Russia on the brink: the deteriorating situation inside Russia threatens the security of the entire region.

The deteriorating situation inside Russia threatens the security of the entire region.

THE climate of anxiety in Central and Eastern Europe is palpable. In Poland the public has been shaken by charges that the country's ex-Communist prime minister, Jozef Oleksy, was a spy. In Ukraine, the Communists, emboldened by the successes of their colleagues in Russia and other former Soviet republics, are seeking to force a referendum on the restoration of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the renewal of the USSR. German officials declared recently that Russian spying has reached levels exceeding those of the Soviet era. To the leaders of Central Europe's post-Communist democracies, their countries' need for early entry into NATO is ever more obvious.

Russia's return to aggressive hegemonism has given Eastern and Central Europeans plenty to worry about. None of the top Russian presidential candidates looks encouraging. Gennady Zyuganov, a Communist leader who preaches traditional virtues with an undercurrent of xenophobia, rails at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He is suspicious of the United Nations, opposes abortion, and calls on Russia to reaffirm its fundamental Christian roots. The ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky uses politico-eroticism based on the great leader's putative sexual potency and animal magnetism. Gen. Aleksandr Lebed has informed voters that Russia is not ready for democracy and that NATO expansion will trigger the start of World War III. He promises to inaugurate a regime of strict law and order and bring the corrupt governing elite to heel. Finally, the wheezing, sleepy, slurring, at times intoxicated Boris Yeltsin has become a voice for a statist regime in which power is held by a few cartels with Red directors.

Yeltsin's former press spokesman, the democrat Vyacheslav Kostikov, has just published a scathing memoir that describes Yeltsin as an amoral politician driven entirely by the quest for power. Still, because the only semi-competitive candidate with some attachment to democratic virtue (Grigory Yavlinsky) is a longshot, President Yeltsin is probably the best that Russia's neighbors and the West can hope for.

What, then, is wrong with the Russian people? Perhaps the better question is: What is wrong with Russia's leaders? It is now clear that in the four and a half years since the collapse of the USSR, something has gone terribly wrong with Russia's transition to a normal market democracy. Instead of a vibrant market society, Russia has become a state dominated by an incestuous corporatist system of cartels. There is no better example of this interlocking system than the fact that Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin is the former director -- and some suspect chief individual shareholder --of Gazprom (the former state gas company, reputed to be the most valuable corporation on earth) and that First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Kadannikov is the former director of AvtoVaz (Russia's equivalent of General Motors).

The power of these representatives of the military - industrial complex has survived the turmoil of Communist collapse virtually intact. Now they, in alliance with representatives of the security structures, are pressing for Russia's return to a traditional pattern of intimidation and oppression abroad.

While the international financial community has again lavished massive loans ($10 billion) on the Kremlin, Russia's governing elite appears to have relegated the West to the fourth tier of Russian interests. The first tier contains the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The second tier, the countries of Eastern Europe. The third tier, the Islamic world and China. Only after relations with these countries are resolved will Russia seek to shape relations with the West.

WHILE this transformation has come about gradually, there is no question that, today, Russia is led by a fundamentally different set of leaders from the ones who took over after the collapse of the August 1991 coup. Out of office are economic reformers Yegor Gaidar and Aleksandr Chubais and democratic reformer Sergei Kovalev. In are hard-liners who have pressed for the war in Chechnya, the return to a state-dominated economy, and the primacy of relations with such renegade regimes as Iraq and Iran.

All this suggests that the Russian political, economic, and security establishments have been paving the way for this summer's likely shift of power to a Communist or nationalist president. Indeed, Russia's power brokers appear to be forcing President Yeltsin to appoint what amounts to a government of transition that already reflects the choices in favor of statism and hegemonism made by Russian voters in December's parliamentary elections.

In the U.S. Government, meanwhile, even the most optimistic predictors of a smooth Russian transition to a democratic society appear to have new and profound doubts. Only Ambassador Thomas Pickering, recently in the U.S. for meetings of the Gore -Chernomyrdin commission, continues to make a case for business as usual. He points out that in 1993 the Communists received around 12 percent of the vote and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's fascists 22 per cent. Now, he says, the percentages are simply reversed. But in truth, in 1995 more than 60 percent of the votes were cast for ultra-nationalist, Communist, and fascist political formations, each of which regards the Yeltsin team as criminally culpable for destroying a great power. Two years before, these forces were a clear minority.

