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CDI Library > Johnson's Russia List

Johnson's Russia List
 

 

December 19, 1999    
This Date's Issues: 3693 3694   3695






Johnson's Russia List
#3694
19 December 1999
davidjohnson@erols.com


[Note from David Johnson:
1. Reuters: Russia puts Duma election results on Internet.
2. AFP: Muscovites show strong support for Luzhkov-Primakov alliance.
3. Reuters: Disgruntled Russians ponder ballot choices.
4. Reuters: Russia leaders vote, some optimistic, some downbeat.
5. Financial Times (UK): CHECHNYA: Modern-day dissident goes out on a limb. 
Writer Anatoly Pristavkin tells John Thornhill of his alarm at the consensus 
in Russian society about the assault on Chechnya.

6. The Sunday Times (UK): Moscow makeover. Today's election in Russia will 
mark the beginning of a rapidly changing nation's return as a world power, 
believes Norman Stone.

9. Andrew Miller: Without a Net: Will the World Wide Web save Russia?
10. Moscow Times: Oliver Ready, Millennium's Greatest Reads? (assorted views
of greatest Russian book)

11. Washington Post: David Hoffman, Election May Break Russian Impasse.
Voters Could Put More Centrists in Parliament, Speeding Market Reforms.
(DJ: I carry this here as confirmation of my thesis of the continuing
influence of Chubais on Americans. Subject for the eXile?)]



******


#1
Russia puts Duma election results on Internet
By Andrei Shukshin

MOSCOW, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Russia paid tribute to the information age on 
Sunday by going online with news of its last big political event this century 
-- a parliamentary election. 


The Central Election Commission set up a special page on its Web site, 
www.fci.ru, to keep Internet users abreast of the latest news of voting for 
the State Duma lower house, contested by 26 parties and blocs. 


Results flowing into the Commission's computers from all 11 time zones in 
this vast country will hit the web site within minutes, election officials 
said. 


The first results are due to appear on screens just after 9:00 p.m. (1800 
GMT), when the last polling station closes in Russia's Western enclave of 
Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. 


People can also watch the results through a more familiar medium -- 
television -- as most TV companies plan real-time coverage late into the 
night. 
Russia is struggling to catch up with economically advanced countries in the 
use of new technologies such as the Internet, but a lack of resources and 
poor infrastructure mean progress is usually confined to big cities. 


Fifty-two percent of people in urban areas have telephones, compared with 
only 20 percent in the countryside. Overall access to telephone networks lags 
far behind Western standards -- just one-third of the level of Switzerland or 
the United States. 


Only two or three federal ministries have official Web sites and even those 
are rarely updated. 


In a country where reindeer are still the most dependable form of transport 
in many remote areas, vote counting is also slow and complicated. 
To speed things up, election authorities have installed a computerised 
vote-processing system called GAS Vybory, which has outlets all over the 
country and will be the main vehicle for supplying results to Internet users. 


THINK TANKS TRIES TO OUTDO ELECTION COMMISSION 


A rival to the Election Commission, the Effective Politics Foundation 
think-tank, started posting early exit poll results on its own Web site, 
www.elections99.com, straight after voting began in Russia's Far East. 


Its findings suggested liberal and pro-government parties would do remarkably 
well, but an election official said the data were unreliable and predicted a 
different outcome. 


Several hours later, the site stopped working. ``The server is the target of 
external interference,'' it said before shutting down. It was not clear 
whether the problem was an information overload or an attack by hackers. 


The Internet also played an important role in the Duma election campaign, 
characterised by mudslinging and heavily biased reporting in the mass media. 


Counterfeit Web sites were set up under names similar to those of some 
leading politicians but containing derogatory remarks about them. Moscow 
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, for example, found his official Web site www.Luzhkov.ru 
hounded by a hostile www.Lujkov.ru. 


Campaigners also used the Internet to start circulating rumours about rival 
candidates which were later picked up by newspapers and television channels. 


*******


#2
Muscovites show strong support for Luzhkov-Primakov alliance


MOSCOW, Dec 19 (AFP) - 
Muscovites showed preference Sunday for the Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) party 
led by the city's mayor Yury Luzhkov and ex-premier Yevgeny Primakov, bucking 
the nationwide trend predicted by polls.


Proud of the modern image of Russia's capital city, many electors voiced 
admiration "for what Luzhkov has done for Moscow" and his anti-Kremlin 
alliance with Primakov as they voted in legislative and mayoral elections.


Valentina Ivanovna, 46, accompanying her elderly relative, said the 
diminutive cap-wearing Luzhkov "looked after old people," paying pensions on 
time, a rarity in Russia.


"Moscow has been transformed. It has become beautiful and it is a world away 
from what it was like under Gavril Popov (the former mayor)," said Ivanovna, 
an employee in the city's public works department.


"Primakov is a man of his word and of action," she added, as she explained 
her vote for OVR.


According to a straw poll conducted by AFP among some 30 voters at three 
polling-stations in the centre, the pro-government Unity party -- forecast to 
come second behind the Communists -- held little appeal in Moscow.


Unity, whose support has surged since its formation little over two months on 
a wave of patriotic fervour over the Chechen war, is just "a creature of the 
Kremlin," Ivanovna said.


She added that she respected "President Boris Yeltsin who freed Russia" from 
Communism, but not his scandal-tarred entourage.


Igor, a 67-year-old lawyer, said he was proud to see Moscow "beautful and 
clean" and praised Primakov as "professional, honest and progressive."


