| Unlike with President Vladimir Putin's domestic
policies, which
are usually ascribed to
one or another group of advisers within the corridors of power,
the genesis of foreign
policy is a murky affair.
Market reform can be traced to the recommendations of the distinctive
so-called St. Petersburg group of technocrats who are not shy
about making their positions known. In the political sphere, it
is no secret that Putin's moves toward centralizing authority
and cracking down on opposition find support among the military,
secret services and other so-called power ministries.
But no clear group influences foreign policy, and analysts are
generally at pains to
identify which individuals have the most access to the
president's ear. Many say Putin
has acted alone in seizing the initiative in foreign policy,
offering the United States
unprecedented cooperation in the fight against terrorism since
Sept. 11.
Putin's renowned silence about his objectives irks members of
the traditional foreign
policy establishment.
"Those who support the president's foreign policy among the
elite are a tiny minority,"
said Sergei Karaganov, head of the independent Council on
Foreign and Defense
Policy, an influential group whose members include a number of
the country's political,
academic and economic elite. Karaganov was speaking at a council
briefing in March.
Andrei Ryabov of the Moscow Carnegie Center agrees. "Foreign
policy is initiated by
a small group of policy-makers," he said in a telephone
interview, adding that the
situation is similar to the ill-fated last days in power of
former Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev, who increasingly relied on a limited group of
hard-line advisers
marginalized from public opinion.
When he came to power, Putin vowed to restore the dignity Russia
lost with the Soviet
collapse. He began on a distinctly hard-line note, booting U.S.
foreign service officials
out of Moscow last year in a case of tit-for tat after
Washington expelled Russian
diplomats it accused of spying.
The president is now using his new pro-Western stance as a political
show of strength -- even as many of his supporters bemoan major
concessions to the United States, such as allowing U.S. troops
in former Soviet states.
But a number of instances in which Putin has capitulated to the
West can be put down
to sheer pragmatism -- such as his decision not to publicly
criticize Washington's
announcement last December that it would p ull out of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty. Moscow had called the treaty a cornerstone of global
security, but could do
nothing to save it.
If he was hoping to reap political rewards from the West, it can
be of little comfort that
tangible benefits have so far been slim.
Putin has been welcomed on the global stage as a responsible
leader, a role he clearly
relishes. But Western leaders have only somewhat muted their
criticism of Moscow's
brutal campaign in Chechnya, and the United States has made it
clear it will continue to
pursue an essentially unilateral foreign policy, brushing aside
criticism from opponents
and allies alike.
Economic dividends for Russia are a more palpable motive for
friendliness to the West, especially given the country's role
as one of the world's top oil and gas producers. Despite general
support for his policies, Putin is widely reproved for making
his decisions behind closed doors. While Karaganov's views are
often close to the Kremlin's outwardly pro-Western position, for
instance, he bitterly criticizes how policy is formulated and
publicized.
"No one understands what he [Putin] really wants in foreign
policy and that's a giant
drawback," Karaganov said, speaking at a Moscow conference
last
week in which he
echoed widespread opinion.
But Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst, tells
a different story, saying
that rather than formulating policy himself, Putin only gives
a
final nod to initiatives worked out by a host of others.
Chief among them are members of the president's administration,
and specifically its
secretive chief Alexander Voloshin. The administration sets
strategic goals and exerts
the greatest influence on foreign policy, Markov said.
A former economist with ties to exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky,
Voloshin is one of the
last major officials in power to have taken office under Putin's
predecessor, former
President Boris Yeltsin.
Voloshin is said to represent the interests of Yeltsin's
political clan, which generally
favored stronger ties with the West. But the chief of staff
rarely appears in public and
almost never makes statements, much less about foreign policy.
Among bona fide foreign policy gurus said to have the
president's ear are Kremlin
deputy chief of staff and top presidential foreign policy
adviser Sergei Prikhodko, who
occupied the same position in Yeltsin's administration and is
in
charge of Putin's
appointment book.
