August 24, 1997  
This Date's Issues: 1141 •1142  • 1143

Johnson's Russia List
#1142
24 August 1997
djohnson@cdi.org

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Washington Post: Peter Reddaway, Beware the Russian Reformer.
While the U.S. Depends On Chubais, Accusations Fly in Moscow.
2. Washington Post: Abraham Brumberg, Old Corruptions in a New 
Regime. (Review of THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA By Andrei Sinyavsky).
3. New York Times: Nancy Ramsey, A Grim Reality Check in Russia.
(Film in Russia).
4. The Times (UK): Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The march of the 
hypocrites.
5. Reuter: Ukraine marks independence, battles with economy.]

********

#1
Washington Post
24 August 1997
[for personal use only]
Beware the Russian Reformer
While the U.S. Depends On Chubais, Accusations Fly in Moscow
By Peter Reddaway
Peter Reddaway is professor of political science at George Washington 
University. 

When Russian president Boris Yeltsin appointed 42-year-old economist 
Anatoly Chubais to serve as a first deputy prime minister in March, 
Western leaders were pleased. Chubais has a reputation as the most 
aggressive advocate of market reforms in the Kremlin and as the 
mastermind of Yeltsin's successful reelection campaign last year. For 
the past five years, he (along with Yeltsin) has been the United 
States's key ally in Moscow. With Chubais and his handpicked team in 
charge of running the finance ministry, beefing up tax collection and 
overseeing the media, U.S. policymakers felt the government's commitment 
to democracy and market reforms was solid. As Lawrence Summers, deputy 
secretary of the U.S. Treasury, put it, Russia now has a "reenergized 
presidency and an economic dream team."

Russian reactions to Chubais have been far more skeptical. As he pursues 
tax deadbeats and cracks his whip over regional barons, Chubais has run 
into fierce criticism and determined opposition across the political 
spectrum. Critics have accused him of censoring the media, undermining 
democracy, engaging in dubious personal dealings, taking orders from 
Washington and building a criminalized form of capitalism. Chubais is 
now more disliked than any other national politician except, perhaps, 
the extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Surveys by independent 
polling firms in Moscow usually indicate both are disliked by some 80 
percent of the population. 

Until 1990, Chubais was a research economist and member of the communist 
party in what is now St. Petersburg. Then he entered politics, and, 
after the hard-line coup attempt of 1991, left the party. He first made 
a name for himself in 1992 and '93, when he oversaw a sweeping 
privatization of the factories of the old Soviet economy. In this role, 
Chubais steered American aid money to the drafters of the needed 
legislation and to the Russian Privatization Center, which facilitated 
the sale of government enterprises.

The goal was to find effective new owners who would boost lagging 
production. Though the legislation was eventually approved by an anxious 
and grudging parliament, the actual privatization process soon provoked 
storms of protest: It had been done too quickly, ordinary people had 
lost out to the strong and powerful, old monopolies had survived in 
semi-privatized form, and, allegedly, Chubais had enabled his personal 
and political friends to acquire prize assets by unfair means. These 
charges were mostly ignored in the West, which tended to regard them 
merely as the expressions of pain inevitable when the old, unsustainable 
ways of a communist economy are opened up to competing forces.

U.S. policymakers were and are explicit about their dependence on 
Chubais. Richard Morningstar, the coordinator of U.S. assistance to the 
former Soviet Union, said in a recent interview published in Prague, "If 
we hadn't been there to provide funding to Chubais, could we have won 
the battle to carry out privatization? Probably not. When you're talking 
about a few hundred million dollars [i.e., the annual average of 
bilateral aid to Russia], you're not going to change the country, but 
you can provide targeted assistance to help Chubais."

The international financial community was likewise wedded to Chubais. 
When Russia approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for 
assistance in early 1995, one of the fund's conditions for extending a 
$6.4 billion loan involved Chubais. According to Anders Aslund of the 
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has been deeply involved 
in dealings between the Russian government on the one side and the IMF 
and the U.S. government on the other, the IMF wanted Chubais in charge 
of economic policy. The IMF did not heed the warnings of Russia's former 
finance minister and representative to the World Bank, Boris Fedorov, a 
pro-market economist, that the loan was a bad idea. "Why should we 
borrow billions of dollars," he wrote, "when not a single person 
believes they'll be spent for the common good?"

At home, Chubais's unpopularity was growing. Later in 1995, he presided 
over an unorthodox fund-raising scheme known as "loans for shares." The 
ostensible aim was to raise badly needed revenue for the budget. In 
theory, the government was to hold auctions of the shares it owned in 
large corporations, at which banks would bid freely and winners would 
make payment to the treasury in the form of loans. However, when 
Russia's independent accounting office later investigated the operation, 
it revealed massive fraud. Not only were the assets undervalued and the 
winners predetermined, but the government actually deposited its own 
funds into the banks that won the auctions. So the banks made the loans 
using the government's own money, and the whole transaction was, for the 
Kremlin, not a major infusion of cash but a net loss. In the resulting 
uproar, Yeltsin felt obliged to fire Chubais.

