Russia's spiraling nightmare.

• Author: Nathan, James A.

On the cusp of the millennium, conditions in Russia seem ripe for a reiteration of the ageless kashmar! (nightmare) of mass disorder. The specter that haunts the country is the bunt: a peculiarly Russian spasm of violence. The bunt is the apparition that visited the Romanov royal family from the "Time of Troubles" to its brutal extermination at Ekaterinburg. As the Tsar's advisor, Count Sergei Witte, warned just before he resigned: "The Russian bunt, mindless, pitiless ... sweep[ing] everything, could face the regime with horrors [that] exceed everything known in history. . . ."

Conditions for yet another bunt seem to be brewing in a soup stirred by monied "new Russians," flavored by pandemic nihilism, and stocked by despair. The real face of most Russians seems a gumbo peppered by underpaid middle-age professionals, alcohol-steeped unemployment (now in excess of 50% of the working-age population), prostitution, a tattered military, forlorn lines of old women, and hollow-eyed soldiers begging in city markets and rail stations from one end of Russia to another.

Ordinary murder once was something of a novelty in metropolitan Russia. Now, bombings and machine gun executions are as common in Moscow and St. Petersburg as they were in Prohibition-era Chicago. The head of the Interior Ministry's organized crime unit, Gen. Vladimir Vasiliev, estimates that 30-40% of the Russian economy is under the control of organized crime. A recent survey by Transparency International, a Berlin-based think tank, rated Russia the world's fourth most corrupt country, after Nigeria, Bolivia, and Colombia.

Russia's military is dissolving in a miasma of criminality, alcohol, pollution, and rust. Most soldiers see their weapons as a source of barter or an instrument of crime. The ragtag collection of praetorians who still can be mustered, often as not, now serve those quasi or wholly criminal regional bosses who keep them fed. Obvious signs of military corruption abound. While draftees, enlisted men, and even officers moonlight, growing vegetables to survive, the army elite has sponsored a boom in opulent country house construction -- on an "average" wage of around $700 a month.

The Russian military estimates that it has just four percent of the resources needed to keep its equipment serviceable. Nearly all of Russia's 200 submarines are rusting dockside, many leaking nuclear fuels. Some boats, from time to time, sink. A year ago, on Army Day, Russian Defense Minister...