The Russian At Center Stage

All politics are local for Vladimir Putin. For a few hours in Ljubljana this weekend he will be a world leader. He will look diffident and dignified in photo ops, engagingly youthful, speaking confidently and with apparent sincerity. Then he will go home to a country whose population once again declined by a quarter of a million people in the first three months of this year, whose infrastructure is on the verge of collapse and whose economy is crippled by corruption and bureaucracy. But while Bush and Putin are in their Slovenian castle, the Russian people will forget about their own problems. The image that Putin presents to the country, and the message that accompanies it--that Russia is back on the world stage--is paramount to his political agenda.

Russia's ego certainly needs boosting. The only resemblance between Putin-Bush and the encounter between John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 will be the month--both being June meetings. The Soviet leader who went to Vienna in 1961 presided over a dynamic, aggressively self-confident empire that was at the height of its powers; today Russia's decline is far from over. Putin is a recently retired civil servant.

He is also much more polite. Though stung by slights from Washington in the early weeks of the Bush Administration, the Kremlin has been very discreet. Putin has discussed the Russian car industry and played host to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands but kept mum about George Bush or national missile defense. His Defense Minister, Sergei Ivanov, has taken a tougher line. Although the Kremlin originally signaled a willingness to discuss changes to the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, Ivanov now implies that there is little to discuss. Adjusting the treaty means destroying it, he warned last week, and Russia does not intend to allow this.

The mixed signals are not surprising. Putin's team is new and inexperienced and much less confident than they would like the world to think. Their foreign policy so far has been characterized by lots of world travel and very little in the way of a plan. Certain features are clear, however. Perceived U.S. arrogance irritates Russians--ordinary citizens as well as officialdom. So does NATO, not to mention the Europeans who criticize limitations on the press or abuses in Chechnya. Moreover, the Kremlin's world view is informed by deep suspicion. Russian academics who work with foreign groups are potential spies. Despite this, the Putin administration is occasionally prone to fits of euphoria, like saying it would like to join the European Union.

In the meantime, the Russians are developing relations with China, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam and North Korea and deepening links with Iran. Western criticism of this infuriates the Kremlin--but emboldens Putin's policy planners as well. These are, after all, countries that enjoyed good relations with the old Soviet Union, and all keep their own people under varying degrees of control. For the neo-Soviets who run Russia these days, this is reassuring. But like their Soviet predecessors, they also want major world powers to consult them, include them, respect them. This is what they miss and what, for a weekend in Slovenia at least, they will get. Too bad they have to go home when it's over.