July 12, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3390 • 3391  •

Johnson's Russia List
#3391
12 July 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. AFP: Polls Favor Primakov For Presidency.
2. The Guardian (UK) editorial: We should listen when the bear roars.
3. Christian Science Monitor: Melissa Akin, Hot, lonely summer for Russia's 
Communists.
4. Itar-Tass: Y2K PROBLEM IN RUSSIA PROVOKES CONCERN-STATESMAN.
6. The Times (UK): Anna Blundy, 'It seems that Russians have ceased to
worshipeven their pre-revolutionary writers. Reverence in general has become
extremely pass'
7. Washington Post: Sharon LaFraniere, Food Aid: Too Much, Too Late?
U.S. Shipments to Russia Unneeded, Ill-Conceived, Critics Say
8. Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye: Anatoliy Stepanovich Dyakov and Pavel 
Lenardovich Podvig, In Search of a Way Out of the Impasse: Strategic
Offensive 
Arms Reduction and the ABM Treaty.]

********

#1
Polls Favor Primakov For Presidency 

MOSCOW, Jul 12, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) If an election were held
today, former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov would be Russia's new
president, according to a poll released Sunday on the NTV television network. 

It said Primakov would take 17 percent of the vote to lead the field in a
first-round election, one percentage point ahead of Communist Party chief
Gennady Zyuganov. 

In a second round, Primakov -- prime minister from September 1998 to last
May -- would defeat all rivals, although the network did not give poll
figures for this claim. 

Primakov has been leading public opinion polls as the man most likely to
follow the ailing Boris Yeltsin as president, although he insists he will
not be a candidate. 

Presidential elections are due in June or July next year. 

According to NTV's survey, if Primakov does not seek election, Zyuganov
would take 19 percent of the first-round vote, and defeat the populist
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov in the second round. 

Early this month former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Thursday he
thought Primakov should become Russia's next president, and that Yury
Luzhkov would be his best running mate. 

********

#2
The Guardian (UK)
12 July 1999
[for personal use only]
Leader/Editorial
We should listen when the bear roars 

That the Russians are angry with the west - and with Nato in particular -
is nothing new. What has changed is that, unlike the cold war days,
outbursts of spleen in Moscow no longer resonate with quite the same force
in Washington and elsewhere. 

What with its crumbling economy, external debt and chaotic internal
politics, the bear's bite is not feared in the way it once was. This is a
mistake, especially now. For Russia's anger over Nato's recent actions in
the Balkans is in many ways justified and since it is not understood, is
the more likely to have broad, negative consequences for the west's
dealings with Boris Yeltsin and, more particularly, his successors. 

The Nato attack on Yugoslavia outraged the Russians on several fronts. In
their eyes, it was an incursion onto their turf, into their traditional
sphere of influence, targeted at a Serbian nation with which Russia has
historic ethnic, cultural and religious ties. 

The assault, undertaken against a sovereign state without UN sanction,
created a dangerous and unacceptable precedent. For those in Moscow already
alarmed by Nato's eastward expansion through Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic, the war confirmed their worst fears - that the western alliance
was bent on isolating and encircling its old enemy by signing up new
members in south-east Europe. 

Nato's perceived attempt to exclude Russia from post-war peacekeeping in
Kosovo, denying it a sector of control and prevailing upon Bulgaria and
Romania to ban Russian military overflights, was at the very least an
egregious affront to national pride. 

But most of all, the Russians were enraged by the failure of the west, in
their view, to acknowledge the decisive role played by former prime
minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in finally persuading Slobodan Milosevic to
throw in the towel and withdraw his troops from Kosovo. Why does this
Russian sense of grievance matter? Because Russia, like any nation state,
does have legitimate security interests beyond its borders - and not merely
what it calls its "near abroad". 

Because Russia maintains the world's second most powerful nuclear arsenal,
upon which it is increasingly reliant as its conventional forces are run
down. Because Yeltsin is sick and could be replaced by a much less amenable
figure. 

Because the Russian military is flexing its muscles as at no time since the
Berlin Wall fell, with recent large-scale, nuclear-purposed manoeuvres
codenamed West 99 over and around Iceland (which caught Nato napping) and
with more planned in the Black Sea-Caucasus region. On the political front,
Russia is refusing to rejoin the Nato partnership council. 

