Yeltsin's Brand of Power Politics

After a successful campaign to defeat another country, a Roman emperor would force the king he had humiliated to parade, in chains, before the victors. In early October, the same kind of spectacle took place in Moscow. The humbled losers were not the defeated defenders of the White House, who capitulated with their hands over their heads. Boris Yeltsin's victims were instead the smiling leaders of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, who appeared before President Boris Yeltsin at the Kremlin to announce they would join the Commonwealth of the Independent States. The architect of this "class reunion," Defense Minister Grachev, was sitting next to Yeltsin. He, too, was smiling.

The hand-wringing that accompanied Boris Yeltsin's crushing of the uprising in Moscow last month deflected attention from an issue that should keep U.S. policy makers awake at nights: Russia's attempt to resurrect an exclusive sphere of influence across the former Soviet Union. Like so many dominoes, the former Soviet republics are succumbing to Moscow's reassertion of imperial prerogatives. The process is now hurtling toward its logical conclusion with Moscow's sights set on Ukraine--52 million people strategically situated in the heart of Central Europe.

President Yeltsin had many differences with his former Vice President, Aleksandr Rutskoi. But a conviction that Russia should exercise hegemony over its former empire was not one of them. True, the two men had vastly opposing strategies. Rutskoi wanted to challenge the West by asserting Russia's imperium through direct military confrontation. He would have wiped out all the vestiges of the new states' independence and reestablished the Soviet Union's borders.

In contrast, Yeltsin has sought to safeguard Russia's relations with the West by more subtle muscle-flexing. Economic blackmail and "rouge" army units have been his weapons to coerce the former republics into the Moscowdominated Commonwealth of Independent States. He seems willing to allow Russia's neighbors to retain the trappings of sovereignty, provided Moscow has the final say on important policy questions.

Recent events in Georgia provide a textbook case of this strategy. The devastating defeat that Abkhazian rebels dealt to Georgian troops in September would have been impossible without support from Russia's army. Subsequently, the Georgian leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, was forced to beg Yeltsin for membership in the C.I.S. The endgame is obvious: a bilateral treaty providing Russia's military with permanent bases in Georgia, including control over its strategic Black Sea coast.

Georgia's reintegration into Russia's security orbit involves about as much mutual consent as a Mafia shakedown. Russia had cowed its independence-minded neighbors with tacit threats of dismemberment before. In the former republics of Moldova and Azerbaijan, an undeniable pattern has emerged. Secessionist rebels, abetted by rouge Russian forces, score impressive military successes. Miraculously, when these states relent and agree to join the C.I.S., Russia's ability to impose a lasting cease-fire soars.

All this, however, has been a prelude to the final act: Ukraine. Moscow now seeks to shortcircuit its largest neighbor's drive for independence. Economically, Russia has exacerbated Ukraine's internal crisis by withholding vital energy supplies. Politically, Yeltsin has waged a successful diplomatic campaign to isolate Kiev internationally in a dispute over former Soviet nuclear weapons.

On the brink of chaos, Ukraine has already made major concessions to Moscow. An original, though reluctant, member of the C.I.S., it has agreed to tighter economic coordination within the Commonwealth, and has surrendered the entire Black Sea Fleet to the Russian Navy. Now, special Russian access to Ukraine's Black Sea ports and Ukraine's acceptance of the Russian-dominated C.I.S. security treaty seem only a matter of time.

With Ukraine's resubjugation, Russia will have gone far toward reconstituting its old empire. In so doing, it will have decisively, and unilaterally, determined the geo-strategic alignment of post-cold-war Europe. Is the West paying attention?

So far there has been no official repudiation or even criticism of the cynical policy proclaimed by Russia's Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, at the United Nations: "Russia realizes that no international organization or group of states can replace our peacekeeping efforts in this specific post-Soviet space." This is nothing less than an abbreviated version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted Moscow's right to intervene in the former Communist world.

By ignoring Moscow's imperial games in the former Soviet republics, the West not only sacrifices the independence of the people who live there, but undermines the fledgling democracy of Russia itself. No nation that enslaves another can truly be free. and if Russia isn't free, how can it be trusted as an ally in the post-Cold war world?