January 6 , 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3004• 3005• 

Johnson's Russia List
#3005
6 January 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Reuters: Elizabeth Piper, Church calls for help on Russian
Christmas Eve.
2. Moscow Times: Geoff Winestock, ESSAY: A Family Marks New Year
in Russia's Rust Belt.
3. St. Petersburg Times: Barnady Thompson, Highs and Lows of the 
Year That Was.
4. New York Times: Michael Gordon, Forsaken in Russia's Arctic, 
9 Million Stranded Workers.
5. Mark Jones: Is Russia turning Fascist?]

*******

#1
Church calls for help on Russian Christmas Eve
By Elizabeth Piper

MOSCOW, Jan 6 (Reuters) - The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in a
Christmas Eve message, called on the government on Wednesday to find a way out
of the country's present chaos and ease the suffering of an increasingly
desperate people. 

Patriarch Alexiy II, whose followers celebrate Christmas according to a
different calendar from that in Western churches, said Russians were
struggling to cope with poverty, crime and ethnic strife after a crippling
financial crisis last summer provoked a slump in the rouble, job losses and
rising prices. 

``Terrible poverty, the failure to pay people their well-earned wages, the
excessively high level of crime and immorality in society, inter-ethnic
strife, the crisis in education, culture and the health service are all
problems constantly encountered by people,'' he said in a statement. 

``May God grant that the state authorities, society and every person of
goodwill do all they can to overcome the present chaos.'' 

The Orthodox Church, which has enjoyed a strong revival since the end of
atheistic communist repression in 1991, marks the birth of Jesus Christ on
January 7, like other Eastern Christian churches using the same calendar. 

The bearded, 69-year-old patriarch said the church had to make further inroads
into everyday life -- a sentiment unthinkable in Soviet times, when the church
laboured under KGB controls and believers faced harassment and persecution. 

``It is essential to revive and strengthen the monasteries, set up new
ecclesiastical institutions of study on all levels, especially Sunday
schools,'' he said in a speech posted on the church's site on the Internet. 

``In the coming year we must complete what we have left unfinished, bring to
perfection much of what we have already done and in all things strive for the
maximum benefit of God's Church.'' 

He also called for Russians to be more tolerant. 

The huge country has become increasingly strained by ethnic and religious
tensions, especially over anti-Semitism in certain sections of the Communist
party, which is the biggest grouping in parliament. 

``It is our Christian and civil duty to abide in harmony, goodwill and
cooperation with each other, to be tolerant of each other and render every
assistance and support to those in need.'' 

The patriarch led a morning service at the huge Christ the Saviour Cathedral,
newly rebuilt to dominate the Moscow skyline after being destroyed on dictator
Josef Stalin's orders in 1931. 

Later, he was to lead mass at the Epiphany Cathedral, which Prime Minister
Yevgeny Primakov was expected to attend. 

He was to lead midnight mass in the same cathedral.

*******

#2
Moscow Times
January 6, 1999 
ESSAY: A Family Marks New Year in Russia's Rust Belt 
By Geoff Winestock 

I spent the New Year's holiday weekend with Arkady, my distant relative, in
his three-room apartment in the city of Ryazan, 200 kilometers southeast of
Moscow. 

Arkady, 69, and my father, 70, had the same great grandfather. Before the war,
they lived in a part of Romania called Bessarabia. The Soviet Union occupied
the province in 1940 and kept it after the war. It is now the independent
state of Moldova. 

While my father escaped to live comfortably in Australia, Arkady is living
like most of the other 400,000 people in Ryazan, on a small pension with
nothing much to look forward to. 

When the Soviets came in 1940, Arkady, then 11, was declared an enemy of the
people because his father was educated in a Belgian university and owned
shares in a factory. 

His father was sent to a labor camp in the northern Ural Mountains and he and
his mother were exiled to the steppes of Kazakhstan to work on a collective
farm. 

After the war, he studied with distinction at a prestigious aeronautical
institute in Sverdlovsk, but the dean discovered he was an enemy of the people
and refused to let him take out a degree. Arkady eventually got a job in
Ryazan at the machine-tool plant where he worked for 30 years. 

Arkady rose to deputy chief mechanic thanks in part to his knowledge of
French, German and English, which he learned from private tutors during his
bourgeois childhood in what was then Romania. 

The Soviet Union equipped the machine-tool factory with the best foreign
equipment, and Arkady was responsible for contacts with foreign contractors.
He was sent around the country to install machine tools at some of the
country's biggest factories. He made some good foreign friends and even went
on a trip to the eastern part of Germany in 1995. 

Arkady and his wife, Galya, now live on their combined pension of 900 rubles a
month. This is quite high by Ryazan standards and, before the crisis, this
used to be worth about $140, enough for what they considered a reasonable
life. 

But the pension has not been paid since September and the raging inflation of
the past four months has destroyed its value. In dollar terms, it is now worth
only $45 a month. The price of most goods has more than doubled, everything
from sugar to meat to soap. Only the price of bread and vodka has stayed the
same. 