"How those auctions were fouled up," the Russian president exclaimed in 
January 1996. "Our enterprises were sold for next to nothing!" The 
powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, a long-standing enemy of 
Chubais, went further. He declared that Chubais's conduct of 
privatization was so dubious that it required criminal investigation. He 
then urged the de-privatization of four large companies whose shares had 
been handed over at knockdown prices, a demand that was ignored.

But Yeltsin found he could not do without Chubais's considerable 
organizational skills. In March 1996, with his personal approval ratings 
in the single digits, the Russian president quietly rehired Chubais to 
take over his reelection campaign. Chubais raised huge amounts of money 
from the private sector, organized Yeltsin's advertising campaign and 
pushed the president to stump around the country. Yeltsin beat the 
lackluster communist Gennady Zyuganov in the July 1996 runoff.

Again, though, questions arose about Chubais's performance. Even members 
of the Yeltsin campaign admitted that its leaders had spent about $100 
million, when the law allowed a maximum of $2.9 million. (Opponents put 
the figure at about $500 million.) More importantly, Chubais's 
credibility suffered a major blow in Russian eyes when he was caught in 
repeated lies about a murky episode in which two of his associates were 
arrested carrying a box with $538,000 in cash out of the main government 
building. Within hours of his aides' detention, Chubais and his allies 
organized a media campaign to impugn the motives of his main rivals in 
the executive branch -- notably Yeltsin's security chief, Alexander 
Korzhakov, who had ordered the arrest. In the ensuing showdown, Yeltsin 
sided with Chubais and dismissed Korzhakov. 

At a press conference afterward, an exuberant Chubais declared that his 
associates were innocent. "The so-called `box of money,' " he said, "is 
one of the traditional elements in traditional provocations of the 
KGB-Soviet type, of which we've had very great experience in our 
country." He professed hope that an investigation of the incident would 
reveal the truth.

The widespread suspicion that the cash was government money to be used 
illegally for Yeltsin's reelection sparked a considerable outcry in the 
press. Yeltsin vowed, after his reelection, that he would not give 
Chubais a new job. Two weeks later, however, Yeltsin reversed himself 
and appointed Chubais as head of the presidential administration, a more 
powerful post than the U.S. White House chief of staff. He also declared 
that all governmental decrees would have to be approved by Chubais 
before he would sign them.

Last November, new revelations about Chubais and the box of money 
revived the scandal in the Moscow media. Moskovsky Komsomolets, Moscow's 
most widely read newspaper, published a transcript of a taped 
conversation between Chubais and some colleagues two days after the box 
incident. On the tape, they discussed covert funding for the campaign. 
One of the colleagues says that he had told Yeltsin by phone that 15 to 
20 people a day could be caught carrying cash out of campaign 
headquarters in sports bags. Chubais expressed great concern for "our 
guys," who had been caught with the money.

"It was we who sent them there -- not somebody else, but us," he was 
quoted as saying. "We'll pay for this with our heads."

Once again Chubais toughed it out: He claimed that no such conversation 
had taken place. But subsequent investigations by independent 
consultants showed that the tape was authentic. Yeltsin was then 
bombarded with demands from the parliament and other groups that Chubais 
be dismissed -- which he ignored. Chubais, meanwhile, according to 
Moskovsky Komsomolets, was warning media executives not to allow further 
discussion of the whole episode in their publications or on television. 
An article in the paper pointed out that the main TV channels were 
controlled by Chubais's associates and concluded that "the political 
censorship we had all forgotten about has once again spread its wings."

Opposition to Chubais has spread beyond the ranks of nationalists and 
communists. His threats to dissolve the Duma, the lower house of the 
Russian parliament, and to have Yeltsin dismiss regional governors in 
the Federation Council, the more conservative upper house, have provoked 
opposition from sectors previously supportive of Yeltsin. In June, a 
majority of the council members signed a declaration of solidarity with 
the Duma, denouncing the threats to close it down. This sort of 
radicalism from the Federation Council has no precedent, because the 
council consists exclusively of the regional governors and the heads of 
regional parliaments, all of whom need viable relations with the Kremlin 
in order to obtain government funds. The declaration, however, was 
published only in a small-circulation paper belonging to the opposition.

Commentators believe that since Chubais has aligned himself with 
Russia's increasingly powerful banks, Western support is now less 
important to his political survival. In May, Chubais said that Russia 
would not need anymore IMF loans in the future. Then he wrote a letter 
to Brian Atwood, the head of the U.S. Agency for International 
Development, asking him to terminate all economic reform contracts with 
Harvard. "Because of changing conditions," he stated, their continuation 
was "not consistent with Russian interests." 

