"Anarchy is the messenger of collapse," wrote Sevket Sureyya Aydemir,
a chronicler of the fall of the Ottoman Empire earlier this century. Observers
of modern-day Russia would be well advised to ponder his words, for it
is the breakdown of the state that underlies so many of Russia's problems,
from the prominence of the mafia to civil war in Dagestan.
For many, it is inconceivable that the home of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky,
a land that under Tsars and commissars made the world shudder in fear of
its might, could terminally implode. But today's crumbling Russian Federation,
the rump state of the Russian and the Soviet empires, bears an eerie
resemblance to the Ottoman one in its last days.
Like Russia, the Ottoman Empire stood astride Europe and Asia. In its
heyday, its neighbors, east and west, quaked in fear of its military machine.
Less well known among the empire's foes but equally impressive were Ottoman
achievements in arts, culture, music, and architecture. For some time,
the Empire's political order permitted the flowering of a world civilization
as colorful as it was mighty.
That political order, however, rested on a relatively rigid blend of
Sunni Islam and Turkish customary law. Efforts to preserve this ideology
inhibited innovation, leaving the empire vulnerable. The Ottoman's consequent
loss of military superiority and a string of battlefield defeats beginning
in the 18th century shook the elite's faith in its own system.
Later, the combined forces of the industrial revolution and a globalizing
market overturned the economic order and upset relations between outmoded
state institutions and the modernizing economy. The tax and legal systems
fell into disorder. At the same time, state servants turned from serving
the state interest to using the state to serve their own, private interest.
As state institutions decayed throughout the Ottoman Empire, public order
broke down, armed gangs and bandits emerged, and rebellions began to erupt.
A similar withering of the state is underway in Russia. Events in the
North Caucasus are only the most glaring evidence. There, the tiny secessionist
republic of Chechnya defeated the Russian Army in 1996 after 21 months
of intense fighting. Since that stunning defeat, the Russian military has
grown only weaker. Today, renegade forces from Chechnya challenge the cash
starved and often food starved Russian forces' now struggling to control
the neighboring republic of Dagestan. As Moscow's grip weakens, armed conflict
threatens to erupt in the nearby Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia as well.
Among Russia's myriad problems, its economic woes are the most publicized.
Although inveterate optimists persist in heralding small success stories
as the seeds of future economic recovery, thereby unwittingly suggesting
that the existence of any economic activity at all is near miraculous,
the fact is that the basic elements of order necessary for sustained economic
growth continue to decay. The banking system is in shambles. And the police,
rather than fighting criminals, increasingly compete with them for extortion
and racketeering profits. Desperate Russians reportedly have begun even
to commit murder for a few sacks of homegrown potatoes.
It is the inability of the state to provide fundamental order that has
fostered the astounding boom in organized crime. Its growth has been so
spectacular that, according to former CIA director James Woolsey among
others, it is no longer possible to separate the state from the mafia.
Significantly, the one thing the Russian state does seem to do well is
to facilitate capital flight. Estimates of the amount of money to have
left Russia over the past seven years range from $200 to $500 billion.
Most of this money was earned from the unimaginative plundering of Russia's
tremendous natural resources.
Those who do not live there commonly dismiss Russia's problems as bumps
on the road to a better, free market future. However, those who do live
there seem to think differently. In the first six months of this year alone,
nearly 400,000 Russians emigrated from their country.
The curious adoption by Western analysts of a central tenet of Marxism--the
belief that economics determine politics-has led many naively to trumpet
the wrecking of the Russian state as a positive achievement. The main thing
is to destroy the centralized economy, they say, and after that a free
market will emerge. It will evolve from primitive to complex, and along
the way it inevitably will nourish the establishment of a liberal political
system, simply because that is what an advanced economy requires.
Such pollyannish thinking is reminiscent of the optimism that accompanied
attempts to save the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman reform effort culminated
in the enthusiastic embrace of a liberal constitution and
the formal rejection of the old order in 1908. Confident that this
new start meant the salvation of the Ottoman state, one prominent reformer
named Enver Pasha declared, "We have cured the Sick Man!" But words cannot
solve problems of governance. And the empire collapsed fifteen years later.
Russia's disarray is similar, as are its confused attempts at reform.
One reason for this is the absence of mass political mobilization in the
country. Some observers point to the lack of a protest movement as a hopeful
sign, wrongly assuming ssuming that it reflects a patient commitment to
see through liberal reforms. In reality, it reflects the political "atomization"
of society. In the Soviet Union, the Communist
Party dominated by breaking down the traditional social, professional
and civ=FEc bonds that allow citiznes to organize politically in more open
nations.
These bonds have yet to be restored. And the growth of anarchy has failed
to elicit much in the way of protest (whereas in France, for example, modest
proposals to trim the welfare state spark nationwide strikes). Impoverished,
tired, sick, cynical and distrustful of their leaders, their political
associations and their neighbors, the Russian people have neither the resources
nor inclination to join together to defend their interests against a corrupt
state and its mafia partners.
Other than the Communists, there is still no political party with anything
resembling a nationwide, grass roots organization. The parties remain the
playthings of Moscow-based politicians. And as Russia's
central institutions deteriorate, the regions have necessarily grown
more assertive, thereby weakening the federal state even further.
If the people cannot goad the state to restore public order, will Russia's
elite? Many believe that Russia's misnamed "Robber Barons" eventually
will. This is a great mistake. Unlike the original American Robber Barons,
who created wealth as they accumulated it, Russia's elite has by and large
stolen its wealth, and have little interest in creating the conditions
conducive to nationwide wealth creation. Nor, with their private militias,
do they have any need for a state or legal system to preserve public order
and protect private property. The present order has served them well.
The decline of today's Muscovite state began in 1980, when the first
sustained homegrown opposition to communism emerged in Poland. Observers
expected that the Russian Federation's rejection of communism and its embrace
of a liberal order in 1991 would halt that decline. Unfortunately,
Russia's reforms now look more like the Ottoman reforms of 1908--markers
on the road to the end.