July 10, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3386 •3387  •3388

Johnson's Russia List
#3388
10 July 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Times (UK): Richard Beeston, Rivals fish for votes as Yeltsin 
unwinds.
2. Stephen S. Moody: Virtual Revisited. Russia's current industrial
expansion 
raises perplexing questions about barter.
3. St. Petersburg Times: Fyodor Gavrilov, Will Politicians Learn the Cost
of 
Chechnya? 
4. Interfax: Kuptsov Denies Primakov Invited To Join Leftist Bloc.
5. Moscow Times editorial: Communists United by Expediency.
6. Interpress Service: ENERGY-RUSSIA: POVERTY, NOT COMPUTERS, THREATENS 
NUCLEAR PLANTS.
7. Andrei Liakhov: Russia and Central Asia. 
8. The Nation book review: George Kenney, Spy or Savior? Review of
THE MAN WHO TRIED TO SAVE THE WORLD: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious 
Disappearance of Fred Cuny by Scott Anderson.]

*******

#1
The Times (UK)
July 10 1999 
[for personal use only]
Rivals fish for votes as Yeltsin unwinds 
Richard Beeston on the holiday that signals change 

PRESIDENT YELTSIN embarks today on the last of his annual summer holidays,
heading for his favourite presidential dacha northwest of Moscow. 

As with a tsar travelling in another era, nothing will be spared to ensure
his comfort as he indulges in fishing, now his favourite sport. 

The regular holidays to the numerous presidential retreats have become
something of a joke in Russia. But this time, the occasion will strike a
more serious note because it signals the end of an era. By this time next
year Russia will have a new leader, and Mr Yeltsin will be the first
Russian leader voluntarily to leave office and go into retirement. 

Yesterday he said confidently that the "political situation in Russia is
quiet". But the truth is that the race for his job is well under way. With
presidential polls due in June 2000, the candidates are begining to emerge
from the shadows. 

The strongest challenger so far is Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, whose
power extends far beyond the limits of Russia's largest and richest city.
The bald, stocky Muscovite has steadily built up his powerbase, which
includes control of television and newspapers. His network of support
extends to big business, the military and the Orthodox Church as well as
broad backing from communists and nationalists. He has been careful never
to challenge the Kremlin leader and has kept his presidential ambitions
private. 

Mr Luzhkov's big handicap is the persistent allegation of ties with the
Russian mafia. At one time three of his confidants were barred from
visiting America because of their links with organised crime. 

In modern Russia politicians have been tainted by similar charges with no
apparent damage to their popularity. But in the hands of a real opponent
details about the murky world of Moscow politics could return to haunt the
mayor. 

One possible challenger is Sergei Stepashin, the chubby-faced Prime
Minister appointed this year by Mr Yeltsin. Despite a mixed political
record, including a role in the disastrous military campaign in Chechnya in
1994 when he was Russia's intelligence chief, he enjoys one major
advantage. Under Russia's constitution the Prime Minister automatically
takes on the role of head of state in the event that the President dies or
becomes physically unable to fulfil his duties. With Mr Yeltsin's record
of illnesses there is a real chance that Mr Stepashin could simply walk
into the job. He would then have three months, with the considerable
advantages of the Kremlin machinery at his disposal, to prepare his
campaign. 

The third possibility is Aleksandr Lebed, the former army general who is
now Governor of the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk. Once regarded as a
favourite, particularly after he resolved the war in Chechnya, he has seen
his popularity fall and he has neither the resources nor the backing to
mount a convincing challenge. 

The race is likely to include many other runners, including Gennadi
Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, who came second in the last
elections, and a number of challengers from Western-style liberals to
extreme nationalists. 

However, much will depend on who the country's bankers and media magnates
support and, in particular, which candidate has best access to television
airtime. 

*******

#2
Date: 10 July 1999
From: Stephen S. Moody (stimru@aol.com)
Subject: Virtual Revisited
Russia's current industrial expansion raises perplexing questions 
about barter.

Growth that results in genuine import substitution and improved tax 
collection is, if you'll pardon the expression, real. If, in fact, there is 
no Russian commercial banking sector to speak of, it must be that barter is 
facilitating real growth. In the absence of a commercial banking system, 
Russia's current industrial expansion appears to refute the contention that 
barter is essentially a popular means of masking deceptive pricing among 
enterprises, and that its primary benefit to practitioners is tax avoidance. 
To the contrary, it appears that barter has allowed Russian industry to 
capitalize on the economic benefits of devaluation, channeling redirected 
consumer spending into real increases in capacity utilization and, as recent 
anecdotal evidence suggests, genuine import substitution--things the Russian 
commercial banking system, even in its heyday, was unable or unwilling to do.

More perplexing still, inflation rates are falling. Russia's 
industrial expansion is occurring without inflationary increases in money 
supply. That means that the growth is not only real, but "real 
positive"--that is, Russian GDP is expanding at a rate which, adjusted for 
inflation, remains positive. However, in the absence of expansionary credits 
from a nonexistent commercial banking system, it also suggests that real 
growth is occurring independent of RCB monetary policy. It suggests, in 
fact, that the barter system--not the Russian Central Bank--controls the 
expansion and contraction of real credit, at least in the industrial economy.

