The Seattle Times
Sunday, July 18, 2004 – Page updated at 12:00 A.M.

Knock on the door old Soviet-era leaders dread

By Kim Murphy
Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW – If you are one of the world’s dwindling number of old Soviet-era
leaders, trapped in your villa with the annoying winds of democracy blowing
in the streets outside, there might be worse things than having longtime
Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov knock on your door.
But not many.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic got the Ivanov knock on Oct. 6,
2000, right when he was counting most on Russia’s support against the wave
of opposition supporters who were in the streets proclaiming the victory of
his popularly supported rival, Vojislav Kostunica. Within hours of meeting
with Ivanov, the Serbian dictator conceded defeat.

Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia heard it on Nov. 23, 2003, when Ivanov
delivered the news that Russia feared that bloodshed could result from the
Georgian president’s standoff with the forces of the “rose revolution”
unfolding in the streets outside. Shevardnadze, within hours, bowed to the
inevitable.

By early May, another standoff was brewing in the Black Sea region of
Adzharia, where longtime Moscow ally Aslan Abashidze repeatedly proclaimed
his intention never to back down in his standoff with the new,
democratically elected Georgian authorities. Then Ivanov darkened his door.
Abashidze left on Ivanov’s plane for Moscow that night.

Speech to old allies

As the aircraft rose through the Georgian darkness, Ivanov poured the
now-former Adzhari leader a glass of whiskey. He told him whatever it is
that the Russians tell old allies whose relationships have grown
inconvenient – no, impossible – in a world in which Russia is no longer a
superpower.

Increasingly, Russia has been forced to rethink old relationships, faced
with NATO’s expansion into former Soviet republics; democratic movements
springing up in countries including Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia
and Yugoslavia, and the United States establishing diplomatic and military
foothold from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea.

Ivanov’s role as the Terminator of Russian diplomacy underscores an
important shift that has occurred in its foreign policy in the past decade,
as Russia has moved from playing the role of global powerbroker to focusing
on its “near abroad,” the former Soviet republics around its borders whose
futures it sees as inextricably linked with its own.

Ivanov has also championed the move to supplant the confrontational dialogue
with the United States that characterized the Cold War with an attempt to
form global alliances against what he sees as the common threat of
international terrorism.

That meant that Shevardnadze, with whom Ivanov worked years ago in Moscow
when both served under the same government, had to be held accountable not
only to popular democratic forces, but for years of reluctance to crack down
on Chechen separatist rebels who had used Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge as a base
for attacks on Russia.

Outlived usefulness

It meant recognizing that Milosevic had outlived any usefulness to Russia,
said Gleb Pavlovsky of the Effective Policy Fund, a political-strategy group
with close ties to the Kremlin.

“What kind of guarantor was he of Russia’s national interests?” Pavlovsky
said. “Russia’s historical clout in the Balkans was being sacrificed (by
Milosevic) for the sake of the interests of a number of shadow-economy
corporations that traded in weapons, cigarettes and gasoline. … Milosevic
failed to become a donor in Russia-Yugoslav relations. He was only a
beneficiary of Russia’s political gifts.”

Ivanov’s role as “an angel of political death” called on to deliver “the
political version of euthanasia” underscores what Oriel College-Oxford
lecturer Mark Almond, in a recent Moscow Times commentary, thinks is
Russia’s attempt to eliminate anything that ultimately could impair control
over its most significant economic resource, oil and gas.

As the United States opens military bases near the Caspian Sea and eases in
friendly leaders along a key oil pipeline route in Georgia, “Russia’s own
energy resources are falling under the shadow of U.S. power, and the routes
to export Russian oil or gas, independent of Washington’s sphere of
influence, are narrowing,” Almond said.

The “Ivanov retreat” in Tbilisi and Adzharia allowed Moscow to address a
source of instability directly on its southern border. A failed state in
Georgia, or civil war between the Georgian capital and a rebellious republic
such as Adzharia, easily could spill into Russia’s troubled southern
republics. A new Georgian government hostile to Moscow likewise could foment
trouble there.

Although it is “a normal reality” that these nations pursue their own
expanded relations with the United States, Ivanov said, “At the same time,
we would consider it wrong and contradictory to our interests to … start
pushing Russia away from this space.

If the United States thinks that it is correct to declare the zone of the
Caspian Sea as a zone of their vital interest, then I do not need to explain
that Russia has many more grounds to claim the entire … (region) as the
zone of our vital interest, because it is the zone which passes all around
or borders.”

Russia has kept many of its former republics dependent on Moscow by becoming
a key supplier of oil and natural gas, literally capable of keeping the heat
turned on in satellite nations including Belarus.

With Shevardnadze, Ivanov said, he never attempted to force the Georgian
president to step down. “The term ‘resignation’ was never featured in my
consultations with Shevardnadze or with the opposition leaders. I did not
persuade Shevardnadze to resign. … It would have been senseless, knowing
Shevardnadze, with whom I had worked for six years as an aide. The decision
he made was made by himself, when I had already left Tbilisi.”

In Adzharia, the oil-rich region of Georgia that had maintained close ties
to Russia even after Georgian independence, Ivanov said he made it clear to
Abashidze that a crisis was possible if he did not come to terms with
Georgia’s newly elected leader, Mikhail Saakashvili.

“And after the consultations, Mr. Abashidze came in and said to me that he
had only two ways: either to leave the country and thus avoid bloodshed, or
to resort to armed resistance, which would lead to … loss of human life.
And he said, ‘In the interests of my people, I have made the decision to
leave the country.’ And we got on the plane and flew away.”

The real issue for Russian diplomacy, some analysts suggest, might be
whether it manages to go the next step, from easing out the old dictators, a
role in which Moscow now seems quite adept, to forming strategic alliances
with the pro-democracy movements angling to take their place.

In countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, said Andrey Kortunov, vice
president of the Eurasia Foundation in Moscow, “The question is, at what
point is Russia ready to revise its position and take risks by supporting
the more radical, more progressive and more flamboyant candidates?

“Probably, for something like this, you need someone who will be more
willing to take risks than Ivanov, someone ready to step down to a new
generation of leaders.”

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company