A 50-year-old woman doctor added: "Luzhkov is the only politician who has 
done something for Russia."


A number of voters, especially elderly people, who came out early to the 
polls, opted for the Communist Party of Gennady Zyuganov, saying they wanted 
"a normal life."


Dmitry, 39, a commercial employee, voted Communist in the State Duma 
parliament elections and opted for Luzhkov for mayor. He did not regret the 
USSR "as we have to go forward" but added that "life was better then."


Muscovites from varying backgrounds opted for the reformist faction, the 
Union of Rightist Forces (SPS), led by ex-prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko.


A retired economist, leaning for support on a stick, Anatoly, 65, said he 
believed the party "is less corrupt than the others."


Anya Efimova, a 21-year-old student, chose Kiriyenko "because he's young."


She criticized Luzhkov, who maintain an iron grip on most reins of political 
and economic power in the Russian capital, for "making it hard for people who 
don't have registration" documents to live in Moscow.


Finally, Alexander Khanygin, 32, a construction worker, chose the liberal 
Yabloko party because "they've got their heads screwed on."


In the Pioneers' Palace, where Gennady Zyuganov voted a little earlier, the 
voting proceeded normally.


Some people thought long and hard before slipping the various voting slips 
into the ballot boxes: as well as the Moscow mayor and State Duma lower house 
of parliament, Muscovites were also electing a local city assembly.


*******


#3
Disgruntled Russians ponder ballot choices
By Peter Henderson

MOSCOW, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Sergei Nosov may go the polls on Sunday, though 
only to register a protest. He has never in his life voted in a Russian 
election and does not plan to do so now. 


``I don't see any alternatives but communists and mafia. I may go down to the 
voting precinct to take away my ballot, just so no one else fills it out. 
I've heard that happens,'' said the bearded 39-year-old, a construction 
worker for the Orthodox Church who had just gone to a service off Red Square. 


An angry electorate roamed the streets as Russia voted for the State Duma 
lower house of parliament, many bent on protesting corruption, muddle and 
poverty nearly 10 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. 


Yuri, 23, the young policeman guarding Communist leader Vladimir Lenin's Red 
Square tomb, said he had cast his ballot before his shift began, checking 
``against all'' parties running for the State Duma lower house. 


Russians take their protest voting seriously. In Soviet times the only 
choices were for and against the Communist Party candidate. Ironically, the 
Communists were the largest party in the outgoing Duma and were expected to 
win Sunday's election again. 


Under current election rules, if votes ``against all'' exceed those of the 
top-scoring candidate, or if less than 25 percent of voters cast ballots, the 
election is null and void. Itar-Tass news agency reported by 1300 GMT that 
enough votes were cast for the election to be valid nationwide. 


Yuri said he voted to re-elect Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov in a mayoral race, 
which also took place on Sunday. 


``Luzhkov took the city from rags to riches,'' Yuri said, voicing the pride 
many Muscovites feel in their city, a haven of light and bounty when many 
regional cities are dark and empty. 


But Yuri said he did not think it worth supporting Luzhkov's parliamentary 
party, Fatherland-All Russia, because he did not think the party could do 
much. Luzhkov will not take a seat in parliament, even if his party does 
well. 


PERSONALITY A KEY TO RACE 


Many Russians clearly voted for personalities rather than programmes, which 
were poorly advertised. 


Andrei Zakharov, 22, who planned to vote for Sergei Kiriyenko, the young 
reformist former Prime Minister, said he disliked Luzhkov, the focus of a 
mud-slinging campaign by opponents in the Kremlin administration. 


``There was a lot of dirt and no one had any real programme,'' agreed 
Alexander Smolnikov, a 52-year-old former Marxist history teacher, who now 
teaches market economics and was enjoying an early afternoon beer on the 
street. 


He voted for the Communist party along with his 88-year old mother, whose 
pension is worth a bit less than $20 per month. 


He expected the Communists to offer social welfare and integrate the market 
into the economy. Analysts have noted a softening of traditional Communist 
rhetoric in this campaign. 


``Of course there must be a market,'' Smolnikov said. ``The genie has been 
let out of the bottle and there is no putting it back, right?'' 


*******


#4
Russia leaders vote, some optimistic, some downbeat
By Sebastian Alison

MOSCOW, Dec 19 (Reuters) - Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister 
Vladimir Putin said they hoped Sunday's parliamentary election would produce 
a more compliant chamber while their arch-foes the Communists predicted 
success. 


Flamboyant ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky also expected ``nothing but 
victory'' while Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, head of a bloc expected to do 
well, nonchalantly said he had spent the morning occupied with his hobby of 
bee-keeping. 


Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said he had been disappointed by the 
campaign's mud-slinging, blaming Yeltsin's Kremlin administration for 
spoiling the run-up to the vote. 


``Russia needs the kind of Duma which will get down to business, make laws 
rather than politicise,'' Yeltsin said after casting his own vote in western 
Moscow. 


``Let's hope this Duma will be able to get on with its job,'' Putin said as 
he left a polling station. ``Let's hope it will be a legislative body which 
we can work with in a friendly way, and be able to resolve the problems of 
the country effectively.'' 


Yeltsin, who enjoys wide powers, and his administration were frequently at 
odds with the old Duma, dominated by the Communist party with 157 members in 
the 450-seat chamber. 


They frequently battled over legislation and the Communists this year led a 
failed attempt to impeach the president. Putin is a Kremlin loyalist but 
found wide acceptance in the Duma, especially after he launched a war against 
Chechen rebels. 


Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov was confident that his party would remain a 
major force in the new chamber. 


``We are in no doubt that we will be first,'' he told reporters as he left a 
polling station in central Moscow. 


The Duma elections are widely seen as a dress rehearsal for next summer's 
presidential election, when Yeltsin will have to stand down after two terms 
in office. 


But Putin, Yeltsin's preferred successor and Russia's most popular politician 
for his conduct of the Chechnya campaign, said talking about the presidential 
vote was premature. 


Zyuganov was not alone in predicting success. 


``I expect nothing but victory,'' Zhirinovsky, head of the Liberal Democratic 
Party, told journalists as he voted. Polls show his vote dropping from his 
third place in the current Duma. 


Sergei Shoigu, the successful Emergencies Minister picked to head a 
Kremlin-backed party called Unity (Yedinstvo), said politics was proving a 
tough challenge. His party is expected to do well, with polls saying it might 
come second. 


``It's easier to deal with any emergency than to get involved in this 
business,'' he was reported as saying. 


LUZHKOV TALKS OF BEES, GORBACHEV CRITICISES PRESIDENT 


The Chechnya campaign also marked Shoigu's vote as he cast his ballot at the 
Mozdok army base in south Russia, just over the border from Chechnya. Shoigu 
has taken on the responsibility of dealing with around 200,000 refugees from 
the conflict. 


Powerful Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, leading the Fatherland-All Russia bloc 
which is vying with Unity for second place, seemed unfazed by fierce attacks 
in Kremlin-backed media. 


Arriving to cast his vote an hour later than planned, he was quoted by 
Itar-Tass news agency as saying he had spent the morning looking after his 
bees. But he also slammed the election campaign, saying it had violated 
ethical norms. 


This theme was taken up by Gorbachev, whose Soviet-era reforms helped usher 
in the end of the Cold War. 


``The presidential powers, the president's administration, came into the 
campaign with its shirt-sleeves rolled up, and spoiled a lot of it,'' he was 
quoted by Interfax as saying. 


Patriarch Alexiy II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, added a sombre 
note. 


``Those whom we elect today will be working in the new century, in the new 
millennium. Let us hope that the new century, coming after the 20th century, 
which is ending so tragically for our people, will be a century of peace.'' 


*******


#5
Financial Times (UK)
18 December 1999
[for personal use only]
CHECHNYA: Modern-day dissident goes out on a limb 
Writer Anatoly Pristavkin tells John Thornhill of his alarm at the consensus 
in Russian society about the assault on Chechnya


Russian history has been dotted with dissidents who have dared to be 
different. In Tsarist times, great writers such as Alexander Herzen and Lev 
Tolstoy challenged the autocracy of the day. In the Soviet era, Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov struggled to expose communism's dark side.


But Anatoly Pristavkin, a contemporary Russian writer, is ashamed that the 
modern-day intelligentsia is betraying its historical role as the moral 
opposition by remaining silent about the rise of authoritarianism and the 
demonisation of the Chechens as the new "enemies of the people".


In spite of his own efforts to speak out in newspaper articles and 
interviews, he fears the intelligentsia has turned dumb about, and society 
deaf to, the human tragedy caused by Russia's latest assault on Chechnya. 
There is such an alarming consensus in Russian society about Chechnya that it 
has not even emerged as an election issue ahead of tomorrow's parliamentary 
ballot.


"If the people like such power then, God help us, it means the people are 
pining for Stalin," he says. "Although many people consider that history is 
irrever-sible, we are capable of anything. Russia is a country of wonders. If 
the generals and the security organs govern us once again then our future 
path will be terrible. And not only for us."


Like many Russian writers, Pristavkin has been bewitched by the physical 
beauty and cultural drama of the Caucasus and considers Chechnya, where he 
spent part of his childhood, as his second motherland. His experiences 
provided the inspiration for his most famous tale, A Golden Cloud Passed the 
Night, which made his reputation during the glasnost era of the 1980s.


In a recent article, Pristavkin was bold enough to question whether the 
Chechens really were responsible for recent terrorist bomb attacks in Russia, 
which triggered the latest war.


He also reminded readers that the Chechens had also been victims when they 
were deported en masse by Stalin to Kazakhstan in 1944. The Chechens later 
returned to their homeland with the bones of their dead relatives in 
suitcases so they could be buried in their sacred earth.


Pristavkin's knowledge of the region's history and peoples tells him there 
can be no such thing as a short war in the Caucasus. In the 19th century it 
took General Aleksei Yermolov decades to suppress the Chechens and then only 
by laying waste to large parts of their territory. "When I first arrived in 
Chechnya every young boy would tell me about Yermo lov as though he were 
their personal enemy. That was 100 years ago, or five generations. The 
Chechens are born fighters, who must defend their honour, their family, and 
their land."


An intense but amiable man, with close-cropped grey hair, Pristavkin argues 
that the economic degradation of the past decade and the loss of the first 
Chechen war in 1994-96 have eroded the Russian people's faith in their 
government.


The latest, highly popular, assault on Chechnya is seen as part compensation 
for these humiliations.


"There are billions of Russian money in Swiss banks, complete corruption of 
the bureaucracy, the disorganisation of industry, and bandits and criminals 
on the streets or in the state apparatus. What can people believe in? They 
can believe in nothing and have even stopped believing in themselves," he 
says.