Now, if the barter system controls the real credit that finances the 
real growth, is it not the real Russian financial system? And if the 
industry it finances responds to devaluation with products that replace 
imports, is not that industry restructuring? And if tax receipts are rising 
as industry expands, is not the barter system financing the taxes industry 
pays?

For all its ills and abuses, barter works. It deserves a closer look.

*******

#3
St. Petersburg Times
July 9, 1999 
NOTES OF AN IDLER
Will Politicians Learn the Cost of Chechnya? 
By Fyodor Gavrilov

YESTERDAY, the mainstream daily Izvestia reported that two Chechen
terrorists had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the bombing of
a Moscow hotel. One of the men was armed with a fountain pen pistol. 

Unfortunately, this isn't the only evidence of rising tensions between
Russia and the so-called Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. I have the
impression that these two parts of the once-whole Soviet Union are on the
verge of a new war. 

The temperature along the entire length of the border between Russia and
Chechnya has been climbing steadily towards the boiling point since the
beginning of this year. Not a week has gone by in the last two months
without armed skirmishes and fresh casualty rolls. Sergei Stepashin's new
government - especially newly sworn Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo -
is talking tough. 

In a recent speech before the State Duma, Rushailo said that the power
ministries had chosen a new tactic for dealing with Chechen "bandits:"
preventive artillery strikes against areas inside Chechnya where "enemy
forces" are concentrated. He even promised to unleash the pride of the
post-Soviet military industry - the A-300 rocket complex. Then he went out
and made good on his threat. 

Chechnya has a long border - as the Russian media stress, "administrative,"
not national - with three Russian provinces: Stavropol Krai, Ingushetia,
and Dagestan. Moreover, many of Dagestan's border regions are populated by
ethnic Chechens. Several important oil pipelines pass through Chechnya, the
same pipelines that could be used to pump oil from the promising deposits
in Azerbaijan to Russian ports. In a word, peace inside Chechnya and with
Chechnya is financially vital to Russia. 

What's happening in the North Caucasus today is awfully similar to what
happened there in 1993-94. Then, large-scale military clashes were preceded
by endless Chechen raids on neighboring territories. The Chechens also did
a land-office business in robbing Baku-bound trains. Those trains stopped
running long ago, and the Chechens have turned to kidnapping. According to
some sources, around 900 people are currently being held hostage in
Chechnya. To be fair, though, it's hard to get reliable information about
Chechnya nowadays - journalists don't want to find themselves in a dark
cellar waiting for their bosses to cough up the ransom money. 

The economies of both sides are in crisis. Every schoolchild knows what
Russia's problems are. And the only thing that Chechnya got from its
defensive victory in the 1994-96 war was the right (which it had earlier)
to exist as a free economic zone, but this means little to investors. Just
as before, our peoples have no job opportunities other than making war. 

To put it mildly, I feel alarmed. Russian public opinion has come full
circle. People are inclined to approve of a decisive reaction on the part
of the government, which is only too happy to do anything to improve its
rating. Once upon a time, on the eve of the last national elections,
presidential candidate Yeltsin needed a peace deal with Chechnya. Now
elections are around the corner once more, and there are a number of
political forces in Russia that could use a victorious war. 

Have Russian politicians learned to contemplate the costs of victory? 

Fyodor Gavrilov is the editor of Kariera-Kapital.

*******

#4
Kuptsov Denies Primakov Invited To Join Leftist Bloc 

MOSCOW. July 8 (Interfax) - A leading Communist 
denied on Thursday that the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF) has invited 
former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov to join the leftist and 
nationalist parliamentary election ticket. Valentin Kuptsov, one of the 
KPRF's leaders and a senior party representative in parliament, told 
Interfax that Primakov, who was dismissed from the post of prime minister 
in May of this year, is unlikely to join any political coalition or run 
for a seat in the lower house. 

It is "very important" for Primakov "to 
gradually come after the tremendous psychological blow [his dismissal] 
into political life by analyzing the true political alignment of forces, 
and this is something that can be done only on the basis of the results 
of the parliamentary elections," Kuptsov said. However, Kuptsov is 
convinced that Primakov will run for president next year. As a 
presidential candidate, the ex-prime minister "could bring together a 
very wide range of both centrist and left-wing forces," he said. If the 
KPRF and its allies win a "convincing victory" in the parliamentary 
elections, and the constitution is amended to trim the president's powers 
and expand those of parliament, the leftists and nationalists might back 
Primakov's bid for the presidency, the communist leader said. 

"We have 
our own candidate, [KPRF leader Gennady] Zyuganov, and we haven't once 
considered a situation where Primakov could join in the presidential 
race. But he [Primakov] would be unable to win single-handedly, without 
support from serious political forces. "Therefore, if we receive the 
maximum majority of seats in the State Duma [lower house] and if changes 
are made to the constitution, we will have every chance of reaching an 
agreement with Primakov concerning his candidacy." Kuptsov said the KPRF 
leadership and most of the party's Duma deputies are certain that the 
leftists and nationalists will win the majority in the next Duma. "Our 
group will again be the first one in numbers," he said. 

