March 20, 2000    
This Date's Issues:  4182 • 4183 • 4184

Johnson's Russia List
#4183
20 March 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Observer (UK): John Sweeney, Russia backs 'nurse killer' in Chechnya.
2. Itar-Tass: Turnout on Polling Day Key Issue of Last Campaigning Week.
3. Reuters: Michael Steen, Voting for foreigners in Russia's Urals. (Bashkortostan region)
4. Washington Post: Mark Kramer, If It Looks Like the KGB, and Acts Like the KGB... 
5. New York Times: Celestine Bohlen, Putin's Litmus Test: 
Handling the Kremlin's Inner Circle.
6. Los Angeles Times: Richard Paddock, Putin's Obscure Path 
>From KGB to Kremlin.
7. The Observer (UK): Amelia Gentleman, Communists defect as Putin heads for triumph bandwagon.]

******

#1
The Observer (UK)
19 March 2000
[for personal use only]
Russia backs 'nurse killer' in Chechnya 
By John Sweeney 

One of the Kremlin's candidates to rule Chechnya is the man the Chechen 
government-in-exile holds responsible for the murder of six Red Cross nurses 
in 1996. 

Adam Deniyev, self-styled president of the Movement for Chechen Revival, is 
also singled out in a US State Department report last year as a suspect for 
the worst loss suffered by the world's oldest humanitarian organisation. 

Andrei Babitsky, the Radio Liberty reporter who disappeared for a month after 
Russian troops handed him over to 'Chechen rebels' in a prisoner exchange 
widely held to be a fraud, also blames Deniyev for his imprisonment. He says 
Deniyev's forces detained him until international pressure forced Moscow to 
order his release. 

The charges against Moscow's favourite Chechen - rumoured to be closely 
linked to the FSB, the new name for the KGB - will be an embarrassment to the 
Kremlin and to Tony Blair, who last week in St Petersburg defended acting 
President Vladimir Putin's war against what he called 'terrorism from 
Chechnya'. 

No charges have been filed in the investigation into the atrocity, the worst 
in the 136 years of the Red Cross. Six nurses were found shot dead in their 
beds. Thierry Meyrat, head of the Red Cross delegation in Russia, described 
the killings as a 'professional assassination', but had no idea who was 
behind them. 

One Chechen woman who worked for the Red Cross at Novye Atagi hospital, near 
the capital, Grozny, said: 'It never made sense to us that Chechens were 
responsible for these killings. They were helping our people.' 

The State Department's 1998 report on human rights practices in Russia 
states: 'Chechen authorities named Adam Deniyev, who they said was an ethnic 
Chechen working as a colonel in the Russian army, as the individual who has 
organised the killings of the aid workers. Russia's Ministry of Interior had 
promised to surrender Deniyev, if his guilt could be proved.' The report 
added that the Chechens said they had sent to Moscow sufficient information 
to implicate Deniyev, but the Russians had failed to hand him over for 
questioning. 

Deniyev, according to Chechen sources in Britain, Denmark and Georgia, is a 
man with an interesting past. Aged 40, he comes from the Chechen village of 
Avtoura in the foothills of the Black Mountains. In the 1980s he went to 
Baghdad. The Russians have long been friendly with the Iraqi regime, 
supplying men and material. 

In the early 1990s, Deniyev was spotted by fellow Chechens in Russian uniform 
with the rank of colonel. He returned home, but was expelled from Avtoura, 
accused of being responsible for the murder of four Chechen villagers. 
Reportedly, he shot a rival dead, and while his family were preparing for the 
funeral his men attacked the house with a rocket-propelled grenade. 

He returned to Iraq in 1993 and 1994, and then was based in Moscow, where he 
established a warehouse business. He is accompanied by armed Chechen 
bodyguards when he moves around Moscow, according to the Chechen sources. 

Deniyev is not accused of carrying out the Red Cross murders personally, but 
ordering his pro-Moscow Chechen subordinates to do so. 

*******

#2
Turnout on Polling Day Key Issue of Last Campaigning Week.

MOSCOW, March 19 (Itar-Tass) - While the last general elections passed under 
the slogan "Beware of car", "the apartment question" spoiled much the 
presidential campaign for several candidates. Many candidates for the State 
Duma lower house were struck out of the lists at that time due to their 
"forgetfulness" to declare their cars as their private property. Living floor 
space plays this role now. 

"Forgetfulness" of Igor Lebedev, son of leader of the Liberal Democratic 
Party of Russia (LDPR) Vladimir Zhirinovsky, to declare a one-bedroom 
apartment as his private property resulted in a scandal, as a result of which 
Zhirinovsky was jotted out of the list of presidential candidates. 

The Central Election Commission came across, all of a sudden, Aman Tuleyev's 
Moscow apartment and the notorious countryside house of Vladimir Putin, 
which, however, did not fall into the category of private property. In a 
word, if not for housing problems, the election campaign could look as 
tedious and commonplace. 

Now that the election campaign on the early presidential elections is nearing 
completion and only one week separates voters from the election day, it is 
hard to predict what surprises and sensations can pop up in the last week. 

All are waiting with impatience how Zhirinovsky's scandal will end. The 
Russian Supreme Court ordered that the Central Election Commission should 
reinstate the LDPR leader on the list of presidential candidates. 

But the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office can lodge a protest with the 
Presidium of the Supreme Court, and the Presidium will probably be short of 
time to examine this case and pass a ruling before the election day. 

This question is of principal importance for the Central Election Commission: 
both in the sense of legal precedent and in the sense of proving the 
correctness of their decision on Zhirinovsky. 

If the Supreme Court Presidium issues a ruling on annulling Zhirinovsky's 
registration, it will be necessary to strike out his name with lightning 
speed from ballot papers for 108 million voters. 

