Book Review: The KGB's Fascination With Potions

By Joshua Foust

It can be difficult to stand out in the somewhat crowded field of Russian scare-books. Whether arguing for the resumption of a “new cold war” or whatever conspiracy happens to be topical, recent years have seen an avalanche of books arguing that Russia is not the somewhat broken creature it is often portrayed in the West.

Boris Volodarsky, however, has a leg up. A former Captain in the GRU, he has first-hand access to many of the files, personalities, and programs one would need to discuss Russia’s international espionage activities. It is just this encyclopedic understanding that he brings to The KGB’s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko. Though often confusing because of the sheer volumes of names, pseudonyms, shadow programs, and overlapping personalities he puts into play, Volodarsky very clearly argues that the posture of Russian intelligence is essentially the same as has been throughout the 20th century.


Volodarsky argues that Russian intelligence holds as much venom for its individual detractors as for its international opponents, And it is venom that he seems primarily concerned with. Assassinations obviously can take many forms — the U.S. prefers flying robots these days. But Volodarsky argues that Russia has a special affection for poison.

And what a poison it is: The particular hallmark of Russian poisons, besides their creativity, seems to be their relatively long kill time. A victim will languish for weeks, even months, in sheer agony before either barely surviving or dying. Volodarsky describes this tradition while tracing Soviet and Russian poisoneers (for lack of a better term) through early uses of merely unusual plant extracts to the industrial development of unique compounds. The resulting potions are engineered specifically to mimic other problems, usually some form of gastritis, so that by the time doctors eventually realize what’s happened, it’s too late to fix.

The inspiration for Volodarsky’s history is the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the KGB defector slowly poisoned with Polonium-210 in 2006. While it can be difficult to parse the complicated history that Volodarsky writes — this is a book by and for insiders — the picture that emerges is damning of Russia going back decades. This might be where the book would fit in the pantheon of anti-Russia books: Volodarsky argues that the post-USSR poisoning activities of Russian intelligence demonstrate a strong continuity between Soviet and Russian activities.

In fact, if we were to read this in the context of similar books of the Russian government’s capriciousness — those by Anna Politkovskaya, for instance — it would be easy to think that it is more dangerous to oppose Moscow today than it was, say, in the 1970s, even though there was much more concern over it back then. Since Vladimir Putin left the Kremlin, Volodarsky writes, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, no longer has to report to the President — they only have to inform him, the prime minister. Given Putin’s almost legendary intolerance for dissent, and the environment he’s created, in which unofficial murders aren’t exactly approved but aren’t exactly punished, it is a pretty terrifying realm that Volodarsky explores.

Unfortunately, that exploration is a real bear to sift through. While the book is engaging as a work of espionage, I found it difficult to keep track of the tangle of personalities and operations. That is in part because Volodarsky’s footnotes aren’t exactly immaculate. Mixed with clinical discussions of operations are Volodarsky’s ideas about what constitutes good or poor tradecraft. While it’s certainly fun to see how central Vienna is to Russian-European espionage, my eyes glazed over during long expositions of place and timing. That’s not to fault Volodarsky’s writing. But for those who aren’t borderline obsessives with the mechanics of tradecraft, the endless detail can become exhausting. It is a little too inside baseball for a layman to pick up and comprehend, and Volodarsky doesn’t provide enough documentation for a layman to follow the breadcrumbs and learn more (though he does, to his credit, highlight other books for more information on individual kills.).

The KGB’s Poison Factory is still a fascinating read. As long as you can slog through. Whether you’re looking for a concise history of Russian intelligence assassinations, or even a taste of how bewildering the intelligence hall of mirrors can be, it is a pretty severe indictment of how the former Soviet capital operates.


Joshua Foust is a military analyst who blogs at registan.net

The Profit Margin: Dealmaking in Iraq

Iraq is the nearest current equivalent to the mad oilrush of the 1990s on the Caspian, but there isn't much out there on how this latest wheeling and dealing is taking place apart from the numbers. Just to pass along to O&G readers that there will be a webstream discussion of the Iraq bonanza this morning. It features two writers from the Economist Intelligence Unit -- Robert Powell and Ali al-Saffar. They are interviewed by Jim Falk of the Dallas World Affairs Council. It starts at 11 a.m. EST. You click here, and sign in.