Late next month, 
the KPRF will decide on forming a parliamentary election coalition with 
other left-wing groups, among them the Agrarian Party and the Movement in 
Support of the Armed Forces, Kuptsov said. He said that Zyuganov and Duma 
speaker Gennady Seleznyov are the top two on the KPRF ticket. The 
candidates for number three include Aman Tuleyev, Kemerovo governor and 
leader of the Revival and Unity group, communists Viktor Ilyukhin, a 
senior Duma deputy, Svetlana Goryacheva, Duma deputy speaker and Yuri 
Maslyukov, a first deputy prime minister in Primakov's government, and 
Nikolai Kharitonov, Agrarian parliamentary leader. 

*******

#5
Moscow Times
July 10, 1999 
EDITORIAL: Communists United by Expediency 

The Communist Party has always been a furtively dishonest political
animal. This is largely thanks to Gennady Zyuganov, who has fought doggedly
over the years to unite nationalists, opportunists and anti-Semites with
self-styled social democrats and wistful Soviet patriots. 

Gennady Seleznyov, one of the party's top-ranking members and the speaker
of the State Duma, used to argue for a social democratic approach to
Russia's political aims modeled on Sweden. Yet Seleznyov is in the same
party with Albert Makashov, the retired general and Duma deputy who
believes a better approach to public policy would be to "beat the yids." 

That Zyuganov is able to keep all these differing elements in one party is
a tribute to þ something. It's tempting to say that this is a tribute to
Zyuganov's talents as a leader and a diplomat, but ample experience with
Russia's most popular politician suggests he is neither. No, most likely
the party's sullen decision to hang together, year in and year out, is a
tribute to widespread lazy opportunism and hazy thinking. 

Now the party is falling apart. Seleznyov, Zyuganov, the hard-line Duma
security tsar Viktor Ilyukhin and the nationalist thinker Alexei
Podberyozkin, Zyuganov's ideologist, are all pulling it in different
directions. 

What happens next? For now, probably nothing. As much as they hate each
other, the top Communists love their jobs and perks. The looming Duma
elections will focus the minds of most of the apparatchiki, and they will
probably stick together reluctantly until they are safely back in
parliament. 

But if there is to be a presidential race in the spring of 2000, probably
some leading Communists will wrestle Zyuganov for the right to represent
the party. Zyuganov certainly seems ripe for such a challenge. As disgusted
as most Russians are with the Boris Yeltsin years, Zyuganov has never been
able to capitalize on that broad dissatisfaction. 

This is partly because Zyuganov & Co. have been so outrageously
collaborationist. Not only have they voted for Yeltsin's governments and
economic policies f they long ago made it clear they would not so much as
object were Yeltsin to jettison democracy, provided he shared power with
them. 

In other words, whether the party falls apart or limps onward doesn't
really matter. It's going nowhere either way. All of which makes it curious
when Yeltsin starts rumbling about the need for the justice minister to
watch these docile collaborationists, because some of them might be
"extremists." 

Extremists? What self-respecting extremist could follow Zyuganov anywhere?
Talk like that just shows the Communists aren't the only furtively
dishonest political animal prowling Russia these days. 

*******

#6
ENERGY-RUSSIA: POVERTY, NOT COMPUTERS, THREATENS NUCLEAR PLANTS
Interpress Service

