From KGB spook to Czar of all the Russias

It’s confirmed that our Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople will be going to Moscow on July 29th, the end of next month, on an official visit. When Ka Blas meets with his counterpart, Russia’s Foreign Minister Ivanov, the probability of a state visit to Manila by Moscow’s new "Czar", Vladimir Putin, will surely be discussed.

Since United States President George W. Bush is also slated to visit Manila in October, after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok, there is a bit of fine-tuning to be done with regard to dates and other items on the prospective agenda. Russian Ambassador Anatoly V. Nebogatov assured me a few days ago this was in the works.

Putin has, in truth, shot up from virtual unknown four years ago to a major role, self-propelled for the most part, on the world scene. His visit here will be interesting, but what profit we may derive from it is still problematic .

Dubya Bush’s Republican predecessor, the last of the Cold Warriors, ex-President Ronald Reagan, had – you examine it closely, "Bush-style" – battered the once superpower Soviet Union into break-up and bankruptcy by zeroing on it relentlessly as "The Evil Empire", then forcing it into a race for supremacy that simply eroded the Soviet treasury.

In the end, the USSR was reduced to such penury that Mikhail Gorbachev had to dismantle the Empire by permitting its "colonies" (the Tatar Belt mentality in tatters) to fall away.

The USSR lost the Ukraine and Belarus, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, East Germany, the Baltic States. The Russians, of course, never forgave Gorby for having been the instrument of the down-sizing of their "power", which is why he can never win any election any more and is reduced to giving lectures worldwide for once substantial but decreasing fees. Nonetheless, in my regard, he remains the hero of glasnost and perestroika.

Most observers will say that the Soviet Union simply "committed suicide". I agree with Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institute, however, in his book, Reagan’s War (Doubleday, New York, London, Sydney, 2002), that Reagan waged an epic 40-year struggle against Communism – and won it by strangling the Soviet economy through the gambit of compelling it to overspend.

Reagan and his guys did their sums. They calculated that Moscow had total hard-currency earnings of approximately $32 billion a year. Thus they underwrote the mujahideen in Afghanistan, supplied them with weapons and cash, and contributed to Moscow’s military defeat and humiliation there. This effort, it can be said, boomeranged on the Americans and their allies, of course. It spawned Osama bin Laden and other anti-American terrorists, on top of the vicious (Pakistani-sponsored) Taliban.

Reagan’s sledgehammer tactics compelled the Soviets to abandon the second strand of their programmed European natural gas pipeline: Lost revenue, $7-8 billion per year.

The cost of counter-insurgency operations against Reagan-backed guerrillas: $3 billion a year. (These US underwritten guerrillas later bit back at America.)

Moscow was led to rush extra arms and weapons to Fidel Castro’s Cuba to soothe Fidel’s anxieties over Reagan’s "invasion" of Grenada and the overthrow of a Marxist regime there. The tab: $3 billion. Military spending increases set by the Soviets to match Reagan’s escalation of US military expenditures and positioning came to $15-20 billion per year.

Lost revenue owing to restrictions on technology imports came to $1-2 billion per annum. Lost revenue from a sudden drop in oil prices amounted to $5-6 billion yearly. Extra aid sent to Poland after Reagan’s sanctions accumulated to a staggering total of $5 billion.

Ironically, Poland – the former seat of the Soviet bloc’s Warsaw Pact military alliance is in the forefront today of America’s allies in central and eastern Europe, and actively supported Bush in the Iraq War by actually dispatching troops to fight in Iraq. Poland will play an important role in the postwar peacekeeping in tandem with the Yanks! How the world has changed?

As for Reagan, the victor in the "war", he’s in the terminal stages of Alzheimer’s disease and no longer remembers that he was once President of the United States – possibly not even his own name.

Thus he cannot even savor his marvelous triumph in "Reagan’s War".

* * *

Mr. Putin is, clearly, determined to reverse the old Soviet Union’s setbacks. He’s practically joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which once confronted the Soviet Union militarily and tactically. He has shoehorned Russia into "almost member" status in the G-8 of the world’s most highly industrialized nations.

About three and a half years ago, an American newsman asked a nonplussed panel of Russian government officials attending the World Economic Forum in Davos who the heck was Vladimir Putin. Although Putin had been their prime minister for six months, the Russian delegates didn’t know very much about him!

Now, everybody knows who Putin is, whether in the east and in the west. Not bad for a former KGB spook who came out of nowhere, thanks to his original sponsor, who has been shoved aside since, former President Boris Yeltsin. Putin, who was KGB rezident in Germany for many years, in truth, intimately knows the West and its weaknesses as well. Aside from speaking fluent German – as do his wife and children (who grew up in German schools). Mr. Putin has proved adept in playing political hardball.

Now President in his own right, and sure to seek a second term shortly, Putin has surmounted a reef of troubles, such as the botched rescue of the doomed nuclear sub, the Kursk, which went to the bottom in the Barents Sea, losing all hands on board. He continues to face a bloody separatist war in Muslim Chechnya.

He confronted and smote to their knees the powerful business Mafiyoshi and the critical media barons who had attempted to test his mettle – ultimately shutting down all critical radio-television stations (no democrat he).

He stemmed the hemorrhage of the Ruble and put it back on its feet. (I had rushed over to Moscow in 1998 to find out whether the Ruble was indeed, collapsing, and, along with it, the "New Russia". CNN and BBC had been trumpeting the Ruble’s coming demise. When I got there, I found nobody flustered. What "meltdown"? My Russian friends laughed. "What protest demonstrations?" they tittered. "Confusion? Despair?" Again, they guffawed. "We’re used to confusion and despair. They’ve been our bedmates for two generations!"

So, there.

* * *

At the end of last May, Putin played host to 40 world leaders in his hometown of St. Petersburg (the former Leningrad of the Soviet era). It was the 300th anniversary party of that sparkling city of five million – one of my favorites, by the way, in all the world – and they put on a grand show complete with firework and hoopla.

There was, I’m told, a fantastic exhibit of Peter the Great and his times, honoring the great founder of that metropolis in the fetid, frozen and disease-ridden swamps and ice floes – the area chosen by that innovative and hardnosed Czar to be Russia’s "window on the West".

The showcased 300 works never before shown in the great Hermitage Museum (which the Soviets had put together in the old Winter Palace of the Czars and Czarinas), a museum which has, indeed, put the Louvre in Paris to shame.

No less than $1.3 billion had been spent on repaving the roads of Putin’s home city, and tarting up the city’s Czarist and pre-revolutionary masterpieces from the glittering Hermitage to the gleaming, restored façade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral (which I used to admire from the third-storey window of my favorite hotel there, the Astoria), as well as Peter’s statue nearby, hymned as The Bronze Horseman. The city today draws three million tourists a year.

Even the Nazi-looted Amber Room in the "restored" Catherine Palace (of the great Empress Catherine, who consumed many lovers including a king of Poland who gifted the frisky Empress with almost half his kingdom in return for a slap and a tickle in the imperial bedroom) was re-created. Working from pre-war black-and-white photographs, it seems, craftsmen duplicated the original dazzle of that fantastic hall at the staggering cost of $11.5 million. Its walls now gleam, according to USA Today (last Friday, June 22), floor to 26-foot high ceiling, with half a million inlaid tiles of amber in 20 different shades, "from battery yellow, honeycomb and topaz, to tangerine, blood-red and mocha".

I’ve always loved St. Peter’s city, zipping there in the bad old days by overnight sleeper train, the Red Arrow, from dour Moscow, into its entrancing embrace. That was an efficient train, although they always forgot, judging by the aroma which wafted through the corridors, to flush the toilet.

I’ll take the same train next time. I’m sure they’ve fixed the toilets.

Petersburg boasts 260 museums, 80 theaters and innumerable palaces plus a wonderful ballet company in the former Marisky Theater, matching the Bolshoi.

Communism? What’s that? They’ve become dirty capitalists today. As for "Czar" Putin, when he called on the Queen of England last week on a four-day visit – the first by a Russian ruler in 160 years (the last visitor was Queen Victoria’s cousin, Czar Nicholas I) he was given, as befitting his Czardom, an imperial welcome.

But a caveat: Beneath that slick veneer, behind that impassive visage, behind the strut and swagger of imperial leadership, still lurks the brooding mentality of the KGB man who, discreetly but ruthlessly, clawed – and charmed – his way to the top.

One thing is certain – Russians who are prone to anarchy need a strong man like him. Perhaps we do, too.

ERRATUM: Nabisco – and not Nachos as inadvertently published yesterday – is the original company which launched the popular biscuit-candy bar Filipinos. Sorry.