"Then they say the Che chens blew up an apartment block. Of course, we must 
strike back at the terrorists. And I speak out against terrorism too. Only 
why do we take it out on a whole people?"


Pristavkin argues that the Russians should be talking with Aslan Maskhadov, 
the democratically elected Chechen president, about how they can jointly 
eliminate the scourge of terrorism. "Yes, we have to fight terrorists. But 
let's fight together. There are normal means of fighting terrorism which have 
been worked by civilised societies. One should not create 200,000 refugees of 
women and children. They will all grow up with hatred towards Russians, and 
towards Russia," he says.


Pristavkin is also alarmed by Russia's indifference to its own military 
casualties, mostly young conscripts from the provinces. When a handful of 
American soldiers is killed in action this is regarded as a national tragedy, 
he says, but Russia makes light of the deaths of at least 400 servicemen 
killed in the latest fighting.


"That means 400 brides who will forever wait for their husbands, 400 mothers 
who will suffer, 400 fathers who will drink themselves senseless because they 
have lost their only child. This is already a tragedy for very many people 
and it will continue."


His great fear is that Vladimir Putin, the popular prime minister and former 
KGB officer, may rise to power by means of exploiting society's baser fears 
rather than appealing to its nobler instincts.


"I am distressed that the rungs on the ladders of power will be violence, 
war, the destruction of another country, another people, and the corruption 
of the mass media," he says.


"There is an old eastern saying: you can conquer a country sitting on a horse 
but you cannot govern a country sitting on a horse. I am not only talking 
about Chechnya but about Russia too. How can a director of the security 
service govern a peaceful country?"


The main, and perhaps only, crumb of comfort sustaining Pristavkin is that he 
believes the young, post-communist generation in Russia has already purged 
itself of the malign mentality of totalitarianism.


He believes today's students are increasingly drawn to the pattern of normal, 
civilised life envisaged by the European Union, where people drive across 
borders without visas and share a common currency, and not by the madcap 
policies of President Alexander Luka-shenko in neighbouring Belarus.


"Probably their children will look at all the events that are happening today 
quite differently," he says. "The hope is that, for them, there will be no 
more clashes of nationalities."


******


#6
The Sunday Times (UK)
19 December 1999
[for personal use only]
Moscow makeover 
Today's election in Russia will mark the beginning of a rapidly changing 
nation's return as a world power, believes Norman Stone
Norman Stone is former professor of history at Oxford University and a 
Russian scholar


The most surreal touch in a rather surreal election is Stalin's picture. That 
face, looking young and benevolent, floats above the Moscow traffic and 
invites people to vote for a splinter group within the Communist party. 
Stalin's grandson, as if from the pages of Robert Harris's thriller 
Archangel, is one of its leaders, but word is that the Stalinist group is 
just someone's wheeze. 


As Russia goes to the polls today the mainstream communists are the strongest 
party, likely to take about a quarter of the vote. The powers-that-be are 
anxious to discredit them, and what better way than to sponsor in secret some 
allegedly Stalinist faction? So, with mysterious financial backing, Stalin's 
face appears above the traffic. No doubt, in the deep provinces, there are 
still many old-age pensioners who sigh for the "order" that prevailed under 
Stalin. For them, since then it has been downhill all the way. 


In fact, the communists are the only political group with a proper 
grass-roots organisation - all those old grannies stuffing copies of the 
local version of Pravda into letter boxes in case the post is interfered 
with. The problem is that the communists, who command a large block of 
voters, do not really know what they want. A return to communism is 
impossible; it failed with a tremendous crash. The party does not nowadays 
really differ from any of the others when it comes to a programme: it just 
wants an end to corruption in high places, and national unity. 


The communists' most likely ally is the Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who has a 
populist touch and is looking increasingly like Mussolini. He has his own 
Fatherland party, and has lined up some of the old guard, including the 
formidable former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. He has distributed money 
to regional governors and some, at least, are in his pocket. Small-town and 
village Russia still accounts for about 30% of the population and these local 
barons can "make" an election, much as landowners used to in 18th-century 
England. 


One mistake that I myself had made on Russia's future was to assume that 
decentralisation would be both necessary and popular. The crisis of Russia 
has reached such dimensions that, like Solzhenitsyn, you assume that the 
place will, and ought to, fall apart. After all, it accords with previous 
crises in Russia's past that the country will split - northwestern region, 
based on St Petersburg, leaning on the Baltic and Europe; a far-eastern part, 
leaning on Japan and South Korea. That would leave a sort of old Muscovy, as 
in Ivan the Terrible's time. 


The problem is that the non-Russian peoples, Chechens apart, do not really 
want this kind of decentralisation. They can see that, if it came about 
seriously, they would be at the mercy of local Russian tyrants, and they 
therefore need a strong centre, such as Luzhkov is proposing. Accordingly, he 
will probably pick up about a tenth of the vote, enough to make him a serious 
contender for power in the next Duma. 


In Moscow, Luzhkov has over-reached himself, and the stories of corruption 
that preoccupy the television have certainly damaged him. Nevertheless, 
Moscow has become a showcase capital, much richer than the rest of the 
country, and Luzhkov will almost certainly be re-elected as mayor. He has 
earned the enmity of the Kremlin, the Yeltsin party and its big moneybags, 
the media mogul Boris Berezovsky. These are dangerous enemies to make. 
Yeltsin's Kremlin has in effect set up its own party, Unity. With its 
collection of local governors and control of large parts of the media, Unity 
will probably do very well. 


The prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has managed to acquire a reputation for 
getting Russia's show on the road. When he was appointed, he appeared to be 
just an unknown former KGB man. But the Chechen crisis has made him vastly 
more popular than anyone else. The degree of ordinary Russians' exasperation 
with the Chechens is not easy to grasp, but I hardly meet anyone who opposes 
the current campaign. They see the Chechens as terrorists and bandits, 
incapable of governing themselves and making Russia much more difficult to 
govern. The former mayor of St Petersburg once said to me that, if he could, 
he would have expelled the lot. Throw in wounded national pride, the Nato 
precedent in the Balkans and a concern for safe passage of oil from the 
Caspian to the Black Sea, and the Chechen campaign makes sense. 


Putin, accordingly, is doing rather well, and the Kremlin's party will 
certainly get a good electoral showing. Curiously enough, it has been 
entering an informal alliance with a party of bright and youngish 
modernisers, the Union of the Right. The Mr Fixit behind this party is 
Anatoly Chubais, who has made a considerable fortune out of his association 
with "reform", and who is widely blamed or credited, depending on your 
viewpoint, with the process of privatisation. To many Russians, it has just 
been a colossal process of theft, but you can defend it at least because the 
old system had crashed so completely, and the urgency was to get some sort of 
productive show on the road. 


The likely outcome of all of this may be a surprise: Russia acquiring, at 
last, a stable government. The Kremlin's party, the Union of the Right, will 
form the basis of Duma support, and the opposition will be too divided. A new 
president, possibly Putin, will be elected in June. 


It is, of course, possible to be gloomy and dismissive about all of this 
process. In the past, I was gloomy as to Russia's future, thinking that the 
non-Russian peoples, who tend to live longer and more healthily than 
Russians, would secede, that the economy would crash and so forth. I was also 
wrong about the promising future of General Lebed, who now seems not to be 
getting anywhere. 


There are endless problems in Russia, but on the whole some sort of show is 
getting on the road at last. When I remember the old Moscow, the grim and 
gloomy city that I first saw in 1988, the changeover is astounding: the 
people just look very different, they walk in a different, more 
self-assertive way. 


In the early 1990s, we had illusions as to how easy the transition to 
democratic ways was going to be, and illusions, too, about the introduction 
of a free market. The elections nowadays are only semi-democratic, and the 
economy is full of mysteries. Just the same, one effect of the crash of 1998 
has been beneficial in that, unable to import as in the past, Russians are 
making their own goods again and prices, which used to be rigged artificially 
high by various protection rackets, have come down to a realistic level. 


We are seeing the rise of a new Russia, one that is shaking off its fixation 
with American ways of doing things and acquiring a new confidence. It is now 
more wary of foreigners, especially Americans, than before. This election, 
surreal as in some aspects it is, marks the start of Russia's return as a 
great power. 


******


#7
From: "andrew miller" <andrewmiller@mail.ru>
Subject: Russia and the Internet
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 


Without a Net: Will the World Wide Web save Russia?


In the past three months, 23 out of every 24 Russian people had no contact
whatsoever with the Internet (see, e.g., www.monitoring.ru). That is, 98%
of the population walks the neo-Soviet wire without a Net.


Of the group that did access the Internet in the past three months, about
half did so only once in the period, or slightly more often than that.


This leaves a group of three million Russians - that is, one in fifty or 2%
of the nation - who can be classified as "active" Internet users. A
relatively impressive statistic, all by itself. Also interesting is that
of all Internet visitors only one in ten (that is, one in 500 Russians) use
the Net to make a commercial transaction. This may be because Visa and
Mastercard are, for obvious reasons, even more rare than Webheads. Or it
may be that the products for sale on the Net are foreign, and over the past
year have become 400% more expensive for Russians with ruble incomes to
buy. Market economics in Russia? There never were any.


However, to identify the true size of the Russian Net "community," we need
to think a bit more critically, and to adjust the figure downwards to
compensate for various factors. The statistics don't, for example,
distinguish between actual Russian citizens and foreigners in Russia who
access the Net with the help of outside resources and for their own
purposes. They're promulgated by those who have a commercial interest in
expanding the size of the Net community. And, of course, there are
well-known statistics which indicate that a certain given portion of all
web-surfers use the Net only for pornography or other criminal activity.
I'd be willing to bet, as I'm sure would most people who live in Russia,
that this percentage is heftier in Russia than elsewhere, but at least
we've got to discount the international average. In short, the
one-in-fifty is quite a liberal estimate. We don't really need to discount
it in order to understand its significance, do we?


Then there's the anecdotal information. For example, St. Petersburg, where
I live, is Russia's second largest metropolis. Its population is larger
than that of Los Angeles and twice that of Chicago. In Piter, there is
exactly one place where citizens can access the Internet freely and free of
charge: there are fourteen terminals (on a good day) on the third floor of
the Russian National Library, located on Nevsky Prospect in the heart of
the historic downtown.


The terminals have no disk drives, so it isn't possible to up- or down-load
material to or from the Net. Sign up is always and a two- or three-hour
wait is usually required for access. According to presidential fiat,
blithely accepted by the passive, non-Net surfing population, the KGB has
the right to unfettered monitoring of all Internet activity, including
e-mail. A passport is required for sign-up.