MOSCOW, (Jul. 9) IPS - While concerns grow in the West about 
Russia's nuclear industry's capability to meet the "millennium bug" 
computer deadline, Russian experts warn that the real threat lies 
in unhappy workers and lack of maintenance. 
These days many of Russia's 29 nuclear plants are hardly in a 
position to worry about the so-called Year 2000 bug -- when 
computers' clocks will mark "00" and are expected to go wild -- if 
salaries go unpaid for months, and repair and modernization work 
is delayed. 
The Sosnovy Bor and Kursk plants in central Russia, for example, 
reportedly do not have enough money for required repairs because 
customers are not paying their electricity bills. 
Civilian workers in Russia's nuclear arms industry have already 
warned of a catastrophe of Chernobyl proportions if the government 
does not find money soon to pay off wage arrears and carry out 
essential maintenance. 
Nuclear power development has been stagnating world-wide since the 
disaster in Chernobyl (Ukraine) in April 1986. 
Three thousand nuclear power plant workers in Snezhinsk, Russia's 
Ural Mountains region recently launched a strike because they have 
not received salaries for more than three months. Representatives 
of the Russian Union of Atomic Industry Workers have said that 
"hungry" nuclear workers are dangerous. 
The estimates of funding needed to address the problem in Russia's 
nuclear power sector vary from $10 million to $700 million, Piotr 
Pertsov, manager of the Year 2000-bug project, told IPS. 
"I'd say the actual cost should be somewhere between $50-$70 
million, but it is unlikely that the money will be found," he 
added. 
Russia's total bill to protect itself from the Year 2000 computer 
bug is estimated somewhere between $200-$300 million and $3 
billion. 
However, some Russian experts argue that the year 2000 computer 
glitch will not threaten Russia's power stations, as most of them 
are not controlled by computers. The real problem is safety 
standards. 
"Obviously, there is Year 2000-bug problem in Russia's nuclear 
sector, though many facilities are not highly computerized as to 
pose a real threat," Alexander Khlebnikov, chief expert of the 
Russian Research Center "Kurchatov Institute," told IPS. 
The Moscow-based center is the successor of "Laboratory No.2." 
founded in 1943 and which became the cradle of the Soviet nuclear 
program. 
Kurchatov is an umbrella organization for scores of research units 
with a total 7,000 staff. 
But this once elite scientific center -- which could be essential 
in solving the computer bug issue in Russia -- suffers now of acute 
underfunding and its staff also goes unpaid for months. 
These days Russian nuclear power plants are operating at only 
one-third of their output of two years ago, because of fuel 
shortages and delays in repairs. 
"We do hope to prevent Year-2000 related problems in the Russian 
nuclear sector, because it's obviously much cheaper than dealing 
with its possible consequences," said Colonel Sergei Nekhoroshev 
of Russia's Emergency Ministry. 
"And the pessimistic scenario becomes nightmarish as we have some 
10 high-risk nuclear and chemical facilities around Moscow alone," 
he said. 
However, Nekhoroshev sounded upbeat in the country's ability to 
uphold nuclear safety, at a recent conference on the issue in 
Moscow. 
A recent study by the National Research Council of the U.S. 
National Academy of Sciences concluded that the U.S. government 
should provide Russia with more financial and technical support 
the next decade to upgrade safety standards and to protect Moscow's 
plutonium and highly enriched uranium stocks from theft or 
diversion into nuclear weapons. 
But Russia has consistently rejected Western claims that its 
nuclear materials are poorly guarded or that its safety systems are 
below international standards. 
No radioactive materials have been reported stolen from Russia's 
nuclear facilities for the past three years, thanks to more 
efficient controls and growing apprehension that they are hard to 
sell, according to Nikolai Redin, who oversees security issues at 
the Nuclear Power Ministry. 
He said there were about 30 failed attempts to steal radioactive 
substances. 
To keep Russia's nuclear material from disappearing abroad, 
Russian, European and U.S. partners opened a Center to track 
stockpiles of uranium and plutonium, and to deal with technical 
issues, including the Year 2000 bug. 
Unlike other major nuclear powers, where the industry is being 
gradually phased-out, Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov 
believes that Russia and the whole world should increasingly rely 
on atomic plants to meet energy requirements and predicts that the 
present trend will be reversed. 
He argues that nuclear power should provide 30 to 40 percent of 
Russia's energy needs, up from its current 12 percent. 
He says Russia should make a profit out of its reprocessing 
facilities and start letting other nations pay to send their 
radioactive waste for reprocessing and storage here. 
The ministry has reportedly offered to reprocess $10 billion worth 
of nuclear waste at its Chelyabinsk plant from Switzerland, 
Germany, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan and eventually Japan. The deal, 
however is not expected to materialize any time soon. 
In the meantime, Russian nuclear technology is finding markets 
around the world. Russia insists -- in spite of Chernobyl -- that 
its technology is safe enough to go overseas, asserting that 
security systems not only meet, but even exceed international 
standards. 
Joint nuclear plant projects are on its way in Cuba, India and 
Iran. 
Russia is helping Iran build a nuclear plant at Bushehr -- a 
project the United States strongly opposes, arguing that Iran -- 
a country still high in Washington's black list -- may use it to 
develop nuclear weapons. 
Russia and Cuba have agreed to create a joint venture to complete 
a partially-built nuclear reactor at the Juragua power station in 
Cuba. 
Construction of two Soviet-designed, light-water reactors began in 
the early 1980s, but financial problems in both Cuba and the Soviet 
Union forced a halt. 
Russian officials are also discussing the implementation of a 1998 
agreement to build a two billion-dollar nuclear plant at 
Kudankulam, India. 
The export of nuclear technology is one of many efforts by Russian 
authorities and individuals to take economic advantage of the areas 
in which Soviet science and technology once excelled and which look 
now doomed due to the country's accelerated downfall in the past 
nine years. 
In spite of projects and hopes, he fact remains that -- as it often 
happens in Russia nowadays -- the country lacks proper financial 
and human resources to combat the millennium bug in its nuclear 
industry, said Sergei Zykov, head of International Science and 
Technology Center, a multilateral body designed to assist the 
former Soviet nuclear sector. 

*******

#7
From: Andrei Liakhov <liakhova@nortonrose.com> 
Sent: Monday, July 05, 1999 
Subject: Russia and Central Asia. 

Russia and Central Asia. 