Arkady used to be able to double his pension by working at the machine-tool
factory. But the sprawling Soviet complex whose gates are only a short walk
from his apartment is now almost derelict. Thousands of workers have been
sacked. There is almost no casual work left for pensioners like Arkady. 

A few years ago, he was awarded a card identifying him as a victim of
political repression. This gives him free use of public transport, 50 percent
off his power and heating bills and a trip by rail anywhere in Russia once a
year. It also means a lot to his self-image. 

Politically, he is not a democrat or a communist. He is completely dispirited.
The new government is as bad as the old government. In fact, Arkady has barely
even noticed a change. He notices the BMWs and Mercedes of the New Russians
that occasionally cruise down Oktyabrskaya Ulitsa. 

I gave Arkady some money in the fall to tide him over the crisis. I was
surprised to find that he had used it to buy a washing machine. Galya had
dreamed of one for years. Somehow, I had thought they would use it for an
emergency or for food. But I suppose they were used to surviving on nothing. 

One of Arkady's sons, Yura, who now lives in Belarus, visited with his family
for the weekend. I shared a room with Yura and his youngest son while his
oldest slept in another room with his new fiancÎe. 

Yura used to make a good living importing cars through Belarus into Russia,
but the scam of importing cars tax-free across the porous Belarussian border
has been closed down. 

Yura has now switched to buying spare parts in Russia for sale in Belarus, but
the economy there is in worse shape than in Russia. The Belarussian ruble's
official exchange is 120,000 to the dollar, but the only place to get it is on
the black market where it costs three times as much. Even there it is almost
impossible to buy currency, so Yura tries to arrange barter deals with Russian
suppliers. It is hard. 

Yura had invested all his money into three new foreign cars that he planned to
sell in Russia, but the crisis has slashed prices on the automobile market
here. He doubts now that he could get a third of what he paid for them. 

All in all, they are a nice family. Despite all the problems, they get
together for holidays. 

It was a traditional Soviet-style holiday. We sat down for a big meal of
jellied meat, stuffed fish and pickles that started with a toast of orange-
colored Russian shampanskoye and moved on to a bottle of vodka. There was no
fresh food. 

We then turned on the television and sat glued to the Song '98 broadcast on
ORT where the stars of Russian pop music from Iosif Kobzon to Filipp Kirkorov
performed. Dressed in sequined tuxedos and satin, they wished us all the very
best for the new year. 

Everybody had their favorite stars. Galya liked Irina Allegrova, who had just
had a change of hairstyle. Yura's youngest liked Filipp Kirkorov. Back in old
Soviet times, there were no real pop stars, they said. They were very proud
that Russia now had some. 

After cake and tea and more vodka, the women then stayed in to watch Krasotka
(Pretty Woman) and we men went out for a walk. 

With the dry snow crisp under our feet, we walked through the factory's market
garden, which used to supply the region with the vegetables the Soviet system
could not provide. 

And then we stopped+ at the factory gates. Arkady became emotional pointing
out
to me each workshop and describing to me the machine tools he had installed
there. And now the factory was ruined. And behind it was another huge factory
that produced tractor parts and behind that an electrical factory. They were
both ruined too. 

Arkady earnestly led me to a corner next to the factory gates and pointed out
a huge medal on the all. It was an order of Lenin, he said. The Ryazan State
Machine Tool Factory was one of very few to receive such an honor. 

Arkady was a member of the Communist Party at the factory, for the entirely
practical reason that it gave him perks. But he also believed in it. I found
it hard to understand how a man who was made an enemy of the people at the age
of 11 could have loved the party that did it to him. Now, with the factory all
but closed and his pension all but worthless, Arkady could not explain it
either. 

*******

#3
St. Petersburg Times
December 29, 1998
Highs and Lows of the Year That Was 
By Barnaby Thompson
STAFF WRITER

"St. Petersburg, everyone will tell you, is different... There is no objective
reason why St. Petersburg should not be a boom town." - Brian Whitmore, The
St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 6.

>From Neville Chamberlain who promised peace in his time, to the experts who 12
months ago forecast a strong economic year in Russia, the battleground of the
forces of politics and the media are littered with the graves of those pundits
rash enough to predict the course of history. Nevertheless, the crowded events
of 1998 will almost certainly determine just how "different" St. Petersburg
turns out to be.

>From the fight for free speech to the struggle for democracy, when the
headlines that Russia's second capital has made over the last year are put
together, they make for tortuous, often depressing reading. This newspaper has
reported many local stories with a national significance: the hazing of
conscripts, the Kafka-esque trial of an environmentalist, the burial of the
Romanovs, the assassinations of a multitude of public figures and the dirtiest
election campaign to which any country with pretensions to civilization can
ever have been subject. And yet, as the printing presses roll on into the last
365 days of the century, there are grounds for hope that the good guys - and
we make no bones about identifying them as such - will win. If they do, then
the foundations of their victory will have been carved out in 1998. For each
year so far in this last decade before the new millennium, we offer this
year's eight most notorious St. Petersburg stories: 

1. BACK-STABBING

It all started with democracy. Back in January, a two-thirds majority of
lawmakers in the Legislative Assembly, many of whom cut their teeth in the
perestroika-era democratic movement, adopted a City Charter - in effect a
local constitution - granting the assembly full-time parliamentary status and
holding Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev to standards of accountability. Unsuccessful in
his attempts to block the Charter, the governor resolved, amid allegations of
bribery and blackmail, to emasculate it, first forcing Speaker and arch-enemy
Yury Kravtsov out of office in April and then vetoing bills that ran contrary
to his interests.

