War Destroying Russia’s Future

The way the government treated it, the raising of the Russian flag over the blackened hulk of the presidential palace in the rebel Chechen capital was akin to the Soviet flag going up over Hitler’s Reichstag, an image graven in every Russian heart as the moment Nazism was finally beaten.

“At 15:35 on the 19th of January, the soldiers of the 276th Motorized Infantry Regiment, commanded by Col. Sergei Bunin, hoisted the flag of the Russian Federation over the presidential palace in Grozny,” intoned Krasnya Zvezda, the army newspaper.

In Parliament Friday, there was a proposal to make Colonel Bunin a Hero of Russia. Though voted down, it was an indication of the strained official effort to label the Chechnya mission a victory instead of the moral, political, institutional and financial disaster it has been.

While the war in Chechnya is hardly finished, and promises at best to become a Russian Northern Ireland, it is not too soon to count the costs of Moscow’s “victory” - costs extend far beyond the lives lost or ruined by one of the crudest bombardments of a virtually defenseless city in recent memory.

The war in Chechnya has exposed and widened the serious fault lines in the economic and political stability of a Russia only three years removed from totalitarian communism.

Internationally, the war has damaged Moscow’s already shaky relations with Europe, the Clinton administration and the new Republican Congress; renewed fears about a new totalitarianism in Russia; accelerated the idea of NATO’s expansion; hurt the prospects for Russian compliance with treaty limits on the use of conventional forces in Europe; delayed the ratification of two important arms-control treaties, and undercut investor confidence.

Domestically, it has isolated President Boris Yeltsin from democrats in Russian society; formalized a new, undemocratic decision-making body, the Security Council, which has become a semi-Politburo; and split and humiliated the army.

It has weakened the Parliament; encouraged anti-Western paranoia; shattered financial and budgetary plans for 1995; threatened vital new loans from the International Monetary Fund, and driven the ruble to a record low against the dollar.

So if the raising of the Russian flag in Grozny allows Moscow to start trying to solve its problems in Chechnya, it will also require Yeltsin and his government to make some fundamental decisions about what kind of country Russia is going to be.

Senior Western diplomats, like many Russian officials, speak with despair about the damage done. “Yeltsin seemed to fall into Chechnya almost thoughtlessly, with one stupid decision leading to another,” said one diplomat. “Now he risks losing almost everything positive he’s managed to build, and in an international atmosphere much less welcoming than it was.”

Among the most important international consequences, he and others said, was the growing mistrust of Russian intentions.

Yeltsin’s pre-Chechnya threat of a new “cold peace” and his continuing reluctance to join NATO’s Partnership for Peace are only adding to the pressure now to expand NATO much more rapidly, precisely the outcome Moscow does not want.

Chechnya has intensified everpresent suspicions about Moscow among American Republicans, now in control both houses of Congress. Steady criticism of Moscow doubles back in the wary souls of Russian nationalists, who control the Parliament here.

The new nativist politics in both capitals hinders the weakened Russian and American presidents from enhancing relations, for fear of hurting their chances for re-election.

The Russian government’s half-hearted announcement of a Chechnya cease-fire accord just before those talks, seemed “highly disingenuous,” one diplomat said.Similarly, the growing nationalism

in Yeltsin’s circle and in the Russian Parliament, more strident with the loss of each Russian soldier in Chechnya, has led to a new distrust of the West.

There is more talk of protecting the Russian economy from Western ownership and Western “designs,” and more paranoia. Last week the domestic spying agency, the Federal Counter-intelligence Service, asserted the Peace Corps, the Carnegie Endowment, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Foundation were spying for Washington rather than providing Russia technical aid.

The mutual suspicion has jeopardized some of the greatest diplomatic achievements of the post-Cold War period, since Russia has still not ratified a treaty banning chemical weapons or the key treaty sharply cutting strategic nuclear arsenals, START-2, which even Ukraine has now ratified.

Domestically, the political scene is now more unstable than at any time since October 1993, when Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the old Parliament building.

The vulnerable defense minister, Gen. Pavel S. Grachev, has attacked the head of Parliament’s defense committee, Sergei N. Yushenkov, for “slandering the army” and blasted Yeltsin’s human rights commissioner, Sergei A. Kovalyov, as “an enemy of Russia.”

Equally important, the economy is badly overheating, with the critical government budget deficit widening because of the costs of the Chechen war. A bigger deficit means increased inflation, already in double digits for each month of the last quarter. More inflation promises a further weakening of the ruble and of investor confidence.

On Friday, the ruble fell to its historic low of 3,947 to the dollar, weaker even than on “Black Tuesday,” Oct. 11, when the ruble had hit 3,926 to the dollar.

“Except for God, no one knows how much has been spent in Chechnya,” wrote the Vechernaya Moskva newspaper. Estimates range wildly, from about $2 billion to about $4 billion, if one includes some rebuilding costs. But much of the equipment lost will not be replaced.

None of those costs were figured into a tight draft budget for 1995 that is already not tight enough for the International Monetary Fund. The fund’s experts are now in Moscow trying to decide how much to provide to Moscow in transitional loans.

Before the war in Chechnya, there was optimism that in return for a real economic stabilization plan and lower budget deficit, the fund and World Bank would provide as much as $13 billion in funding.

There is less optimism now, especially since Chechnya is diverting political will from the painful, vital task of stabilizing the economy and cutting the budget deficit.

It will also be harder now for Yeltsin to refuse new money to the military.

So with less than a year to go before scheduled parliamentary elections and 18 months before presidential ones, the Chechen fiasco puts Russia at another major crossroads.

“It may seem callous,” said senior Western diplomat, “but where Russia goes now matters a lot more than whether Chechnya becomes independent.”