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March 21, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4185  4186 4187 




Johnson's Russia List
#4186
21 March 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com


[Note from David Johnson:
1. Donald Jensen: Putin's Rise Delays Constitutional Reform.
2. Newsweek: Bill Powell and Yevgenia Albats, The Man Who Would 
Be Czar. Will an ex-KGB man restore law and order, or order without 
law? What the rise of Putin says about the Russian soul. 

3. Reuters: USDA sees worse Russia feed grain shortage in 2000.
4. Interfax: CHECHEN CAMPAIGN IS NOT OVER, BANDITS WILL BE 
ELIMINATED - PUTIN.

5. Interfax: YABLOKO LEADER FAVORS STATE OF EMERGENCY IN GROZNY, 
SOME OTHER AREAS OF CHECHNYA.

6. The Times (UK): Vanora Bennett, Kremlin wives were murdered, 
raped, imprisoned or killed themselves.

7. New book: The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global 
Perspective by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer.

8. Moscow Times: Gordon Hahn, 'Revolution' Realism.
9. The Russia Journal: Michael Heath, Young reformers stir the 
crowd. Nemtsov warns of sorry fate if capital doesn’t come home.

10. Washington Post: David Hoffman, Miscalculations Paved Path 
To Chechen War.]



******


#1
From: "Donald Jensen" <JensenD@rferl.org>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 
Subject: Putin's Rise Delays Constitutional Reform


Putin's Rise Delays Constitutional Reform
By Donald Jensen
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty


Vladimir Putin's coming to power has sidelined proposals to reduce the
constitutional powers of the Russian presidency, a major reason for
Russia's current governance crisis. A Putin administration, in fact, would
be more likely to deepen the crisis by amending the constitution to further
strengthen presidential power. 


The Russian Constitution, ratified in December 1993, provides for an
extraordinarily strong chief executive with a weak legislature and
judiciary. Popular support stemmed from a desire to be permanently rid of
the stalemate with the parliament that had paralyzed the national
government for the previous two years and led to bloodshed on the Moscow
streets. The strong presidency was tailored for Boris Yeltsin, who many
liberals and Western governments believed to be the best guarantor of
economic and political reform. It also reflected Yeltsin's desire to
maximize his own political power and Russia's historical and cultural
preference for a strong leader. 


Despite formally strong presidential powers, the weakness of Russia's
institutions and the rule of law contributed to the high personalization of
authority and a chronic difficulty in implementing government decisions.
Yeltsin ruled largely by decree, signing more than 1000 per year, many of
which were largely ignored. On many issues Yeltsin ignored the elected
Duma, whose powers, budget, experience and professionalism were limited.
The government, nominally independent, was largely absorbed into the
presidential structures.


Most importantly, this imbalanced system allowed businessman, regional
leaders and many others to exert disproportionate pressure on the
presidential apparatus. Key government programs involving the transfer of
billions of dollars worth of state assets, such as privatization and the
1995 loans-for-shares auctions, were decided by presidential fiat with the
support of the so-called "oligarchs." Yeltsin's sprawling, unaccountable,
corrupt Presidential Administration, for example, not only ran a vast
business empire, but also acted as an advocate for favored leaders and
their programs. For most of his presidency Yeltsin tried to govern by
skillfully balancing these interests. During his final years in office,
however, an exhausted and infirm president was coopted by some of them.


Changing the constitution to address these problems would be one answer,
but amending it is difficult. As political scientist Robert Sharlet has
pointed out, the process is designed to be a highly public and visible
procedure requiring wide consensus which would confer the greatest
legitimacy on constitutional change. 


Nevertheless, there have been many proposals to scale back the presidency.
While some plans have suggested tinkering with succession procedures or
the power to declare and wage war, one ambitious blueprint called for a
parliamentary system in which the legislature would appoint the prime
minister and the cabinet; in another, the Duma would appoint the prime
minister with enhanced powers, with the prime minister picking the
government and the presidency scaled back; a third alternative would
maintain a strong, but diminished president, create a vice presidency and
give more autonomy to the government. The Duma would have he right to
appoint and remove the prime minister and his ministers. 


There have been three major attempts to go forward with these changes. 


The first was in reaction to Yeltsin's 1994 invasion of Chechnya but the
proposed amendments failed to gain the necessary two-thirds support in the
Duma.


The second effort began in 1997, this time in reaction to Yeltsin's health
problems. A broad coalition of parties, factions, and regional leaders
proposed a diverse series of amendments, including proposals addressing the
problem of presidential disability. Yeltsin resisted these proposals,
arguing that amending the constitution only a few years after it was
adopted would be premature. In the end, the parliament and the president
agreed on an antecedent law, passed in 1998, on the procedures for
constitutional amendment, but did not change the system itself.