In my remarks I'd like to concentrate on Economics - Oil, Gas and Gold.
But firstly a bit of history, which is a way to answer some of the points
raised in JRL discussions:

Russians have a long history of presence in Central Asia which is as
chequered and controversial as (for example) the British history in India,
Afganistan and/or Burma. The thesis that the Russians are the only
positive Western-like influence in the region is arguable at least and the
opposite view of the historic (and probably current too) Russian influence
seem to be (at least to an outside observer) a very biased view caused
primarily by some immediate political considerations.

I spent quite some time in Uzbekistan in early 80ies and saw how the old
system of traditional Islamic values adjusted itself to the realities of
"developed socialism". The result was sometimes funny, sometimes
ridiculous, but mostly the old system adjusted quite well to Soviet ways. 

After a considerable lapse of time I've spent quite some time doing
Central Asian related business for the Firm I currently work for and I
think I had a chance to have a good look at what some of these countries
are. In my view (I know I shall not be very popular for this) all of them
are dictatorships, some mild some moderate and some obvious and I find it
at least strange that some JRL contributors are trying to find
"democracies" in the region. Political regimes which exist in these
countries have adjusted to Western terminology in the same way they
previously adjusted to external trappings of communist ideology with no
fundamental change in the underlying socio-political system. That
capability to adjust without fundamental change is, by the way, one of the
more remarkable legacies of the Russian influence in the region.

I can't share the view that Russia supports "better" regimes in the
regions than the US - it's too simplistic and remeniscent of the old good
Cold War "black and white" ideology. All regimes in the region are great
pragmatics who understand that their personal survival at the top almost
solely depends on the amount of foreign money they are able to bring to
their respective countries or/and clans. The hole left by withdrawal of
Soviet cash injections (and with some exceptions the economies of the
region were always very inefficient) has to be filled somehow.......

The current policies of all of these regimes are primarily based on the
economical consideration and greed. The only base of the economies of the
region left are natural resources. All the Governments of the region work
on the assumption that the region is a bonanza for natural resources of
all kinds - a combination of South Africa and the Gulf. Is it really so?

The Soviets had a huge, very professional and quite thorough geological
service which dug, drilled and exploded for the new reserves for almost 80
years. By mid 70ies all the USSR's reserves were quite thoroughly mapped
and catalogued. On the basis of this information decisions were taken to
develop particular reserves. All this was done on a central planning basis
and although the Soviet planners were a lot of things but they were as a
rule not completely stupid. The natural question is then why the USSR did
not proceed with development of what is now claimed is an easy pick, but
proceeded to spent zillions on the development of reserves virtually in
the middle of nowhere? 

To answer this I'd like to remind that in '91-'92 all the economies of the
region came to a virtual standstill. And...... suddenly....... Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan declared that they sit
on exiting new reserves. What followed is history.......... But........
Bakyrchik (in Kazakhstan) has sold its gold mine to an Indonesian interest
without getting a gram of gold out of the ground; an attempt to start gold
production in Uzbekistan spectaculously failed in '96 when a newly
established US crushing plant blew up as the result of technical
miscalculation at the opening ceremony nearly killing the Uzbek President;
Larmaq (a Dutch independent oil/gas co) had to withdraw from Turkmenistan
having lost more than US$100 million in a gas exploration project,
recently the closure of one oil consortium was announced in Azerbaijan,
there are a lot more examples like this. It now becomes apparent that
although the reserves are there they are neither as large as originally
claimed nor an easy pick. But...... the subscription bonuses have been
paid prior to commencement of any works, the local economies were propped
up, local ruling elites are rich and happy, life goes on!

The Western interest in the region (meaning money to the regimes) is
largely based on energy interests. The regimes MUST support the illusion
that the region is a natural resources bonanza to have continious Western
interest, which means to them one thing - more money - it's not very
difficult to do that having such masters of propaganda as heads of state
(all of them were CPSU Central Committee members! (with the exception of
Armenian President)). 

Russian interest in the region is currently broadly very similar to the
Western but with the internal Russian turmoil, it's mostly represented by
sporadic efforts of two Russian energy giants - Gazprom and Lukoil to get
a cut of the most promising reserves. Unfortunately there is no coherent
long term Russian policy towards the region and with CIS becoming less and
less efficient it's likely that the Russian involvement will continue to
diminish for some time. 

Although it is true that currently all the regimes are selling their
support to the highest bidder - this may be hardly considered a long term
trend for a number of reasons some of which were thoroughly analysed in
the JRL already. A lot will depend on what Russia (which is one of the
natural "poles of attraction" for the region) will look like after June
2000. It will always be interested in the region primarily for security
and geopolitical reasons but it will be some time when a coherent Russian
policy towards the region will emerge. This policy is likely to depend on
how much reserves will be actually found and developed particularily in
the Caspian, on the level of Western (primarily US) involvement in the
region and on the level of religious and ethnic tolerance of all things
Russian (which is at the moment on its very lowest in some parts of the
region). 

The other natural pole for the region (with the exception of Georgia and
Armenia) are its southern neighbours, the system of values of which is
more close to the underlying structures of the Central Asian society.
Their influence will always be a natural counter balance of Russian
interest in the region and the "tug of war" between Russian and Islamic
influence will constitute the core of the sociocultural development of the
region for the years to come. 