Other Internet access, at one of the city's half-dozen private Internet
cafes, costs between 30 and 100 rubles per hour. The mean Russian income
is about 1,800 rubles - so a relatively well-paid Russian could surf the
Net for up to two hours per day - if, that is, he didn't need to eat, live
anyplace or wear clothes. As for the half of the population not so well
paid . . . A computer costs a minimum of 10,000 rubles to buy (five
months' wages, and there's no such thing as credit or a reliable warranty)
and home Internet service costs about 20 rubles per hour on top of that.
The KGB, of course, would stil be listening (as they may well be to this
very message, even as I type), perhaps even more so.


Lack of Internet use in Russia, thus, isn't too hard to understand.


So to answer the question: No, the Internet won't save Russia. Indeed, by
contributing to a heightening class polarization and elitism that is little
different from the variety that thrust the nation into the bloody Bolshevik
Revolution in 1917, the Net is probably only worsening Russia's decline.
Those who think otherwise would be well advised to have a rethink.


Andrew Miller
St. Petersburg, Russia
PS: Thank you enormously to all those who responded, both favorably and
unfavorably, to my prior JRL note. My internet access is quite limited, as
you may imagine, but I received your posts and will respond in time.


*****


#8
Moscow Times
December 18, 1999 
Millennium's Greatest Reads? 
By Oliver Ready
Special to The Moscow Times


With only two weeks left, the greatest Russian book of the millennium has 
probably already been written. Eliciting a range of answers from the 
predictable to the esoteric and from the medieval to the modern, we asked a 
selection of Russian and non-Russian writers and literary specialists to name 
and describe their favorite book of the era: 


Fazil Iskander 


War and Peace (1865-69). We have nothing better. There's a whole number of 
reasons: It represented, I think, the greatest flowering of Leo Tolstoy's 
talent; it was written during the most harmonious period of his family life; 
and here his majestic gift found a majestic theme. Of course, his next novel, 
Anna Karenina, was also truly remarkable. But there you can already see signs 
of the troubles and tragedy that would befall his domestic life. Here there 
is absolute harmony. 


The Abkhaz novelist and short-story writer Fazil Iskander celebrated his 80th 
birthday this year. Among his best-loved books are "Sandro of Chegem" and 
"The Gospel According to Chegem." 


G.S. Smith 


Vladmir Nabokov's The Gift, begun in 1932, published with cuts in Paris in 
1937-38, in full in New York in 1952, in English translation in 1963, and 
finally in Russia in 1990. I have re-read it every year since before I can 
remember, and each time it gets better f more subtle, more profound, more 
funny, more poignant. The novel is above all a celebration of the private, 
driven by two principal convictions: the family as the most important locus 
of human relations, and the absurdity of politics. It is inexhaustibly rich 
because of the range of its characters and the parallels and contrasts 
between their roles, the delicate portrayal of gender relations, the 
resourceful handling of narrative voice (if only Bakhtin could have read 
it!), the exquisitely witty literary allusions, the sharpness and 
sensuousness of observation of things spiritual and physical, the evocation 
of places present and absent, and the constant awareness of how things might 
have been but are not. Above all, here is the Russian literary language in 
the hands of a newly matured master who revels in his own virtuosity, but 
never loses his grip on the human dimension. 


Gerry Smith is Professor of Russian Literature at Oxford University. His new 
book "Things That Happened," about the Soviet poet Boris Slutsky, was 
published by Glas earlier this year. 


Mikhail Butov 


Dear readers! If I've quite understood what this is all about f that we have 
to name the most significant Russian texts of the outgoing millennium f then 
the answer to this question initially struck me as extraordinarily 
complicated. After thinking about it, I realized it's unexpectedly simple and 
entirely unambiguous. It's got to be The Lay of Prince Igor [the premier 
literary work of Kievan Rus, allegedly written between 1185-87, translated in 
1960 by Vladimir Nabokov f ed.] and The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by 
Himself [the polemical autobiography of Avvakum Petrovich, the best known 
priest of the Old Believers, written between 1672 and 1675, and seen as 
Russian literature's first extensive autobiography]. I think these choices 
need little explanation. Out of the entire body of Russian masterpieces, 
these have stood the greatest test of time. Today, we can confidently say 
that they will never become outdated or archaic, but will remain relevant and 
alive for readers, in whatever distant future world they may find themselves. 


Mikhail Butov is author of the 1999 Booker-Smirnoff Prize-winning novel, 
"Svoboda" or "Freedom." He works for the literary journal Novy Mir. 


Penelope Fitzgerald 


If you'd asked me a few years ago I would have suggested Tolstoy's 
Resurrection or Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and if you'd asked me in 1989 I 
would still have chosen those two but I would have added Tatyana Tolstaya's 
stories, in particular A Clean Sheet (if only for the sentence "Ignatiev did 
not know how to cry, and so he smoked.") But I was disappointed, wrongly 
perhaps, by what she's written since. 


But you're asking me in 1999 and I would like to name Andrei Platonov, and 
above all his story The Return (1945). In The Return, everything happens 
naturally, but by chance. At the very beginning Ivanov has received his 
demobilization papers and is ready to go home to his wife and children. His 
unit gives him a send-off party. But there is no train at the station and he 
has to go back to the barracks for the night. The next evening there is 
another, much less enthusiastic, party and, once again, no train. Ivanov 
can't face his mates again, and prepares to spend a night onthe platform; 
that is how he comes to meet Masha, with whom he half falls in love. Then, at 
the end, when he takes the train again, this time in search of Masha, he 
looks out of the window, just to see how far it is to the crossing, and 
catches sight of his own two children stumbling along in a vain attempt to 
intercept him. Ivanov has not been getting on at all well with his son Petya 
f but still, these are his children. He throws his bag out of the window and 
climbs down from the carriage. One might think "how Russian," but that is 
another way of saying that Russian writers above all acknowledge the 
tragicomedy of chance and at the same time the moment when (as Ivanov puts 
it) a human being "touches another life with his naked heart." 


