They gather in Moscow, plant a few kisses, snap a group photo and draw up a few vague schemes to be forgotten in time for the next get-together.
Then the leaders of the ex-Soviet republics go back to their own drab cities to complain about how the Commonwealth of Independent States is a waste of time.
It has helped none of them win a civil war or boost their popularity. It can’t even seem to budge most trade barriers that went up after the Soviet collapse.
But still they come, herded together by instinct. Perhaps only they can fully understand each other’s troubles. Perhaps they are nostalgic for the old Politburo galas.
If the Soviet Union has been described as the jailhouse of nations, the CIS is like a run-down halfway house that keeps drawing back maladjusted convicts long after they have finished serving time. A visit with Boris Yeltsin is like a chat about old times with a friendly parole officer. This, of course, is how much of the West prefers it. It wants Yeltsin to have exactly as much sway over his colleagues as Queen Elizabeth has over India and Australia at summits of that other useless commonwealth.
Ukraine, leery of dominance by the Kremlin, has been paid handsomely by America to make sure the CIS remains a sideshow.
With the exception of a few de facto Russian satellites, other ex-Soviet republics have found their own counterweights to Russia – Azerbaijan in Turkey and America, Turkmenistan in Iran, Moldova in Romania.
The shame is that the CIS could do some good if it could ever get out from under its reams of useless paperwork and the suspicions that it furthers Russian hegemony.
There are gains from free trade to be had – as long as the deal used the lowest common denominator instead of the highest to harmonize external tariffs. There are crime syndicates to be pursued across borders – once some of the dictators in the club stop using police cooperation as an excuse for hunting exiled dissidents. There are common social woes like hidden unemployment and drug addiction to be addressed, but these are not topics that ever clutter the CIS agenda.
The ex-communists who meet in Moscow are too jealous of their newfound prerogatives, too enamored of the spiffy new flags they have designed to share responsibility for a common effort.
And Yeltsin has now consigned the CIS to the status of a talking shop and source of some harmless consolation prizes, as billionaire financier Boris Berezovsky’s appointment to the position of CIS secretary proves.
With men like these in charge, the West’s paid paranoiacs can sleep soundly. The CIS will long remain a joke without a punchline.
