Zee Beam News

PARIS (by columnist Angela Charlton for RIA Novosti) - Russia at the dawn of 2005 little resembles the Russia of a year ago. A chasm divides western and Russian opinion on what the country does resemble, and whether 2004 was a disaster or just another bumpy year.
To Europe and the United States, Russia looks chastened and embarrassed after a battery of foreign policy setbacks over the past year, increasingly isolated in its authoritarianism. To Russians and some of their neighbors, Russia looks like a vigorous economy with an iconic president, a pillar of stability in an unpredictable world. The perception gap is only widening.
To Russian officialdom, the biggest political event of the year was Vladimir Putin's re-election in March. Yet to outsiders his re-election was a foregone conclusion and was eclipsed by other events, such as the ex-Soviet Baltic states joining NATO.
The Baltic governments' rejoiced at being welcomed into this western club and severing their last remaining ties to Moscow. Putin and his compatriots were unhappy, yet the president suffered no drop in popularity as a result. Most Russians had long ago resigned to NATO expansion and hold Boris Yeltsin to blame for the phenomenon.
Still, the expansion fed a fear among Russians that blossomed throughout 2004, the fear of a U.S.-led juggernaut advancing on Russia, trying to surround it, isolate and humiliate it, and pounce on its oil wealth. The West and Russia trade accusations of imperialism yet ignore their own imperial tendencies.
Yukos provoked another deep divide. Some western governments worried that the oil company's demise was a terrifying signal to honest businesses in Russia and their investors. Russia's rich started spiriting their money overseas again. Yet the rest of Russia cheered the prosecution of an oligarch whose riches were less than clean. And multinationals like GE inked major deals with Russia despite Mikhail Khodorkovsky's travails. The selloff of Yugansneftegaz, Yukos' main production unit, to state-controlled Rosneft outraged western observers, who called it a brash and unjustified renationalization. In Russia it was viewed as the safe and logical conclusion to the whole affair, even if it was not exactly fair.
The North Caucasus gave Putin little rest in 2004, and briefly rekindled global interest in the Chechnya war. The death of Chechnya's pro-Moscow president Akhmad Kadyrov demonstrated the Kremlin's lack of control over the province despite four years of insistence that the large-scale fighting is over. The horrific school hostage-taking at Beslan and other terrorist attacks gripped the world. Overseas viewers condemned the attackers yet found little sympathy for the Russian troops' plight.
Russia won diplomatic victories at the U.N. following Beslan but lost all chance of western support for the Russian government's policies in Chechnya when Putin introduced his electoral reforms in September. Western commentators and politicians were appalled at his plan to ban elections for governor and independent parliament deputies. Russians, however, largely agreed to Putin's promise of keeping them safe through stronger government.
Tensions with the West have been building for some time, and were fed by Georgia's revolution in 2003. Russia's relations with its southern neighbor continued to sour in 2004 as Georgia's president overtook the pro-Russian leadership of the Adjaria province, and then again when Moscow's involvement in elections in Abkhazia backfired.
This erosion of Russia's power along its periphery didn't stop there. Next came Ukraine, where Putin's blatant support and mountains of Russian campaign advice failed to get Viktor Yanukovych elected. The bungled election turned Ukraine upside down, pushing normally passive Ukrainians into the streets to demand and win a new vote, which Viktor Yushchenko easily won Sunday.
Many Russians agree that Putin's misstepped grossly in Ukraine, yet Ukrainians will hardly abandon their northeastern neighbor. Yushchenko's first trip abroad will be to Moscow, in an acknowledgement of how much damage Russia could do to his fledgling tenure.
The momentum of the end of the Cold War and its residual good will have at last died. The foreign policies of Russia and western countries in 2005 will reflect this. But Russia remains a country of great potential for oil investment, IT development, tourism. Whether 2005 taps these depends largely on Putin. He won a strong new mandate in March elections and endowed himself greater powers through his electoral reforms in the fall, yet his position on the global stage, and even his own backyard, is wobbly.
Russia's 2005 also depends on the outside world: WTO membership, whether Russia stays in the G8, its future role in Iraq. Western leaders must choose how much to punish Russians for their president's actions.