The iPhonization of Central Asia

Some six months ago, this blog discussed the possibility that mobile broadband could alter the discourse in Central Asia by creating a level playing field between independent and state-controlled news media. O&G contributor Sasha Meyer sees events moving faster in that direction. His report:

By Sasha Meyer

Since the fall, analysts have been describing the advent of a mobile internet revolution, with some predicting 1 billion devices to be online by 2013. Central Asia will be part of the trend, with the down-drift of prices persuading more consumers to replace their conventional cell phones with Internet-capable, PC-like smartphones and smartbooks.

Competition is helping. Facing strong competition from iPhones and Blackberrys, the big cellphone makers are rolling out their own models: Nokia, the world’s biggest handset maker, has introduced its N97 and E72, and started offering netbooks. No. 2 Samsung has launched a smartphone platform. Meanwhile, newcomers are piling in. Google has shipped Nexus One, Lenovo plans to buy a handset maker and has just unveiled a smartbook; and chipmaker Freescale has introduced prototype smartbooks that it says will reach stores by the summer. Apple’s eagerly anticipated tablet will give the whole mobile product category a further boost.

Importantly, iPhone and Blackberry are being introduced to China, the world's biggest and fastest-growing market. Chinese telecoms are signing up some 10 million customers per month and the biggest – China Mobile – has 508 million users, more than the entire population of the European Union. (By comparison, Verizon, the largest U.S. mobile operator, has 89 million subscribers.)

When these phones take hold in Central Asia, they will create new opportunities and challenges, both for the governments and the societies.

The governments will face their typical conundrum: how to gain from global progress without surrendering control. That even North Korea has set up a 3G network shows that new technology will be allowed and deployed, if after some foot dragging, simply because technological compatibility with the rest of the world is increasingly essential today.

Internet access will probably be fairly open. Online censorship is often trivial to bypass and generally ineffective. China, the world’s most sophisticated censor, “is losing a war over the Internet” even though it “has prevailed in battles,” report Loretta Chao and Jason Dean in The Wall Street Journal. The governments can and will literally pull the plug on Internet access; but they will do so only in critical moments, and then still be compelled to turn it back on, as happened in Burma after the 2007 monks' protests and in China following last year’s riots in the western province of Xinjiang.

Internet hasn’t realized the expectation that it would usher in democracy anywhere. But ubiquitous wireless access to the Web is likely to have other effects, including economic benefits and the isolation of an older, Soviet-era generation that tends to cling to the old ways.

But probably the most important effect will be in allowing the society to better understand itself: Online behavior reveals a society’s mood and preferences; this is more the case with untethered web access, which allows for more spontaneous behavior since people don't have to wait in line at an Internet café, or until they get in front of their home or office computer. As Michael Lewis writes in Next: The Future Just Happened, the Internet allows people to pick any identity; our choices are “telling us what we want to become.”

In addition, everyone turns into kind of a reporter, with the ability to send description and images of events they encounter. Everyone is pushed – government-controlled media outlets, opposition and independent news organizations – to improve their own reporting.

The overall impact could be the expansion of Central Asia’s version of the “parallel society.” Sabrina P. Ramet, professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, describes it well in another context in her 1994 book Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation:

Parallel society “is a living part of any society. Its breadth varies in inverse proportion to the breadth of allowable open activity: Where the political authorities let society organize itself, parallel society inhabits the narrow ravines of subculture, deviance, and crime; where the political authorities seek to impede society's self-organization, parallel society encompasses a much wider array of socially organic processes.

Parallel society “cannot completely ignore the official structures, the legal codes, and official economy: it cannot be fully "independent" or create a full-blown "alternative," though it self-consciously tends in that direction."

There is "the possibility of interaction, interference, mutual influence, and exchange with official society. It also leaves open the possibility of an eventual merger of the two, or as advocates of parallel society envisioned, the swallowing up of official society by the freely self-organized structures of parallel society. This is, in effect, what came to pass in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, as well as in Slovenia and Croatia by mid-1990."

