March 9, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4156 4157

Johnson's Russia List
#4157
9 March 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Reuters: Western lending to Russia fails to foster reforms.(Joseph Stiglitz)
2. AP: Angela Charlton, Putin Test: What To Do With Land.
3. Bloomberg: Russian Yak-40 Plane Crash in Moscow Kills Nine.(Artyom Borovik dies)
4. Stanislav Menshikov: Re: Gary Peach/4154.
5. Jay Alexander: Re: 4154- Hough/McFaul.
6. Peter Ekman: RE: 4156 Kuzina/Cost of Education.
7. RFE/RL: Paul Goble, 'Unanimously'
8. Moscow Times: Oksana Yablokova, Nyet Says Just Say No To Every Candidate.
9. Time: Paul Quinn-Judge, The Ice-Cold Strategy. Vladimir Putin is running a passionless campaign and hinting at sweeping reforms that lie ahead.
10. New York Times: Celestine Bohlen, Russian Regions Wary as Putin Tightens Control.
11. Ira Straus: The Pitiful Western Response to Putin on NATO.]

********

#1
Western lending to Russia fails to foster reforms
By Lida Poletz

NEW YORK, March 8 (Reuters) - Western lending to Russia has failed to foster 
desired reforms and international financial institutions should consider 
curbing what looks like a long-term dependency on foreign aid, the World 
Bank's former chief economist said on Wednesday. 

Joseph Stiglitz, speaking at a forum on aid to Russia, said he backed some of 
the ideas in a congressional commission's report, released earlier in the 
day, that said the International Monetary Fund should stop long-term lending 
and focus on short-term emergency financing. 

"I think the recommendations ought to be taken quite seriously that the IMF 
should not be involved in what has turned out to be a long-term lending 
situation," said Stiglitz, who resigned from the bank last year saying he 
wanted to speak his mind. 

"Russia's transition to a market economy wasn't anywhere near as successful 
as it was thought. Output today is 50 percent of what it was at the start of 
the transition. Poverty has increased dramatically. 

"The strategy of focusing on privatisation and not focusing on inequality has 
made the principles of democracy far weaker than they might have been," he 
said. 

WEST NEEDS TO STAY INVOLVED 

But the deputy head of the IMF department dealing with Russia, Gerard 
Belanger, argued the IMF had achieved success as well as failure in Russia, 
and said the West needed to remain involved in Russia's move to a market 
economy. 

"Should the IMF remain engaged with Russia? That question is asked only by 
those who see things in two colours, black and white," said Belanger, another 
panellist at the forum. "But there are many shades of grey." 

He said Russia had achieved improvements in fiscal revenues, authorities were 
beefing up tax collection, strengthening oil prices had buoyed revenue from 
exports and the IMF was able to influence policies during negotiations on 
loan programmes. 

But Belanger said the economic plans of Vladimir Putin, likely successor to 
former President Boris Yeltsin, remained "a question mark." 

"(Putin) praised direction of policies over the last two years as being 
suitable for the Russian model, so maybe the government will continue the 
economic reforms already in place but without a comprehensive programme in 
mind," Belanger said. 

RUSSIAN REVIVAL BEGINS 

The IMF and World Bank have pumped tens of billions of dollars into the 
Russian economy in the eight years since the Soviet Union fell apart. 

But economic output is only just beginning to revive from a long and painful 
slump and millions of Russians live below the poverty line. 

The most spectacular failure came in the summer of 1998 when, weeks after 
winning a multi-billion dollar rescue deal, Russia defaulted on some debt and 
devalued its rouble currency. 

A year later the IMF resumed lending to Russia but this money was to settle 
old Russian debts to the Fund and payments were halted again last year 
because Russia was not meeting the programme's structural conditions. 

*******

#2
Putin Test: What To Do With Land
March 8, 2000
By ANGELA CHARLTON

YAROSLAVL, Russia (AP) - What do the potato patches and dairy farms that ring 
this eastern Russian city have in common with the barren wind-swept steppes 
of Siberia? 

The Russian government owns them. Russia has more land than any country and 
the government owns nearly all of it. 

And that makes perfect sense to most Russians. So farmers were upset when 
acting President Vladimir Putin - the front-runner in March 26 presidential 
elections - suggested selling the fields and turning Russia into a nation of 
landowners. 

``Why should we sell our land? So that foreigners can buy it? So that 
(Russian) criminals can buy it and watch it disintegrate?'' asked Alexander 
Zylev, director of the Molot collective farm, 150 miles northeast of Moscow. 
A portrait of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin hung crookedly above his desk. 

The last decade has brought free elections, free media, and privatized many 
stores and businesses. But reformers say the country cannot be considered a 
real democracy or build a market economy until it abandons the Soviet system 
of state ownership of land. 

They also say Russian farms will never be productive until they move into 
private hands. But who would want to buy the much-abused land Russia has to 
offer? 

Most of the country's 370 million acres of agricultural land are still farmed 
collectively. Yet the farms produce a fraction of what they did in the Soviet 
era - and they were grossly inefficient then. 

Although it has some of the most fertile farmland in the world, Russia relies 
heavily on food imports. Record-low grain harvests in the past two years 
prompted Russia to beg for 8 million tons of food aid from the United States 
and European Union. 

Zylev's farm is cluttered with broken-down tractors, and half its cowsheds 
sit empty, filled with snow seeping through rotten roofs. Across Russia, farm 
workers often take home leftover vegetables as wages - or steal them. Farmers 
can't afford fertilizers, feed or equipment, and are diving deeper into debt. 

