August  29, 1997  
This Date's Issues: 1155• 1156 • 

Johnson's Russia List
#1156
29 August 1997
djohnson@cdi.org

**********

From: "Mark Ames" <exile.editor@matrix.ru>
Subject: eXilelist
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 17:41:01 +0400

Dear David,
Here are a few pieces from the most recent eXile, including Abram
Kalashnikov's Press Review (which has been getting a big response from your
list), a piece by co-editor Matt Taibbi on phone tapping, my column on my
recent visit to Belarus, as well as my review of Masha Gessen's new book on
the Russian intelligentsia, and our editorial, which attempts to answer the
question, "Do newspaper editorials ever influence anything?" 
I know this collection is long, but we drink enormous amounts of coffee and
eat Red October chocolate bars like there's no tomorrow, so we can't
shuttup here. Keep the faith.
Mark Ames
Editor, the eXile

---------

A Gang-Bang of Cosmic Proportions
Press Review By Abram Kalashnikov
the eXile

"There has never been in a single case, in all the gang rapes we've seen,
where one man tried to stop it." Gail Arbanel, Director of Santa Monica
(CA) Rape Treatment Center, in a report on gang rapes.
Crowd psychology is a funny thing. I had an American friend once tell me-as
a means, I think, of demonstrating how many tall buildings there were in
his home city-that he once happened upon a crowd of people in New York
yelling «"Jump!" to a man who was standing on a ledge on the fifteenth
floor of a building in Greenwich Village. He jumped. And died. And then
everyone went home.
Journalists, in crowd situations, are a pretty lame bunch. They don't go to
Anatoly Chubais press conferences and yell, "Confess!" They don't put on
armbands and start rightist political movements. And they certainly don't
attack women on pool tables in public bars. They probably would if they
could. It's just that most journalists are pretty lousy pool players. They
write about pool, rather than play it.
Journalists do, however, occasionally demonstrate one peculiar form of
antisocial crowd behavior. It's a thing I like to call the gangbang story.
Once one or two of them get on a certain topic, the rest of them often
start to worry that they'll look weak if they don't pile on, too. And
pretty soon, you've got a full-fledged gangbang. An innocent story suddenly
finds itself savaged by every hack in town, with each man lining up to
unzip his briefcase, whip out the same cliches as the previous man in line,
and fall on his helpless subject.
Russia is witnessing a Western journalist gangbang. It's called the Mir
Space Station story. The Mir story fits all the requirements of the
gangbang genre. For one thing, it is totally irrelevant, of virtually no
interest to anyone but journalists, boasting a storyline and the appearance
of drama, and unfolding concurrently with other stories that are both more
important and more likely to offend and confuse readers. In this respect it
is similar to other classic gangbang topics, like plane crashes,
little-girl-trapped-in-a-well stories, and Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential
campaign. We Russians know Mir doesn't matter. There are other things to
worry about, like the theft of every last square centimeter of state
property. Even sensationalist Moskovsky Komsomolets knows that. As its
deputy editor, Andrei Lapik, said: "What is interesting for America is not
interesting for Russia, and vice versa. It's an ordinary event."
Gang rape victims often talk of blacking out, and failing after a while to
distinguish one attacker from the other. That's because the attackers are
all pretty much doing the same thing. One has a difficult time after a
while sorting out the difference between the "crippled space station" of
the Financial Times's Chrystia Freeland and the "crippled space station of
AP's Barry Renfrew. "Troubled," "Decrepit," "Unfortunate," "Clunky" and
"Falling Apart" are other required elements of just about every Mir story.
Some agencies get a little fancy with the headlines and captions: "Mission
Control Central Chief Vladimir Solovyev Covers His Eyes During a
Communications Session." 
When I lived in the States I made the mistake once of buying a 1985
Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. In 1991 I was driving it in New Jersey and it
broke down. I waited for help and eventually saw it fixed again. I did not
write home about this incident. I certainly did not write home four times a
day, a la Reuters and AP, attaching the word "decrepit" to my Oldsmobile in
each letter and attaching pictures of myself covering my eyes as state
troopers attached the jumper cables. And I was not nearly successful enough
in my attempts around campus to find hallucinogenic drugs to suggest in
public that my crippled Oldsmobile was a symbol of America in decay. 
Legend has it that when Mongol invaders sacked Russia, they would often
stab their rape victims to create new holes to violate if the others were
already taken by busy comrades. AP has been trying something similar with
the Mir story. In its desperate attempts to find new angles on this cosmic
auto-repair saga, the AP on August 13 ran an un-bylined story which
suggested that Russian cosmonauts were making procedural decisions in order
to earn more money in bonuses:
"Moscow (AP)-Cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev switched his Soyuz capsule to
manual control as he approached the Mir Space Station, then guided the
ships into a gentle embrace-and earned himself a hefty cash bonus."
"Russian and U.S. space officials," the mystery AP writer went on, "agreed
that Solovyev's decision to go manual last week was the best way to get the
job done. But [note the 'But,' suggesting dissatisfaction with the
U.S.-Russian dismissal of the bonus issue-A.K.] the episode highlights the
unusual reward system which Russian news media say also pays $1,000 for
each spacewalk."
No wonder the AP writer left his byline off. If I were a cosmonaut and came
back to earth after a long ordeal to find out that some American reporter
had been nosing around Star City, asking my superiors if maybe I was doing
spacewalks in order to pad my pocket, I'd be wanting to pay that writer a
little visit-and make sure that he was hereafter referred to as "crippled
AP correspondent." 
The AP hack goes on to write: "Russian media report all the figures in U.S.
dollars, suggesting that astronauts will be paid in U.S. currency, which is
much preferred to rubles."
Those darned cosmonauts-always want dollars. They're just like those
fellows in Red Square who were trying to sell us rabbit hats. No wonder
they're out there doing space walks. 
Even the much-heralded Washington Post got in on the gangbang, suggesting
in a July 24 piece by Daniel Williams that controversy had erupted when the
press reported that news of cosmonaut Vasily Tsibilev's relative's death
had been withheld from him by Mission Control. "Russian officials only
stopped denying the story after the Reuter news agency reported from
Tsibilev's home town that the family had kept the death secret."
Here, now, is the height of irrelevant nitpicking. The press learns that
Mission Control has judged that a cosmonaut will be less likely to freak
out, suffocate, and destroy their multi-billion dollar machine if he does
not hear of unpleasantness at home, so in its infinite wisdom, the press
decides to go public with the story, fully aware, incidentally, that
cosmonauts have access to ham radio and therefore hear the news. That
Reuters was hanging around Tsibilev's home sniffing around for corpses to
publicize while Tsibilev himself was in the middle of a dangerous mission
seems grounds enough for summary execution to me. But for the Washington
Post to come in and mop up on this story and pronounce Mission Control in
the wrong is absolutely comic. Don't these reporters have anything better
to do?
The AP certainly doesn't. In its efforts to keep the orgy of mediocre prose
flowing, the AP was thrilled to stumble upon the news that a milk
commercial had been filmed on Mir. Before you knew it, a story with the
following lead appeared:
"One small drop of milk; one giant leap for TV commercials."
Ugh. When will it all end? Answer: not until Mir crashes. Like the OJ
trial, this gangbang will not end until the victim is exhausted. We can
only hope the American shuttle scientists will fix Mir. Then maybe the damn
thing will explode and we can all read something interesting for a change.