Such voters would seem disposed to elect anyone but President Yeltsin. But Yeltsin's advisors are apparently not convinced. They have pressed him to woo the nationalist part of the electorate by adopting a more muscular anti-U.S. foreign policy, and the Communist part by increasing government spending on social programs and slowing down the pace of privatization. If Yeltsin fails in this bid to secure majority support, there is little chance that he will be able to steal the election through fraud at the polls. In the last parliamentary elections, at least as many local election commissions appeared to favor the Communists as favored Chernomyrdin's pro-Yeltsin Our Home Russia party. And since then, the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, has been waging a skillful campaign, melding a reactionary Pan-Slavic neo-imperialism with traditional Communist sloganeering. Echoing anti-Semitic themes, Zyuganov posits a twilight centuries-long struggle between a moral Christian society -- Russia -- and a soulless, materialist Western society stripped of its Christian essence by capitalism and Jewish domination of finance and commerce.

Even if -- against all odds -- Yeltsin can score a victory over Communist and nationalist hard-liners, he would probably wind up following external policies resembling those of his enemies. Indeed, he is already doing so in the escalation of warfare in Chechnya. And no signals of a hard-line foreign and defense policy could be clearer than the appointment of Nikolai Yegorov as presidential chief of staff and Yevgeny Primakov as foreign minister.

How much does all of this matter? A recent report prepared by Yuri Baturin, President Yeltsin's national-security advisor, places Russia's potential in a global context. Russia's gross domestic product is 15 percent that of the United States. Demographic trends suggest the Russian population -- barring a major new influx from other countries of the former USSR -- will not significantly increase over the next twenty years. The report's authors conclude that Russia will not be able to claim the role of "Number Two Superpower" but instead should seek the role of a "micro-opposition" in the world, working to block U.S. and NATO hegemony.

Some might argue that Russia's weakness means that the country no longer poses any significant threat. But Russia remains a great military power with a massive nuclear arsenal. Moreover, Russia's potential for economic revival is great because of its unrivaled reserve of natural resources. Most significantly, Russia remains a great power when compared to its neighbors and so poses a potential danger for security and stability in Central Europe and Central Asia. Absent a well-conceived Western policy, Russia will certainly attempt to restore the former Soviet Union. Indeed, the response of Russia's elite to the reality of Russian decline outlined in the Baturin report has been first denial, then anger, and finally a determined effort to change the geopolitical balance by the restoration of the Soviet state through reintegration, whether voluntary or coerced.

TO respond to this emerging challenge, Western leaders should stop viewing Russia through a Cold War prism. Russia is not the superpower that the Soviet Union was. While it is important to think about Russia in traditional balance-of-power terms, we should do so in a fundamentally new way: not as a superpower, but as a regional power in Central Europe and Central Asia. An anti-democratic, xenophobic Russia seeking to restore its hegemonic rule poses a serious threat to its immediate neighbors in those regions. And history teaches us that such a threat could eventually spill over and destabilize Western Europe and the Middle East.

The key, then, is to balance Russian influence by bolstering cooperation among countries Russia would like to dominate. In Central Asia, this means bolstering the autonomy of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. In the critical European arena, it means strengthening the stability and independence of Poland and Ukraine -- especially by working to ensure the energy independence of Ukraine, whose reliance on Russian oil and natural gas is its most pronounced strategic vulnerability.

Together Poland and Ukraine have a population of over 90 million, roughly three-quarters that of European Russia (Russia west of the Urals). Ukraine has possession of some of the former USSR's most modern arms; under the terms of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, it has two-thirds as many tanks and armored personnel carriers as Russia.

Recent internal problems in Poland and Ukraine suggest that balancing Russian influence will be difficult and will require skillful Western policy. In Poland, these problems include evidence of a significant web of relationships between Warsaw's governing ex-Communists and Russian intelligence. In Ukraine, there is the worrisome presence of pro-Russian, pro-reintegration movements. Ukraine's and Russia's Communists recently coordinated a wave of miners' strikes, which Ukrainian authorities dealt with successfully. But the Communists are trying to collect three million signatures to force a referendum on restoring the USSR. The Polish spy scandal and the bold mobilization of Ukraine's Communists are not at all coincidental signs of Russia's increasingly active external policy.

