January 9, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4021 4022

Johnson's Russia List
#4022
9 January 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Sunday Times (UK): Mark Franchetti, Putin puts Grozny triumph on hold.
2. Boston Globe: David Filipov, Putin rides the popularity of a war Russians want to win.
3. RFE/RL Russian Election Report: Laura Belin, ANALYSTS DIFFER ON SECRET OF SUCCESS FOR UNION OF RIGHT FORCES.
4. RFE/RL Russian Election Report: Laura Belin, FEWER WOMEN TO SERVE IN NEW DUMA.
5. New York Times: Michael Wines, Yeltsin's Big Visions, Unfulfilled.
6. Andrew Miller: Boris, We Hardly Knew Ye!]

*******

#1
The Sunday Times (UK)
9 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Putin puts Grozny triumph on hold 
Mark Franchetti Moscow 

STARING at the bare floor of his cell in a bombed-out house deep inside 
Chechnya, 19-year-old Sergei Fyodorov looked like a frightened child rather 
than a soldier sent to quell hardened Islamic fighters in the breakaway 
republic. 

A prisoner of Chechen fighters, the baby-faced Russian conscript wore little 
more than a tattered blue shirt and spoke nervously in subdued tones as he 
contemplated the shocking ordeal he had endured and the uncertainty of what 
lay ahead. 

Fyodorov was captured during a fierce battle last month and was unaware of 
his exact whereabouts. Unidentified Chechen fighters led me to him along 
muddy back roads to avoid any signpost indicating the name of the village 
where he was hidden. 

The teenager's bleak story was a far cry from the optimistic accounts Moscow 
has given of Russia's war against the Islamic rebels it accuses of mounting 
terrorist attacks on civilian apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere last 
summer. But it is on the fate of young soldiers such as Fyodorov that the 
electoral ambitions of Vladimir Putin, Russia's hawkish acting president, may 
hang. 

Putin, 47, has staked his chances of succeeding Boris Yeltsin, who resigned 
on New Year's Eve, on crushing the rebels in Chechnya with the smallest 
possible Russian losses so that he can maintain public support in the run-up 
to the elections on March 26. 

Fighting in Grozny, the Chechen capital, eased yesterday following Russia's 
announcement that it was partially suspending its drive to capture the city. 
The official explanation was a threat posed by toxic chemicals the rebels 
were said to have deployed. Unofficial sources suggest that Russian forces 
needed a pause to regroup and reconsider their strategy after taking heavy 
casualties. The two generals commanding forces in Chechnya are to be 
replaced. 

Fyodorov's experience hints at the reality behind Moscow's predictions of 
imminent victory in the last rebel strongholds of Grozny and the mountains of 
southern Chechnya. 

The last time Taisia Fyodorova, his mother, received news from her son was 
last August when, in a letter home, he told his parents not to worry about 
the war in Chechnya. His officers had given him personal assurances that he 
would not be sent there, he wrote. Soon he would come home on leave. 

"I was fooled," he said. "I found out I was going to Chechnya once I was 
already on the front line. First we were told that we were being sent on a 
training exercise in the Caucasus, then that we would be posted on the border 
with Chechnya. Instead I was on the front firing off from a tank into 
villages without knowing if I was killing rebels or innocent civilians." 

Originally from Buinsk, a village in the republic of Chuvaschina, 400 miles 
east of Moscow, Fyodorov had served a year in the army. He spent two months 
fighting in Chechnya before he was captured in the battle for Alkhan-Yurt, on 
the outskirts of Grozny. 

"I still don't know what happened," he said. "There was shooting all round 
when suddenly our vehicle got hit. I think it drove over a mine. I was thrown 
to the ground and lost consciousness. The next thing I knew I was being held 
prisoner with another 20 soldiers." 

According to the military, only a few soldiers were killed during the battle 
for Alkhan-Yurt, which the Russians took at the time but which the Chechens 
recently claimed to have recaptured. Fyodorov said that in his battalion of 
300 men, 50 were killed. The Chechens smuggled their prisoners across Russian 
lines on foot during a night operation to take them to "safe" hideouts. 

While the military claims that fewer than 600 soldiers have died, a pressure 
group called the Soldiers' Mothers Committee believes the figure may be as 
high as 2,000. 

Fyodorov's fate is unclear. At best he will be released in exchange for 
Chechen fighters who are being held by the Russians. At worst he could be 
executed, although the men holding him ruled that out on the grounds that he 
is not a professional soldier and did not choose to fight in Chechnya. 

The pause in the fighting this weekend was seen as a blow to Putin, whose 
immense popularity with the Russian public is largely the result of his tough 
stand on Chechnya. Putin, a former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) 
- successor body to the KGB - sought a more rounded image last week, saying 
he had exchanged e-mails about pets with Brigitte Bardot, the French actress 
and animal welfare activist. 

However, he failed to provide any details about his KGB past or about his 
policies. In a reminder of the debt he owes Russia's powerful security 
services, Putin has praised their work and announced that their role and 
resources should be expanded. 

A German newspaper reported yesterday that he had been expelled from West 
Germany for suspected espionage while working as a correspondent for Tass, 
the official Soviet news agency. 

He returned to work in Dresden, East Germany, between 1984 and 1989, 
operating under the diplomatic cover of deputy director of the so-called 
House of Soviet-German Friendship. 

Sergei Stepashin, a former Russian interior minister and prime minister, said 
that in the world of the KGB, Putin, a fluent German speaker, was often 
referred to as "Stasi", the name of East Germany's once-dreaded secret 
police, with whom he appears to have worked closely. 