Another question which is capable of drawing attention of the public, is a 
verdict which is to be passed next week by the Central Election Commission on 
numerous complaints concerning the pre-election campaigning by Yabloko leader 
Grigory Yavlinsky. 

His colleagues in the presidential race Stansilav Govorukhin, Ella Panfilova, 
Umar Jzhabrailov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky spoke with indignation about his 
too frequent appearances on TV screens in various broadcasts. Chairman of the 
Central Election Commission Alexander Veshnyakov confirmed that the 
commission had received many other complaints on this question. 

This notwithstanding, a turnout of voters remains the main problem. 
Veshnyakov personally acknowledged at one of news conferences that he was 
afraid of an effect of "a soccer game": fans remain at home when they do not 
expect a suspense struggle. 

At the same time, despite pessimism of some politologists concerning the 
turnout, it should be no lower (according to a preliminary forecast of the 
Central Election Commission chairman) than at the general elections in 
December, something around 60 percent. 

Much depends on activity of voters. Russians, like a legendary warrior, 
turned to be at a cross-roads: either a president is elected already on March 
26, or a runoff will be needed in April. 

If a turnout is under 50 percent, the elections will be pronounced invalid. 
Then the question will rise on new presidential elections next summer. There 
is no need to explain what it will mean for the country, living in a feverish 
tempo of elections since the start of the last autumn. Besides, elections are 
a very expensive thing. 

Veshnyakov tries to dispel another illusion. According to the law, people who 
had run earlier in the race have the right to participate in new presidential 
elections. 

*******

#3
Voting for foreigners in Russia's Urals
By Michael Steen

ISKRA, Russia, March 19 (Reuters) - A horse-drawn sledge loaded with hay 
edges its way along an icy lane, past the village hall where a poster shows a 
pouting Vladimir Putin asking voters to endorse him as Russian president. 

But the driver's greeting in a thick Turkic voice, and the chatter of his 
neighbours, shows that the acting president's appeal for strong central 
government is in a language foreign to many in the sleepy Urals village. 

And politically, it could spell the end of the wide-ranging autonomy enjoyed 
since 1990 by leaders of the Bashkortostan region -- 1,500 km (930 miles) 
east of Moscow. 

Slightly larger than Greece, Bashkortostan is home to four million people 
from more than 70 ethnic groups. Russians are the largest, but they are 
outnumbered by mainly Moslem Tatars and Bashkirs. 

In Iskra, everyone is a Chuvash except the doctor, and he is a Tatar. 
Five-year-olds in the kindergarten nod shyly when asked if they speak Russian 
and go back to reading in the Chuvash language, now flourishing after years 
of Soviet-era decline. 

Villagers are not overly concerned about a return to centralised rule from 
Moscow. 

``People here are interested in the election,'' said Nina Ivanova, the 
school's headmistress. ``I think most people will vote for Vladimir Putin -- 
they've seen him and he seems serious.'' 

In Iskra, as in most places outside big Russian cities, the main source for 
news and election campaigning is television. A Soviet-era broadcasting system 
means that most of the country receives only partly state-owned ORT and RTR 
television, which critics say are biased in favour of Putin. 

Village head Vladimir Gerashimov said the outcome of the vote mattered little 
to his 1,200 residents. None of Putin's 11 challengers had so much as sent a 
poster to the village. 

``Moscow's a long way away. We've always lived here and always will,'' he 
said. 

DELIBERATELY SLOW TO REFORM 

Local officials voice support for Putin, but a return to centralised 
government from Moscow could cost them the independence that they say they 
have used to shield the area from the worst rigours of Russia's economic 
reforms. 

In Ufa, an hour's drive to the north of Iskra, past occasional oil pumps 
covered in hoarfrost, officials said the republic had been deliberately slow 
to reform its economy. 

Bashkortostan holds large stakes in all part-privatised enterprises. 
Agriculture is little changed since Soviet days. 

``Reform should be gradual,'' Bashkortostan's President Murtaza Rakhimov said 
in an interview. ``We did not split up collective farms, but are gradually 
carrying out reforms...And it works, we have a working bank system, oil 
refineries and chemical plants.'' 

Other officials said that by keeping stakes in oil companies and refineries 
-- the dynamos of the local economy -- Bashkortostan kept tax collection 
rates high, funding the local social welfare budget. 

Critics say the region is run like Rakhimov's personal fief, charges he 
emphatically denies. 

``It will be a long time before we have true democracy like you,'' he said. 
``I don't think in five or 10 years. It will probably take as long as it took 
you in England to create. You didn't do it in one day.'' 

CORNERING THE MOSLEM VOTE 

Rakhimov backs Putin, but is clearly treading a tightrope. 

He bucked Russian public opinion in condemning the war in separatist and 
mostly Moslem Chechnya, but said Putin had been forced to launch a brutal 
military campaign there to wipe out ``terrorists.'' 

Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace in Moscow, said Rakhimov and President Mintimir Shaimiyev 
in neighbouring Tatarstan were fighting a rearguard action to preserve their 
autonomy. 

``They will show their loyalty (to Putin) in order to keep their positions,'' 
he said. ``They have no choice but to maintain as friendly relations as 
possible with the future president.'' 

Talgat Tadjuddin, the Supreme Mufti of one of Russia's Moslem communities, 
said he thought Moslems sympathised with Putin's pledges to restore law and 
order. 

``A man who wants to restore law and order deserves to win,'' the Mufti, who 
carries a mobile phone and wears a large Levi's belt, said in an interview in 
his Ufa headquarters. 