The third attempt was triggered by the economic collapse of 1998. In an
effort to gain Duma approval of Viktor Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister,
Yeltsin signaled his willingness to consider amendments. A pact was
drafted, but Yeltsin backtracked when Chernomrydin's candidacy failed a
second time and compromise candidate Yevgeny Primakov was approved instead.
A subsequent effort by Primakov to revive the pact and later to draft a
new one in 1999 convinced Yeltsin that Primakov was too independent and the
Prime Minister was removed. Yeltsin conceded, however, that the
constitution needed revision, but only after the presidential elections in
2000.


Putin's interim presidency, a product of this system, has stopped the
momentum for downsizing the executive branch. The presidential succession
was less a genuine transfer of power than the final act of a months-long
drama orchestrated by the political and business interests to find a
successor to Yeltsin who would protect their interests. To represent its
interests in the legislature, the Kremlin created the Unity party, in
reality far less a political party than a coalition of governors, with
shallow roots in the society, and dependent on the executive branch for
their viability. The fact that Putin is both acting president and prime
minister during the three-month transition further weakens the other
federal structures. 


In recent weeks, moreover, Putin has hinted he may try to reverse the
country's decline by seeking additional powers. He has supported extending
the term of a Russian presidency from four to seven years. The Kremlin has
also raised again the idea of directly appointing Russia's governors --
their popular election, beginning in the mid-1990s, was a major facto
contributing to the ebbing of authority from the federal center. 


Even stronger formal powers, however, is unlikely to solve Russia's
political problems. More important would be to recast the executive's
relationship to the regions and the rest of the federal government by
building coalitions to ensure more effective governance and more lasting
popular support. Power sharing agreements that fell short of actually
amending the constitution, but which all parties observed, would also help
establish the ground rules of political behavior. Such rules characterize
healthy constitutional systems. These steps would require, however,
avoidance of strong-armed tactics and less reliance on the oligarchs and
other special interests. During his interim presidency, at least, Putin
has been unwilling, or unable to act in this direction.


*******


#2
Newsweek
March 27, 2000
[for personal use only]
The Man Who Would Be Czar 
Will an ex-KGB man restore law and order, or order without law? What the rise 
of Putin says about the Russian soul. 
By Bill Powell and Yevgenia Albats


It is the winter of 1999. Boris Yeltsin, aging and ill, decides he has had 
enough. He and his family are hounded by allegations of corruption; his 
country, in the midst of a disastrous economic decline, is at war again in 
Chechnya. On the eve of the new millennium, he suddenly resigns. His 
replacement is a tough, faceless KGB apparatchik about whom almost nothing is 
known. Nothing--except, it would soon emerge, that he reveres the KGB, never 
resigned from the Communist Party, believes that snitches in the Soviet era 
were patriots and says a strong state is in Russia's "genetic code." Shortly 
after taking over, a Russian journalist is arrested in Chechnya for reporting 
bad news about the war, and the new president calls him "a traitor."
Four years ago, just after the last Russian presidential election, no one 
would have believed it. Back then, a scenario like the one that has recently 
unfolded in Moscow would have sounded like the first chapter of a Frederick 
Forsyth thriller, not the stuff of Foreign Service cables to Foggy Bottom. 
Vladimir Putin's rise to the brink of the Russian presidency--he will most 
likely be elected overwhelmingly this Sunday--has been so swift, and so 
unexpected, that Washington and the rest of the world have been caught 
flat-footed. Everyone is still reading from the old script. Secretary of 
State Madeleine Albright calls Putin "one of the leading reformers." 
President Clinton dismisses any comparisons between Russia's stomping of 
Chechnya and Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Publicly, at 
least, the West has decided to act as if little has changed--Boris the 
democrat has anointed Putin as his successor, and therefore everything must 
be OK.


A lot has changed. Russia's next president has few reform credentials, and he 
may not even be a democrat. But nor is he a dictator yearning for a return to 
Stalin-era repression. Nine years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 
Putin's expressed desire for the Kremlin to restore order in Russia puts him 
smack in the middle of his country's mainstream. Putin will be elected 
Russia's next president less because of what he has done as prime minister or 
acting president than because of who he is. His approval rating remains at 55 
percent not only because his war in Chechnya is popular. Putin is the Russian 
Everyman made good--sort of a Soviet Horatio Alger: plucky Vladimir, who
comes 
of age in the Brezhnev era, joins the KGB, works hard and ends up being 
president of his country. He strikes just the right chords of nationalism, 
speaks to Russian pride and, in Chechnya at least, backs up his words with 
action. Who better, most Russians now feel, to clean up the mess Boris 
Yeltsin has left behind than a competent, no-nonsense former KGB man?


