May 5, 2014
Kazakhstan May Be the Next Ukraine
By Richard Lourie
After a lapse of more than a century, the Great Game has begun again — in Kiev of all places.
In the 19th century, the Great Game was the rivalry between the British and Russian empires for Central Asia. England was wary that Russia’s relentless expansion would one day threaten the jewel in the imperial crown, India. Both sides vied to dominate Central Asia’s markets.
Seizing their “rightful” portion of Kazakhstan would bring Russia great riches and enormous geopolitical advantages.
Are the Donbass Separatists Paid Stooges?
When former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky visited Donetsk a week ago, the masked men holding the regional administration building refused to let him in, saying “you can easily learn everything about what is going on in Donbass from Russian media reports.”
Two hours later, Denis Pushilin, the self-proclaimed leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, came running to meet with Khodorkovsky. Pushilin — who formerly headed the Donetsk branch of the MMM company, Russia’s most notorious Ponzi scheme — was simply following orders issued by Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine.
When a high-profile mediator like Khodorkovsky arrives to speak with the insurgents but is told to “go watch the evening news,” it suggests that the insurgents are not insurgents at all but paid stooges.
Human nature has not changed in the last three months: A person fighting for something he believes in and who feels his back has been pushed up against the wall will always welcome an opportunity to state his case. And when given the chance, he’ll talk your ear off. But someone who is just carrying out orders will simply ask his superiors how he should respond to questions.
I also visited the occupied administration building in Donetsk. The pro-Russian protesters fell into two distinct categories.
The first group consisted of pensioners and a motley assortment of local residents. The pensioners kept screaming slogans in support of President Vladimir Putin, which were intermixed with slogans that U.S.-backed fascists had occupied Kiev.
The second group consisted of armed men in masks, the leaders of the “Donetsk Republic” and even their press secretary who, rather than state the insurgents’ position, told me to listen to his interview on Russian television. He then told his men to escort me out of the building.
Khodorkovsky received the same treatment.
Pushilin then showed up to have a talk with Khodorkovsky — not only because Akhmetov told him to do it but because he thought the photo-op with Putin’s exiled political rival would raise his status.
The whole episode was absurd. First, Akhmetov did not sit at the same table with Pushilin. He said hello and promptly left. Second, Akhmetov sent one of his men at the meeting who simply watched the proceedings in silence. He watched Pushilin to make sure he did not say too much to Khodorkovsky.
But when Khodorkovsky, who saw that the man was a strong Russian Orthodox believer, attempted to get Akhmetov’s representative to say a few words about the Ukrainian and Moscow patriarchs, he made a move to respond but apparently realized that he was not authorized to speak and shut his mouth again.
The problem is that pensioners and a handful of bored, unemployed local residents are not enough to seize and hold the regional administration building. That is why it is likely that they are being backed up by others.
These are the people who can voice their demands to Russian state-controlled television, reading from teleprompters scripted by the very same station but who break into a sweat at the prospect of delivering those same demands, unaided, to anybody else.
The game went into a state of suspension during Soviet times. Some commentators spoke of a new Great Game after the Soviet collapse and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, but that was more romanticism than realism. There was a jockeying among Russia, China and the U.S. for markets, resources and military bases, but what was lacking was any grand geopolitical design or strategic imperative. All that changed with Kiev.
Though the final outcome of the Ukrainian crisis is uncertain, two things are already clear. Russia has revealed itself as non-Western, if not anti-Western. When push comes to shove, Russia will not play by the rules of the West because it does not see the world as the West does. In Putin’s Darwinian mind, the drift of Ukraine into the Western camp would complete NATO’s encirclement of Russia, which, from the survival point of view, is inadmissible. Foolishly, perhaps, he is not overly concerned about the economic damage the sanctions will cause. No doubt he believes that ties with European business are too tight and complex to permit sanctions that bite deep. Putin, the enemy of the rules of globalization, is counting on globalization to save him.
All the same, Putin’s not taking any chances. He is aware that something has broken in his relations with the West. It will take time, but the West has already begun weaning itself from Russian energy. And so the main effect of Kiev has been to accelerate Russia’s turn to China.
Putin has said of Russian-Chinese relations: “We do not have a single irritating element in our ties.” In fact, the relationship is fraught with tension. First and foremost is what could be called Russia’s demographophobia. In the country’s vast Far East, there are only 7 million people, while China’s three northern provinces bulge with more than 100 million. Many are already working in Russia, crossing the border as Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin quips “in small groups of 5 million.”
Putin settled all outstanding border disputes with China in 2004 — for which he was savagely attacked by liberals who accused him of “capitulation” and even of being a “Chinese agent of influence.” But no one could be more aware of the importance of conventional border agreements than Russia, which has just violated its own Budapest Memorandum pledge to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Russia fears becoming no more than a source of raw materials and energy for China and a market for its products. China itself would never let itself be put in a position of dependency on Russian energy.
And that is where the Great Game comes back in. What Russia learned in Ukraine is that a good-sized piece of a country can be sliced off if it has a high percentage of Russian speakers and if they express their will for annexation in a referendum.
The Ukrainian template fits nicely onto Kazakhstan. That country is rich in resources and sparsely populated — 17 million. Twenty five percent of the population are Russian, a number which reaches 50 percent in the northern and northeastern parts of the country. When envisioning a post-Soviet Russia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn posited a new state formed of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Northern Kazakhstan called “southern Siberia.”
At the moment, Kazakhstan seems quiet and stable, but that will not last long since the man ruling the country since Soviet times, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is now in his mid 70s and reported to have prostate cancer. He has no sons and is not known to have made any plans for his succession. A certain amount of turmoil can realistically be expected upon his death. And if there isn’t any, some can always be created.
Kazakhstan’s limited military forces of some 70,000 would not offer significant resistance to Russia. Seizing their “rightful” portion of Kazakhstan would bring Russia great riches and enormous geopolitical advantages. Russia’s already long, 4,400-kilometer border with China would be substantially increased. Although China may have thus far resisted becoming energy dependent on Russia, it may now find itself in a new form of dependence. Since a great deal of China’s energy imports and manufactured exports pass through Kazakhstan, Russia would gain control over that flow. Russia would also gain political power through control of the border with Xinjiang, where Uighur insurgents contest Han domination.
The U.S. is pretty much the odd man out in the new Great Game. Under Russian pressure, the U.S. is being expelled from its last foothold in Central Asia, the Manas air base it has rented outside the Kyrgyz capital. That base had been used to ferry men and materiel to and from Afghanistan. The Kyrgyz government simply refused to renegotiate terms. And so the army of the richest nation on earth will exit Central Asia under the inglorious banner: LOST OUR LEASE.
Now the U.S. is shopping around Central Asia for a place from which to launch drone attacks after the year-end pullout from Afghanistan. The contrast with Russia could not be starker. Moscow has found its way again in Central Asia on a road that leads straight from Kiev to Kazakhstan. It now has a strategic imperative. The Great Game is very much back on.
Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”
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