TRANSFORMATION WATCH #10:
COUP II (PART II) — WHAT THE U.S. SHOULD DO NOW

(Washington, D.C.): Events over the
past 48 hours suggest a further
unravelling of the democratic forces’
hold on power in Russia. Subsequent to
yesterday’s publication of a Center for
Security Policy Decision Brief
entitled, “Transformation
Watch #9: Coup II — The Unfolding Crisis
in the Former USSR” ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D_133″>No. 92-D 133),
the following portentous developments
have occurred:

• In remarks before senior Russian
  diplomats Tuesday, President
  Boris Yeltsin warned,
  “There is terrible danger.
  But in the West, they don’t yet
  understand this.”
  In particular, Yeltsin accused
  the National Salvation Front of
  advocating “the overthrow of
  legally constituted
  authorities.” Yeltsin has
  become sufficiently alarmed at
  the growing power of the Front
  that he banned it and
  the parliamentary guard (a 5,000
  man paramilitary force) on 27
  October.
• The National Salvation
  Front has also announced plans
  calculated to provoke incidents
  in the Baltic States.
  During the period from 20-30
  November, Front members intend to
  visit Russian army garrisons in
  the Baltics for the purpose of
  “securing the rights of the
  troops and their families.”
• Under the orders of Parliament
  Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, parliamentary
  guards have also surrounded the
  offices of Izvestia,
  today a relatively independent
  newspaper, for the purpose of
  subordinating the paper to the
  control of the
  communist-dominated Parliament.
  Yeltsin has previously promised
  his support for preservation of Izvestia‘s
  autonomy.
• According to a report broadcast
  today on National Public Radio,
  Khasbulatov has also
  assigned to this militia
  responsibility for the security
  of 75 buildings in
  Moscow, including state
  television, the Foreign Ministry,
  and the Constitutional Court.
  Importantly, NPR also quoted the
  unit’s head as saying he would
  take orders only from the Speaker
  of the Parliament — not from
  President Yeltsin or anyone else.

• Yesterday, RFE/RL reported that representatives
  from the Russian Atomic Energy
  Ministry and other nuclear
  technology organizations have
  just concluded a nine-day meeting
  (15-24 October) with a
  delegation of Iranians
  and have apparently now agreed to
  a construction timetable to
  provide Iran with a VVER nuclear
  reactor — over U.S.
  objections.

Action Needed Now

It would be a tragic mistake in U.S.
foreign policy should the United States
now, in the words of former President
John F. Kennedy, “witness or permit
the slow undoing” of democratic and
free market reform in Russia — or
elsewhere in the former USSR — without a
strategic, U.S.-led effort to deter such
a momentous development. The Center for
Security Policy believes that those
communist and nationalist forces that
seek to turn back the clock to an
authoritarian — even fascist — Moscow
center must be put on notice
by the United States (ideally, in
coordination with its allies) that their
“Coup II” machinations, if
implemented, will entail real
penalties in terms of Western support and
assistance.

Toward this end, the men who
aspire to be the next president of the
United States need to let it be known now
that they will not permit U.S. resources
(financial, economic, technological,
energy-related etc.) to be used to
underwrite a new, re-centralized and
menacing proto-Soviet state.
Markers must be put down at once
that the following sorts of steps will be
taken if either (or both) of these
conditions apply:

1. the mandate of
   democratically elected officials
   like Boris Yeltsin is vitiated
   by the communist-controlled
   Congress of People’s Deputies in
   the absence of free and fair
   national elections or

2. the process of
   democratic and free market
   economic institution-building
   continues to be stymied
   as hardline elements regroup and
   assert incremental political
   control.