The real issue, apart from a dispute over allegedly improper behavior by 
two Harvard advisers, was control of the Russian stock market. 
Previously, Chubais had supported the idea that an equivalent of the 
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should monitor and control the 
stock market. So U.S. funding had been channeled through Harvard to 
build up an effective regulatory commission. But the big banks prefer 
the so-called "German model," in which banks regulate the financial 
securities industry. They know they would not face the considerable 
checks on bank power erected by the Germans. Chubais has, in his first 
break with the Western privatization program, endorsed the "German 
model." As one Western banker in Moscow said, "This gives incredible 
power to the banks. They will hold the reins of the securities market 
and have a strong influence on the pricing of shares."

Grigory Yavlinsky, an economist and unsuccessful presidential candidate, 
says that Chubais and his cohorts in the government are creating "a 
corporatist and criminalized sort of capitalism." He charges that 
Chubais's policies are bleeding the economy at huge social cost with 
little discernible benefit. He is also alarmed by a new tax code being 
promoted by Chubais that would give the tax enforcement authorities such 
draconian powers that it would, if not modified, help to create "the 
prerequisites for a police state."

Chubais's claim to be a dedicated democrat, says Moskovsky Komsomolets, 
is hypocritical. One of the paper's leading commentators charged last 
month that Chubais "is a much bigger communist than Zyuganov" and uses 
"authoritarian, purely Stalinist methods." Recently, the liberal Moscow 
paper, Obshchaya Gazeta, summed up what most of the political elite 
feels about Chubais when it accused him of working to concentrate 
control of the economy, the political system and the media in the hands 
of a few politicians and bankers.

Such is the public standing of the man who is at the heart of U.S. 
policy toward Russia. His questionable integrity and authoritarian ways 
are fostering anti-Western sentiments in the Russian public and 
compromising the ability of the U.S. government to maintain viable 
relations with Russia. We should, in my view, stop funding a corrupt 
government and stop supporting individuals who not backed by their own 
people.

**********

#2
Washington Post
24 August 1997
[for personal use only]
Book World
Old Corruptions in a New Regime
By Abraham Brumberg
Abraham Brumberg has written frequently on Russia and Eastern Europe.

Review of
THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA
By Andrei Sinyavsky
Translated from the Russian by Lynn Visson
Columbia University Press. 98 pp. $19.95

I HAVE A friend in Moscow, in his early sixties, who embodies some 
typical traits ascribed to the Russian intelligentsia. A champion of 
human rights, he was expelled from the Communist Party, and for a number 
of years, while suffering from other misfortunes, he considered his 
expulsion the greatest misfortune of all. Of course to be shorn of party 
membership also meant to be deprived of access to certain amenities 
enjoyed by the country's political elite. Still, I am sure that for my 
friend the loss of party membership constituted more of a spiritual than 
a material calamity.

Then came Gorbachev, and my friend was overjoyed. When Gorbachev was 
cast into limbo, my friend became an enthusiastic disciple of Yeltsin 
and, while unhappy about some of his new leader's policies, has remained 
loyal to him to this day, becoming a leading member of the "democrats." 
What he miraculously failed to perceive, it seemed to me, was how he had 
been seduced by the perquisites of his position, which included a car 
and driver to take him to his spacious office in the "White House" (seat 
of parliament and government) and the use of a special Kremlin store 
(this, of course, before Moscow was inundated with fruits, vegetables, 
smoked meats and Gillette razor blades following the deregulation of 
consumer prices in January 1992 and the enthronement of the "free 
market"). I remember suggesting to my friend that one result of the 
blessed free market reforms was the creation of an obscenely bloated 
"new class" on the one hand, and masses of impoverished citizens on the 
other. He was reluctant to grant the latter, but "anyway," he would say, 
"all this is temporary, an inevitable detour on the way to full 
prosperity."

I relate this tale because my Moscow friend is one of the many Russian 
intellectuals that Andrei Sinyavsky had in mind in a series of lectures 
he delivered at New York's Columbia University and that are now 
available in book form. A brilliant essayist and short story writer, 
Sinyavsky (who died a few months ago) in the 1950s and '60s smuggled his 
works to the West, where they appeared under the pseudonym "Abram 
Tertz." Arrested in 1965 along with Yuri Daniel, a writer who also sent 
his works abroad (as "Nikolai Arzhak"), and then sentenced to seven 
years' hard labor for disseminating "anti-Soviet propaganda," Sinyavsky 
was permitted to emigrate to Paris with his wife and son in 1973.

SINYAVSKY'S LECTURES constitute a scathing indictment of the slice of 
Russian society known for more than a century as the "Russian 
intelligentsia." A cri de coeur would perhaps be a more accurate 
description of the book, since many of those Sinyavsky castigates, in 
anger as much as in sorrow, were his friends. In his view, they betrayed 
their calling as the "conscience of the nation," as the critics and 
enemies of autocracy in whatever guise it may appear.

