APPENDIX 16
Memorandum submitted by Professor Archie
Brown, St Antony's College
1. At one level the part played by the FCO
in relation to the Russian Federation has been constructive and
highly competent. At another level, that of policy, it has been
a relative failure. If the aim of British policy has been for
Russia to institutionalise the democratisation process which got
underway in the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and to support
the establishment of a market economy and civil society based
on the rule of law, then it has not succeeded.
2. It must be recognised, of course, that
the success of such processes depends primarily on the Russians
themselves—and especially on the presidential administration
and the government of the Russian Federation—rather than
on any particular Western Government. However, the "general
line" of both Washington and London towards Russia in the
post-Soviet period has been flawed.
3. President Boris Yeltsin has for the greater
part of the 1990s been treated as if he were the very embodiment
of Russian democracy and moderation. While a great exaggeration,
there is at least an element of truth in that view. Contested
elections still occur and if the December Duma 1999 election and
the June 2000 presidential election proceed on schedule and are
conducted fairly (though that remain an `if and in many parts
of the country Russian Federation elections hitherto have been
characterised by cheating), that would be an important further
step along the path of democratisation. However, Yeltsin has shown
little respect for the procedural aspect of democracy. So far
as moderation is concerned, it is to his credit that he has presided
over a cautious foreign policy and, so far as the Russian diaspora
is concerned, he has been restrained and certainly no Milosevic.
Yet, he is also responsible for the indiscriminate attacks launched
on Chechnya and hence—as the Washington Post correspondent
who covered the 1994-96 war there, Lee Hockstader, recently observed—for
the deaths of more citizens of Russia than any Kremlin leader
since Stalin. While Western governments expressed outrage at the
deaths of fourteen Lithuanians in Vilnius in January 1991, for
which they held Mikhail Gorbachev politically responsible, they
have been much less critical of the killing of tens of thousands
of Chechens and Russians in the Northern Caucasus. Foreign Offices
must deal with the powers-that-be, but a concern with human rights
should have led the British government to protest at the fact
that IMF lending to Russia continued unabated during the war in
Chechnya of the mid-1990s. Indiscriminate bombing of cities and
villages in Chechnya, which has restarted in the autumn of 1999,
was not even condemned as forthrightly as it deserved to be.
4. This might be attributed to a concern
for Russian sensitivities in the light of the fact that the Russian
Federation is a country which has (a) lost its superpower status—except
in the very real sense of having the military means to destroy
life on earth; (b) lost territory, following the collapse of the
Sovient Union, which in important cases had been part of a greater
Russian state for centuries; and (c) from 1992 had to adjust to
having twenty-five million Russians who had been citizens of the
Soviet Union living `abroad'—in the other successor states
of the USSR. If so, it will be important to avoid the insensitivity
(which, to be fair, is more prevalent in Washington than in London)
of a readiness to countenance NATO expansion into former republics
of the Soviet Union. NATO membership for, say, Estonia, Latvia
or Ukraine—where there are large Russian minorities—would
send wrong signals to Russia unless the policy was sufficiently
flexible to embrace the possibility in principle of Russia itself
becoming a member of NATO at a future date. Otherwise, NATO will
be viewed, as increasingly it has been in Moscow, as an anti-Russian
alliance.
5. British policy has identified disproportionately
not only with Boris Yeltsin but also with a group of economic
`reformers' whose policies have been strikingly unsuccessful and
who are highly unpopular in Russia. A survey conducted by the
All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) in
1999 found that the post-Soviet period is viewed more negatively
by the population than any other era of the twentieth century.
Only 5 per cent of the population viewed the Yeltsin years positively
and 72 per cent had a negative attitude to them. One does not,
of course, need to agree with all of the Russian evaluations,
especially, for instance, if one notes that the same survey found
that between 1994 and 1999 the percentage of respondents positively
evaluating the Stalin years rose from 18 per cent to 26 per cent.
That last response clearly owes much more to progressive disillusionment
with present conditions, and an associated tendency to view the
past through rose-tinted spectacles, than to objective study of
the Stalin era. What the survey data do indicate, however, is
a large gap between the relatively complacent British view, at
least until recently, of developments in Russia and the perceptions
of a majority of Russians themselves.
6. Support for a form of capitalism, however
corrupt, seems to have taken precedence over support for a rule
of law and democratic institution-building. At a Foreign and Commonwealth
Office seminar, held on 6 May 1994, in which I participated, I
complained about the fact that the British Government had made
not even a nuanced criticism of the way in which President Yeltsin
dissolved the previous legislature (in September-October 1993)
and I was critical also of Yeltsin's more recent instruction (in
March 1994) to the Procurator-General to find a way of not implementing
a constitutionally-legitimate decision of the newly-formed State
Duma—the exercise of its right of amnesty to release from
prison those who mounted the coup against Gorbachev in August1991
and those who had been arrested when they left the bombarded Moscow
White House on 4 October 1993. The Procurator-General Alelksei
Kazannik, disagreed politically with the Duma's decision but accepted
that the deputies were within their constitutional rights. The
response to my criticism of Yeltsin from a senior Foreign Office
(an excellent specialist on Russia for whom, in general, I have
the greatest respect) was that the Russian President was right
to tell the Procurator-General to find a way of circumventing
the Duma's exercise of its prerogative: that was what law-officers
were for!
