, such as
Mr. Putin, it is axiomatic that if Russia is to be "mighty,
all-powerful," it must be ruled from the top down.

Two significant realities flow from the above. The first is that Moscow
is the home of a parasitic political elite that identifies the interests
of Russia with its own interests. Subordinating an enormous country with
11 time-zones to all decision-making concentrated in the hands of remote
Moscow bureaucrats is a formula instinctively favored by parasites. The
monopolistic power of the Muscovite elite suffocates local initiative
and prevents the various regions of Russia from exploiting their own
talents and resources.

It is not an accident that under Stalin as well as in recent years,
Moscow has been and remains the privileged beneficiary of modernization
and development. In contrast, other Russian cities continue to stagnate
and the Russian countryside remains largely reminiscent of the days of
Tolstoy. To this day, much of all foreign investment is devoured by
Moscow alone (or recycled abroad) while in many other cities (like
Vladivostok, for example) even rudimentary services -- housing, hospital
care, etc. -- are almost primitive.

Secondly, the leeching and self-centered mindset of the Moscow political
elite stifles political democratization. Mr. Putin's move is popular
with the elite because it propitiates the basic interests of a power
elite that still harbors nostalgia for great- power imperialist status,
that identifies its own well-being with domination over all of Russia,
and through Russia over at least the former states of the Soviet Union.
To the power elite, the independence of Ukraine, or of Georgia, or of
Uzbekistan is an historic offense. To it, the resistance of the Chechens
to Russian domination is a "terrorist" crime. To it, autonomy for 20
million ethnically non-Russian citizens is a challenge to its own
privileges.

The turn toward statist centralism under Mr. Putin's KGB regime should
not be confused, however, with a return to some form of communist
totalitarianism. Today's Russian rulers realize that communism meant
stagnation and the elite knows that communism also would mean relative
deprivation for itself. State-capitalism, subject to central control, as
well as the advantages of wealth and travel abroad provide the best
formula for both self-gratification and nationalist aspirations.

Mr. Putin's regime in many ways is similar to Mussolini's Fascism. Il
Duce made "the trains run on time." He centralized political power in
the name of chauvinism. He imposed political controls over the economy
without nationalizing it or destroying the economic oligarchs and their
mafias. The Fascist regime evoked national greatness, discipline, and
exalted myths of an allegedly glorious past. Similarly, Mr. Putin is
trying to blend the traditions of the Cheka (Lenin's Gestapo, where his
own grandfather started his career), with Stalin's wartime leadership,
with Russian Orthodoxy's claims to the status of the Third Rome, with
Slavophile dreams of a single large Slavic state ruled from the Kremlin.

That combination may be appealing for a while but ultimately -- probably
within a decade or so -- it will fail. The younger and better educated
and more open-minded Russian generation will slowly permeate the ruling
elite. The upcoming generation will not be satisfied with life in a
Fascist petro-state in which the Kremlin glitters (because of oil
profits) while the rest of the country falls further and further behind
not only Europe but also China. They are aware that decentralization of
their huge country, which can unleash social initiative, is the key to
modernization. That reality cannot be obscured forever by the slogans
about "terrorism" that Mr. Putin used to justify the imposition of
stifling political centralization.

Indeed, already today the neighboring Ukraine of nearly 50 million
people (whom the Bush NSC has so studiously ignored while naïvely
courting Mr. Putin) is beginning to provide a contrast in two major
domains: its economic progress is more diversified and more evident in
other cities than just in the national capital; and its politics (while
still vulnerable to manipulation) have produced two genuinely contested
presidential elections. As of today, no one can predict the outcome of
the Ukrainian presidential elections scheduled for late October, a fact
that stands in sharp contrast with the Russian "elections" in which Mr.
Putin was the candidate.

Unfortunately, over the last several years the White House has fostered
a cult of Putin that has done great harm to the increasingly isolated
Russian democrats. Their cause deserved support. There were Russians who
bravely stood up and opposed the progressive silencing of Russia's free
media. There were Russians who voiced concerns regarding the narrowing
scope of Russia's democracy. There were Russians who protested against
the inhuman and almost genocidal massacres of the Chechens. Never once
did any of them hear any measure of support from the top leadership of
the country that once held high the standard of human rights in
opposition to communist tyranny.

Moreover, the Bush administration should wake up to the fact that what
happens in Russia bears directly on what may also happen in the space of
the former Soviet Union. Today, many in the newly independent
post-Soviet states fear that in the name of a war against terrorism the
U.S. may also ignore Mr. Putin's intensifying efforts to encourage
manipulated elections in Ukraine, to promote separatism in Georgia
(while fiercely crushing the Chechens for seeking it), and to isolate
Central Asia from the international economy. The fact is that prospects
for democracy within Russia are interconnected both with the existence
of national pluralism within the space of the former Soviet Union and
with the spread of political pluralism within Russia itself.

There is a basic lesson for America in all this: For democracy to thrive
in Russia, its neighbors must be truly secure, the rights of non-Russian
minorities must not be forgotten, and Russian democrats must not be
ignored.