Its defence minister is warning that Moscow will oppose key arms control
measures, such as the proposed renegotiation of the 1972 anti-ballistic
missile treaty. It is complaining once again about the treatment of Russian
minorities in the Baltic states, and it is accelerating towards a reunion
with Belarus which it sees as part of its "front-line" with Nato. 

It has threatened to undermine Milosevic's isolation by providing direct,
bilateral aid. More broadly, the recent arms-buying visit to Moscow of
President Hafez Assad of Syria, and another by a senior Iraqi minister, has
provided a timely example of how Russia can still exert significant
influence even further afield. 

Yeltsin last week reassured his armed forces and promised more military
spending. "Our mutual relations with Nato and the US remain delicate and
difficult. We will not confront Nato directly but we will not flirt with
them, either." The west should take note. 

********

#3
Christian Science Monitor
12 July 1999
[for personal use only]
Hot, lonely summer for Russia's Communists
Party lawmakers hold a vigil in parliament, plotting for elections
that could be their last chance for power. 
By Melissa Akin, Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Temperatures in the Russian capital have hovered around 95 degrees F. for
the past month, and no one is feeling the heat so much as the Communists. 

While colleagues vacation at their country houses and the beach, about 30
Communist legislators sweat away each summer day in their offices,
hobnobbing with reporters, plotting election strategy, and reviewing the
latest digs from President Boris Yeltsin. 

"We must be prepared for anything," the Communist Party's No. 2, Valentin
Kuptsov, says solemnly. 

The Communists say Mr. Yeltsin is sitting in the Kremlin dreaming up ways
to keep them off the ballot in elections for the Duma, or lower house of
parliament, in December, and for president next summer. To counter the Duma. 

If they can't find a way to rekindle popular support, it may be the
beginning of the end for the party, whose core of support is an aging
population that grew up with a communist ideology. When those voters are
gone, the party will not last long, analysts predict. 

The once mighty Communists are split by defections and dissatisfaction in
the ranks and no longer sure of the commanding election victories they once
thought were guaranteed by widespread poverty, disappointment in reform,
and popular fury at Yeltsin. 

The president has been on the attack, hinting that he is considering a ban
on the party and publicly declaring that the body of Soviet founder and
Communist icon Vladimir Lenin will be removed from public display at its
tomb next to the Kremlin and buried. 

Just six months ago, after Russians lost millions, if not billions, in a
national banking crash and the ruble fell to a quarter of its August value,
the Communists predicted the protest vote would be so big that they would
have to split into three parts to absorb it. In addition to the
middle-of-the road Communist Party, leaders said they would create a
radical party and a moderate party in the vein of the European social
democrats, an admission of divisions that have long existed. 

"The problem is that the Communist Party is not a homogeneous entity as it
used to be, 20 or even 15 years ago," says Yevgeny Volk, director of the
Moscow office of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It is
composed of very different groups and political views." 

The local daily Moskovsky Komsomolets recently compared the party's
fractious subgroups to "red scraps" in a patchwork quilt. 

Radical communists, whom Mr. Volk estimates at 20 percent of party
supporters, are disgusted by what some of them call "collaboration" with
the Yeltsin government, blaming moderates for promoting private property,
approving belt-tightening budget measures, and for scuppering the
Communist-inspired bid to impeach Yeltsin that failed by only a few votes
in May. 

Moderates, meanwhile, express alarm at the radical nationalist and
anti-Semitic tendencies in the party. 

Caught in the middle is Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, the target of
anger from each side for coddling the other. 

The party's credibility with the public was sapped, moreover, by the
spectacular failure of the impeachment attempt. And the anti-Yeltsin vote,
once monopolized by the Communists, is seeping away. 

New political parties founded by powerful regional leaders, namely the
Fatherland movement of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, are siphoning it off.
Leaders of those parties have something the Communists don't: a track
record in post-Soviet governing for voters to examine. 

Hoping to shore up popular support, the Communists are trying to reassemble
the powerful coalition from 1995 that won virtual control over parliament,
with 150 seats going to Communists and 70 going to their allies. 

But many of the small Communist-aligned parties that rode in with the
Communists back then are no longer sure they want back in the fold. On
Thursday, the Agrarian Party, a key member of the 1995 coalition, announced
it would run for parliament on its own this year even though its chances of
winning are slim. 