Putin was born to a poor working-class family in Leningrad (now St. 
Petersburg) in 1952. An only child, he, like millions of other Russians, grew 
up in what is called a kommunalka (communal apartment), sharing a bathroom 
and a windowless kitchen with several other families. He was a street kid, "a 
hooligan, not a Pioneer," or a Soviet Boy Scout, he says in a new book-length 
interview, which NEWSWEEK excerpts in the following pages. Thanks more to a 
kind teacher than his parents, Putin eventually found discipline in a sport 
that has become a lifelong passion--judo. "Sport is sport," he says, "only 
when it is about sweat, blood and hard work."


A movie glorifying Soviet spies in World War II sparked teenage dreams of a 
career in the KGB. He even walked into a KGB office and asked how to sign up. 
Putin was politely told to attend law school first. He did what he was told. 
After graduating from the legal department at Leningrad's state university, 
he joined the KGB in his hometown. In 1984 he went to the KGB's intelligence 
academy and, the next year, was posted to Dresden in what was then East 
Germany. Putin mainly gathered political intelligence, and had a decent but 
undistinguished career.


Near the end of his tour, Putin witnessed the crackup of communism. He 
watched as East Germans, after the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, 
stormed secret-police buildings; he says the demonstrations were "annoying." 
The loyal servant of the Soviet state was most angry, he says, at the lack of 
help from Moscow: "I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. 
It was clear that the Union was sick."


To the extent that Putin has any democratic credentials, they were 
established in the next few years. In 1990, a mutual friend introduced him to 
the late Anatoly Sobchak, one of the leaders of Russia's democracy movement. 
Soon Sobchak would become St. Petersburg's first democratically elected 
mayor, and Putin followed him to city hall. His work there got him noticed in 
Moscow and, in 1996, powerful Yeltsin aide Pavel Borodin--now a central
figure 
in a scandal involving construction contracts on Kremlin-owned 
property--recruited Putin as his deputy. His rise in Moscow was astonishingly 
quick. Colleagues say Putin was hard-working, capable, appeared to have no 
ambitions of his own and was fiercely loyal to the Yeltsin clan. That 
impressed the president's two closest advisers: former chief of staff 
Valentin Yumashev and Tatyana Dyachenko, his daughter. In July 1998, Yeltsin 
named Putin head of the FSB, one of the KGB's successor agencies. In August 
1999, Yeltsin named him prime minister, and on Dec. 31, acting president.


Putin has never run for office, never won a single vote; but at the end of 
Yeltsin's tumultuous nine years in power, not many people in Russia care. 
Washington might want a reformer in the Kremlin; Russians quite plainly do 
not. When Chechen rebels invaded Dagestan in Russia's northern Caucuses last 
August, Prime Minister Putin hit back fiercely. Using the street language of 
his youth, he said Russian troops would track down the insurgents and "blow 
them away even in their outhouses." A ferocious assault into Chechnya 
followed and continues today. Putin's tough image--burnished by the war--has 
made him immensely popular among ordinary voters, particularly those who live 
outside Moscow. "He has proved he is a genuine muzhik [a real man]," says 
Aleksandr Oslon, head of the Public Opinion Foundation, a polling group in 
Moscow. "He is like a leader of a street gang on whom you can rely."


Running on his tough image and little else, Putin allows people to see him as 
they wish. Liberals from the St. Petersburg days, like Anatoly Chubais, now 
believe that Putin is a pragmatist who knows there is no choice but to 
continue on the path Yeltsin at least started down: to private property and a 
market economy protected by the rule of law. In fact, his liberal supporters 
argue his popularity gives him the political elbow room to do just that.


Putin's backers insist there is nothing to fear. He will, they say, restore 
law and order to a chaotic, crime-ridden country. Skeptics worry he will 
restore order, without law. In post-Soviet Russia, that is a very fine line 
to tread. In the book of interviews just out in Russia, Putin makes it clear 
that in his heart, he is comfortable with the use of force. "You have to hit 
first," he says at one point, "and hit so hard that your opponent will not 
get to his feet." He has certainly lived up to that philosophy in Chechnya. 
Where else--and to what end--Putin will might apply it in the future is what 
the world will soon find out.


*******


#3
USDA sees worse Russia feed grain shortage in 2000

WASHINGTON, March 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. Agriculture Department staff in 
Moscow forecast the shortage of feed grain in Russia to worsen in 2000, 
according to a report released on Monday. 


The USDA said trade sources estimate that Russia would need between 30 and 33 
million tonnes of feed grain to maintain livestock production at current 
levels. 


"The feed situation in this year is gloomy," the report said. "Low grain 
stocks and structural problems in the Russian grain sector, domestically 
available supplies are not expected to increase in 2000." 