Instead, says Sinyavsky, they yielded to the temptation of power as soon 
as they were allowed a taste of it themselves. They have justified the 
appalling results of Russia's "economic reforms" -- the corruption and 
crime, the impoverished state of millions of people, the horrendous 
social inequalities. They closed their eyes to some of Yeltsin's savage 
acts, such as the use of force against the Russian parliament in October 
1993, conjuring up shabby excuses to justify something that could easily 
have been avoided and that in fact represented the third suppression of 
a duly elected representative body in 20th-century Russia (the other two 
being the tsarist closing of the first parliament, or Duma, in July 1906 
and Lenin's dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918).

As so often in history, Yeltsin's supporters argued that "there was no 
alternative." (I recall an eminent Russian jurist, an intelligent and a 
"democrat," assuring me that the parliament was in the hands of 
"anti-Semitic scum" who had to be "destroyed" lest the country turn into 
a "fascist dictatorship" -- for which there was about as much evidence 
as there was for the claim that Gorbachev had tried to revive a 
"Communist" dictatorship.)

Most grievously, says Sinyavsky, most of the "democrats" supported the 
beastly Chechnya War and the transparent lies Yeltsin and his supporters 
used to justify the carnage, as an editorial in Izvestia put it, 
"because of the vastly greater threat of a Bolshevik restoration." It is 
instructive to be reminded of the fawning behavior of some leading 
intellectuals, including the recently deceased balladeer Bulat 
Okudzhava; the poet Bella Akhmadulina; Yegor Gaidar, the father of 
"shock therapy"; and many others. Sinyavsky cites the strident appeals 
to their hero ("the major bulwark of democracy in Russia") to dissolve 
the "parties and associations," the bands of "political provocateurs and 
hooligans" who dare to oppose him -- all uncomfortably reminiscent of 
the hysterical demands in the 1930s to do away with the "mad dogs" 
daring to oppose Stalin.

To his dismay, Sinyavsky discovered, by examining materials pertaining 
to the year 1937 (the most horrifying in the annals of Stalinist 
terror), that many Russian intellectuals of that time, including such 
revered figures as Boris Pasternak and Konstantin Paustovsky, toadied to 
Stalin. In the past, many students of Russia (including this reviewer) 
were inclined to assume that this was the price these figures had to pay 
to save themselves and their families; and no doubt this was true for 
some. But what can be said -- to cite but one example -- of the entry in 
the private diary of the much-admired writer Kornei Chukovsky that 
records how he and Pasternak were "intoxicated by the joy" they 
experienced in coming face to face with Stalin? (Compare this with the 
gushing actress at a reception for Yeltsin in the Kremlin: "You are 
getting so tired, dear Boris Nikolayevich! Come see us and take a 
break.")

In drawing parallels with the 1930s, Sinyavsky sometimes goes over the 
top: The reign of Yeltsin, with all its repugnant features, cannot be 
compared to Stalin's terror, nor are reactions to the two always 
analogous. But he is penetrating in illustrating the extent to which 
Russian intellectuals have imbibed some of the most noxious norms of 
Soviet political culture: intolerance, leader worship, the tendency to 
reduce every conflict to a life-and-death struggle between the forces of 
light and darkness and to ascribe the vilest motives to political 
opponents.

Above all, Sinyavsky helps to entomb the conventional concept of 
"intelligentsia." In fact, as the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada 
observed some time ago, the intelligentsia -- in the sense of an 
independent, free-thinking force defining itself in opposition to the 
country's rulers -- had vanished already before the birth of the Soviet 
Union. Of course not all were lured, either then or now, onto the 
slippery road to power, and some who embody the old pre-revolutionary 
values of the intelligentsia endure. Andrei Sinyavsky, who never shirked 
a good fight, was eminently one of them.

********* 

#3
New York Times
24 August 1997
[for personal use only]
A Grim Reality Check in Russia
By NANCY RAMSEY