A Future For Citizen Journalism in Central Asia

In the early 2000s, the Ketebayev brothers – Bakhytzhan and Muratbek – ran Central Asia’s most interesting journalistic enterprises. They were Kazakhstan’s Tan TV and the weekly newspaper Respublika. They provided open coverage of the fascinatingly public political warfare among President Nursultan Nazarbayev, his son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev, and a group of businessmen-politicians. It all ended unhappily as a couple of the businessmen went to prison, Aliyev was exiled to Austria, and Tan was turned into an entertainment channel; since then, Respublika has limped along with continued trouble. For the last couple of years, Bakhytzhan Ketebayev has been back with a new venture. Sasha Meyer thinks that Kanal Plus, Ketbayev’s new enterprise, may be Central Asia’s answer to Al-Jazeera. Meyer’s report:

By Sasha Meyer

A group of Kazakh journalists says it wants to radically alter the landscape for news media in Central Asia. Much of their success hinges on how far their deep-pocketed anonymous backers will be willing to go.

Kanal Plus (K+) is a private Kazakh satellite TV company that attracted attention in September when it broadcast a series of interviews with former first son-in-law Rakhat Aliev into Central Asia, thus snapping the hitherto taboo subject on the Kazakhstan airwaves.

In an interview with Radio Liberty's Bruce Pannier, company president Bakhytzhan Ketebayev said his ambition is to become region's public broadcaster. To reach that goal, he’s preparing to diversify away from Russian into the local languages. Ketebayev also plans a citizen journalism component, in which Kanal Plus would air videos shot on cell phones by ordinary viewers and submitted via the Internet.

Such a social component would help increase the TV channel's popularity. It would also reduce its vulnerability. Kanal Plus doesn't have its own network of correspondents, and instead relies on local partners who provide videos. These local associates are often pressured by state officials not to collaborate with Kanal Plus. (The company itself operates from an undisclosed location outside the region and is thus beyond the direct reach of the authorities.)

The participatory journalism effort would also help alleviate a weakness: The company has no partners in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, so one might find local citizens in both countries filling the gap.

Last but not least, the use of public journalism would ensure that the reporting is harder hitting and resonates more strongly with ordinary people.

If done right, Kanal Plus could achieve in Central Asia what Al Jazeera accomplished in the Arab world. Within three years of its 1996 launch, the Qatari channel became, in the words of journalist and author Thomas Friedman, “the freest, most widely watched TV network in the Arab world,” because it had eliminated the state monopoly on news and analysis. In 1999, John Burns of The New York Times said Al Jazeera gave the Arab viewers “newscasts without censorship” and “explores issues long suppressed by the region's rulers, including the lack of democracy, the persecution of political dissidents and the repression of women.”

A feat like that is more affordable today than then. There are more satellites, and their transponders can squeeze in more channels because of advances in data compression and multiplexing. On the ground, dish antennae and TV receivers are now within the budgets of many more Central Asians. And the scale favors Central Asia: Unlike the Arab world, with its 25 countries and territories, 358 million people and 14 million square kilometers, Central Asia is just five countries, 60 million people, and four million square kilometers.

Obviously, much depends on the priorities of Kanal Plus's sponsors. Ketebayev says the channel is funded by rich Kazakhs. He won’t identify them, but says they believe they can preserve their wealth only if the justice system is more law-based. In their view, Kazakhstan’s system and that of the rest of Central Asia protects neither the poor nor the rich, but only the ruling families.

How far these backers are willing to support Kanal Plus’s journalists is anyone's guess. But they could turn Kanal Plus into a typical Russian news outlet circa 1996. Independent of the government, Russian TV channels were free to criticize officials and politicians. However, they were often used by the oligarchs who owned them as tools in mud slinging campaigns in their own struggle for more money and power. As a result, the journalistic quality was rather low.

Alternatively, Kanal Plus' funders could emulate the style practiced by Alexandr Lebedev. The billionaire former KGB officer supports Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most daring newspaper, but doesn't interfere in its reporting. The latter approach would give Ketebaev and his band of journalists a chance to realize their ambitions and have an Al Jazeera-like impact on Central Asia.