Ufa's other Mufti, Nurmukhamed Nigmatullin, said Moslems should choose 
Russia's president according to their conscience, but he did not welcome any 
move to centralising Russian power. 

``I sometimes say: if a man is like an elephant, how can he walk?'' 
Nigmatullin said. 

Local officials said the region's melting pot of religions and ethnic groups 
meant it cherished the autonomy under which it set holidays and focused 
resources in line with needs. 

But they said the republic had no desire to leave the Russian federation. 
``Where would we go?'' said one Bashkir. 

In Iskra, meanwhile, voters are prepared to do their civic duty and turn up 
at the polling station. The local folk group is practising songs to perform 
at a village meeting a few days before the vote. 

And their repertoire is not confined to Chuvash songs. 

``Of course not, we're quite used to singing to Russian tunes too,'' said one 
elderly man. 

*******

#4
Washington Post
19 March 2000
[for personal use only]
If It Looks Like the KGB, and Acts Like the KGB . . .
By Mark Kramer
Mark Kramer is director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and a 
senior associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard 
University. 

Much has changed for the better in Russia over the past decade, but not all 
of the repressive instruments of communism have disappeared. At least not 
entirely. The KGB--the most notorious of them all--ceased to exist just weeks 
before the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, and its secret police and 
foreign intelligence units were transferred to new agencies that soon came 
under the Russian government's control. But today, the KGB's influence is 
alive and well. Its main successor, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, 
seems pleased to assume the KGB's mantle.

Unlike the KGB, the FSB has a Web site (www.fsb.ru). There, the KGB legacy 
casts a long shadow. In fact, visitors to the site may wonder whether the KGB 
has ever really ceased to exist. The site is dominated by a photograph of the 
Lubyanka building--headquarters for the KGB and now for the FSB--beneath 
which the KGB had its interrogation and execution cells. The site displays 
the FSB emblem, which, apart from its double-headed Russian eagle, looks 
remarkably like the KGB's. The connection is more than skin-deep. The site's 
history section links to several pages of key facts about both agencies, 
implying that the FSB is proudly carrying on the work of the KGB.

The theme of continuity is also hard to miss in the FSB's slick new 
coffee-table book, "Lubyanka: From the History of the Fatherland's 
Counterintelligence Service." It lauds the exploits of both Soviet and 
Russian state security officers as they valiantly warded off enemies. Apart 
from perfunctory references to certain "excesses," mostly under Joseph 
Stalin, the book paints the KGB and FSB in unabashedly glowing terms, 
describing them as "elite organizations untouched by corruption." The KGB, it 
says, "played a major part" in efforts in the late 1980s to "rehabilitate 
citizens who were illegally repressed during the '30s, '40s and '50s."

The drive to rehabilitate the KGB gained momentum late last year with the 
rise of Acting President Vladimir Putin, the overwhelming favorite in next 
Sunday's presidential election. Putin was a loyal KGB officer for nearly 17 
years. He ran the FSB for just over a year, until he was appointed prime 
minister last August. (On Dec. 31, then-President Boris Yeltsin handed him 
the presidential powers.)

Putin has spoken fondly about his work in the KGB. In a series of interviews 
for a book published just last week, he endorsed the agency's "principled" 
behavior and claimed that one of his main functions was to spy on NATO. He 
compares himself to Yuri Andropov, the longtime head of the KGB who was the 
Soviet leader briefly in the early 1980s. A few months ago, Putin ordered a 
monument and plaque commemorating Andropov to be returned to their place of 
honor at the FSB's headquarters, from which they had been removed in 1991.

So far, Putin's nostalgia for Andropov has not led him to embrace Andropov's 
worst traits. Still, Andropov is hardly the kind of figure that a Russian 
leader should want to emulate. Hundreds of recently declassified documents 
show that he was a champion of repression at home and abroad, and that he 
spearheaded vicious campaigns against dissidents, nonconformists and many 
others during his tenure at the KGB. 

Even if praise for Andropov were not so misplaced, the effort by Putin and 
other Russian officials to restore "honor" to the KGB's historical reputation 
is deeply troubling. Suppose that, after World War II, the West German 
government had regarded its security forces as proud successors of the 
Gestapo and SS. Suppose that the current German government were to create a 
Web site depicting the "history" of the Gestapo, the SS and the postwar 
German security forces as a seamless web.

In Germany, of course, none of this would occur. One of the salutary 
consequences of Germany's defeat in World War II was the Allied occupation of 
the country. Although it took decades before many Germans fully acknowledged 
the enormity of Nazi crimes, the system of historical accountability 
established by the Western occupying powers had a lasting, positive effect. 
The SS and Gestapo were--and still are--remembered with the opprobrium and 
revulsion they deserved. It is inconceivable that any German politician or 
security official nowadays would speak favorably about the SS or would put 
out a coffee-table book lauding the Gestapo's service on behalf of 
theVaterland.

But post-Soviet Russia is not postwar Germany. The Soviet Union came to an 
end not through war, but through internal collapse. Those in power in Moscow 
after the collapse (many of whom had loyally served the communist regime) 
avoided a genuine reckoning with the past. 

That failure to make a complete rupture with the Soviet past squandered a 
great opportunity. The KGB had been the main architect of an attempt to 
preserve the Soviet Union in August 1991, and after that coup failed, the 
agency's days seemed numbered. It even seemed likely that the KGB would go 
the way of most of the East European security services, which were dismantled 
in 1989 and have not been resurrected under new names. For a few tense days 
after the coup, senior KGB officials waited at the Lubyanka, fearing that a 
wave of popular and official reprisals against their agency might ensue.