An official working on Stasi archives confirmed that the communist former 
East German government had decorated Putin for his KGB work. Der Spiegel 
magazine said that spies recruited by Putin among West German businessmen and 
East Germans hoping to emigrate could still be providing Moscow with 
information from the West. 

By the time he left the secret service in 1991 to become St Petersburg's 
deputy mayor, Putin had attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel. 

Later, while head of the FSB, Putin was accused of seeking to shelve an 
investigation into the murder of Galina Staravoitova, an outspoken liberal MP 
shot outside her apartment in November 1998. 

As he heads for near-certain victory at the polls, his mysterious past is 
unlikely to trouble the electorate, however. Chechnya matters more. 

"I watch the news from my neighbours' because I can't afford a television, 
but I don't trust the reports," said Taisia Fyodorova. "The whole thing is a 
scandal." 

*******

#2
Boston Globe
9 January 2000
Putin rides the popularity of a war Russians want to win 
By David Filipov, Globe Staff
[for personal use only]

MOSCOW - The war that Russia cannot win has turned into a battle that
Vladimir 
V. Putin cannot lose.

Russia's campaign against separatists in Chechnya may not bring peace to the 
Caucasus soon, but the military juggernaut that propelled Putin, the acting 
president, into the Kremlin seems almost certain to guarantee him an easy 
victory in the election March 26 for a full term.

Even as fierce resistance by Chechen rebels has blunted a Russian drive to 
capture Chechnya's capital of Grozny, the overwhelming popularity of the war 
in Russia, and the Kremlin's media campaign to keep it that way, have created 
the impression that nothing that happens there can spoil the coronation of 
Putin as Russia's president.

Many analysts foresee a protracted conflict in Chechnya that will evolve into 
a lengthy, costly guerrilla war. That could sap Putin's popularity over the 
long run, but it will not prevent his election in two months.

Putin created an aura of inevitability by portraying the offensive as a 
series of well-planned, well-executed successes - and making sure that this 
is what the television networks show. Events that contradict this view - such 
as the insurgents' counterattack Wednesday on sections of Grozny that the 
Russians claimed to control - do not make the news.

But the fact that the rebels can still counterattack at all raises questions 
about the sanguine reports on state television.

''This is not leading anywhere; it makes no sense as a military campaign,'' 
said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst in Moscow. ''The rebel resistance 
is getting stronger as the Russian military gets weaker. But with the 
propaganda machine working the way it is, anything can be declared a victory. 
This is all about putting Putin in the Kremlin.''

Russian and Western analysts once questioned how long the Russian public 
would put up with an unwinnable war in the Caucasus. But now observers agree 
that nothing short of a military disaster can derail Putin's drive to the 
presidency.

Michael McFaul, a Stanford University professor, said many analysts had 
originally believed that support for the war would be undermined as Russian 
casualties mounted. But this argument, he said, was based on a faulty analogy 
with the 1994-1996 war in Chechnya, which Russia was forced to abandon.

In 1994, Russian citizens did not understand why their military invaded 
Chechnya, McFaul said. Now, he said, everyone - rightly or wrongly - 
subscribes to the notion that the current offensive is a counterterrorist 
campaign against ''bandits'' who attacked Russian territory and bombed 
innocents in Moscow.

''The more body bags come home, the greater will be the resolve to defeat 
these `terrorists,''' McFaul said.

What made the turnaround in opinion possible is the most glaring weakness of 
Russia's campaign: its lack of any clear sense of what defines ''success.'' 
Launched in October as a security operation following a wave of rebel attacks 
on neighboring regions and a series of deadly apartment bombings that may or 
may not have involved Chechens, the offensive quickly turned into a battle 
for territory. And as the advance ground on, politicians redefined it as a 
struggle for Russia's national identity as a great power.

With the military strictly controlling access to the combat zone, it is 
difficult for independent observers to tell how the battle is going. Even if 
the rebels score successes, no one in Russia has to know about it.

Right now, success in Chechnya is anything that looks like a resolute 
response, said Sergei Markov, director of the Institute of Political Research 
in Moscow. ''This is seen as a just war. People have the feeling that if 
Russia loses control over that region, it will cease to exist. 

''Support for the war, and Putin, will not decrease no matter what happens,'' 
he said. ''Opinion is in favor of winning, of putting the Chechens on a 
reservation, of solving this like America solved its problems with Indians in 
the 19th century.''

At the outset, Russian generals said they would employ tactics similar to 
those NATO used against Serb forces in Kosovo, with high-precision attacks 
and low casualties. But now much of Chechnya is in ruins and official Russian 
losses are 465 dead and 1,583 wounded since fighting began last fall. In the 
past 10 days, 70 Russian servicemen have been killed and 155 wounded as 
Chechen resist ance has stiffened.

But unless the Chechens pull off a series of major attacks that force Putin 
to resign or cancel elections, most analysts said, Putin's presidential bid 
is unlikely to be derailed.

That would only happen in the event of a defeat ''serious enough to break 
through the seemingly solid military control over information flow from the 
fronts,'' said Arthur Martirosyan of the Conflict Management Group in 
Cambridge. ''Putin can easily turn almost any occasional defeat in Chechnya 
into a victory on the image-making front by playing a tough guy.''

For the military, the only problem seems to be its inability to take Grozny, 
which would allow it to declare an end to the war. Russian troops are pinned 
down by sniper fire and unable to expel the rebels from bunkers in the ruined 
city. Russian generals were forced to cancel plans to celebrate the New Year 
in central Grozny.