Second in influence, Markov said, is the Foreign Ministry, which
works out tactical
approaches to policy set in the Kremlin. Foreign Minister Igor
Ivanov, a career
diplomat, has generally shown himself to be a cautious official
who toes the Kremlin
line.
Third in importance, Markov said, is the Defense Ministry,
headed by Putin's close and
hawkish associate Sergei Ivanov, who, like the president, is a
former KGB officer.
The Carnegie Center's Ryabov, meanwhile, said Sergei Ivanov is
the only one of
Putin's advisers who can without question be said to influence
foreign policy. Ivanov
often makes saber-rattling statements and reflects the outwardly
more cautious
approach to relations with the West that held sway before Sept.
11.
The government's liberal economic bloc of technocrats --
including Finance Minister
Alexei Kudrin and Economic Development and Trade Minister German
Gref -- are
among the groups that play a part in foreign policy, not least
with their pressing for
Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization. Big
business, especially exporting
firms such as gas giant Gazprom and oil major LUKoil, also has
a
role in pushing its
interests.
Finally, members of the "foreign policy elite" -- academics,
analysts, legislators with
foreign policy expertise and other shapers and mirrors of public
opinion -- also
influence the Kremlin's foreign policy decision-making process.
Chief among them is Mikhail Margelov, head of the Federation
Council's foreign affairs
committee, another former KGB agent who is reputed to be a close
presidential adviser.
Reflecting the Kremlin's current foreign policy line, Margelov
supports warmer ties
with the United States, saying the position is in the interests
of Russia's national
security. "I hate to say this, but fortunately for us the
Americans got involved,"
Margelov said of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan in a recent
interview with the
Financial Times.
He tied the campaign in Afghanistan to Russia's war in Chechnya,
justifying the
internationally criticized conflict by saying, "Sept. 11
has
shown us we have a common
enemy."
Margelov has been a Kremlin spinmeister for some time, dating
back to when
then-Prime Minister Putin was looking to run for the presidency.
Margelov followed by
helping run the military's propaganda effort at the start of the
second Chechen war in
1999 in his position as chief of Rosinformcenter, the state
information agency
notorious for keeping a tight lid on the campaign while
releasing dubious statistics and
rosy forecasts.
The war -- not least because of the government's positive spin
-- helped boost Putin's
public opinion ratings to unheard-of heights, virtually assuring
him the presidency in
2000.
Markov said Margelov's importance to the Kremlin lies less in
his formal role as foreign
policy chief in the upper house than in his promise as a young,
up-and-coming
politician.
Also influential, but to a significantly lesser degree, are
members of Karaganov's
Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.
Karaganov is close to Prikhodko, Markov said, but not to the
Kremlin as a whole.
"Many [of the council's] proposals aren't accepted and some
are
even sneered at," he
said. The once mighty U.S.A. and Canada Institute of the Russian
Academy of
Sciences, headed by Sergei Rogov, has even less of a role in
policy-making, Markov
added.
The Council on Foreign and Defense Policy had a far greater say
in the affairs of
Yeltsin's Kremlin. Karaganov is close to Yevgeny Primakov, the
former spymaster and
longtime foreign minister who was the main factor behind
increasingly hawkish foreign
policy under Yeltsin's administration.
Karaganov, in his own words an "informal adviser to the
president," says his council
does not aim to influence policy but rather the minds of the
political elite.
However, the council was instrumental in the ouster of
pro-Western former Foreign
Minister Andrei Kozyrev in 1996 and the installation of Primakov
in his place, ending a
brief diplomatic honeymoon with the West following the Soviet
collapse.
Appointed prime minister in 1998, Primakov became a Kremlin foe,
a position that was
underscored when he joined forces with powerful Moscow Mayor
Yury Luzhkov in a
failed bid to run for the presidency. Karaganov went into the
enemy camp as a chief
adviser.
