March 19, 2000    
This Date's Issues:  4180 • 4181

Johnson's Russia List
#4181
19 March 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Russia Journal: Otto Latsis, Can we live in Russia?
2. Itar-Tass: Russians Have Greater Interest in Presid than General Polls. 
3. Moscow Times: Helen Womack, Puppetmasters Keep Sense of  Humor Intact.
4. Seamus Martin: Keller on Aron/4178.
5. gazeta.ru: Olga Proskurina, Why Should Russia Enter the EU?
6. BBC MONITORING: RUSSIAN TV CHANNELS PREPARE FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS.
7. RIA Novosti: RUSSIAN TV CHIEF PROMISES "SENSATION" AS PART OF ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE.
8. New York Times: John Lloyd, The Logic of Vladimir Putin. 
To Russians, the acting president isn't nearly the mystery he 
is to Western eyes.] 

*******

#1
The Russia Journal
March 20-26, 2000
Can we live in Russia?
By Otto Latsis

Everyone, it seems, is still asking the same question – who is Vladimir
Putin? What will the acting president do if he wins the March 26 elections?
Forecasts range from radiant to apocalyptic. But everyone is forgetting the
obvious – the future president’s personal intentions and dreams aren’t the
only factor that will shape his actions. 

Of more immediate impact on the president will be the objective situation
and problems the country faces. The future lies not only in the president’s
hands but in the activities of Russia’s civil society. 

The accepted view is that Russia doesn’t yet have a civil society. But is
it possible to pinpoint from what day and hour a country has a civil
society? There are a number of indicators that help to give a clearer
picture of how a civil society is doing. 

In autumn 1998, a dozen or so acquaintances met to discuss a question that
was part of the fallout of the August 1998 financial crisis: Is it possible
to live in Russia? These people were confident, successful and able to run
businesses in Russia or abroad. They wanted to run their businesses in
Russia, but was it possible? That was what they set out to decide.

All were between 30 and 40; all were top managers of generally successful
medium-sized companies including the Russian branches of some well-known
foreign firms. The group included Ruben Vardanyan, president of brokerage
Troika-Dialog; Sergei Vorobyev, general director of Ward Howell’s Russian
branch; Andrei Arofkin, Director of Credit Suisse First Boston’s Russian
office; Anatoly Karachinsky, president of IBS; Vladimir Preobrazhensky,
deputy president of Vimpelkom; and Alexei Reznikovich, director of McKinsey
& Co.’s Moscow office.

The group founded the 2015 club and a working group to draw up "scenarios
for Russia," plotting the country’s development through to 2015. Using
their own money, they hired secretarial staff for the group and rented a
holiday home in the Moscow region for several weekends where they invited a
hundred different experts – politicians and political scientists,
economists and businessmen, sociologists, historians, journalists and
writers. 

The aim was not to make forecasts, but to write scenarios, not of what will
happen, but of what could happen given various sets of conditions and
developments both in Russia and the world as a whole.

The result of several months’ work was a couple of dozen scenarios that
were then condensed into three – optimistic, pessimistic and middle-road.
Among themselves, the group members called them the scenario where you
could both live and work in Russia, the scenario where you could work in
Russia but your kids would be better off elsewhere, and the scenario where
you should get out of Russia as soon as possible. 

They were pleasantly surprised to find the optimistic scenario had a
chance. Then came the moment for going public with the results of the
group’s work and doing everything possible to ensure the country chose the
path set out by the optimistic scenario. A book of scenarios was published,
presented to the press and aired on TV by popular presenter Vladimir Pozner
in a series of discussions with audiences in the provinces.

But after the initial success and open discussion, crisis came. The club
found itself up against a wall – it was still just a club and was trying to
tackle problems for which a political party was needed. But the club had no
intention of founding a party. It looked like the club might have to close.

An answer was found, however: The club decided to set up the National
Project Institute to analyze development trends in society, as well as to
draw up and implement projects that would contribute toward the optimistic
scenario. 

The "Library" publishing project is already under way. Projects titled
"Education," "Formation of Communities," "The Style of Productive Culture,"
and "Connections" are under discussion. There are also plans for large
projects –"The Social Contract," "Business Motivation," and "The New Man."

Perhaps even a group of talented and energetic people like this will find
the work too much – time will tell how much they can actually carry out.
But the fact that there is such an active group is important. It’s
important that "new Russian business" is not just associated with images of
oligarchs and moneygrubbers out for a quick buck that they can then spirit
safely out of the country.

*******

#2
Russians Have Greater Interest in Presid than General Polls. .

MOSCOW, March 19 (Itar-Tass) - Russians display greater interest in the 
presidential elections and regard them more important (exactly one week is 
left for the election day) than the elections to the State Duma lower house 
last December. 

This conclusion was drawn by experts of the ROMIR public poll agency on the 
basis of results of a comparative analysis of public polls held this March 
and last November. Poll results were supplied to Itar-Tass. 

Participants in the poll, held on March 11-12, were asked what the coming 
presidential elections mean for Russians. Last November, ROMIR put forth a 
similar question to Russians before the elections to the State Duma. 

A greater number of Russians -- 22 percent in March against 15 percent in 
December -- regard elections as a chance to influence the political life in 
Russia. Simultaneously, the number of people who believe that everything is 
already settled and sealed, and one vote does not mean anything, declined 
almost by the same percentage (19 to 26). 

An increase was also registered in the number of people who regard elections 
as their civic duty (40 percent to 32). There was a drop in the share of 
Russians who said that elections do not mean anything for them (six percent 
to 11). 

