Russia is undergoing an identity crisis of monumental proportions, according to former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, one in which the nation's people are debating such basic questions as "What is Russia?" and "Where is Russia?" "We in the United States are not a participant in that debate, although obviously the decisions of that debate will affect us," Mr. Brzezinski told the standing-room-only crowd that had gathered in the Luce Hall auditorium on Oct. 28 to hear him discuss "The Future of Post-Imperial Russia." His visit was sponsored by the Chubb Fellowship at Timothy Dwight College.
Mr. Brzezinski opened his talk by relating a recent experience in which he spied Mikhail Gorbachev in a Washington, D.C. bookstore signing copies of his memoirs -- which Mr. Gorbachev confessed were selling better in the United States than in Russia. Seeing "the former leader of the former other superpower" casually visiting the capital city of its former rival struck Mr. Brzezinski as "symptomatic of the upheavals going on in Russia today," he said.
"We have lived in an age when empires have come to an end," noted Mr. Brzezinski. "And none had an end as bizarre as that of the Soviet Union."
In fact, the agreement that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union was written in a secluded hunting lodge by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the heads of the Urkraine and Belarussia republics -- each of whom had "his own agenda," noted Mr. Brzezinski. After drafting the document establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States CIS -- a process that was "punctuated with shots of vodka," he said -- the three leaders first called President George Bush and the head of the Soviet armed forces to get their approval of the new arrangement before notifying Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Within two weeks of the signing of that agreement, conflict broke out in the republics and Russia's borders were pushed back in some areas "to where they were in the 1600s," noted Mr. Brzezinski, who is now counselor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies and professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.
"The new reality that emerged was a multiplicity of nations," he said, and as a result, Russia is undergoing "an understandable and unavoidable period of uncertainty." The question foremost in the minds of U.S. leaders is "How long will the democratic experiment last, or will the empire be restored?" noted Mr. Brzezinski. His own view is that "at least at the present moment, the state of Russian democracy is not good." Mr. Brzezinski described Russia as a nation that is "dominated by private and public corruptions," where the "privatization" of industry has produced a number of "wealthy but parasitic" individuals.
"Russia is a state in which the top leaders are quarreling publicly," accusing each other of treason and subversion -- "a state in which the top leader is absent from power and in bad health, and when in good health, not sober," declared Mr. Brzezinski.
"It is a state in which the army has not been paid for months," he said, noting that soldiers have been selling their uniforms to tourists and their equipment to foreign forces. In the Russian army, which has 13 different command structures, and in the general population, "there is a great deal of political alienation," he added.
On the positive side, he noted, there are the upcoming "relatively free elections," "a relatively free press," "a measured and structured free enterprise system that is becoming stronger," "some notion of civil rights beginning" and "no public enthusiasm for imperial ventures that will cost in blood or money."
Mr. Brzezinski predicts that it will be "a decade or two" before Russia establishes a true free market economy and constitutional government. "We can help Russia in this, but our ability to help is marginal. Ultimately, it has to be done by the Russians themselves." He also noted that, while many Russians would like to see a return to the empire of old, "within the CIS today there is opposition to the concept of integration and unionization," a movement spearheaded by Ukraine.
"If we can simultaneously help Russia, but buttress the newly independent states, we are reinforcing the context in which Russia is redefining itself," said Mr. Brzezinski. "We can create a context for Russia to redefine itself as a national state, not an imperial state."
-- By LuAnn Bishop