For the marketing year 1999/00, which started in October 1999 and ends 
September 30, 2000, USDA forecasts actual Russia consumption of feed grain at 
approximately 25.1 million tonnes, almost 15 percent lower than the previous 
year's consumption of 28.6 million tonnes, and 5 to 8 million tonnes less 
than needed for livestock production. 


"Reflecting this, grain prices have shot up on average of 14 percent since 
December and are expected to increase by as much as 20 percent," the report 
said. 


The source of the problem, the USDA predicts, is that most Russian feed mills 
"will run out during March because of high prices, regional trade barriers 
and the non-delivery of grain contracts." 


*******


#4
CHECHEN CAMPAIGN IS NOT OVER, BANDITS WILL BE ELIMINATED - PUTIN 


GROZNY. March 20 (Interfax) - Russia's anti-terrorist campaign in
Chechnya is not over, acting President Vladimir Putin told
correspondents at the Khankala military base on Monday.
He attended a departure ceremony for the 331st guard paratroop
regiment, which is leaving Chechnya for home.
"This is the last war in Chechnya," Putin said. But "as soon as we
leave, the enslavement of the Chechen people will begin and a bridgehead
for attacks on Russia will be built. Russia cannot allow that to happen
and won't, it is absolutely ruled out."
"We have the choice of either finishing off the bandits here, where
everything has started, or to leave and to wait for them on other
Russian territory. We'd better do it here," Putin said.
"There are no winners or losers in this campaign," Putin noted. "We
can regard the bandits and international terrorists in Chechnya as
losers, but their relation to this land is ephemeral."
As for the future of rebel groups scattered in the highlands, the
acting President referred to the federal amnesty bill. "We have not only
adopted the bill but also have started to implement it. Now it is up to
those whom the bill concerns. The ones, who have not stained their hands
with the blood of Russian nationals, have not killed or robbed, have a
choice," Putin said. "We are ready for negotiations with such people to
solve the problems of the territory we are now on."
"There are still some who prefer to run away and to hide in caves.
Let them hide, but it is not my fault if anyone fails to do it. Those
who announce solidarity with the bandits or think they are bandits
themselves will be cut off," Putin said, adding that such people will
face special operations by the police and the army.


*******


#5
YABLOKO LEADER FAVORS STATE OF EMERGENCY IN GROZNY, SOME OTHER AREAS OF
CHECHNYA


MOSCOW. March 20 (Interfax) - Presidential candidate and leader of
the Yabloko movement Grigory Yavlinsky favors a state of emergency in
Chechen areas lacking local administrations, among them "Grozny, a town
wiped off the face of the earth".
"The state of emergency is necessary to bring the whole situation
(in Chechnya) into the legal channel," Yavlinsky said at a news
conference in Moscow on Monday.
In the opinion of Yavlinsky, direct presidential supervision over
Chechnya will require the adoption of a related bill.
Stability in the Northern Caucasus can be attained only if the use
of force is combined with political settlement, the presidential
candidate said. "I have been campaigning for such formula for seven
months," he said. "The country has paid a huge price with many human
lives for that lack of formula."
"The liquidation of terrorist groups and bandits is an absolute
imperative that is not open for debate. However, it is also necessary to
normalize the life of civilians in Chechnya and to provide for political
settlement," Yavlinsky said.


*******


#6
The Times (UK)
20 March 2000
[for personal use only]
Kremlin wives were murdered, raped, imprisoned or killed themselves 
By Vanora Bennett 
A Russian leader's wife's lot is not a happy one, and no one seems more 
acutely aware of that, these days, than Lyudmila Putin. Her husband is the 
runaway favourite in next weekend's presidential election, yet the blonde Mrs 
Putin, whose good looks and good fortune are undermined by her Eeyore-ish 
tendency to be happy only when sad, insists she cried all day when she found 
out that Boris Yeltsin was vacating the Kremlin to make way for her Volodya. 
Why? 


"I knew this was the end of our personal life," she says mournfully. "At 
least till the election. Perhaps for four more years." 


Mrs Putin has a point. Her two daughters have been whisked out of their 
exclusive German school in Moscow, where they might have become targets for 
kidnappers. The future first family's life is, even now, being lived behind 
bullet-proof glass and the muscly backs of bodyguards; their future will be 
an endless exercise in protocol, paranoia and lack of privacy. 


Yet we should ration our sympathy. Almost every other woman who has taken up 
residence in the Kremlin deserves more pity than Lyudmila Putin lavished on 
herself last December 31. 


Earlier this century, any Kremlin wife who attracted the least public 
attention was doomed: murdered, betrayed, raped, imprisoned or simply 
humiliated until she killed herself. Lenin's wife, the doughty revolutionary 
Nadezhda Krupskaya, had to stand by while her husband dallied with Inessa 
Armand, a curvaceous French-born exponent of free love. 