The reason, says analyst Sergei Markov of the Center for Political Studies
in Moscow, is an "idea crisis" in the party in the run-up to elections. The
Communists cannot win on an anti-Yeltsin platform alone. 

"They barely managed to beat Boris Yeltsin, a weak opponent, in 1996. Now
they can't explain how they can beat a strong enemy like Yury Luzhkov's
Fatherland," Mr. Markov says. 

The one person who could galvanize the Communists to unify and unite public
opinion behind them is their archenemy, Yeltsin. 

If the president makes good on the threat of an attempted ban, "It would
give them new impetus," says Volk. 

"In Russia people like those who are persecuted by power." 

*******

#4
Y2K PROBLEM IN RUSSIA PROVOKES CONCERN-STATESMAN

MOSCOW, July 12 (Itar-Tass) - Chairman of the State Communications 
Committee Alexander Ivanov, speaking on Monday at a meeting of the 
Russian government presidium, said that "the state with resolving the 
Y2K problem in Russia provokes concern". 
He attributed his words to "inadequate resources to carry out work in 
this field", noting that two billion roubles were spent already on 
updating computer systems. 
However, according to data on June 30, the total volume of expenses to 
settle this problem should amount to 13 billion roubles. 
Ivanov also reported that rates of updating computer systems are very 
low now. "Only 30 percent of work has been done," he emphasised. The 
chairman stressed that the solution of the Y2K problem should be 
completed already in November. 
In this connection, he supposed that great quantities of special and 
other computer technology may start coming from the West in October. 
The expert did not preclude a chance that "Western secret services will 
try to worm their way into computer systems of government bodies or in 
computer systems of Russian power-wielding structures". 
Ivanov proposed that all government bodies should set up centres and 
teams of specialists for the time of a possible computer failure, that 
is on the night between December 31 and January 1, 2000. These centres 
could efficiently settle the problem of computer failures. 
He also expressed an idea of carrying out "preventive measures in some 
ministries, including cuts in flights of civil aviation planes". 
Opening the meeting, Stepashin underlined that solution of the Y2K 
problem is of extreme importance, since only 172 days are left to the 
new year. 
He expressed hope that bleak forecasts, made by the Western mass media 
that Russia will experience serious malfunctions in the operation of 
computer networks on the night between December 31 and January 1, would 
not come true. 

*******

*******

#6
The Times (UK)
12 July 1999
[for personal use only]
Anna Blundy 
'It seems that Russians have ceased to worship even their pre-revolutionary
writers. Reverence in general has become extremely pass'

Tolstoy had a lot of very nice walnut furniture. Pottering about his shady
Moscow house in Khamovniki, one imagines how easy it might be to write War
and Peace, or at least, say, Resurrection, if one had a nice parquet floor
like the one upstairs at Lev Nikolayevich's place, or indeed a country
estate like Yasnaya Polyna. 

It is a green wooden rambling thing, set back from the street and its
ghastly beer factory, in a cool leafy garden that seems a thousand miles
from the heat and hassle of Moscow. Inside, about twenty old women sit on
stools needlessly fanning themselves with yellowing pamphlets. "Used to get
a lot of schoolchildren in," one of them said through the gloom. "They
didn't understand the significance though, of course." 

Apparently Tolstoy used to read aloud to guests of an evening while (or
perhaps after) Rachmaninov played the piano. It is tempting to fantasise
that he read the finest extracts of Anna Karenina to a captive audience,
but in actual fact the company was probably dying to escape as he launched
into his latest religious tract and they were all desperate for Sergei
Vasiliyevich to stop with the modern stuff and play something by Beethoven. 

One day last week, as Tolstoy's cobbling tools lay baking on their
workbench, and the bicycle he took up riding at 67 leant against a wall in
the back room and his big fur coat hung in the hall, there were only three
visitors eyeing up the furniture. Two foreigners and their son, who is
named after the man himself. 

It seems that Russians have not only discarded the blind adoration they
once had for Lenin, but they have also ceased to worship even their
pre-revolutionary writers. Reverence in general has become extremely pass.
In England it has long been acceptable, if not fashionable, to declare that
you think Shakespeare or Dickens is rubbish, but in Russia a certain type
of awe was once exhibited when speaking of literary giants. 