The assembly split into two camps, one fighting for a Western-style system of
checks and balances and the other determined to maintain near-total executive
rule, issuing unchallenged decrees on any matter, from the raising of
utilities and rents to the privatization of prime real estate. With elections
looming in December, the battle was on for the future of St. Petersburg,
perhaps the only spot left in Russia with something democratic to defend.

2. THE END OF HOPE

That democracy was cast into grave doubt at about 10:45 p.m. on Friday, Nov.
20th on Griboedova Canal, when two unknown assassins pumped bullets into the
body of liberal federal lawmaker Galina Starovoitova - one of the original
leaders of the perestroika democratic movement and a prominent human rights
activist. Russian political figures quickly and unanimously denounced the
killing - with the notable exception of the governor of the city in which it
took place, who was recuperating, apparently, either from a spine injury or an
ankle problem, either in North Ossetia or Finland. Whatever ailed him, it was
apparently not Starovoitova's death, as he failed to turn up either to the
public rally held in her honor or to the funeral.

Yakovlev reacted angrily to comments from various politicians on the
increasing criminalization of St. Petersburg politics, but the facts are
stacked against him. Since September, high-profile killings in his city have
acquired an almost numbing regularity (see page 5). Starovoitova's killers -
one of whom was using a state-of-the-art weapon more commonly associated with
special forces on covert operations - clearly felt they could do so with
impunity. They were only a couple of meters away from the OMON.

3. THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

Yaklovlev's protestations aside, Starovoitova's murder brought home to the
rest of the country just how underhanded the politics of Russia's capital of
culture had become. The catalogue of crime seemed endless: Vote buying, media
manipulation (see page 11), intimidation, murder, blacklists, disinformation,
accusation and counteraccusation were central to an electoral free-for-all in
which no quarter was taken and none given. As an example of an eccentric
tactic which has become commonplace in Russian elections, take the 12th
district, in which First Deputy Speaker Sergei Mironov competed against none
other than... Sergei Mironov (no relation) and, of course ... Sergei Mironov
(ditto).

Were the voters taken for fools? The cold, unadulterated figures show that
eight Yabloko, 14 Bloc of Yury Boldyrev, six Communist, one Soglasiye and 21
independent candidates will convene in the Mariinsky Palace for the next four
years. But the implications for the city are titanic. With what looks like a
29-21 split in favor of the democrats, the Legislative Assembly can not only
protect its Charter but also further the cause of democracy and the free
market - if the democrats can unite. Division has been their Achilles heel too
often. Will they see sense?

4. A DAY IN COURT

Meanwhile, a lone crusader was defying the forces of law and order in the form
of the Federal Security Bureau, and although international governments were
taking a polite interest, environmentalist and ex-navy captain Alexander
Nikitin wasn't having much luck getting his point across at home. With spooks
waving at him every time he visited the lavatory, the FSB, nobly acting in the
interests of security of this modern state, charged Nikitin with treason seven
times using secret and retroactive legislation, confined him to the city
limits and even rewired the airwaves of a city radio station while their
target was giving a live press conference in May.

For passing on alleged military secrets to the Norwegian environmental group
Bellona, otherwise known as alerting the world to the ham-handed way in which
the Northern Fleet stashes its nuclear waste in a couple of paper bags and
heaves it over the side, the most significant human rights case in post-Soviet
history finally came to trial in October of this year, with Nikitin facing up
to 20 years in the slammer if convicted.

He won the battle, but not the war. Two weeks into the trial, St. Petersburg
judge Sergei Golets told the court that the prosecution's indictment was too
vague, and instructed the FSB to resubmit it only when they had made the
charges more specific. It wasn't an acquittal, but it was the next best thing.
At first cautious - "Imagine how you would feel if for three years
investigators have been fabricating charges against you, and then the court
rules that nothing is proved" - Nikitin's defense lawyer Yury Shmidt then
claimed victory.

If he is eventually acquitted in 1999, a powerful blow would be dealt to
Russia's secret police, whose methods and tactics have changed little from
Soviet times. Alexander Nikitin has been named Amnesty International's first
Russian Prisoner of Conscience since Andrei Sakharov. He has been invited to
the U.S. White House to receive an environmental prize and to Canada to
emigrate if he chooses. So far, he is free to do neither.

