THE CASPIAN CHARADE

MOSCOW. Naturally, with all the fuss about Russia’s government crisis and daily expectations of the young candidate Premier’s failure in the Duma, followed by the President’s stamping his foot and ordering the Russian Parliament dissolved, few paid serious attention to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s visit to Moscow. The more so that he came, allegedly, to greet his old friend Viktor Chernomyrdin on his sixtieth birthday. No longer Premier, but things like that don’t matter between friends. However, several days before his arrival official word came that the Kazakh leader’s visit, originally announced as unofficial, would be a working one. Why? For a very good reason. During his Kremlin meeting with Mr. Yeltsin the Russian side had agreed to a division of the Caspian Sea (earlier the news was spread unofficially, with the press noting “considerable headway” in the Russian-Kazakh talks on the sea) which was officially confirmed by both Presidents after the meeting.

Personally, I was interested not so much in the details of the Yeltsin-Nazarbayev arrangement (though quite important in themselves) as in Russia changing its policy. The Russians are generally known to take a very dim view of sharing anything with anybody when already having a part of it. Their stand in the Caspian issue remained unchanged for quite some time, hard as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan tried to talk Moscow into dividing the oil-bearing sea by the boundaries dating from Soviet times (then administrative, not national). Russia’s reluctance to delimit the Caspian Sea was quite logical in the context of Primakov’s foreign political doctrine, as Tehran was its main ally at the time. The latter repeated over and over again that the Caspian natural wealth belonged to all the coastal states, so their reaction to the Russo-Kazakh arrangement is predictable.

Today, Russia has to choose between Iran and Kazakhstan, rather than between Iran and the CIS. With the next extraordinary summit getting closer, it becomes increasingly clear that Russia will not be able to offer its immediate neighbors anything new. The last thing Boris Yeltsin needs now is another scandal, so he is skillfully neutralizing potential troublemakers. Still, the Russian stand cannot change anything on the Caspian scene where the new search for oil and its allocation has begun (by the way, involving Russian companies which are not likely to protest against Mr. Yeltsin’s decision). Sooner or later, the Caspian Sea would have to be divided. Thus, Russia’s position looked rather like a tool of diplomatic pressure which, at the right moment, could be turned into a way to demonstrate friendly intentions. I think that we will witness more than one such maneuver before the next CIS summit.