Ah, for the good old days when we used to worry about Russian strength--about Soviet tanks in Afghanistan or those hydra-headed Euromissiles. Neither was very pleasant, but at least we knew the options. We could boycott the Moscow Olympics or deploy our own Pershings to force the Brezhnevites to talk arms control. Now, the West is rattled by Moscow's weakness, as it has been ever since the Russian tricolor went up over the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991. The difference, as the collapse of the Russian ruble shows, is dreadful. The only choice we have is between bad and rotten.

Should the West shovel more money into a bottomless pit lined with greed and sheer thievery? Not even certified Russophiles would agree. How shall we count the billions that have poured into this kleptocracy only to be drained into Swiss bank accounts and Riviera real estate?

So we should no longer do what we once could. But neither can we do what we should, even though the recipe is quite simple: descend upon Moscow accompanied by an army of professionals, each flanked by a close-combat expert for protection, to build a modern state from the putrid rubble of bureaucratic communism. Break the stranglehold of the Mafia. Construct a tax system that fills the government's empty coffers. Put laws on the books enshrining property rights and bankruptcy rules. Assemble an American-type securities and exchange commission with enforcement teeth. Teach bankers and businessmen the proper ways of accounting and disclosure. Haul into court the "oligarchs"--those thuggish "New Russians" who are feasting on the carcass of the Soviet command economy and who use their ill-gotten gains to buy politicians, then use these puppets to make even more money.

Alas, Russia is not a 19th century colony where Western intruders built administrations and infrastructures. Modernization since Peter the Great has been foreign-inspired, but home-grown. If Boris Yeltsin could not turn the trick in seven years, outsiders shouldn't even try.

So wash our hands of Yeltsin and Russia? Yes to the first, but still no to the second. The Russian President, once the West's darling, is beyond salvation and not worth it, to boot. Incapable of governing, he is in the game only for one last desperate throw of the dice to save his own and his family's skin.

He has used and misused everybody: his buddies in the West and his point men at home--from General Alexander Lebed to his latest victim Sergei Kiriyenko, his Prime Minister for all of five months. He has taken billions from the West, only to build Potemkin villages designed to fool his benefactors with phony reformist fervor. Now he is playing footsie with his worst enemies, the communists, whom he cravenly propitiated on Friday by serving them the heads of his last pro-Western stalwarts, Anatoli Chubais and Boris Nemtsov. Instead, he should have fired himself.

PAGE 1  |  PAGE 2