But her burden was light compared with that of Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda 
Alliluyeva. She is believed to have killed herself in 1932 after her husband 
poured abuse and cigarette butts on her head at a Kremlin dinner. Whispered 
alternative explanations abound - that Stalin killed her or that she 
committed suicide having discovered he was really her father. 


Stalin's wartime Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, gave his master his 
beautiful Jewish wife Polina as a mistress. That did not save Polina: Stalin 
sent her to the Gulag as a Zionist agent while her husband meekly stood by. 
Only after the dictator's death did Molotov, asked what reward he would like 
for years of service, dare reply: "Bring back Polina." 


But the largest number of female victims was culled by Lavrenty Beria, head 
of Stalin's security organisation, a bogeyman rapist who haunted the 
exclusive schools around the Kremlin where his colleagues' daughters studied. 
With one gauntleted hand, Beria's aide and driver, Colonel Sarkisov, would 
haul a pretty schoolgirl out of the playground, before driving her off to the 
Lubyanka prison to be violated by his master. Only Beria's wife Nina refused 
to believe her husband had slept with 760 women. She insisted the whole army 
of "lovers" were secret service agents, being debriefed. 


Naturally enough, by the late Soviet era, a tradition of fearful female 
reticence was established inside Kremlin walls. Victoria Brezhnev, whose 
husband cheated on her from the moment of marriage, escaped into the kitchen 
and shut her ears to tales of his amorous and military escapades. While he 
invaded Afghanistan, she made gooseberry jam. Russians, who remain suspicious 
of female emancipation, still feel Mrs Brezhnev was doing the decent thing. 


Bucking that trend, even in relatively gentle modern times, has only 
guaranteed more public rage. In the 1990s, the woman Russians most loved to 
hate was Boris Yeltsin's high-profile daughter and "image-maker" Tatyana. 


Was she having affairs with any (or all) the Kremlin insiders trying to get 
her father's ear? Russians wondered with grim pleasure. And was she making 
millions from peddling her influence? 


A decade earlier, pretty, witty Raisa Gorbachev, who first broke the Soviet 
tradition of female invisibility and let herself be seen in public with her 
husband, won the loathing of the masses for nothing worse than dressing well 
and visibly enjoying herself. Only last year, when she was on her deathbed 
with leukaemia and, at last, obviously suffering, did the Russian public 
begin to feel it might have been a little churlish. One of the notices pinned 
to her funeral flowers in Moscow read: "Farewell, and forgive us." 


But Mrs Putin need not fear a similar fate. She is the perfect helpmeet for a 
KGB husband with expressionless boiled-fish eyes who does not drink, smoke, 
lose his temper (except with Chechens) or talk much. 


A provincial ex-air hostess, she is a meek soul who dresses simply and never 
questions her husband. Like him, Mrs Putin is attractive to Russian voters 
precisely because of her disciplined dullness; her charm lies in her being so 
extraordinarily ordinary that no one will notice her enough to hate her. 


******


#7
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000
Subject: Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity
From: "Julie Billings" <Julie_Billings@pupress.princeton.edu>


Below you will find a description of a new title published by Princeton
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Johnson's List. Thank you very much.
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Princeton University Press


The Tenacity of Ethnicity
A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective
By Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer


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Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with
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Balzer brings to life the saga of the Khanty over several centuries. She 
analyzes trends in Siberian ethnic interaction that strongly affected 
minority lives: colonization, Christianization, revitalization, 
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and state politics, including recent devastations stemming from the energy 
industry's land thefts. Balzer documents changes that might seem to 
foreshadow the demise of indigenous ethnicity. Yet the final chapters reveal 
ways some Khanty have preserved cultural values and dignity in crisis. 
Khanty identity has varied with the politics of individuals, groups, and 
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*******


#8
Moscow Times
March 21, 2000 
'Revolution' Realism 
By Gordon M. Hahn 
Gordon M. Hahn is the coordinator of special Russian research programs at the 
Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He submitted this comment to The 
Moscow Times. 


The optimist who expected a quick consolidation of democracy and the market 
in Russia and the pessimist who argues that Russia is lost both have gotten 
it wrong. Unrealistic expectations have led to bitter disappointment and to 
recent calls for vigilance in the face of a supposed resurgent nationalism. 
These are the fruits of a grand misunderstanding about the nature of the 
"Second Russian Revolution" and Russia's transformation from Soviet 
totalitarian rule. 