The polls registered a drop in the number of people who believe that there is 
no sense in staging the elections now -- from four to two percent in March. 

The number of people who regard the elections an important day for the 
development of democracy in Russia, remained intact -- 9 percent. The number 
of people who found it difficult to reply, slid only by one percent -- from 
three to two. 

ROMIR conducted the March poll according to an All-Russian representative 
selection with the participation of 1,500 respondents from 40 subjects of the 
Russian Federation. 

*******

#3
Moscow Times
March 18, 2000 
FACES & VOICES: Puppetmasters Keep Sense of Humor Intact 
By Helen Womack 

The makers of "Kukly," NTV's satirical puppet show, excelled themselves last 
week when they portrayed Vladimir Putin as a punter, cruising the streets of 
Moscow in search of political prostitutes with whom to play election games. 
All my Russian friends were talking about it afterward, and the outraged 
reaction in the State Duma only underscored the fact that the puppeteers had 
hit the bull's-eye. 

I have often thought that as long as Russia has "Kukly," there is hope for 
this suffering country. "We think so, too," said Grigory Lyubomirov, one of 
the program directors, who let me sit in on the filming of the next episode 
at the Mosfilm studios. But he and his colleagues were afraid that things 
might be about to change. 

In the past, Boris Yeltsin himself defended "Kukly" when narrow-minded 
officials wanted to take it off the air. When Yeltsin's health began to 
decline, members of the "Family" started ringing up and asking if the 
president's image could be "smoothed a bit," Lyubomirov said. Now, unfriendly 
signals were coming from the security organs, in particular from Interior 
Minister Vladimir Rushailo. "He does not phone himself but lets it be known 
that we could have 'nepriyatnosti' [unpleasantness], that terrible Soviet 
word." 

Lyubomirov, a genial man with a ponytail, said he had a sense of dÎjÈ vu. 
When Putin was studying law at Leningrad University in the 1970s, Lyubomirov 
was reading philosophy and considered himself a dissident. "I did not know 
Putin personally," he said, "but I know his type. He is just like the KGB 
officer who used to interrogate me then, a cold-eyed fellow more concerned 
with abstract state interests than the lives of real human beings." 

After Putin's likely election, Russians might lose some of their freedoms, 
but the "Kukly" program is determined to resist, said the director. Along 
with the news, the program has the highest viewer ratings in the country. 
"That is because it gets to the heart of politics in an understandable way," 
said Lyubomirov. "It achieves what political anecdotes used to do in 
communist times." 

Most politicians aspire to be portrayed on the show because it is a sign that 
they have made it. "Obscure politicians sometimes try to bribe us to make 
puppets of them," said the director. But a politician has to earn his place 
on "Kukly." 

Once on the program, the politician can expect little mercy. "The dignity of 
individual human beings is sacred," said Lyubomirov, "but politicians get 
what they deserve, because they offer themselves to the public as a product." 

I can let you in on a secret. This weekend's "Kukly" will be as biting as 
ever. I was fascinated, watching the actors operate the puppets in a new 
episode set in ancient Japan. Putin-san has nearly achieved perfection. He 
can poke his opponents in the ribs while talking about the weather and stay 
awake at the opera for two whole hours. But he feels he should test his 
strength by fighting the seven samurai. The only problem is that the samurai, 
the other presidential candidates, just lie down and give in. There is 
nothing left for Putin-san but to compose haiku poetry. "A duck flies over, a 
goose flies past, I stand and wonder which to shoot." 

The show is another classic that should have viewers roaring with laughter 
and politicians reaching for their revolvers. 

******

#4
Date: 19 Mar 2000
From: "seamus martin" <seamus.martin@russia.com> [DJ: Irish Times
correspondent]
Subject: keller on aron/4178

Keller has done a “snow job” on Aron in the way that Aron has done a “snow
job” on Yeltsin. He does so in an extremely distasteful manner using the
age-old and particularly dishonest tactic of branding possible opponents
before they open their mouths. Anyone who says a bad word about Aron’s book
is one of the following: 

a) A disappointed leftist.
b) An unreconstructed cold warrior.
c) A Russian reactionary.
d) A member of the “condescending intelligentsia” in Russia.
e) A member of the “condescending intelligentsia” in the West.
f) Most damning of all: The sort of person who is “normally invited to
review books about Russia.”

Almost everyone on earth (including Keller himself under section f) is
suspect.

Having dealt with the possible opposition with a method used in the past by
both Stalin and McCarthy Keller proceeds to give an abysmally uncritical
assessment of the book. In particular he fails to note serious flaws in
Aron’s methodology.

For example, Yeltsin is shown as a decisive actor in the Kremlin on October
3rd, 1993 after hardline communist and neo-fascist demonstrators had broken
through security cordons to reach the Russian White House, where the rebel
Parliament was holed out. He is shown as urging his ministers and his
generals into action. "Yeltsin's heart began to pound. Was this the
beginning of something so unspeakably frightening to the Russian ear? Of
something he had been afraid to say even to himself? Yet it had come to
pass. This was civil war."

This description of the events of October 1993 as "civil war" goes beyond
melodramatic exaggeration. The deaths of about 150 people in two days in
two extremely circumscribed areas of Moscow - the White House and Ostankino
TV station - were highly regrettable. To describe them as civil war,
however, is arrant nonsense.

As for Yeltsin's bringing the reality of the situation to bear on the minds
of his paralysed officials and soldiers, there exists a different version
of the story. Sergei Parkhomenko, a respected correspondent of the liberal
daily Segodnya put it this way at the time: "the President appeared to me
not to be very lucid. He did not seem capable of pressing the control
buttons. Everything remained chaotic". Parkhomenko was in the Kremlin at
the time; his account is first hand.