The KGB's apprehension seemed justified when thousands of protesters gathered 
near the Lubyanka to watch a crane take down a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, 
the founding chief of the Soviet security apparatus. Unfortunately for 
Russia, the dismantling of the statue was the only real damage the KGB 
suffered. When the agency was split up, its massive secret police apparatus 
was left almost intact.

If democracy were firmly established in Russia, this would not necessarily be 
of concern. But Russia's democratic progress has been limited and precarious, 
and the potential is clear for abuses by the security apparatus, with or 
without approval from the top.

Over the past year, the FSB has acted without justification against 
researchers and journalists who displeased the government. It has imprisoned 
courageous activists such as Alexander Nikitin and journalist Navy Capt. 
Grigory Pasko as they tried to bring attention to environmental damage caused 
by Russian naval vessels. The courts dismissed the spurious cases brought 
against the pair. But the FSB's efforts to intimidate sent a chilling message 
to those who would question official policies. More recently, the FSB lodged 
groundless espionage allegations against a respected civilian expert on 
nuclear weapons, Igor Sutyagin. His arrest seems to have been intended to 
cast a pall over Russian scholars' collaboration with foreign counterparts.

Limiting contact with the outside world would also seem to explain attempts 
by the FSB and another former KGB directorate to control access to the 
Internet. The FSB has requested--or where necessary coerced--all Internet 
service providers in Russia to accept electronic surveillance of all traffic. 
By searching for key words, the agency determines which e-mail will be 
monitored--or intercepted. A friend of mine in Russia who was detained 
briefly and interrogated by the FSB a few months ago told me that he could 
tell by the questions he was asked whether his e-mail had been monitored.

Far from concealing such actions, the government can be downright boastful 
about them. A senior communications official recently told the Moscow Times 
that the KGB's successor agencies "have the right--and now the ability--to 
monitor private correspondence and telephone conversations of individual 
citizens." Although the FSB's "right" to eavesdrop requires that a warrant be 
issued, the agency can draft its own. FSB officials have said that they 
expect their surveillance of Internet traffic to grow rapidly in the years 
ahead, and I have no doubt of it.

None of this is to suggest that the Soviet regime is about to be revived or 
that a full-fledged police state has been reestablished. Compared with the 
KGB's massive repression, the most serious abuses by the FSB still seem 
limited in number. Although Putin recently acknowledged that he "regrets the 
demise of the Soviet Union," he is just as insistent that "only those who 
have no brains want the Soviet state to be restored."

Nonetheless, enough troubling signs have emerged to warrant concern. Earlier 
this month, a prominent member of the Russian parliament, Alexander 
Korzhakov, formerly Yeltsin's top adviser, called for the KGB's restoration: 
Even the defunct service's enemies, he said, "now admit that the dissolution 
of the agency gained us nothing. . . . It's time for us to unite all our 
secret services into a tight fist and strike at those who are preventing us 
from living normally. Russia needs a KGB. Let's stop being coy about it."

If Putin heeds that advice, it will be a grave setback for Russia's tenuous 
democratic achievement.

*******

#5
New York Times
March 19, 2000
[for personal use only]
Putin's Litmus Test: Handling the Kremlin's Inner Circle
By CELESTINE BOHLEN

MOSCOW, March 18 -- When Boris N. Yeltsin was re-elected Russia's president
in 
1996, he owed his victory in large part to the so-called oligarchs, a group 
of Russian multimillionaires -- bankers, oilmen and media moguls -- who in 
turn owed their wealth and influence to Mr. Yeltsin. 

This closed and cozy circle worked very well for a very few in Russia until 
Dec. 31 when Mr. Yeltsin suddenly resigned, putting the Kremlin in the hands 
of Vladimir V. Putin, the man poised to win Russia's presidential election on 
March 26. 

Now observers are asking whether a Putin victory will carry the same kind of 
debts to the same, or a similar, group of oligarchs that compromised Mr. 
Yeltsin's final scandal-ridden years in office. 

Having obtained their wealth by buying state assets on the cheap, trading 
heavily on their Kremlin connections, most of Russia's "oligarchs" survived 
the devastating financial crash of August 1998 by a cynical manipulation of 
their remaining properties. 

Some have since moved to legitimize their holdings, while others have rushed 
to acquire new ones -- the recent dash to divvy up Russia's aluminum industry 
is a case in point. But now, with a new era beginning in the Kremlin, 
virtually all are looking over their shoulders at Mr. Putin, an ex-K.G.B. 
agent who is promising to put Russia's affairs in order, and its criminals in 
jail. 

For Russian businessmen and foreign investors, Mr. Putin's treatment of the 
oligarchs will be a litmus test of his promises to put the Russian economy, 
and its vast natural wealth, under the rule of law, with equal opportunities 
and conditions for all. 

For Russian voters, many of them poor and bitter, how Mr. Putin handles such 
figures as Boris A. Berezovsky -- the most notorious of oligarchs -- will be 
a sign of the new leader's relationship to the Family, an almost mythical 
clique made up of rich businessmen, Yeltsin family members and Kremlin aides 
that has become the watchword for Russia's crippling crony capitalism. 

On this issue, as on others, Mr. Putin has made reassuring statements. 
Campaigning today, he promised voters that a class known as oligarchs "will 
cease to exist."Late last month, he told supporters, "It is necessary to 
prevent anyone from latching on to power and being able to use it for their 
own purposes." He has also put forward -- albeit in vague terms -- an agenda 
of legislative reform, such as long-awaited changes to the tax code that are 
hailed by business leaders as a step toward more sensible regulation of 
Russia's unruly economy. 

But looking at deeds rather than words, Mr. Putin has yet to show his hand. 
And that is a disappointment for those who expected him to start off by 
taking a tough line against the favorites of the Yeltsin era. 

