December 17, 2007 (LPAC)--News media, especially in Russia, have been humming for days with a bizarre, provocative "scenario," for Russia, launched through the just-issued CSIS report, "Alternative Futures for Russia," authored by Andrew Kuchins. In a fantasia which mixes Sergei Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" with Boris Gudonov by way of Harry Potter and James Bond, Putin is assassinated on leaving midnight mass at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on January 7, 2008. He is replaced by present Railway Minister Vladimir Yakunin, who shoots down striking miners and purges and kills political opponents. Yakunin's tyranny uses a highly nationalist and religious secret service, combined with the most advanced technology, and so on and so forth.
One can speculate on who dumped this scenario into the CSIS report and why. The rest of the report, with the exception of Thomas Graham's contribution, is a farrago of incompetence.
An unknown Russian author, writing under the pseudonym "Andrei Kachin," posted the perfect riposte on Andrei Kobyakov's RPMonitor.ru website on Dec. 14. His "Alternative Futures for America" scenario begins with what may be a vehicular homicide at Bush's Texas ranch: the President falls off his bicycle and dies in the presence of Vice President Cheney, who immediately makes himself dictator. Subsequent episodes feature Osama bin Laden, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even Paul Wolfowitz briefly becomes President. The "Kachin" contribution insightfully spoofs the CSIS original, by whipping up precisely those few American personalities and cliches which are current in the lowest level of Moscow street-corner gossip, and concocting a so-called scenario on that basis.
For the rest, the CSIS report testifies amply to its own incompetence. In a report which appeared only last week, Kuchins features a long list of Putin's possible favored Presidential nominees: Medvedev is not among them. Kuchins and other authors repeatedly ask "who could have foreseen" in 1987 that the Comecon and the Soviet Union would disintegrate. In fact, Lyndon LaRouche had foreseen it already in 1983, even though they could still not anticipate it in 1987.
The "experts" panel advising Kuchins could agree on virtually nothing, leaving him with little to say beyond this "scenario" which someone slipped under his door. The "experts" from business wrote that Russia is a wonderful place, because there's a lot of money to be made there. The "politicals," on the other hand, write that Russia is reverting, or has reverted to dictatorship.
Thomas Graham of Kissinger McLarty Associates, formerly special assistant to the President and senior director for Russia at the NSC, is an exception. Although he avoids going into depth on the bases for his thinking, which may be explained by the shallowness of his audience, Graham insists on some important negatives. The basis of US Russia policy should be the physician's maxim: "first, do no harm." The US should refrain from intervening into internal Russian affairs, because ignorance of Russia is universal in the US, and in Europe as well. We should not seek to form hostile alliances on Russia's borders. The purpose of people-to-people exchanges should be just what they are advertised to do, rather than, in so many words, to feed dissent and subversion. Good advice.