*******

#8
The Nation
July 26, 1999
Book Review
Spy or Savior? 
by GEORGE KENNEY 
George Kenney, who writes frequently on foreign affairs, resigned from the
State Department's Yugoslavia desk in August 1992 in protest over Bush
Administration policy in the region. 

THE MAN WHO TRIED
TO SAVE THE WORLD:
The Dangerous Life and
Mysterious Disappearance
of Fred Cuny.
By Scott Anderson. 
Doubleday. 374 pp. $24.95. 

In the third week of June, almost unnoticed during US-Russian wrangling
over the international peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, the Russian
government closed fifty of sixty border crossings into its breakaway
province of Chechnya and launched artillery and helicopter gunship strikes
on Chechen positions. Although the cost of regaining control over
Chechnya--acknowledged to be militarily lost in 1996 after a horrific
struggle--would be prohibitive, Moscow nevertheless has a few compelling
reasons to play the military card. The strikes were primarily a response to
Chechen attacks. In addition, a successful Chechen separation from Russia
could induce other autonomous areas to leave the Russian federation, not
merely from the notoriously unstable Transcaucasus but from large swaths of
the Russian map. Paranoid about these possibilities, Moscow believes its
continued military domination of non-Slavic areas, albeit without complete
control, is vital for Russia's survival as a sovereign state. This, of
course, is flawed thinking. If Russia is not to dissolve like the Soviet
Union or, worse yet, end in a cataclysm like Yugoslavia's (with the added
piquancy of loose nukes), it must negotiate peacefully across a welter of
emotional claims to self-determination. 

The conundrums of that bigger picture were, whether he realized it fully or
not, what gave international relief superstar Frederick Cuny so much
trouble in his valiant but ultimately doomed efforts to save Chechnya. They
were probably what killed him. His life story is a synecdoche of sorts,
embodying questions about the tensions between humanitarian aid and
military intervention, nongovernmental work and state diplomacy. And his
vexing end only serves to highlight those vexing questions. 

In The Man Who Tried to Save the World, Scott Anderson explores the mystery
of Fred Cuny's death in Chechnya and the question of who he really was (a
deep-cover, paradoxically high-profile spy or an astonishingly effective
humanitarian relief worker). Anderson also examines (in a less than
satisfying gloss) what made him such an important figure and gives a kind
of watercolor of Cuny's early life that does, in fact, help us separate the
myth from the man. The book reads more like a suspense novel than a
biography, and it should; in retracing Cuny's movements, Anderson several
times rashly risked his own life at the hands of Chechen militias. 

Cuny's disappearance in Chechnya in early April 1995 produced a shock wave
of high-level meetings, an exchange between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin
and an exhaustive on-the-ground investigation with help provided by, among
others, US diplomats, the CIA, the FBI, Russian and Chechen security
services, prominent relief workers, foreign journalists, Cuny's family and
the Soros Foundation, Cuny's employer. It is fair to say that at the time
of his death he was regarded as the most talented emergency-relief-work
expert in the world, and perhaps the most influential. 

Fred Cuny's friends miss him terribly. Although I did not know Fred nearly
as well as many others, I counted him as a friend. We were at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace at roughly the same time, from late 1992
to mid-1994--he as a part-time senior associate, I as a consultant. Our
paths often crossed at meetings and social functions, and we shared a
professional interest in the Balkans. So when Cuny set up a Sarajevo gas
and water project for George Soros in 1993, I followed its progress with
attention, communicated regularly with him by satellite phone and, that
December, stayed at his house and worked out of his office while on a
private fact-finding mission to the Bosnian war. After I left Carnegie I
kept up our contacts--my last talk with Cuny took place in late March 1995,
hours before he left the States for his fateful trip to Chechnya. 

Originally written shortly after Cuny's disappearance as an article for the
New York Times Magazine, the germ of this book grew into another three
years of work for Anderson, who hunted for clues to what happened. He saves
his arguments about Cuny's demise for the end of this tale, building on a
vibrant montage of biography and scenes of the Chechen war zone. After
sifting through masses of evidence and weighing the credibility of hundreds
of conflicting local sources, Anderson offers the reader a complicated
conclusion without quite saying he believes it himself: that Gen. Dzhokhar
Dudayev, then the president of Chechnya, personally ordered the detention
and execution of Cuny and three colleagues who accompanied him on what was
supposed to have been a simple day trip for refugee-needs assessment. The
men had been traveling from their base in Sleptsovskaya, Ingushetia, across
the border to the Chechen capital, Grozny. 

Anderson suggests that Cuny's party, by attempting to reach Grozny via a
back road that took them through Bamut, the site of an officially--but
possibly incompletely--decommissioned Soviet nuclear missile base, might
have been in a position to confirm or deny reports that Chechnya possessed
two or more leftover, uncatalogued nuclear warheads. Dudayev, according to
this theory, feared that a revelation either way would ruin an artful
ambiguity that divided attacking Russian forces' attention between Bamut
and other fronts. This, it must be said, is essentially the Russian
explanation of Cuny's fate, and it has also been tacitly accepted by senior
US government officials. Dudayev himself was killed in April 1996 by an
air-launched Russian smart bomb keyed to his cell phone. The Chechens have
never admitted a thing. 