"Unfortunately, my own hopes that he would distance himself from them are 
wrong," said Evgenia Albats, a well-known Russian investigative reporter. 

According to Ms. Albats and others, the signs of Mr. Putin's continued 
engagement with Mr. Yeltsin's inner circle are small, but telling. Mostly, 
they revolve around individuals -- such as Aleksandr Voloshin, the Kremlin's 
chief of staff, or Valentin Yumashev, one of his predecessors, both bona fide 
members of the Family, both widely reported to have kept a hand in the Putin 
campaign. 

"He left the same gatekeepers in place, Yumashev and Voloshin, and we know 
that they are closely connected to Berezovsky," Ms. Albats said. There are 
also reports that Mr. Yeltsin's daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, who emerged 
publicly in 1996 as her father's campaign adviser, has also been involved in 
the Putin campaign. 

When Mr. Putin took office on New Year's Eve, his first decree granted 
immunity to Mr. Yeltsin, and provided material support -- housing, cars, 
medical benefits -- to Yeltsin family members. Soon afterward, he dismissed 
Ms. Dyachenko from her official Kremlin job, but reappointed Mr. Voloshin. He 
demoted first deputy prime minister Nikolai Y. Aksyonenko, reputedly a Family 
favorite, but kept him in government in his old job, as railway minister. 

"We hear rumors that he promised to keep Voloshin for a year, and if he does, 
it means that the Family is still in full control," said Igor Malashenko, 
president of NTV-Holding, part of the media group controlled by Vladimir V. 
Gusinsky, another oligarch who has been at war with the Kremlin -- and Mr. 
Berezovsky -- for more than a year. 

Mr. Malashenko and others say the appointment of Mikhail Kasyanov, who as 
first deputy prime minister now heads Mr. Putin's government and has been 
linked in the Russian press to members of Mr. Berezovsky's clan, could also 
be a sign of Mr. Putin's dependence on that clique. 

"If Mr. Putin appoints Kasyanov as the next prime minister," Lilia Shevtsova, 
a senior analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, said at a recent 
conference, "it would be a very nasty, a very bad sign. It would be a sign 
that Mr. Putin cannot be independent, that he cannot brush aside the 
influence of several important and very powerful groups that still continue 
to rule Russia." 

The doings of Russia's oligarchs have long been a running soap opera in the 
Russian press, where feuds and alliances are reported on regularly, usually 
with scant detail and heavy interpretation. The recent fight over the 
aluminum industry has been widely depicted as a clash between two clans -- 
one including Mr. Berezovsky and his ally Roman Abramovich, and the other 
including Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate and ally of Anatoly B. Chubais, 
the former Kremlin aide, head of Russia's electrical utility monopoly, and an 
honorary oligarch. 

According to investment analysts, Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Abramovich, 
operating through 24 separate offshore companies, are believed to have 
acquired 60 to 70 percent of the Russian aluminum industry. 

Mr. Putin has done nothing to stop the property deals, nor has he shown 
favorites. Although both he and Mr. Chubais have connections that date from 
their days together in St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin has been distinctly cool to 
his old colleague. 

"So he tries to distance himself, he tries to find some point above the 
oligarchic fray," Ms. Shevtsova said of Mr. Putin's silence. "He cannot 
control, he probably knows this, and he takes it rather calmly because he 
doesn't have enough power to stop it." 

In many respects, the battles portrayed in the media are a reflection of 
battles over the media, which some analysts see as the area of Russian life 
in which the oligarchs wield the most political influence. 

Because of his control over ORT, Russia's largest and most watched television 
station, Mr. Berezovsky has often proved to be a useful, even essential, ally 
for the Kremlin. That was most apparent in last fall's parliamentary election 
campaign, when several prime-time programs on ORT mercilessly, and 
successfully, slashed the main opposition party headed by former Prime 
Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov. 

The presidential campaign has been spared such vicious attacks, although NTV, 
the flagship station of Mr. Gusinsky's empire, has maintained a critical view 
of Mr. Putin, and in particular, the war in Chechnya. Mr. Putin, in return, 
has refused all interviews on NTV, or with any other media in the Gusinsky 
empire. 

A recent announcement that ORT's broadcasting license will go on the auction 
block in May, when it will expire, has been seen as an attempt to show Mr. 
Berezovsky his place. "Berezovsky is a loose cannon and ORT is a huge 
propaganda machine," Mr. Malashenko said. "I doubt very much he will accept 
being pushed out, but they are keeping him hanging, which means until the end 
of May, he should behave loyally." 

Some, like Ms. Shevtsova, feel the real test for Mr. Putin will be whether he 
chooses to pursue investigations against Mr. Berezovsky and others that were 
dropped a year ago when the Kremlin forced out Russia's chief prosecutor, 
Yuri I. Skuratov, with a sex-and-video scandal. 

Others doubt that Mr. Putin would be ready, during his first months in 
office, to take on such a powerful opponent, and the team that engineered his 
meteoric rise. Both Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Voloshin are widely credited with 
the strategy that propelled Unity, a pro-Putin party, to victory in the 
December parliamentary elections. It was that result, many analysts believe, 
that convinced Mr. Yeltsin to relinquish his office six months ahead of 
schedule. 

Pyotr Aven, a former finance minister and president of Alfa-Bank who supports 
Mr. Putin, argues that relations between the oligarchs and Kremlin officials 
have been inflated in the public mind, and that -- despite the habit of some 
Kremlin insiders of vacationing in Europe with favored businessmen -- it is 
those in government ministries who really bend to oligarchs' pressure. 

Mr. Aven feels that Mr. Putin himself is independent and will remain so. For 
one thing, the Putin campaign is not as dependent on private money as Mr. 
Yeltsin's was in 1996, when the president had to stage an extravagant, 
come-from-behind victory over Gennadi Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader. 
This time, there are no Putin advertisements on TV, no T-shirt, no rock 
concerts. 