7. Unfortunately, the last thing Russia
needed was Western complaisance in the face of a cavalier disregard
by Russian authorities for the rule of law. A more recent Procurator-General,
Yuri Skuratov, was dismissed this year by Yeltsin at the point
at which he was beginning to exercise his independence as a law-officer,
when his inquiries started focusing on alleged malfeasance within
the presidential administration. Similarly, when Pavel Krasheninnikov
was removed as Minister of Justice in August this year, he was
(the Financial Times reported) told by Kremlin officials:
"You have one problem: you always cite the law".
8. From the point of view of the development
of business activity and a regulated market economy, nothing is
more important than the establishment of a legal framework and
respect for the law. The rule of law is also fundamental to the
success of the process of democratization in Russia which at the
moment is under threat, both from those with much to lose who
would like to avoid the uncertainty of elections and from the
growing disillusionment of the population with what has passed
for democracy in the Russian Federation during the 1990s.
9. Successive British governments and the
FCO have surely been in favour of the rule of law and of democratic
institution-building, but the issue here is whether it has been
a sufficiently high priority. They have been reluctant to criticise
those who pursued short-term material and political gain at the
expense both of legal norms and the development and consolidation
of democratic institutions. That has appeared less important than
support for Yeltsin and economic "reformers".
10. The economic policy pursued by these
"reformers" from 1992 was generally welcomed by British
ministers and officials. It was also in line with what was known
as the "Washington consensus" (which included the Bush
Admininstration, the Clinton Administration, the IMF and, until
recently, Congress) which has now, with the benefit of hindsight
and belated attention to massive corruption, become a Washington
discord. The disagreement is greatly to be preferred to the consensus.
In Britain the conventional wisdom has also been that a combination
of Yeltsin and the economic "reformers" should be backed.
There were dissenting voices even in the early 1990s, but they
were not heeded. Not having or needing the benefit of hindsight,
the late Alec Nove (he died in 1994) observed as early as 1992
that "the more naive forms of laissez-faire and free trade
seem to have acquired a grip on the (Russian) reformers' minds".
While Nove fully accepted the longer-term desirability of currency
convertibility and import liberalization, he argued that in the
short term this was not what Russia required. On the contracty,
"the liberalization of trade plus currency convertibility
would have predictable effects: those who have accumulated millions
of roubles . . . will salt them away in the banks abroad . . .
. Foreign loans will be speedily used up, with minimum effect
on the much-needed reconstruction or the needs of the impoverished
majority". He was exactly right about the dire consequences
of an economic policy which had the strong backing of the IMF
and Western governments.
11. In some respects post-Soviet Russia
has had too much of a market economy and in other respects too
little. Encouraged by neo-classical economic ideology, still fashionable
in the early 1990s, post-Soviet Russian leaders underestimated
the importance of having a strong and viable state. They, nevertheless,
acquired a bloated state which expanded by osmosis rather than
design and yet was incapable of performing such basic functions
as collecting taxes, paying public service workers (including
the armed forces), and maintaining law and order. Russian economic
reform has been partial in both senses of the term, "partial".
On the one hand, the state authorities have shown a partiality
towards some particular financiers and businesses who acquired
state assets at prices far below their market value. On the other
hand, to take just one example to which Joel Hellman of the EBRD
has drawn attention, rapid foreign trade liberalization with incomplete
price liberalization allowed state enterprise managers "to
sell their highly subsidized natural resource inputs (for example,
oil and gas) to foreign buyers at world market prices".
12. Some of the above points are increasingly
accepted, it seems to me, by the British government. The "Washington
consensus", which is no longer unchallenged even in Washington,
does not hold the sway it once did in London. There are, of course,
strict limits on what British governments can do to influence
policy in Russia—perhaps especially now when there is widespread
disillusionment among both politicians and citizens with Western
advice following a decade of decline of production and in living
standards for most Russians. One major lesson—especially
in the difficult conditions of the former Soviet Union—should
be not to identify too strongly with a particular grouping within
the Russian political spectrum but to concentrate on supporting
democratic and legal institution-building, a pragmatic economic
policy, and the peaceful resolution of internal as well as external
conflict. A critical reappraisal of IMF lending in the 1990s would
also be appropriate, for there has been a massive net outflow
of capital from Russia during the very years the Russian authorities
were seeking, and obtaining, large IMF loans. These loans may
have helped particular Russian power-holders, but they have been
remarkably ineffective in fostering either democratic norms and
institutions or economic investment in the Russian Federation.
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