August 7, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3426 •3427     •

Johnson's Russia List
#3427
7 August 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Moscow Times EDITORIAL: 8 Days On, IMF Deal A Shambles.
2. AFP: Russian media mogul gives business daily lukewarm independence 
pledge.
3. Itar-Tass: Stepashin Cites Three Major Defense Programmes.
4. Itar-Tass: Saratov Governor Calls for Alternative to All Russia.
5. Itar-Tass: Otechestvo Unlikely to Be Locked out of Duma Elections.
6. Boston Globe: By David Filipov and Brian Whitmore, New Russian alliance 
mirrors the Kremlin's shady politics.
7. Los Angeles Times: Robyn Dixon, Signs Point to a Power Struggle. Russia: 
A series of cryptic billboards signifies a battle for political control 
within the country's ruling elite. The fight has also reached the airwaves. 
8. The Electronic Telegraph (UK): Marcus Warren, The city where armour is 
a vital business asset. (St. Petersburg).
9. RFE/RL: Michael Lelyveld, Russia: U.S. To Boost Employing Scientists 
To Reduce Arms Proliferation.
10. The Nation: Abraham Brumberg, Back in the USSR. (Review of Everyday 
Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatrick). 
11. Reuters: PM vows to tackle Russian Caucasus ``bandits''
12. Itar-Tass: LUZHKOV'S Otechestvo Invites Spiritual Heritage to Merger.]

*******

#1
Moscow Times
August 7, 1999 
EDITORIAL: 8 Days On, IMF Deal A Shambles 

It hasn't taken long for the Russian government to show how much respect it 
has for the economic reforms that it has committed itself to as part of last 
week's deal for IMF money. 

It has been just eight days since the Russian government and the 
International Monetary Fund agreed upon the plan, but already Russia has 
acted to ban all exports of oil products; said it will accept eight Tupolev 
Backfire bombers in lieu of Ukraine's gas debts; and smiled on a Rosbank 
proposal to skip competitive tenders and just leave 40 percent of the Customs 
Committee's banking business in Rosbank. 

A lawyer could argue that none of these actions technically breaches the 
Statement on Economic Policies that the Russian government and Central Bank 
signed July 13. But all skate dangerously close to doing so, and all 
certainly violate the spirit of key points in the deal. 

Banning the export of oil products, for example, sits strangely alongside the 
Statement. The Russian government is worried that rising prices will put 
gasoline out of reach for motorists and farmers; in the recent past, its 
solution has been to crossly order oil companies to hand their oil over at a 
loss. 

The IMF has taken a dim view of this frustration-as-policy. So the Statement 
is filled with pledges to do better. It allows for turning off the oil 
pipeline in only one case f for oil companies who haven't been paying their 
taxes. Elsewhere, the Statement says explicitly that pipeline access cannot 
be limited for any other reason; it renounces government decrees ordering oil 
producers to hand their oil over to nonpaying domestic refineries; and it 
pledges to get rid of export tariffs on oil as soon as possible. 

As to Rosbank putting up its hand and volunteering to keep the lucrative 
customs business without any bidding, we wonder how Rosbank got this business 
in the first place. Rosbank now controls lucrative possessions transferred 
from the dying Uneximbank f like the Customs Committee bank accounts, a 
credit card clearing business and a financially successful share depository 
system. The last time we checked, the now-defunct Uneximbank owed its 
creditors millions of dollars; how were all of its valuables moved so airily 
to Rosbank? Does the IMF care? Does anyone? 

Then there is that bomber barter deal. Again, the Statement says nothing 
about barter deals. But it does talk of the need to raise cash revenues, 
especially from Gazprom. Instead, Gazprom will now be paying some of its 
taxes in Tupolevs. 

The IMF agreement was always meant to be broken. But these days, it seems 
that IMF pledges are falling even faster than Russian governments. 

*******

#2
Russian media mogul gives business daily lukewarm independence pledge

MOSCOW, Aug 7 (AFP) - The new owner of Russia's leading business daily 
Kommersant, Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, has told staff he will not 
order journalists what to write but will set the paper's political line.

In a front page article Saturday Kommersant quoted the controversial media 
mogul as saying he had bought the respected publishing house to serve as a 
platform for his political views.

Berezovsky confirmed to Kommersant staff on Friday that his Logovaz holding 
was wrapping up details of the purchase of an 85 percent stake in the group 
from an obscure off-shore outfit American Capital.

"There is no question of interference in the choice of subjects for 
articles," the paper quoted him as saying.

"I will try to influence only at the level of the paper's political 
priorities," it reported.

"The most I can do to influence the policy of your publication, is to make 
myself heard, to ensure that my point of view on such-and-such a question, my 
arguments, are heard.

"That not only does not exclude the presence of other opinions in the 
newspaper but even makes their presence absolutely necessary," he said.

Asked by journalists how the paper would cover criminal investigations into 
his business empire, Berezovsky replied tersely: "Just as before. If before 
you wrote the truth, then no one will stop you doing it in the future."

In a brief non-committal comment on Berezovsky's pledges Kommersant wrote: 
"The new owner of the Kommersant publishing house has bought it only to have 
the ability, by the force of his conviction and his logic to influence the 
people who work there and through them, society in general."

Berezovsky's purchase of Kommersant comes in the heat of a battle between 
Russian business giants for media control in the run-up to December's 
parliamentary and next summer's presidential polls.