But not all is bleak. Ukraine's Communists have little chance of electing a president. And despite considerable sentiment for reintegration with Russia in Ukraine's ethnically Russian Crimea and in the linguistically Russian Donbas, Ukraine's prime minister and parliament seek to preserve their country's sovereignty.

President Leonid Kuchma, who visited Washington recently at the invitation of Freedom House, restated his opposition to Ukraine's participation in a military - political union of the Commonwealth of Independent States. While asserting his desire for close economic relations with Russia, he reaffirmed that Ukraine sees the CIS as an economic entity, not a military - political one. He also pledged to continue along a path of democracy and market reform; he declared: "The strategic aim . . . for Ukraine is to enter the European Union."

Ukraine is the key to denying Russia the status of world power. Naturally, Ukraine does not want to be a buffer, and it has no wish to absorb the blows of a militant and belligerent Russia. Neither, though, does it want to be a bridge between Russia and the West -- "People walk all over you when you're a bridge," says Ukrainian ambassador Yuri Shcherbak. Instead, its leaders want it to be an integral part of Europe.

Poland's recent woes, too, can be overcome. Polish reliability is integral to the strategy of NATO expansion. To restore confidence in Poland's leaders amid the widening spy scandal will require placing non-Communists at the head of the defense and foreign ministries and establishing a permanent commission to review secret-police documents concerning appointees for public office.

Amid the growing uncertainty in Eastern Europe there are, for the first time since President Clinton took office, signs of an adjustment in U.S. policy in the region. That policy includes a reassertion of a U.S. commitment to NATO expansion. And there are signs of a shift in U.S. attitudes toward Russia.

Most significantly, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who has steered our Russian policy from the inception of the Clinton Administration, has shifted perceptibly in the last year. Gone is the Pollyannish talk about helping Russia complete its transition to democracy. Replacing it is a more realistic view that Russia's transformation to a normal European state will be a matter of generations rather than years. This new perception has emerged partly as a result of Russian conduct and partly in response to tough congressional pressure, particularly from Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has advocated close cooperation with Ukraine.

In a recent op-ed article for the New York Times Mr. Talbott signaled the U.S. shift when he asserted: "Russia is stepping up its call for economic and political integration. . . . we oppose coercion and intimidation of neighboring states. We will endorse regional cooperation only so long as it is truly voluntary and only if it opens doors to the outside world."

In a February 22 story on President Kuchma's meetings with President Clinton and Administration officials, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. views Ukraine "as a counterweight to any attempt by Moscow to dominate neighboring states." A high-level White House official confirmed to me the accuracy of this report. He then observed: "In the days after the collapse of the USSR, we thought the emergence of Russian democracy was the key to ensuring the democratic transition of Russia's neighbors. Today, the reverse view predominates: the emergence of stable democracies on Russia's periphery -- especially in Ukraine -- is critical to Russia's emergence as a stable democracy."

Michael Mandelbaum has argued in Foreign Affairs magazine the view that the central security issue in Europe is Ukraine. Mandelbaum, who was an advisor to the 1992 Clinton campaign, worries that expanding NATO to include Poland will isolate Ukraine. However, it is hard to see how a Poland that regards itself as isolated and abandoned would be a more reliable ally of Ukraine than a confident Poland anchored in the Western alliance. Moreover, Ukraine has a powerful military and the capability to protect itself from aggression provided it is economically secure. NATO expansion will not isolate or weaken Ukraine if it is accompanied by a Western commitment to provide financial support for Ukraine's energy needs and its transition to a market system.

For the moment, foreign policy does not loom large in the U.S. presidential race. But with the Russian presidential elections on the horizon, events in Eastern Europe will not go away. We are rapidly approaching a critical juncture that will determine the shape of the post - Cold War world. The strategic choices made in the next year will be crucial in deciding whether Central and Eastern Europe will move toward permanent stability, security, and prosperity. If the U.S. exercises its leadership thoughtfully and clearly, such an outcome is within our grasp no matter what choice Russian voters make in June.