And Mr. Aven, for one, has not been asked to donate money this time, as he 
was then. "They don't need it," he noted wryly. 

*******

#6
Los Angeles Times
19 March 2000
[for personal use only]
Putin's Obscure Path From KGB to Kremlin 
Acting president, who's likely to win election, remains a mystery. The 
ex-spy has also managed to project himself as whatever Russians and 
foreigners alike want him to be. 
By RICHARD C. PADDOCK, Times Staff Writer

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia--It was 1976, and Vladimir V. Putin was living a 
lie. He had recently graduated from law school and was working for the KGB 
when he bumped into two high school classmates, Sergei and Yelena Kudrov. 
Putin told them that he had just won a car in a government lottery and 
was working at the local prosecutor's office, the Kudrovs recalled. He ducked 
questions about his job by joking: "Before lunch, we're busy catching 
criminals. After lunch, we're busy shooting them." 
Today, after 16 years as a spy and a decade in government posts, Putin 
is poised to become Russia's second elected president. As acting head of 
state, he is expected to win next Sunday's election. Yet much of his past 
remains a mystery, and the kind of president he would be is shrouded in 
uncertainty. 
The Kudrovs remember Putin as an earnest, hard-working student who 
quietly stood his ground but never bragged. They plan to vote for him but 
wonder if he hung on to the good qualities of his youth during his rise to 
power. 
"I think he is a decent person," said Sergei Kudrov, a onetime chemical 
engineer who manages a building materials shop. "But our experience tells us 
there are no decent people in the Kremlin. So my question is: If there are no 
decent people in the Kremlin, what is he doing there?" 
As prime minister since August and acting president since New Year's 
Eve, Putin has pledged to restore order, revive the economy and make Russia 
great again. 
He has led this nation into a brutal war in the republic of Chechnya 
that has left thousands of people dead and forced a quarter of a million from 
their homes. He ordered the destruction of Chechnya's capital, Grozny--once a 
city of 400,000--and has kept silent about widespread atrocities allegedly 
committed by his troops. 
Although he has offered few specifics about what he would do with a full 
term as president, a poll done for the Moscow Times and released Friday shows 
him leading his 11 challengers with 53% of the vote. The same survey gives 
his closest rival, Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov, 22%. 
At 47, Putin is the youngest leader to rise to power in the Kremlin 
since Josef Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. 
Fit, energetic and active, he has profited from the striking contrast with 
Boris N. Yeltsin, the doddering president who appointed him. 
Like the good spy he was, Putin has demonstrated the ability to take on 
the appearance of whatever people wish to see in him. In a sense, he has 
become a blank screen on which Russians and foreigners alike project their 
hopes and desires. 
To nationalist Russians, Putin is a patriot who will crush Islamic 
separatists in Chechnya and reunite the country. To Communists, he is a 
pragmatist with whom they can build an alliance in parliament. To 
monarchists, he is an enlightened leader who will remove Lenin's mummy from 
its Red Square mausoleum. 
Western-oriented business people see Putin as a "reformer" who will 
further open the country's markets to foreign investment. To Russia's 
tycoons, he will protect crooked privatization schemes of the 1990s that 
helped make them rich. President Clinton, who met with Putin last year, 
recently declared that he is a leader "we can do business with." 