5. REST IN PEACE 

On Friday, July 17, as several thousand OMON and police forces wandered around
St. Petersburg, an ordinary Russian Orthodox archpriest held a short prayer
service in the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, and called on God to have
mercy on the contents of the nine small coffins before him. Everybody else had
come to see the burial of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Empress Alexandra, three
of their five children and four servants, all of whom died in a hail of
bullets exactly 80 years previously. But after nine years of investigation
into the authenticity of the royal remains by Russian, European and American
scientists - whose findings were rebuffed by counterparts from the Russian
Expert Commission Abroad - the question of exactly who had been dug up in
Yekaterinburg was still not settled.

With practically the whole world looking at St. Petersburg, the Tsar's burial
could have served as the final seal on the communist chapter in Russian
history. Certainly there was much rhetoric aimed in that direction. "Burying
the victims of the Yekaterinburg tragedy is ... a symbol of unification in
Russia, and redemption of our guilt," said President Boris Yeltsin, who only
turned up because the renowned historian Dmitry Likhachyov told him to.

The Church begged to differ, refusing to recognize the authenticity of the
remains and deciding not to send ranking officials to the burial. Threatening
telephone calls to priests from their faithful flock opposing the church's
involvement revealed a level of skepticism over the Tsar's bones that in fact
stretched from religious to secular parts of society. Spend $800,000 on
interring a man who led Russia into two disastrous wars and provoked two
bloody revolutions, when factories are closing and wages go unpaid? Or was it
worth it to expunge the guilt of Russia's communist past, during which the
Church slavishly collaborated with the Soviet state?

Yevgeny Volk, an analyst at the Moscow office of the Hermitage Foundation, put
the dilemma succinctly. "In this case," he said, "history is not uniting
Russia but dividing it. It all boils down to the unwillingness of society to
examine its past honestly ... It is easier to proclaim democracy than labor to
overcome the totalitarian mentality." To how many aspects of Russian life in
1998 could these words apply?

6. MUMMY'S BOYS

While Russia may have an ambivalent attitude to her past, the generation that
will oversee her future has been getting an extraordinarily rough deal. Like
many countries, Russia has laws stipulating compulsory military service for
men when they reach their 18th birthday. Unlike many countries, military
service is also apparently a requirement of those who simply look 18. And when
you've been hauled off the street or out of the metro, given your crew cut and
tried on your army boots for size, the fun's only just starting.

The Soldiers' Mothers Organization spent a busy year updating its overflowing
catalog of horror stories based largely on letters written by their
conscripted sons - letters revealing the seriousness with which the Russian
armed forces takes the defense of the country. Thus, recruit Andrei, 20,
related how happy he was protecting the Motherland by building fences in the
village of Lesniki about 50 kilometers north of St. Petersburg. Better than
drilling at the nearby military base of Kerro, anyway, or unloading canned
food at the apartment of your commander's lover, or working unpaid at various
factories, or any of the other occupations that effectively amount to slave
labor. Perhaps the army is economizing on ammunition.

The even nastier side of the conscript's life, and a compelling reason to
dodge the draft, still comes in the form of hazing or dedovshchina, which is
commonly known as bullying. The Soldiers' Mothers Organization possesses
hundreds of letters testifying to the ingenuity of army officers in their
torture of the weak and subordinate.

In March, the Military Prosecutor's Office of the Leningrad Military District
started to bring some of the allegations of hazing to court, adding to the
victim's hotline opened the previous year (219-28-98, if you're in trouble)
for recruits wishing to complain. Not surprisingly, most are too frightened to
object either to the bullying or to working as slaves. As the situation of the
armed forces becomes more and more apparent, with wages going unpaid for
months and morale reaching new depths, the lack of concern showed by the
government in this area is remarkable.

7. BEATEN BLACK AND BLUE

A continued feature of St. Petersburg life was that of young men with shaved
heads, uniforms and heavy military style boots launching attacks on ethnic
minorities - and that was just the forces of law and order.

In July, Kupchino District Council Deputy Denis Usov was beaten up by a gang
of Caucasian youths in revenge for his distribution of leaflets calling for
the area to be cleansed of ethnic minorities. Foreign students at the State
Medical University - mostly from India and Sri Lanka - continue to catalog the
violent attacks made on them by skinheads inside or outside their dormitory.
Meanwhile, in what became known as the "Chechen syndrome," beat police and
OMON forces targeted "litsa kav kaz skoi natsionalnosti" (Caucasians) for
regular document checks, as the city police department under new boss Viktor
Vlasov released figures putting Georgians and Azeris at the top of statistics
of crimes committed by foreigners.

With Duma Deputy Albert Ma ka shov's shouts of "Yids!" backed up by his party
leader Gennady Zyuganov and his own derogatory remarks about Zionists, anti-
Semitism has now become - if it wasn't before - practically an official policy
of the post-Soviet Communist Party, leading media tycoon and executive
secretary of the CIS, Boris Berezovsky, amongst others, to call for the
Communists to be outlawed from politics. The unfortunate conclusion is that
these episodes are fairly indicative of the tension that underpins race
relations in Russia as a whole.