Putin recently suggested holding a referendum on ``the land question,'' which 
he has called a key priority. And the parliament, which saw many hard-liners 
ousted in December elections, could finally give Russia a post-Soviet land 
code that would encourage private farming. 

``The question is whether Putin will be strong enough to overcome the public 
fear of free land sales, the conservatism among Russians - rural and urban,'' 
said Cameron Sawyer, who runs a Moscow-based real estate company. 

As bad as Russian agriculture looks now, many Russians fear private land 
ownership would be worse. Farmers worry that serious reform would shut down 
unproductive farms and cost them their livelihoods, and city dwellers worry 
about food supplies drying up. 

In addition, most Russians are too poor to buy the land, and farmers fear 
rich Russians or foreigners will snap it up and take it out of agricultural 
production. 

Valentin Milto is a rarity in rural Russia. He wants to buy the land his 
Russian-Dutch company, Agronova, uses for growing potatoes. 

``I need permission from the local administration to do anything ... To seek 
a loan, to sell seeds to a neighboring farm,'' Milto said, while inspecting a 
well-stocked Agronova warehouse west of Yaroslavl. 

But even his own employees are resisting his efforts to buy land. 

``I trust my bosses, they're good people. But if one foreigner buys land, 
then another will, and soon all of Russia will be foreign,'' said Tatyana 
Zhidkova, a seasonal worker stuffing beets into buckets. 

Working land leased from state farms around Yaroslavl, Agronova produced four 
times as many potatoes per acre last year as the national average. It was one 
of the region's few agricultural businesses to turn a profit. 

Its neighbors, including Zylev's Molot farm, were not pleased. Some 
complained to local authorities, and Agronova had to seek new land plots 
after one lease deal soured. 

Technically it's already legal to buy and sell land, thanks to decrees signed 
by Boris Yeltsin. But Russia still lacks a parliament-approved land code, 
keeping potential buyers away. Only about 6 percent of Russia's land is in 
private hands. 

Besides, the people with money aren't interested in taking over farms with 
bloated payrolls and mountains of debt. Demand for land is so low that the 
land Agronova wants to buy would cost about $7 an acre, Milto said. 

*******

#3
Russian Yak-40 Plane Crash in Moscow Kills Nine

Moscow, March 9 (Bloomberg)
- A Russian-made Yak-40 airplane en route to Kiev crashed at Moscow's 
Sheremetyevo-1 airport immediately after takeoff, killing all nine people on 
board. 

The passengers included Ziya Bazhaev, president of Alliance Group, a Russian 
consulting company, and former president of OAO Sidanco, an oil producer 
partly owned by BP Amoco Plc; and Artyom Borovik, president of media company 
Sovereshenno Sekretno (Absolutely Secret), which produces a periodical and a 
TV show of the same name. 

The flight had five crew members and four passengers, Russian news agency 
Interfax reported. The plane, produced in Soviet times, belongs to 
Vologodskiye Airlines, Interfax said. Russia has about 300 airlines operating 
on regional routes that were created after the breakup of the Soviet-era 
state airline. The small companies spun off from Aeroflot are known as the 
``baby-flots.'' 

The airplane ``is an ancient old Soviet thing,'' said Kim Iskyan, an analyst 
at Renaissance Capital in Moscow. ``When the Soviet Union broke up a lot of 
Yak-40 have been disbursed between baby-flots.'' 

The airplane, which crashed at 8:43 a.m. local time, was to be put out of use 
in July 2001, after being in operation for 24 years, Interfax reported. 
Causes of the crash are still unknown. 

Russian emergency services identified the victims after their bodies were 
pulled from the wreckage of the plane. Federal Aviation Service investigators 
have been sent to the site to try to determine the reasons for the crash. 
Sheremetyevo-1 airport, used mainly for flights within the former Soviet 
Union, reopened after being closed earlier this morning. 

OAO Aeroflot, Russia's state-controlled international airline, said it 
doesn't fly any Yak-40 planes. 

*******

#4
From: "stanislav menshikov" <menschivok@globalxs.nl>
Subject: Re: Gary Peach in Moscow Times in JRL-4154 #17
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 

Mr. Peach's article addresses the Zyuganov-Glazyev budget proposal. He
calls it "wacky", abounding in "fantastic figures", drawn "from the 
ceiling", "numerical hocus-pocus", etc.

I have my own objections to that proposal on which I dwell in my Moscow
Tribune column posted in the same JRL under #10.

My point is that actually some of some of Glasyev's numbers are quite
credible. For instance, his figure on capital flight is 320 billion
roubles, whereas the highly reputable Russian-European Centre for Economic
Policy Centre(RECEP) financed by the EU gives its estimate for
1999 at 360 billion. The difference is not too significant to deserve Mr.
Peach's epithets. The Glazyev figure is basically correct, even on the 
conservative side. What about the other figures? Can Mr. Peach show that
they are out of order, and can he
present more credible figures instead? If not, why take the trouble to
write? Simply to show how the author hates the communist Zyuganov and
non-communist Glazyev? Why not, just for a change, present serious
arguments that could really help destroy the Zyuganov-Glazyev proposal
instead of shouting insults? Would sound much more credible.

The trouble with Glazyev is not that his figures are wrong, but that he
does not propose effective ways of tackling capital flight. Imposing a
full-proof barrier against transfering profits abroad will not make
businesses necessarily invest that money at home. Also, even if Glazyev
was able to stop capital flight, that would not result in an automatic
transfer of that money to the federal budget. And even if he managed to do
right that, it would not be wise to spend all of the extra money on
pensions and wages of government employees rather than spend a significant
part of it on promoting capital investment.

