Sat, Sep 01, 2001 page24

• Russia's gaze looks toward Germany

  ALLIANCES When it seeks a soul mate these days, Russia is more likely to select Germany than the US. Failure to find a home in Europe would leave Russia in isolation

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Those who wonder where Russia's affections turned after its infatuation with the US soured should come to this enclave of farms and Baltic beachfront, a prize patch of German heartland until the Red Army seized it in 1945, and talk to Irina Korobova. They'll get an earful.

  In a three-story factory where Soviet laborers once outfitted fishing trawlers, Korobova, 27, is the deputy director of Grammer AG Kaliningrad, a spotless German plant whose 380 workers produce upholstery for 5,000 BMWs, Volkswagens and Audis daily.

  

  Those who wonder where Russia's affections turned after its American infatuation soured should come to Kaliningrad. In a three-story factory here, Irina Korobova, 27, right, is the deputy director of Grammer AG Kaliningrad, a German plant that produces upholstery for 5,000 BMWs, Volkswagens and Audis daily.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  She learned German in high school. This year, she completed German business school.

  "Just working at these enterprises is a great experience. You learn the mentality of Germans; you learn their punctuality," she said. "And we have the German system of quality control -- calculated in parts per million."

  Nobody doubts that by virtue of wealth and power alone, the US will dominate Russia's foreign policy for decades. But when Russia seeks a Western soul mate these days, it looks not across the Atlantic, but just 370km west, where Poland stops -- and Germany begins.

  Rekindled romance

  It is not just that Russia's nouveau nationalists now believe the US icon has clay feet. Russians are trying to rekindle a centuries-old romance. When Germany and Russia were not fighting -- often at the cost of central and east Europeans squeezed in their embrace -- they carried on a torrid affair of heart and mind.

  Germany sent Russia its nobility and expertise -- Catherine the Great; the last czarina, Alexandra Fyodorovna; Marx and Engels; an entire German province on the Volga (the Germans were lured by Catherine to modernize Russian farming, then exiled to Kazakhstan by Stalin). The Slavs, in turn, lent the Germans their passion, enticing them with the mystery within Russia's fusion of Europe and Asia.

  The relationship has also caused great destruction. Take Kaliningrad itself: famous before World War II as Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, birthplace of Kant and a center of German culture.

  Today, it is squalid and concrete-faced, the legacy of Soviet ambition and testimony to Russia's enduring thrust westward -- to Germany.

  Only the nature of that thrust has changed. Where Khrushchev sought ideological hegemony, Russia now trolls for investment, business expertise and technology. And something equally vital: an affinity utterly lacking in its US dialogue.

  Russia's partner

  President Vladimir Putin, a fluent German speaker who served the KGB in the 1980s in Dresden, last year called Germany "Russia's leading partner in Europe and the world." He has showered Berlin with bouquets to prove it, from help for industry to his defense ministry's purchase of hundreds of new BMWs.

  He has exchanged three visits with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (more than with any leader outside the former Soviet Union), and plans a September trip to Berlin. And that omits the Russian Christmas that the Schroeders spent at the Putins' home outside Moscow.

  "Russians today sort of love Germans and hate Americans. A lot of people tell us that," said Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. "It has something to do with big, big hopes. The Russians think that somehow, in the depths, Germany understands Russia and that Germans will help them out."

  Rahr and others say that is half right. Germany does understand Russia -- so well, courtesy of centuries of military, cultural and royal intimacy, that it is not ready to help the Russians out more than it already has -- at least not yet. Schroeder underscored that in April, in an article in the German journal Die Zeit.

  "We exclude any German `special way' in the relationship with Russia," he wrote. "We want a new normality in the relationship between the two nations, without illusions, without sentimentality."

  He reflects a Western consensus that Russia should not join their exclusive club until it proves it can play by Western rules -- and that the proof is still lacking, despite Russia's promises of democratic and economic reform.

  This view leaves Russia as Germany's jilted lover.

  "I think that the Russians, although they would never say it, may feel that the time of their great-power glory is over, that Russia can't continue as a free agent," said Dmitri Trenin, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment's center in Moscow and author of a new book on Russian geopolitics, The End of Eurasia. "This Russia needs a relationship with Germany."

  Russia, Trenin said, now contemplates a very real fear, "that Europe will basically stop at Russia's borders, and will turn its back on an unreformable Russia."