MOSCOW -- Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema," Lenin
reportedly said not long after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. With a
population that outside the cities was largely made up of people who couldn't
read, cinema would become a "powerful media of enlightenment for the masses,"
he said. But today Russian film directors hesitate to tell people their
profession. 
"There's no prestige; it means you're very poor," says Aleksandr Baranov. 
"People either think I'm sleeping with someone powerful or that I'm a
bandita, a criminal," says Natalya Pyankova. 
Six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, filmmakers in Russia and
the former republics are in crisis, much like their counterparts in Poland,
the Czech Republic and Hungary. The once powerful Mosfilm and Lenfilm
Studios, which regularly produced more than 60 films a year during the Soviet
era, today turn out no more than a handful. A distribution system that
insured that films would play across the Soviet Union has been undermined by
videotapes (many pirated), rundown theaters, audiences' inability to afford
theater tickets and the popularity of Grade B American action movies. 
Gone are the good old days of censors and state subsidies, when filmmakers
used an Aesopian language to tell their stories, when irony, indirection,
satire, humor, metaphorical language and surrealism were the esthetic. Gone
too are the heady days of perestroika, when state censorship was lifted yet
there was still a strong ideology to resist. 
All of this is a serious jolt both to artists and to an industry that once
held an exalted position, giving the world Sergei Eisenstein ("Potemkin") and
Vsevolod Pudovkin ("Mother") as far back as the 1920's and, more recently,
Andrei Tarkovsky ("Andrei Rublev") and Nikita Mikhalkov ("Burnt by the Sun").
The problems faced by filmmakers all over Eastern Europe are writ large in
Russia, a vast, chaotic land with little tradition of democracy or market
economy but a great one of holding its artists in special regard. 
"In Russia, artists were always considered to be prophets," said Naum
Kleiman, the director of Moscow's Film Museum. "Now artists no longer have a
function in society. For us, cinema was a liberating language; we had very
good and honest artists trying to bring us the truth. We had people who used
to go to the cinema 40, 50 times a year. Now that audience is destroyed." 
In a country where a long talk in a cramped kitchen -- over vodka, salty
fish and dark bread -- would once have brought on rambling discourses on the
Russian soul, talk with filmmakers today, over Turkish coffee, is about
markets, distribution. Audiences were once a given, after a film was approved
by censors; now, who the audience is for a particular film is open to
question. And this uncertainty is affecting story lines and esthetics in
general. 
"For the last several years, filmmakers in Russia have been making films
not for their audiences but for international festivals, boards of five to
seven people," said Daniil Dondurey, editor of Film Art. "And what are those
seven people expecting? They want to see that Russia is a horrible country,
that a killer will never be punished, that there are no happy endings, that
moral values will never win. And the director wants to show that he is a
courageous boy who shows this to the world." 
Such dark themes are not new. During perestroika, when it became
permissible to criticize the system directly, most filmmakers found it hard
to resist doing anything else. Chernukha, or blackness, became the order of
the day. Vasily Pichul's "Little Vera" (1988), for instance, showed the life
of a provincial working class teen-age girl in all its loneliness and
uncertainty. Chernukha still holds many in its sway: Aleksei Balabanov's new
film, "Brother," is about a rootless young soldier who returns to civilian
life and becomes a professional killer (acclaimed at festivals, the film has
yet to find a distributor in Russia). 
But stories that portray the motherland as a safe house for criminals are
ones that Russian audiences no longer want to see, and that filmmakers are
moving away from telling. 
"I got tired of so many killers and prostitutes," Mr. Baranov said of his
most recent film, "Shanghai." Named after a neighborhood in Alma-Ata,
Kazakhstan, the film follows seven days in the lives of several people,
including a boy and his grandfather, an artist and a couple who talk of
moving to Moscow. "I looked around to see how we live now," continued Mr.
Baranov. "People came up to me after they saw it and said, 'It's been a long
time since we've seen something that was about our own lives.' " 
Last month, "Shanghai" was one of more than two dozen films from Russia and
the former republics shown as part of the 20th Moscow International Film
Festival, a biennial event. Once a grand celebration, the festival was
plagued throughout its 11-day run this year by questions of whether it was
appropriate to spend a reported $6 million on a festival when the industry
here is near collapse. The film director Aleksandr Sokurov held up permission
to allow his "Mother and Son," a meditative film with little dialogue, to be
Russia's entry in the international competition, until he felt assured that
the $6 million could not have been redirected to filmmaking itself. ("Mother
and Son," which attracted much acclaim when it had its premiere at the Berlin
festival earlier this year, will be included in the New York Film Festival,
which starts next month.) 
Foreign visitors viewing the Moscow festival's Russian film series at Dom
Kino, the filmmakers' union headquarters, were often asked -- by Russian
critics, and even promoters -- why they were not going to see the films in
the international competition instead. Adding insult to injury, Dom Kino is
not open to the public, and the native films scheduled to run in commercial
theaters as a sideline to the festival were often canceled. One evening, at a
newly renovated theater minutes from Red Square, advance tickets to one
failed to sell, so a French thriller was substituted. 
