What Happens If the Big Bad Bear Awakes?

A few miles down the road from the border guards' shack where Lieut. Colonel Reso Chachua wards off the winter winds of the Caucasus, a thick rope stretches across a boundary that neatly illustrates what it means to have Russia as a next-door neighbor. On Chachua's side of the rope lies Georgia, a former republic of the Soviet Union that declared its independence in 1991. Less than 200 yards on the other side lies Abkhazia, a former part of Georgia, which won its as yet unrecognized independence last year by breaking a Moscow- mediated cease-fire and, with the help of arms supplied by Russian military commanders, thrashed the Georgians badly enough to send them heading home to Tbilisi.

But no sooner had Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's head of state, suffered this humiliating defeat than he too began receiving military assistance from the Russians. Those weapons, however, were not for fighting the Abkhazians -- who had already consolidated their victory -- but for putting down another insurrection by Georgian followers of former President Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Thanks to the Russian guns, Gamsakhurdia's resistance finally collapsed. Now rival leaders on both sides of the rope boundary find themselves indebted to Moscow. To Chachua, at least, the logic is all too obvious. "Everything here," the Georgian commander concludes, "depends on Russia."

That is the realization dawning throughout the 14 republics along its periphery that Moscow somewhat possessively refers to as the "near abroad." In the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine and across Central Asia, Russia has been engaged in a bold game of restoring its influence. By applying pressure along ethnic fault lines and playing rival political factions against one another, Moscow has succeeded in making its presence count among its former vassals. At the same time, Russian diplomats have ventured farther abroad, playing a successful part in easing the Bosnian conflict -- most recently by persuading the Serbs to open the airport in the besieged town of Tuzla. While Russians feel a new sense of pride as their mediation efforts pay off, these activities have also provoked speculation that the imperialist Russian bear has awakened from its post-cold war snooze.

The methods by which Moscow seeks to woo back the near abroad republics can be crude, often mustered under the broad banner of protecting ethnic Russians. In some cases the tool is brute military force of the sort used in December 1992 when Russian-manned planes from Uzbekistan helped bring down a government of Tajikistan composed of Islamic and democratic groups, and installed pro- communist rulers. In other regions, Russia prefers to flex its muscles by yanking the economic rug out from under a government -- as it did last week when Moscow began cutting off gas supplies to Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. Regardless of the medium, the message remains the same: Moscow holds -- and withholds -- the keys to survival in the near abroad. This is not so much imperialism, says former CIA Director Robert Gates, as it is an effort "to make a bad situation worse so that these countries are forced to come to Russia for help."