THERE'S A BEAR IN THE WOODS (DYING)

Review: of Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State by David Satter: Russia's darkness rising (Martin Sieff, 5/23/2003, UPI)

Something -- in fact, a lots of things -- went terribly wrong during the early 1990s transition of Russia from State Communism to a supposed free market economy. Many others detailed the problems of transition in detail as they were happening, but Satter maps the contours of the debris that was left.

Without any stable legal structure governing the owning and trading of property and wealth or the regulation of business transactions in the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russian society became totally criminalized, not merely in its day-to-day dealings but in the widespread existential consciousness of its people. Russia's newly emergent oligarchs have often been nicknamed "Robber Barons" after the Gilded Age plutocrats of late 19th-century industrial America, but the term is a misnomer in all too many ways. Industrial titans like John D. Rockefeller in oil and Andrew Carnegie in steel built huge business empires and acquired enormous power. But they did so within an ordered society, built tremendous industrial infrastructures that generated wealth for generations after them, and felt obligations towards it. Rockefeller and Carnegie, like the Ford family after them donated hundreds of millions of dollars to enormous, organized philanthropies that immeasurably boosted education, health and culture, first across the United States and then across the wider world. The Robber Barons of President Boris Yeltsin's Russia really were that. They created an industrial and socio-economic desolation and called it peace. [...]

Things have stabilized, and somewhat improved since President Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin. But the criminalized, rapacious super-oligarchs, those billionaire modern barons, retain control of the Commanding Heights of the Russian economy.

Beneath them, a society of 145 million people stretching across almost one-seventh of the land surface of the planet remain mired in poverty, despair and a moral squalor even more devastating than their physical one. Russia's population continues to implode with soaring death rates and plummeting birth rates. The underlying reason for this, far more than the collapse of living standards in the 1990s was, Satter concludes, that most of those people had lost all hope. They now despaired of things ever getting better. [...]

There is still time for Russia to stabilize and for those who wish her well to support the constructive forces for good within her. But most of the promise has been squandered, and the Hobbesian nightmare of a society of chaos, red in tooth and claw, remains the dominant reality today.

Western policy-makers, especially in Washington, would do well to study these pages and to ponder the teachings of the great Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev with which Satter closes this important, troubling book: "In the soul of the Russian people there should appear ... a transfiguring and creative beginning." Only then, "the creative instincts will defeat the rapacious ones."

We harbored great hope for Vladimir Putin when he took power, believing that he might be precisely what many feared, an authoritarian. What Russia needs right now is not freedom but order and it is likely the case that only an authoritarian, even a fairly brutal one, can re-establish the order in which a future freedom would flourish. Russell Kirk put the matter typically well: "The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws." Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2003 8:10 AM