But these are all issues that need serious discussion in a democratic
campaign if one wants to free it from the atmosphere of a provincial
circus.

Another point. Today Messrs Berezovsky and Abramovich are allegedly buying
into aluminium. Putin asked the Anti-Monopoly Ministry to look into that
matter. But the matter is more serious than preventing monopoly in
aluminium. When profits earned in oil are invested in aluminium shares,
that does not result in either increasing oil reserves of Sibirskaya Neft'
or production capacity of Krasnoyarsk Aluminium whereas both Russian oil
and aluminium industries are in need of more investment into physical
capital and modernisation. So there is some logic in government
interference in controlling revenues from oil and aluminium exports. This
is not something that Zyuganov-Glazyev simply grabbed from the ceiling.
Worth discussing, but seriously, without hysterics.

Instilling order at Gazprom and RAO EES is also a serious mattter. These
are natural monopolies with majority government ownership, and the
government needs to see that its interests are properly looked after.
Control over Mr. Viakhirev is not a Glazyev invention, it originated way
back in the Chubais-Kiriyenko times. Was the government consulted when
Gazprom bought 30% of shares in Media-Most? Wasn't it more reasonable to
invest that money in repairing and extending natural gas pipelines and
other infrastructure? 

Recently, Mr. Putin has criiticised RAO EES for not collecting enough cash
on its sales and that it was in arrears on its federal taxes. A perfectly
legitimate issue for concern. Mr. Chubais responded by claiming that the
share of cash in RAO EES revenues has been brought up to 50% and that Mr.
Putin was misinformed. But reputable data published by RECEP shows that the
electric utility's cash share is only 30%, not 50%. Obviously there is
evidence of disorder in accounting reflecting on government revenues.
Whether the missing sum is as high as Zyuganov-Glazyev claim is a matter
for serious investigation, not simply for brushing it aside as another
communist invention.

Mr. Peach is probably aware about what Yulia Latynina (a colleague on the
Moscow Times) has convincingly revealed about Gazprom and RAO EES. The
word
"disorder" is an extremely mild way of describing the situation there. It
is a system of feudal sheikdoms presided over by their top bosses where
affiliate or regional bosses are maximising their personal fortunes at the
expence of shareholders, including the state. Installing order is the
minimum that the government should do with these crooked organisations. No
communist invention, at all.

One can understand thay Mr. Putin wants to look presidential and not
condescend to direct debate with Mr. Zyuganov or whoever. But reputable
newspapers should be able to seriously discuss serious issues without
losing face. After all, they owe this as a public service to their
readers.

Visit my homepages at: http://www.fast.ane.ru/smenshikov

*******

#5
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 
From: JAY ALEXANDER <jatalex@falcon.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: 4154- Hough/McFaul

Re" Hough on McFaul. I don't understand Hough's pipedream that a different
program of democratization would have Russian blooming now. Talk about
rose colored glasses!! Could anyone seriously imagine that Russia's
"transition" from Communism to capitalism/pluralism--or whatever you wish
to call it--could have been smooth, easy, quick, and marvelous. Get real.
Whatever happened to that old bugbear Russian "political culture"? Does
esteemed prof. Hough fire these potshots just to stir things up or what?
Jay Alexander, University of Kansas

*******

#6
From: "Peter D. Ekman" <pdek@co.ru>
Subject: RE: 4156 Kuzina/Cost of Education
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 

Regarding the Gazeta.ru article on the cost of education in Moscow,
particularly the following two paragraphs:

"It's common knowledge that it takes not only good knowledge to enter a
prestigious Moscow institute but also a decent sum of money. Take for
example the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), one
of the most prestigious and highly thought of institutes in Russia. To
enter the commercial department of the MGIMO (official tuition fees are
about 5-7 thousand dollars annually), costs several thousand dollars just
for the applicant's preparation for entrance exams and another 7-8 thousand
dollars to guarantee matriculation, usually paid either through tutors or
via other channels. 

"The cost of entering the prestigious departments of the Moscow State
University (MGU) is approximately the same. Other departments are somewhat
'cheaper'. The expenses depend on the kinship and acquaintances of the 
would-be student and on the friendly ties of his/her parents with
influential personnel in the institute"

What may not be clear to some readers is that only a part of the student
body pays the "official tuition fees," the rest attend free and are even
(sometimes) paid a (nominal) stipend by the state. The payments to tutors
shouldn't necessarily be considered bribes - they apparently do perform
some tutoring services most of the time. What part is for tutoring, and
what part is for other services is probably hard to say, so maybe it's just
best to call it "side payments."

I'm very interested in the actual cost of education at Moscow universities,
but obviously there are some complications in calculating these numbers in
Russia. If anybody has reliable information for major Moscow institutes for
the following please send it to pdek@co.ru: Institute Faculty Official
tuition/yr %Students paying official tuition Typical side payment

*******

#7
Russia: Analysis From Washington -- 'Unanimously'
By Paul Goble

Prague, 8 March 2000 (RFE/RL) -- During the weekend, a political party 
claiming to speak for Russia's Muslims and other minorities did something 
more reminiscent of Soviet times than of democratic societies. According to 
the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass, it voted "unanimously" to back acting 
Russian President Vladimir Putin for election.

Given Putin's lead in the polls, this action by the Refakh movement passed 
largely unnoticed. After all, ever more groups are jumping on Putin's 
bandwagon. But by declaring that its delegates had taken this decision 
"unanimously," Refakh has taken a step that recalls the Soviet past and 
raises questions about Russia's democratic future.