Aron’s heroic tale stems from a vested interest. It comes, according to the
footnotes, from the Zapiski of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin himself. This is
a cut-and-paste job of an account written after the event by Yeltsin or one
of his ghost writers. This is not serious disinterested scholarship. This
is propaganda.

Yeltsin's liaisons with some of the more disreputable characters in Russian
business, including the oleaginous Boris Berezovsky, are brushed aside as
follows: "There is little doubt that the secrecy in which Russian robber
barons cloaked their dealings resulted in a vast exaggeration of their
wealth and power both by the Moscow rumour mill and by the resident
correspondents (Keller included?) of Western newspapers and television
networks, who dutifully package and ship the endless stream of that mill's
products."

There is an echo here of claims by the Kremlin administration that reports
of money-laundering and corruption close to Yeltsin and his entourage have
been invented by the "western media" as part of a co-ordinated campaign
against Russia.

It should be noted too that some members of the resident western media lost
their lives in those October days in Moscow in 1993, while Aron and,
presumably Keller, were sitting on their exceedingly smart arses far from
the carnage at the Ostankino TV centre.

******

#5
gazeta.ru
March 17, 2000
Why Should Russia Enter the EU?
By Olga Proskurina, staff writer

Elaborating a program for Vladimir Putin on Thursday, the Center for
Strategic Research considered the question of foreign investing with a
great deal of heat on both sides of the issue. At the least there were no
disputes concerning the suggestion that Russia might enter the EU, the
elimination of certain taxes, and the shutdown of State Property and Energy
Ministries. 

Both State Property and Energy Ministries were first upbraided, however, by
chairman of the Coordinating Committee Dmitry Vasilyev, former chairman of
the Federal Commission of the Securities Market. He spoke on behalf of the
rights of investors. According to Vasilyev, these two departments had been
stifling reforms and doing little to improve the investing climate. In
their current form, Vasilyev stated, the tax on profit and the tax on
revenue essentially make each employer and all his employees seem tax
criminals. At any given moment, the tax-collecting organizations can accuse
one of hiding revenue, and the accused will need to prove his innocence,
all presumptions about it set to the side. For this reason Vasilyev that
taxes should be on 
the whole more circumstantial. Then revenue will flow into the budget, and
private investing into the economy. 

To fight bureaucracy, claims the former chairman of the State Securities
Commission, not only must the majority of employees be fired, but the empty
positions they leave behind should themselves be liquidated, and 
the freed means should go to raising the salaries of the now smaller number
of employees. This plan would cut corruption as well. 

Further, taking to the improvement of the Russian investing climate is
acting director of the Austrian bank Creditanstalt, Sergei Zenkin. The
climate is no good, says Zenkin, because investors have no confidence as to 
where the country is headed. In the case of Poland and Ukraine, on the
other hand, investors understand the futures of both countries, because
both clearly state their intentions to enter the European market of
electroenergy and to join NATO, and both clearly demonstrate an advancing
step in their decided directions. Zenkin followed this by saying that
Putin's renowned response to the question of whether Russia will join NATO
-- And why not? -- invariably raised the spirits of many foreigners. The
director of the Creditanstalt believes that Russia should make similarly
clear and loud an announcement of plans to enter the EU, not just in the
way of PR, but as a true and principal decision. Then foreign investors
would certainly begin a 
flow of funds into Russia. If Russia does indeed enter the EU (or rather,
if the EU does indeed accept Russia), the country's economy will be
signifantly changed, a subject left diplomatically untouched by
participants of the discussion. 

At the last the discussion was brought to its conclusion by the seminar's
director, Yevgeny Yasin. The important thing now, he stated, is to hold the
people who decay the investing climate from outweighing the people who
helps to improve it. From this point of view the seminar is to be viewed
at least as helpful -- if the Russian investing climate has not been
improved, at least it has not been worsened. And still Yasin was unhappy. I
expected something extraordinary, he stated, but there was nothing
extraordinary. I've long had a profound feeling that something can go awry
at any moment, changing the investors' situation. Somewhere there is a
person who surely knows the secret to improving the investing climate. But
it appears that he is not here in this auditorium. 

******

#6
BBC MONITORING 
RUSSIAN TV CHANNELS PREPARE FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Text of report by Radio Russia on 18th March 

[Presenter] The main Russian TV channels promise to give every detail of
the presidential election on Sunday 26th March. Just as during the [Russian
State] Duma election [in December 1999], the federal information centre
Election-2000 will be opened in Ostankino TV technical centre. Officially
the centre will open on Saturday 25th March and will operate throughout
Monday 27th March. 

The information will get to the centre's monitors via the Elections state
automated system [Russian: Vybory]. Regular TV linkups between the centre
and the electoral commissions of the Russian Federation's constituent parts
have also been planned. 

The corporate TV agency said that Moscow NTV will broadcast a special issue
of "Oh the lucky man" [a gameshow] programme. Some candidates such as Ella
Pamfilova, Yevgeniy Savostyanov and Umar Dzhabrailov will take part in the
programme. Other presidential candidates Vladimir Putin, Grigoriy
Yavlinskiy and Gennadiy Zyuganov have not accepted the invitation to assert
their erudition for money. 

Moscow TV Centre will host the "I choose the future" telethon between 0900
[0600 gmt] 26th March and 0300 27th March [2400 gmt 26th March]. By showing
video clips about Russians and their everyday life the creators of the
programme are planning to appeal to the voters to take part actively in the
presidential election. The videos will have the same title: " My heart is
with Russia" and "I love this land". 