Anderson was not the only journalist interested in putting the story
together. PBS's Frontline series produced an excellent documentary. Much of
it, with additional source material such as audio clips of interviews with
Cuny, articles and memos he'd written, and articles about him, can be found
at www2.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny. 

As Anderson and others convincingly argue, a preponderance of the evidence
does suggest that a group of Chechens killed Cuny and his colleagues in or
near Bamut. But was concern over nuclear deterrence really the motive? And
did the order really come from Dudayev? Cuny was well and favorably known
to the senior Chechen leadership, particularly after his scorching critique
of Russian culpability for the war in an April 1995 article he had
published in The New York Review of Books shortly before returning to
Chechnya. That, and Cuny's frequent media appearances on top-rated shows,
offered the possibility of additional, priceless publicity for the Chechen
cause. In addition, through Cuny, the Chechens were about to get
substantial humanitarian aid from a politically powerful billionaire. It
only stands to reason that the Chechens who killed him must have convinced
themselves that he wished to do them harm that superseded tangible proofs
of the help he offered. 

One explanation for this mental calculus is speculation that the Russians
planted the notion that Cuny was a spy. Russia had the real motive for
removing Cuny, after all. Anderson rules out a Russian false-flag operation
on the grounds that, because of its detailed nature, the Chechen
intelligence allegedly "incriminating" Cuny as a spy and his colleagues as
Russian agents could have been produced only after Cuny's detention. Fair
enough--but what if a local Chechen intelligence officer, duped by Russian
disinformation, clumsily tried to fabricate an exculpatory rationale after
carrying out the execution of Cuny and his party? Anderson's conclusion
relies much too heavily on a single shaky source who puts Dudayev in Bamut
at the time Cuny disappeared. 

Something Anderson doesn't mention was pointed out to me by Paul Goble, a
friend of Cuny's and the area expert from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Chechen culture, based upon a Sufi version of Islam, holds that there are
two kinds of knowledge: ordinary knowledge to which everyone has access and
hidden knowledge for the elite. With a gnostic perspective, and in a
nightmare wartime environment, people become particularly susceptible to
the kind of disinformation that may have surrounded Cuny. Fearing that the
Russians would arrange his death after the New York Review piece, Goble
pleaded with Cuny not to return to Chechnya. Between Scott Anderson's
analysis and Paul Goble's, I side with Paul, though I am not fully
persuaded. At the very least, I think that since Cuny gave his life to help
the Chechens, we should reserve judgment on the worst allegations against
them absent any hard evidence. 

There remains the question of what Cuny was doing in Bamut and whether it
is at all likely he was a spy. The road through Bamut was not the logical,
the easiest or the safest way to Grozny. His driver was from there, so one
explanation could be that the driver just wanted to pass by home; but this
seems rather feeble and would not hold up in Cuny's priorities. Anderson is
right, I think, in his observation that the only credible reason for Cuny
to go to Bamut was to check on the nuclear warheads story. Indeed, in our
last conversation I remember Cuny saying, seemingly out of the blue, that
everything was for sale in Chechnya, "including nuclear missiles."
"Armed!?" I asked, thinking it was nonsense. "Yes!" he averred, but he
didn't elaborate and I didn't pursue it. Anyhow, the missiles were on his
mind just before the trip, which somewhat corroborates the supposition. But
then what explains his interest? Anderson does a good job of laying out the
range of possibilities: Cuny was a paid, deep-cover official of the US
government; a government-directed but unpaid, unofficial agent; or a
regular source with unique, highly prized access to areas of interest.
Anderson suggests that the reality was a fuzzy combination of the latter
two. I concur. I asked Cuny about this once, and he vigorously denied
working under deep cover. (If he had been, he would of course have denied
it; nevertheless, I believed him.) 

Many did think Cuny was a paid, clandestine government agent. Others,
including sometimes members of his own family, wondered. Two of his
undertakings in particular seemed hard to explain without recourse to
obscure government powers. First, after the Gulf War, Cuny--practically
single-handedly--expanded the militarized zone of Operation Provide Comfort
by several hundred kilometers, making possible the safe return to their
homes in less than a hundred days of approximately 400,000 Iraqi Kurds. It
must be understood that without Cuny they would not have gone home in 1991
and very well might still be refugees parked on the Turkish-Iraqi border.
How Cuny managed this is an epic tale in itself--suffice it to say he
talked local US military commanders into helping while turning a deaf ear
to their superiors. Although the top brass were incensed, they could not
argue with Cuny's overnight success, for which they received the credit.
Then, in Sarajevo for Soros, Cuny miraculously got his cargoes priority on
United Nations C-130 relief planes (entirely filling many flights), got
huge flatbeds of equipment past Serbian "customs authorities" and built an
ingenious water-treatment plant that was impervious to shelling, replacing
the one destroyed by the Serbs. Nobody could understand how it was done. 