There is still the matter of harassment, intimidation and murder. Novaya Gazeta, after all, has had four of its reporters murdered since 2001, including Anna Politkovskaya. Just last month, Kyrgyzstani journalist Gennady Pavlyuk was thrown out of a window and killed. Yet, even in Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev appears far less willing than Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to countenance the murder of journalists. If properly carried out, citizen journalism could actually favor those who become Central Asian reporters: It would be hard to silence several hundred reporters; none of the Central Asian republics might be prepared to absorb the negative image of violence against the staff of such a high-profile organization.

Guest Column: U.S. Media Turbulence Points to New Day in Central Asian Journalism

Central Asia remains dangerous for independent journalists. In the latest case, Gennadi Pavlyuk, a 40-year-old Kyrgyzstani reporter who was highly critical of the Kyrgyz government, was tied up with duct tape in neighboring Kazakhstan, thrown from a six-floor Almaty apartment balcony, and died Dec. 22d; a Kazakhstan report implicates the Kyrgyz special services. In Uzbekistan, photojournalist Umida Ahmedova faces up to two years in a labor camp for defamation because of a set of 110 portraits called “Women and Men: Sunrise to Sunset,” depicting the lives of ordinary Uzbeks. On the other side of the Caspian, Azerbaijani bloggers Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli say they have little faith in overturning their 2½-year sentences for hooliganism. The Azeri pair gained attention last July for a video spoof in which Hajizade appeared at a mock press conference wearing a donkey costume.

Nonetheless, Sasha Meyer sees a reason for optimism on the Caspian. It lies, Meyer writes, in the technology that is transforming journalism in the West. His report:

By Sasha Meyer

Typically, the U.S. comes up with new Internet-related innovations, and later the new products, services and trends are used and emulated elsewhere. If this pattern can serve as a rule of thumb, then what's happening in American journalism hints at new ways to support independent news reporting in Central Asia.

Earlier this year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, reported, ”Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions. ... Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites.” At least some reporters now enjoy “a new prospect: individual journalists, funded by a mix of sources, offering expert coverage to many places.”

This is similar to what happened in the Silicon Valley in the 1990s, when power shifted from investment firms to engineers, which itself echoed the experience of the movie industry a few decades earlier. As Michael Lewis wrote in The New New Thing, ”Once the studios lost their clout, the stars seized power. And once they'd seized power they raised their price and demanded the right to direct their own pictures.”

This trend is painful for Western journalists. Reforming institutions such as newspapers that have not seen any change since the invention of the telegraph means a lot of jobs will be lost before a renewed industry emerges.

However, for those who support independent news reporting in places like Central Asia, this is good news. A free press and its institutions never took root in the region, thus there is no need to reform anything. Instead, these supporters can focus on new ways to fund local journalists. Again, Westerners offer interesting models to experiment with.

One example is Christopher Allbritton's approach to covering the Iraq war. Here is how BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante described it: “Albritton didn't have a juicy contract with The Washington Post or CNN. Rather, his trip was funded by 320 people who donated $14,334 through his Web site, Back-to-Iraq.com. Months before the conflict began, the former Associated Press reporter posted a notice on his site: He wanted to cover the war and asked for readers' financial support for ‘independent journalism.’ As the cash rolled in, Allbritton hit the road with his laptop computer, filing via a satellite phone or Internet café. Donors were put on a premium e-mail list, so they received stories early and got extra reports and pictures. They also passed along story ideas and occasionally berated him for overheated metaphors. ‘Readers were my editors,’ he says." Albritton’s website had a peak daily readership of 50,000.

Another example is GlobalPost, an online for-profit startup launched this year, whose stated mission is "to redefine international news for the digital age." Instead of sending reporters abroad, the publication relies on the network of 65 part-time correspondents who are already there. Its subscription service called Passport seeks to make the journalist the central figure, Elizabeth Jensen reported in The New York Times. "It offers access to GlobalPost correspondents, including exclusive reports on business topics of less interest to general audiences, conference calls and meetings with reporters, and breaking news e-mail messages from those journalists," Jensen wrote. Miriam Elder has written on Central Asia for the GlobalPost.

This expansion of the reporters' role, coupled with the trend among U.S. newspapers to outsource foreign coverage, offers new opportunities for journalists in Central Asia. Foundations and NGOs that support independent media in the region can help them to take advantage of these opportunities by providing two missing ingredients: training and marketing.

