Summertime, And the Critics Are Going Easy

With the northern hemisphere bathed in summer sunshine, the United States is feeling rather good about Russia. It always does at this time of year.


The Wall Street Journal is publishing glowing accounts of the modest rise of the ruble against the dollar and concludes that, with foreign currency reserves estimated as high as $10 billion, Russia's economic tide has turned. The Washington Post suggests that last month's compromise between President Boris Yeltsin, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and the State Duma shows that "democratic institutions in Moscow are consolidating, not weakening."


The Economist peers into the future to recommend long-term investment: "Tomorrow's property-owning, bourgeois Russians will enjoy enough rights to ensure that the state serves their interests, not the other way round. They will be the first Russians who could ever claim as much."


A U.S. consensus is forming around the new book by Anders ?slund, the Swedish diplomat who was once invited to join the Yeltsin government as an economic adviser. The title -- "How Russia Became a Market Economy" -- says it all, reinforcing the comforting feeling of Americans that Russia is roughly on track to democratic prosperity.


Published by the prestigious Brookings Institution, ?slund's book is the most authoritative assessment of the bumpy, crime-strewn and chaotic process through which the increasingly privatized Russian economy emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet system.


It is also the most optimistic statement of that program's success. ?slund properly stressed the vast progress made, rather than focusing too much on the grueling and often brutal way that progress was achieved, from the shelling of the Russian parliament to the devastation of Chechnya.


"The total decline in the actual material standard of living has not exceeded 10 percent. Who could have believed that communism's demise would be so cheap?" ?slund claims.


While Yeltsin's leadership was essential, ?slund concludes that "in effect, Yeltsin had no political strategy at all, and no program." Like much of the rest of his book, this may imply a rather more miraculous role for the invisible hand of the markets than even Adam Smith might dare suggest.


The now universal critique of Yeltsin points to another part of the new American consensus -- that Chernomyrdin is emerging as the man to support, a safe pair of hands who will keep politics under control as the free market works its stabilizing magic.


The contrast is extraordinary between this rosy summertime haze of optimism about Russia and last winter's gloom, when Grozny burned and the U.S. press was full of dire warnings about the new group of hardliners coalescing around Yeltsin.


There is some concern about General Alexander Lebed, a little bit more about Yeltsin's health and a nagging awareness that the peace talks with Chechnya are still a long way from success. "But if the progress with Chechnya is good enough for the European Union to go ahead with its Russian trade agreement, that's a promising sign," the State Department said last week.


But the real question is, will this sunny good feeling survive anther Russian winter and a turbulent election campaign while the government struggles to keep the budget deficit under control as it has to pay for the harvest?