******* 

#7
RUSSIAN TV CHIEF PROMISES "SENSATION" AS PART OF ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE
Text of report by Russian news agency RIA on 18th March 

Moscow, 18th March, correspondent Mariya Pereslegina: Russia TV [RTV] "will
try to carry off a sensation" 15 minutes before the preliminary results of
the [presidential] election start to be announced, at 2045 [1745 gmt] 26th
March. The deputy chairman of the All-Russia State TV and Radio Company,
Sergey Goryachev, told RIA this. Of course, he did not reveal what the
"sensation" was about. 

Goryachev said that on election day Russia TV will start "saturated"
coverage at 1700 [1400 gmt], when a programme made jointly by RTV,
Avtorskoye Televideniye and [news programme] "Vesti" will come on air. 

ATV's press club will gather leading politicians, analysts and journalists.
Goryachev said the discussion will be interspersed with live linkups from
the regions and candidates' headquarters. RTV correspondents will start
their reports from the east of the country, where the voting will take
place earliest of all, then live linkups from Russia's major towns and
cities will follow, and finally the TV marathon will end in Russia's
easternmost point, Kaliningrad. 

Goryachev said that RTV will simultaneously hold a viewer poll by phone and
on the Internet. Also, "people who cannot watch RTV 26th March will be able
to listen to RTV on Mayak Radio's frequency, and Mayak correspondents will
participate directly in the TV's work". 

The programmes "Gorodok", "Ustami Mladentsa" and "Bashnya" are currently
preparing special editions on the subject of the election, and they will be
shown as part of a giant news bulletin. It is not yet known who will be
"reflected" in Nikolay Svanidze's 2000 [1700 gmt] "Zerkalo" programme
[Zerkalo is Russian for mirror]. 

At 2100 [1800 gmt], after the polling stations close in Kaliningrad,
Central Electoral Commission Chairman Aleksandr Veshnyakov will start
announcing the preliminary results live from the Federal Information Centre
[FIC]. RTV will show all information on the way the election is going
graphically on a giant map of the country as it comes in. There will be
five or six live linkups with the FIC. "On election day, RTV's entire
information programming will be live", Goryachev said. 

******

#8
New York Times
19 March 2000
[for personal use only]
The Logic of Vladimir Putin 
To Russians, the acting president isn't nearly the mystery he is to Western
eyes. 
By JOHN LLOYD (xye14@dial.pipex.com )
John Lloyd, based in London, wrote the cover article "Who Lost Russia?" for
the magazine in August.

"You know," says Igor Shadkhan, as we sit in his office and discuss his
longtime friend Vladimir Putin, "Henry Kissinger came here to St.
Petersburg when Putin was deputy mayor. Putin spoke to him in German." 

Vladimir Putin, Russia's acting president, has a few unlikely friends, and
one of them is Igor Shadkhan -- a Jewish documentary film producer who says
he was a quiet anti-Soviet dissident in his day. Any self-respecting K.G.B.
officer should have had three different kinds of alarm bells ringing over
these attributes, but not, it seems, the future president. Shadkhan made a
film about Putin in the early 90's, when the latter was first deputy mayor
of Petersburg and became his friend. 

"So Kissinger asks Putin, 'What did you do before this?' And Putin says, 'I
was in the secret service.' And Kissinger says, 'Me, too!' " 

Shadkhan has a lot of good stories about Vladimir Putin (pronounced
POO-teen), all seemingly calculated to reveal traits that will play well to
a Western audience. Another one is about a trip to Germany, during which
Shadkhan confessed to Putin that, as a Jew, he could never feel comfortable
around Germans. "He said he understood exactly how I felt, but said: 'You
should try to understand that this is a new Germany. They are not Nazis any
longer.' And he persuaded me to think again." 

These stories have at least as much symbolic as real truth. The first
exculpates Putin from his association with the world's great terror
instrument, the K.G.B., by revealing that, East and West, the power people
were all at it, all privy to dark secrets and darker deeds. The second
shows a liberal, humane and decent European, sensitive to Jewish feelings
on the Holocaust, but wise enough to know these should not be used to
prejudge contemporary Germans. 

This is quite an extraordinary picture for an officer of a secret police
force that used both Nazi stereotypes and anti-Semitic ("Zionist")
conspiracy theories as part of its quotidian output. Yet it is how many
Russians who regard themselves as liberal wish to see him; and it is how
Western leaders hope he will be. The parade of Western foreign ministers
whom he has received have all been given time over the allotted hour and
emerged to spout variations of President Clinton's upbeat formulation of "a
man we can do business with." Robin Cook of Britain went in with a list of
human rights points on Chechnya, only to be met with a high-octane
presentation on precisely that subject. He came out saying the meeting was
"positive" and "good," even as more stories of torture and mass executions
streamed out of Chechnya. 

In Moscow, I watched Putin answer questions from the public in a phone-in
organized by the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. To one caller, who ventured
that "the ideology of Communism was still very dangerous," he said that he
felt "pretty much the same as you . . . people should see in practice the
ideas you and I advocate, the ideals of democracy and the market economy."
Asked why there was so much fuss about the disappearance of the Radio
Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky in Chechnya, he said that Babitsky wanted
to go to the side of the Chechens, "the people whose interests he
effectively served" -- the hard-line position on Babitsky. 

I watched him again, in London, as he was interviewed early this month by
Sir David Frost. He demonstrated many of the same qualities: an alert,
controlled poise; the ability to project easy familiarity; a well-briefed
acuity in defending the seemingly indefensible. (In Chechnya "there are
terrorists who kidnap innocent people by the hundreds and keep them in
cellars, torture and execute them. . . . Bandits of this kind -- are they
any better than Nazi criminals?") He also gave the reassuring impression
that, in him, Russia has found a humane version of Peter the Great, a ruler
who will open the country to the influence of a world at once gentler and
more dynamic than Russia has ever been. ("I cannot imagine my own country
in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world," Putin
said. Could Russia join NATO? "I don't see why not. I would not rule out
such a possibility.") 

It is now a conventional trope that Vladimir Putin is a mystery. But why he
was promoted to a position where he now stands poised to win the presidency
of Russia in next Sunday's elections is not a mystery. He is very good, and
particularly so in the areas where a modern politician must be. He is a
consummate public performer. From its dark bowels the K.G.B. has produced a
star, one who speaks of his former institution with proud dignity. "I have
never wanted to be a James Bond," he told Frost. "But working in state
security was something I had always wanted -- since back in school." 

He comes to the international arena trailing clouds of odium from a Chechen
war that has seen all-out assaults by the Russian Army on towns --
especially the capital, Grozny -- with no discrimination between civilians
and fighters. Accounts of torture, beatings, rapes and killings in prison
camps like the notorious Chernokozovo are too well documented to be
misinformation or hype. And yet Putin is able to take the fight to the
enemy, arguing that the Russian Army is defending Europe and "what we call
the civilized world" from terrorism and extremism. 

While in Moscow, I attended a private meeting between senior German
parliamentarians and Gen. Valery Manilov, the first deputy chief of the
Russian general staff. The Germans made their points that Manilov's army
was abusing human rights. Manilov, smiling patiently, said they had not
quite got it. "Here in the Southern Caucasus we have seen a general
commitment to unite terrorist forces to make a bid for state power. There
were 25,000 men under arms, with one system of command, of supply and of
technical support. It was a regular terrorist army. You might bear this in
mind when you talk of the 'nonproportionality' of our response." 

This is the Putin doctrine, against which both domestic and international
protests have so far been muted. No longer do we have a Yeltsin who sought
to square the interests of the West with the behavior of his generals --
and usually, as far as the generals were concerned, chose the former. Now
the state and the military are as one once more. The Yeltsin years of
neglect of the Chechen problem, as well as the shameful (to the military)
agreement of 1996 that effectively admitted defeat and handed over control
to the Chechen warlords, has been explicitly renounced. The Russian writ
runs again in the Caucasus -- but with freedom, not oppression, on its
banners. The Chechens, Putin told Frost, "are not a defeated people. They
are a liberated people." 

If foreign governments can find some encouragement in this, they can also
find much to worry about: Putin's past in the K.G.B.; the high proportion
of his current allies who share that past; his pride in it; the brutality
of his war in Chechnya; his callous treatment of the Babitsky case; the
insistence on a stronger state. All of these make human rights champions in
Russia, and a wide arc of opinion in the West, deeply skeptical, even
hostile -- even before he starts to govern. For the center-leftists in
power in most of the rich world, with a political need to appear moral in
their dealings, Putin is as difficult to cope with as China. Realpolitik
and commercial interests demand an embrace; the human rights lobbies
scream. It is neuralgic. 

But that is Putin through Western eyes; the eyes that see him as a mystery.
He is less of a mystery to Russian eyes, which are not moistened much by
the plight of the Chechens. Many Westerners see the K.G.B. as an
undifferentiated horror; most Russians do not. For a very brief period,
democratically minded Russians did turn against the security services.
After the failure of the August 1991 coup against President Mikhail
Gorbachev, the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky was wrenched off its plinth
outside the K.G.B.'s Lubyanka headquarters. Living in Moscow at the time, I
was near tears as I watched the crowd try to bring down the massive
sculpture of the austere terrorist who founded the service. The crowd,
however, was not large, and most observers were not as moved as I was.
This, one of the great images of the fall of Communism, had much less
resonance in Moscow than in the West. 

The K.G.B. was weakened, but it was not reformed. Its crimes were never
properly examined, and there was no consistent public pressure to do so.
Soon after Dzerzhinsky's toppling, a bust of Yuri Andropov, long-serving
K.G.B. chief and briefly general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party,
was prudently removed from its niche in the Lubyanka wall. In December,
Vladimir Putin, who served under Andropov, ordered it restored. 
'In the 1970's . . . the choice of officers was exclusively of a high
order,' said one of Putin's old K.G.B. pals. 'The state had the possibility
to find and attract . . . the most able, the most sincere, . . . and the
most ambitious of young people.' 

K.G.B. men had been heroes of Soviet fiction and journalism since the
1920's. From the mid-30's to World War II, the depiction of the agent as
hero became particularly clear-cut, a notable example of the Soviet genius
for dissimulation. It was an image that many millions of Soviet citizens
accepted, at least in part. Putin's father, also Vladimir, probably did.
According to a recent profile published in Moscow, he was a Communist Party
member who "had links" with the K.G.B.; the family was both patriotic and
reserved, "pure Leningrad working class." His mother died of cancer in
1998, his father of a heart condition a year later, soon after Putin became
prime minister. Reportedly, the old man said on his death bed, "My son is
like a czar!" 