Putin Won't Debate or Air Commercials 
Putin's appeal among the electorate is so broad that he has refused to 
debate other candidates and has declined to run campaign commercials 
promoting himself like a consumer product. "I will not be trying to find out 
in the course of my election campaign which is more important, Tampax or 
Snickers," he said disdainfully. 
Putin, just under 5-foot-6, seems to enjoy perpetuating the mystery that 
surrounds him. He was asked in a recent interview with the newspaper 
Kommersant Daily whether he will become a different person once he wins 
office in his own right. "Do you really have the desire to change all and 
everything?" he was asked. 
"I won't tell you," Putin replied. 
In an attempt to give the former spy a human face, his campaign last 
week released a book, "In the First Person: Conversations with Vladimir 
Putin," based on 24 hours of interviews with three journalists. It is the 
first time that Putin has disclosed many details of his early life and KGB 
career. 
The book and interviews by The Times with former teachers, classmates, 
KGB colleagues, St. Petersburg officials and staff members paint a portrait 
of a man reared in hardship and Communist tradition who acquired a strong 
desire to achieve and a belief in discipline and order. To hear Putin tell 
it, his family background is like a page from Soviet history. He represents 
the third generation of his family to serve the Communist leadership or its 
secret police, starting from the first days of Bolshevik rule in the 1920s 
and ending with the death throes of the Soviet Union in 1991. 
According to Putin, his paternal grandfather, Spiridon Putin, worked as 
a cook for V. I. Lenin and then Stalin. It is unlikely that he would have had 
such a job without being part of the state security apparatus. 
During World War II, Putin's father, Vladimir, served in the 
NKVD--predecessor of the KGB--and was dropped behind Nazi lines in Estonia, 
Putin said. The elder Putin's unit was nearly wiped out, but he escaped by 
hiding underwater in a swamp and breathing through a hollow reed, his son 
said. Later, his father was wounded by a grenade, he said, and saved only 
because a friend carried him miles across the ice to a hospital. 
Putin's mother, Maria, meanwhile, was trapped in Leningrad, as St. 
Petersburg was formerly called, by the 900-day Nazi siege. She barely managed 
to avoid starving to death--a fate that claimed 640,000 lives. Putin said he 
had two older brothers who died in early childhood, one shortly after birth 
and one during the siege. 
The family's house was destroyed during the war, and Putin's parents 
ended up living in communal housing in Leningrad. In October 1952, five 
months before Stalin died, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born. 
The Putins, occupying one small room, shared the apartment with several 
families. There was no hot water or a proper kitchen. Putin recalls as a 
child chasing rats in the stairwell. 
His father worked at a train-car factory and was the secretary of a 
Communist Party cell; his mother held a series of low-level jobs, including 
sweeping streets and washing test tubes at a laboratory. 
Putin's teachers say he was selected in the ninth grade to attend 
Leningrad School No. 281, a school for the city's brightest students. 
His classmates and teachers there remember him as a top student who was 
self-confident but did not try to draw attention to himself. Smaller than 
others his age, he studied judo and sambo, a Russian cross between judo and 
wrestling. 
Classmate Sergei Kudrov recalled that, in ninth grade, an older student 
kicked Putin when no teacher was looking. Putin kicked back. After school, 
the bully and his friends were waiting. Putin calmly stepped forward and 
quickly subdued the bigger boy. Putin never boasted about it, Kudrov said, 
and no one at school picked on him again. 
Speaking recently about the war in Chechnya, Putin just as easily could 
have been talking about that schoolyard fight: "Only one thing can be 
effective in such circumstances: to go on the offensive," he said. "You must 
hit first and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet." 
That same year in school, Putin decided that he wanted to join the KGB 
after reading a novel about a spy in Germany. At the time, he said, he knew 
little about the agency's gruesome history of mass repression and murder or 
its continuing suppression of dissidents. "My impressions of the KGB were 
based on romantic stories about spies," he said. 
Putin was so interested in the secret police that he went uninvited to 
the KGB's Leningrad office. The KGB never took anyone who volunteered, an 
agent advised him, only those it selected. Putin asked how he could best 
prepare himself, and the agent suggested law school. Putin's course was set. 
He won a place at prestigious Leningrad State University and studied 
law. He never contacted the KGB again, but the omnipresent agency was 
watching. During his final year, the KGB offered him a job. He was graduated 
in 1975 with a law degree and began working in counterintelligence. 
Putin was one of a select few chosen to study in Moscow at the KGB's 
foreign intelligence institute, where he was enrolled under the pseudonym 
Platov, learned German and earned a black belt in judo. 
In 1985, the KGB sent him to East Germany, where he lived in Dresden and 
had a cover job heading a German-Russian house of friendship. 
Putin said the main focus of his work was spying on member nations of 
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His assignment was to recruit agents, 
collect data from public and covert sources, analyze the material and send it 
to Moscow. He was successful enough that he received two promotions and his 
term was extended two years. 
Although he rarely left East Germany, his supporters say his experience 
in Dresden gave him firsthand exposure to the West and the advantages of its 
political and economic systems. 
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and Putin's job collapsed with it. 
Putin destroyed secret documents, burning so many that his stove "burst." 
He returned to Russia in 1990, the year Germany was reunified. 
He had been steadily climbing the KGB ladder, but now everything in his 
homeland seemed uncertain. The KGB appointed him deputy director of Leningrad 
State University, but working there undercover was not what he wanted to do. 
Soon after, he met Anatoly A. Sobchak, an ex-law professor who was 
chairman of the city council and one of Russia's foremost democrats. 
Putin said he told Sobchak that he was still a KGB agent but was offered 
a job anyway. Putin became one of Sobchak's key aides and helped him win 
election as mayor in 1991. Soon after, as die-hard Communists staged a coup 
and seized Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Putin said he quit the KGB, 
retiring as a lieutenant colonel. 
"Vladimir clearly realized we couldn't double-deal, we couldn't play a 
double game," said Valery A. Golubev, a former KGB agent and Sobchak staff 
member who quit the spy agency at the same time. 
Putin became deputy mayor and ran the day-to-day operations of the city. 
Among his duties was heading St. Petersburg's department on foreign economic 
ties. 

'100% Discipline and . . . 100% Order' 
"When we worked in Putin's agency, we had 100% discipline and we had 
100% order," said Marina Manevich, a former staff member. "This was not 
coerced. It was introduced softly, tactfully and in a very intelligent 
manner. And if such order and discipline are enforced in our government, that 
will be great luck for our country." 
Putin's friends in St. Petersburg say his biggest accomplishment was 
opening the city to foreign investment. The early 1990s also set the stage 
for the city to become Russia's crime capital, where today corruption is 
rampant. 
Sobchak, who died Feb. 20, was charged with corruption after he left 
office, but Putin was largely untouched by such allegations. At one point, 
Putin was accused of playing a pivotal role in shipping metals abroad in 
exchange for food that never reached the city, but no charges were filed. 
After Sobchak lost his 1996 bid for reelection, Putin was offered a job 
in Moscow by Pavel P. Borodin, the head of the powerful Kremlin property 
department. Borodin was later at the center of a scandal over allegations 
that a Swiss company gave Yeltsin and his family credit cards after winning 
huge Kremlin contracts. But Putin, as Borodin's deputy, was not implicated. 
Putin said he was more surprised than anyone in 1998 when he was 
appointed to head the FSB, the reconstituted KGB. Last August, as fighting 
with Chechen rebels began to heat up, Yeltsin named Putin as premier and his 
preferred successor. At the time, few thought that the mousy, soft-spoken 
Putin could persuade voters to elect him president. 
Putin said he expected to last only a few months, just like the three 
previous prime ministers. But rather than worry about his longevity, he 
concluded that his mission was to bring the Caucasus Mountains of southern 
Russia under control and squash the rebels who posed a threat to the nation's 
stability. 
He mobilized for war, and his moves struck a chord with the public. His 
popularity skyrocketed--as much for his willingness to take a firm stand and 
restore order as a desire to fight the Chechens. 
In the 80 days since Yeltsin stepped down, Putin has sent mixed signals 
about what his presidency would be like. 
He has criticized government corruption, yet his first move as acting 
president was to sign a decree granting Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. 
In an interview on British television, he talked theoretically about the 
possibility of Russia's joining NATO, but he has bluntly refused to allow 
international observers to investigate allegations that Russian troops have 
raped and executed civilians in Chechnya. 
He has shown little respect for media freedom, sanctioning the arrest of 
a journalist in Chechnya. Yet he speaks about the necessity of establishing 
the rule of law. 
He has put trusted ex-KGB colleagues in top positions, but rejects 
speculation that he intends to sweep out Yeltsin-era officials after the vote 
and impose authoritarian rule. 
"This logic is characteristic of people with a totalitarian way of 
thinking," he said. "In theory, that's how a man should behave if he wants to 
stay in this place for the rest of his life. I don't." 
Sergei L. Loiko of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report. 