Cuny had a special gift, a genius really, for figuring out local quirks of
how things were implemented. With this quality--combined with an unusual
willingness to sacrifice his own comfort in sharing the living conditions
of those he sought to help and increased hobnobbing with the military in
the last decade of his life, which lent an additional air of mystery--he
fit the part of the perfect spy. But Cuny loved the limelight, while most
real spies, of course, are anonymous. 

Having discovered a note written when Cuny was 30 in which he lays out for
himself a multitude of grandiose ambitions, Anderson uses it as a central
refrain in recounting Cuny's life, playing back snippets at various
milestones. It is a useful device, perhaps, in establishing his driven
personality, and it does help put in perspective the tall stories Cuny told
and that others told about him. But a focus on ambition gets in Anderson's
way when describing a critical personal transition for Cuny that culminated
in the early nineties: from fieldwork involving natural disasters to work
involving relief in the midst of war, or "complex emergencies." In the
former he was largely, even completely, in control. In the latter he was a
smaller player in an opaque political process, frequently forced to rely on
his own and others' abstract judgment. Cuny lived for the moment; he was,
through no fault of his own, not a strategic thinker. 

It turned out that he was not equally gifted at anticipating the whims of
politicians, either in Washington or abroad. What this boiled down to was
that Cuny, far from being his own master and seeking ever-greater risks as
a means of self-promotion, as Anderson describes it, was being tossed by
his employers into situations he did not understand, for purposes neither
he nor anybody else could clearly articulate. 

Operation Provide Comfort gave Cuny five-star credentials in dealing with
complex emergencies. But Provide Comfort--a humanitarian intervention
massively backed by a recently victorious military coalition--was an
anomaly because of the limited number of manipulable players on the ground.
The next complex emergency Cuny worked on, Somalia, revealed more of his
weaknesses even as it confirmed his strengths. The United States would not,
I strongly believe, have gone into Somalia in 1992 if not for Cuny. I
watched him in action making the tour of Washington, talking the ears off
senior officials in a surprisingly successful attempt to convince them to
do something about famine relief. But they did not do it the way he
recommended! Anderson has that part right too. Cuny did not want
intervention anywhere near Mogadishu or in any manner involved in clan
warfare. Carried out in that way it was a disaster, as he predicted it
would be. Nevertheless, Cuny demonstrated a bothersome lack of foresight in
terms of the politics of the bureaucratic process. 

In Sarajevo we again see, this time on a foreign front, a critical
disconnection between Cuny's ability to get things done and his ability to
cope with the ambiguities of high-level, wartime political machinations. He
built a fantastic water project that would have saved a lot of lives (most
people killed during the shelling were killed getting water from public
wells), but when he tried to turn it on, the Muslim authorities wouldn't
let him. A memo he wrote speaks for itself: In what has to be one of the
most frustrating and bizarre meetings in my life, our team was pleading
with the city government to turn on the water during the heaviest day of
shelling in Sarajevo in 6 months. With bullets literally pinging off the
window sill and rounds going off in the lot next door, the Water Institute
was talking about a long-term testing regime that was more complex than
anything we would see in the U.S. 

Later he told me that the Muslims had actually fired a rocket-propelled
grenade at the facility to get him to back off. He did. (The spigot was
eventually opened quite a while after Cuny's departure from Sarajevo, after
his death; it did help save the city in the latter days of the siege.) But
Cuny had failed to understand the politics of the Bosnian war, the
essential corruption of the Muslim leaders and possibly even the desire to
preserve one of the city's most poignant images of suffering. 

What, then, was the purpose of a humanitarian intervention in Chechnya?
Cuny's backers tended to see a wider pattern of complex emergencies for
which humanitarian intervention was everywhere the thin end of the wedge of
further military intervention tied to geostrategic political purposes. It's
unimportant that those larger purposes went undefined. Perhaps the UN could
have been called in to Chechnya; perhaps something else could have been
done. Political pressure, if successful, could have stopped the war. If
not, there would be many other complex emergencies to choose from. But Cuny
was still thinking in terms of the nuts and bolts of helping people and was
simply unaware of the political forces arrayed against him. He trusted
those he worked for to handle that part of it. They didn't. 

Anderson describes a memorial service held for Fred Cuny at the Carnegie
Endowment in September 1995. In attendance were most of Fred's extended
family, along with representatives of scores of humanitarian relief
agencies, diplomats, State Department personnel, foreign ambassadors, even
National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.... The tributes--some humorous,
some sad--continued for well over two hours. Afterward Craig Cuny [Fred's
son] felt vaguely annoyed.... "I guess in a way I'm tired of it," he said.
"It gets tiring to hear all these people talking about how much they loved
my father, how great he was, when he spent his whole career butting heads
with most of them and trying to get them to listen." 

I was there too and also felt annoyed, but for a different reason. The
people Cuny worked for should have taken better care of him. They should
have stopped him from going back to Chechnya once it became obvious he was
scared (and he was very scared--possibly for the first time in his life).
They should have scaled back their ambitions. They should at least have
uttered a single mea culpa. 

*******