The tycoon also has stakes in the national ORT and Moscow-based TV-6 
television, as well as the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Novye Izvestia dailies and 
the Obshaya Gazeta weekly.

His media outlets this summer have waged war against Moscow mayor Yury 
Luzhkov and former premier Yevgeny Primakov, potential presidential 
contenders whom Berezovsky opposes.

The rival daily Sevodnya, whose owner Vladimir Gusinsky is a Luzhkov ally, 
quoted Berezovsky as telling Kommersant staff: "I'm not a dictator, but I 
have the right to express my point of view. I will try to convince you of 
this."

But his track record at ORT and the recent sacking of Kommersant editor Raf 
Shakirov meant the paper was unlikely to retain its editorial independence, 
Sevodnya commented.

Kommersant was previously one of the few independent Moscow dailies whose 
editorial policy was not dictated by its owners, developing a record for 
breaking news and penetrating insight into Russia's murky world of business. 

*******

#3
Stepashin Cites Three Major Defense Programmes.

ULYANOVSK, August 7 (Itar-Tass) - Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, who early 
on Saturday came to Ulyanovsk on the boat for a stop-off on his three day 
tour of the Volga region, said the the government had determined three 
priority defense programmes. 

He told reporters that one of the programmes, worth one billion roubles, "is 
related to space, to ensuring our defense and security". 

The billion roubles will be issued from the federal budget before the year 
2005. 

Stepashin said Russia needs such programmes, as "after the Yugoslav events, 
we cannot say that our defense power is capable, equal to other countries". 

"We now have a different world, so we need eyes and ears in space," he said. 

Stepashin said the government would settle nutual debts with enterprises in 
the defense sector. 

He said "80 per cent of mutual debts will be settled" over this year, and 
"this problem will be finally resolved in the first quarter of the next 
year". 

Later in the day, Stepashin visited Russia's largest car factory AvtoVAZ in 
Togliatti. 

He allowed AutoVAZ to make contracts with non-residents for car deliveries 
with deferment of payments for one year. 

Stepashin chaired a meeting on problems of Russia's aircraft production. The 
meeting was held at Aviastar company which produces Ruslan transport planes. 

He will attend a meeting of Big Volga association over the agricultural 
situation in the Volga region

********

#4
Saratov Governor Calls for Alternative to All Russia.

ULYANOVSK, August 7 (Itar-Tass) - Saratov regional governor Dmitry Ayatskov 
said All Russia movement should be counterbalanced by an alternative 
association of regional governors chaired by Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin. 

"The association All Russia is still not all Russia," he told Itar-Tass in 
Ulyanovsk, where he came to attend a meeting of Big Volga regional 
association. 

Stepashin is visiting Ulyanovsk on Saturday on his three-day tour of the 
Volga region. 

Ayatskov, who is one of leaders of Our Home Is Russia movement, said there 
was the need for a "political organ" to be an alternative to All Russia which 
a few days ago has merged with Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's movement 
Otechestvo for elections to the Duma lower house of parliament. 

"I think that it is necessary to revive the council of Russian governors, at 
the head of which would be premier Sergei Stepashin," Ayatskov said. 

"The council of governors should be a pro-president and pro-constitution 
political organ," he said. 

Stepashin told reporters that he was going to convene a meeting of the 
governor council, which has not met for a long time, on August 31. 

*******

#5
Otechestvo Unlikely to Be Locked out of Duma Elections.

MISNK, August 7 (Itar-Tass) - The Russian Justice Ministry by the end of the 
next week will answer the official inquiry of the Central Election Commission 
about eligibility of public and political movements to take part in elections 
to the Duma lower house of parliament, Justice Minister Pavel Krasheninnikov 
said on Saturday. 

Krasheninnikov, who is attending a joint collegium meeting of the Russian and 
Byelorussian justices ministries in Minsk, told Itar-Tass that Otechestvo 
movement led by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov was not to late to register for the 
elections. 

"I think that Luzhkov and his Otechestvo movement will not drop out of the 
election process.The whole question is in which capacity he will participate. 
I think they should decide it on their own," Krasheninnikov said, adding that 
he was giving his personal view. 

Krasheninnikov said the Justice Ministry is checking documents of 138 
organisations that registered as of December 19, 1998. 

*******

#6
Boston Globe
7 August 1999
[for personal use only]
New Russian alliance mirrors the Kremlin's shady politics 
By David Filipov, Globe Staff and Brian Whitmore Globe Correspondent, 

MOSCOW - Meet the new bosses. Same as the old bosses?

Proclaiming themselves the alternative to Kremlin cronyism, some of Russia's 
most powerful regional leaders joined forces this week to create an alliance 
that could drastically reshape the country's political landscape.

Analysts say the new alliance could dominate December's parliamentary 
elections and put its leader, Moscow's ambitious Mayor Yury Luzhkov, in 
position to win the real prize: next year's presidential vote.

But would a Russia ruled by Luzhkov's alliance, Fatherland/All Russia, look 
all that different from Boris N. Yeltsin's Russia?

Although Luzhkov and his allies are presenting themselves as the guardians of 
Russian democracy, their own commitment to democratic principles looks 
dubious at best. Their election bid looks more like an effort to preserve 
their privileges than to reform the corrupt system Yeltsin has put in place.