Soviet leaders prided themselves on gaining unanimous or virtually unanimous 
support for their decisions. Until the Gorbachev era, government bodies and 
Communist Party committees almost inevitably voted "unanimously." And voters 
routinely approved carefully selected candidates with 99.9 percent or more of 
the vote.

Such unanimity reflected not agreement but rather a continuing effort by the 
party both to portray itself as being in possession of scientific truth about 
all things and to intimidate those who might object to one or another aspect 
of the party's policies into concluding that they were both few in number and 
completely isolated from the mainstream.

At the end of the Soviet period, this unanimity collapsed as government 
bodies like the Congress of Peoples' Deputies demonstrated that there were 
real and deep divisions about almost every question and that the political 
community tended to divide differently depending on the issue involved.

Many Soviet citizens who had become accustomed to unanimous decisions, to the 
sense that their country was united on all major questions, were profoundly 
troubled by this change. But many more were empowered by the discovery that 
disagreement did not necessarily lead to disaster and that being in a 
minority on one issue did not mean being an outcast on all.

Indeed, that sense of political possibilities underlay Russia's halting steps 
toward democracy after 1991. First in the Supreme Soviet and then in the 
State Duma, the politicians seldom voted unanimously for anything. Instead, 
they have remained divided, even fragmented and often were unable to reach a 
decision at all.

That is often the way of democratic societies. But because relatively few 
Russians had any experience with that aspect of democracy, many of them were 
troubled by it and have welcomed the decisiveness of individual leaders such 
as President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s and Putin now.

Some of them, the recent action by Refakh suggests, apparently would like to 
go further, to return to a time of unanimous decisions and the social 
unanimity that such decisions appear to reflect. But such a shift entails 
three dangers which may give pause to some of those who are superficially 
attracted to this option.

First, decisions reported as "unanimous" are seldom unanimous in fact. Rather 
they reflect the power of a leader or leadership group to impose its will and 
stifle opposition. But such power is not a source of strength but rather one 
of weakness. 

Not only does it mean that the real issues cannot be thrashed out in public, 
but it also means that minorities on one issue can seldom hope to gain a 
majority on others in the absence of radical and ratchet-like change.

Second, "unanimous" decisions by their very nature are intended by the 
leaders who insist on them to be intimidating, to force those who disagree 
into silence and thus reduce still further their chances for finding support. 

And third, and perhaps most dangerous of all, "unanimous" decisions give a 
false sense that everyone agrees. They suggest that the leaders do not have 
to worry about opposition, that everyone is satisfied, and that things can 
continue without radical change for as long as the leaders maintain power.
At present, "unanimity" does not seem to be the biggest problem on the 
Russian political landscape. But Refakh's decision to do something 
"unanimously" is a straw in a wind that is pointing in the wrong direction.

******

#8
Moscow Times
March 9, 2000 
Nyet Says Just Say No To Every Candidate 
By Oksana Yablokova
Staff Writer

With a presidential race whose outcome is widely felt to be predetermined, 
the idea of voting for "none of the above" or not voting at all is being 
regarded as a potentially significant factor in determining the results. 

Among the various groups calling for this type of protest vote, the one with 
the most prominent participants seems to be the Nyet, or No, campaign 
launched last week. 

Nyet's objective is to get people voting against all the candidates, 
especially in the second round, said Vladimir Pribylovsky, Nyet's 
coordinator. In the first round, organizers are asking people to vote either 
for democratic candidates or for "none of the above." 

By law, if the number of votes "against all" exceeds the number of votes for 
the leading candidate f the most likely to face off in the second round are 
acting President Vladimir Putin and Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov f new 
elections would have to be held in four months. 

These four months, Pribylovsky said, would give democratic forces time to 
regroup and perhaps come up with a single candidate, and would also be enough 
time for Putin's rating to drop. 

Pribylovsky stressed that Nyet supporters are not calling for a boycott. 

Boycotting would only make it easier for election officials to falsify 
results by tampering with the unused ballots, he said, while manipulating 
votes for "against all" is difficult. 

"If the results are to be falsified, let them labor over it," Pribylovsky 
added. 

Pribylovsky, who is president of the Panorama political research center, 
emphasized that he is participating in Nyet as a private citizen. 

The campaign, which Pribylovsky coordinates together with Glasnost Foundation 
leader Sergei Grigoryants, includes about 100 human rights activists living 
in Russia and abroad. 

He said the campaign aims to attract those who hadn't planned to vote at all, 
and it is this mission that distinguishes Nyet from other movements. 

Nyet is not unique in its call to vote against everybody. A group of some 20 
activists from the Committee of Cheated Voters made the same plea at a rally 
Wednesday in downtown Moscow. And last December, members of the Anarchist 
Nongovernmental Control Group climbed atop the Lenin mausoleum waving a 
banner with the words "Against All." 

But other movements, such as Soyuz 2000, a group of journalists and political 
activists, have a different goal: They are simply asking Russians not to 
vote. 

The goals of Soyuz 2000 were recently publicized by Moscow's English-language 
Exile newspaper under the headline "Smash a Television! Don't Vote!" 

Pribylovsky, who plans to hold a press conference closer to election day, 
admitted his chances of affecting the outcome are slim, but the results of 
December's parliamentary race inspire some hope. Repeat elections will be 
held in eight electoral districts nationwide after nearly 2 million voters 
chose the "against all" option. 

Pribylovsky said that if a second round is held in April, his movement will 
ask some of the candidates to address voters with a call to vote against 
everybody, just as former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev did after 
winning less than 1 percent in the first round of the 1996 race. 