Economic and Financial Measures

• Paris Club negotiations
  concerning the rescheduling of
  some $80 billion in former Soviet
  debt will be suspended.
  Negotiations with those Soviet
  successor states who continue to
  pursue structural reform along
  democratic and free market lines
  should proceed.
• Further lending to Russia
  by the IMF, World Bank, the
  European Bank for Reconstruction
  and Development and other
  multilateral institutions will be
  suspended.
• The United States will work to
  interrupt most, if not all, G-7
  bilateral financial flows
  to Russia (e.g., commercial
  export-support loans would be cut
  off whereas funds designated for
  strict humanitarian relief or the
  destruction of nuclear, chemical
  or biological weapons might be
  continued).
• Elements of the growing network
  of bilateral exchanges
  — such easily abused initiatives
  as assistance to the strategic
  Russian energy sector and defense
  conversion-related
  “cooperation” — will
  be put “on ice.”
• A moratorium will be imposed upon
  U.S. projects in the
  Russian energy sector —
  initiatives that could ultimately
  generate revenue streams
  sufficient to fund the reversal
  of private entrepreneurship in
  that country, not to mention the
  political freedoms that accompany
  it.
• Dual-use exports
  to Russia will be curtailed
  immediately and a concerted
  effort will be made to
  reconstitute multilateral export
  controls on such items both in
  COCOM and in individual G-7
  control and enforcement regimes.

Political and Military
Measures

• Planned deep cuts in U.S.
  defense spending will be
  postponed, if not reversed.
• Russia — and other Soviet
  successors departing from the
  path of wholesale political and
  economic change — will be
  suspended from the North
  Atlantic Coordination Council.
• Space cooperation
  — a technology field that is
  particularly susceptible to
  dangerous transfers of know-how,
  equipment and software (e.g.,
  those concerning ballistic
  missiles, guidance systems,
  communications, advanced
  simulation and design technology,
  etc.) — between the United
  States and Russia will be
  suspended.
• Sharing of information
  and similar cooperation between
  the CIA and other U.S.
  intelligence agencies and law
  enforcement organizations with
  their Russian counterparts will
  be put on hold.

Diplomatic Measures

• A public diplomacy
  campaign will be
  initiated to focus international
  opprobrium on those bent on
  thwarting the democratic and
  economic transformation of the
  old Soviet Union. Such a campaign
  would demonstrate that this
  time the United States
  stands unambiguously on the side
  of the beleaguered forces of
  reform in Russia, such as those
  supporting the economic program
  of Acting Prime Minister Yegor
  Gaidar.
• State visits and
  other traditional courtesies (if
  not all lower-level working
  visits) would be denied to agents
  of the anti-reform movement.
• No special treatment will
  be accorded to Mikhail Gorbachev
  should he reemerge as a front-man
  or leading light in such
  anti-reform factions as Civic
  Union. In particular, his
  predictable appeals in the West
  for more assistance flows and
  “political understanding and
  empathy” for the resurgent
  Old Guard will be firmly
  rejected.
• Unhelpful Russian
  initiatives at the United Nations
  and in other multilateral
  settings, such as Moscow’s
  insistence that Belgrade be
  expelled only from the U.N.
  General Assembly — but not
  from myriad other United Nations’
  organizations — will be
  resisted.

The Bottom Line

In light of the rapidly deteriorating
situation in the former USSR, it is
imperative that a sharp departure from
past practice be made. Today, there need
to be publicly declared
milestones in the political, strategic
and economic fields — milestones against
which the performance of Russian leaders
can be judged by the United
States and its allies.

Congress, moreover, must be made a
co-equal partner in enforcing these
sensible, disciplined and transparent
standards. Under no circumstances
should the decision whether to respond or
not to slippage on Russian reform be left
up to a handful of executive branch
officials with a vested interest
in not rocking the boat or preserving their
interpretation of “positive
momentum.”

After all, totalitarians tend to be
masters of the almost imperceptible
garrotting of Western-style reform.
Insensitivity to this fact helped get the
Bush Administration into the trouble now
known as “Iraqgate”; the
Congress and the American people need to
understand the goals and the stakes —
and be party to them at the take-off,
not just in the crash landing.

Such a clear-eyed policy will, in all
likelihood, be made more difficult by the
reemergence of a gaggle of apologists for
Civic Union and other Russian anti-reform
elements. Many of these will be the same
“experts” who were last heard
mindlessly extolling the virtues of
Mikhail Gorbachev’s communist regime and
warning against supporting the democratic
forces in Russia. They will doubtless be
no less deaf, dumb and blind when it
comes to the hardliners who would now
topple the latter and try to reconstitute
the empire lost by the former.

Professors Stephen Cohen
of Princeton, Jerry Hough
of Duke and Ed Hewitt of
the Brookings Institution and the Bush
NSC — among many others — have been
sufficiently wrong in the past that
future recommendations they might make
about the need to treat with resurgent
Russian hardliners should be sharply
discounted. Better yet, they
should be rejected outright.