The Soviet secret police became, after Stalin's death, much more of a
"thinking corporation," and in doing so became increasingly attractive to
the upwardly mobile. By the time Putin joined in 1975, the officers of the
foreign intelligence branch, the First Chief Directorate, were well
established as an elite. In her 1988 book on the K.G.B., Amy Knight quotes
a former Czechoslovak intelligence officer, Ladislav Bittman, to the effect
that the typical Soviet foreign intelligence officers "radiate more
self-confidence and personality than a diplomat without the K.G.B.
connection. A K.G.B. official dresses more elegantly, entertains more
freely and shows more individuality even in discussing sensitive foreign
policy issues and Soviet politics." 

On a visit to one of Russia's newest and smartest banks, I asked its
chairman if this was true. Aleksandr Lebedev is head of the Russian
National Reserve Bank, and was in the late Gorbachev years an officer -- an
intelligence officer, not a K.G.B. man" -- in the London Embassy. He is
still in his 30's, fluent and subtle in English, beautifully dressed,
working from a sumptuous office. "They came out of the best places --
Moscow State, Leningrad State, the Moscow State Institute for Foreign
Relations," Lebedev said. "The state was looking for people with a talent
to make others feel well disposed toward them. Tennis was encouraged, so
you could move easily in high society in the West." 

This theme -- of civilized men doing dispassionate analysis for a rather
less civilized leadership -- runs strong. In an interview in Komsomolskaya
Pravda in early February, Sergei Ivanov -- like Putin, a former
middle-ranking foreign intelligence officer and a close friend whom Putin
made secretary of the Security Council -- said modestly that "the cream
went into the K.G.B. And a word on the human rights defenders. Andrei
Sakharov said not long before his death in 1990 that the one organization
which expressed respect for him was the K.G.B. Do you believe the opinion
of this man?" I could find no reference or memory of Sakharov's saying such
a thing. Late last month, though, Sakharov's widow, Elena Bonner, signed a
letter with other former dissidents calling Putin's fledgling regime "the
introduction of modernized Stalinism." 

Putin's crafted image of civility and Europeanism -- it carries an echo of
the promotion of Andropov in the 1970's as a jazz-loving intellectual -- is
accented by his strong attachment to St. Petersburg, the place he was born
and spent most of his career. The city was meant to be a window on Europe
and a door for it; and Putin is said, now, to represent it. In a crumbling
palace on St. Petersburg's Nevsky Prospekt, I found Valery Golubev, who is
chairman of the city's Committee for Tourism and Development of Resorts,
and a friend of Putin's. (They worked in the same K.G.B. analytical
department in the early 1980's.) 

"In the 1970's, when we joined, the choice of officers was exclusively of a
high order," Golubev said. "The state had the possibility to find and
attract into that kind of work the most able, the most sincere, the most
decent and the most ambitious of young people. Petersburg isn't Moscow;
it's a European city. Every stone breathes these traditions, and it gets
into the head of every Petersburger. Moscow is more Asiatic in its
mentality, and the other regions are even more so. The people from
Petersburg are more interesting, freer, freer in their thoughts." 

Putin's period in the K.G.B. in St. Petersburg and in East Germany has been
trawled over, but little has emerged beyond the enormous paradox that this
self-confident, articulate and subtle performer was regarded -- when he was
noticed at all -- as gray, silent, nondescript. He was posted to Dresden in
1985, where his cover was to run the Soviet-German House of Friendship in
Leipzig. His real task was to recruit agents to supply technical and
economic information; he may have been involved in setting up a K.G.B.
network to prepare for the collapse of East Germany. 

hen East Germany did indeed collapse, Putin headed back to a routine job in
St. Petersburg -- screening foreign students at his alma mater, Leningrad
State. There he was picked up by Anatoly Sobchak, the former St. Petersburg
mayor who gave him his start in politics. If the Soviet Union could
produce, in its dying days, an upper-class radical, Sobchak was it. Tall,
handsome, cultured, with a rhetorical style at once impassioned and
beautifully phrased, Sobchak could have -- and in the opinion of many,
including himself, should have -- been Russia's first president. 

In February, in what turned out to be his last interview -- just 62, he
died of a heart attack about a week later -- Sobchak gave me an unclouded
and rosy picture of Putin. This was not surprising. Putin had shown his
loyalty by bringing Sobchak back from a velvet exile in Paris, where he had
fled to avoid charges of corruption. (Putin, almost in tears, referred at
his funeral to a man "hounded to his death" by enemies in the pre-Putin
Kremlin.) 

"I met him again after many years, by chance," Sobchak said. "He said he'd
left the K.G.B., and so he became my aide, then in a few months my deputy,
then first deputy. For six years we worked together very closely. He was
utterly professional. He worked very well with others, knew how to talk to
them. He was decisive. When you put something to him, he would think about
and, if he could do it, he would say yes, never no. Judge his success -- he
was in charge of foreign investment, and by 1993 we had 6,000 joint
ventures, half the total in Russia." 

Searching for clues to the "real" Putin can be frustrating. Those who know
him well offer little more than variations on the Sobchak line --
admiration, praise, an impression of sober industry and self-sacrificing
loyalty. It is confirmed even by the few foreigners who knew him. "I found
him great to deal with, compared with these other Russian bureaucrats who
all wanted to fleece you," says Graham Humes, an American who set up a
charity in St. Petersburg. "He was very intense; he controls everything in
the room. You felt he wanted to be feared but didn't want to give you cause
to fear him." 