----------

Russian Conference Calls bring Excitement to Expats
By Matt Taibbi
the eXile

One of the great advantages to moving to Russia from the West is that we're
able to experience here all kinds of social oddities that we we'd never
tolerate in our own safe, dependable countries. A great example, probably
the best example, is the whole issue of tapped phones. Virtually every
foreigner who's ever visited Russia spends his first week here walking
around with a gleeful and slightly guilty smile on his face, like a
teenager who's just experienced his first auto-induced orgasm. The smile
means: I'm getting off on this. This place is twisted and sick, and I'm
getting off on it. And if he opens his mouth to let his secret out, he's
likely to do so by saying: "I think my phone is tapped! I heard a click!"
Foreigners love to talk about how they think their phones are tapped. They
like the idea that some one considers them important enough to be worth of
listening to. In the West, you either have to be a mafia Don or a
Vice-President to have a phone tap. Here all you need is a liberal-arts
degree, a pack of condoms, and a baseball hat. As long as someone's
listening, you can safely conclude that not everyone thinks you're a loser.
For that kind of honor, you don't mind having your privacy invaded. After
all, you want privacy, you can always go home.
During the communist era, it was pretty much a given that a foreigner's
phone was always tapped. Then, after 1991, the phone-tapping issue died
down for a while. Now, thanks to a series of lurid news stories involving
tapped phone conversations, the issue is back. We've got those naughty
onanist smiles on again as we pick up the phone to call our friends: "Did
you hear, Boris Nemtsov's phone was tapped! Hey, did you just hear a
click?"
We've got good news for all you people who get off on the idea that your
phone might be tapped: It probably is. If you occupy any position where you
might have access to information that might later influence a major
business deal, experts agree that you're probably being monitored. You can
join Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais, Sergei Lisofsky, and a number of others in
an exclusive club-the Bugged-fest Club.
There's nothing reporters love more than catching politicians on tape using
bad language, and a little over two weeks ago, the hacks at Novaya Gazeta
caught a rich haul. A certain "someone" dropped a package off at their
offices containing a cassette tape of Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov
and creepy ORT Reklama thug/Anatoly Chubais crony Sergei Lisofsky casually
debating over the phone how best to subvert a Presidential decree on income
declaration that Nemtsov himself had authored. The best part was catching
Nemtsov, who sounds pretty distinguished in public, sounding off like a
longshoreman on the phone:
Nemtsov: Vy menya, blyad', postavlyaete na rovnom meste!
Lisofsky: No Borya, mog biy tvoi chelovek khot' pozvonit'.
Nemtsov: Zvonyat po dvatsat' raz. A tam tvoi Grigoriev na khui vsyekh
posilayet!
Scarcely did the public have time to digest the reality of a Deputy Prime
Minister barking in "nine-story" bandit slang than a veritable wave of
speculative articles appeared in Russian newspapers asking the question:
who was bugging Nemtsov, and how many phones are tapped these days? Fueling
the talk was the fact that the Nemtsov piece was the second high-profile
news sensation revolving around tapped phone conversations to hit the
newsstands in the last year: in November 1996, Moskovsky Komsomolets pest
Alexander Khinshtein published his bombshell "Golosui Ili..." article, in
which Anatoly Chubais was caught in a bugged conversation with Viktor
Ilyushin discussing ways in which they might best suppress criminal
investigations (again involving the abovementioned Lisofsky, incidentally).
Novaya Gazeta, which took a lot of criticism following the publication of
the Nemtsov piece for its "tacit" participation in the invasion of
Nemtsov's privacy, went ahead in its next issue to raise the issue of phone
tapping in general. In a page 3 piece they published the results of a poll
of Duma deputies, asking each and every member of parliament 3 questions:
a) Do you think your phone is tapped; b) If yes, who do you think is doing
it, and c) Do you care?
The results were interesting. In response to the first question, every
single respondent answered in the affirmative. More than half, according to
reporter Olga Migacheva, added the word konechno, "Of course!" But if
Russia's elected representatives were all in agreement that they were being
listened to, they were less sure about who was doing it. Many listed
opposing political factions as the likely culprits, some fingered foreign
spies, and a surprisingly small number pointed to the FSB. However, and
most surprisingly, nearly all of them said that the organ most likely to be
bugging them was FAPSI-the Federal Agency of Governmental Media, an organ
subordinate to the government administration. 
Curiously, FAPSI is the organ that is supposed to, by law, regulate not
only phone-tapping, but ownership and use of any machine other than a
telephone than can be connected to a telephone line. By a law passed in
1995 called the "Federal Law on Operations of Investigative Bodies," not
only are phone-tapping apparati supposed to be regulated, but also such
ordinary devices as fax machines. By law, every single fax machine in
Russia is supposed to be registered with FAPSI. Most of us can therefore
add an unregistered fax machine to the list of reasons we can be thrown out
of the country, should that ever become necessary to anyone.
The Novaya Gazeta staff was curious as to why so many deputies would
suspect FAPSI, a body not traditionally associated with intelligence
surveillance, of tapping their phones. According to the paper, one
"prominent" deputy said that he came to that conclusion after learning that
his political opponents were receiving printed transcripts of his telephone
and office conversations within one day after they occurred. 
