The New Imperial Russia

How unsettling it was to read that President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian air force to send its strategic, nuclear-armed Bear long-range TU-95 and Blackjack TU 160 bombers back on patrol missions around the world. It means that once again Russian bombers will be flying missions over the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans, to the edge of U.S., Japanese, and European airspace and far from Russian borders. Moreover, just a few days earlier, Chief Admiral Vladimir Masoein, Russia's navy commander, declared that Russia would reestablish a formidable naval presence in the Mediterranean, not a sea contiguous to Russia itself.Fifteen years ago, when Demokratizatsiya made its first appearance, Russia had ceased such missions-not because it did not want to, but because it could not afford to. (If the United States keeps squandering its resources in Iraq, there may well come a time when the United States will face similar cutbacks.) Not only did the USSR disintegrate in 1991 but so had the Cold War. Putting an end to more than seventy years of confrontation, Russia under Boris Yeltsin reversed course and embraced democracy and the market, or at least its own Slavic versions. This was seen as eliminating most of the ideological differences separating East and West. As for the remaining balance-of-power issues, particularly between Russia and the United States, they were largely put aside, if for no other reason than that Russia seemed to be near bankruptcy. After the financial breakdown of August 17, 1998, when Russia defaulted on its debt and most of its banks were forced to close, Russia was indeed bankrupt. Through most of the 1990s, Russian military forces lacked the funds to fuel their planes for more than a few hours a week. The TU-95s and TU-160s were kept on the ground. Russia's inability to suppress rebels in Chechnya in 1994-96 highlighted how far Russia had fallen from its superpower status. If Russia could not put down a rebellion within its borders, how could it be expected to be any more effective outside those borders? Moreover, with widespread unemployment, a ruble few inside or outside Russia wanted, and a country sacked by rapacious oligarchs and contending mafia clans, it seemed it would be many decades before Russia would again be able to afford to fund its military and political adventures and aspirations.But sooner than anyone anticipated, the economy began to recover. Within a year after the August 1998 collapse, there were already signs of revival. In August 1999, after trying out four different prime ministers, Yeltsin finally settled on a virtual unknown, Vladimir Putin. By then, helped by the rising price of petroleum, industrial production in September 1999 began to grow at rates as high as 20 percent per year. Admittedly, this was against a backdrop of a 15 percent decline in September 1998, but in 1999, GDP for the whole year rose almost 6.5 percent.Looking back, many observers unfairly credit the turnaround in the economy to Putin. But industrial production began to increase earlier, in March 1999, when Evgeny Prima-kov was prime minister. Nonetheless, Putin did all he could to sustain the growth once he was appointed prime minister. Urged by the talented St. Petersburg economic advisers he brought into the government, he enacted a flat income tax of 13 percent and set a goal of 7 percent annual economic growth, which, given the magic of compound interest, would double the GDP in ten years.Undoubtedly, these measures had an impact. Not all Russians suddenly started to declare their income and pay taxes once taxes were set at 13 percent, but enough people paid to help improve Russia's financial situation. More important, it was the increase in petroleum prices that triggered and sustained Russia's decade-long economic boom. Without taking anything away from Putin, it is not an exaggeration to say that if Yeltsin's term had lasted a few more years, even under his otherwise unsteady and permissive leadership, the Russian economy would have recovered from its near disintegration. …