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Wall Street Journal September 20, 2004 Moscow's Mussolini By ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI Mr. Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, is the author, most recently, of "The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership" (Basic Books, 2004). Thou art so pitiful, Poor, and so sorrowful, Yet of great treasure full, Mighty, all-powerful, Russia, my Mother! Citing these stirring words of the poet Nekrasov, Vladimir I. Lenin, the new dictator of Russia, published on March 12, 1918, his reasons for moving Russia's seat of government from St. Petersburg (Petrograd) to Moscow. Amid the chaos, confusion, and violence of those revolutionary days, Lenin, having just five days earlier entrenched himself in the Kremlin, proclaimed: "Russia will become mighty and abundant if she abandons all dejection and all phrase-making, if, with clenched teeth, she musters all her forces and strains every nerve and muscle. . . . work with might and main to establish discipline and self-discipline, consolidate everywhere organization, order, efficiency, and the harmonious co-operation of all the forces of the people, introduce comprehensive accounting of and control over production and distribution -- such is the way to build up military might and socialist might." Moscow -- which centuries earlier had been the capital of Ivan the Terrible but was demoted to the status of a provincial town when Peter the Great opened a window to Europe by constructing St. Petersburg as his new capital -- thus once again became Russia's epicenter. And so it remains to this day, with Lenin's slogans eerily anticipating Vladimir Putin's recent justification for centralized power. It is important to recognize that to the Russians the Kremlin is more than just the seat of government. It epitomizes the centralizing tradition of the Russian autocracy. It is a tradition that is fearful of any regional autonomy, of any genuine decentralization, a tradition that fosters the chauvinist paranoia that political pluralism will almost inevitably precipitate the breakup of Russia itself. That mentality fitted well into the Stalinist notions of central planning, and it fit well into the bureaucratic mentality of the KGB with its ethic of suspicion and hierarchic discipline. For products of the KGB, such as Mr. Putin, it is axiomatic that if Russia is to be "mighty, all-powerful," it must be ruled from the top down. Two significant realities flow from the above. The first is that Moscow is the home of a parasitic political elite that identifies the interests of Russia with its own interests. Subordinating an enormous country with 11 time-zones to all decision-making concentrated in the hands of remote Moscow bureaucrats is a formula instinctively favored by parasites. The monopolistic power of the Muscovite elite suffocates local initiative and prevents the various regions of Russia from exploiting their own talents and resources. It is not an accident that under Stalin as well as in recent years, Moscow has been and remains the privileged beneficiary of modernization and development. In contrast, other Russian cities continue to stagnate and the Russian countryside remains largely reminiscent of the days of Tolstoy. To this day, much of all foreign investment is devoured by Moscow alone (or recycled abroad) while in many other cities (like Vladivostok, for example) even rudimentary services -- housing, hospital care, etc. -- are almost primitive. Secondly, the leeching and self-centered mindset of the Moscow political elite stifles political democratization. Mr. Putin's move is popular with the elite because it propitiates the basic interests of a power elite that still harbors nostalgia for great- power imperialist status, that identifies its own well-being with domination over all of Russia, and through Russia over at least the former states of the Soviet Union. To the power elite, the independence of Ukraine, or of Georgia, or of Uzbekistan is an historic offense. To it, the resistance of the Chechens to Russian domination is a "terrorist" crime. To it, autonomy for 20 million ethnically non-Russian citizens is a challenge to its own privileges. The turn toward statist centralism under Mr. Putin's KGB regime should not be confused, however, with a return to some form of communist totalitarianism. Today's Russian rulers realize that communism meant stagnation and the elite knows that communism also would mean relative deprivation for itself. State-capitalism, subject to central control, as well as the advantages of wealth and travel abroad provide the best formula for both self-gratification and nationalist aspirations. Mr. Putin's regime in many ways is similar to Mussolini's Fascism. Il Duce made "the trains run on time." He centralized political power in the name of chauvinism. He imposed political controls over the economy without nationalizing it or destroying the economic oligarchs and their mafias. The Fascist regime evoked national greatness, discipline, and exalted myths of an allegedly glorious past. Similarly, Mr. Putin is trying to blend the traditions of the Cheka (Lenin's Gestapo, where his own grandfather started his career), with Stalin's wartime leadership, with Russian Orthodoxy's claims to the status of the Third Rome, with Slavophile dreams of a single large Slavic state ruled from the Kremlin. That combination may be appealing for a while but ultimately -- probably within a decade or so -- it will fail. The younger and better educated and more open-minded Russian generation will slowly permeate the ruling elite. The upcoming generation will not be satisfied with life in a Fascist petro-state in which the Kremlin glitters (because of oil profits) while the rest of the country falls further and further behind not only Europe but also China. They are aware that decentralization of their huge country, which can unleash social initiative, is the key to modernization. That reality cannot be obscured forever by the slogans about "terrorism" that Mr. Putin used to justify the imposition of stifling political centralization. Indeed, already today the neighboring Ukraine of nearly 50 million people (whom the Bush NSC has so studiously ignored while naïvely courting Mr. Putin) is beginning to provide a contrast in two major domains: its economic progress is more diversified and more evident in other cities than just in the national capital; and its politics (while still vulnerable to manipulation) have produced two genuinely contested presidential elections. As of today, no one can predict the outcome of the Ukrainian presidential elections scheduled for late October, a fact that stands in sharp contrast with the Russian "elections" in which Mr. Putin was the candidate. Unfortunately, over the last several years the White House has fostered a cult of Putin that has done great harm to the increasingly isolated Russian democrats. Their cause deserved support. There were Russians who bravely stood up and opposed the progressive silencing of Russia's free media. There were Russians who voiced concerns regarding the narrowing scope of Russia's democracy. There were Russians who protested against the inhuman and almost genocidal massacres of the Chechens. Never once did any of them hear any measure of support from the top leadership of the country that once held high the standard of human rights in opposition to communist tyranny. Moreover, the Bush administration should wake up to the fact that what happens in Russia bears directly on what may also happen in the space of the former Soviet Union. Today, many in the newly independent post-Soviet states fear that in the name of a war against terrorism the U.S. may also ignore Mr. Putin's intensifying efforts to encourage manipulated elections in Ukraine, to promote separatism in Georgia (while fiercely crushing the Chechens for seeking it), and to isolate Central Asia from the international economy. The fact is that prospects for democracy within Russia are interconnected both with the existence of national pluralism within the space of the former Soviet Union and with the spread of political pluralism within Russia itself. There is a basic lesson for America in all this: For democracy to thrive in Russia, its neighbors must be truly secure, the rights of non-Russian minorities must not be forgotten, and Russian democrats must not be ignored.