The 1991 Soviet revolution was neither a peaceful revolution from below, like 
Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, nor a negotiated transition to democracy, 
as in Poland and Hungary. Nor has it been like the violent first Russian 
revolutions against tsarist autocracy or the Chinese revolution won by 
political movements organized in "councils of workers, peasants and soldiers" 
rooted in society and independent from the state. 


The essence of the Soviet/Russian transformation has been a bureaucratic, 
state-led revolution from above. Opportunistic Communist Party members led by 
Boris Yeltsin, elected chairman of the new RSFSR Congress of People's 
Deputies in June 1990, and state apparatchiks who defected from the reform 
camp led by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev were instrumental in 
overthrowing the communist regime. Soviet Party bureaucrats and younger 
members of its nomenklatura ruling class won control in mid-1990 over the 
core republic in the Soviet Union - the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist 
Republic - and carried out a creeping bureaucratic revolution against the 
central Soviet party-state machine. Their weapons were RSFSR state 
institutions, parliamentary laws, presidential decrees and administrative 
orders, not the marches, strikes and bullets of revolution from below. 


The RSFSR Supreme Soviet declared Russia sovereign in June 1990. Russian law 
then transferred all property, financial and natural resources in Russia from 
Soviet to RSFSR jurisdiction. The Central Bank and new quasi-commercial banks 
destroyed the Soviet centralized financial and banking systems. By winter, 
the country took the first steps toward establishing its own presidential, 
KGB and military institutions. 


Upon election as president in July 1991, Yeltsin decreed the removal of Party 
organizations from all state institutions and enterprises in Russia. During 
the August 1991 coup, Yeltsin placed under RSFSR control all Soviet 
institutions, including the KGB and military. When the coup failed, the Party 
was banned, effectively abolishing the old regime. With the Party gone, 
Russia abolished or expropriated the Soviet state, ministry by ministry. With 
the regime and state apparatus gone, there was little reason for the 
republics to maintain the union. 


The Soviet Union was tossed into history's dustbin. Throughout this period, 
the masses were rarely mobilized, but when they were it was most often to 
defend revolutionaries from above, not to overthrow the remnants of the 
partocratic regime. This explains the limited extent of social revolution and 
the lack of violence during the fall of the Soviet regime. This also 
explainsmuch of the troubled development of democracy and the market in 
post-Soviet Russia. The co-opting of Party and state apparatchiks and entire 
structures by the revolutionary Russian regime has left the nomenklatura in 
power along with its limited understanding of and weak commitment to building 
political and economic institutions based on the rule of law. 


Acting President Vladimir Putin is typical of Russia's revolutionary 
bureaucrats, having defected from a key Soviet institution, the KGB, in 1990 
to the administration of Leningrad's Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Thus, state 
institutions are politically divided, diminishing the cohesion needed for 
concerted revolutionary economic transformation. This contributed to 
undemocratic, uneconomical insider nomenklatura privatization and cemented 
the relationship among corrupt bureaucrats and criminalized semi-private and 
private financial-industrial groups. 


The expropriation of the old regime's structures has also prolonged old 
operating procedures, preserving the bureaucracy's strong role in the 
economy. The result is a weak state unable to defend its own interests or 
those of society from the preferences of bureaucrats and oligarchs, as well 
as an inefficient state that does too many things and does them all poorly. 


The limited mobilization of the masses, while it may have helped avert the 
violence associated with revolution, stunted the development of civil 
society, especially the formation of political parties and trade unions that 
defend societal interests. The consequence of these limitations in Russia's 
revolution is an unstable, corrupt, oligarchic and almost anarchic 
quasi-democracy and market. 


If Russia's revolution had been properly understood, there would have been 
more realism regarding the prospects for even mid-term progress toward the 
consolidation of democracy and the market. Because of the limited nature of 
elite and institutional change under revolution from above, the 
institutionalization of democracy and the market should have been understood 
as a decades-long process, greatly dependent on generational change and the 
slow grind of cultural transformation and nonviolent institutional change. 


An appreciation for the duration of such a project might have suggested that 
foreign assistance target institution-building on behalf of the polity, the 
market and civil society, reforming the courts, developing small business 
outside Moscow and funding public associations rather than state structures. 
Having failed to seize the historical moment and having ensured a more 
drawn-out period for development, the challenge now is not to react to every 
fleeting political change in Moscow. It is time to hunker down to the 
business of building civil institutions and exploiting avenues for expanded 
cooperation as long as they last. 


******


#9
The Russia Journal
March 20-26, 2000
Young reformers stir the crowd
Nemtsov warns of sorry fate if capital doesn’t come home
By MICHAEL HEATH

If foreign investors in Russia could select the deputies that comprised the
majority in Russia's third State Duma, they most likely would choose clones
of one man ­ Boris Nemtsov.