******

#9
Time magazine
MARCH 13, 2000
The Ice-Cold Strategy
Vladimir Putin is running a passionless campaign and hinting at sweeping 
reforms that lie ahead
BY PAUL QUINN-JUDGE/MOSCOW

The 1996 presidential elections in Russia were a cliff-hanger. Boris Yeltsin 
began with single-digit approval ratings and pleas from some top aides to 
cancel the polls rather than face certain defeat. He not only risked losing, 
he risked dying. A major heart attack after the first round was carefully 
hushed up, but the sight of an overweight candidate with a drinking problem 
and major health problems boogying on the stage scared his doctors witless. 
This time there will be no near-death experiences and no onstage dancing, if 
Vladimir Putin has his way. Russia's acting President wants a dull, 
predictable election. His team is running a carefully designed noncampaign, 
which kicked off last week, with the subliminal message that the Putin era 
will be nothing like the Yeltsin years. In fact, the election is a 
distraction for Putin. He wants to get it over with fast and turn to what his 
aides hint will be a new revolution in Russia--sweeping reforms of the 
economy, bureaucracy, judiciary and government.

So, instead of rallies with teenybopper pop groups, the acting President will 
"just work," his press minister Mikhail Lesin says. Putin keeps his promises 
vague: ending poverty, for example, or restoring Russia's place in the world. 
He aims to win in the first round, on March 26. Both admirers and adversaries 
think he has a very good chance. The campaign is "boring," says Alexander 
Oslon, Putin's pollster, with a touch of satisfaction. "No drama." According 
to his polls, Putin is running about 30% ahead of his nearest rival. Other 
polls more or less agree. But this deliberate dullness has been achieved with 
exquisite skill. And he has left his main opponent, Communist Party leader 
Gennadi Zyuganov, looking even more baffled than usual.

Putin has successfully pitched himself as a modern Everyman. The closest 
thing to an election manifesto that he has issued, an open letter to the 
Russian people, is spattered with macho words--"will," "order," "force," 
"discipline"--that send a shiver of excitement down the spine of the 
law-and-order advocates in Russia, many of them natural opponents of serious 
reform. He has also seduced hard-liners with his calls for a strong state and 
a powerful army. The war in Chechnya is, by official reports at least, going 
his way. Military commanders declared a victorious end to large-scale 
offensives in the secessionist republic last week, claiming that the back of 
the resistance had been broken. Yet Putin's open letter is also an implicit 
indictment of the inaction, indecision and impotence of the Yeltsin years. 
This appeals not only to hard-liners but also to Yeltsin's liberal critics, 
who were sickened by the rampant corruption during Yeltsin's tenure. And 
Putin has balanced his tough-guy message with images, unusual for a Russian 
politician, of a caring, even tender-hearted modern male. He has sat red-eyed 
and verging on tears, on camera, at the funeral of his onetime mentor, the 
ardently anticommunist, Gorbachev-era reformer Anatoli Sobchak. In all this, 
Putin has shown his perfect political pitch--his ability to go into any room 
and immediately strike the right chord.

This has presented his rival Zyuganov with a new set of handicaps. Not that 
he needs any. The head of the biggest party in Russia, well financed and with 
a regional network that other politicians would die for, Zyuganov has been 
unable to extend his power base beyond his party diehards. The main reason is 
a level of campaigning ineptitude that makes one suspect he is terrified of 
winning. If Putin has perfect pitch, Zyuganov is tone deaf. A middle-level 
Soviet-era bureaucrat who has not grown with the job, he turns off all but 
the converted with his wooden speeches and distinct lack of charisma. 

But Putin is the real enigma in the elections. His words hint at major 
changes; his deeds suggest something more subtle. Associates say he has 
distanced himself from Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire power broker who 
symbolizes the cynicism of the Yeltsin era. Yet an influential adviser to 
Putin's election campaign is a close Berezovsky associate, Yeltsin's daughter 
Tatyana Dyachenko. Who is fooling whom? The elections will provide the 
answer. This time they will not be a cliff-hanger, but they will be climactic 
in their own more subdued way. 

******

#10
New York Times
March 9, 2000
[for personal use only]
Russian Regions Wary as Putin Tightens Control
By CELESTINE BOHLEN

KAZAN, Russia -- The last time this city's white-walled fortress fell to 
Moscow was in 1552, when Ivan the Terrible defeated the powerful Tatar 
khanate of Kazan. Now Tatarstan -- one of the 89 regions in Russia's awkward 
and disjointed federation -- is under siege again, this time by Vladimir V. 
Putin. 

Mr. Putin, the acting president and the clear favorite in the March 26 
presidential election, keeps hammering away at variations of a single theme: 
the urgent need to restore the authority of a strong central government in 
Russia and bring its far-flung, free-wheeling regions to heel. 

The message has not been lost here and in other regional capitals where, for 
the last 10 years, local leaders have grown used to doing things their own 
way, sometimes with the consent of Moscow, sometimes without. Except for 
Chechnya, the southern republic now flattened by war, no other region has 
pulled harder at Moscow's leash than Tatarstan. 

In 1990 -- even before Boris N. Yeltsin, campaigning to become Russia's first 
president, urged the regions to assume as much sovereignty as they could 
"swallow" -- Tatarstan, with its majority Muslim Tatars, was already leading 
the pack. It declared sovereignty, laid claim to the considerable oil wealth 
beneath its soil and draped itself in all the trappings of statehood, from 
flag to hymn to its own national day. 

And like many of Russia's other 89 regions, Tatarstan has often set itself 
above Russian law. Going beyond its prerogatives under Russia's tax code, the 
republic has added taxes of its own, to the fury of local businesses. It has 
imposed restrictions on foodstuffs crossing its borders into neighboring 
regions. Its election laws and practices make a mockery of democracy, 
according to a lawsuit brought by a local journalist after a close analysis 
of a series of strangely skewed election results. 

But most of all, many residents complain that they are living not in a modern 
state but in a feudal society in which the ruling clan, led by President 
Mintimer Shaimiyev, has a lock not only on government, but on an economy that 
somehow missed the boat when Russia went headlong into a free market. 

Mr. Putin has vowed to put a stop to such freelance federalism. Speaking last 
month to law students in Siberia, he called for a return to longstanding 
Russian traditions. "Russia was created as a centralized state, and it has 
existed exactly this way," he said. "Thus, we had czarism, then Communism, 
and now the president has appeared, the institution of the presidency." 

Mr. Shaimiyev, a wily realist and above all a survivor, has taken the hint 
and is careful not to disagree with Mr. Putin. But he says he wants to be 
sure that Mr. Putin's strong state does not exclude the political process, 
with its usual give and take. 

"What does strong authority mean in the conditions of democratic development 
of the country and the market economy," Mr. Shaimiyev asked in a recent 
interview. "If it means observance of people's rights and freedoms and 
guarantee of civil ownership, then I agree we need strong authority. But if 
it is seen as giving orders from the top, well, that is utopia, and then 
there is no further need for reform in Russia." 

Mr. Shaimiyev has been at his job for 12 years. In that time, he has managed 
to ride out every one of Russia's crises, including those -- like the 1991 
Communist-backed coup and the recent ill-fated opposition party led by former 
Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov -- in which he backed the losing side. 

In the parliamentary elections last December, Tatarstan voters, loyally 
following their leader's advice, backed Mr. Primakov's party. On March 26, 
Mr. Shaimiyev predicts, they will follow him just as loyally onto the Putin 
bandwagon, which he joined with unabashed alacrity once it became apparent 
that the acting president was a sure winner. 

Much has changed in Russia since last fall, when Mr. Shaimiyev and other 
regional bosses were able to throw their weight around and dictate the terms 
of their support. "Now, the issue is not how much regional leaders will be 
able to get from the center, but about how much they can avoid losing," said 
Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace. 

"Regional leaders are very afraid of Putin," said Yelena Mizulina, a 
parliamentary deputy from the ancient Russian city of Yaroslavl. "He will 
pressure them -- and that is a good thing for Russia -- but the key test will 
be how he does it." 

Mr. Putin has already begun to tighten control. Moving quickly after Mr. 
Yeltsin's sudden resignation on Dec. 31, he has replaced about one-fourth of 
the presidential representatives in the regions -- officials assigned to 
enforce federal authority but who, in reality, were often beholden to 
regional leaders during the Yeltsin era. In at least two cases, Mr. Putin's 
appointees were former chiefs of the local FSB, the security service that he 
once headed. 

Few people dispute the need to tidy up the relationship between Russia's 
regions and the central government, to bring local laws into conformity with 
federal laws. And most agree that these issues would have come to a head this 
year, regardless of who succeeded Mr. Yeltsin. 

"I can say for certain that no unified system of power exists in Russia 
today," Yegor Stroyev, chairman of the upper chamber of Parliament, where 
regional leaders have ex officio seats, said in a recent interview with the 
newspaper Izvestia. "All there is the framework of power." 

After the election, Mr. Putin may take even bolder steps. Plans now being 
floated by his supporters include a proposal to group the regions in larger, 
more manageable super-provinces -- perhaps corresponding to eight existing 
interregional associations or to the "guberniye" that existed in czarist 
times. Another proposal calls for Moscow to appoint most regional governors, 
rather than have them elected locally, with the exception of some sensitive 
regions, like the two metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the 
so-called national republics, like Tatarstan, that are home to non-Russian 
ethnic groups. 

Such changes would require constitutional amendments and a political 
consensus that is lacking. Few expect Mr. Putin to start a costly and even 
dangerous political clash with regional leaders any time soon. But some 
analysts note that these proposals give a sense of the direction of Mr. 
Putin's own thinking about the future shape of Russia. 

Here in Tatarstan, President Shaimiyev presides like a latter-day khan, 
ruling from a sumptuously renovated palace inside the local Kremlin's walled 
enclave, hard by a giant new mosque that rivals the largest of Kazan's 
Orthodox churches. 

As leader of this republic of 3.7 million, most of them, like himself, Muslim 
Tatars, Mr. Shaimiyev's rule is unchallenged, although not as ham-handed as 
the president of neighboring Bashkortostan, who routinely oversteps basic 
democratic norms. 

In Tatarstan, the state council, or legislature, is firmly in the president's 
pocket, with two-thirds of its seats filled with his appointees, from local 
administration heads to the prime minister to directors of state-owned 
factories. 

The local economy looks much like it did in Soviet times. Tatneft, the local 
oil company that is the source of much of the republic's wealth, is publicly 
traded, but firmly under the regional government's control, as are all its 
major petrochemical factories. 

In much of this, the Shaimiyev family has kept a hand, giving rise to a local 
joke that Tatarstan's democracy is guaranteed by the fact that the president 
has two sons. 

Mr. Shaimiyev, who has both the easy charm and political acuity of the boss 
of a big-city political machine, makes no apologies for having taken Mr. 
Yeltsin at his word on the offer of unlimited sovereignty, even when it meant 
flouting the Russian Constitution. 

Back then, he noted, Tatarstan was seething with Tatar nationalist sentiment. 
Later, when the Chechnya pursued an outright separatist course, many were to 
praise both Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Shaimiyev for having found a viable -- if 
messy -- political solution. 

