Davos, Switzerland.--A year ago the main excitement at the World Economic Forum held annually in this resort town was provided by Russia's advocates of crash economic reform, who had just lost out in Moscow. They came to Davos with their American advisers to forecast runaway inflation in Russia, with accompanying political chaos.
A year later the trouble in Moscow is political rather than economic. The economic pessimists were wrong. Things are no worse than they were; they may even be better. Inflation year-on-year is lower than last year, and liberalization of the economy and of the energy sector in particular goes on, if very slowly, and at immense social costs. George Soros describes Russia today as "robber capitalism arising from mass privatization." However, that is not the worst of the possible outcomes.
There undoubtedly is a mass constituency for reform, thanks to privatization, as Anatoly Chubais, the country's deputy prime minister in charge of finance and the economy, told this year's Davos meeting. Whether this means, as he argued, that reform is irreversible, is not as apparent to the outsider as it seems to him. In any case, which reforms? Not the political ones.
The political reforms are what count, and the trend seems against them. The Yeltsin government has become steadily more isolated and arbitrary as the months have gone by, and a serious question exists as to whether the parliamentary election supposed to take place in 1996 will actually happen. The Russians at Davos have mostly spoken about the election in conditional terms. One added that if the parliamentary election does take place as scheduled, so -- "probably" -- will the next presidential election.
Chechnya has been a turning point. Most of the Russians present at Davos support the policy of forcing the Chechen nation back into the Russian federation, all adding of course that it should have been done differently. This often involves apologetic remarks about young soldiers who get out of hand in combat.
The troops may have got out of hand, but their political commanders were the problem. The issue is not whether Russia has a reasonable case in wishing to hold the federation together. It is whether war is the way to go about it. Then it is about whether the liberal democracies should finance repression in Russia.
I was particularly struck at this meeting with something I am reluctant to say because it will be taken as personal attack, yet which seems to me important. This is the seeming lack of general culture among many if not most of these younger Russian politicians (and avowed reformers). They are Soviet Man, cast loose to become Capitalist Man.
They are victims still of a Soviet system which systematically attempted to destroy the humanist and religious traditions of Russia by means of a totalitarian educational effort to substitute proletarian internationalism, "scientific socialism" and atheism for the old civilizational norms and traditions of the country.
The Soviet effort to inculcate a new cosmology eventually produced much alienation and cynicism, but was successful to the extent that the alternatives to it were damaged or eliminated. The destructive effort was helped by the fact that it went on for 70 years -- three generations.
The Russian reform politicians were formed by the Soviet system. All were functionaries in the Soviet government or members of state or party institutes until the system collapsed. They are not educated men, cultivated men, as their counterpart state officials and academics ordinarily are in the U.S., France or Germany. (One had a different impression of Mikhail Gorbachev, possibly because of the influence of his wife, a professor of literature.)
They have become converts to Western economic and political ideas, but from the outside. They lack the intimacy, range of associations and ideas, and experience of market capitalism and democracy which Westerners automatically possess. Obviously this must be so. Until democracy has been successful in Russia for a generation there will be no other kind of politician.
Nonetheless the limits of these men must be understood. The fatuous eulogizing by American presidents and German chancellors of Boris Yeltsin as a great democrat displays a Western unwillingness to see these men as they are. They are people in an extremely difficult situation, attempting to make over not only their country's political system but its political and economic culture. At the same time they lack a comprehensive understanding of what is supposed to come out of this effort.
They are working with slogans. They were brought up on slogans. What they do understand is power, because power is what Leninism was about. The struggle in Russia today is about democracy, but it is also about power, and the struggle for power will determine the struggle for democracy.
8, William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist.