A NEW CURTAIN AND TIME OF TERROR?

YOU come to the line that matters halfway down the sloping road to this old town (Narva). A border guard waves your car into a queue of vehicles, where his colleagues are examining documents, searching car boots and raising and lowering the iron boom that marks off Estonia from Russia and the rest of the old Soviet empire. In the gloom of a northern winter, their dark, tight-fitting uniforms make them look like a SWAT team without the dogs.

Since we were headed east, the guards were looking for food smugglers. Estonia wants to prevent its desperately limited supplies being bought up for resale to hungry Russians. Rather than go into the provenance of the three bananas sitting in a plastic bag under the driver's seat (bought the previous day in Finland), I omitted to mention them - and felt a pang as we were waved through, as if we had been smuggling firearms. But after all, they were our supper.

To write about the rolling-back of the old Soviet western border following the collapse of the final part of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is moving enough: another loose end tied up from the machinations of Hitler and Stalin. But to see before your eyes what it's leading to is even more affecting.

That rudimentary gate on the Narva road is about to become one of the key points in the next Iron Curtain.

As if to prove the point, a St Petersburg-registered car roared past us while we were in no-man's-land and hurtled straight at the barrier on the Russian side, a policeman just managing to raise it out of the way in time. As the Lada fish-tailed on the slushy road, it might have been the Checkpoint Charlie scene from a Cold War film.

Where the first Iron Curtain was imposed by Moscow to keep the former Eastern European States within the Soviet empire, the aim of the next, Western-devised, one is to keep the Russians at home. Estonia may be a tiny place with a population of not more than 1.5 million but, as a jumping-off point to the West for those who live in St Petersburg and Moscow, it has become a magnet.

Armed with a Finnish visa (not so difficult to get), Russians have only to take the train to Tallinn, catch a ferry and they're in Helsinki. The Soviet Union denied its citizens the right to travel abroad by refusing to issue exit visas, but it doesn't exist any more.

Power over exit visas passed to Russia in the wake of the failed August coup, but somewhere between Moscow and Tallinn Russia's writ ran out, and its citizens could for the first time in their lives set foot in another country without having had to submit themselves to surly customs and immigration officials or pass before the intimidatory gaze of the KGB.

For some, it was an almost miraculous experience, leaving their country the way one might step on to a bus. No-one thought it could last for long, and it hasn't. Next week the second Iron Curtain is due to close. Then, should the snappy driver from St Petersburg try to return to Estonia, he would be stopped at the Narva border and, if he did not have an Estonian visa, sent back. Independent Estonia has assumed the right to control its borders and to admit or refuse whomever it chooses.

While visas will be readily available to most nationalities, they will be available only to Russians who can produce a letter of invitation from an Estonian resident. This brings Estonia into line with Finland and was evidently the price the Finns extracted for lifting that very requirement for Estonians wanting to travel to Finland. In other words: "Before we open the door between us, please shut the one between you and your neighbour."

Once the Estonian door is shut, the West will be free to continue supporting (the days of urging are gone) the removal of exit restrictions by all the members of the old Soviet empire. Such restrictions, as we all know, are a violation of the fundamental right of human beings to freedom of movement.

The free movement that the Finns (above all in the West) are afraid of is of overcrowded Ladas from Moscow and St Petersburg to the Finnish border. So far, the only people from the old empire to have gone there in numbers are, bizarrely, a couple of thousand ethnic Romanians who came from Moldova in the south to try to return to Romania via Finland. After camping in the border town of Vyborg for a few weeks, they were sent away.

THE lady at the Hotel Viru in Tallinn was quite calm about it: a foreign correspondent from Moscow may no longer settle his bill in roubles. "Roubles are no longer the currency of this country," she said, as if oblivious to the roubles flying all over Tallinn between Estonians, Russians, Byelorussians, traders from the Caucasus and, for all one knew, every other part of the former empire.

We replied that the Estonian currency, the crown, was not yet in circulation.

"Then you will pay in dollars," she said.

It is one more sign of the way the barriers are building around the old empire. What Westerners pay today, Russians pay tomorrow. The new Iron Curtain is a political wall but its foundations are in economics, and they have not been built by the West.

So disastrous is the economic decline in the old empire that it is difficult to imagine any other immediate outcome than a new Iron Curtain, even if the West did nothing. Countries that suffer hyper-inflation become prisons for all but those lucky enough to have assets or incomes in foreign currencies.

Estonia is wise to get rid of the rouble as quickly as it can but it can't get shook of Russia so easily. There are only a million ethnic Estonians in the country and half a million Slavs, the vast majority of whom are Russians; and Estonia's economy is intermeshed with Russia's. To help dissolve its eastward economic connections, Estonia is looking north to Finland, its linguistic brother. But that, in turn, elevates anxiety among its Russians.

If, one day, there were to be two armies of massed Ladas at the Narva border - one of Russians heading west to leave Russia, the other of Russians driving east to leave Estonia - it would hardly astound anyone familiar with the 800 years of that city's recorded history. Over the past 100 years it has belonged to (or been occupied by): Russia once, the Soviet Union three times, Germany twice and Estonia twice. Today it is a sleepy textile town whose importance as the subject of strategic contest seems long gone. Or has it?

Whatever happens in eastern Estonia, things are calm at the western end. My passport contains Estonian visa No. 13, issued in Moscow last week and bearing the coat-of-arms of the Republic of Estonia, thanks to the imprint of a rubber stamp that took some time for the mission to find.

The same dogless SWATs were there at the Tallinn ferry terminal when I arrived from Finland last Friday, looking into car boots and directing drivers into the customs office. With visa No. 13, I felt fully accredited, for once.

Would I please go through customs and immigration?, I was asked by a kindly SWAT man, pointing to a structure about the size of a freight container. I crouched inside, to be asked my name and car registration number by a youth, who wrote down the answers in an exercise book. Perhaps there was some hope yet; this was hardly JFK Airport.

But he never once looked at my visa.

By Pyotr Patrushev:

THE people have little trust in their rulers, and central authority is rapidly disintegrating. Food riots erupt in Moscow and the provinces. Sharply rising prices for basic foodstuffs are being regulated but with little success.

Provinces, especially in the south, are restive or actively rebelling, while traditional enemies on southern flanks are poised to exploit any instability to achieve their own military and political aims.

Disfranchised and dispossessed ruling classes and the military released from duty are ready to join whatever cause or person will restore to them at least a semblance of old power and privileges.

Criminal activity is on the rise.

Western help is welcome, while conditions attached to it and the inevitable interference with the running of the country and its economy by foreigners is deeply resented.

Is this the picture of the Soviet Union in the winter of 1991-92? Well, yes, and also Russia in the spring of 1605.

Historically, the three main ingredients which led to the so-called "Time of Troubles" in Russia at the beginning of the 17th century were as follows:

* Hunger and discontentment of the population.

* Power vacuum.

* Foreign interference.

At that time, three successive harvest failures had led to widespread hunger, which had wiped out perhaps a third of the population.

However, some historians believe that there was plenty of grain to feed everyone throughout the years of famine. Hoarding by the rich landowners, the Church and the State, as well as inefficient distribution and spoilage, were what led to disaster.

Whatever was done finally by the authorities was too little and too late.

Within the power vacuum that opened after the death of the autocratic Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) in 1584, the various factions were using the famine and the popular discontent in their power struggle, rather than attempting to stem it.

Today, all the above-mentioned elements are present in varying degrees in the republics since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The former communist power elite - the military and the bureaucrats in the central ministries - have fallen under the fiscal axe of the new rulers.

Of course, some of them will be able to integrate themselves into the newly emerging republican and regional power structures, but many - perhaps most of the centre-oriented bureaucrats, the military and the former KGB -will not easily find themselves a place in the new order.

They belong to the highly specialised class of Muscovy courtiers whose very raison d'etre was collection of taxes from the provinces and the maintenance of central authority.

They have four centuries of relentless selection behind them. Their painstakingly acquired and considerable skills in disbursing authority to the provinces, in imperial management and advance, in communication with abroad, however warped and ideologically distorted, are now useless.

This would have been bad enough to remind us of the spring of 1605. However, the problem runs much deeper.

The bulk of the population in the old Soviet Union were, in fact, State employees. They were purposefully "infantilised" by the party rulers so that they lost all their initiative and will to forge their own economic or political destiny.

They are much more prone to embrace ideas of Western aid rescuing them (a Soviet version of the cargo cult mentality) or millenarian ideas of salvation-by-demagoguery, as practiced by some presidential candidates during the past Russian presidential election (notably by Mr Zhirinovsky, who rose from almost complete obscurity to secure about 6 million votes).

The hunger and the discontentment of the masses this winter may swell this number many times.

Yet the West is dithering in its attempts to deliver aid to the right people, and perhaps justifiably so.

As one German aid worker remarked, only 10,000 out of 80,000 parcels sent to Russia reached the right destinations. As he put it, as long as the insatiable stomach and tentacles of the mighty octopus - the old army and the dispossessed but still powerful former Communist Party elite - continue to strangle Russia, no aid will help it out of its present trouble.

The uprising of 1605 and the civil unrest that followed catalysed around the figure of the so-called "False Dmitry", a defrocked monk who pretended to be the son of Ivan IV. The son had, in fact, been killed in mysterious circumstances in 1591, but the Poles used this false pretender to advance their own imperial and religious ambitions.

The Russian nobility, and even the clergy, had largely supported the usurper, hoping to get rid of him once their power was restored.

However, this foreign connivance and the internal collaboration led only to further unrest, which lasted till 1613. In the process, it gave Russia a healthy dose of xenophobia as well as supplying it with a new and powerful impulse for empire-building.

While the danger of a new coup along the lines of the August one is probably exaggerated (certainly, Yeltsin and his revamped security services have been keeping a close watch on its potential leaders since the coup), the danger is likely that the seemingly odd coalition of forces - centralised bureaucracy, old Communists, the military and ex-security forces, conservative Orthodox clergy, workers' organisations and Russian nationalists - will play on popular discontent and come up with a Zhirinovsky-like figure in its grab for power.

With the political demise of Gorbachev, the power vacuum has not been resolved but has instead become more acute.

Yeltsin's popularity was in part due to his struggle with Gorbachev. Now, when he will be required to deliver the promises he had made during and after his election, his former alibi about the centre draining Russia of power and money will no longer be available.

Yet, the resources of the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States are already overstretched.

The Polish experience with the rise and fall of Lech Walesa's popularity may be instructive here.

In 1605, Russians blamed Tsar Boris Godunov for their troubles and pinned their hopes on the miraculous salvation promised by the False Dmitry. Now they will blame Yeltsin.

GORBACHEV's political demise may actually be a relief to him, for the jockeying for power around Yeltsin and among some of his old comrades and colleagues reminds one of the Times of Trouble. Their political irresponsibility is matched only by the strength of their ambitions and their grave underestimation of the severity of the situation.

What are the lessons we can draw from this historical comparison?

Well, there are some good moments in this seemingly dreary repetition of history. The uprising of 1605 was relatively bloodless. The masses did not have the energy or the will to initiate another massacre.

Even the pretender was unsure enough of himself to instigate mock court proceedings against his rival nobleman, Basil Shuisky, whom he would have liked summarily to execute. Shuisky went on to live another day and even to govern Russia for a brief period.

The recent decision by the Constitutional Court to challenge Yeltsin's decree on the amalgamation of security organs may be a good portent (though, of course, it may instead be used by Yeltsin's opponents to further destabilise the situation).

Now that the IMF and the Deutsche Bank have virtually taken over the running of economic reform in the former Soviet Union, and Ukraine has become independent and deprived Russia of its safe south-western flank, the old xenophobic fears in Russia will be reawakened with a vengeance.

The integration of the Muslim republics into the Commonwealth will be an economic burden for the new union, while leaving them outside would seem to present political and even military dangers.

Of course, most of these fears may be unjustified: Russia and its new allies will, in time, have to get used to living with the new geo-political order.

The realistic choices for Russia and the CIS may be not market economy or socialism, but state capitalism with some smattering of social security administered by a huge and corrupt bureaucracy - or a neo-fascist dictatorship

It may behoove the West to learn the lessons of history and act decisively as a timely and impartial mediator as well as an aid donor, lest another False Dmitry plunges the still nuclear-armed Russia into a new Time of Troubles.

 Editor: Pyotr Patrushev’s books and articles can be found on his website, www.russiantranslate.org

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