Strong journalistic skills are still scarce in the region. Oleg Panfilov, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said in an interview that the quality of reporting has much room for improvement. American and European journalism schools could play a role here by doing for journalists in places like Central Asia what MIT has done for engineers worldwide: make course contents available online for anyone to use. The MIT effort called OpenCourseWare has been popular with geeks across the planet and led to similar projects at other schools, helping create an international consortium and a global movement.

Once trained, the local reporters would still need help making themselves known to international news media and gaining credibility and trust, another challenge their Western supporters could help to overcome.

The domestic audience in the region would also benefit, thanks to a form of a cross-subsidy. Working part-time for a foreign publication like GlobalPost would provide the journalist with time and money to research and report for news sites whose audience is ordinary people in the region. Furthermore, the reporter's work published abroad would still reach the region as such content typically gets picked up by local bloggers.

Two Decades Later in Central Asia, Still Awaiting the Revolution

By Sasha Meyer

Western news reports on the revolutions of 1989 have been celebratory. But in Russia the mood has been somber. Russian writers want to know what went wrong. Among them, Sergey Kovalev, a Soviet-era dissident, laments that Soviet dissidents by and large failed to form into an effective political opposition once the Soviet collapse was under way. That thought has been echoed by Aleksandr Podrabinek, who argues that power simply shifted from one group of former apparatchiks to another. Lev Ponomarev distinguishes between two types of dissidents – those who started out the era outside the system, and those who were insiders – and decides that the latter had managerial experience, and it was they who came to power; he cites Aleksandr Yakovlev, Boris Yeltsin and Anatoly Sobchak among them. It is from the confluence of factors raised by all these writers that Russia gets its largely Soviet flavor of governance.

Central Asia, too, has been run the last two decades by such figures – Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, Nursultan Nazarbaev in Kazakhstan, and so on. The only exception has been Askar Akayev, Kyrgyzstan’s former president. Taking stock of their performance, it’s useful to consider the achievements of what other originally backwater nations achieved in similar two-decade periods of time.

In 1968, South Korea was still a poor country, with a per-capita GDP equal to that of North Korea. Twenty years later, its car makers were selling upscale vehicles in the U.S., the world's most competitive market, and its economy had overtaken Belgium's. Most recently, its Korea Electric Power this week beat out marquee French, Japanese and U.S. consortia to win a contract to build four nuclear power plants in the United Arab Emirates.

In 1986, Vietnam was still reeling from the impact of the wars with China, France, and the U.S. Food shortages were common. A little over two decades later, Vietnam has one of the world's fastest-growing economies. It doesn't just export the usual paraphernalia of international trade: clothing, shoes and appliances. The country is turning into a high-tech hub, hosting IBM's cloud computing facilities and Intel's $1 billion chip-making plant, among others.

In the early 1980s, Turkey had an anemic and quasi-statist economy. Again, a little over 20 years later, Turkish companies make more than half of all TVs sold in Europe. Its apparel such as Mavi jeans are sold at upmarket stores like Nordstrom. Elsewhere, as Hugh Pope writes in Sons of the Conquerors, ”Turkish manufacturers' reputation had grown enough, in fact, that some Chinese clothing designers imitated higher-quality Turkish styles and brands.” The strength goes beyond consumer goods – Turkey has contracted to supply parts for America's F-35, the world’s most advanced jet fighter.

In the meantime, Central Asia has followed a trajectory that resembles Africa's in the years after gaining independence. Passages from Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shadow of the Sun read like today's Central Asia. The gaining of independence, he writes,

“was characterized by a universal optimism, enthusiasm, euphoria. People were convinced that freedom meant a better roof over their heads, a large bowl of rice, a first pair of shoes. A miracle would take place – the multiplying of loaves, fishes, and wine.”

“[But] nothing of the sort occurred. On the contrary. optimism quickly turned to disenchantment and pessimism. The people's bitterness, fury, hatred was now directed against their own elites, who were rapidly and greedily stuffing their pockets.”

“[And] in the years since independence, fundamental human rights were brutally violated by the government. People were denied the right to live in freedom and with mutual respect. They were not allowed to have their own opinions. Organized political gangsterism and the politics of falsehood turned all elections into a farce. Instead of serving the nation, politicians were busy stealing.”