That didn't stop Boris N. Yeltsin, who stepped down as president on New 
Year's Eve to make way for Putin, from predicting on Thursday that victory 
for Russia was near.

''Two more months and then we will plant our Russian flag in Chechnya,'' 
Yeltsin said in Jerusalem.

But if Yeltsin has not learned the perils of setting a public timetable, the 
generals have.

''It's terrible when we set a date,'' General Victor Kazantsev, the Russian 
top commander in Chechnya, said last week. ''We've already made a lot of 
mistakes, saying it would be a New Year's gift or a birthday present for some 
high official. The most important thing is to save lives.''

Is there any chance the rebels could pull off something like the August 1996 
offensive that drove the Russians out of Grozny - a victory stunning enough 
to shake Putin's air of invincibility? 

While officers lambasted politicians for stopping the 1996 war, the larger 
reason for the defeat was that the rebels were able to surprise the 
numerically superior and better-armed Russians. And a drive last week through 
Chechnya indicated that their forces are poorly prepared for attacks from the 
rear.

In some areas, there were no troops for miles. Soldiers at checkpoints said 
they are under constant fire, especially at night, but get little support. 
Except at forward positions on the outskirts of Grozny, the troops' vigilance 
is often not high. Moreover, said Felgenhauer, the analyst, many officers 
were recently rotated out of Chechnya, leaving less experienced leaders in 
their place.

Some observers say this is the perfect scenario for the rebels to attack, if 
they still have that capacity.

But that might not shake Putin.

''Even a disaster can be turned into a propaganda victory,'' Felgenhauer 
said. ''It's because the majority of Russian citizens want ... to be told 
about victories, because they want victories.''

*******

#3
RFE/RL Russian Election Report
No. 8, 7 January 2000

ANALYSTS DIFFER ON SECRET OF SUCCESS FOR UNION OF RIGHT FORCES
By Laura Belin

After the strong showing of Unity, the biggest
surprise of the Duma election was that the Union of Right
Forces gained 8.52 percent of the party-list vote. Just a
few months earlier, the Union of Right Forces seemed a
longshot to clear the 5 percent barrier, let alone to
surpass Yabloko, which at the time enjoyed double-digit
support in opinion polls. The bloc's success appears to
have stemmed from a combination of factors.
The Union of Right Forces had enough money to wage an extensive
advertising campaign, and also received ample coverage in
news and interview programs, both on state-controlled and
on private television networks. However, Yegor Gaidar's
electoral bloc had similar advantages during the 1995
campaign and fell short of 5 percent. The Union of Right
Forces may have benefited from associating itself with
Vladimir Putin during the final days of campaign (see
"RFE/RL Russian Election Report," 17 December 1999).
While Gaidar's bloc mainly attacked the Communist
Party during the 1995 campaign, the Union of Right Forces
used much of its ammunition against Yabloko this year.
Leaders criticized Yabloko and its leader, Grigorii
Yavlinskii, in televised debates, party literature and
articles published in the regional press (see "RFE/RL
Russian Election Report," 10 December 1999). That strategy
appears to have worked in many regions. In St. Petersburg,
the Union of Right Forces came in second in the party-list
voting with 17.3 percent, while Yabloko finished fifth with
11.1 percent. In 1995 Yabloko led all parties in St.
Petersburg with 16 percent of the vote.
Russian commentators have put forward other
explanations for the success of the Union of Right Forces
as well. "Novye izvestiya" argued on 23 December that the
bloc's strategy of winning the young electorate (for
example by staging a series of rock concerts across the
country) was not effective. Turnout on 19 December was some
62 percent, lower than the 64 percent in 1995, suggesting
that no wave of new young voters swept the Union of Right
Forces into the Duma.
Instead, "Novye izvestiya" credited Samara Oblast
Governor Konstantin Titov for delivering a massive number
of votes to the bloc. In regions visited by Titov during
the campaign, the Union of Right Forces gained a
significantly higher percentage of the vote than its
national average, the newspaper noted. Similarly,
"Komsomolskaya pravda" argued on 28 December that the Union
of Right Forces did far better in regions Sergei Kirienko
visited during the campaign than in regions with comparable
social and economic profiles.
Aleksei Kara-Murza, a member of the Union of Right
Forces political council, has argued that its success in
the "depths of the provinces" (glubinka) was the key to
clearing the five percent barrier. "Tribuna" on 21 December
quoted Kara-Murza as saying that in most major cities, the
Union of Right Forces received not many more votes than
Gaidar's bloc had in 1995. But in smaller cities and rural
areas, the Union of Right Forces gained 3 to 4 percent of
the vote, compared to just 1 percent for Gaidar's bloc four
years ago.
The one major disappointment for the Union
of Right Forces was its showing in the 225 single-member
districts. Only five of its nominees won seats: Boris
Nemtsov in Nizhnii Novgorod, two in St. Petersburg
(including Irina Khakamada), and one each in Perm and
Samara. Gaidar's bloc managed to win nine single-member
districts in 1995. The increasing success of candidates
backed by regional leaders hurt the Union of Right Forces--
especially in Moscow. Candidates endorsed by Fatherland--
All Russia won 12 of the capital's 15 single-member
districts.