The deputy said he was so outraged he called a team of FAPSI debuggers into
his office to have them check for phone and open-air bugs (called
"zhuchki," or beetles, in Russian). FAPSI came and swept the office once,
then twice, and found nothing both times. The deputy learned that the
transcripts were continuing to be delivered. "So I reasoned that it was
either their own incompetence, or FAPSI's own bugging, that was
responsible," the deputy concluded.
Whoever the culprit, most government officials now take it for granted that
their phones are bugged. In response to the last question of the Novaya
Gazeta survey, most deputies said they were indifferent to bugging-"like to
the weather," as one put it.
If Duma deputies, whose political influence is constantly waning, feel
certain that they are being bugged, what about Russia's bankers and
businessmen, who have much more that is concrete to gain and lose from
their everyday work activities? Most private security experts agree that
it's time for all businessmen-Russian and foreign-to begin assuming that
their phones and/or offices are tapped. What's more, most of them agree
that it is not FAPSI or the Federal Security Services that are most likely
to do the tapping, but private businessmen who hire free-lance tappers to
spy on their competitors.
"This sort of thing is already in place and a fact of life," said Anatoly
Ilyin of Wackenhut Security. "The only thing it depends on is the level of
commercial interest a person's position holds for other people. If there is
something worth listening to, he will be listened to-and this is
irrespective of a person's citizenship."
"It exists, and it is something our clients are certainly concerned about,"
said Richard Prior of Kroll Associates. "There is an element of competing
business interests wan-ting to know what their competitors are doing."
Bankers, brokers, real estate dealers, and executives in large corporations
are among the people who should expect that their phones are tapped, said
Ilyin. "The emphasis is on learning information-say, the investment
strategy, or the targeted properties, of a certain firm- that other
companies can profit from by knowing."
But it's not just bureaucracies and businesses that are getting into the
tapping business. According to the newspaper Sovershenno Sekretno, the
Koptevskaya gruppirovka has in recent times replaced the Solntsevo gang as
Moscow's most feared mafia group in large part because of its intelligence
capabilities; its leadership is made up largely of Afghan veterans with
experience in military intelligence. Last month's issue asserted that the
Koptevskaya gang (incidentally, the same gang that became famous this past
winter for hiring Moscow city police officers as security guards) helped
gain control of the Sheremtyevo airport region by assassinating the head of
a rival gang, whose whereabouts were determined through a tapped phone
conversation.
Igor Kolaskov of the Regional Directorate for the Fight Against Organized
Crime (RUOP) said that use of phone and room-bugging technology has become
widespread among criminal gangs primarily because it is so easy to purchase
the technology here.
"You can buy the services everywhere," he said. "The registered security
firms will all deny that they do it, but a great many of them have access
to the technology and will bug anyone you like."
Kolaskov said that the practice is so widespread that buggers have been
forced to lower prices significantly lately due to a rise in competition. 
"It now costs about $20 per square meter to bug a room," he said. "It used
to be more."
Part of the problem in combating phone-tapping, Kolaskov said, is that the
tappers are often KGB veterans whose knowledge of the technology exceeds
that of law-enforcement organs.
"You have a situation where there has been a mass exodus of the best
surveillance professionals from the security organs into private security
services," he said. "And they know everything, these guys."
Are foreigners being bugged? Absolutely, said Kolaskov.
"Nationality doesn't play a role in who gets bugged," he said. "If there's
money to be made, a foreigner is just as likely to be bugged as anyone
else. He may even be bugged by more than one person."
How can one tell he's being bugged? According to the Novaya Gazeta article,
there are a few telltale signs, all of which, given the wide range of
unexpected technical glitches in the Russian phone system, are bound to
increase the paranoia level of the average eXpat. The warning signs are:
sudden increases and decreases in phone volume, a sudden break in the phone
line (meaning the tape has ended), and voices breaking into the line
suddenly, only to disappear immediately. 
All of these things, of course, could easily happen for innocent reasons.
But do we want them to be innocent? Many foreigners, security experts say,
are likely to be glad that their phones are bugged.
"It adds romance to their lives," said David Kursurov, a private detective
and security consultant for Gerat security. "Foreigners want to be bugged."
"Yes, I agree, there are many people who like the idea that their phones
might be bugged," laughed Prior.
Is phone tapping, even if it exists, really no more of an annoyance than
the weather? Unless you're a deputy prime minister with a political career
to think about, or a gang leader who has to worry about being hit, the only
real danger to phone tapping is the same danger most businessmen take for
granted anyway-that anything they say might reach the wrong ears, that
their plans might become public before they have time to pull them off, or
that their competitors might be getting a leg up on them. In this country,
not only are all people (i.e your partners, employees, secretaries,
drivers) a potential security problem, but all phone lines as well. In a
city where paranoia and stress are, for a population of largely cynical,
thrill-seeking foreigners, part of the charm, yet another reason to be
vigilant and secretive probably detracts less than it adds.