Nevertheless, audiences say they want to see more Russian films, or at
least that's how they answered a market survey recently conducted by the new
head of Gorky Studios, Sergei Livnev. Production will start next month on an
ambitious project that many believe is the best hope to revive Russian film.
Gorky will release 12 movies a year, filmed for approximately $200,000
apiece, with private and public financing: comedy, romance, thrillers,
horrors, mysteries, all with happy endings. In a strategy to beat pirates at
their own game, these movies will be released on video immediately; the best
films will have a simultaneous theatrical release. "We want to create a new
old habit," said Mr. Livnev. "Each month, when you leave work on, say, the
15th, you pick up the latest video in your local metro station kiosk." 
Mr. Livnev, also a screenwriter and director, is new to producing; the son
of a well-known documentary maker, Marina Goldovskaya, he is only 33 years
old and is therefore someone who is not linked to the old state-subsidies
system. His most recent film, "Hammer and Sickle," is set in 1937 and centers
on a fictional sex change; it is a surrealistic, metaphorical journey into
the heart of Stalinism. 
Unfortunately, "Hammer and Sickle" was not on the schedule at Dom Kino,
because it was held up in litigation. On the calendar were films with an
assortment of themes: war, death, first love, loss of innocence, preserving
one's humanity against historical currents. Few of these films lived up to
the standards set by Russian cinema of years past; all were worth watching,
however, for how they reflected current society. 
"Cinema is a medium between myth and social reality," said Sergei
Dobrotvorsky, a critic who headed the festival's jury for Russian films. "We
lost our reality, the symbols of everyday being. In a Soviet film, you had
recognizable symbols: a Soviet apartment, specific books, a portrait of a
Russian poet and one of Ernest Hemingway on the wall. That reality is now
gone, and we are waiting for a new one." 
If Mr. Livnev, as a producer, is trying to create a new audience for
Russian films, filmmakers are searching for that point where myth and social
reality meet on the screen. The dominant esthetic that worked during Soviet
days, with metaphor and irony, is no longer viable, and critics agree that a
new one has yet to be created. But that does not mean that filmmakers are not
working energetically in a world they did not anticipate. Aside from bringing
to light wounds both old (pogroms) and new (ethnic conflict, on which "The
Graveyard of Daydreams," by the Georgian director Georgi Khaindrava, stood
out), here are four directions suggested by filmmakers who had movies at the
festival: 
Make films with, for and about your friends. This is a deeply rooted
Russian tradition: you could not count on the state, but you could count on
your friends. 
Ms. Pyankova's "Strange Times" focuses on the lives and loves of three
characters in Moscow. Critics immediately understood its title and enjoyed
its playfulness as men and women couple and uncouple. 
Focus on chernukha's antithesis: svetlukha, or lightness. "I want people to
laugh when they see my film," said Murad Ibragimbekov, the director of "A Man
for a Younger Woman." This film is based on a story by Mr. Ibragimbekov's
father, a well-known Azerbaijani writer: A middle-aged businessman visits an
alchemist for a youth potion so that the young actress he's in love with will
not leave him. He's sent to scrape off bits of a rhinoceros's horn, which
lands him in jail. The moral? Accept your fate. 
Stick to the tried and true, but give it more form. "Form is important,
content is not," said Abai Kharpikov, director of the stylized thriller "The
More Tender One." Mr. Kharpikov, along with Baranov, is one of several
filmmakers who came to be known as the Kazakh New Wave in the late 1980's.
They hailed from Kazakhstan, a republic settled by Khrushchev, which had in
effect lost its history and gained a Soviet one. And they reveled in making
"easterns," taking their lead from American westerns, French New Wave and the
directors' own sense of filmmaking as a game. Set in the vast open spaces of
their beautiful and desolate native land, the films offered a metaphor for
the vacuum left when the walls of the state collapsed. 
Be experimental and don't apologize for it. (Grants from the West are
easier to come by if you call yourself experimental.) 
One sideline to the festival was a program run by the Parallel Cinema
group, who began life in the Leningrad underground in the 1980's. (This work
was intended to run parallel to, or coexist with, official state cinema.)
Their films and videos included older work by the Necrorealists, who
substituted metaphors for a dying society for the socialist realism canon;
one critic described their work as "a harsh tragicomic vision suffused with
traces of black humor, surrealism, slapstick and a punk industrial style." 
Gleb Aleinikov is one of the more talented of the Parallel Cinema group.
Mr. Aleinikov, along with his brother Igor, made "Tractors" in 1987,
satirizing and eroticizing that most sacred of socialist realist symbols.
After Igor died in a 1994 Aeroflot crash, Gleb ceased being productive for a
while, but he recently began working again and just completed a road movie
begun in 1990. 
"We got used to the new," said Mr. Aleinikov of both his generation and the
last 10 years in Russian society. "During perestroika, there was always
something new. Then after the putsch, until 1995, people were waiting for
something to happen. Now we know what our situation is, and that we have to
act within this new world." 
Russia has always had an uneasy relationship with the present. "It's an old
Russian tradition, going back to Peter the Great," said Mr. Kleiman of
Moscow's Film Museum. "We're in a constant war with the past, we're looking
ahead with hope to the future, and we don't pay attention to the present. But
the situation today is completely new. Imagine being asleep for 70 years,
waking up, and the first place you're standing is on the edge of a roof. It's
a little hard to keep your balance."

*********

#4
The Times (UK)
21 August 1997
[for personal use only]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn denounces double standards in international
morality -- from Britain's bombing of Dresden to the tragedy in
Yugoslavia

The march of the hypocrites

In the Computer Age we still live by the law of the Stone Age: the man
with the bigger club is right. But we pretend this isn't so. We don't
notice or even suspect it -- why, surely our morality progresses
together with our civilisation. Professional politicians, meanwhile,
have deftly covered certain vices with a civilised veneer. In the 20th
century we have enriched ourselves with innovations in the field of
hypocrisy. We find ever more ingenious ways to apply double (triple?
quadruple?) standards.

The bloody Yugoslav tragedy has unfolded before our eyes (and is it over
yet?). To be sure, blame for it lies with the Communist coterie of
Josip Broz Tito, which imposed an arbitrary pattern of internal borders
upon the country, trampling on ethnic common sense, and even relocating
ethnic masses by force. Yet blame lies also with the venerable
community pf Western leaders, who -- with an angelic naivete -- took
those false borders seriously, and then hastened at a moment's notice,
in a day or two, to recognise the independence of several breakaway
republics whose political formation they apparently found to be
advantageous. It was these leaders, then, who nudged Yugoslavia toward
many gruelling years of civil war; and their position, declared as
neutral, was by no means such.

Yugoslavia, with its seven estranged peoples, was told to fall apart as
soon as possible. But Bosnia, with its three estranged peoples and
vivid memories of Witlerite Croatians slaughtering up to a million
Serbs, had to remain united at all costs - the particular insistence of
the United States Government. Who can explain the disparity of such an
approach?

Another example: the Trans-Dnestr Republic and Abkhazia were deemed
illegitimate simply because they were "self-prociaimed". But which of
the CIS countries was not "self-proclaimed'? Kazakhstan? Ukraine?
They were immediately and unconditionally recognised as legitimate, even
democratic (and the "Ukrainian Popular Self-Defence" Brownshirts
continue to march about freely, torches and all). Did not the United
States also "self-proclaim" their independence? Meanwhile, the Kurds
are not allowed even to self-proclaim. When they are not being squashed
by Iraq, with the tacit consent of the United States, then they are
being smashed by Nato member Turkey even on non-Turkish territory, while
the whole civilised world looks on with utter indifference. Are the
Kurds a "superfluous nation" on this earth?

Or take the Crimea and the port city of Sevastopol. Any sober mind on
either side would at least agree that the Crimean question is very
complex, whereas Ukraine's claim to Sevastopol has no legal base. Yet
the US State Department, choosing not to trouble itself with the history
of the matter, has continued to assert authoritatively, for six years
running, that both the Crimea and Sevastopol are unequivocally the
property of Ukraine, end of discussion. Would it presume to speak so
categorically on, say, the future of Northern Ireland?

Still another accomplishment of political hypocrisy is apparent in the
way in which we conduct "war crimes tribunals". Wars, for thousands of
years, have always been aggravated on both sides by crimes and
injustices. In hopes that a just reason might prevail, in order to make
sense of war and to punish evil passions and evil deeds, Russia proposed
The Hague Convention of 1899.

Yet no sooner did the first war crimes trial take place -- the Nazis at
Nuremberg -- than we saw, elevated high upon the judges' bench, the
unblemished administrators of a justice system that during those same
years handed over to torture, execution and untimely death tens of
millions of innocent lives in its own country.

And if we continue to differentiate between the always inevitable deaths
of soldiers at war and the mass killings of undoubtedly peaceful
citizens, then by what name shall we call those who, in a matter of
minutes, burnt to death 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima alone --
justifying the act with the astounding words, "to save the lives of our
soldiers"? That President and his entourage were never subjected to
trial, and they are remembered as worthy victors. And how shall we name
those who, with victory fully in hand, dispatched a two-day wave of
fighter bombers to reduce to ashes beautiful Dresden, a civilian city
teeming with refugees? The death toll was not far below Hiroshima, and
two orders of magnitude greater than at Coventry. The Coventry bombing,
however, was condemned in trial, while the Air Marshal who directed the
bombing of Dresden was not only spared the brand of "war criminal", but
towers over the British capital in a monument, as a national hero.

In an age marked by such a flourishing of jurisprudence, we ought to see
clearly that a well-considered international law is a law which justly
punishes criminals irrespective -- irrespective -- of their side's
victory or defeat. No such law has yet been created, found a firm
footing, or been universally recognised. It follows, then, that The
Hague tribunal still lacks sufficient legal authority with respect to
its accused and might on occasion lack impartiality. If so, its
verdicts would constitute reprisal, not justice. For all the numerous
corpses of civilians uncovered in Bosnia, from all the warring parties,
no suspects seem to have been found from the safeguarded Muslim side.
Finally we might mention this remarkable tactic: The Hague tribunal now
hands down indictments in secret, not announcing them publicly.
Somewhere, the accused is summoned on a civil matter, and immediately
captured -- a method beyond even the Inquisition, more worthy of
barbarians, circa 3,000 BC.

Perusing the world map, we find many examples of today's hypocritical
double standard. Here is but one more. In the Euro-American expanse,
all sorts of integration and partnership are cultivated and nurtured,
stretching over lands on the periphery of this space, like Ukraine,
willing, even to incorporate faraway Central Asia. At the same time,
all sorts of political interference and economic pressure are vigilantly
applied in order to derail the very plan of a rapprochement between
Belarus and Russia.