*******

#4
RFE/RL Russian Election Report
No. 8, 7 January 2000

FEWER WOMEN TO SERVE IN NEW DUMA
By Laura Belin

While many politicians and commentators have hailed
the new Duma as more "centrist," "pragmatic," and
"constructive" than its predecessor, the 19 December
election marked a clear step backward in one respect.
Whereas some 11 percent of deputies in the outgoing Duma
were women, the figure is close to 7 percent for the new
Duma. The election results suggest that not only is there
no future for a special women's party in Russia, but the
leading political groups give very few prominent spots on
their candidate lists to women.
In the parliamentary election of December 1993, Women
of Russia surprised observers by gaining roughly 8 percent
of the party-list vote after campaigning for more socially-
oriented economic policies. Two years later, Women of
Russia just missed the 5 percent barrier, winning 4.61
percent of the party-list vote and three single-member
districts.
Earlier this year, it appeared that there would be no
women's movement on the Duma ballot. Yekaterina Lakhova,
former leader of the Women of Russia Duma faction, became
the number four candidate for Fatherland--All Russia.
Although Lakhova was no longer a member of Women of Russia,
that movement initially forged an alliance with Fatherland-
-All Russia as well.
However, Women of Russia decided in September to
campaign for the Duma independently. According to "Vremya-
MN," Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov had promised that women
would comprise 30 percent of the bloc's party list.
However, Women of Russia leaders became angry when most of
the women candidates were placed near the bottom of
regional lists, where they had virtually no chance of
winning Duma seats. (Their objection proved well-founded;
in the end Fatherland-All Russia won 32 seats off its party
list, but only five of those are likely to go to women.)
Having maintained a strong regional network, Women of
Russia was among the minority of blocs that registered for
the election by collecting 200,000 signatures instead of
submitting a monetary deposit. However, it was not the only
bloc on the ballot that sought women's votes. Tatyana
Roshchina's Russian Party in Defense of Women registered as
well, and the proposals she espoused during free air time
debates and videos were virtually indistinguishable from
those advocated by Women of Russia: socially-oriented
market reforms, better care for the elderly and children,
more attention to health issues. Ella Pamfilova's For Civil
Dignity bloc advocated an almost identical program as well.
Other parties explicitly campaigned for the women's
vote too, especially the Communist Party of the Russian
Federation. Women of Russia was believed to have gained the
bulk of its support in 1993 from the communist electorate,
and the KPRF made a determined effort to woo women voters
in subsequent campaigns. The KPRF often featured women in
its free air time debates--especially when one of its
opponents was from Women of Russia or the Russian Party in
Defense of Women. Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov also
expressly appealed to women during some campaign speeches.
For instance, addressing the Union of Patriotic Students on
13 November, Zyuganov noted that women topped five of the
KPRF's regional party lists.
Many other electoral blocs featured women during their
free air time slots, although they did not specifically
appeal to women voters. Lakhova participated in several
televised debates on behalf of Fatherland--All Russia.
Socialist Workers' Party leader Lyudmila Vartazarova
campaigned for the Bloc of General Andrei Nikolaev and
Academician Svyatoslav Fedorov. The Movement in Support of
the Army aired a campaign video featuring an officer's
widow, who called on women to help their sons and husbands
by supporting the army. Sazhi Umalatova was a constant
presence in videos for her Party of Peace and Unity. Peace-
Labor-May and Sergei Baburin's Russian All-National Union
also were represented by women in several free air time
debates.
In the end, Women of Russia gained 2.04 percent of the
party-list vote, less than half its 1995 percentage. Even
if one adds the 0.8 percent gained by the Russian Party in
Defense of Women and the 0.6 percent of ballots cast for
Pamfilova's bloc, it is clear that a women's party has
little potential to clear the 5 percent barrier in future
parliamentary elections.
Of course, not all women in politics agree that
setting up separate parties is the best path to better
representation. Still, very few women in Russia have gained
high-ranking spots in a major political party or electoral
bloc. "Parlamentskaya gazeta" on 30 December published a
provisional list of those who will receive the 225 Duma
seats allocated proportionally among the six blocs that
cleared the 5 percent barrier. Just 13 are women: five from
Fatherland--All Russia, three from Unity, two from the KPRF
and from Yabloko, and one from the Union of Right Forces.
It is conceivable, though unlikely, that a handful more
women on party lists could win Duma mandates, since several
high-ranking candidates, such as Unity leader Sergei
Shoigu, are declining to take up their seats in the Duma.
The picture for women was not much more encouraging in
the single-member district races. Women won just 19 of the
216 districts that were filled on 19 December (eight races
were declared invalid and no elections were held to fill
the seat from Chechnya). None of the winners represented
Women of Russia. Eight were from the KPRF, three from
Fatherland--All Russia (including former Yabloko member
Oksana Dmitrieva), two from Unity, two from the Union of
Right Forces (including Irina Khakamada), one from Our Home
Is Russia, and three independents. (One of the independent
winners, former Federation Council member Valentina
Pivnenko, was also backed by Fatherland--All Russia. She
has plenty of legislative experience, having headed the
legislature in the Republic of Karelia.)
Numbers do not tell the whole story. There were quotas
for women in various Soviet-era legislative bodies, yet
virtually no women rose to positions of real power in the
USSR. Still, current trends suggest that women will play
only a marginal role in Russian politics for many years to

*******

#5
New York Times
January 9, 2000
[for personal use only]
NEWS ANALYSIS
Yeltsin's Big Visions, Unfulfilled
By MICHAEL WINES

MOSCOW, Jan. 8 -- This grand nation boasts a 1,100-year lineage of autocrats, 
from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great; from Aleksei the Quietest One to 
Uncle Joe Stalin. So the question arises: what to call its first democratic 
leader, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin? 

Boris the Liberator? True, he ended more than a millennium of dictatorship. 
But Russian democracy, such as it is, clings to a slim reed. Boris the 
Beneficent? Mr. Yeltsin did bestow the blessings of capitalism, which has 
created a new Russian middle class. But his policies also plunged millions 
into poverty far more grinding than most any American has known. 

Boris the Peacemaker? Only with the West; the horrors of Chechnya are even 
now being relived. How about Honest Boris? Few perceive him as downright 
corrupt; unfortunately, Russian government under his rule was a more-or-less 
open kleptocracy. 

And so it goes. Granted a decade on the world's main stage, Mr. Yelt sin, 68, 
played it to the hilt, switching strategies, seizing moments and confounding 
enemies up to his unexpected resignation on New Year's Eve. That he will go 
down as one of Russia's historic figures, along with Peter, Ivan and even 
Vladimir Lenin, is beyond question. 

But unlike them, Mr. Yeltsin defies pigeonholing. He was a brilliant 
politician and, perhaps, a lousy president. He put down a Communist revolt in 
1993 in the most tyrannical of ways, shelling his own Parliament. But he 
never tried to stifle Communism itself, however much he detested it; that 
would have been undemocratic. 

"I think the Communists have already banned themselves," he said in an 
interview last June. "They are political failures." 

He had a vision of a Russia that would never persecute innocents the way his 
own father was persecuted by Stalin. In his country's bleakest hour, at the 
depths of a K.G.B.-led coup against the Soviet reformer Mikhail S. Gorbachev 
in 1991, that vision led him to climb atop an armored troop carrier outside 
his besieged office and, armed only with an idea, bring an empire to its 
knees. 

Mr. Yeltsin seldom had trouble with the big picture. It was the pointillism 
of policies and laws and bureaucracy that seemed not just to elude him, but 
to leave him dazed -- or bored, maybe. 

He ran through six prime ministers and uncounted deputies, trying to find 
someone who could turn his dreams into bricks and mortar. In his chosen 
successor, Vladimir V. Putin, he may have found someone close -- a 
self-professed democrat with policy skills and a Yeltsin-like fondness for 
the strong hand. 

But oh, the price he paid for the years of searching. 

"To have a vision was crucial," said Robert Legvold, a Columbia University 
political scientist and Russia scholar. "Without it, there would have been 
disaster. But to have a vision without the ability to implement it is the 
source of all the problems they have now." 

The problems frequently seem to overwhelm the good in Mr. Yeltsin's legacy. 
>From its pinnacle as an empire that put the first man in space and built 
now-outmoded industry at a dizzying pace, Russia has taken a terrifying fall: 
the gross domestic product has been halved, the average life span has fallen 
2.5 years, the birthrate has dropped by one-third, and the mortality rate has 
risen by one-quarter -- all just since 1990. 

Russia's once-fearsome army now sends soldiers out to forage for mushrooms 
because there is no money for food. At $33 billion, total spending in the 
2000 federal budget is less than what the Kmart Corporation took in from 
American shoppers last year. 

Inflation, while down from the quadruple-digit rate of the early 1990's, is 
expected to exceed 30 percent this year. Almost a third of the nation scrapes 
by beneath the official subsistence level -- and the subsistence level is a 
bare $36 a month. 

Some of this wreckage, though not all of it, can be laid at Mr. Yeltsin's 
feet. Blessed with enormous political momentum after the collapse of the 
Soviet Union, the Kremlin still failed to get Parliament to pass the basic 
legislation -- land reform, financial regulation, commercial law -- that 
underpins a capitalist society. 

And, in common with leaders of some of the other post-Communist societies, 
the president let the government fall under the sway of cronies, political 
supporters and palm-greasers who frequently put the people's interest behind 
their own. 

Mr. Yeltsin's decision to privatize state industries swiftly through a 
now-infamous voucher program devised by American economists proved an 
invitation to corruption. Ordinary Russians had no idea what to do with stock 
certificates, much less how to participate in corporate governance. Entire 
companies and even industries were snapped up and their assets looted by 
crooked factory managers, mobsters and tycoons; workers were left holding the 
empty bag. 

The government has fared little better than industry. Internal corruption and 
political horse-trading caused billions to be squandered on Kremlin 
renovations and marble-slathered ministry buildings while pensions and 
teachers' salaries went unpaid. 

Favoritism is common: it is hard to envision another major nation selling its 
oil fields at cut-rate prices to political supporters, for example, or calmly 
allowing the state-run railroads to funnel its freight through a Swiss 
forwarder tied to the son of the former railways minister. 

Such unending corruption has not just sapped the government of money and 
manpower, it has all but destroyed public confidence in the Yeltsin 
government and blackened his family name. Why Mr. Yeltsin has so stoically 
accepted it is one of the great mysteries of his reign. 

Grigory A. Yavlinsky, the reform-minded leader of the Yabloko party, once 
recalled giving Mr. Yeltsin an urgent warning about bureaucratic thievery, 
only to be greeted with a sigh and a shrug. "Grigory Alekseyevich," Mr. 
Yeltsin is said to have replied, "What do you expect? Russia has always been 
corrupt." 

It is easy to heap the blame for these crushing failures on Mr. Yelt sin, and 
to his credit, he has shouldered it. In his emotional farewell speech on Dec. 

31, he asked forgiveness from those who thought independence would produce 
overnight pie-in-the-sky, adding a bit ruefully, "I myself believed in this 
-- that we could overcome everything in one spurt." 

In his defense, however, Russia today seems permanently and irremediably a 
capitalist state -- flawed and not wholly privatized, maybe, but with a 
growing base of small businesses, a rudimentary banking system and a currency 
in which the people have a modicum of confidence. 

