BACKGROUND: In the April, 2003 energy accord between Russia and Turkmenistan, Russia secured for itself a strong position throughout Central Asia in regard to gas while perpetuating its rent-seeking and colonialist exploitation of Turkmenistan. Although this deal clearly shortchanged Turkmenistan’s future so that President Niyazov could further consolidate his position at home; most attention focused on the energy aspects of this deal and the tremendous leverage it gave Russia and which Moscow has subsequently exploited throughout Central Asia. However, the side payment that Russia made to Niyazov, namely that he could essentially force Russians in Turkmenistan to give up their Russian citizenship and passports and compel them to choose either Russian or Turkmen residence, has subsequently triggered an explosion in Russia. First raised in the media by critics of the deal, the charges of a sellout of Russian compatriots in the ‘near abroad’ soon convulsed the Duma and official media as well. This fact could mark an important tendency in Russian politics especially as Duma and presidential elections draw nearer. Since 1991, despite much talk of support for the Russian Diaspora, in fact the government has done little to advance their causes and immigrants from former Soviet republics have encountered considerable difficulties inside Russia. Undoubtedly the belief that it only had to talk a good game but that what really mattered was concrete economic and geopolitical advantages drove Russian policy here. Niyazov sought to force the Russians in Turkmenistan either to leave or to stay inside the country with no hope of appealing to Moscow against him so that he could consolidate his regime further in the wake of an abortive coup against him in November, 2002. In return he was willing to mortgage Turkmenistan’s future economic well-being to Russia. Now this mutual miscalculation has led to a situation where the Duma and more covertly the government are regularly denouncing him and the deal while threatening to bring pressure on Turkmenistan for allegedly sheltering drug dealers and terrorists. While we cannot be certain how the future course of this uproar may affect the deal and its key provisions; it does tell us something about the likely trends in Russian politics at least through the presidential elections in 2004. The Kremlin will probably now raise the question of the condition of Russians abroad in much tougher form both rhetorically and in actual policy, since it will not allow itself to be outflanked by aroused domestic opinion. If Moscow intends to play the Diaspora card, this will put its relations with key states in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, in a whole new light and signify new efforts at pressuring these states over their domestic policies. In other words, we can expect increased near-term strains in Russia’s relations with Central Asian states.

IMPLICATIONS: Other factors in the deal with Ashgabat also make for disturbing future trends. The firm chosen to move gas from Turkmenistan to Russia and Ukraine is Trans-Ural, a firm chartered in a Hungarian village named Csadba and headed by one of the most notorious crime lords in Russian organized crime, Semyon Mogilevich. Mogilevich’ firm stands to make from $320 million to $1 billion on this deal, and this raises the most disturbing implications. First, it attests to the commingling of government, major energy corporations, and criminal enterprises in Russia and to the mutual enrichment of each of these actors at the expense of the citizens of the CIS, not just Russia. As these firms are already contributing significant sums to President Putin’s reelection it is impossible to pretend that he and his colleagues are unaware of Trans-Ural’s background. And given the long-standing ties between Gazprom and Russia’s special services, the widely reported collaboration of these institutions with organized crime and Russian energy and other firms that has been widely reported throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and the involvement of those services in the earlier attempted coup in Turkmenistan in 2002, not to mention earlier ones in Georgia and Azerbaijan, the implications of this deal become much more stark for all concerned. Obviously we are seeing in Central Asia the expansion of the relationships described by numerous Central and East European observers and officials. We also see graphic evidence of the criminalization of Russian energy policy, the state, and the special services and their mutual collaboration in efforts to impose a neo-colonialist economic and political relationship towards Russia upon Central Asian and presumably other CIS governments as well. Given other forms of economic pressure possessed by Moscow, Russian efforts to coerce these states through the instigation of popular unrest – as Jane’s recently reported about demonstrations in Georgia, pressure to join Russian dominated defense arrangements, and the numerous other pressure points throughout these weak states that Russia can access, it is clear that Moscow is playing a very hard version of the great game using time-tested instruments of Russian policy.

CONCLUSIONS: These two aspects of the deal with Turkmenistan were not prominently featured originally or were not well known abroad. But they can only fill observers with heightened apprehension concerning the instruments and objectives of Russian policy in Central Asia and more broadly in the CIS. Not surprisingly, the fate of those policies is intimately linked to the fate of democracy in Russia, and under Putin the latter has not fared well. In particular, the advance of the intelligence and police agencies has been a clearly marked if not loudly advertised element in state policy. Indeed, given the relationships exposed by the deal with Turkmenistan, we can speak more confidently about police capitalism in Russia. But also we may have to start speaking about another feature of policy that resembles late Tsarism, namely the effort to play the Russian nationalist and Diaspora card for domestic purposes. Both of these instruments of policy threaten not just Russian democracy, they also endanger the other states of the CIS at a time when Russia does not have the means to control the potential avalanche that is agents are playing at starting. Can further destabilization of the Central Asian and CIS regimes really be in Moscow’s interests?

AUTHOR BIO: Professor Stephen Blank, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA.