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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