Even the disastrous economic collapse last year, which wiped out many 
Russians' savings for the second time in a decade, has proved something of a 
blessing by dragging the ruble down to a realistic value, making exports too 
expensive for most people and thus sparking a real revival in domestic 
production. Russia's economy actually grew last year, and is poised to grow 
again in 2000. 

Westerners are quick to attack the theft, ineptitude and backsliding that has 
marked every step of Mr. Yeltsin's reign. But in retrospect, neither they nor 
Mr. Yeltsin may have appreciated the enormous cultural gulf between his 
Russian heritage and the Western ideals he sought to graft onto his homeland. 

This is, after all, a land that had never known a free vote or a 
civil-servant bureaucracy. Or, for that matter, a competitive bid. Mr. Yelt 
sin, after all, was not Jefferson or Locke, but a party apparatchik from 
Sverdlovsk, a hard-line Communist who once oversaw the order to bulldoze the 
house where Czar Nicholas II and his family were massacred decades before at 
Lenin's behest. 

Mr. Yeltsin's coming of age is all the more heroic for that. A peasant 
construction worker from the Ural Mountains, he was a latecomer to the 
Communist bureaucracy, at 30. But he quickly rose to become the Sverdlovsk 
party leader on the strength of his personality and no-nonsense approach. 

It seems unlikely that he was unaware of the inhumanity of the system for 
which he worked. When Mr. Yeltsin was but 3, in 1934, Stalin's enforcers sent 
his father, Nikolai Ignatievich, to a labor camp simply for being a kulak -- 
a landowning peasant. 

In his 1994 autobiography, "The Struggle for Russia," Mr. Yeltsin wrote that 
he came to know the details of his father's persecution -- the pettiness of 
the charges against him, the identities of his accusers -- only after coming 
to power in Moscow and examining the Cheka files on the case. 

" 'Owned, owned, owned' -- that was why he was guilty," Mr. Yeltsin wrote. 

"He had worked a lot and taken responsibility on himself. Did the Chekists' 
machinery really gobble up people so senselessly? Perhaps my life would have 
taken a different turn had I been able to see my father's file earlier." 

When Mr. Gorbachev, a smoother and more outwardly ambitious man, dragooned 
him to run the city of Moscow in 1985, Mr. Yeltsin was an instant hit -- an 
opinionated, straightforward breath of fresh air who actually seemed to 
listen to citizens' complaints. 

Mr. Gorbachev quickly came to see him in another light, that of a rough-edged 
blowhard who wanted his job. In 1987, Mr. Yeltsin was removed from atop the 
Moscow Communist apparatus -- a political death sentence -- after criticizing 
the snail's pace of Mr. Gorbachev's reforms. Soon afterward he was 
hospitalized because of the first of a series of heart problems. 

But he did not give up. 

Over Mr. Gorbachev's objections, he landed a seat in the Russian Parliament, 
then became its chairman. In 1990, he quit the Communist Party. In 1991, he 
overwhelmingly won election as president of Russia, then still a Soviet 
republic. Three months later, when the K.G.B. started a putsch against an 
increasingly vacillating Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Yeltsin grabbed the reins of the 
democratic movement, leading a genuinely popular revolution. 

By the end of the year, Mr. Gorbachev had resigned, the Soviet Union was 
demolished, and Mr. Yeltsin and leaders of other major Soviet republics had 
agreed to go their separate ways. It was the greatest peaceful revolution of 
the 20th century. 

Mr. Yeltsin's instincts, toward individual liberty and market capitalism, 
were certainly right by Western standards. It is his execution that has been 
criticized. 

He has shown undue enthusiasm for manipulating the news media and spending 
wads of illicit cash to ensure his side's electoral victories -- not just in 
the December parliamentary elections, but also in 1996 when his own 
re-election was at stake. 

He is roundly condemned for putting down the 1993 Communist uprising by 
shelling the very Parliament where his appearance atop an armored vehicle had 
peacefully defused a coup. More than 150 people died in the ensuing battle. 

To be sure, Mr. Yeltsin was in the fight of his life, moving against coup 
plotters who already had called for a military revolt and for his arrest -- 
and who seemed perilously close to accomplishing both. 

But his reputation has never quite recovered among average Russians, whose 
tolerance for political upheaval already was long past the breaking point. 

Some others, however, see his excesses as a blessing. 

"He was an autocrat who forced himself to be a democrat," said Edvard S. 
Radzinsky, a Russian historian and chronicler of the Romanov dynasty. "Even 
when he destroyed the Parliament at the White House and had the right to 
arrest many people for life, he didn't do it. He understood that he had to 
set an example." 

In a curious way, Mr. Yeltsin's failings are his asset. A true czar might 
have yanked Russia out of Communism and into a capitalist economy more 
cleanly, but without freedom. A purer democrat would have succumbed to the 
1993 coup that Mr. Yeltsin so decisively suppressed. 

Mr. Yeltsin, a czar with a democratic heart, made a mess of the process from 
start to finish. And a decade into independence, his nation is bloodied, 
bereft, penniless, sick -- and still, by somewhat generous standards, free, 
for the first time in history. 

"Our history is both cursed and magnificent," Mr. Yeltsin wrote in his 
autobiography. "It is fitting that in Russia the tragedies, these 
contradictory strands of history, are so tightly woven together." 

He was referring to Stalin. But he could as easily have been writing about 
the Russia created by Boris the Bold -- and about himself. 