"We both, Yeltsin and I, knew about the discrepancies in the laws," Mr. 
Shaimiyev said. "But such was life back then. We had to calm the people down; 
the people of Tatarstan were demanding independence. Yelt sin could see it 
with his own eyes." 

At every step, Tatarstan took the lead in stretching, straining and twisting 
Russia's federal relationships. Its unilateral declaration of sovereignty was 
issued one year before Mr. Yeltsin uttered his famous phrase. In 1994, it was 
the first of Russia's regions to negotiate a bilateral treaty with Moscow, 
which, in time, became the model for some 40 such treaties signed by other 
Russian regions. 

Now, with a new era dawning, Tatarstan is likely to have to roll back its 
claims to sovereignty, said Lev Ovrutsky, a journalist based in Kazan. 

"From the beginning, Tatarstan was the pioneer," he said. "It was the first 
to get results with its declaration of sovereignty, and now it will be the 
first to make corrections." 

As the rumblings from Moscow become more distinct, people here are divided 
about what Mr. Putin's ''strong state" will mean to them. For five years, 
Tatarstan has been able to keep half of its federal tax revenues, an 
arrangement heavily criticized in Moscow but widely applauded here, where the 
standard of living is among the highest in Russia. 

Many Tatars, who take pride in their republic's quasi-sovereign status, fear 
that Mr. Putin's strong words will usher in a new era of Russian chauvinism. 

"The new political regime in Moscow will be extremely authoritarian, and it 
will lead to a taking away of the rights that have been won by Tatarstan," 
said Damir Iskhakov, a historian and founding member of the Tatarstan Social 
Center, which played a key role in the Tatar nationalist movement of the 
early 1990's. 

But paradoxically, Mr. Iskhakov said, some Tatar nationalists support a 
greater role for the federal government on the theory that it will be less 
selfish, and less narrow in its distribution of power and resources than the 
current local elite. 

Many local entrepreneurs, both Russian and Tatar, are also looking to the 
federal government to loosen the stranglehold on private business now held by 
regional leaders. 

"The local authorities want money, but mostly they want to control things," 
said Valery Khubulav, executive director of Zarya Confectionary, a privatized 
company. 

Andrei Tatyanchikov, a businessman and leader of the local branch of the 
Union of Right Forces, a party of free-market advocates, recently founded a 
club of like-minded young entrepreneurs who want to see change come to 
Tatarstan. 

"We are not looking for another revolution, '' Mr. Tatyanchikov said. "What 
we want is for the government to follow the law. We want an even playing 
field, with one set of rules. We have already gone through a series of crises 
-- high inflation, high interest rates, the crash of the ruble -- and we 
adjusted to all of it. Now we are tired, and we want this craziness to end." 

******

#11
From: IRASTRAUS@aol.com (Ira Straus)
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000
Subject: The Pitiful Western Response to Putin on NATO

The Pitiful Western Response to Putin on NATO
By Ira Straus
U.S. Coordinator
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO
www.fas.org/man/nato/ceern (where one can check, inter alia, into reports 
dating back to the early '90s on the real problems with bringing Russia into 
NATO, and on the range of options for solving them)

It is embarrassing to see well-known Western analysts still, ten years after 
the fall of the Berlin wall, rejecting the idea of Russia joining NATO. And 
still using the most childish argument of all to reject it -- that Russia 
cannot ever join NATO because in that case NATO wouldn't have an enemy 
anymore and there would be no more need for NATO to exist. 

This kind of comment has appeared from a number of prominent Western media, 
including otherwise-respectable strategic analysts; from Putin’s domestic 
critics in Russia; and -- saddest of all -- from the voice of the West in 
Moscow: the Moscow Times. 

Not surprisingly, Putin has backtracked from his comment about the 
appropriateness of Russia joining NATO. Faced with this barrage of ridicule, 
he had no choice. 

The Moscow Times writer wondered who the enemy would be, and concluded in its 
headline that NATO would defend us from the Martians. It was the kind of joke 
that people used to make nearly a decade ago, when they first heard of the 
idea of Russia joining NATO. 

Back in 1991, when Yeltsin first asked into NATO, and did so with a palpable 
enthusiasm for a grand democratic alliance, the idea ran up against all of 
the usual habits of popular thought as to what NATO was all about. The pace 
of change of thinking in Moscow was enormous in the course of that 
revolutionary year; in the West, it continued at the usual snail's pace. The 
disconnect led to a kind of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance led to 
jokes about the absurdity of Russia-in-NATO. It was understandable at that 
time, even if a bit childish, given the extraordinary national interests that 
were at stake.

Then some people started thinking. They remembered that the Atlantic alliance 
went back to the two world wars, long before there ever was a Cold War, so 
Russia was not really its formative enemy after all, and maybe it could do 
without having Russia as an enemy. They considered whether countries always 
have to have an enemy in order to remain united; maybe countries, once 
already united in fairly effective institutionalized forms, could stay united 
against merely a basket of potential future threats, instead of remaining 
forever stuck on hating one single former enemy. And maybe the institutions 
of NATO could be used to draw in the former enemy Russia, just as NATO had 
drawn in Germany. 

But evidently not everyone started thinking. Some are still repeating the 
"then who’d be the enemy?" line, as if they were still in the party-going 
one-liner stage. 

Today it is six years after NATO expansion got underway officially, and the 
pressure for Baltic membership is keeping the Russia-NATO relation 
inescapably on a front burner. It’s pretty sad to see how many people have 
yet to start thinking about it.