--------

BOOK REVIEW: DEAD AGAIN by Masha Gessen
Once Again: Fast Food for Thought
By Mark Ames
the eXile

Masha Gessen's new book, "Dead Again," had been lying around the Moscow
Times offices for a couple of months, while Opinion Page editor Michael
Kazmarek held up reviewing it. He wisely considered the book to be so
disappointing that, instead of making one of his own columnists look bad by
subjecting her book to an honest review, he chose to keep silent on the
subject. Then last Saturday, interim editor Geoff Winestock, worried about
the eXile's pre-announced review, overruled Kazmarek. Since no one on the
staff would take the thankless job of blowing Gessen's book, Winestock
penned the shameless review himself.
And now the truth about "Dead Again." As the Stephen King-esque title
suggests, Gessen's book is an annoying, shallow collection of
semi-portraits of Russians who belong or belonged to the intelligentsia.
Russophiles looking for a challenging book that tackles deep, painful
issues will be disappointed: this feels more like a collection of Gessen's
old articles re-tooled to give a sense of narrative, a theme. What you get
is a mixture of affected, hard-hitting style, and no substance. For that
reason, when you finish "Dead Again," you are left without a single
memorable impression. Instead, you've spent 197 pages with a group of
mostly unpleasant, whining narcissists. Nothing sticks to the mind, nothing
remains but an icky film. Perhaps that is to Gessen's credit, although I'm
sure she didn't intend it: this book has merely confirmed my own belief
that the Soviet intelligentsia were, for the most part, a class of the most
unbelievably self-absorbed snobs on earth; their fall from power is as much
a tragedy as Imelda Marcos' loss of her shoe collection--and,
substantively, not too different. After reading her bathos-soaked
interviews, I'll never again be able to read the names of Galina "Gimme
Power" Starovoitova, Yevgeny "I'm Just a Poet" Saburov, Yelena "You say
tomato, I say 'Fuck you!'" Bonner, and other minor minds, without a queasy
feeling rising in my gut. 
"Dead Again," as the title suggests, attempts to answer the gripping
question that the Russian intelligentsia loves to ask itself in its deepest
moments of self-pity: are we dead? By allowing her book to be framed by
this banal, meaningless issue, Gessen opted for cheap melodrama. Her
answer, which falsely claims to "debunk the question," offers a happy,
Reaganesque "no, the intelligentsia is NOT dead" answer. In so doing,
Gessen in fact merely reinforces the narcissism, keeping the frame alive
for one last go.
The most shocking thing about "Dead Again" is that Gessen got published by
Verso Press. Verso is known in American academic circles as the leading
radical (ie. Left-wing) press. They've brought to America all of the names
that have become bibliography requirements for any aspiring liberal arts
academic: Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno... right up to
the postmodernists, including Baudrillard, Barthes and Lyotard. Every
liberal arts academic literally DREAMS of getting his book published by
Verso. I remember this one young English professor I knew from Harvard, Tom
Richards. He was an avowed Marxist literary critic and Thomas Pynchon
fanatic, a pseudo-eccentric whose entire career was shaped by Verso. All
Richards ever whined to me about was trying to get his book--a Marxist
critique on the origins of advertising in Victorian England--published by
Verso. Tenure-track at Harvard wasn't good enough. Verso was the Mercedes
600SL of the "radical" academic world. If you drove a Verso, you were it,
baby. 
Now, Masha drives a Verso. With a bumper sticker that says, "My other car
is a Volvo."
How did she get it published? That's a question I always ask myself every
time I read a book that forces me to choose between bitter anger and raw
envy. Gessen tells us how she got published: Verso's own Malcom Imrie asked
her to write it. Well, that was easy. You see, Gessen is an extremely
prolific writer in America, an insider's insider, publishing in everything
from neo-con rags like the New Republic to quasi-radical gay publications
such as The Advocate and Outweek. It must be said that in America,
"Radical" is its own oppressive establishment with its own strict dress
code, and one of the easiest tickets into that "radical" establishment is
homosexuality--this, in spite of the fact that lesbianism is already
mainstream in America. Gessen perfectly fit the "radical" press'
prerequisites: lesbian advocate, feminist, Jew, and a good
"I-was-oppressed" story [the back cover claims that Gessen, at age 14, was
"forced to leave Russia by state-enforced anti-semitism"; correct me if I'm
wrong, but wasn't the Soviet policy the complete opposite? Didn't they
force Jews--and everyone else--to STAY, and that's why America had things
like the Jackson-Vannick amendment?]. 