The recent obituary of Omar Bongo, president for life of Gabon, could be a résumé of his Central Asian peers:

Mr Bongo made no distinction between Gabon and his private property. He had ruled there so long, 42 years, that they had become one. It was therefore perfectly natural that an oil company, granted a large concession for coastal drilling, should slip him regular suitcases stuffed with cash. It was natural that $2.6 million in aid money should be used to decorate his private jet, that government funds should pay for the Italian marble cladding his palace, and that his wife Edith's sea-blue Maybach, in which she was driven round Paris, should be paid for with a cheque drawn on the Gabonese treasury. Of the $130 million in his personal accounts at Citibank in New York, it was probable – though Citibank never asked, and nobody ever managed to pin a charge on him – that much of it was derived from the GDP of his country.

The suggestion of fiddling public finances flummoxed and infuriated him. Corruption, he once explained to a reporter, was not an African word. No more was nepotism: He simply looked after his family, supplying them with villas in Nice as well as the ministries of defense and foreign affairs. When French judges in 2009 froze nine of his 70 bank accounts, he was outraged. An attack on him was obviously an attempt to destabilize his country. He was equally indignant when in 2004, after a "Miss Humanity" pageant was held in Libreville, Miss Peru charged him with sexual harassment for summoning her to the palace and, he hoped, to his nifty behind-the-paneling bed. If something was in Gabon, by nature or chance, he evidently had first dibs on it.

To alter the course would be simple. Consider what China did in 1979 – land reform that, by freeing peasants in a largely agricultural society, instantly improved the lot of many, and generated the cash needed to modernize the industry. Not incidentally, it also generated broad public support for the government, and helped to strengthen political stability.

Uzbekistan would achieve a big advance by halting the production of its biggest current crop – cotton – and planting native fruit in its place. Uzbekistan grows cotton – a subtropical, water-thirsty crop – on some 1.5 million hectares in this arid region, earning about $1 billion from exports. On the cost side of the ledger is a massive loss of land to salt, polluted river water unfit even for agricultural use, growing international criticism of child labor during harvest time, and tension with neighbors over water rights from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Cotton simply doesn’t pay. As a comparison, Chile earns $1.26 billion from the export of grapes harvested on just 182,000 hectares; it causes no environmental damage, and brings in an additional $1.37 billion from wine exports. All in all, the South American country makes $3.34 billion selling various fruit. Emulating its success in Central Asia should be simple given that the region is home to many varieties of fruit and walnuts. Agribusiness is a serious source of cash even in more advanced economies like Portugal and New Zealand, as well as in high-tech powerhouses like South Korea, which is a top-ten producer of onions. So, far the only place in the neighborhood to adopt this strategy is the neighboring Chinese province of Xinjiang, which exports apples to Kazakhstan and pears to the United States. Xinjiang also exports its products to Mongolia, Japan and Malaysia.

The stumbling block is probably the prevailing mindset among officials in the region. Russian researcher Olga Kryshtanovskaka has found that up to 83% of government positions in Russia are held by former members of the Soviet nomenklatura. The figure for Central Asia is probably higher as its bureaucracy survived the Soviet collapse intact.

Soviet-era writers have been scathing about this upper layer of society, which comprises just 0.1% of the population. Soviet-era writer Michail Voslensky called the nomeklatura “an invisible aristocracy whose reign is more oppressive than that of the czars.” Hungarian essayist György Konrád caustically writes that the nomenklatura often fail economically, trained as they are in a Communist system in which "the more stupid lead the more intelligent, because it has made political reliability a more important job requirement than ability." There is traction to this thinking. For instance, a Western diplomat based in Tajikistan says of local officials in a report by the International Crisis Group, "We are not just dealing with selfishness and greed, but incredible incompetence at all levels.”

The question then is whether there will be new faces in the political elites, and whether they will make a break with Soviet-era attitudes, as has happened in Georgia and to a lesser degree in Ukraine.

Or whether the region will continue to be like Gabon and Egypt – in the former, the new president is the son of the late Omar Bongo; in the latter, the combination of a youthful population bulge and governmental economic incompetence is creating an increasingly religious and conservative society, possibly opening the door to the Pakistani outcome in the longer term.