8. FROM CRISIS TO DRAMA

But the story that will define 1998 and quite probably 1999 as well was the
collapse of the Russian economy in the summer, a meltdown that had been on the
cards for some time but was difficult to believe when it happened. Was it
George Soros and his fateful letter to the Financial Times warning of the
imminent and necessary devaluation of the ruble that triggered the implosion?
Was it the knock-on effect from the Asian crisis that seems to have hit
economies everywhere in the world except in the United States? Was it the
lowest world oil price for two decades? Or was it simply the Russian bubble
loudly bursting after years of crony capitalism and financial mismanagement? 

Whatever the case, on Aug. 17 the government and the Central Bank announced
that they would no longer be supporting the ruble. Six days later, the
government of Sergei Kiriyenko went the way of the dodo, and the world's
second largest nuclear power spent several weeks with no economic policy and
no political leadership. Tragedy, as Russia's banks and public scrambled for
dollars, turned into farce, as the exchange rate bounced up and down like a
rubber yo-yo, and suddenly it was rubles that became harder to find than gold
dust. The country's international credit rating slumped to CCC-, and talk of
disintegration, anarchy and revolution was halted only on the appointment of
Yevgeny Primakov to the post of prime minister on Sept. 11. Primakov became
effectively the country's sole leader as President Yeltsin's power declined
almost as fast as his health.

It is remarkable how homo russicus adapts to change. As the year draws to a
close, the ruble rate hovers at 20 to the dollar, the banking system has
collapsed like a pack of cards, the State Statistics Committee is forecasting
an inflation rate of 80 percent for the next 12 months while the International
Monetary Fund prophesies an 8.3 percent contraction of the economy - and
people are already talking about "the crisis" in the past tense. But with the
government printing money, an IMF loan on hold and the country's opportunistic
politicians keeping their fingers on the president's pulse, no bets are being
taken on the date of a recovery. 

Compiled from 12 months of reports from Brian Whitmore, John Varoli, Anna
Badkhen, Alice Lagnado and Charles Digges.

*******

#4
New York Times
6 January 1999
[for personal use only]
Forsaken in Russia's Arctic, 9 Million Stranded Workers
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

PEVEK, Russia -- Here in Russia's most northern city, a winter's day is two
hours of cheerless gray. The temperature plunges to 40 below. And delays in
getting wages are measured in years, not months. 

It is the edge of the world and the end of the line for thousands of
Russians drawn here during Soviet times by promises of high pay and patriotic
appeals. 

"Our parents were lured here by the romance of the north," said Irina
Akulenko, 32, cradling her 2-year-old daughter in her arms. "Like almost
everybody else, I would like to get out now. But we don't earn anything here,
and there is no way we can leave." 

Trapped in Russia's frozen frontier, many workers resemble the political
prisoners who were brought here decades ago. They are unable to leave and are
often not even paid -- at least not promptly, and not always with money. 

The colonization of the north was one of the Soviet Union's most audacious
ventures. The Soviet government wanted the region's ores and natural gas and
was determined to bend nature to its will to get them. Entire cities sprouted
on the forbidding tundra. Cargo ships plied the iceberg-laden waters, lugging
food and fuel. 

Now the dismal economics of the north has finally caught up with these far-
flung regions. Russia's new market economy cannot bear the colossal cost of
feeding and heating the northern outposts. 

And yet the cash-strapped Russian government has done little to relocate the
almost 9 million Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians and other former Soviet
citizens who live there. It has even failed to formally rescind the benefits
mandated to lure workers. People continue to arrive only to find that many
promised rewards exist only on paper. 

In the Chukotka region, an expanse the size of France that runs along the
Arctic Sea to the Bering Strait, many workers have done their best to flee.
Apartments have sold for bargain prices in Pevek and other cities. Smaller
settlements have been abandoned, turning them into shuttered, icy ghost towns.

The 85,000 who remain carry on despite soaring food prices, uncertain fuel
shipments and unpaid wages. They endure in the hope that Chukotka's rich veins
of gold will draw deep-pocketed foreign investors, or simply because they lack
the money to buy a ticket out. 

"The northern territories are in terrible shape now," conceded Alexander
Nazarov, the governor of the Chukotka region. 

Opening the North Was a Soviet Dream 

A concrete hammer and sickle still signals the approach to this harbor city,
one of the major gateways to the Russian Arctic. But a splash of graffiti has
updated the Soviet symbol: spray-painted across are the words "The Exploited."

It is a paradox that a land of such uncanny isolation and wild beauty could
become a painful example of the follies of planning at the Kremlin, 3,600
miles to the west. 

Before the days of Soviet power, this was a land of Chukchi indigenous
people and polar explorers, a place where winter mornings begin under moonlit
skies, the summer sun never sets and fierce arctic cyclones erupt almost
without warning. 

It was Chukotka's gold and mineral wealth, however, that attracted the
Kremlin's attention. Had the Soviet government concentrated on the bottom
line, it might have built small settlements and flown in workers for monthlong
shifts. 

