Teddy bears: the Russian people are in no mood for conflict, which ought to ease NATO expansion.

Mr. Rose is professor of public policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. His latest book is How Russia Votes, co-authored with Stephen White and Ian McAllister.

TO ANYONE who knows the past half-century of European history, the idea that Russia is a peace-loving nation is hardly plausible. The whole idea of NATO expansion assumes that Russia is a threat to the peace and security of Europe and the United States.

But Russia today is not the Soviet Union. The Red Army has ceased to exist, and the power of the new state to coerce Russians has gone. Russians now have substantial freedom to ignore what their governors command, especially when it means risking their lives for an aggressive action abroad. The Afghan War was deeply unpopular in the Soviet Union, but the information blackout and suppression of opposition enabled the Soviet state to continue it for years.

Chechnya has been doubly sobering. For the first time, television has brought into Russian homes visible evidence of what happens when the Russian military machine starts to roll. Furthermore, Chechnya is a civil war fought within the boundaries of the Russian Federation. To ordinary Russians, avoiding civil war is far more important than maintaining the country as an international power.

You can't fight a war if the population is demoralized, for unhappy conscripts will run away rather than dutifully march toward gunfire. Yet demoralization may also encourage an irrational yearning to recapture great-power status. Vladimir Zhirinovsky has voiced conspiracy theories about the threat of the West to Russia's security, and Solzhenitsyn has warned of the West's threat to the Russian soul. Potentially, such rhetoric is a call to arms for the Third Rome to defend itself against Western barbarians.

But do Russians want to fight? Today, there is no need to rely on what Russian leaders say; Russians can be asked what they think directly. Since January 1992, the New Russia Barometer (NRB) has annually interviewed a representative nationwide sample to find out what Russians outside the Koltsevaya Doroga -- the Moscow Beltway --think about the issues that elite politicians deal with inside the Beltway. The numbers reported here are principally from the sixth NRB survey, conducted immediately after the second round of the 1996 presidential election. (For details, see http: //www.strath.ac.uk/departments/cspp/.)

Russians have gone cold on the Cold War. Mutual deterrence rests on fear of an enemy. Consistently, the New Russia Barometer finds that a big majority of Russians do not see other great powers as a threat to their country. Nor are they worried about threats from other republics of the former Soviet Union or from ethnic conflict arising within Russia (Figure 1). Given that Russia has been invaded twice by Germany in this century, it is particularly striking that four-fifths of Russians do not see Germany as a threat to their security today. Equally noteworthy, more than three-quarters do not see ex-Soviet republics as threatening their security, and two-thirds see no threat from other nationalities in Russia.

The minority of Russians who are concerned about their security are as likely to see a threat coming from Iran or China than from across the Atlantic. Both countries are as close to Russia as Central America is to the United States -- and potentially much more dangerous. While more than a third of Russians see the United States as posing some or a big threat, this minority has not increased as a result of preparations for NATO's expansion. Instead of marching in uniform behind a red banner, young Russians would rather window-shop, looking forward to the day when they can promenade around in Guess jeans with Gucci accessories.

The real threats to the security of Russians are at home. Crime on the street and the wholesale embezzlement of assets by high-ranking public officials and "biznessmen" have demoralized Russians. Knowledgeable Russians are also fearful of the nuclear threat from within -- namely, another Chernobyl.

The Army is not trusted. At its zenith, the Soviet Army was a threat to NATO countries and to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe who had been "liberated" by Soviet troops. Yet it was also a threat to many Russian conscripts, for their welfare was often of no concern to officers. Given military conscription, Russians' views of their military are based not on CIA reports but on seeing it from the inside. The great majority of Russian families have one or more members who had experienced Soviet military discipline. They know from trusted sources the conditions that soldiers have faced in Soviet barracks.

A majority are distrustful of all Russian institutions, whether state institutions such as the army, or those meant to represent the people, such as parties and trade unions. The Army is less distrusted than politicians or businessmen; the average Russian is skeptical rather than actively distrustful about soldiers.

Insofar as the Army is trusted, this appears to reflect a popular perception of the Army as a non-political institution beyond the machinations of Kremlin politicians. Any attempt to bring the Army into politics would reduce this asset. Likewise, any attempt by the military to take control of the government, as in some Latin American countries, would be widely resisted by Russians. Only 11 per cent would like the Army to rule, the same percentage as would like a return to the Tsar.