The people who care most about democracy in Russia do fear him, however,
and say they have cause. They see him as the past returned, and say so. I
talked one evening in Moscow to Sergei Kovalev, a onetime protégé of Andrei
Sakharov. In his frowzy office in a crumbling apartment building, he
remains serene but as uncompromising as ever. For him, as once for
Sakharov, liberal democracy is available, so why not have it? "Putin's
priority will be to increase the powers of the state, and in Russia that
tradition is a grim one. He will be efficient, but efficient in what cause?
I heard that he talked of K.G.B. men being 'dropped into power like
paratroopers' under his rule. Yeltsin at least made efforts to overcome the
reflexes of the party boss he had been. In this case, we see a glorying in
the traditions of the K.G.B., and the power they now have." 

Kovalev's hostility is echoed by Amy Knight of George Washington
University, the West's foremost scholar of the organization. "I don't agree
with all this modern-man stuff about Putin," she said. "Look what he's
doing -- he's clamping down. Look at what's happening in Chechnya." 

Boris Pustintsev felt the sharp end of the K.G.B. stick when, in 1956, he
and a group of fellow students at Leningrad State wrote a letter of protest
against the Soviet intervention in Hungary. He served five years in a
prison camp in Mordovia. In 1992, Pustintsev was a central witness in a
film on St. Petersburg made for Britain's Channel 4. In the film he is seen
referring to the "K.G.B.-ization" of Sobchak's administration, with six of
the city district's leaders being former K.G.B. officers. Two days after
the documentary was shown in a Petersburg cinema, Pustintsev was assaulted
by a gang of young men. He was left nearly unconscious, with a wound that
almost cost him the use of his right eye. 

One evening in his flat, Pustintsev showed me both the Channel 4
documentary and an interview he did with Petersburg TV after the assault --
his face still bruised and his eye heavily bandaged. In a voice shaking
with anger, he says that "if people like that, people of the type of Putin,
ever get real power, then we are all finished!" It was a little eerie,
watching the eight-year old interview in a country that was preparing to
give a great deal of real power to Vladimir Putin. 

Pustintsev is convinced that the "K.G.B.-ization" he warned against is now
coming to pass. He points to the three men who stand behind Putin at the
summit of Russian state security, all of whom are drawn from the
Leningrad/Petersburg K.G.B.: Sergei Ivanov, head of the Security Council;
Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service (F.S.B.), the
domestic intelligence arm; and -- most notably -- Viktor Cherkesov, the
F.S.B.'s first deputy director. "This man was known as a democrat hater
when he was head of the Petersburg F.S.B.," says Pustintsev. "He led an
attack on the democratic organizations when they began to emerge in the
last part of the 1980's." The clear signs are that both Patrushev and
Cherkesov enjoy Putin's closest trust. 

Putin was taken to Moscow in June 1996 by two Petersburgers -- Anatoly
Chubais, the former privatization minister and deputy prime minister, then
at the height of his powers, and Aleksei Kudrin, who had been head of St.
Petersburg's privatization committee and is now acting finance minister.
Putin moved up the ranks like a destroyer steaming unscathed through
broadsides. In July 1998, he left the Kremlin to become the head of the
F.S.B. By the following March he was in charge of the Security Council, and
in August was made prime minister. In these posts, he avoided scandal and
took pains to stress his loyalty to Yeltsin. 

When Putin was head of the F.S.B., Yevgeny Primakov was prime minister --
placed there with great reluctance by Yeltsin, as the opposition surged
after the economic crash of August 1998. Primakov, himself a former spy
master (in foreign intelligence), began to move against businesspeople and
politicians he thought corrupt. Putin was ordered to investigate Boris
Berezovsky, the billionaire financier and patron of the Yeltsin "family" --
the extended circle of relatives and trusted associates that helped make
key decisions, agreed on key appointments and drew a tight protective ring
around the former president. Putin refused. 

It was a shrewd choice -- to defend an ailing and politically weakened
Yeltsin against Primakov, then the most popular politician in Russia, with
the Communist and nationalist opposition forces in ascendancy. But Yeltsin
rallied, eventually dismissing Primakov, and Putin had earned the trust of
the "family," which took him in as one of its own. 

In a memorandum prepared in January for a leading Russian financial
conglomerate by an analyst with close knowledge of the Kremlin court, the
argument is made that Putin remains a partial prisoner of the family
because of his inexperience. "Putin," the analyst writes, "was in the last
10 years a man who fulfilled another's orders; he lacks experience of
carrying through political decisions solely on his own. He is still under
the spell of Yeltsin's greatness. He has a subordinate type of mentality
and feels dependent on Berezovsky's clan." 

Upon assuming office after Yeltsin's resignation at the New Year, Putin
signed a decree exempting the president from any criminal or civil suit --
an act widely believed to be part of the reason he was chosen as Yeltsin's
heir. But the decree may also have broken the spell. For while Putin -who
certainly lacks experience in the corridors of absolute power -- remains
dependent on the dark skills of the Kremlin fixers, he is also putting
together his own circle. 

Besides the three top people in security, other senior appointments include
Viktor Ivanov (no relation to Sergei) from the St. Petersburg K.G.B.; Igor
Sechin, Putin's main aide in St. Petersburg; Dmitry Kozak, a former head of
the St. Petersburg legal department; and Vladimir Kozhin, former head of
the St. Petersburg regional center of Currency and Export Control -- a body
reputedly run by the security services. For center-leftists in the rich
world, Putin is as difficult to cope with as China. Realpolitik and
commercial interests demand an embrace; the human rights lobbies scream. It
is neuralgic. 

This is an embryonic team of stalwarts, few of whom owe their advancement
to anyone but Putin. It is being fleshed out by a few standouts, also
overwhelmingly of Putin's generation or younger, who were already in place
-- above all, Mikhail Kasyanov, first deputy prime minister and former
finance minister, who went up sharply in his boss's estimation when he
secured a settlement last month to restructure Russia's private-sector debt. 