Luzhkov has barely concealed his presidential ambitions. But Yeltsin's inner 
circle - darkly referred to by the Russian media as ''The Family'' - openly 
distrusts Luzhkov. To keep Luzhkov from winning power, Yeltsin's allies have 
resorted to a smear campaign waged by the newspapers and television stations 
the Kremlin controls and suspicious-looking tax audits on the media it 
doesn't.

How low will the Kremlin go? Last night, state-controlled ORT television's 
nightly news featured a commentator who warned that the rise to power by 
Luzhkov's multi-ethnic alliance would amount to a ''Tatar conquest'' of 
Russia.

Earlier in the week, Luzhkov promised to put an end to such heavy-handed 
tactics. 

''Our wish is to serve our citizens, to solve the country's real economic 
problems,'' Luzhkov told a news conference. ''Our wish is to care for and 
develop the values of a democratic society, to develop the economy on 
free-market principles.''

In reality, Russia's 89 regions and semiautonomous republics are run by the 
very same type of shady clan politics that Luzhkov accuses Yeltsin's Kremlin 
of fostering, just on a smaller scale.

In Russia, regional leaders rule their provinces like feudal lords, using 
local mafias and corrupt law-enforcement bodies to govern virtually 
unchallenged. They suppress dissent, censor the press, and reap the profits 
of their own privatization schemes - until now, with the silent assent of the 
Kremlin, which has relied on the regional leaders for support in Yeltsin's 
struggles with his Communist opposition.

Take Mintimer Shaimiyev, president of Tatarstan - an oil-rich republic of 5.5 
million people located 400 miles east of Moscow - who joined Luzhkov to 
announce the alliance Wednesday.

When Shaimiyev needed to get reelected in 1996, he ran unopposed, even though 
Russian electoral law forbids uncontested votes. That same year, Shaimiyev 
issued a decree making it illegal to insult him, with fines ranging from $800 
for individuals to $6,000 for news organizations. Last year, he shut down the 
republic's only opposition newspaper, Altyn Urda. 

He has used his considerable clout in Moscow to win lucrative exceptions to 
federal tax and export laws - money that disappears in the republic's murky, 
unreformed accounting system. The Kremlin never complained. Until this week, 
Yeltsin's aides were hoping Shaimiyev would join an electoral alliance that 
would support the president.

''Shaimiyev is a typical regional despot,'' said Yury Korgunyuk, a political 
analyst at the Moscow-based INDEM research center. ''It is impossible to do 
anything in Tatarstan without him. There is no free press and no real 
independent institutions. To oppose him is suicide.''

Opposing the administration of St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev, who 
was there with Shaimiyev and Luzhkov on Wednesday, is not necessarily 
suicide. But it can get you killed. 

Russia's second city, known for its winding canals, Baroque architecture, and 
cultural sites, has since Yakovlev's 1996 election become known for something 
else: gangland-style assassinations.

Over the past several years attorneys, bankers, entrepreneurs, journalists, 
and government officials have been slain in what can only be described as an 
epidemic of contract killings. Sometimes the victims are outspoken opponents 
of the governor, like liberal legislator Galina Starovoitova, who was gunned 
down in her apartment stairwell last November.

Yakovlev has not been implicated in any assassinations. But local media, and 
the city's former police chief, allege links to various crime figures, 
including the Tambov mafia that controls the city's fuel market and ''Kostya 
the Grave,'' the notorious head of St. Petersburg's vicious burial services 
mafia.

In February, federal prosecutors arrested Yury Shutov, a city council member 
and close Yakovlev ally, and charged him with murder, conspiracy to commit 
murder, and racketeering. Shutov is accused of leading a 12-member 
assassination squad that had carried out a series of high-profile killings in 
St. Petersburg including those of a leading banker, businessman, and attorney.

Shutov was elected in St. Petersburg's municipal legislative elections last 
December, which have been called the dirtiest in Russia's post-Soviet 
history, with rampant use of dirty tricks and even physical attacks against 
Yakovlev's opponents being the norm.

Post-Soviet election politics, for Russia's regional barons, often boils down 
to intimidation. In 1996, president Murtaza Rakhimov of Bashkortostan - 
Tatarstan's neighbor and another prominent member of the new alliance - 
threatened to cut off heat and electricity to regions that did not deliver a 
sufficient number of votes for a candidate for reelection named Yeltsin.

Now it is Luzhkov who will benefit.

''This alliance gives Luzhkov a colossal political machine in the regions,'' 
said Sergei Markov of the Center for Political Studies.

That is bad news for Yeltsin's Kremlin. Luzhkov has vowed to reverse some of 
the cozy privatization deals that allowed people close to Yeltsin to make 
fortunes and build huge industrial and media empires, and prosecute those 
responsible. Sources say prime minister Sergei Stepashin may take the fall 
for allowing Luzhkov to form his alliance. The sources say Stepashin may be 
replaced by someone tougher - like security chief Vladimir Putin.

Luzhkov's ascendance may be even worse news for the voters in the provinces, 
who look to have even less chance of affecting the upcoming elections than 
previous ones.

''The more the local elites are consolidated,'' political analyst Boris 
Kagarlitsky wrote in The Moscow Times this week, ''the less pluralism depends 
on the will of the citizen.''

