BY BORIS KAGARLITSKY
The times are past when the US and Russian presidents greeted one another simply as "Boris" and "Bill". Boris Yeltsin is no longer in the Kremlin, and Bill Clinton has left the White House. The new administrations in both countries started out by criticising one another. Bush caught Russian spies in the United States, while Putin condemned the US plans to develop an anti-missile defence system.
Quite soon, however, the mutual accusations began to die away, and the leaders of the two countries made haste to meet one another. They were in such a hurry to meet that they did not even wait for the G8 summit in Genoa, where one way or another they would spend time together.
In essence, the two administrations have a great deal in common. Both are striving for discipline and for the market. Both use nationalist rhetoric and are intolerant of dissidence.
Fortunately for the people of the US, George W Bush does not have such unrestricted power in his country as Putin has in Russia. Fortunately for the whole world, Vladimir Putin does not have such unrestricted power on a global scale as Bush does.
It is significant that the summit between the two presidents was preceded by a meeting between Anatoly Chubais and Dick Cheney. If Cheney is officially the number two person in Washington, Chubais is nowhere near the top in Russia's formal bureaucratic hierarchy, despite being an influential courtier. There is general agreement, however, that for many years Chubais has been the most hated individual in Russia.
The fact that it was Chubais whom Putin chose to conduct negotiations with the US is extremely important. In essence, Chubais and Cheney acted not as the vice-president of the US and a senior Moscow bureaucrat, but as representatives of the two groups of corporate interests that rule their respective countries.
It is the representatives of big business who draw up the agenda, which the politicians are merely required to implement. The business chiefs no longer do this behind the scenes, but lay direct claim to leading administrative posts.
Cheney represents the US oil business, and Chubais the Russian fuel and energy complex. It is the interests of these two forces that will determine Russian-US relations in the near future, at least while the issue is "constructive interaction" rather than corruption and spy scandals.
The people who control the Russian energy sector want to attract US capital. The US corporations are interested in Russian assets, which are being sold for no more than a quarter of their value — even taking into account the bribes and kick-backs that have to be paid to conclude the deals.
Heading off for his meeting with Cheney, Chubais declared that he intended to study the experience of the deregulation of the energy industry; despite the disaster in California, he considered this a brilliant success and a model for imitation.
Compared with the spectacle in Russia last winter, when the privatised energy system left whole provinces without electricity or heating for periods ranging from a week to two months, the rolling blackouts in California might indeed be considered an achievement.
While Chubais was engaged in selling Russia's energy industry to his US friends, Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov was doing a deal on the conditions on which Russia would reconcile itself to the new "Star Wars" plan.
Moscow's rhetorical protests turned out to be no more than an effort to force up the price. No-one in the Kremlin denies any more that the Russian government is willing to renounce its diplomatic resistance to Bush's strategic project, provided Russia gets sufficient compensation.
What is involved in the first place is Russian companies receiving lucrative orders within the framework of the US program, and, in the second place, that the system of anti-missile defence should be limited at least to a degree (and accordingly, that the Russian strategic forces should not become totally useless).
This corresponds in part to the rhetoric of Washington itself; if the question is one of defence against mad dictators in the Third World, the scale of the deployment needed will be significantly less than if the matter were to involve a struggle against Russia.
The Moscow authorities understand perfectly that the country Washington sees as a potential strategic adversary is no longer Russia, but China. The trouble is that in these circumstances, a rapprochement with the US would leave an increasingly weak Russia having to face up to the growing might of China alone.
The Russian leadership has therefore come up with an answer it regards as simply brilliant. Russia will supply conventional weapons to China, and at the same time will participate in the technical programs of the US.
Both countries, of course, will pay good money — and in modern-day Russia, that is what everything boils down to.
No-one is particularly worried about how the new arms race will finish up. It is obvious, though, that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, in the fifth act someone is going to take it and start shooting.
The diplomatic frictions have turned into ordinary market haggling, which is quite natural in an epoch of free trade.
If the top-level negotiators find a common language, no-one will be upset any more either about the crushing of the free press in Russia, or about the genocide in Chechnya. Why, in fact, should the US administration worry about children dying in Chechnya, when for many years it has been starving children in Iraq? And why should burnt-out Grozny merit more attention than bombed-out Belgrade?
Bush and Putin, for all their rhetorical disagreements, have found a common tongue.
Ultimately, we are faced with two presidents whose election to the top post in their countries was accompanied by elements that were bizarre in the extreme.
After the presidential election in Russia, the press discovered an orgy of vote-rigging compared to which all the marvels that occurred in Florida seem like a childish joke. In other words, the Russian bureaucrats also have a lot to teach their US colleagues.