PERSPECTIVES: Answering Putin's challenge to the G-8 (05/07/06)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Answering Putin's challenge to the G-8

If all politics is local, as House Speaker Tip O'Neill once famously said, then few politicians have delivered for their hometown like Russia's President Vladimir Putin. As a member of the G-8, the group of leaders of the world's eight major industrial democracies, Mr. Putin selected St. Petersburg as the venue for Russia's turn this July to host the exclusive gathering. It's where he grew up, went to college, landed a job with the KGB and as deputy mayor, got his start in politics.

The G-8, of course, is anything but local. It has its roots in the 1973 oil crisis and the global recession that followed. In response, President Gerald R. Ford in 1975 convened a gathering of senior financial officials from the U.S., Europe and Japan to discuss economic issues. Two years later, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing hosted a summit of the leaders of West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. A schedule of annual meetings was adopted under a rotating presidency, and the Group of Six (G-6) was formed. In 1976 Canada joined, making it the G-7. Starting in 1991, the USSR and later its successor, Russia, began meeting with the G-7 after the main summit. In 1998, in appreciation for President Boris Yeltsin's economic reforms and agreeing to NATO's eastward expansion, Russia was accepted into the summit, creating the G-8.

For President Putin, hosting the G-8 summit in his hometown has to be immensely gratifying. "Being valued by the West is very important to Putin," according to Alexei Arbatov, former chairman of the Duma Defense Committee. "He considers Russia a great Western power - that's the basis of his world view."

That was also Tsar Peter's motivation in 1703, when he decreed construction of St. Petersburg as a "Window to the West." Like Mr. Putin, Peter the Great wanted to present Russia as a modern country, equal to any. To accomplish that, he used the same methods to build his city that the pharaohs used to build the pyramids.

A century later in the summer of 1839, French aristocrat Marquis de Custine visited Petersburg and observed in his travelogue, "Journey for Our Time," it was "only too easy in St. Petersburg to let yourself be taken in by the appearances of civilization." Appalled by the human costs of Peter's imperial showcase, he saw "a real barbarism barely disguised under a revolting magnificence."

That same summer, the newly liberated serf, 25-year-old Taras Shevchenko, was working as an illustrator in St. Petersburg and writing the Kobzar, the poetry collection that would change the course of history. Like de Custine, Shevchenko was haunted by St. Petersburg's construction slaughter - 100,000 slaves, including many Ukrainian Kozaks, died building it. For him, Peter was the "voracious beast [who] reared his shining capital on tortured corpses."

A hundred years later in 1934, with the city renamed Leningrad, the head of its Communist Party, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated, in all likelihood at the behest of Joseph Stalin. That murder launched the Great Terror, including 1,100 victims found in a mass grave in 1997 at Sandarmokh about 243 miles north of St. Petersburg. These included four Orthodox archbishops, 30 Catholic priests, 300 Ukrainian nationalists and intellectuals, 20 Tatar political figures, a Gypsy king, Belarusian leaders, Russian cultural figures and workers. Sandarmokh was kept secret, like other Soviet crimes, until the St. Petersburg Chapter Memorial pieced together clues from KGB archives and unearthed the ghastly site.

Vladimir Putin, himself a career KGB man, prefers not to acknowledge all this history. As Russia's president, he's surrounded himself with people with the same training and mindset. Not surprisingly, civil liberties in Russia, property rights, the rule of law, freedom of speech and non-governmental organizations are all being suppressed. Mr. Putin routinely meddles in his neighbors' affairs, most notoriously with manipulation of Ukraine's election, the use of energy as a foreign policy cudgel, the boycott of Georgian wine and the festering sore in Chechnya. The U.S., for its part, is unhappy that Russia tried to undercut its Iraq policy by providing Saddam Hussein with war materiel and military intelligence on the eve of America's invasion in 2003 and is now playing an obstructionist role in the effort to stop Iran's nuclear program. Russia, of course, denies everything - including much of its own past - and poses as a country like any other.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, responding to calls for Russia's expulsion from the G-8, says only that the country is going through "a difficult transition" and maintains expelling Mr. Putin would be a mistake - "a personal insult, like spitting in his face," according to Mr. Arbatov.

So what to do? Russia's conduct under the Putin administration is inconsistent with the values and objectives of the G-8. On the other hand, Russia is a veto-wielding member of the U.N. Security Council, a nuclear juggernaut and an energy giant, so expelling Mr. Putin would raise problems the U.S. would rather not deal with.

President Bush has often spoken of his friendship with "Vladimir" as one that allows him to speak privately and candidly with Russia's leader about democracy. (But to no avail, it seems.) Well, it's come time that Mr. Bush and his G-7 colleagues lift the curtain on the 21st Century version of "barbarism barely disguised under a revolting magnificence," that the Marquis de Custine perceived 165 years ago. Blunt words are needed; clear gestures required.

While in St. Petersburg, President Bush and other democratic leaders should pause to lay a wreath to commemorate the victims of communism. Mr. Bush should then follow up with a trip to Kyiv to confer with President Viktor Yushchenko and, while he's there, lay another wreath to honor victims of the Nazis at Babyn Yar. He might point out how the totalitarian mindset that made the Holocaust possible, also formed the basis for the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine. From there, he should get into his limo and go to the Famine memorial to lay a wreath there.

If all that makes Mr. Putin squirm, and even if it spoils his party, then good. Otherwise we'll all be squirming as G-7 leaders act as if a Mr. Putin's Russia were a normal country like theirs. It isn't. Pretending that it is would be the biggest mistake of all.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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