******

#7
Los Angeles Times
August 7, 1999 
[for personal use only]
Signs Point to a Power Struggle 
Russia: A series of cryptic billboards signifies a battle for political 
control within the country's ruling elite. The fight has also reached the 
airwaves. 
By ROBYN DIXON

MOSCOW--Some cryptic billboards have appeared on Moscow's streets, ones that 
advertise no product and contain a message so subtle--but sinister--that few 
of the people who pass by them each day pick up their meaning. 
In fact, the signs aren't meant for everyone. They're actually giant 
postcards to the country's most powerful people: The Family, as the Yeltsin 
clan is known. The riddle is, who is sending them? 
This much, at least, is known: The billboards are a public sign of a 
power struggle between Russia's top oligarchs. The battle, which has been 
going on behind the scenes for some time, is now erupting into the open as 
Russia's titans in the media and political spheres jostle over next summer's 
presidential elections. 
Under the heading Clean Planet, the billboards show the eponymous hero 
of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince" digging into a little 
planet. A quotation from the famous children's book warns of the dangers of 
the terrible baobab tree, which must be dug up before it takes root or it 
will be impossible to get rid of. 
The coded message is in the word "baoBAB," with three capital letters. 
Asked what it meant, passerby Yuri Abrosimov, 47, department head at a design 
bureau, squinted in concentration and concluded, "It could be about the 
environment." 
In fact, a more menacing message lurks behind the innocent prince. The 
letters BAB are the initials of one of the nation's most powerful tycoons, 
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, who is seen as part of The Family, a term used 
to describe not only President Boris N. Yeltsin and his family but also his 
entourage. 
When the three letters were pointed out to her, Yelena Mayeva, 48, an 
engineer at a plastics factory, was shocked by the billboard. 
"It's really terrible if it is connected in some way with Berezovsky, 
because it's an appeal to uproot and destroy him," she said. 
Even if the Little Prince billboards are the work of Berezovsky's 
enemies, the tycoon shrugs them off. 
"Since I am involved in political activity, I only profit if the BAB 
acronym creates an association with my name," he said. "It is good for me." 
The Little Prince signs follow another cryptic billboard message around 
Moscow--what appeared to be personal birthday congratulations, with a 
photograph of a man and the words: "Roma thinks of The Family, The Family 
thinks of Roma. Congratulations. Roma has chosen a cool spot." 
Although most Russians would not recognize the picture, it was of Roman 
Abramovich, another powerful tycoon close to The Family and a director of the 
oil company Sibneft. The billboards weren't up for long. After an angry 
complaint from Sibneft, the advertising company hastily took them down. 
But it's more difficult to lodge a complaint about the Little Prince 
billboards, because their message is more subtle. As passerby Abrosimov put 
it: "There are two groups in the population: the first, who are trying to 
make ends meet, and the second, who are on top fighting for power. The first 
group will never recognize the hidden meaning in this ad, while those who are 
fighting on top will catch the meaning straightaway." 
The billboards are only one sign of the power struggle, which is also 
visible in the news and interviews run by two of Russia's powerful national 
TV networks--both controlled by big tycoons. The rapid-fire delivery of the 
Moscow news presenters makes it difficult for the average viewer to sort the 
propaganda from the real news, but the message is clear to political 
insiders. 
So obvious has the media struggle become that politicians and pundits 
refer quite casually to the "TV war," as if it were a normal thing in a 
country approaching parliamentary and presidential elections. 
The war between the country's two big TV networks is a sign that 
Russia's tycoons, who joined to back Yeltsin in 1996, have split this time 
around. The throne is up for grabs. 
"The fact the oligarchs have split now and are fighting each other means 
that the pattern of elections will be different from 1996, when everyone was 
scared of a Communist comeback," said Kremlin watcher Andrei Piontkovsky, 
director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies. "There are no 
true Communists left, only swindlers, and all these swindlers are fighting 
each other like venomous snakes in a jar." 
The majority state-owned ORT channel, with its pro-Kremlin line, is 
widely believed to be controlled by Berezovsky. The station recently ran an 
expansive interview with Berezovsky, during which he bitterly attacked 
Moscow's mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, who has presidential ambitions. 
Luzhkov is being backed by rival network NTV, owned by another powerful 
tycoon, Vladimir A. Gusinsky, who is Berezovsky's bitter enemy. The night 
after ORT's Berezovsky interview, NTV struck back, running a long interview 
with Luzhkov, who attacked Berezovsky. 
ORT also ran a story reporting that NTV had massive debts. NTV snapped 
back with a story asserting that ORT had manipulated the figures, and named 
Berezovsky and Kremlin chief of staff Alexander S. Voloshin as architects of 
the attack. 
Suddenly, NTV found itself under investigation by the tax police. 
And there are other signs that the Kremlin wants to bring the opposing 
media baron to heel. After a ministry was set up in June to oversee the 
media, the new minister, Mikhail Y. Lesin, said that "protecting the state 
from a free mass media is a very pressing issue." 
Voloshin made similar threatening noises recently, warning that the 
pressure put on the Kremlin by NTV and Gusinsky's other media was 
"impermissible." 
Some warn that the power struggle will send tremors through Russia's 
fragile democracy or even culminate in the cancellation of elections. 
Political analyst Piontkovsky said Russia's powerful tycoons now pose more of 
a threat to the country than the Communists. 
"It is clear that neither of the sides will be able to maintain the 
present level of hysteria for yet another year [until presidential 
elections]. If the tension persists in the war between the clans, they are 
most likely to finish each other off before the elections," he said. 
But some believe that the TV war is a good thing, among them Nikolai 
Altynbayev, 38, who was interviewed at one of the Little Prince billboards. 
"Let there be war," he said. "In the course of this war, ordinary people 
will find out more new facts about each of the opposing sides as they sling 
mud at each other." 