At a forum last Tuesday that brought together representatives of foreign
businesses in Russia with State Duma deputies, Nemtsov shone out among the
speakers. Indeed, at one point, the former first deputy prime minister was
interrupted when the audience broke into applause in response to his
analysis of the reason for huge capital flight from Russia.


Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces (SPS), told the
audience that encouraging capital back to Russia required no magic measures
­ other than ensuring an attractive environment in the country.


"If we try to regulate everything [in an attempt to halt capital flight] we
will find that even more money leaves the country," Nemtsov said. "The
money goes where it’s best for the money."


That aside, Nemtsov said foreign investment would not increase in Russia
until international businessmen started to see some of Russia's wealthy
elite bringing their money back into the country. He suggested acting
President Vladimir Putin might be able to try an "administrative measure"
to encourage this.


"Putin will have an enormous amount of authority after the elections, and
he could easily call in the oligarchs and say: 'Dear friends, if over the
next six months you don't bring back $200 million to Russia, then you’d
better watch out,'" Nemtsov said.


He added that most of the oligarchs in Russia who have significant funds
abroad want to live in this country.


"I think Putin could say to them: 'bring $10 million back into the country
this month. You can spend it on whatever you like ­ build a hotel, or
invest it into the automotive industry, but bring it back now,'" Nemstsov
said. "If he persuades them, then others will soon follow [in bringing
money back]."


But if Nemtsov inspired the audience about what Russia could do, the deputy
leader of the Yabloko Duma faction, Sergei Ivanenko, brought the audience
back to reality with a thud ­ as he spoke frankly about the situation in
Russia today and its prospects in the near term.


Ivanenko was not at all optimistic about Russia's chances of pulling out of
its current economic hole, and he criticized Nemstov, saying he was one of
the leading figures in an administration that oversaw the corrupt system
that has come to dominate decision-making in, and the economy of, Russia.


But Ivanenko also had some positive points to make. Notably, he insisted
Yabloko would continue to pursue the cause of productionsharing agreements,
particularly in the oil industry, so that each individual case did not
require Duma approval.


One of the more poignant comments from investors came from American
business consultant, Thomas Nastas. He said one of the most critical issues
confronting Russia was the concentration of wealth in certain areas of the
country.


"Right now 60 percent of wealth is concentrated inside the garden ring [in
Moscow]," Nastas said. "There is perhaps 10 percent not far outside the
ring and then another 15 percent in St. Petersburg. That means 85 percent
of the country's wealth is concentrated in small areas."


He explained that he has lived in both Volgograd and Vladivostok and
believes that some way must be found to bring development and some
prosperity to the regions.


"This is a huge problem. If something is not done, then Russia is going to
wind up a country of 10 million people, and this needs to be discussed,"
Nastas said.


But perhaps the sense of what needs to be done in Russia was best summed up
by Nemtsov, who recalled the famous poem by Tyutchev saying one cannot
understand Russia with the mind alone, one has to believe in the country.


"I think that although it is a beautiful poem, we now need to think
differently. The time has come to really apply our minds to Russia's
problems and discuss ideas and, unlike what Tyutchev said, now we really
must apply our intellect to Russia," Nemtsov said.


********


#10
Washington Post
March 20, 2000
[for personal use only]
Miscalculations Paved Path To Chechen War
By David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service


MOSCOW ­ A year ago this spring, Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya's first elected
president, urgently demanded a meeting with Russian President Boris Yeltsin
to bolster his own dwindling power and warn of the threat of another costly
war with Russia.


Over the next months, Maskhadov, the silver-haired former Soviet artillery
officer who had led the Chechen rebellion in the mid-1990s, made repeated
entreaties for an audience at the Kremlin. But he never got a meeting.


Today, Maskhadov is in hiding, branded a terrorist by Russia. The Chechen
capital of Grozny lies in ruins from Russian shells. The second war in
Chechnya in six years has left thousands dead on both sides, completely
redrawn the political landscape in Russia and touched off new criticism
from the West.


The story of how Russia and Chechnya slid back into war has been the
subject of debate and intense speculation here and abroad. The outbreak of
hostilities coincided with the unexpected rise of acting President Vladimir
Putin as Yeltsin's hand-picked successor, and led to speculation that the
Kremlin engineered the war in order to propel Putin to power, or at least
influence the March 26 presidential elections.


However, a reconstruction of key turning points on the road to war in
Chechnya shows Russian officials and Chechen fighters were driven by a
series of miscalculations, rather than by a calculated ploy. Russian
analysts, military specialists and others interviewed for this article
suggested both Russia and the Chechen fighters bungled badly as they
responded to escalating tensions. The Chechen leaders and warlords, now
battered and in hiding, have yet to give their side of the story.