In the days after Sept. 11, Putin moved away from the so-called
Primakov doctrine of
"multipolarity" -- advocating cooperation with India
and China
to balance the global
reach of the United States -- and toward the ostensibly
pro-Western yet firmly
pragmatic and often even hard-line views of his
behind-the-scenes advisers. Those
included Putin-supporters Markov and his associate and chief
Kremlin spin guru Gleb
Pavlovsky, head of the Efficient Policy Fund and creator of the
Strana.ru web site,
which publicizes the Kremlin's positions.
Ryabov said that while Markov and Pavlovsky's influence has been
strong, it has
declined somewhat since the beginning of the year as Putin
pushed his overtures to
the West even further.
"The new situation needs new ideas and new projects,"
Ryabov
said. "The old logic
no longer holds."
The newest tendency was more than clear when the Kremlin barely
issued a peep after
Washington announced it would pull out of the ABM Treaty.
Observers had been
expecting a major outcry.
When the Pentagon said in March that it was sending up to 200
troops to Georgia,
several politicians and diplomats flew off the handle. Those who
objected loudly
included Foreign Minister Ivanov and Dmitry Rogozin, chairman
of
the State Duma's
foreign affairs committee and a known hawk.
In a by-then familiar pattern, Putin kept quiet on the issue
before giving the final word:
U.S. troops in Georgia did not pose a threat to Russia.
But Karaganov said such seeming contradictions were usually
planned. "Eighty
percent of such cases reflect a policy of 'good cop-bad cop,'"
he said. "The rest are a
result of incompetence," he added, naming as an example
Federation Council Speaker
Sergei Mironov's decision during a recent trip to Israel to skip
a meeting with
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Markov agreed, saying he was absolutely certain Rogozin's
position on Georgia -- in
which he proposed the Duma vote on recognizing the independence
of two breakaway
regions of Georgia -- had been orchestrated ahead of time with
the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, among those to bemoan current policy are Vyacheslav
Nikonov, head of
the Politika think tank, once political strategist to Luzhkov
and also a member of the
Council of Foreign and Defense Policy. He said the 1990s had
brought ruin to a
coherent foreign policy mechanism amid general Yeltsin-era
anarchy, from which the
country has yet to recover.
"Foreign policy has many towers," he said at the council
conference, alluding to the
Kremlin's many spires. "There's no single policy because
each
one [tower] has its
own."
Liberal Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, speaking at the same
meeting, also criticized
Russia's foreign policy by saying it did not reflect the will
of
the people and that it was
caught between the old Soviet command system and a more
democratic future. "The
authorities are alienated from society," he said.
But Ryzhkov also said it was crucial for Russia to become an
integral part of Europe,
echoing the views of another liberal, Yabloko leader Grigory
Yavlinsky, who praised
post-Sept. 11 foreign policy as Putin's chief achievement.
"The vector of foreign policy can have strategic perspectives
and serve as a prologue to Russia's becoming a European state
in the widest sense of the word," Yavlinsky told Interfax
last Tuesday.
The Kremlin's rapprochement with the West looks set to move
forward as the Kremlin
continues to set out a role for itself in post-Sept. 11
geopolitics.
Moscow recently dropped its staunch opposition to Washington's
intention to extend
its war on terrorism to Iraq.
As Moscow and Washington prepare for a summit in May, both sides
aim to further
boost U.S.-Russian relations with the negotiation of a nuclear
arms-reduction
agreement and the development of a new NATO framework that would
give Russia a
greater say in decision making.
But Karaganov said Putin's reliance on a small group of advisers
and refusal to
publicize his goals would create problems in the future. "The
president has at the very
least to attract people from different parts of the country, not
only in Moscow," he
said. "If he doesn't explain what he wants, he can't attract
those who would otherwise
support him."
See also:
as
publised at
www.themoscowtimes.com
Russia-US
Relations
The Door to Europe is in Washington
Grigory Yavlinsky Obschaya
Gazeta, May 16, 2002
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