Like the surprisingly bourgeois house in Ulyanovsk where Lenin spent his
childhood (they put the icons back up a couple of years ago), Tolstoy's
house in Moscow was a place of pilgrimage for Soviet tourists. Their
country's greatness was never considered to be purely political, it was
also linked by the Communists to the arts. The Bolshoi Theatre was the
showpiece of Stalinist Russia and the revolutionary poets and artists were
always considered to have made a significant contribution to the Communist
cause. Art, they used to say, belongs to the people. 

Now that nothing much belongs to the people any more, it appears they have
seen enough bearskins and quills and ceramic stoves. It is not that art is
dying as it seemed to be a few years ago. In fact, more and more people are
going to Moscow's theatres and concert halls, escaping perhaps from the
economic crisis in culture. But it is a question of respect. 

Pushkin's 200th birthday was marked with the kind of festivities that many
ageing intellectuals felt would better befit Graceland, and the few
Russians that do trundle out to Yasnaya Polyana, on a Sunday afternoon do
it more for the picnic and the family outing, than to pay their heartfelt
respects to a hallowed genius. 

When the Russian National Orchestra sailed up the Volga a couple of years
ago, stopping at various towns along the way, the provincial concert halls
of Samara, Togliatti and Kazan were packed to overflowing. 

Everyone had dressed up for the occasion, even the seven-year-old girls in
ribbons and party frocks knew not to clap between movements, and tearful
five-year-old boys, moved to distraction by the music, presented Mikhail
Pletnev with flowers. This was more like it. The Soviet regime treated high
culture like a pop concert - people cheered and shouted, wolf-whistled
their favourite ballerinas and teenagers would plaster their walls with
pictures of Sviatoslav Richter. 

But now, in the big cities, adoration is out of style. Go to the concerts,
fine. Read the books, great. See the plays, nobody is stopping you. But as
far as going on pilgrimages to the birthplace of a national hero, peering
at his washbasin and wondering how he could possibly have had time to make
those boots, people have had their fill. 

On the other hand, it is perhaps not for a Western hack to write off
Russians' interest in 19th-century leather sofas. "All newspaper and
journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no
retreat," Lev Nikolayevich wrote in 1871. How many people are clamouring to
disagree these days?

********

#7
Washington Post
12 July 1999
[for personal use only]
Food Aid: Too Much, Too Late?
U.S. Shipments to Russia Unneeded, Ill-Conceived, Critics Say
By Sharon LaFraniere (lafraniere@glasnet.ru)

MOSCOW--Over the past two months, workers at the Sokolniki flour mill in
northeastern Moscow have unloaded 184 rail cars full of wheat, shipped
courtesy of a U.S. food aid program aimed at needy Russians. No complaints,
said Viktor Drozdov, the mill's director, but for one thing: The Sokolniki
flour mill doesn't really need the wheat.

Drozdov said the mill was able to supply seven of the city's bread
factories just fine before the food aid arrived. Indeed, in all of Moscow,
it would be difficult to find a market whose shelves are not laden with
bread or bags of flour.

Supplying the well-stocked Sokolniki mill through a sweltering summer was
surely not in the plan when the White House mounted a massive food aid
program last November to save Russia from what looked like a bitter, hungry
winter ahead. But critics say bad timing and a skewed list of recipients
are only the most obvious problems with the $1 billion effort. They say the
aid was unnecessary and benefited American farmers and shippers more than
the Russian people.

Armed with Russian reports of a disastrous harvest the previous summer and
a drastic drop in imported food supplies caused by the financial crisis
here, the U.S. Agriculture Department declared it would give Russia about
$600 million worth of wheat. It also provided a 20-year loan at 2 percent
interest so Russia could buy an estimated $400 million worth of corn,
soybeans, poultry, meat, seeds and rice.

"It is in our interest to make sure that Russians are fed through the
winter," said Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman on Oct. 28.

Eight months later, it may be the program itself that needs help. Among the
problems: The winter came and went before cranes hoisted the first shipment
-- 2,000 tons of pea seeds -- onto a St. Petersburg wharf in March. The
bulk of the commodities are coming only this summer just as Russian farmers
begin gathering in their own new harvest.

"If I was waiting for this corn, I would have killed all my birds by now,"
said Nikolai Bandurin, who runs a poultry farm in the Rostov region on
Russia's western border.