Instead, opening the northern frontier became an industry. Political
prisoners were used as pioneers in the vast region, the closest Russian
territory to Alaska. Then the Soviet government turned the north into a test
of communist commitment. 

Apartment houses, schools, hospitals, sports complexes, stores and hotels
were built on stilts, the better to cope with the perpetual permafrost. A
Chernobyl-style nuclear power plant was built at Bilibino, one of Chukotka's
arctic cities. 

To attract workers and their families, wages were several times higher than
on the "mainland," as residents here refer to Russia below the Arctic Circle.
There were free vacations and, in contrast to the south, no delays in buying
cars. Pensions, which men generally get when they are 60 and women when they
are 55, were provided five years early. 

"The north was one place where Soviet citizens could legitimately receive a
higher income," said Andrei Markov, a Moscow-based economist with the World
Bank. 

Nor did the north suffer as much from the shortages that afflicted the rest
of the Soviet Union. The program to ship food and fuel to the north, which
makes up almost half of Russia's vast territory, was one of the most heavily
subsidized parts of the Soviet economy. Only agriculture and the coal industry
received more. 

By 1989, the north's population had climbed to 9.7 million, making it far
more densely populated than comparable areas of Alaska, Canada and
Scandinavia. Even the population of remote Chukotka swelled to 185,000. 

But Pevek is no longer the kind of place that attracts the country's talent.
It suffers from the same ills as much of Russia, but the consequences are far
more serious. 

Because virtually all food is imported, the price is several times that in
pricey Moscow. That puts meat and vegetables out of reach of poorer residents,
who unlike Russians in the south have no kitchen gardens to fall back on. 

The high cost of travel has turned many laborers into virtual prisoners. The
$200 for a one-way ticket to Moscow is several times the monthly salary of
many workers, assuming they receive their pay. 

The federal government has helped some residents leave, giving priority to
pensioners and veterans. Others have used their life savings and whatever help
they could marshal from relatives to buy their way out. Pevek's population has
shrunk to about 7,500 from more than 13,000 a decade ago. Thousands more are
desperate to get away. 

Many Lured in Cannot Get Out 

Aleksandr Maslov, the 32-year-old chief physician at the Pevek Hospital, was
among the thousands who clamored to move here. 

"I could do things that doctors on the mainland could not afford," he
recalled. "My wife and I flew south to go to the seashore each year. People
had work. They had social guarantees. It was not easy to get selected to live
in the north." 

Now Maslov is desperately trying to hang on to his staff. 

"Our surgeon keeps telling me he will leave if he does not get his back
wages," he said. "Theoretically, I have a good job; but it is in a city that
is dying." 

Selling your apartment is not an effective way to raise money. Apartments
are in such low demand that they sell for a pittance. 

"The most I can sell my apartment for is $750," said Alla, a 59-year-old
former geologist who runs a small market in the center of town. "I need at
least $6,000 to buy a cheap apartment in central Russia. There is no way to
make that much money here." 

For all the adversity, life goes on. Pevek even boasts a heated indoor
swimming pool filled with sea water, a legacy of Soviet days. 

At Mys Shmidta, an arctic town 270 miles to the east, the hardship is more
extreme. As fuel ran out, the Russian government sent a tanker ship and an
icebreaker that fought their way through the ice floes to Pevek. Then a convoy
of trucks braved a bitter snowstorm to haul fuel to the isolated settlement. 

"The government sent a tanker ship and icebreaker to help them out," Ms.
Akulenko said. "It would be cheaper in the long run to evacuate them." 

Benefits Guaranteed but Not Often Paid 

The only alternative to chronic and costly supply problems is to help people
leave the north and lure new investment to support a smaller population. It is
a daunting task, especially in a society where labor mobility remains an alien
notion. 

The government's policies have not helped. The Kremlin spends only 0.1
percent of Russia's gross domestic product to ship food and fuel to the north,
down from an extravagant 2 percent in Soviet times. 

But the Kremlin is also not doing much to help people leave. Only 10 percent
of the 1.8 million who have left the region since 1989 did so with government
assistance. 

Compounding the problem, many of the benefits that the Soviet Union
introduced to lure workers northward are, surprisingly, still guaranteed by
law. These must be paid by local governments and newly privatized enterprises,
though they often fail to do so. 

The increasingly false promise of high pay and generous benefits has drawn a
million new residents since 1989, keeping the population in the north near 9
million. 

About half of the new arrivals are from the non-Russian former Soviet
republics, like Ukraine and Belarus, whose failing economies make life in the
north appear attractive. 

"Most people want to leave," Markov said. "There are hundreds of thousands
in each region and city who are waiting to go." 

Hoping the West Will Invest in Mining 

In Chukotka, waiting is a painful process. Not only does it have an
exceptionally severe climate, but it and the nearby regions of Yakutia,
Magadan and Kamchatka lead the nation in unpaid wages, according to government
data. 

