Nobody Knows the Trouble They'll See : RUSSIA 2010: And What It Means for the World, <i> By Daniel Yergin & Thane Gustafson (Random House: $23; 320 pp.) </i>

By A. Craig Copetas

Jan. 9, 1994 12 AM PT

<i> A. Craig Copetas, winner of the 1990 Olive Branch Award for his work as Moscow correspondent for Regardie's Magazine, is the author of "Bear Hunting With the Politburo" and a former visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute of Advanced Soviet Study at Columbia University</i>

I am perhaps not alone in thinking a Cold War needs to be declared on books filled with motivational anecdotes that offer American and Russian leaders inspiration. Once an author gets anywhere near to mentioning streamlined nuclear deterrent strategies, or divulging on the dust cover that my $23 will buy a read which “grew out of a confidential study developed for a select group of international companies by a leading international consulting firm,” it’s time to sound a Red Alert.

‘Russia 2010” is yet another foundation-grant spinner in the perpetual motion of Russia/ex-USSR books. Its tragedy is twofold: It misses a huge and untouched constituency of book-buyers who, though curious about Russia, are anesthetized by tautological surveys; and, perhaps more consequential, this type of hyped discourse mugs State Department analysts (who blundered in predicting Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, the 1991 putsch, and the 1993 artillery barrage) into conceiving what-it-means-for-the-world Russian strategies like medieval monks locked in a cloister.

Co-authors Daniel Yergin, a 1992 Pulitzer Prize winner for his book “The Prize,” and Thane Gustafson, a Georgetown University professor and former think-tanker at the Rand Corp., seem to enjoy drowning in the Russia chaos they want so hard to save us from. After balling together enough Russian yarns to stuff a bear, they unwind these wet narratives around projected events to create four possible life forms to inhabit Future Russia. The technique is called “scenario planning,” a drill developed at Shell Oil in the early 1970s and now popular among consulting firms and military forecasters to calculate “a structured, disciplined method for thinking about the future.”

So what’s new in “2010”? Not much, especially for those who’ve taken the time to be haunted by Brian Cox’s recent “Salem to Moscow,” or mesmerized by the prescience in any of W. Bruce Lincoln’s histories of the early days of Bolshevism. Indeed, the MTV crowd would learn more by spending a couple of bucks for the late Frank Zappa’s 1989 Financial News Network reports on how to develop trade with the USSR.

The four “scenarios” are imaginative graduate-school exercises, but alongside the elegant calisthenics of “Rethinking the Soviet Experience” by Stephen Cohen, “Russia 2010” has as much original power and fury as “The Little Engine That Could.”

What’s angering about “Russia 2010” is that Yergin and Gustafson have all the professional gear to be the Lewis & Clarke of the new Russia, yet they wade around in Russia’s entrails, sometimes divining prophecy like guest experts on McNeil/Lehrer, at other times sounding like the holiday tourist who acquires expertise through a long night drinking with apparatchiks aboard the Red Arrow train between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The authors maintain, for example, that whatever precise form Russian capitalism takes, by 2010 it will be a force to be reckoned with in the world economy. “Increasingly, Russian will be a language heard in the financial district, the industrial fairs, the business hotels, and the ski slopes and beaches of the world.” Such declarative wisdom, especially from a Pulitzer Prize winner, is an intellectual misdemeanor. In discussing Russia’s prime movers, the term used in scenario development for the actors able to alter the game, they go for the felony: “As powerful as organized crime has become in Russia the last few years, it is not a prime mover in the fate of Russia and will not become one.” This kind of announcement is rooted in the disingenuous belief made popular during the Industrial Revolution that society needs a few crooks to amass wealth so that later generations can afford to grow into law-abiding capitalists.

Each Future Russia scenario is written in Milton-Bradley prose, game boards included. Muddling Down, in which Russia disintegrates, is Chutes & Ladders; Two-Headed Eagle, in which Russia becomes a militaristic plutocracy, is Stratego; Time of Troubles is Risk for real; and Chudo (Russian for miracle) is a convincing Candyland. Players in each game are required to accept such basic instructions as, “The core of the Soviet system has been obliterated. The Communist ideology and its center of power, the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, have been destroyed.” This might float in an oil company think tank, but anyone who’s done hard time in Russia will smile at such a notion.