Let's turn to the book, to an example of her substance-less, hard-hitting
prose: "Russia, as Russians are fond of saying, is a very large country.
One-sixth of the world's land mass. Unfathomable. Unruly." H'm. The lack of
predicates in the prose usually portrays immediacy, urgency. Here, we learn
that Russia is a very large country. Verbless. Meaningless. Let's move on:
"There is a very particular taste of helplessness that fills the mouths of
the Russian intelligentsia like a silent scream when an outrage rips
through a part of the empire." Wow, jarring stuff. But boil down the
modifiers, and look at what she really says: "The intelligentsia suffers
more than other people when other people suffer." Strip the intelligentsia
of their pathos, and all you get is grating self-promotion. Gessen, who
lets us know several times that she comes from the intelligentsia, is not
afraid to indulge her peers.
Or how about her almost Monty Python-esque account of the semantics debate
within a feminist organization over whether or not to use the word
"gender." When the feminists were tongue-tied, as it were, Gessen inserts
this laughably melodramatic aside: "There was something to this wholesale
hopelessness [over which word to use] that fit the more heart-rending
traditions of the Russian intelligentsia... So I asked [the feminist],
inasmuch as language determines mentality, aren't you trapped in a vicious
circle?" That Gessen uses this dated 70s Frog-theory cliché about the
supremacy of language-in-thought isn't surprising. Nor is the fact that she
tries to force feminism, a non-issue in Russia, into top-billing.
Feminists, Jews (or anti-semitism), and homosexuals all get star status in
her book. The reason has nothing to do with the Russian intelligentsia,
something to do with Gessen, and everything to do with her intended reading
public. Verso's Western readers EXPECT these things: when reading a book
about the Russian intelligentsia, they DEMAND to read about suffering and
melodrama on the one hand, and easily-identifiable points of reference
(feminism, homosexuality, watered-down post-structuralism, and the
inevitable "Russian Generation X") on the other. And Gessen, a true
professional in the art of magazine journalism, knows how give her audience
what they expect. For this reason, you get almost ten pages, or five
percent of the book, on Robert Fillipini, the American "wife" of Gessen's
friend, gay journalist Yaroslav Mogutin, and not even a SINGLE mention of,
say, Dmitri Prigov, who is a giant of postmodern poetry; Alexander Minkin,
easily the greatest Russian (or world) journalist of the 90s; or Alexander
Dugin, the most controversial intellectual of the post-communist era. The
eXile's own Edward Limonov, one of the intellectual leaders of the radical
right and a writer whose works are taught in West European seminars, is
only mentioned in a kind of gossip columnist name-dropping spree at
Mogutin's teary-eyed farewell party. In fact, much of the book reads like a
high brow Michael Bass name-dropping affair: "We were at ROBERT FILLIPPINI
and YAROSLAV MOGUTIN'S farewell party, when we bumped into a teary-eyed
EDWARD LIMONOV, whose campaign to liquidate all non-Russian elements is
picking up steam..."
While Gessen offers up a happy Hollywood-ending answer that the Russian
intelligentsia is not dead, she fails to address the issue of what went
wrong. The Russian intelligentsia, cut off from the West, atrophied. They
spent the past 50 years sword-fighting an extinct dragon: authoritarianism
of the sort perfected in the 20's and 30's. But the world has changed as
drastically in these past 50 years as it did in the time from Voltaire to
Marx, and the Russian intelligentsia, now exposed to the "free" world,
could not handle the shock... Imagine Voltaire trying to apply his theory
of enlightenment, forged in a country of feudal oppression, to explain the
condition of man during the Industrial Revolution. He would have been lost,
irrelevant. Like the Aztecs exposed to the flu viruses brought to them by
the Spanish conquistadors, Russia's intellectuals succumbed the minute they
came into contact with the West. It wasn't a bad blind date, as Gessen
cleverly suggests--it was a case of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. One
developed fire, the other developed muscles. The physical courage of the
Russian intelligentsia during Soviet times, while admirable, is irrelevant.
In Darwinian terms, the strains of thought developed on this island of
authoritarianism were passed by by continental intellectuals who had to
develop far more subtle, complex techniques to fight a far more subtle,
complex monster. Battling a dragon like the Communist Party made Russian
intellectuals mentally flaccid, overconfident in their powers. They
believed that by suffering physically, they had achieved some intellectual
height. Those kitchen quips and literary puns are now only mildly
interesting for their historical value.