Taking a long view, Nazarov, the governor of Chukotka is pinning his hopes
on persuading Western investors to tap his region's rich veins of gold and
mineral resources. Chukotka has recently been hit by sagging gold prices. But
the hope is that prices will recover and that new, more efficient ventures
will be started for which workers will flow in and flow out for stints in the
north. That would minimize the cost of sustaining the population. 

These days, however, Pevek's aging airport is not a hub for mobile workers.
It is the scene of a desperate protest. After waiting three and a half years
for their wages, 11 workers who clean and service the airport buildings began
a hunger strike in late November. 

Instead of money, the workers have received small monthly supplies of rice,
peas, sugar, flour and some meat as an advance against their pay. But after
the collapse of the ruble in August, even the rations began to shrink. 

"We've been hungry for a long time," said Slava Rybin, a bearded worker who
lay on a cot in a dingy dormitory near the airport. "The only difference is
we're not working any more." 

(Responding to the protest, the Chukotka authorities finally gave the
strikers almost half of their back pay. The workers suspended their strike
after five weeks of fasting. By then, three of the workers had been
hospitalized. Fellow workers who did not strike also received some back pay,
but not as much.) 

While Nazarov boasts about Chukotka's resources, he does not underestimate
the difficulties in developing his region. Nor does Ms. Akulenko, whose
parents moved to Chukotka decades ago. 

"They say that if we get new technology for our gold deposits, we can be
self-sustaining," she said, bundled up against the bitter chill. "But who
knows if we can hang on for that long." 

*******

#5
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 1999
From: Mark Jones <Jones_M@netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: Is Russia turning Fascist?

This idea is nonsense, for several reasons.

Firstly, fascism historically benefited from the existence of the Soviet
Union. In the aftermath of the First World War, the 1919 Versailles
peace treaty started out as a treaty designed to end the war but,
as fear of the revolutionary tide spreading from Russia infected 
the top-hat-and-tailed diplomats in Paris, it became a vehicle for
virulent anti-communism. This fear of the bolsheviks came to
determined all international diplomacy and policy-making as
well as the evolution of domestic politics, in all the capitalist 
states in, during interwar years. Thus Hitler was the creature 
of German capital and his international sponsors included Britain 
and France, as well as even the Rooseveltian USA. 
'Appeasement' was actually a code word for the policy
of fomenting a Russo-German war.

There are no similarities today. No big Russian capitalists, or their
western sponsors, are pouring money into Russian fascist leader
Barshakov's coffers. And nor does Barshakov enjoy another 'material
base' of Hitler's: the presence of large hostage jewish communities.
Anti-semitism in Russia is a disease without a cause -- Jews are
present, and disproportionately evident in business and public life; but
there are no large communities available as the ghettos of the future,
around which Barshakov can organize his pogroms. It is not enough just
to point to 'cosmopolitan international conspiracies' of Wall St,
Zionism, Israel, and the (mostly jewish) Russian oligarchs. To mobilize
the Russian blackshirts on a large scale (which is necessary to
terrorise and intimidate the Russian working class - always the true
objective of fascism) there must ALSO be Jews by the million in the
streets and neighbourhoods of Russian provincial towns. And there are
not. (The fact that Barkashov's unelectable fascists are marching
alongside the universally-detested and fear police in some provincial
Russian towns, says more about the fear which local elites have
of the anger of the masses, than it is a parallel with the early
Hitler years. The German police were respected and the Nazis gained
respectability by associating with them. The Russian militia are 
simply a branch of the mafia and represent no-one but themselves; if
Barshakov's goons are ready to identify with them, this is more
evidence of Barshakov's clinical lunacy, not of an impending
fascist coup d'etat. At least Zhirinovsky became a wealthy man
from his efforts; Barshakov is unlikely to achieve even that,
since he will never be able to take his place in 'respectable' 
Russian society, or buy property abroad, unless perhaps in Serbia).

Fascism in Russia will never win the backing of international finance
capital, and anyway lacks the bogeyman -- a mass Jewish internal
presence - to rally the chauvinistic, fearful masses around. One might
also point to certain cultural differentia specifica which separate
Slavonic from German antisemitism. Russian antisemitism is popular,
traditional, deep-seated -- but not virulent. The idea that a mass
fascist party can be confected around the psychic trigger of rabid mass
antisemitism is wrong. Russians just aren't like that. They have a great
dislike of military experiments, and of authoritarian regimes which offer
nothing but hopelessly romantic, mystic consolation. Barshakov of
course has nothing practical to offer. What in fact is Barshakov's
concrete programme? Hitler's was to end unemployment by putting workers
either into arms factories or into uniform. Every German knew why, and
understood that the state debts incurred would be paid off by the
Czechs, Belgians, French etc., not by the Germans. But anyone who
supposes that a similar programme is feasible in Russia today is
universally understood to be a certifiable lunatic. Is Russia going to
invade Poland and then Germany, led by Barshakov's legions? No, of
course not. Therefore no-one will vote for Barshakov, who anyway 
understand all this perfectly well himself (that is why he has to 
field his unelectable candidates anonymously as 'independents'.)