In varying degrees, Yergin and Gustafson underpin each sandcastle scenario with the assumption that the ruble can be gauged with an aerodynamic precision, neglecting to consider the drag of conservative estimates that show half the $31.7 billion Russia earned from exports in 1992 (and nearly three times the $6 billion designated by the World Bank for stabilizing the ruble) fleeing Russia in the same year. A country’s currency is only as strong as the goods produced by its economy, and money remains robust through reinvestment, not capital flight. Russia manufactures nothing the West wants. The Siberian El Dorado is too expensive for sufficient exploitation; moreover, the price of reaching, harvesting and transporting this red herring is too cost intensive to pay back Western investors while concurrently fueling the velocity of immediate hard currency Russia needs to catapult its 150 million people into the 21st Century. As for the coherent economic policy necessary to glue an economic miracle together by 2010, forget it. Russia is still debating how best to invent the wheel while jets zoom overhead, and for Yergin and Gustafson even momentarily to apply Wall Street wizardry to the ruble is to scumble the basic grammar of Russia.

Yet Yergin and Gustafson are obsessive to the point of desperation to hold that Russia should be considered a Western-style country. Between the lines of all four scenarios lurks the view that the demise of systemic communism automatically gave Russian leaders a right to be judged as amateur democrats. By the most liberal of Western political and economic standards, Russian leaders are dangerous, Barnum & Bailey with nuclear weapons. That’s the reality of Russian realpolitik, and it won’t get you invited to a Russian Embassy cocktail party. Tactful? No, but notarized in whispers by more Western diplomats than one might imagine.

There are certainly democrats and economic reformers in Russia, but not in the boxcar loads necessary to pull off the socioeconomic miracle the authors fancy throughout and try to sell in the final chapter. “What follows is a snapshot taken along Russia’s road to the market,” Yergin and Gustafson begin in the urgent pomp of a full page, italicized epigram. “These are not scenarios. The people are real, and their words are their own. Except for the tycoon Neverov, only their names and a few details have been changed for their own protection . “

Then, in this “Dragnet” style, comes the phenomenal tale of young Ivan, a Russian entrepreneur under mafia pressure to turn $200,000 worth of Western goods over to heavily armed cutthroats. Blistering barnacles! Ivan calls in the KGB, who put a recording device on him. The mysterious gangsters are escorted away in handcuffs.

“It looks like an American film,” says Ivan. “If there wasn’t a KGB, the mafia would be in control.

“I’ve never dreamed about the future,” he says at the end of the visit. “And I don’t dream about the future now. There’s a Russian proverb--that a drunken sailor can come and knock everything over.”

Cartoon-bubble reportage with a moral is a fine way to end “The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” but certainly not a book that offers authoritative jacket blurbs by former U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss and former Defense and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger. It makes an old Moscow correspondent wonder who’s been kidding whom all these years. If Yergin and Gustafson had hoped to leave us with an electric parable on a Russian miracle, they would have done better to locate and identify Ivan’s tormentors, and find out how much it cost them to get back into the miracle economy. In Russian, it’s called kto kovo , and it’s a shame the authors, who pepper “Russia 2010” with selected Russian-language aphorisms, failed to check out this phrase before concluding “the state never quite managed to control the black market.”

Nonetheless, there’s an influential category of individuals who will regard a book termed “visionary and provocative” by Richard Nixon on the dust jacket as deserving more than cynicism honed on reporting Moscow’s mean streets and Gorbachev/Yeltsin press conferences. If you count yourself among this distinguished group, I respectfully paraphrase what the late U.S. ambassador Chip Bohlen had to say over a poker game at Spasso House, “The only people to beware of in life are those who say I never get drunk on champagne, and the ones who want to tell you what’s going to happen in Russia.”