Of the deliveries so far, 40 percent of the wheat and about one-fourth of
the corn have gone to the regions around Moscow and St. Petersburg, the
richest, best supplied cities in the country. Program documents listed on
the Internet show that the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions are slated to
receive as much food as the Far East and Arctic regions, the only areas
that reported food shortages this winter.

The American foodstuffs, plus another $400 million worth of aid from
European countries, are the equivalent of 10 percent of Russia's annual
agricultural output, according to minutes of a meeting of foreign
agricultural attaches convened at the World Bank. To keep from undercutting
Russian producers, the food aid was to be sold at current market prices. 

But a dozen Russian buyers of the food aid said they are paying well under
the Russian market price -- less than half of it, in some cases.

Otherwise, "why is it called humanitarian aid?" demanded Alexei Yakovlev, a
regional agricultural official who is helping to manage sales of U.S. corn
to poultry farms in the Rostov region.

Beyond the problems of pricing and timing, it is not clear that Russia
needed food aid to begin with. The World Bank argued from the start that
the problem was not lack of food, but the cost of food. Even the bleakest
regions got through the winter without mass hunger.

Instead of the 5 million ton grain deficit that officials in Moscow had
predicted, government statistics compiled by the World Bank indicate that
the country wound up with a surplus in June of about 2 million tons, not
counting the foreign food aid.

To the program's critics, the conclusion is hard to miss: The real
beneficiaries of the food aid are not Russians, but American farmers, who
were able to unload some of their own record surpluses at taxpayer expense.
Food aid also helps American shipping companies because U.S. law mandates
that they deliver it.

But for Russians, said Yevgeny Serova, an agricultural economist in Moscow,
the aid is not only unnecessary, it is dangerous. In her view, it threatens
Russia's fledgling market system and agricultural producers and revives the
old Soviet-style food chain that capitalism was supposed to dismantle.

"Eight years we have been waiting for this market system to emerge," said
Serova. "Now we try to destroy it."

Not surprisingly, U.S. officials see it differently. Asif J. Chaudhry, the
U.S. agricultural official in charge of the program in Moscow, pointed out
that the Russian government itself asked for help last October. He said the
amounts of food aid provided are simply too small to disrupt the market
system and that prices were carefully negotiated to match existing market
standards.

Although food seems abundant in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Chaudhry said
the cities needed aid because they were the most heavily dependent on
imported food. And as for timing, he said, "The aid has come in at a point
when previous stocks and supplies have run out, and these supplies have
come in and filled the gap." He disputed the estimates distributed by the
World Bank, saying that Russia is facing another bad harvest with no grain
left in stock, not even donated goods.

"All over the country, we have seen factory after factory and mill after
mill are processing U.S. wheat, and they are all indicating that if they
had not received U.S. wheat, they would be shut down," Chaudhry said.

The United States and the European Union, which mounted its own support
program, decided to come to Russia's aid last fall at a time of real
uncertainty about what lay ahead. Russia's devaluation of the ruble and
default on its domestic debt in August meant the country faced skyrocketing
prices and dwindling deliveries of imported food, which made up as much as
half of Russia's food supply. On top of that, the coming harvest was said
to be the smallest in 40 years.

But noted economists and some government officials argued that predictions
of famine were vastly overblown and that the crisis might be a blessing in
disguise for Russian producers because they could sell more at home. While
the harvest was bad, economists noted, the previous year had produced a
bumper crop. They said it was a given that Russian farmers had
under-reported production, so official figures of stocks could be off by as
much as 20 percent or more.

When the government queried Russia's 89 regions in early October, only one
-- Magadan, on Russia's Far East border -- reported food shortages.

A number of Russian government officials opposed the foreign aid, including
the minister and deputy minister of agriculture and the minister of
finance. But the decision rested with Gennady Kulik, a deputy prime
minister who had spent 20 years managing state-controlled agriculture under
the Communist government. Accepting the food aid not only alleviated fear,
it increased Kulik's power, because it gave him goods to hand out -- or not
-- and state contracts to award. Against government rules, one of four
firms chosen in a closed auction to distribute the food is headed by a
well-known friend of Kulik's.

Calculating prices for different goods to be sold in different regions at
different times proved a daunting task. Officials finally set minimum
prices and left the Russian sales agents to figure out and collect the
additional funds if the regional market price were higher.