English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald is an ardent Russophile and author of 
"The Beginning of Spring" (Flamingo), a novel set in Moscow and described by 
Anita Brookner as a "real Russian comedy" 


Sergei Roy 


I didn't choose the book of the millennium f the book chose me. As a kid I 
read Journey Beyond Three Seas by Afanasy Nikitin, a Tver merchant who set 
out in 1466 for the principality of Shirvan in the hope of trading there, was 
robbed in Astrakhan by Tatars, sailed on, regardless, across the Caspian to 
Persia, then on to India, where he knocked about for years before setting out 
for Russia via the Black Sea but died en route. He recorded his impressions 
in several notebooks f as fine a literary monument from the Middle Ages as 
any. 


It has rightly been said that there is no journey but the journey within. 
Nikitin's staid descriptions of adventures and foreign mores are interspersed 
with lyrical digressions that no student of the Russian ethos can overlook: 
searing passages about nostalgic love of his land and the pull of strange 
horizons; explorations of a soul "between faiths" f a typical intellectual's 
dilemma; a sense of utter loneliness in the midst of alien crowds, of being 
forsaken in a cold world that even fragments his simple faith in the Orthodox 
God. 


It is a sad footnote to the story that present-day merchants of Tver have 
thought of no better way of paying tribute to Afanasy Nikitin than naming a 
brand of beer after him. 


Sergei Roy is a writer and journalist based in Moscow. 


Mikhail Ugarov 


The book with the greatest significance for me is Ivan Goncharov's novel 
Oblomov (1859). Goncharov was never considered a "writer-philosopher" like 
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky f but that's how he appears today. Oblomov, a novel 
about an inveterate idler who whiles away his nobleman's lot in sloth and 
dreams, is for me the story of a man who preserved his integrity and never 
gave in to the people who would reform him. In the 19th century, idiotic 
critics predicted the death of Oblomov and all he stood for, but they didn't 
know that for the 20th century Oblomov would be an Olympian figure, a man out 
of Arcadia f whole and at peace with himself, a combination that is every 
Russian's dream. You can say that there is a Dostoevskian Russia, a Tolstoyan 
Russia, a Gogolian Russia, a Goncharovian Russia. Dostoevsky's Russia was 
fine for the years of Brezhnev's stagnation, but for me today's Russia is 
Goncharov's. 


This dawned on me almost by chance, during work on a play I am writing on the 
theme of Oblomov. It will be called "The Death of Ilya Ilyich." In it, I 
interpret the personality of Oblomov through something very similar: A.A. 
Milne's "Winnie the Pooh." Oblomov is Pooh, his servant Zakhar is Piglet, and 
his rival Stolz f Eeyore. As for Olga Ilyinskaya, with whom both Oblomov and 
Stolz fall in love, she's the North Pole to which they make their expedition. 


Mikhail Ugarov is a Moscow-based playwright. His play "Golubi," or "Doves," 
recently ended its run at the Stanislavsky Drama Theater. 


Alexei Birger 


If we're naming the book of the millennium than I should make a proviso: I 
won't mention poetry. Poetry is such a subtle, personal and intimate thing 
that either you have to say everything or nothing, as if it were a 
confession. There's no point talking about it in clichÎ. 


So I'm naming Alexander Pushkin's novella The Captain's Daughter (1836) f a 
historical narrative about the Pugachyov Uprising f as my book of the 
millennium. I know of no other work so perfect in form and so deep in 
meaning. Reading The Captain's Daughter always heralds a new discovery, 
whether in its marvelously light and elegant adventure-based plot or in the 
profundity of its analysis of Russia's nature of rebellion f an analysis that 
now seems like a prediction of what lay in store for Russia almost 200 years 
on. When you re-read The Captain's Daughter, it becomes absolutely clear 
where that Pushkinian lightness of breathing comes from, and that sense of 
catharsis, as if your lungs are being cleansed by the grace of faith and hope 
with which the novel is suffused. 


Alexei Birger is the author of numerous children's and adult detective novels 
and a translator of English poetry. 


Natalya Ivanova 


Crime and Punishment (1866). A unique gift allowed Fyodor Dostoevsky to turn 
a newspaper anecdote into a book that deals not just with Russia, but with 
the fate of humanity itself. This is an analytical and prophetic novel in 
which freedom puts man to the test. It raises the cursed questions of human 
existence. What is a man? A "quivering creature" or a superhuman invested 
with the right to kill a similar creature f one as useless and base, say, as 
the old usurer murdered by the protagonist, the young student Raskolnikov. 
Dostoevsky's heroes engage in debate with the book of all millennia f the 
Bible f and test its very foundations. Each character has an independent 
voice but is ignorant of the whole truth, while the novel's powerful 
polyphony allows every idea to be expressed and heard. The novel combines 
philosophical and aesthetic quests, it echoes the great works of Shakespeare 
and Cervantes, and crowns the achievements of classical poetics, while 
setting the tone that would dominate our outgoing century. 


Natalya Ivanova is a critic on the staff of the literary journal Znamya. 


Compiled and translated by Oliver Ready. 