The idea of needing to have an enemy is not an entirely innocent thing. It 
entails a determination to have an enemy. It leads to arbitrarily "defining" 
countries as enemies. It encourages unrealism about enemies, as if it were a 
useful cost-free thing to have an enemy. It screws up the ability to figure 
out who is a real enemy and to deal with friends and enemies intelligently. 
Those with a memory might recall Carl Schmitt. He was the most profound 
exponent of the theory that society needs to have an enemy for its cohesion, 
and must be able to define the enemy by sovereign will. He joined the Nazi 
party. His Germany proceeded to make enemies of the whole world, as it went 
about enthusiastically defining enemies. The whole idea of the enemy-need 
lies outside of the sphere of democracy; it falls within the range of fascist 
political theory. Obviously some immature regimes on the edge of collapse can 
think that it might help them if they found an enemy, but what is this idea 
doing in the West today? 

It is also disappointing to see even Geremek of Poland attacking the idea of 
Russia joining NATO, and doing so in the terms of saying that it would make 
NATO meaningless for want of an enemy. He used to speak the language of 
democratic dreams, and of translating dreams into reality. After 1989, he 
continued to dream of Poland joining the West. He ignored the official snobs, 
who for several years after 1989 continued to dismiss his dreams as lying 
outside of reality. Then, after years of his beating on the door, NATO 
finally opened the door and his dreams came true for his native Poland. Now 
he is firmly ensconced inside the NATO doors -- and he is one of the group 
that is heaping scorn on Putin and the Russian Atlanticists for speaking of 
"dreams" (his own word). 

Vaclav Havel gave speeches in the first years after 1989 ridiculing the 
"realists" who stood only for the status quo or for the easily-anticipated 
changes in it. He and Geremek continued to speak of helping and integrating 
Russia, and for this they were attacked by some Westerners for "speaking the 
language of perestroika". Tragically, Havel and Geremek have in some degree 
been deflected by the powerful socializing influences of the NATO status quo, 
and now are sometimes prone to use their bluntness on behalf of the very same 
narrow-minded attitudes they used to criticize.

Political dreams are not always fantasies. Certain types of dreams are 
implicit goals and impending realities, emanations of a perceptive 
subconscious at a time when they cannot be expressed openly for fear of 
ridicule or punishment. The passage from dream to joke to goal to reality is 
the hallmark of the emergence of an idea from the stage of repression. 
Repressed ideas, taught Freud, get expressed as dreams; semi-repressed ideas, 
as jokes. 

All the Eastern bloc peoples had dreams of joining the West in the era of 
Communist repression. With the waning of the repression, the dreams quickly 
grew into popular public jokes; with the end of repression and the elevation 
of dissident perspectives to official power, they became national goals. 

In Eastern Europe, the dream-goals were validated by the West, even if 
belatedly. In Russia, they were mostly beaten back by the West. The erotic 
element in these dreams -- the element of affection and hope, once quite 
vivid in them -- has been cauterized out of them. These thoughts have 
survived intact only on the level of jokes. And most of the jokes are no 
longer made in an emerging constructive spirit, as when the mind gradually 
opens up from dream to goal. Rather, they are made in a regressive, 
destructive spirit; sarcasm moves in where there used to be playful, hopeful 
jesting. Sarcasm can serve as a way for the mind to close itself off from its 
profound interests in integrating Russia into the West, and to settle back 
into the old mental furniture of adversarial Russia-West relations.

At this point, the main response to the idea of Russia joining NATO seems to 
be on the level of bad-spirited jokes. ‘Why have any NATO at all in that 
case?’ ‘It would solve the problem, and NATO would disappear the next day.’ 
The sarcasm of these comments is palpable. It is a big step downward from 
1991, when the West met Yeltsin’s overtures with confusion and with jokes to 
be sure, but at least the spirit of it was friendly at that time.

The sarcasm indicates a sad feature of the discussion: that people are 
suppressing their hopes and dreams of Russia joining with the West, hopes and 
dreams they had been briefly unashamed of in 1991, but now have to hide 
behind words of sarcasm. The reasons for this are various. The sense of 
cognitive dissonance is still there about Russia joining the West, or about 
NATO including its enemy Russia, or even about investing NATO with idealism. 
It was understandable that, in 1991, the general public had not yet overcome 
its cognitive dissonance on these matters; it was the very first time that 
most of them ever heard of the idea. At that point, the jokes served as a 
screen to hide confusion and buy time for thinking that should have begun. If 
only the thinking ever began! It is less understandable that, in the year 
2000, the political elite in the West, including the strategic and foreign 
affairs elite, has for the most part remained stuck in its original cognitive 
dissonance and has slipped into sarcasm. It is as if to abandon any intention 
of clarifying its hopes for and interests in Russia.

There have been a few noteworthy exceptions. As soon as Poland got safely 
into NATO, Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke in favor of Russia joining. So did the 
President of Poland (maybe that is why Geremek attacked the idea). NATO 
officially says the door is not closed. But the West will have to do a lot 
better, if it wants to fashion a door that it genuinely intends for Russia to 
enter. 

There are some real problems with Russia joining NATO. They are problems for 
which solutions could be found, and they pale in comparison with the problems 
that arise from excluding Russia; but they nevertheless would have to be 
addressed in order to make it work. They are never addressed. They are 
sometimes mentioned obliquely, but not as problems to solve; rather, as more 
profound reasons for simply excluding Russia from NATO. As long as people are 
oriented on this question mainly by silly jokes and excuses for not even 
thinking about including Russia, it will remain impossible to address the 
real problems and solve them.

*******

Web page for CDI Russia Weekly: 
http://www.cdi.org/russia