Barshakov and Russian fascism are bogeyman invented by Western
special services and intended for the gullible (especially, it seems,
the residual trotskyist left). The objective is to embarrass by 
association Zyuganov and the KPRF, to try to strip away the KPRF's
professed constitutionalism and to *diminish the KPRF's electoral
appeal*. This shows how clearly western would-be manipulators of
Russian affairs understand that the real danger to Russian
capitalism is not the brownshirt streetfighting nationalists --
but precisely the Duma left which has to be discredited at all
costs. They are playing with Jungian archetypes designed to
arouse strong and misguided emotional responses. It is a
sinister game and its real purpose is to prepare Russia and
the world for the *closing down of Russian democracy* and the
installation of a pro-western dictatorship. It is a desperate gamble
and unlikely to succeed, but that is what the West is doing. Indeed,
excoriating the despised Duma (Russia's only functional instance
of democracy) has been what western diplomats, fucntionaries and
the media has done since Yeltsin first created the thing. They fear
and hate the Russian masses just as much as their 'liberal' stooges
do, and they have not and never will accept the legitimacy of
the Russian socialist left, elected or otherwise. So we should be
aware of the main theme of 1999: to prevent at all costs KPRF
electoral advance.

who have resolutely refused to do what Western powers (and
the trotskyists) would really like, i.e. to man the barricades in
romantic, abortive and bloody risings which would enable the west and
its comprador Russians clients to crush Russian communism forever and
reconstruct Russian capitalism and civil society accordingly. What really
irks and irritates the West and the Russian 'liberals' or
'deremocrats' (shitocrats) as they are locally known, is Zyuganov's
canny refusal to behave like a Bolshevik from Central Casting 
in search of a tank to throw himself under. Actually this irritation
and growing fear of Zyuganov and the KPRF is justified because the detested
KPRF is the only real danger Russian capitalism now faces. (Witness
the odd contortions of the Russian oligarch-owned media -- reflected
by the western press -- which simultaneously ignores the KPRF while
demonising it -- on the one hand, these are paltry parliamentary buffoons,
corrupt, incompetent and compromised poodles etc; on the other hand 
these were the evil conspirators behind the Starovoitova shooting etc 
-- thus the KPRF is such a 'threat' to 'democracy' that it must 
be 'banned'. All this western and comprador desperation shows only
that the KPRF is indeed a mass organisation and a real potential
threat to western hegemony in Russia, especially in this year of
Duma and possibly presidential elections. For the KPRF electoral 
juggernaut already looks unstoppable; the KPRF will dominate the 
next Duma and may even have a large enough majority to impose
constitutional change; and as for the presidency, the desperate thrashing
around of the punditry between Lebed, Luzhkov and Yavlinsky, 
backlights one thing: the silent but looming presence of Gennady
Zyuganov (it was none other than the CIA and Strobe Talbott
who first advised Yeltsin, in the heady days of spring 1992, to
legalise the banned communists on the grounds that nostalgic pensioners
needed an outlet; this seemingly-inspired de-criminalisation of
the communists looked mighty magnanimous at the time, but now when
the communist future of Russia is already taking shape, and as
Primakov produces grand anti-American alliances from his hat,
and breathes fire in defence of Saddam, that decision doesn't
look half so machiavellian).

The KPRF is the main obstacle to finance capitalism's plans for Russia.
Therefore it makes sense to try to tar Zyuganov with the alternative
brush: that of being a brown nationalist, a fascist in red clothing. The
anti-Semitic statements coming from some KPRF high-ups is a godsend for
those like Gaidar, Chubais etc. and their western sponsors who have so
far failed to demonize the KPRF or destroy its popular base.

Is Zyuganov openly embracing an anti-Semitic popular politics? The
answer is clearly no. His recent statement (republished on JRL) is 
draws careful distinctions between anti-zionism and antisemitism, 
and his declaration that we can and should be anti-zionist, are not 
only within the whole tradition of Soviet diplomacy and political 
thinking and represent no new 'brown' departure; they are within
the moral and political universe embraced by the western left at least
since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war demonstrated the illusionary nature of
Israeli 'kibbutz socialism' and the reality that Israel and zionism are
hand in glove with imperialism.

If anything, Zyuganov is LESS nationalist now than when he was expelled
from the CPSU for nationalist deviations 15 or so years ago; like all
Russians in his position, he has had the chance to travel and it has
broadened his mind.

Zyuganov's nationalism is fuelled by the genuine indignation at the fate
of his country which any normal half-patriotic citizen of any state ought to
feel, and it is ahred by tens of millions of Russians whose indifference to
poltiics and public life is just for show; deep down, they bitterly,
passionately care. That's what worries the CIA and Mad Albright and
their stooges, of course.

Actually, the fate of Russia this year is more likely to be decided by what
happens on Wall St than by the devious manouvrings of western dark forces
attempting to contain/divert Russian popular outrage. If the DJIA collapses,
there will be another Russian revolution. If not, not.

Mark Jones

*******