Be careful what you wish for...

[jducoeur]

I was reading Newsweek this week, with yet another article about how the fall in oil prices is weakening the reigns of the Oil Tyrants -- particularly in Venezuela, Iran and Russia. Just under the surface was the common smugness, that bad leaders like Putin are now facing civil unrest, even riots, as their petro-states are exposed as having been built on sand.

Which leads me to think this through. The results are disquieting. I mean, what exactly do we expect will happen here? Yes, it's lovely to contemplate Putin being gone: he's a demogogue, effectively a dictator, and by no means an benign one. I think many Americans expect that, if he's weakened, that means a lovely, real, democratic government will kick him out and take over, and all will be friendly. And that's a pretty silly thing to expect.

Assuming the oil price stays low for at least another year, we're looking at *serious* civil unrest in Russia: major declines in GDP, ever more people out of work, general unhappiness with the government's perceived incompetence, leading to more protests and riots. There is no chance that the authorities will sit back and simply take that -- they've already begun putting out draconian laws to stamp down on it. As always, that won't actually stop the unrest, just push it under the surface to simmer.

And *that* leads all kinds of bad places. I see two likeliest options. One is that Putin keeps a lid on things, probably by making society ever more totalitarian again. The best way to do that is kick over a lot of anthills, even starting wars that keep the populace focused on outside threats and provide some economic focus. In other words, stoke the fires of nationalism ever-higher, a classic dictator's trick.

The disconcerting part is that that is probably the *less* dangerous option. The scarier one is revolution of some sort: the populace gets angry enough, the government blinks at the wrong moment, and it gets overthrown. From there, things can go almost anywhere. It would be possible that a genuinely smart and benign government would take over -- but honestly, I don't think the pieces are in place to make that likely. Rather, I suspect it's likelier that, as with so many revolutions, they would wind up simply replacing one dictator with another, more aggressive and somewhat less sane. (Or possibly with some band of revolutionary zealots: madmen in groups are often even more dangerous than individually.)

Hence, I recommend a bit of care with the schadenfreude. Putin may be a vicious piece of work, but there are significantly worse options out there, and considerably scarier people who could be holding Russia's nuclear button...

Comments

[serakit.livejournal.com]

What's happening in Russia? It sounds Very Bad- and one of my friends at school comes from Moscow.

[jducoeur]

Short version: Russia has been riding high for the past several years, due to the high price of energy. (More on the basis of natural gas than oil, but they tend to track roughly together.) Money's been flowing into the government, and from there to the people, and the industry has been supporting much of the economy.

This has bolstered Putin, as he has cemented his hold on the country. Technically, he stepped down as President -- but he then took over as Prime Minister, changed the rules to make Prime Minister more powerful, and arranged for one of his proteges to be elected as President. And in a couple more years, he'll be eligible to run for President again. Since his policies have apparently made the country much richer, he's been very popular.

Now, though, with oil and gas prices way down, all those services that the state has been paying for from energy exports are getting cut, and the economy is generally tanking, far worse than here in the US. This is leading to civil unrest, and that's provoking gradually more draconian security measures. The latest I heard was that couple hundred thousand military who were supposed to be retired are being pulled back into active service; everyone assumes that this is so that they can put down any threats of internal problems...

[pryder]

The article also talks about Chávez and Venezuela, and that's a more difficult case. Chávez is flawed but he's not the tyrant that Putin is; most of what he has done really has been aimed at spreading more of the country's wealth among more of the population. I think he went too far with re-nationalization, but it's not clear whether a more moderate course of allowing continued private ownership but with higher taxes was politically feasible.

So, what's the solution for them, now that revenues are off? They could cut back on the public works spending, but the country desperately needs a lot of those public works. (The problem is that for many years they had a typical third-world extraction economy, where nearly all the benefit from resource extraction went to the outside investors rather than the populace of the country, and infrastructure was badly neglected.)

[jducoeur]

My main concern about Chavez is that, as far as I can tell, he's got an even stronger messianic streak than Putin. That is, Putin appears to think of himself as a strong father-figure to his country, but Chavez is showing every sign of thinking of himself as a saviour. And he's less subtle about it. Putin stayed in power, but also stayed within the rules, engaging in a little rules-hacking to pull it off; Chavez is simply changing the rules to his benefit.

So I do worry that Chavez may be even more dangerous (to his own country) in the long run: a lot of the worst tyrants have the "paved with good intentions" origin. I think Putin knows *exactly* what he is, good and bad, and is ruthlessly pragmatic; Chavez really believes in himself as the good guy, and that often means that *anything* can be justified on the grounds of "the good of the people". We'll see where that goes.

Regardless, though, you're correct that the populace are the real victims here. The economic wreckage is likely to be dire, if oil prices stay low for very long, since they haven't done enough to diversify the economy yet. And sadly, I think it's unlikely that the US is going to help much -- despite Chavez' smart PR moves using cheap oil, people are going to remember his anti-US rhetoric more clearly. I just hope that they get through the mess without too much horror, and get the clue that the best use of oil wealth is to build an economy that *isn't* dependent on it. (As the smarter Gulf states have been doing...)