Book Review: In 1989, Economics, Not Dissidents, Ruled the Day

By Sasha Meyer

A region ruled by dictators who came to power with promises of a great and prosperous future. A cultivated nationalism characterizes governance. Dissidents are small in number, disparate and isolated from society. And political opposition, where it exists, is reluctant to claim political power.

That sounds like a profile of Central Asia today. But in fact, it's Eastern Europe in 1989, as described in Uncivil Society, a new book co-authored by Princeton professors Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross. Both are the authors of previous, excellent works set in the former Soviet space in 2001 – Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted and Gross’s Neighbors (the latter a finalist for the National Book Award) – and they again soar in this slim format.

Again, the strength of Kotkin’s and Gross’ narrative is that it stakes interesting new ground, but does so on the basis of facts and figures, and not philosophy or theory. The authors’ premise is that the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe were accidents, triggered by small, random events. Contrary to conventional wisdom, they argue, dissidents were marginal in the march of events – indeed, the idea that there was any significant opposition to communism “falls into the realm of fiction.” Instead, energized by the poor economic performance of the communist governments, each country’s population spontaneously self-mobilized. As for “the opposition,” such individuals were reluctant to take power, and were pushed into it by the people, the authors conclude. As much as anyone, the Communist regimes themselves were responsible for what happened: They ignored the public mood and belatedly replaced an odious leader with a newer face (Germany); they negotiated an exit (Poland); they bolstered the opposition in order to have a negotiating partner (Hungary); or they were the victim of an internal coup (Romania).

These events are a good illustration of Mohandas Gandhi’s belief that the obstacle to freedom is not coercion by the ruling order (always a tiny minority), but cooperation on the part of the ruled (always a vast majority). In 1989, widespread and deepening economic dissatisfaction removed this obstacle.

Uncivil Society offers up a rich picture of what happened and why: Dissidents were heroic and the governments not so. But it was when the economic fiasco became undeniably obvious to the man on the street that the regimes came down.

But what does all of this mean for other regions, in particular Central Asia? For dissident bloggers, opposition websites and broadcasters like Radio Liberty that wish to see greater political openness, getting out the word of a governments' dismal economic record erodes its public legitimacy.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev inadvertently captured the situation in Central Asia in his much-reported Nov. 12 speech on Russia’s economy. As the Economist put it:”His diagnosis is relentless: a primitive, commodity-based economy that cannot create prosperity; the lack of reforms; and all-pervasive corruption.”

This dreadful performance is particularly evident when compared with the achievements of others. Starkly, former comrades Hanoi and Beijing have produced growing and sustainable prosperity through manufacturing-led exports. Meanwhile, while the Central Asian leaders insist that freer politics will produce deadly instability, Ukraine and Georgia have demonstrated the self-interested hollowness of the claim – in both, competitive if chaotic politics accompany robust economic growth. Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, though branded by some as reckless, irrational, and megalomaniacal, has proven that a bloated Soviet-style bureaucracy and endemic corruption – two ills that afflict Central Asia – can be sharply curtailed within just a couple of years. Elsewhere, Turkey and Indonesia illustrate that being Turkic or Muslim and having an accountable government are not mutually exclusive.

Micro-economics resonate. Unlike political issues such as civil liberties and democracy – abstractions to many, and confused with the chaos of the post-perestroika years – economics are understood from Peoria to Khojand. As Kotkin and Gross suggest, authorities learn to shrug off negative press on civil liberties. But economic malperformance and malfeasance aren’t as easily ignored. For example, it's difficult to explain why the Kyrgyz government won’t get out of the way of Aidai Asangulova, a young designer who employs eleven women, and whose hand-made scarves are a huge success at the Takashimaya department store in New York. Her customers want more. Yet Ms. Asangulova is unable to expand because the local financial police keep auditing her in order to squeeze out “a share.”

Andrey Illarionov is showing the way. On his blog, this former adviser to Vladimir Putin draws on facts and statistics, eschewing emotions or a sense of desperation, in harsh and brutal analyses of Russia’s economic performance. The result is an effective and popular critique of Kremlin policy.

The Internet, of course, makes his job easier. As Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet-era dissident, has said: ”I think, had we had the Internet in the 1960s, the Soviet power would have collapsed in the 1970!”