********

#6
From: "andrew miller" <andrewmiller@mail.ru>
Subject: Boris, We Hardly Knew Ye!
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 

$200 million isn't much - not even in post Y2K Russia, where (if we're
generous) it's only 0.1% of the nation's GDP. It would, however, be enough
to pay the salaries (on time) of half a million Russian associate
professors (assuming there are that many) for a full year - or to give a
like number a 100% raise. The mere passbook interest on the sum, deposited
at an American bank, would be enough to pay decent pensions to 12,500
Russian senior citizens for a year (rather than have them, say, begging for
scraps in public or simply starving to death). And then of course there's
the old adage that $200 million here, $200 million there, pretty soon
you're talking about real money.

This is what leads us to realize, when we see the giant golden central
cupola of the Khram Khrista Spasitelya (that is, Cathedral of Christ the
Savior) rising once again awesomely over Ulitisa Volkhonka about 500 yards
south of the Moscow Kremlin, that the church is important to Russians.
Because it didn't used to be there, and it cost $200 million to rebuild. I
spent part of the Y2K New Year's eve in the Cathedral, watching it get
consecrated by Russian Patriarch Alexei II, and you can imagine how
surprised I was when Alexei let it slip to the sellout audience in
attendance for the occasion that Boris Yeltsin had resigned, and blessed
his successor Vladimir V. Putin (the current Prime Minister). Alexei might
have assumed that we already knew about the resignation, as it had taken
place a few seconds earlier, but if so he'd forgotten that we weren't as
"in the know" as he is. It didn't much matter, though, because the
response from the gallery was one big unison shrug, and more upward gaping
at the truly awesome gilded interiors of the cathedral.

The church was first built . . . well, it's hard to say exactly when
because it was so huge it took four decades to complete. It was Russia's
monument to its defeat of Napoleon in 1814 (one of many actually). What's
important is that it was a mere babe of 60 or so when Joseph Stalin's KGB
blew it up in 1932.

Why did they do it? Well, for one thing they'd been trying to take it
apart more subtly, brick by brick, for more than a year and weren't
getting anywhere. They just don't build 'em - you know the rest. Grampa
Joe had a master plan to build on the site, and the church was in the way
you see.

What did he want to build? Well, imagine this: a skyscraper as tall as
the Empire State Building (but round, like a column or, to be more exact, a
pedestal) and on top of it a statue, as tall as Lady Liberty, with glowing
red eyes to warn off unwary stray aircraft. No kidding, this is all a
matter of record. It was to be called "The Palace of the Soviets" and an
artist's rendering of the design can be seen in the basement museum of the
newly rebuilt cathedral along with several other momentos of the old days.

Stalin's building plans went awry, however, when first Hitler (had to tear
up the foundation to beat plowshares and iron girders in to swords) and
then the high water table due to the nearby Moscow River intervened
(squishy soil, you see). In the end, they didn't put up a parking lot but
a giant (and I do mean really, really big) public swimming pool.

Stalin blew up hundreds of Orthodox churches all over Russia, and
white-washed the frescos on thousands more (turning them into movie houses
and horse stables) and the general (church-going) populace didn't lift a
finger to stop him. This is the well-chronicled Russian malaise. Stalin
even at one time contemplated the demolition of St. Basil's on Red Square
itself, thinking it got in the way of military parades (there were TV ads
for Stalin in the recent State Duma election cycle, the Party of Stalin is
alive and well, though not electorally as yet). 

I spent the last hour of 1999 on that same Red Square ringing in Y2K with
about a million Russians, whose main occupation was shooting off recently
available fireworks of every description so that by the time the government
got around to it's own light show, literal and figurative, it was an anti-
climax to say the least. President Yeltsin appeared a few minutes before
midnight to make the traditional address to the nation, and added that "oh,
by the way, I won't be around next year. Putin is taking over, it's been
real." Then he was outta there (defying the hyperbolic, breathless
predictions of many concerning his intent to declare an emergency or a
union with Belarus, nearly synonymous), and Putin appeared to offer his own
greeting. You know Putin, he's the former KGB field operative, former KGB
spymaster (you remember the KGB, they're the ones who blew up Khrista
Spasitelya), the one who Patriarch Alexei had been blessing earlier in the
day. The one Russians are going to freely elect their next president in
three months. The one who's already blowing things up in Chechnya. The
irony on Red Square that night was positively gooey.

When Yeltsin spoke, there was once again a giant shrug and much merry
making - indeed, no one had been paying the least attention to the address,
or to Putin's follow-up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. The snow was
romantically falling, the Russian Big Ben (the national clock on the
Kremlin's Savior Tower) was romatically chiming, the giant TV's switched to
a jolly cartoon of Santa riding a dragon (to be followed shortly, perhaps,
by Russian brewer Baltika's new TV ad: "A Santa without a beer would be so
wrong, Just like a love without a song!).

Russians don't care much, you see, for Boris Yeltsin. Why not?

Well, suppose I were to tell you that Abraham Lincoln was elected the 14th
president of the U.S. in 1860 with less than 40% of the popular votes -
that is, more than 60% of America DIDN'T want Lincoln to be president, he
had far less popular support than that enjoyed by the impeached, venal,
Bill Clinton. Suppose I were to add that on August 21, 1858, Lincoln said
publicly that "I am in favor of the race to which I belong having the
superior position" since "the negro . . . is perhaps not my equal in moral
or intellectual endowment." What if I next pointed out that although
Lincoln's army was more than twice the size of that of his "enemy"
(Jefferson Davis, an American) in number of soldiers, and so much larger in
economic resources that the two hardly bear comparison, Lincoln and the
utterly incompetent generals he personally selected (one of whom, U.S.
Grant, would go on to preside over what was arguably the most corrupt
federal administration in history) needed five long brutal years to achieve
victory, at a cost of more American lives than in all other wars fought by
the U.S. combined. And finally, what if I reminded you that Lincoln was
unarguably guilty of the single most egregious transgression of the U.S.
Constitution in history when he purported to amend it by personal fiat in
1863 with his famous, illegal, "Emancipation Proclamation" (as a matter of
law, had anyone been foolish enough to have paid the slightest attention to
Lincoln's inane declaration, this might have set a precedent for a
subsequent "Enslavement Proclamation" by the first KKK president to achieve
power).

