Why can't Russia be normal?

Russia has always been a mystery.

In the recent movie, The Good Shepherd, a defector from the KGB warns his CIA interrogators that Russians flunk polygraph tests. The machines, he says, can't fathom the Russian "soul."

That famous sensibility inhabiting the inner Russian was the wellspring of the extraordinary surge in Russian writing and music over the last 150 years.

On a large scale, as in Dmitri Shostakovich's 8th Symphony about the Second World War, which claimed 20 million Russian lives, it can make their catastrophically cruel story heroic. On a private scale, it is why those of us who have lived there treasure our Russian friendships.

But the cycles of revolution and reaction, romantic surges and destructive descents have left Russians with an overdose of drama. Today, they seem to want less soul and more security.

After a scary night of lethal fighting in October 1993, when renegade parliamentarians tried to usurp then president Boris Yeltsin, I can remember an anguished TV panellist asking, "Why can't Russians be normal?"

Nothing about those days in Russia fitted anybody's definition of "normal." A totalitarian society and state-controlled economy had flip-flopped in the space of months. Behaviour recently forbidden became mandatory for success, whose very definition turned socialist principles upside down.

Moviemaking stopped because fiction could not match everyday drama. Human costs were real. Pensioned scholars actually did root in garbage pails. My favourite bartender had been a cardiac surgeon.

Ragging the puck

Under the shock therapy that accompanied the shift to open markets, too many ordinary Russians were adversely affected while gangsters prospered and sly operators manipulated a new capitalist system for which no legal framework yet existed.

Anatoly Chubais, the reformist champion of privatization once said on the radio that Russia had to reform "Canadian style." When I asked him what in the world he meant, he said it was a hockey metaphor — the Soviets control the puck until there's an opening; the Canadians dump it into the forward zone to see what comes up.

His philosophical point was that it would be a contradiction in terms to try to de-control an economy in a controlled way.

But it was all going downhill too fast, and many Russians blamed their troubles on the pace of democratic change.

There were other problems, too, of course. While most Russians supported the Kremlin when it attempted to stop a nasty band of jihadists and murderous crooks in Chechnya from breaking away, the Russian army's brutal behaviour in attempting to put down the uprising was humiliating.

Then, terrorism struck. The history of cynical brutality in Russian life has given Russians a higher threshold of insulation from shock. But the terrorist outrages of the late 1990's, right up until the Beslan school siege in 2004, created panic. Too many children died.

Putin to the rescue?

Boris Yeltsin was an earthy populist whose intuition sought three fundamental rights for Russians: To own property, to speak freely, and to elect their government.

But Yeltsin soon lost his hero status. GDP fell by 50 per cent under his watch. Crime doubled.

People wanted a leader who would stop the rot, make them proud again, after the breakup of the USSR, and the depressing inversion of so many lives.

In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned in favour of a prime minister rapidly promoted from obscurity, Vladimir Putin.

Shortly afterward, Putin won the presidential election with 52 per cent of the vote.

Putin was elected to stabilize Russia. When President George W. Bush said he looked into Putin's eyes and "saw his soul," Russians laughed because that was the last thing they saw or wanted.

In the 2000 election, Russians chose a sober, articulate, and practical man who could deliver discipline, order and, above all, no bad surprises.

The dark side

I had met Putin in his obscurity as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg where he had the reputation of getting things done. I was Canada's ambassador to Russia at the time and one of the things he was doing was taking on criminals who were then intimidating idealistic Canadian entrepreneurs.

Putin confided he expected political extinction the moment other city councillors raised his KGB past. But a serious operator from the one Soviet organisation that severely punished corruption was just what the majority wanted.

So it goes today.

I recently went back to Russia with my Russian-speaking wife seeking answers to two questions: Is Putin moving Russia's fledgling democracy backwards? And is Russia turning away from the West?

Western disenchantment with Russia has darkened noticeably of late with the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and turncoat security operative Alexander Litvinenko.

Most Western pundits concede Putin didn't order the murder of these critics of his regime, but hold him responsible for creating a culture in which such murders are possible.

Sadly, such atrocities have been possible for some time. But what is his responsibility?

To stabilize Russia, he believed he had to consolidate power in central government. The vogue in politics today — Bush, Tony Blair, Stephen Harper — is indeed for tight central control.

But Putin's style reflects a Russian male tradition of intimidating perceived opponents, of being the toughest of the tough guys.

As a result, Russian participatory democracy has taken big hits.

What free press?

In Russia today, TV is either in state hands or self-censorship. Newspapers are riotously free but few read them.

In politics, liberal opponents were marginalized largely because they were being financed by billionaire oligarchs, some of whom had ripped off state assets and then tried to get into politics. Now, the oligarchs are mostly in exile and one, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is in jail.

Direct elections in several Russian states and cities have been replaced by appointments by the Kremlin.

The old-style judicial system, as well, is increasingly under the Kremlin's thumb — though whether for reform or control, it's hard to tell.

Non-governmental organizations are also being roped in by new rules. I met Lyudmila Alexeyeva, an elderly heroic militant for human rights who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group. Her efforts to promote judicial transparency and fairness are every day being squeezed by a state that seems paranoid about openness.

Also, big business, which means energy, is increasingly part of a power complex under the Kremlin control. Outsiders, like the biggest single investor in Russia, Shell, are being pressured to sell their holdings.

These are the trends that caused the murdered Politkovskaya to write a year ago that Putin was "by guile or indifference" presiding over a Russia "slinking back toward a Soviet past."

It's complicated

Putin emphatically insists, including on his four-hour open-line talks, that there will be no turning back from democracy. But even top Russian officials confide "the jury's out" on whether the transitional period of today is biased toward increased democracy or authoritarianism.

For a Canadian, it is almost impossible to judge governance in Russia by Canadian norms today. But on Russian terms, it is extraordinary how far they have come, and the costs they have paid.

Democracy is not a theory, it is behavioural practice that needs time to grow.

Many thoughtful Russians we know are conflicted. They judge Politkovskaya's diagnosis too dark, and attribute violence and murder to the survival of powerful rogue elements who want neither order nor democracy.

The prevailing opinion of the largely silent Russian people is that Putin has delivered on his mandate for greater security. He increased his vote to 71 per cent in the 2004 election, and a Pew poll awards him 75 per cent support today.

Russians applaud GDP growth of about seven per cent a year since he was elected and many are basking in a doubling of personal incomes. Prosperity is no longer restricted to fast-lane gamblers.

The high price of oil is the reason for all this growth but a sizeable middle and professional class has emerged of late.

As for corruption, our Russian friends casually accept "horoshaya corruptia," the good corruption like the tips and small payments that move things along. But they believe that big-time corruption is something the Putin regime actively dislikes.

After Putin what?

And what about the world? Russians appear to have become less interested in what is going on outside Russia. The pro-Western opening in the early 90's is seen to have earned nothing in return.

Today, Russia's main partner is energy-dependent Europe and self-confident Russians expect Putin to stand up to Europe, which he does so, as well as to the U.S.

Meanwhile, he unnecessarily rattles the nerves of Russia's freshly independent, smaller neighbours.

But the acute question is whether Russia will play a positive and moderating role as a stakeholder in the world community on such issues as Iran and Sudan.

If Russia could work at being helpful instead of always playing for leverage, the UN Security Council could regain the effectiveness briefly known in the early 1990s, especially as constructive Russian behaviour could well influence a rising China.

The consensus among my Russian friends is that Putin will respect the constitution and retire at the end of his second term in 2008, probably to be succeeded by another democracy-lite manager from his circle, such as former chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev, or Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov.

A new leader in Moscow would join fresh faces emerging in Washington, Paris and London, which might improve the testy tone of international communication today.

Partnership will only work, of course, if Russia grasps that it is counter-productive to use its energy muscle on its neighbours; push foreign companies around; and seek to intimidate the likes of reformers such as Lyudmila Alexeyva.

But partners need to remember the big picture, as well, that the Gorbachev-Yeltsin renunciation of Communism and the Cold War changed the fundamentals of our world as well.

Russia still deserves our friendship and support.