And what of Nato expansion? Which, by the way, adds allies who surely
will remain apathetic and useless vis-a-vis the Alliance's global,
non-European aims. It is either the traditional Cold War hypnosis,
impairing one's ability to see the powerlessness of Russia, beset by
internal troubles. Or, on the contrary, it is extreme far-sightedness
on the part of Nato's leaders. Should the high-tariff strangling of
Russian exports (except for coercively cheap natural resource exports)
prove insufficient: should the implacable diktat of Russian internal
policy (bundled with loans that only enfeeble) prove insufficient as
well; there will now be, in reserve; the "neutralisation" of Russia into
a comatose state.

I have not the means to guess whether Russia's current leaders
understand this: Most likely they do not: witness their own clumsy
participation in that elegant new phenomenon of the "peacekeeping
forces" in Bosnia or Tajikistan; or their confused, lost policies
regarding the CIS countries, or their doomed attempts to hold on to
Chechnya, with reckless disregard for the human cost; witness, finally,
their blind inability to find a reasonable and just solution to the
controversy over the Kuril Islands.

They see themselves at the helm of the ship of Russian history, but they
are not. They do not direct the course of events.

As for those who do, their plans to establish a "final worldwide
security" are ephemeral as well. Given human nature we ought never to
attain such security. It would be futile, at the very least, to march
towards this goal armed with hypocrisy and scheming short-term
calculations, as practised by a revolving door of, officials and by the
powerful financial circles that back them, Nor can security be bought
with any new technical "superinvention" -- for no secret lasts. Only if
the creative and active forces of mankind dedicate themselves to finding
gradual and effective restraints against the evil facets of human nature
to an elevation of our moral conscious-ness -- only then will a faint,
distant hope exist. To embark upon this path, and to walk it, requires
a penitent, pure heart and the wisdom and willingiress to place
constraints on one's own side, to limit oneself even before limiting
others. But today that path only elicits an ironic chuckle, if not open
ridicule.

If so, don't bother calling for "world security".

*********

#5
Ukraine marks independence, battles with economy
By Irene Marushko 
KIEV, Aug 24 (Reuter) - Ukraine celebrated its sixth anniversary of
independence from Soviet rule on Sunday, and the main surprise for its
detractors is that it still exists. 
The country's declaration of independence in 1991, supported by 90 percent of
its 51 million people, was the Soviet empire's death blow and marked the end
of 300 years of rule from Moscow. Now the struggle is to reform and fully
stabilise the economy. 
``The child is now six years old and many are puzzled that it's still
alive,'' Ivan Drach, president of the All-World Forum of Ukrainians, said at
a conference last week marking the event. 
The organisation unites native Ukrainians and some 10 million ethnic
Ukrainians scattered across 46 countries. 
Ukraine's thousand-year-old history began with the mighty Kievan Rus empire
but since then has mostly been spent under the rule of various invading
powers. 
Drach asked delegates to lay flowers at memorials to the poet Taras
Shevchenko, who 150 years ago called on Ukrainians to break the chains of
tsarist rule, and to the seven million Ukrainian victims of a 1930s famine
during dictator Josef Stalin's rule. 
``Ukraine has gone through difficult times,'' said President Leonid Kuchma in
his independence day speech. ``Now there must be intensive work done to solve
Ukraine's internal problems.'' 
The new Ukraine has yet to vanquish an economic crisis which began the day it
was born, leaving millions living below the poverty line and waiting for the
cash-strapped government to deliver a wage backlog totalling $3.6 billion. 
But annual inflation was forecast at about 15 percent this year against a
whopping 10,300 percent in 1993. The hryvnia, the currency last used in the
Kievan Rus period and re-introduced last year, has remained rock solid. 
``Certainly the transition from the kind of economy that existed in the
Soviet Union has been difficult. No one is under any illusions that it has
been easy,'' said U.S. ambassador William Miller. ``But there has been
significant progress.'' 
Kuchma, elected to a five-year term in 1994 on a platform of closer ties with
Russia but who subsequently aimed his policies in favour of the West, noted
Ukraine had signed treaties with neighbouring Russia, Belarus, Poland and
Romania. 
The Russia deal in May settled the long-standing dispute over the Black Sea
Fleet in Crimea. Ukraine went on to celebrate the first anniversary of its
new constitution in June, and followed up by signing a special Charter with
NATO in July. 
``This is a transition period,'' said the president, who last year said
Ukraine's biggest accomplishment was preservation of civil peace and
inter-ethnic harmony. 
One Western diplomat said the continuing economic crisis detracted from the
anniversary and pointed to a general ``rudderlessness'' and insecurity on the
part of Ukrainians whether independence was desirable. 
``Because of the continuing economic pain and no prospect of rapid
improvement, at least not that the leadership has been able to convey, the
ordinary Ukrainian has not been able to win from foreign policy gains, which
have been numerous,'' he said. 
The government under Kuchma, a Russian-speaker who learned Ukrainian after
becoming president, has slowly been reversing Russification policies
practised under Soviet rule and introducing Ukrainian as the language of
state and education. 
Some 11 million ethnic Russians live in Ukraine, while Russia and Kazakhstan
are home to some seven million Ukrainians. Other countries which boast large
Ukrainian populations are Canada and the United States. 

*********