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this 
report. 

*******

#8
The Electronic Telegraph (UK)
7 August 1999
[for personal use only] 
The city where armour is a vital business asset
By Marcus Warren

IN Russia's high-risk world of big business and politics it pays to prepare 
for the unexpected, even if the thickest armour plating money can buy cannot 
always protect your car from a rocket-propelled grenade or anti-tank mine.

"My principle is to make my death as expensive as possible for my murderers," 
said Vyacheslav Shevchenko, a member of the Russian parliament from the old 
imperial capital, St Petersburg. He was only half joking. Thorough 
precautions are sometimes not enough to save targets from the formidable 
arsenal of weapons deployed by armies fighting Russia's gangster wars.

Mr Shevchenko, a member of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist party, is 
lucky to be alive. The inquiry into his alleged attempted murder has revealed 
that an ambush which was supposed to kill him last winter was meticulously 
planned.

His car had been under surveillance for three months. Two groups of 
attackers, disguised as cross-country skiers, had staked out the terrain. A 
hole had been dug in the road, ready for 65lb of explosives hidden only 15 
yards away. His attackers topped up the booby trap with an anti-armour mine. 
"I don't think even a tank would have survived that blast," Mr Shevchenko 
said. Only the would-be killers' timely arrest saved his life.

By Russian standards, that ambush out in the countryside would have been a 
relatively restrained affair. Last week's murder of Pavel Kapysh, one of St 
Petersburg's leading businessmen, was far more spectacular. Two 
rocket-propelled grenades slammed into his armour-plated Chevrolet in the 
city's historic centre during the morning rush-hour. He died later in 
hospital.

Mr Kapysh was nicknamed St Petersburg's "Petrol King" and one motive for his 
death may have been a struggle for control of the profitable local petrol 
industry. Other theories of the reason for his death abound, including a 
battle for supremacy within his own business empire or a falling out with 
rivals from outside Russia's second city.

Vladimir Barsukov, a competitor of Mr Kapysh questioned by police after his 
death, said: "Unfortunately, there are groups capable of carrying out any 
type of murder. That murder was exceptionally daring and highly 
professional." Mr Barsukov speaks from experience. In the days when 
armour-plated limousines were still a rarity in Russia his car was raked by 
fire from an automatic weapon in an attack which left him riddled with 17 
bullets and cost him his right arm. It would have been fatal had his guards 
not invaded the hospital where he was taken for treatment and persuaded its 
doctors, reportedly at gunpoint, to revise their diagnosis that they could do 
nothing to save him.

Despite St Petersburg's reputation as one of the country's most dangerous 
cities for businessmen, Mr Barsukov says he feels safe here. "I consider the 
measures taken by my security service sufficient," he said in a rare 
interview. "If a firm's work is organised on a legal footing then, as a rule, 
its manager or owner are not under threat."

A powerful figure in St Petersburg, Mr Barsukov has been linked by police in 
the past to the notorious "Tambov Group", an alleged organised crime 
syndicate. He denies such a group has ever existed. Whatever his background, 
he is now regarded as a hugely influential, legitimate businessman in the 
city. Like everyone else in this beautiful city, home to some of the world's 
finest museums and palaces, he resents the view that St Petersburg is 
"Russia's criminal capital".

But its reputation has been damaged by the cull of businessmen and 
politicians in the last year, among them a party colleague of Mr Shevchenko 
and a grandmother and respected liberal, Galina Starovoitova.

The city's proximity to the West, its port and the weakness of its governor, 
Vladimir Yakovlev, have each been suggested as reasons for the crime wave. 
Locals prefer another explanation for the city's image problem: the old 
rivalry with Moscow. Things are much worse down there, they protest, where 
the police under-report crime statistics to skew the figures in the modern 
capital's favour.

********

#9
Russia: U.S. To Boost Employing Scientists To Reduce Arms Proliferation
By Michael Lelyveld

Boston, 6 August 1999 (RFE/RL) -- The U.S. State Department may be forced to 
cut some programs for Russia and other countries in the region to provide 
jobs for needy scientists at research institutes, a top aid official says.

William Taylor, the State Department's coordinator of assistance for the 
Newly Independent States, told RFE/RL that the U.S. government may have to 
reduce or eliminate other programs in order to fund increases for Russian 
research scientists.

Ambassador Taylor spoke Wednesday after the U.S. House of Representatives 
voted to slash nearly $2 billion from President Bill Clinton's request for 
the foreign aid budget next year. The bill provides $725 million for the 
region, which is $307 million less than the administration wanted.

The U.S. Senate previously approved $780 million, virtually assuring that any 
compromise in the Congress will fall far short of the aid goal. The president 
has been advised to veto the entire measure, but no final decision has been 
made.

Although the House of Representatives did not make cuts in specific programs, 
it reduced the president's request for the region by about the same amount as 
the State Department's planned spending for a program known as the "Enhanced 
Threat Reduction Initiative." The initiative is largely aimed at providing 
jobs for nuclear and other scientists who may be tempted to sell secrets to 
countries like Iran.