Putin also has his own party, Unity, which won more than 25 percent of the
votes in last December's Parliament elections, almost as many votes as the
Communists. It did so on one policy: vote for Putin, the savior of the
country. It acts as the Kremlin's anchor, uniting with the Communists to
manufacture a complaisant parliamentary leadership. 

Putin will not use this power base to make war on capitalism, but he wants
to send packing those responsible for bringing it to Russia. The most
prominent among them, Anatoly Chubais, who is said to have confidently
expected to be offered a top post, continues to support Putin. Indeed, he
is now a business oligarch in his own right, and as head of the giant
monopoly Unified Electricity System, he needs good relations with the
administration. But Putin has been catlike in his relations with him --
publicly criticizing Unified's financial performance while making no
pretense of consulting Chubais or his colleagues on economic policy issues. 

Sobchak made an interesting comment about Putin as president, saying that
"he will govern both as Teddy Roosevelt and as F.D.R." What he meant,
Sobchak said, is that Putin will be as concerned as Theodore Roosevelt to
strengthen the state, to take on the "malefactors of great wealth." And
like Franklin Roosevelt, he will try to use the state's power to rebuild a
country that has plummeted from relatively great economic heights to
poverty and mass unemployment. 

In London, I met Pyotr Aven, a former trade minister and now head of
Alfa-Group, one of Russia's largest banks. "We must have a clean role model
at the top," he said. "Clearly, that has not been the case. Then we must
choose. Do we want the Asiatic model -- which is corrupt but works as long
as you have a dictator who is active? Or do we want the democratic market
model -- which works, but only with transparency and reliability? At the
moment it is a mix. Putin has to choose; I think he is bound to choose the
latter option." 

He has little choice. Russia has become a capitalist country -- distorted,
corrupt and inefficient -- but with small and large capitalists who can be
opposed only with a force he cannot use without destroying what progress
there has been. Putin, for all of his popularity, is constrained: he
cannot, any more than any other contemporary leader, command the economy. 

He is also constrained by the weakness of his state in the world. This
above all will dictate a continuing collaboration with the West. But his
experience has made him suspicious of the West and alert to further
incursions on what he sees as Russia's interests. "There is now a firm
consensus view at the highest level that Russia must make its own economic
and security decisions," says a Swedish-born investor, Peter Castenfeld,
who has worked closely with successive Russian governments, including
Putin's. "At the root of this view lies the perception that the West, in
particular America, misused its position of power under labels like
'strategic partnership' and 'free market reform' when Russia was weak. They
think America was intrusive and manipulative inside the Kremlin. They think
professed Western values are a cover for self-serving positions, and that
the 'international community' is largely jury-rigged. 

"This isn't seen by them as being anti-American. They just think America is
so powerful that it is unpredictable, because it is able to project
domestic political needs into the international arena at will. So they want
to strengthen the state -- to make the economy work better, be more
rule-based and market-oriented. They also want to strongly resist increased
geostrategic pressure on their neighbors. They fear very much that NATO
will be pushed to expand into the Baltics. Estonia is 20 minutes by car
from Putin's and Ivanov's hometown." 

Putin has been clear in the central things: his desire for power and his
effectiveness in wielding it. He is also a master of the sine qua non of
modern, or perhaps postmodern, politicians: he can manipulate symbols.
Among the most potent of those in post-Soviet Russia is that of the
Orthodox Church. Putin is the first Russian leader since Czar Nicholas II
who can plausibly proclaim himself a believer, having been baptized soon
after birth and remaining faithful to the creed. 

At a ceremony in the Kremlin to celebrate the New Year, Putin came into the
vast hall from one side to meet the patriarch of Moscow and all the
Russias, Aleksei II, who entered from another. Putin knelt to kiss the
patriarch's hands. It was an act rich in paradox: the former K.G.B. colonel
kissing the hands of one who -- according to a dossier published in the
early 90's -- was more than usually helpful to the K.G.B. while rising
through a hierarchy that was routinely vetted and controlled by the
security services. "Vladimir Vladimirovich," said the master of ceremonies
as he rose, "what is your message for the new millennium?" "Love," said the
president-to-be. 

While I was in St. Petersburg, I was able -- through a chance meeting with
a director for the New York Metropolitan Opera named Peter McClintock -- to
visit the rehearsals at the Marinsky Theater of Prokofiev's opera "War and
Peace." Directing the opera is the Russian-American filmmaker Andrei
Konchalovsky, whose two-volume memoir is currently a best seller in Russia.
Speaking after a rehearsal one evening, he was gently gloomy, even
determinist, about his native country. "All Russian politicians will favor
the state -- it is part of our culture. Orthodox and Communist culture
privileged suffering, submission; there was no tradition of free thought.
Putin is a product of Russian culture, like Yeltsin. We have had a chaotic
period -- because we have no balance. Now there will be a period of
authoritarianism. It is inevitable, and won't be too bad." 

The opera was commissioned during the last war under the personal
supervision of Stalin, and ordered to be superpatriotic. Now it finds
itself pressed into state service once more. Earlier this month, Vladimir
Putin attended the opening in St. Petersburg. With him was the British
prime minister, Tony Blair -- bidding to cement the kind of relationship
with the new Russian power that Margaret Thatcher had with Gorbachev in his
early years. Even before his power is confirmed by the people, Putin is a
member of the club. The traditions he inherits, the war he has pressed to
its bloody end, all these are accepted, swallowed, in the hope of stability
in his tottering country. That, too, is no mystery. 

*******

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