There is no strong demand to regain the "lost" republics of the Soviet Union. The break-up of the Soviet Union was a shock for tens of millions of Russians living outside the Russian Federation, and for tens of millions of Russians with relatives in other republics that they had felt as much a part of their country as Ohioans consider Texas or California part of the United States.

The countries in the so-called "near abroad," the Confederation of Independent States, differ in their importance to Russians. More than three-quarters want close ties with Belarus and Ukraine, and more than half want close ties with Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. But less than half see close ties with Armenia, Azerbaijan, or Georgia as especially desirable. It is significant that ordinary Russians are more concerned with ties with Black Sea republics or with the Soviet "Arizona" of Central Asia than with Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania, which less than two-fifths think important.

While most Russians are concerned about Russians living in the CIS countries, they reject Zhirinovsky's militaristic bluster. Instead, they agree with Winston Churchill's dictum, "Jaw jaw is better than war war." If problems arise, nearly every Russian favors negotiations (Figure 2). If talk gets nowhere, three-fifths endorse a tough and tender strategy of applying economic pressures on poor neighbors who require passage across Russian soil to reach world markets, while also preparing to repatriate millions to the Russian Federation.

Russians draw the line when it comes to the use of force. Four-fifths do not want to take military action if Russians in the near abroad are threatened. A Russian threat to use military action to "protect" its nationals there would be doubly dangerous. It would threaten the security of Russians caught in the line of fire and threaten the credibility of the Russian government because of lack of support from ordinary Russians.

Russians in the near abroad often prefer life there. Just because Russians have always had a love of fairy tales, it does not mean that they believe the stories told them by politicians in Moscow. The great majority in the provinces do not believe that Moscow would deliver on its promises, and that makes it hard to collect taxes and makes local officials hesitate to transfer revenues collected to Moscow. Nor do Russians outside Russia believe their lives would be bettered by an expansive Russian state so long as Russia itself is still deteriorating.

Fear of genocidal enmity is the main reason that might induce Russian nationals in the CIS to demand help from Moscow. However, such fear does not exist. When political tensions between the constituent parts of the Soviet Union were at their height in 1991, the great majority of Russians outside Russia stayed in what they considered their homes. A survey at that time commissioned by the Committee on Migration of the Soviet Ministry of Labor found that a majority of Russians did not feel threatened by living as a minority in a multi-ethnic society.

The Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia are striking examples of the absence of political homesickness. Most Russians who moved there when it was part of the Soviet Union now find themselves foreigners, legal residents with the right to work and draw a pension but without the right to vote. When the New Baltic Barometer, a companion survey to the New Russia Barometer, asks Russians there how they compare conditions with life in Russia, more than half believe conditions for people like themselves are worse in Russia, and for an additional quarter Russia is so remote that they don't know what conditions there are like. When asked whether their Baltic home or Russia offers a better chance for a rising living standard, 68 per cent of Russians living in Estonia think it does, as against 12 per cent believing Russia offers equally good chances; and in Latvia 55 per cent think their Baltic home has more opportunities.

Russians and Baltic peoples differ to some extent in their political outlooks, for more than three-quarters of Estonians and Latvians see the Russian state as a threat, compared to a fifth of Russians living in those countries. But in all communities a majority believe that hardline Russian nationalists threatening the use of force are a threat to the peace and security of everyone in the Baltic states. Russians do not want to be "rescued" by hardliners, for they have seen on television how Russians are now living in Grozny.

You don't need to be the oracle of Delphi to predict that if Russia launched an aggressive war a once great military force would be destroyed. The Russian Army would implode through demoralization and desertion, and the nominal beneficiaries of the conflict would suffer too. Given the "softness" of Russian morale, NATO powers should not be intimidated by a putative Russian threat to invade lands hundreds and thousands of miles to the west. Nor need NATO powers fear Russian troops rolling to the "rescue" of outposts of Russians from Kaliningrad to the Trans Dniestr. And in the countries likely to be included in an expanded NATO, the immediate threat to peace is not a "sky high" missile war but the eruption of "little local difficulties" in the Balkans.