Suppose I were to say all that and then to suggest that the giant memorial
to Lincoln in Washington D.C., and the one on Mt. Rushmore, and the
national holiday in his honor, and the penny and the five dollar bill - all
these are unwarranted tributes to an incompetent, racist, anti-Democrat who
did far more harm to his country than he did good. What if I then claimed
that what the American people think about this man, one of their most
beloved historical figures, is largely irrelevant to any outsider, to whom
what actually matters are only the objective facts. Would you go along
with me?

If you would demur, pointing out that the American people may have some
reasons, however sentimental, for elevating Lincoln to hero status
independent of his faults, and that these reasons are entitled to
preeminence over what any outsider may deem to be the facts because he is,
after all, an American president, and certainly if you want to deal
effectively with Americans you need to understand those reasons inside and
out, then what would you say about this:

On November 29, 1999, Newsweek magazine, via its Moscow correspondent Bill
Powell, stated: "Bill Clinton tried conjuring up the Boris Yeltsin of old
last week, the one who eight years ago stood defiantly on a tank and saved
Russia's fledgling democracy." With some authority, because I've done it
more times than I can count, I can tell you that if one were to read a
sentence like this to any assemblage of Russian people one might care to
arrange, they wouldn't believe it. They would think one was making it up,
having them on as it were. If enough time were spent to convince them of
its authenticity, then it would be met with an expression not unlike the
one you might make if you drank a glass of really, really spoiled milk and
then found a cockroach at the bottom of the cup. For Russians, you see,
Yeltsin is quite like Lincoln - except that he lacks the rosy glow of
hindsight, any actual tangible success of any kind (whilst his failures are
legion), and the fortuity of having been brutally gunned down in public
with his wife at his side. Indeed, for Russians, the latter is not really
a significant ennobling factor - as the near complete public forgetfulness
concerning assassinated Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova is concerned (on
the anniversary of her death, almost nobody gathered at her gravesite in
St. Petersburg to mark the occasion - I know because I was there).

This is because Russian people don't value democracy at all seriously and,
even if they did, don't think Boris Yeltsin had anything to do with
"saving" theirs. Rather, if anything, they think he wrecked it. They hate
Boris Yeltsin, passionately, almost as much as they hate Mikhail Gorbachev,
the man who brought down communism. It may not have escaped your notice
that the Russian people, in the exercise of their democracy, have three
times now selected the Communist party as their favorite as far as
legislative politics are concerned. When they weren't voting for
communists, they were voting for parties lead by (Otechestvo, Yevgeny
Primakov) or endorsed by (Yedinstvo-Medved), Vladimir Putin) former KGB
spymasters. Between them the communists and the KGB-lead parties control
the vast majority of votes in the Russian Duma. The Communists
specifically, you may already know, have repeatedly tried to impeach
Yeltsin, accusing him of "genocide" because the Russian population is
shrinking, and Otechestvo ("Fatherland") founder Yuri Luzhkov is Kremlin
Public Enemy No. 1, the victim of an endless barrage of personal attacks on
state-owned ORT and RTR television.

So was that masked man, the one they called Boris Yeltsin, who just rode
off into the sunset? Is he who we say he is, or who they say he is? Who
is Lincoln? What is truth? What is fiction? Oughtn't we to better
understand Russia, at least more accurately, before it is too late? Will
Newsweek be partly responsible for Cold War II? These are the questions -
perhaps the JRL can provide some answers.

One might wonder, of course, that if what I say about Yeltsin and the
Communists is true why didn't the Russian people unelect Boris Yeltsin at
the first opportunity, replacing him with his rival Genady Zyuganov, leader
of the Communist Party. Well, in point of fact, in 1996 the Russian people
nearly did just that - and many believe they actually did just that. A
giant troup of the most famous pop stars toured the country touting Yeltsin
in semi-free concerts, his resources were unlimited and dwarfed those of
Zyuganov, and his government controlled most of the television , print and
radio media in the country. Yet, Yeltsin only just manage to squeak by
Zyuganov in a runoff election that many Russian people judge to have been
rigged by the clan of oligarchs who surround Yeltsin, sucking on him in
their view like leeches, and who desparately wanted to avoid
communist-inspired renationalization of their stolen assets at any price.

In the same article, Powell also wrote that "the conflict in Chechnya,
Russia's second war in the region, is wildly popular among the voters."
Did the election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 mean than the Vietnam war was
"wildly popular?" Do Russian mothers really clamor to send their sons off
to die in Chechnya? Do the sons really line up around the block waiting
their chance to go? Do Russians enjoy being responsible for the
annihilation of countless innocent women and children - are they a
bloodthirsty, brutal people bent on world domination? Or are Russians, in
fact, somewhat worried by Chechnya and simply, as all people always do,
rallying around their flag in time of active combat? These, too, are
interesting questions upon which perhaps the JRL can shed some light.

Andrew Miller
St. Petersburg, Russia

******


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