  Yet in this tale of unrequited reaching, there is a curiosity: In a way, the West longs for Russia's affections just as much. Many believe Europe's long-term stability rests on what Putin professes to want: a Russia lashed tight, by economic, political and even military ties, to Europe and the Western traditions it embodies.

  Russia has been an unstable global force for centuries, the reasoning goes, because it has seen its neighbors as potential invaders instead of allies. Security usually meant gobbling up surrounding lands to create a Russian buffer zone. And that led to war.

  Historic nightmare

  Failure to find a home in Europe would leave Russia with two unpleasant options: isolation, which is a proven failure, or a problematic and precarious alliance with China.

  "This is the historic nightmare of Russia, being isolated and surrounded by enemies," said Horst Teltschik, a Russia expert and former national security adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "And if Germany is not interested in Russia -- in taking leadership on the vast question of how to handle Russia -- then nobody will do it."

  For better or worse (and both are accurate), that is Germany's historic role. Catherine sought to remake Russia in the German mold in the 18th century. In the 19th, Marxist thought infected Russia, and Siemens, the vast German conglomerate, helped build its railways.

  Between the World Wars, Germany and Russia, two diplomatic pariahs, found solace and power in secret and public alliances. After the Soviet Union turned a third of Germany into its satellite at the start of the cold war, West Germany kept top-level diplomatic contacts with Moscow, bought vast amounts of Soviet natural gas and, ultimately, advanced the Kremlin billions when Mikhail Gorbachev struggled to reform the empire.

  Today Germany is Russia's largest creditor, holding 40 percent of its US$48 million in Paris Club debt, and by far Russia's largest trading partner. Next to the US, it is Russia's second largest foreign investor, and overall, more German companies have Russian stakes.

  It sounds impressive. But it is beer money compared with German interests elsewhere: In 1999, German direct investment in Russia -- money spent on factories, equipment and such -- totaled US$727 million. In Poland, with one-fourth the population, it totaled US$4.87 billion.

  The old question

  What restrains German businesses is what restrains the German government: trust.

  "It's the old question," said one former German diplomat in Russia, now a business executive.

  "The reform policies are hailed; things have positively changed. But it's not yet enough. They haven't reached the level of reform that we need."

  Kaliningrad is a telling example, if extreme. This province, the size of Connecticut, separated from Mother Russia by 320km of Baltic territory, dreams of being Moscow's gateway to Europe. Instead, it is where Europe comes to a dead stop.

  After 45 years as a top-secret naval base, Kaliningrad was rendered useless by the Soviets' military collapse. In response, the Kremlin laid plans for a free economic zone -- a Russian Hong Kong on the Baltic.

  An economic zone exists, with tax and customs benefits conferred by Moscow. But the freest market these days is the peddlers at border posts who seize on the tax breaks to smuggle cheap cigarettes into Poland.

  One German company that relied on incentives to establish a small assembly line, BMW, nearly saw production shut down this year when some benefits were abruptly revoked, then reinstated on Kremlin order.

  "Every year, there are discussions about whether the laws on this special economic zone are valid or not," said Stefan Stein, a German economic representative in Kaliningrad. "There are a lot of problems, but the main problem is stability. There's no political stability."

  Economic incentives

  Putin has proposed a regimen of economic incentives lasting through 2010. But when German businesses asked Stein whether he could guarantee any program to last, he said, "I had to say no."

  "They'll give chances for big foreign businesses," he said. "But they'll take them away because there are big Russian interests."

  Such unpredictability matters. Though Kaliningrad is half the distance to Berlin as it is to Moscow, and so historically Teutonic that maps carry German and Russian names, Germany has invested even less here than has tiny Lithuania.

  And in the short term, at least, investment is likely to become harder. Kaliningrad's two neighbors, Lithuania and Poland, are on the cusp of admission to the EU, which promises to constrict their porous borders, erect new customs and visa regimes, and upend everything from Kaliningrad's electricity supply -- now piped free, from Russia through Lithuania -- to pollution by Russian airliners.

  But Yuri S. Matochkin, a former Kaliningrad governor, calls the coming isolation an opportunity, not a threat. He argues that economic incentives are beginning to take effect, and that growth now outstrips that of mainland Russia.

  Korobova, at the Grammer plant, hopes so.

  "It could be difficult, because we're an enclave," she said. "A citizen of Kaliningrad couldn't survive without having a European Union passport."

  "As I see it, there are two ways to go: either return to the old way, and complete militarization, or open up to the West and become a more Western city, a little Western state."

  Like many in the West, Germany is waiting to see which Russia ends up at its doorstep.
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