Putin Turns Russia Eastward Again

With President Vladimir V. Putin’s trip to Beijing last week, Russia’s ties to China have now drawn closer than at any time in the past 40 years.

The Russian president signed a joint statement with President Jiang Zemin that was startling in scope. Russia and China agreed to work together not just in opposing the U.S. missile defense system but in many other areas of foreign policy, including Central Asia and Taiwan.

“We’ve come a long way in three years. In 1997, it took time for our foreign ministers to negotiate just a short declaration on Iraq,” says Leonid Moiseyev, a Russian diplomat who accompanied Putin. “Now, our presidents can quickly sign a long communique covering a wide range of international issues.”

The military aspects of the Sino-Russian relationship continue to deepen too.

“There’s a high degree of dependency already between Russia’s defense industries and the Chinese market,” says Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “And the Chinese know that the Russians are in a position where they can’t afford to say no.”

Russia already has sold China advanced Sukhoi warplanes that Russia’s own military doesn’t have the money to buy, along with destroyers, missiles and other hardware.

Russian military experts say there may well be more to come. Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian defense analyst, predicts China may seek Russian help to stop American aircraft carriers from intervening if there is a crisis over Taiwan.

“For decades, Soviet [weapon] designers were working on ways to kill U.S. carriers,” said Felgenhauer. “We [Russians] have lots of things on file, basically anti-carrier weapons, and we could share some of these with the Chinese.”

Nevertheless, one can detect in Russia more than a little ambivalence about the country’s new China connection.

Russian military leaders have opposed giving high-tech planes and missiles to China that they fear might some day be used against their own country. Economic officials gripe that China doesn’t buy enough Russian products beyond the arms supplies.

And many other Russians voice the fear that the sparsely populated areas of Siberia will be overwhelmed by an influx of Chinese.

“We’re probably losing the territory” of Siberia, says Alexei Bogaturov of the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Russians are leaving, while the number of Chinese is rising.”

Valery Zaitsev--an Asia expert at IMEMO, a leading Russian research institute--says his country perceives a “China threat. . . . The Russian Far East is rich in resources and scarce in population. It’s a natural place [for China] to expand.”

Amid such conflicting currents, Russian scholars say there can be no return to the era a half-century ago when the Soviet Union served as the patron of Mao Tse-tung’s fledgling Communist state.

“We don’t want an alliance with China,” says Evgheny Bazhanov, one of Russia’s leading Asia specialists. “We know that if we did, the alliance might collapse, and then we’d have a confrontation like we did in the late 1950s. We’re big powers, and sometimes our interests diverge.”

Besides, Russians admit, times have changed. Back then, an impoverished China treated Russia as its big brother. Now, Russia is much weaker, and the Chinese have become the economically dominant partner.

In courting Beijing, Putin was following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Boris N. Yeltsin. But a day later, Putin made history of his own by visiting North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

No leader from Moscow, Russian or Soviet, had ever set foot in Pyongyang before. In the early 1990s, Russia cozied up to South Korea and at the same time threw the North Korean economy into turmoil by cutting off oil subsidies.

Putin, however, was eager to win North Korea’s help in heading off the U.S. missile defense program. When the North Koreans pleaded that Putin should visit only Pyongyang and not South Korea during his Asia trip, the Russians obliged.

Kim responded gratefully, turning out massive crowds for Putin and staging a banquet where old North Korean generals recalled Russian-language songs they hadn’t sung for decades.

Back in Moscow, some Russians were appalled. “I hate for him to go to this country and legitimize it,” said magazine editor Masha Lipman. “I hate for him to be photographed getting scarves from Young Pioneers.”

But the North Koreans seemed to be attracted to Putin, with his ex-KGB background and his desire for a more powerful government. The Korean hosts recited for their Russian guests an old saying that a weak country needs a strong king. Everyone understood.

North Korea keeps in a Pyongyang museum the railway car in which the Great Leader Kim Il Sung sojourned overland to Moscow decades ago. That trip took a month, with Soviet officials throwing lavish feasts to toast Kim.

Kim Jong Il may visit Moscow soon, Russian officials say, but he won’t be wined and dined in the same fashion. “We can’t afford it anymore,” says Moiseyev wanly.

Putin’s trip made it clear that Moscow is again playing the Great Game in the Far East. But for a weaker Russia, life in Asia just isn’t what it used to be in the Soviet heyday.

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Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.