--------

A WHITE GOD IN MINSK
BY MARK AMES
the eXile

When I was checking out of my hotel in Minsk earlier this month, one of the
cleaning women approached me with an obsequious steel-toothed smile.
"You're leaving already?" she asked me.
"Yeah, I'm sorry to go," I answered.
"That's too bad," she replied. "I wanted to introduce you to one of my
daughters. I brought pictures of them to show you the other day, but then I
saw you come here with someone, and... Well, the oldest one is
twenty-eight. Maybe... she's too old for you? She has a young boy. I also
have an eighteen-year-old daughter. I can introduce you to either one.
Which would you prefer?"
"They both sound nice."
She was persistent about pimping one of her daughters off on me. She
wouldn't let me go. After all, I was a White God, and these days in Minsk,
White Gods are few and far between. She showed me a pair of black and white
neo-Soviet passport photos of her daughters: Sveta, the 28-year-old, and
Anna, the 18-year-old. H'm. This was going to be a tough choice. Should I
take door number one-fresh, nubile, easily-impressed; or door number
two-divorced, mother... Damn, this was a real brain teaser... 
So how did Minsk get this way? How did I wind up with this steel helmet and
sword, wading onto shore of some wheel-less Indian settlement, way out here
in Eastern Europe?
Even though Minsk is actually a clean, attractive, quiet, friendly city-a
jewel by provincial Russian standards-it is almost totally devoid of
foreigners. Ever since Lukashenko came to power, greedy, young,
underqualified Western "entrepreneurs" saw their gold-plated lollypops
snatched from their hands. So they split town, realizing that their chances
of participating in the economic rape of Belarus was next to nil:
Lukashenko had basically cancelled "privatization" and "foreign aid,"
meaning, for folks like us eXpats, that Belarus has nothing to offer. By
eschewing a Western-rape-friendly policy, Belarus has also earned a bad rap
from the Western press. 
There's a lot of good going on in Belarus that never gets reported. For
example, did you know that Belarus posted a 2.6 percent gain in GDP last
year, and a massive 11 percent gain in the first half of this year-all
achieved in total defiance of World Bank and IMF advice? Of course
not-reporting that kind of good news about Belarus, or the fact that
Lukashenko's approval rating among the population would make any world
leader drool with envy, might confuse our sense of good and bad, right and
wrong. So he's a "tyrant," and Belarus is an "economic basket case."
Consider this recent editorial, "Russia and Its Tyrant Neighbor," from that
ultimate paper of record, the New York Times: "Belarus's economy, which
looks the same as it did 10 years ago, is so feeble that it makes Russia's
economy look robust." Well, there's some truth to this: ten years ago, the
economies of both countries were about double the size of what they are
today-meaning if Belarus's economy looks like it did ten years ago (and
indeed it is getting there faster than its "booming" neighbor Russia), it
is the envy of nearly all of the FSU. Belarus doesn't have wage arrears
problems and miners' wives laying down on railroad tracks like Russia. In
fact, Russia only paid off its arrears by changing the terms of its gas
supply agreements, squeezing Belarus for a huge sum of cash (at the advice
of anti-Belorussian Western advisors). Even so, Belarus continues to grow.
If Lukashenko could run in a free and fair Russian election, he could
possibly win-which means Chubais' friends would lose everything. That's why
the "Russian liberals"-the English-speaking thieves, one of whom owns ORT,
the other who owns NTV-despise him. For them to support Lukashenko would be
as mad as Al Capone supporting J. Edgar Hoover. (On a minor point, the
opposition press IS alive in Belarus. The Minsk News, the only
English-language newspaper in Belarus, is rabidly anti-Lukashenko-in
comparison, the Moscow Times reads as though Chubais himself edits it.
Imya, the popular Minsk weekly, not only savages Lukashenko with words, but
always prints a brutal, hilarious eXile-esque full page picture of the
president in highly unflattering poses.) 
We only know the bad because Lukashenko doesn't play our game, and because
he doesn't suck up to the most gullible PR conduit in the world--the
Western press. Compared to last year's press darling, Alexander Lebed,
Lukashenko is a puppy. Lebed's people once boasted that intellectuals--the
press, that is--are the easiest people to snow over with a few good
soundbites. He also boasted that killing 30,000 people was a reasonable
figure to bring order to Russia. And yet the press loved him. Lukashenko,
on the other hand, tosses a few people in jail, and the way it's reported
in the press, you'd think that the gas chambers were running at 110
percent. Even a longtime Minsk-based EBRD employee, after bemoaning
Lukashenko's economic policies, admitted to me that the only difference
between Belarus and Ukraine--which is the world's third largest recipient
of American aid--is purely rhetorical. "Ukraine at least talks the talk,"
he quipped, "but neither of them walk the walk [of market reforms]."
Grim portrayals mean people are loathe to even visit, much less invest, in
Belarus. Indeed, almost everyone asked me, before I left for Minsk, if I
wasn't worried about getting arrested. Not at all-if anything, I'd happily
offer my services as a kind of Goebbels to the Lukashenko regime, should
they ever need a counter-propagandist. The way I see it, thanks to
Lukashenko's badboy rhetoric, the cleaning woman offered me her two
daughters. So he's all right by me. And this is the point I want to get
across here. If a poll were held today, I would be one of the 55 percent of
Belorussians who recently gave their leader a thumbs-up of approval, and
not one of the nine percent of Russians that gave Yeltsin-the hero of the
West-a similar approval. Why? Because frankly, I like being a White God. It
feels good walking down the street and having people throw themselves at
your feet. I had no fewer than three marriage proposals, including one from
a "virgin". It was hilarious and gratifying and I never expect to
experience that again in Europe, barring some kind of war.
Men dream of being White Gods because, more than anything, it is sexually
appealing. For women, it's a bit different. Women generally aren't turned
on by desperate male losers the way men get excited by desperate girls. But
this doesn't mean that the White God Factor doesn't appeal to women as
well-only for them, it's usually a sentimental thing. Women too like being
in a position of strength-in this case, to "help the needy." 
When I was in Vang Vieng, Laos, this one German Greens type complained to
me that the White God Factor was already receding. "It's not so good in
Laos anymore," she said with a hint of frustration. "The people aren't as
poor as they used to be. Four or five years ago it was better." She didn't
even realize how evil that was-wishing that the locals were more poor, only
in order to satisfy her sentimental desire to be "needed" and "helpful."
Whatever-the point is, it's almost ALWAYS good for us when others suffer
and we don't. 
So thank you Mr. Lukashenko for saying the wrong things in the wrong way to
the wrong people. And a big thank you to you, The New York Times (and every
other Western news organization), for spreading cheap Cold War lies about
an alleged tyrant and his allegedly basket-case nation. And oh yes, to you
as well, all the aggrieved bankers, IFIs (international finance
institutions) and human rights activists for helping to scare all the White
People away from Belarus. All of you helped make my five days in Minsk
among the most memorable of my life.

