Amir Taheri

By : Amir Taheri

According to a saying attributed to the Russian mystic Alexei Khomiakov, reality is like a rooster that wakes you up with its crowing when you are in the depth of a sweet dream.

Khomiakov was a leader of the Slavophiles who dreamt of uniting all “Slav nations” under Russian leadership to realize Russia’s “Manifest Destiny” as the “Third Rome” and the standard-bearer of Christianity’s final victory.

Without quite caressing such illusions, Russia’s current leader Vladimir Putin has his own dream of Russian grandeur — a dream, which is perfectly legitimate, provided it does not pose a threat to others. Russia is a big country. In fact it is the largest in the world, is a great nation and has had a leading role in global affairs for the past two centuries.

However, there are now signs that in the course of his sweet dream Putin may have bitten more than Russia can chew at this moment. This is why Putin would do well to hear the rooster of reality crow under his bedroom.

In a lengthy interview with the German mass circulation paper Bild, Putin tried to blame his government’s mounting difficulties on “a dangerous drop in revenues” largely thanks to the fall in energy prices.” He also revealed that in 2015 the Russian gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 3.8 percent while the fall in industrial production was 3.3 percent. With inflation hovering close to 13 percent and unemployment edging above 12 percent, the Russian economy is in its worst shape for more than a decade. In other words the “Putin boom years” may well be over. Putin blames all that on “hostility by western powers.”

Even if we accept Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a “victim of western appetite for hegemony”, the fact remains that no country becomes a victim of others without its own participation in a process that leads to victimization. If Russia became a victim it was because it had become “victimizable” to coin a word. That, in turn, was the direct result of specific policies that were bound to lead Russia into rough patches at home and abroad.

To start with, Putin’s economic policy was bound to make Russia dependable on energy exports to western markets. The history of the past 150 years, that is to say since Americans started the global oil trade, shows that oil has been subject to yoyo price fluctuations more than any commodity that has made or broken many exporters.

When he assumed supreme power in the final decade of the last century, Putin took to the economic model established under President Boris Yeltsin like duck to water. Easy money from exports of oil and gas meant that most Russians could have a taste of the good life without doing much to earn it.

At a time when the global economy was switching to its 21st century model of almost non-stop technological change, Russia found its comfort zone in western-style consumerism not backed by adequate productive energies. In just a decade whole rafts of Russian industry including cherished sectors such as armament simply disappeared. Instead Russia tried to venture into a service economy, developing a financial sector and promoting tourism, an area in which it had little or no experience. As a result, Russia today has nothing to sell to anybody and none of the 5000 or so global brands has a Russian owner.

The trouble with depending on energy exports is twofold. First, oil and gas production is largely automated and thus generates few jobs. The Russian energy export industry for example accounts for less than four per cent of total employment in the country.

As if economic stagnation and massive corruption were not enough, Putin has led Russia into a series of foreign adventures that defy any rational cost-benefit assessment.

Putin also antagonized Turkey, which has always been a key neighbor, angered Belarus, danced into a deadly deal with the mullahs in Tehran and entangled Russia into the Syrian hornet’s nest.

Entanglement in Syria may be Putin’s worst foreign policy error so far. This is perhaps why Putin is now trying to redefine and reduce his Syrian gamble. He knows that even if they give him the whole of Syria he would be winning nothing but a time bomb. Even dreams of a permanent Mediterranean base in Syria now look daft. A base that is constantly threatened by attacks from the hinterland is of little use.

Putin is still popular enough to change course. And provided he forms a broader-based government instead of surrounding himself by careerist yes-men as he is now, he may start hearing Khomiakov’s rooster crowing in the dark.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in the Column section are their own and do not reflect RiyadhVision’s point-of-view.

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