*******


#9
Washington Post
19 December 1999
[for personal use only]
Election May Break Russian Impasse
Voters Could Put More Centrists in Parliament, Speeding Market Reforms
By David Hoffman


MOSCOW, Dec. 18--Inside Russia's most basic law of economic rights, Chapter
17 
has a big hole: There's no statute on the buying and selling of land. Over 
the last four years, President Boris Yeltsin and the Communist-dominated 
parliament have fought each other to a bitter stalemate over creating a land 
code to fill one of the many gaps in the quest to become a market economy.


Sunday's election for a new lower house of parliament may break that 
political impasse and others like it, according to analysts and politicians. 
The chamber, called the State Duma, is the unruly workshop of Russia's 
transformation to a market democracy, and the election will provide an 
important clue about what direction the transition will take.


The Communists and nationalists who dominate the lower chamber have 
frustrated many attempts to pass more market-oriented economic legislation, 
including a new tax law. They pressed the government for more subsidies. They 
voted to restrict freedom of religion, attempted to impeach Yeltsin, and 
declined to approve a major arms control treaty with the United States.


While the parliament managed to approve a new civil and criminal code, it was 
accused in the press of being beholden to wealthy lobbyists and tycoons. It 
did not come to grips with Russia's national identity, failing to agree on 
the lyrics of the national anthem.


But the new Duma could be different, and analysts say it could be less 
resistant to change. If the final polls are a good indicator of voter 
preferences, the Communists may still have the biggest bloc. But there 
appears to be a chance that the remainder of the chamber will become more 
centrist. The Communists could be surrounded by parties more inclined to 
cooperate with the government, and with more market-oriented views.


"The future Duma has a chance to become more sensible than the current one," 
said Mark Urnov, a former Kremlin political strategist who is now director of 
the Expertise Foundation here. "The Communists are not going to reign any 
more."


These predictions are pinned largely on the unexpected surge of popular 
support for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and a brand new party, created by 
the Kremlin just a few months ago, which appears to be riding high on Putin's 
coattails. The new party, called Unity, is headed by Sergei Shoigu, the 
minister for emergency situations (such as earthquakes). While it has 
virtually no program other than backing Putin, the party has grown rapidly in 
the polls since Putin declared he would vote for it.


Forecasts for a more centrist Duma also rest on polls showing that pro-market 
reformers led by former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko also have a good 
chance to make it into parliament. Two other parties with a centrist bent are 
almost certain to win seats: Yabloko, led by Grigory Yavlinsky, and the 
Fatherland-All Russia bloc, headed by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and former 
prime minister Yevgeny Primakov. Also, polls show that ultranationalist 
Vladimir Zhirinovsky stands a chance to make it. Despite his clownish image 
and sharp anti-Western rhetoric, Zhirinovsky in recent years has cast votes 
close to the government's.


The 450-member Duma is elected in two parts. Half the seats are chosen based 
on the vote for party lists; a party must get a minimum of 5 percent to win 
Duma seats. The other half are chosen in individual districts based on 
whichever candidate gets the most votes.


Since the individual district candidates are not always linked to parties, 
some weeks may pass before the composition of the chamber is clear. Urnov 
said about 100 candidates so far have not allied with any party. If 60 of 
them join Putin's party, he said, then it will likely be as large as the 
Communists were in the Duma's last session, when they had 158 seats.


The upper house of parliament, called the Federation Council, is made up of 
regional leaders, only a few of whom face reelection this time.


Putin's strong standing, based on popular backing of the war in Chechnya, is 
still fragile and unpredictable. But his ascendancy has lifted the Unity 
party into second place in some surveys, even though no one has a good idea 
what the party stands for.


"Unity is the most apolitical bloc. Those who are used to some kind of 
program say, 'There is no program,' " pollster Alexander Oslon said. "Unity 
is the people who like Putin."


Urnov said Unity is "a party that seeks to establish order and ensure stable 
rules of the market. They would aim to fight crime, money laundering, 
economic crimes. . . . They are pragmatists and doers."


Others say the bloc was the brainstorm of Boris Berezovsky, the tycoon who is 
close to Yeltsin's inner circle. The Unity party is reminiscent of earlier 
Kremlin efforts to forge, from the top down, a centrist political party. The 
1995 attempt, Our Home is Russia, which was led by then-prime minister Viktor 
Chernomyrdin, is on the ballot this year, but has little chance of winning 
seats.


One impact of the surge of support for Unity has been to undermine the 
Luzhkov-Primakov group, which has seen its fortunes decline under the 
withering heat of a Kremlin smear campaign. Unity has grabbed some of that 
bloc's support.


The market reformers also have made something of a comeback this year. 
Despite disenchantment with liberal, open economic policies following the 
1998 devaluation, the Kiriyenko party appears to have done well in capturing 
the imagination of younger voters. Strategist Anatoly Chubais, the architect 
of Russia's privatization, won a gamble when he gave early and strong support 
to Putin and the war effort. Yavlinsky, the other market reformer, is also a 
favorite among younger voters, but hesitated in supporting the war.


The Communists have been pushed out of the limelight this year amid all the 
attention devoted to Putin, but they still enjoy a strong base of 20 percent 
of the electorate, predominantly among the old and poor. They have backed the 
Chechen war while continuing, as in the past, to declare the Yeltsin "regime" 
to be a "catastrophe" for Russia. While not abandoning populist themes, some 
Communists appear to be trying to evolve into something more like a Western 
European social democratic party.


*******

 

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