The proceeds from the food aid are to go to Russia's chronically
under-funded pension fund, theoretically enabling it to pay off $500
million in arrears and sock some away. As of mid-June, only $3.4 million
had trickled in, but state agents have months to transfer proceeds from the
sales to government coffers.

Mindful of reports of fraud that tarnished a previous food aid program,
European governments dispatched hundreds of inspectors throughout Europe
and Russia at a cost of about $12 million to monitor the shipment and
distribution of the aid. The United States is making do with just 14
inspectors in Russia, although embassy personnel also are supposed to check
deliveries during their travels. 

How much misappropriation or illegal diversion they can intercept is
anyone's guess. On Tuesday , officials seized 10 rail cars stuffed with
European rye. The grain was headed across the border to Estonia, despite a
strict ban on the exporting of food aid.

Unlike the Americans, the EU refused to ship food to Moscow, St. Petersburg
and the "black earth" provinces, which produce much of Russia's basic
crops. The Europeans also insisted that certain commodities be sold at
higher prices than the Americans demanded.

While officials labored over logistics, the winter passed, with only a few
sparsely settled areas in the Far East and north reporting food shortages.
Now that the food aid is pouring in, some regions do not want it. The
Agriculture Ministry informed the World Bank last week that it is diverting
some corn seed shipments to regions for which they were not originally
intended to protect Russian seed plants financed by the World Bank.

The Siberian region of Krasnoyarski Krai refused offerings of meat, and the
neighboring region of Kemerovo also is apparently not too desperate.
Kemerovo dealers are working the Krasnoyarski processing plants, trying to
resell food aid sent to their region, according to Russian media reports.

In Rostov, poultry farmer Nikolai Bandurin said he will buy U.S. corn
rather than local fodder when it finally arrives. "If they wave it in front
of us, of course we'll take it," he said. "But the policy is wrong. This
help will be damaging to Russia."

Drozdov, whose Sokolniki flour mill is slated to receive 75,000 tons of
grain, said the U.S. wheat is simply replacing what he would have bought in
Russia, the other former Soviet republics or European countries, such as
Hungary. "We would have managed without it," he said. "The price of bread
would have gone up, but not by much."

Although most Russian farmers do not seem to have been hurt by the influx
of food aid thus far, Vladimir Kasyanenko, who runs a wheat collective farm
in Rostov, is making contingency plans. He said he will simply store his
wheat and sell it abroad later when the food aid programs end and export
restrictions are lifted.

He might have a bit of a wait. The Russian government is again predicting a
poor harvest, this time because of drought and locusts. Said Agriculture
Secretary Glickman two weeks ago: "My guess is they're going to want
additional assistance."

*******

#8
Fate of START Treaties, ABM Treaty Viewed 

Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, No. 25
2-8 July 1999
[translation for personal use only]
Article by Anatoliy Stepanovich Dyakov and Pavel Lenardovich Podvig, 
associates of Center for Study of Disarmament Problems under MFTI (Moscow 
Institute of Physics and Engineering), under rubric "Opinion": 
"In Search of a Way Out of the Impasse: Strategic Offensive Arms 
Reduction and the ABM Treaty" 

The State Duma postponed consideration of the START 
II Treaty for the umpteenth time. Nevertheless, the present crisis will 
be resolved sooner or later and the Duma will be forced to return to 
considering the question of ratifying this Treaty. It is not difficult to 
anticipate that the most serious of a number of factors capable of 
affecting the outcome of consideration will be the issue of steps taken 
by the United States in the area of creating a ballistic missile defense 
[BMD]. It is a question above all about the fact that the United States 
crossed a very important line in its progress toward deploying a national 
missile defense--in January 1999 the U.S. administration openly declared 
the desire to get changes made to the ABM Treaty. 

It must be noted that no official proposal has been made by the 
Americans as of the present time. It also is not known what kind of 
modification to the ABM Treaty the present U.S. administration will 
propose. Meanwhile, in the course of discussion of the START II Treaty in 
the State Duma it was emphasized repeatedly that one condition for the 
Treaty's entry into force and Russia's fulfillment of it is strict 
compliance with the 1972 ABM agreement. 

Thus, not just the future of the ABM Treaty was in question, but the 
strategic arms reduction process as well. We have been witness to another 
delay in START II ratification, which may completely deprive this Treaty 
of chances of entering into force at any time. By the way, judging from 
steps taken by the United States lately, START II ratification no longer 
is on the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities. 

The attitude toward the START II Treaty in Russia also cannot be called 
unequivocal. The government insists that the Treaty must be ratified, 
since Russia cannot maintain its strategic forces at the level envisaged 
by START I. In accordance with the program approved by the RF Security 
Council last summer, no more than 1,500 warheads will be in the makeup of 
the Russian strategic forces. Inasmuch as this figure is less than half 
of the limit being established by START II, the main argument in favor of 
ratifying START II is the existing understanding on the beginning of the 
next phase of arms reduction talks, which can begin only after START II 
enters into force. 

These are the considerations which in the final account made progress 
possible in the question of START II, which was reflected in the draft 
law on ratification of this Treaty prepared by the Duma. In particular, 
the document contains a number of provisions which must be included in 
the new arms reduction treaty. Above all this is a lower overall level of 
warheads than stipulated at Helsinki; steps aimed at reducing the upload 
potential; and the need to take all systems of strategic arms into 
account. On the whole, if one carefully studies those requirements Russia 
is placing on the START III Treaty, then it becomes clear we are speaking 
about a correction of the most substantial shortcomings of START II. 

The possibility of concluding the START III Treaty on terms acceptable 
to Russia always has generated very great doubt. In a situation where 
Russia has decided to reduce its strategic forces regardless of the 
outcome of talks, it is very difficult to expect the United States to 
make any kind of serious concessions, let alone agree to revise basic 
provisions of START II. Nevertheless, until recently Russia had 
practically no other solution, inasmuch as only the beginning of START 
III talks gave it hope of preserving an approximate balance of strategic 
forces. In our view, the U.S. declaration of its intention to get a 
change in the ABM Treaty radically altered the situation by having 
deprived the START III talks and consequently also a policy based on the 
need for ratifying START II of any kind of reasonable prospects. 

The rejection of START II ratification with reference to the U.S. desire 
to deploy a BMD also will be unable to change the situation. That step 
only will reinforce the U.S. position and largely will make its 
withdrawal from the ABM Treaty easier. It is not difficult to foresee 
that the responsibility for destruction of the arms reduction process 
will be placed on Russia, which will have to experience many negative 
consequences of that turn of events. 

Even if one assumes that the START II Treaty will be approved by the Duma 
and will enter into force, the polar positions of Russia and the United 
States on the question of the need to change the ABM Treaty will make any 
kind of progress whatsoever impossible at talks on START III. As a 
result, Russia will find itself in a situation in which the development 
of its strategic forces will be limited not only by the country's 
economic capacities, but also by START II requirements, and there will be 
practically no chance of relaxing them. In addition, Russia will 
experience constant pressure from the United States in the question of 
changing the ABM Treaty, which will be reinforced by the threat of U.S. 
withdrawal from this Treaty. And although preservation of the ABM Treaty 
is one of the conditions that Russia is advancing with ratification of 
START II, the threat of Russia's withdrawal from START II (let alone from 
START I) hardly will be taken seriously by the United States. 

In assessing prospects for preserving the ABM Treaty, it must be noted 
that Russia is more interested in this today than ever before. Russia's 
rigid position on this issue, however, hardly will be able to keep the 
United States from such a decision. Moreover, an analysis of present U.S. 
antimissile programs shows that it will be able to progress rather far in 
creating a base for a system of ABM defense of national territory without 
violating Treaty provisions. It is a question above all of the 
possibility of deploying space tracking and target designation systems, 
which unquestionably will be a key BMD component, and about in-depth 
modernization of existing early warning system radars. 

Thus, regardless of whether or not the START II Treaty is ratified, a very 
lengthy period of uncertainty will await Russia both with respect to 
parameters of further arms reductions as well as with respect to the 
future of the ABM Treaty. In our opinion, such uncertainty will in no way 
contribute to developing a reasonable strategy of organizational 
development of the Russian nuclear forces which would permit preventing 
an irreversible disturbance of the strategic balance. The main danger of 
such a situation lies not even in the fact that as a result the United 
States will withdraw from the ABM Treaty and deploy an ABM defense of its 
territory, but in whether or not by this moment Russia will have the 
capability of countering this step with anything. 

