|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Many mainstream conservative and business writers have realized that Russia stands the most to gain from an intensified U.$. war with Iran. Russian weapons will get a test and improved market; the run-up to the war has already increased the price of oil and hence Russia's export returns and if the united $tates were really so stupid as step up the shooting beyond a certain level, oil fields could go ablaze and waterways jammed and a huge shortage of oil could develop. The beneficiaries from this scenario would be oil men like Bush himself, military contractors, but also Russia, the second biggest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia. The Russian trade surplus could suddenly become even larger.
At the same time, MIM had a very typical Western interaction with Russia by reading recent writing(1) of Boris Yeltsin's prime minister (1991-1994). Yegor Gaidar is the die-hard Liberal known for wrecking the Russian economy with free-market reforms that paved the way for today's oligarchy in Russia. As the Russian people correctly believe, Gaidar should be on trial for genocide against his own people, especially senior citizens and prime age men.
It seems that Gaidar has at least intellectually travelled all the way back to Marx. This confirms the image of Russians as easily going from one extreme to another, often in the head of the very same persyn. It seems that fascism, communism and extreme Liberalism are all possibilities within the same Russian thinker.
We have to agree with one of Gaidar's reviewers Vladimir Shlapentokh: "What a difference a new book makes in which Marx in fact dominates Gaidar’s theoretical reasoning. It was indeed a return to Marx."(2) Now this is a story that we do not hear in the West, how the darling of Western Liberalism in Russia has repented at least intellectually if not politically yet.
The Iran question is well-explained by Gaidar's strident economic determinism. According to Gaidar it was Saudi Arabia that landed the mortal blow to the Soviet Union, when it decided its response to the invasion of Afghanistan would be to crush the price of oil by radically increasing exports.
"The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.Politically, Gaidar's explanation makes sense, because we know that Saudi Arabia did lend aid to Pakistan and the likes of Osama Bin Laden as did the United $tates when it came to fighting the Soviet social- imperialists in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Theoretically it also fits in with those who say that the "extensive model of development" of the Soviet Union just ran out of gas. There was a diminishing returns effect going on in the Soviet Union which needed to be able to diversify and deepen its economy but was not able to."As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive."
When the price of oil fell, Russia went into a recession, if we leave out oil and vodka. Gaidar says the illness went further than that, because it was politically impossible for the leaders to cut the military-industrial complex and so Russia turned to loans, including eventually, a $100 billion Western loan. That ended up being a stop-gap and eventually Russia had to cut the empire loose in order to be able to charge it market prices for oil and gas as we see today. This last bit ends up being a sop to Russian nationalism, which says that all along the glue in the Soviet Union was sacrifice by the ethnic Russians.
According to Gaidar, no one, not the pro-Yelstin forces nor the "coup plotters" trying to preserve the Soviet Union really had a solution for the Soviet budget crisis. In justifying the acceptance of Western loans, Soviet leaders believed that they faced potential famine worse than anything in Soviet history. The weakness of the financial position was to show as "defense spending" fell to virtually zero in the following years of disorder.
Arab "terrorism" came along as the principal focus just in time to give Putin a boost in oil prices and save Japan from becoming the principal victim of U.$. aggression. We also know that to this day, the business writers consider Russian banking to be at the bottom end of the world, as in the bottom quarter's.
Just maybe it is possible that Soviet social-imperialism had leaders of low financial competence. They seemed to have no way of using political power to advance the economy. All of the Soviet Union's potential surplus seemed to go back into the economy only to be lost, so when the price of oil collapsed, the Soviet Union could not fund itself. To this day, oil prices have rocketed but the male life expectancy remains below 60,(3) because of the ineptitude of the Soviet social- imperialists. The population of Russia is still shrinking.
Gaidar argued that if the Soviets had had democracy, they could have come to a political solution with support from the people. Instead, rigid elites and empire constraints forced Soviet leaders' hands according to Gaidar. Thus, he still pontificates for democracy. He is basically saying Russia is subject to instability and it is better to have democracy in a moment of crisis. We can look forward to finding out if even with a higher price of oil, the Russian economy reaches a point of rigid stagnation and crisis.
We have to agree that Gaidar has put his finger on something that adds to MIM's own analysis of the crisis of the Soviet social-imperialists. Specifically, Gaidar came up with an analysis of the timing of the collapse via the Saudi struggle. Conversely, the rise of the price of oil explains the resurgent nationalism in Russia that Putin is allowing today.
MIM does not agree that the collapse of oil made it "inevitable" that the Soviet Union would collapse. We will say that we are not at a stage of history yet when socialism is something that can be done by people living in comfort as if the quality of the leaders did not matter. It was a nice idea to take a buffoon like Khruschev and hope that socialism would guide him to greatness, but it was not to be. Subsequent leaders lacked the penetrating understanding of the economy to head the vanguard of socialism in the world. Since the most advanced economies are dominated by bourgeois populations en masse, we are stuck with our chances in relatively backward economies. To get a majority portion of the world to a comfortable socialism will require some breakthroughs, and those breakthroughs in Russias, Chinas and Albanias will have to be with leaders with paths forward that are not obvious to the Khruschevs, Gorbachevs and even the coup plotters of 1991. We are not doubting that all these people were stuck in an economic determinism, a weak understanding of economic planning and finance, without a sense of how to translate politics into an expanding economy. Yet as the success of Stalin proved, the Soviet Union did not have to be an economic failure.
Against us, it could be argued that World War II simply killed off too many political leaders of a generation, and buffoons were all that was left. Therefore, we could speak of a demographic problem for the revolution, too much of a leadership gap to overcome. So not only did the Russians make the mistake of assassinating Stalin in his ripe old age, but also there really weren't the kind of people around who would be able to make up the leadership gap made worse by World War II. If so, then this would be a case where Hitler won something of a victory by clearing the way for Anglo imperialism and I$rael while weakening the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, Yeltsin, coup plotters of 1991 and Gaidar were intellectually stuck about what to do about the oil revenue shortfall.
In any case, if the united $tates intensifies war with Iran now, it won't be with Putin's co-leadership. His vacillation on the question will be understandable: he won't want nuclear clouds on his borders but his treasury will benefit if the war intensifies. Russia will be spared Persian and Arab wrath this time around. In this geopolitical conflict, the Russian leadership is emerging as the winner of an upsurge in oil prices. While China improves its economic position and South Asia is starting to look to its economic leadership with actual funding of projects for example, Russia emerges as more able to carry out tit-for-tat with the united $tates on a narrow range of issues.
Notes:
1. http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.25991,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
2. http://www.msu.edu/~shlapent/Gaidar.htm
3. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18295329/