The administration is trying to increase spending for the initiative because 
of the Russian economic crisis of last August 17. The government is seeking a 
total of about $1 billion for the threat reduction effort, including separate 
spending by the Departments of State, Energy and Defense.

The House of Representatives said that it agrees with the merits of the 
program, but not with the higher amounts that the administration wants to 
spend.

"They are not convinced that the rapid expansion of several projects is 
feasible or justified," said Ambassador Taylor, quoting from a House of 
Representatives report.

But the administration remains committed to the idea of more spending for 
threat reduction. If they have to live with the foreign aid measure, 
officials would be forced to make some tough decisions on other programs in 
order to raise spending for scientists, Taylor said. Some lower-priority 
projects might have to be eliminated altogether, posing a difficult choice.

"There's no consensus on what is a low-priority program," the ambassador said.

The State Department administers a variety of regional programs that include 
efforts to build democratic institutions and promote market reforms. But it 
is too soon to say which projects will suffer the most.

The U.S. Administration may also adjust its planned funding for all regional 
programs, providing an increase for scientists that is not as large as its 
original request. Officials had planned to raise spending more than fourfold 
from $21 million to $95 million at the International Science and Technology 
Center in Moscow and the Science and Technology Center of Ukraine in Kyiv, 
for example.

Funding could still be doubled or tripled for science programs, resulting in 
increases with less drastic cuts in other areas of aid.

The struggle is the latest sign of the high priority placed on arms 
proliferation and doubts about programs to control it. In May, the U.S. 
Congress imposed a series of new restrictions on another program to employ 
Russian scientists, known as the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention, 
administered by the U.S. Department of Energy. Members of the U.S. Congress 
were angered by reports that only a fraction of prior funding had actually 
been paid to the scientists because of Russian taxes and charges by U.S. 
companies and government arms laboratories, which cooperate in the program.

In previous years, Congress has complained that funds were not spent in the 
same years that they were appropriated due to inefficiency. This year, 
Congress has threatened to cut the funding and require that a greater share 
go to the scientists. Russian taxes on aid would not be allowed.

Differences over the programs must be worked out in September to meet the 
budget deadline for the next U.S. fiscal year, which begins October 1. But 
the fights over aid programs are likely to be perennial, as long as Russian 
arms technology continues to spread. 

*******

#10
The Nation
August 23/30, 1999
Book review
Back in the USSR 
by ABRAHAM BRUMBERG (102142.2545@compuserve.com)
Abraham Brumberg has written widely on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

EVERYDAY STALINISM:
Ordinary Life in Extraordinary
Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
By Sheila Fitzpatrick. Oxford. 288 pp. $27.50.

The study of the Soviet Union in the United States, as distinguished from 
random journalism, memoirs and polemics, began on the right foot. After the 
end of World War II, a large body of Russians stranded in Germany and 
unwilling to go back to the Soviet Union furnished American social scientists 
with a priceless opportunity to study the institutions and mores of a society 
for more than two decades virtually unknown in the United States, then 
briefly allied with it and then again isolated from it by a wall of 
ignorance, suspicion and enmity. The so-called Harvard refugee project 
resulted in several pioneering works, among them Joseph Berliner's Factory 
and Manager in the Soviet Union, Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer's The Soviet 
Citizen--Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society and Mark Field's Doctor and 
Patient in Soviet Russia, all of them offering illuminating insights into how 
the Soviet system functioned and how it affected the daily lives of its 
citizens.

But as time went on and Sovietology became an established feature of the 
academic scene, things changed. The early focus on social studies shifted 
gradually to political subjects, to an emphasis on Soviet foreign policies, 
the establishment of "people's democracies" in Eastern Europe, the expansion 
of Soviet influence in the Third World and so on. The shift was due partly to 
the paucity of firsthand information on the Soviet Union and other Communist 
countries, but also to the intensifying cold war, which inevitably influenced 
the scholarly community. Sovietology certainly did not become, as some have 
charged, an instrument of US foreign policy, but to some extent it mirrored 
the new atmosphere.

It is the singular achievement of Sheila Fitzpatrick, professor of modern 
Russian history at the University of Chicago, that her book marks a return to 
the early focus of academic studies of the Soviet Union. She was helped in 
this task by the gradual lifting of Soviet censorship, by the ability of 
Western students--since the early seventies--to travel and study in the USSR 
and also, as her bibliography amply demonstrates, by the number and range of 
studies of different facets of the social scene in the USSR that have been 
published over the past ten years or so. She has produced a fine 
work--engrossing, well written, superbly documented and much-needed to boot.

For her sources, she turned again to the records of the old Harvard project, 
still a trove of information on the thirties, and to reports written by 
secret-police agents for the use of a select number of high-level party 
officials, and held under lock and key until the recent opening of many 
(still not all!) secret archives. These make absolutely fascinating reading. 
So do letters from readers to newspapers, the personal correspondence 
intercepted, neatly sorted out and catalogued for their bosses by diligent 
NKVD agents, and a huge reservoir of denunciations, some signed, some 
anonymous, which were evidently carefully examined by the organs (as the 
security agencies were called), and sometimes read even by Stalin himself.

An assiduous scholar, Professor Fitzpatrick seems to have scrutinized every 
relevant scrap of paper. Her explication is a model of balance and 
judiciousness. She begins with the Communist Party's basic features, its 
untrammeled faith in itself, its revolutionary mystique, its penchant for 
secrecy (inherited from its conspiratorial pre-revolutionary years and 
hypertrophied under Stalin), the initially moderate and then increasingly 
lunatic cult of the Vozhd (Leader), the growing tendency of the thousands of 
"little Stalins" to emulate their Leader, a habit congenial to them and 
perilous to their victims.

The misfortunes that descended upon the country in the thirties are not 
exactly terra incognita. Their roots, as Fitzpatrick shows, lay in Stalin's 
cataclysmic policies of breakneck industrialization and collectivization, 
which she depicts vividly and with numerous apposite examples. "On the 
streets all the shops seemed to have disappeared. Gone was the open market. 
Gone were the nepmen [private businessmen]. The government stores had showy, 
empty boxes and other window-dressing. But the interior was devoid of goods."

Living standards plummeted. Shortages--of food and all imaginable consumer 
goods, from cutlery to shoes to needles and thread--became the reigning fact 
of life. People lived in hovels, windowless basements and "communal 
apartments," where one room housed up to thirty people and one toilet 
sometimes served 400. Famine and cannibalism stalked the countryside, while 
people would queue for up to fourteen hours a day, starting in the middle of 
the night, to get a single loaf of bread. Nerves frayed beyond endurance, 
with fistfights and knifings a common occurrence.

That these monstrous conditions were a result not only of imbecilic planning 
and human error but of deliberate ideological decisions is illustrated by the 
fact that almost all individual artisan activities were banned as "survivals 
of bourgeois values," human suffering be damned. Is it to be wondered at that 
the show trials of the thirties brimmed with accounts of "wrecking" and 
"sabotage," eerie cases of "placing broken glass in workers' butter" and the 
like, all laid at the feet of Stalin's "enemies"? The outside world was so 
mesmerized by the byzantine nature of the trials, with their phantasmagorical 
confessions and prevarications, that it has tended to ignore their more 
"traditional" function of singling out scapegoats to explain the consequences 
of the party's ruinous policies. Individual memoirs apart, most histories of 
this period were written from the top--that is, showing how the policies were 
shaped and implemented, rather than how they were perceived and experienced 
by their subjects. It is the latter, to repeat, that constitutes the major 
distinction of Fitzpatrick's book.

The thirties were not only an age of excruciating misery for Soviet citizens 
but also a decade of hope, utopian dreams and idealism. While millions 
starved and suffered, others--mostly young party zealots but also some 
writers, poets and other intellectuals--genuinely believed that the agonies 
of the present were bound to yield to a radiant future.

Alongside the sham, cynicism and opportunism of daily life were selfless 
sacrifice, a sense of commitment and--last but not least--rewards in the form 
of upward mobility for the emergent "new class." More than half a century on, 
it is sobering to realize that most of those superannuated men and women 
parading their nostalgia for the good old days on the streets of Moscow and 
Petersburg, and hysterically waving portraits of Stalin, are the authentic if 
pathetic remnants of those hordes of idealists and the beneficiaries of 
Stalin's policies, all of them remaining touchingly faithful to his memory.

Fitzpatrick writes with grim amusement about the privileges extended to the 
new class--special stores, foods average citizens could not dream about, 
dachas and spacious apartments equipped with modern conveniences. She writes 
with compassion about the lives of the dispossessed, disfranchised, disdained 
and humiliated, the vast majority of Soviet citizens. Among them were 
millions of "dekulakized" peasants, "socially alien elements" and their 
offspring--i.e., aristocrats, priests, czarist officials (including the 
lowliest ranks), "capitalists" and the like, not to speak of those thousands 
of erstwhile members of hostile political parties.

The result, she notes, was a society filled with resentment, suspicion, fear 
of informers and hypocrisy, a natural result of having to conceal one's 
"social origins." Children were among the most helpless victims, denied 
entrance into schools and professions, pressured to reject, if not to 
denounce, their parents. Hundreds of thousands of bezprizornye--homeless and 
often delinquent children--roamed the countryside, much to the annoyance of 
people like Marshal Voroshilov and Stalin himself, who in 1935 issued a 
decree making minors 12 and older subject to the death penalty.

One chapter in Everyday Stalinism deals with the impact of the upheavals of 
the thirties on the institution of the family. Fitzpatrick observes (and 
documents) that the response to the continued blows from without was very 
frequently a valiant attempt to keep the family together. Given the 
circumstances--with husbands running away from their wives and children, the 
age-old Russian blights of alcoholism and wife-beating (to which the police 
frequently paid little or no attention), and women forced to function as 
breadwinners, mothers and homemakers--it was no easy task.

Not all was silent suffering and submission to fate. As Fitzpatrick 
illustrates, defiance of the authorities, hostile remarks about Communist 
leaders (including Stalin), mordant jokes and even open expressions of anger 
and criticism were rife. Naturally, the organy were concerned. By 1937, when 
terror, a recurrent feature of Soviet life, swept the country like a plague, 
open or half-concealed opposition to the authorities became impossible. Frank 
conversations, even within the inner sanctum of one's home and family, were 
fraught with danger.