*******

#7
The Observer (UK)
19 March 2000
[for personal use only]
Communists defect as Putin heads for triumph bandwagon 
By Amelia Gentleman, Moscow 

At a gathering in a stuffy Moscow basement early on Friday morning, the 
leaders of Russia's Communist youth movement had a revolutionary announcement 
to make. 

Komsomol members should vote against the only Communist candidate in next 
Sunday's presidential elections, the movement's leader declared. Instead, 
they should opt for acting President Vladimir Putin - a man who claims no 
affection for the Communist Party and de-scribes socialist ideology as a 
spent force. 

Igor Malyarov, a pallid, middle-aged man squeezed into a tight-fitting 
Soviet-era suit, gazed fiercely through tinted glasses at his audience and, 
spitting with passion, proclaimed: 'I call on the patriotic Communist youth 
of our country not to vote for Gennady Zyuganov.' 

Putin remained something of a dark horse, Malyarov conceded, but he had 
notched up numerous accomplishments, notably the war in Chechnya, which were 
'precisely what modern Russian society needs'. 

It was the most humiliating blow for Communist leader Zyuganov, who is doomed 
to take second place when Russia votes next week. Despite an arduous 
campaign, Zyuganov has lost crucial ground to Putin, who has shrewdly 
appealed to the same nationalist sympathies of the Communists' core voters. A 
poll last week suggested that 25 per cent of those who voted Communist in the 
December parliamentary elections were now preparing to vote for Putin. 

The Komsomol movement, which at its prime boasted millions of members, was 
created to instill Communist values in Russians at an early age. One of its 
pioneers declared after the 1917 Revolution: 'Children, like soft wax, are 
very malleable and they should be moulded into good Communists.' 

Today the dwindling organisation continues to unite the country's remaining 
Communist youth (aged from 13 to 35), but these modern young Communists, no 
longer as pliable as they were in the aftermath of the Revolution, have no 
qualms about abandoning their leader in favour of the amorphous figure of 
Putin. 

Dmitry Dubovsky, 20, an engineering student and secretary of the Komsomol's 
Moscow branch, admitted Putin would get his vote. 'He is young, tough, 
energetic, educated and knows how to take decisions,' he said. 'Zyuganov 
represents the worst in our society. I don't like the way he looks, I don't 
like the way he talks. Every time I hear him on television I get irritated." 

The Komsomol defection followed higher-profile desertions. The magnetism of 
Putin's guaranteed victory has attracted a rival party, the Union of Right 
Forces, to endorse him - abandoning one ofits own leaders who is standing 
against Putin. And Moscow's Mayor, Yury Luzhkov, announced that his 
Fatherland movement was also ready to support Putin - under certain 
conditions. 

Last week Zyuganov travelled across Russia in a last-ditch attempt to boost 
his popularity. The latest stage of his panache-free campaign was a trip to a 
medical school in a radiation-polluted town in the Urals, where he tried to 
charm the women into voting for him - greeting every female student he met 
with an awkward grin, and the words: 'Hello, beautiful.' 

It was not a success. Irina Sharupova, 22, said: 'I don't think I'll be 
voting for him. His ideas are dying ideas. We don't need more dying.' 

Although he refuses publicly to admit defeat, Zyuganov knows he has no 
chance. Latest ratings put his support at about 20 per cent, way behind 
Putin's 58 per cent. 

During the last presidential race in 1996, Boris Yeltsin's advisers paid 
Zyuganov the compliment of demonising him and his party to motivate the 
electorate, characterising the election as a battle of Red versus White - a 
fight between Communist revival and liberal principles. This time, however, 
Zyuganov's party has become an irrelevance in Putin's unstoppable charge for 
the Kremlin. The well-organised Communist Party cannot help Zyuganov. Even 
Putin admitted recently that the Communists were 'the only really strong, 
really big party with a firm social base'. 

But Putin's appeal has flourished without such structural support - nurtured 
instead by the more powerful force of TV coverage. With Putin's every move as 
acting President guaranteed coverage, Zyuganov is unable to compete. 

The policy statements of Putin and Zyuganov have little to distinguish them - 
both playing on the need to restore Russia's greatness. Instead, the race is 
increasingly about personalities. Pitched against the stumbling, slurring 
Yeltsin, Zyuganov, 56, could present himself in a youthful, relatively sane, 
energetic mould. But now, alongside the relatively dynamic Putin, 47, he 
appears bumbling and without charisma. 

Communists will turn out to vote however foul the weather next Sunday, and 
Zyuganov may be able to comfort himself with the thought that Putin's 
supporters are seen as more complacent, and less likely to turn out on the 
day. But the comfort is a slim one. 

******

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