--------

EDITORIAL
(In recognition of Moscow's 850th jubilee, the eXile has decided to reprint
the editorial from its inaugural issue, which hit the newsstands just after
the coup in August 1991)

We here at Moscow's new nightlife biweekly welcome the changes ushered in
by last week's cataclysmic events. This is a new Russia, we are a new
newspaper, and we hope to live out a long future together. Like all new
couples, we have a vision of how we would like the future we plan on
spending together to be. We can't speak for Russia, but from our side,
we're pretty clear about what we want.
What we want from this relationship most of all is stability. We want to be
sure that after years of turbulence, democratic Russia stays democratic. If
the democratically-elected parliament decides at any time that it doesn't
agree with us, we believe they should be dissolved immediately. And if they
protest their dissolution, the strictest measures should be enforced. Call
us crazy, but we hope the President acts with tanks and troops to defend
democracy if it is ever threatened, incurring as many civilian casualties
as he deems necessary.
Now, this thing with Chechnya is a tricky issue. Obviously things are a
mess down there. War probably won't solve anything, but we at the eXile see
tremendous economic opportunity in military action and we support any
decision to militarize the republic. We furthermore believe that the
initial invasion of Grozny should be undertaken without air cover, so that
the number of tank casualties increases, raising the level of military
production that will be necessary to sustain the conflict. Soldiers should
also not be provided with either socks or underwear, and should be
encouraged to sell arms to the enemy in order to prolong the war. 
Such a situation may, we believe, result in hostage crises. Should the
Chechens ever take a large number of hostages and retreat to a village the
size of, say, Pervomaiskoye, we believe that they should initially be
shelled, then completely surrounded, and then finally allowed to escape
while incurring a high number of civilian casualties. 
As it stands, Russia trails way behind the West in a number of key
indicators, among them crime. High levels of violent crime distinguish
successful societies like the United States from the rest of the world, and
Russia should do its best to rectify this situation. Police should be paid
at 1991 levels for the next six years or so, with only minor adjustments
for inflation. Murders, especially high profile ones, must not be solved.
Conversely, the incarceration rate should increase, with especial attention
focused on petty criminals and/or innocent people. No additional money
should be allotted to prison reform, particularly to overcrowding problems
in Moscow prisons like Butirka and Lefortovo. They can fit more people in
there. When and if these people are released, they must be denied
residential registration, in order to make it impossible for them to work
legally and more likely that they will commit crimes of ever-increasing
seriousness in order to survive. 
Auctions of state enterprises should be held at maximum speed in order to
create a class of property owners who will fight tenaciously to retain
their holdings against the spectre of communism. To make things simple, we
at the eXile believe that property should be concentrated in the hands of
exactly seven people, preferably bald bankers. These seven people must be
supported wholeheartedly as long as they show any enthusiasm for allowing
foreign peoples to make large returns on small investments on their
properties. When and if they veer from this policy, it will then become
clear that power should not be concentrated in the hands of a few people,
and democratic principles should be upheld through a wiser distribution of
governmental and electoral power.
Lastly, we want money. To this end, the governments of Russia and of her
new Western partners should allocate huge sums to the hiring of foreign
consultants. These consultants must have large per diems, which they should
spend in the bars and restaurants that will ultimately form our advertising
base. Should this policy be instituted, we calculate that by August 1997 we
will be a money-making 24-page operation, and the paper will have become
affluent enough to afford to have hired top-shelf editors to replace the
amateur staff currently in place. We only hope they don't screw up that
850-year thing. With all the good news we envision, that should be a hell
of a party.

**********