Russia Rising!

While I was in Russia, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili decided to send troops into the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian troops, who were ostensibly on a peacekeeping role, were attacked and several were killed as Georgian forces attacked the two republics. The weeks preceding this witnessed hectic activity in Tbilisi. Condoleezza Rice came calling and assured the Georgians of full US support and even a possible entry into NATO. Shades of US Ambassador April Glaspie's meeting with Saddam Hussein of Iraq on July 25, 1990, when she assured him that the US will not be unduly perturbed if Iraq invaded Kuwait. That was the cue for Saddam to occupy Kuwait, which finally ended in disastrous consequences for Iraq and Saddam personally.

 Our friend Saakashvili is an interesting fellow. He is a US citizen of Georgian origin who returned to Georgia to seek that country's leadership primed and paid for by the US. Georgia's geography makes it important as any oil pipelines out of Azerbaijan into the West, fully skirting Russia, will have to run through it. Whether egged by Rice or not, Saakashvili miscalculated. The Russian response was swift and devastating. His army, modernised and supplied by the US and Israel, collapsed within hours of the Russian counter attack. Russia is back.

 In the weeks before the August coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, Moscow was one of the bleakest places in the world. It was dank, grey and tatty. Even as the Indian ambassador extolled the resilience and power of the Soviet State, the corner store outside the compound did not even have a loaf of bread. Back in Hotel Ukrainiya, we foreigners ate at special dollar designated restaurants where the buffet tables were piled high with meat and vegetable dishes and chased down with a choice of beverages. Soviet citizens ate at ruble designated restaurants where the menu was quite spare. My Russian friends didn't need much persuasion to accept invitations to breakfast, lunch or dinner.

We foreigners shopped at beriozkas with our black-market dollars and snapped up submariner wrist watches, cut glassware and caviar at good prices. It all reminded me of an unforgettable scene in David Lean's version of Doctor Zhivago where the aristocracy is shown feasting in a restaurant while tired and scruffy little children peer in with their noses pressed against the glass.

 More disasters followed the failed coup. The drunkard Boris Yeltsin terminated the Soviet Union and led Russia into economic and social chaos and for six long painful years the Russian economy kept contracting and the new elite looted the country. The West clapped with joy and its strategists announced a unipolar world. Others like Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘End of History'.

In New Delhi, a new lot of World Bank and IMF trained technocrats comfortably padded with international pensions charted a new course for India. Like true Great Gamers, they also clapped with joy believing that Russia will implode. It didn't make a whit of difference whether it was Narasimha Rao or Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the helm. At the end of his tenure, as Russia opened another layer of the matrushka doll, Yeltsin gave way to a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin.

 Putin's arrival on December 31, 1999 began to transform Russia. By 2004, Russia was well on course. That year, the GDP grew at 7.9 per cent. The average GDP growth since 2000 has been over seven per cent and the GDP has grown six-fold. It has risen globally from 22nd to 10th largest now.