Fitzpatrick ends her description of the upheavals and anguish caused by the 
mass terror on a striking note: "There were fearful things that affected 
Soviet life and visions that uplifted it, but mostly it was a hard grind, 
full of shortages and discomfort. Homo sovieticus was a string-puller, an 
operator, a time-server, a freeloader, a mouther of slogans, and much more. 
But above all, he was a survivor."

One wonders, in reading this absorbing book, to what extent the long-gone 
thirties shaped not only the era of Stalin's direct successors but also that 
of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the post-perestroika period already a decade old 
and not--as far as one can see--about to vanish or be superseded by yet 
another drastic upheaval, however long Yeltsin may stay on his throne. The 
unfulfilled promise of a society ruled by law; the wretched conditions of the 
vast majority of Russians side by side with the rise of a bloated and cynical 
middle class; the corruption, the freewheeling criminality--how much is all 
this, and more, rooted in the conditions, the mores, the patterns of thought 
and behavior, and the institutions whose foundations were laid in the 
twenties and came to fruition in that terrible decade of the thirties?

That Russian society has undergone some fundamental changes is a truism not 
worth repeating or exploring. But how much of the past has come back to haunt 
it? Perhaps Professor Fitzpatrick will take up this question next time she 
puts pen to paper.

*******

#11
PM vows to tackle Russian Caucasus ``bandits''
By Martin Nesirky

MOSCOW, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin ordered the 
military to tackle ``bandits'' in the North Caucasus region of Dagestan after 
armed groups ringed mountain villages there on Saturday, Russian news 
agencies reported. 

``Bandits are bandits,'' Interfax news agency quoted Stepashin as saying on a 
visit to the Volga city of Ulyanovsk in another region of the vast Russian 
Federation. ``One needs to tackle them appropriately. We have the forces and 
the means.'' 

But, mindful of Russia's disastrous failure in its 1994-96 war against rebel 
Chechnya, Stepashin tempered his remarks about the incident, which followed 
two weeks of clashes between police and Islamic militants in Dagestan. 

``Russia will not repeat its mistakes in the North Caucasus,'' Interfax 
quoted him as saying. ``No more Russian soldiers will die there.'' 

The deputy commander of Interior Ministry forces told RIA news agency 
additional interior and regular Defence Ministry troops were being deployed 
in the inaccessible mountain region. 

Stepashin played an important role in the Chechen war as head of domestic 
intelligence. Thousands of civilians and troops died in the conflict. 
Chechnya is now outside Moscow's control. 

``I just spoke to the chief of general staff, Anatoly Kvashnin and I will 
speak to Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo,'' the premier said. ``It would 
appear several dozen bandits penetrated three villages in Dagestan from 
Chechnya.'' 

Stepashin told Russian news agencies Kvashnin and the head of Interior 
Ministry forces would fly to Dagestan on Sunday. 

Chechen officials denied any armed groups had crossed from their territory 
into Dagestan and vowed to respond to any military build-up along the border. 

Earlier, Russian agencies said Dagestani leaders had briefed Stepashin on 
Saturday's incident and he then ordered commanders to deal with the problem 
with ``maximum effectiveness.'' 

An Interior Ministry official in Dagestan said by telephone armed groups had 
seized the villages of Rakhat and Ansalta near the border with Chechnya and 
were digging in. Russian news agencies said a third village had also been 
taken. 

On Friday, Stepashin vowed there would be no new war in the North Caucasus 
but said any attempts by radical Islamists to seize parts of the region would 
be dealt with swiftly. 

The agencies said between 200 and 500 armed men had crossed the border into 
Dagestan early on Saturday to take the villages. They said the men included 
Chechens as well as Dagestanis. 

Russian news agencies quoted security sources in Dagestan as saying a group 
of Wahhabists, followers of an austere brand of Islam, was plotting to turn 
part of Dagestan into an independent Islamic state through a military putsch. 

Stepashin said on Friday such a move would cost them dear. 

``Let them just try it and they will soon see what will become of them,'' he 
said. 

Russia's North Caucasus is a patchwork of fractious regions and republics. 
The semi-autonomous republic of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, for example, has been 
teetering close to violence since a disputed gubernatorial election in May. 

******

#12
LUZHKOV'S Otechestvo Invites Spiritual Heritage to Merger.

MOSCOW, August 7 (Itar-Tass) - Spiritual Heritage movement has held talks 
with Otechestvo and with the Communist-allied Russian National Patriotic 
Union on terms of merging with the two movements in the elections to the Duma 
lower house of parliament due in December, the leader of Spiritual Heritage, 
Alexei Podberoyzkin, said on Ekho Moskvy radio on Saturday. 

He said his movememt had got a "very flattering proposal from (Moscow Mayor 
Yury) Luzhkov", who is the leader of Otechestvo, or Fatherland. 

"He has invited us to join collectively the membership of Otechestvo with 
providing the places in the central and the regional lists and majority 
districts," Podberyozkin said. 

He said Otechestvo's programme coincides with Spiritual Heritage's 95 per 
cent, and therefore there are no idelogical differences, "but there are 
doubts in another plane". 

As for the merger with the Russian National Patriotic Union, Podberyozkin 
said a mandatoiry term for this was that Spiritual Heritage is given a 
faction in the parliament in case of the electoral victory "so that it is not 
accountable to the presidium or the central committee of KPRF (the Russian 
Communist Party)". 

******