Revenge of the Nerds?

For the past five years, Russia and China seemed on the verge of winning the power and respect as superpowers that had eluded them since their failures at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. This time their victory was on the strength of economic rather than military muscle.

With 10 percent annual economic growth, compounding each year, a soaring stock market and vast human and natural resources, suddenly there was no stopping them. Now, the power that both possessed, that had cast such a pall over the peace talks of 1919, was very real indeed.

For anyone who watched carefully the progress of these two nations in the decades since their failure to win any tangible respect in 1919, it was clear that their success was inevitable.

For Russia, it was natural resources that truly made her a superpower. Lenin and Stalin won their power at the point of a gun and a massive domestic terror campaign, combined with the still (nearly a century later) bewildering refusal of the Western powers to touch the third rail of Bolshevism. These Bolsheviks never understood that the real power that would make their nation a superpower was the natural resources that lay deep beneath the earth of their own country, as well as the extraordinary energy and vitality of a people that were unleashed to work for their own, rather than their leaders’, profit.

Putin understood that in capitalism, not communism, was the path to global domination – if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. More than twenty years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, when another brilliant KGB chief, Yuri Andropov had just come to power in the USSR, one of his brilliant young minions lunched with me, clearly ecstatic that his native land finally had a leader who could truly take it to the next plateau of true equality with the West and superpower dominance.

Vyatcheslav Kovalev was a product of the apparat – raised in privileged surroundings in Moscow. His father had served as Stalin’s Minister of Agriculture and paid for his failures by banishment – but unlike many of those who failed this heir to Ivan the Terrible’s mantle, it was a gilded exile to Tokyo as Soviet ambassador to Japan. His son took one of the paths open to the priviligentsia and joined the KGB. Now in the early 1980s, speaking impeccable French, with the poise and dress of a graduate of a French Grand Ecole, he was serving in the spy agency’s Paris station. He was happy to deal with a young CBS News correspondent over lunch at Chiberta, his favorite two-star restaurant just off the Champs-Elysées, where he spun his tale of the New Russia, just two weeks after Andropov assumed power on November 12, 1982.

Many in the West were paralyzed with fear that a KGB chief had risen to leadership in the Soviet Union. Others dismissed him has just another communist head of a nation that couldn’t even make its elevators go to the top floors or its toilets flush reliably. Kovalev had another, more accurate perspective. Andropov would be a great leader, he said, because only officials of the KGB, the one organ of state power that dealt unblinkingly with the outside world, understood precisely how flawed the Soviet Union was, and how vast the economic disparity between his nation and the West. Understanding this gulf was the first giant step toward bridging it. If he lived long enough. Andropov did not. At least not long enough to effect any substantive changes. Three months after assuming power, he suffered total renal failure and five months later the Central Clinical Hospital where he would spend the last six months of his life, ruling the Soviet Union from his hospital bed. Fifteen months after assuming power, the only KGB chief ever to hold the top office in the Soviet Union was dead.

Young Kovalev was crushed. Russia’s only hope was gone, succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, a narrow-minded, stone-headed bureaucrat. It took nearly eight more years before communism was to fall of its own weight. But by the time Vladimir Putin officially assumed office on May 7, 2000, capitalism was the new national system of Russia. And economic muscle would be the engine that would make the nation a superpower.

That’s the position Putin found himself when on Monday, on the eve of the start of the G-8 summit in Germany, Putin revived an arms race that most considered long dead. During one of his rare Moscow press conferences, the Soviet leader flexed his newfound muscles, delivering a warning from his position of strength as leader of one of the world’s leading supplies of energy.

"It is obvious that if part of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States is located in Europe we will have to respond. What kind of steps are we going to take in response? Of course we are going to acquire new targets in Europe."

A nuclear arsenal combined with the ability to turn off the spigot of vast resources of oil and natural gas? Russia, the superpower that Lenin, Stalin and a parade of Soviet communist leaders so desperately desired, has arrived.

The next time, we’ll have a look at China and its failures and successes. Meanwhile, wait for A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, or if you’d like a look at the economic aspects of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, have a look at Chapter 9 1/2.