It seems to us that in order not to permit destruction of the strategic 
arms reduction process as well as rejection of all ABM Treaty 
limitations, which will follow U.S. withdrawal from this Treaty, Russia 
must consent to certain changes to the document. In agreeing to modify 
the ABM Treaty, Russia nevertheless must emphasize that the sole reason 
it considers these changes possible is that it is a question of a limited 
ABM defense. Accordingly, all changes in the Treaty must be limited from 
the very beginning to an increase in the number of deployment areas 
permitted and in the number of interceptor missiles. At the same time, we 
must insist on a ban on any space attack weapons in a strategic ABM 
defense system. 

In consenting to a modification of the ABM Treaty, Russia has the right 
to demand that the United States consider Russian interests in the 
strategic arms reduction area. It must be a question above all of an 
immediate beginning of talks on concluding a new arms reduction treaty, 
which must envisage a reduction in the number of deployed warheads to a 
level of 1,500. The new treaty definitely must include measures aimed at 
eliminating the upload potential and at total destruction of nuclear 
sea-launched cruise missiles, and must give Russia sufficient freedom in 
choosing the future of its strategic forces. As already was noted, the 
inclusion of such measures in a new treaty inevitably signifies a 
revision of a number of key provisions of the START II Treaty. In this 
connection Russia and the United States must acknowledge the nonviable 
nature of the START II Treaty and terminate its ratification process by 
mutual consent. 

In our view, the principal measure aimed at eliminating the upload 
potential should be the verifiable destruction of nuclear warheads 
(nuclear warhead devices) being removed from delivery vehicles that are 
being eliminated or "downloaded." It is estimated that this measure will 
permit a significant reduction in the number of warheads in reserve. It 
is obvious that carrying out the verifiable elimination of nuclear 
warheads will require solving a number of difficult technical and 
organizational problems. Therefore the development of decisions in this 
area must be a subject of separate talks, which also must begin without 
delay. 

It is desirable to reach an understanding over the next few months 
about beginning a series of talks; otherwise the approaching 
parliamentary elections in Russia and later also presidential elections 
in both countries will lead to an impermissible delay in coming up with a 
coordinated position or will make it totally impossible. It is 
exceptionally important that the understanding on beginning of talks 
contain basic parameters of future agreements so both sides are definite 
as to the way in which to plan the development of their strategic forces. 

In our view, Russia and the United States could agree to the following 
package of measures aimed both at a further reduction of strategic forces 
as well as at a change in the ABM Treaty. 

1. An understanding on terminating the START II Treaty ratification 
process and on beginning talks on strategic offensive arms reduction to 
the level of 1,500 warheads, which will include the following elements: 
destruction of nuclear warheads being removed from delivery vehicles that are 
being eliminated and "downloaded," and a replacement of dispensing 
platforms of delivery vehicles being "downloaded"; 

a ban on deployment of ground-based ballistic missiles equipped with 
more than three warheads, and a ban on "downloading" of ICBM's equipped 
with more than three warheads; 

elimination of nuclear sea-launched cruise missiles and the warheads of these 
missiles. 

2. The beginning of talks on developing procedures for verifying the 
destruction of nuclear warheads and the subsequent storage and recycling 
of fissile materials being freed up. The priority task of the talks must 
be to develop the procedures for verifiable destruction of nuclear 
warhead devices being removed from delivery vehicles that are being 
eliminated in the course of fulfilling the strategic offensive arms 
reduction treaty. 

3. The beginning of talks on modifying the ABM Treaty, the goal of 
which will be to make the following changes to the Treaty: 
an increase to two in the number of permitted deployment areas and a 
corresponding increase in the permitted number of interceptor missiles; 

a ban on deployment of space-based antimissile attack systems that are 
based on any physical principles; 

confirmation of the ban on creating a dense BMD system and development of 
confidence-building measures called upon to ensure effective verification 
of compliance with this ban. 

There is no question that adopting such measures will require both Russia 
and the United States to make certain concessions, and very considerable 
ones at times. At the same time, we are convinced that these steps will 
permit taking the strategic arms reduction process out of an impasse and 
will create a foundation for continuing the Russian-American dialogue in 
the area of disarmament on a parity basis. 

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