According to Russian accounts, Putin accelerated a plan for a major
crackdown against Chechnya that had been drawn up months earlier. Moreover,
when Putin became prime minister last Aug. 9, he inherited what he has
called a legacy of Russian neglect of Chechnya. Russian officials had
staked their hopes on Maskhadov bringing order to the separatist region,
but in the months before the war, he lost control. The growing chaos was
thrown into high relief for Moscow when a Russian general was kidnapped
last March after Maskhadov had ensured his safety.


On the Chechen side, rebel leaders launched an attack against neighboring
Dagestan last August in the mistaken belief that they would encounter weak
Russian resistance and spark an Islamic uprising. The uprising didn't
materialize, and the incursions were repelled.


As both sides edged toward a wider conflict, the bombing of several
apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities in September, killing nearly
300 people, drove Russian leaders over the edge. Moscow has blamed the
Chechens for the bombings, but there is no proof to substantiate the
allegations and no one has claimed responsibility. The precise intentions
and identity of the bombers are unknown, but the result was unequivocal ­
the bombings created a mood of war hysteria in Russia.


Was the war inevitable? Many Russian analysts say that in dealing with a
power vacuum in Chechnya since it won de facto independence after the
1994-96 conflict, Russian leaders were hobbled by their own weaknesses,
including the residual trauma ­ the "Chechnya syndrome" ­ of the first war.
As Chechnya sank into anarchy, Russia was passive until it was too late,
according to many people interviewed for this article.


"It was a whole chain of missed opportunities," said Emil Pain, a former
Kremlin adviser on Chechnya and now director of the Center for
Ethnopolitical and Regional Research here. He recalled that Russia and
Chechnya had signed a treaty two years earlier. "What was done to take
advantage of this peace? Nothing! Everything was done to the opposite."


Turning Points


A turning point toward the second war came March 5, 1999, at the Grozny
airport.


Gen. Gennady Shpigun, the Russian Interior Ministry representative in
Chechnya, boarded a Tu-134 passenger plane for Moscow. Masked gunmen
grabbed Shpigun and bundled him off the plane and into a waiting car.


The kidnapping outraged officials in Moscow, but it was not unusual. In the
aftermath of the first Chechen war, hostage-taking became a flourishing
business as Chechnya's economy hit bottom. Foreign aid workers, clergymen,
journalists, law enforcement officials, soldiers and bystanders were sucked
into the trade in people.


The kidnappings showed that "Russia was not capable of exercising any
control or influence over Chechnya," said retired Maj. Vyacheslav Izmailov,
a 26-year veteran of the military who served in Chechnya and since has made
a specialty out of trying to negotiate freedom for hostages there.


The constant hostage-taking "demonstrated the impotence of Russia's power,"
he added. "It was Russian inactivity, and impotence, that was a cause of
the war."


Izmailov said he spoke with Maskhadov, Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev
and others in Chechnya. "They thought that Russia was lying down, and they
could do anything," he said.


In Moscow, Boris Berezovsky, a business tycoon who was closely connected
with the Kremlin staff around Yeltsin, succeeded in winning the release of
some Russian hostages through direct contacts with the Chechens. Berezovsky
has said he has been in frequent telephone contact with Basayev, the
Chechen warlord who was a rival to Maskhadov and later led the incursion
into Dagestan. Others have charged that Berezovsky sent money to the
Chechens as well.


When the Shpigun kidnapping occurred, Sergei Stepashin, then the interior
minister, had already been through a painful personal experience with
Chechnya. He was involved in planning the disastrous first war that ended
with a Russian withdrawal, and had been fired by Yeltsin after Basayev led
a rebel raid on a hospital in 1995 in which more than 100 civilians were
killed.


Shpigun's kidnapping, despite Maskhadov's assurances, was "over the top,"
Stepashin recalled. At the time, Stepashin warned of tough measures against
Chechnya if Shpigun were not released in three days. The ultimatum was
ignored, but Moscow remained cautious about leading the country into
another Chechen war.


In an interview, Stepashin said he started planning to cordon off the
region after the Shpigun kidnapping, a plan that envisioned Russian troops
taking northern of Chechnya all the way to the Terek River. The plan, as it
was often discussed, would allow Russia to launch strikes from the north
deeper into Chechnya to destroy the rebels' "bases," according to Stepashin.


One of those in on the discussions last summer was Putin. But Putin
recalled later that the cordon alone was "pointless and technically
impossible," apparently because of Chechnya's rugged terrain.


Putin's role leading up to the war is opaque, but as head of the Federal
Security Service, Russia's domestic successor to the KGB, he attended key
meetings on Chechnya, officials said. The Dagestan raid came just at the
moment of a power shift in Moscow, and the link between the events has
never been clear.


Just two days after Basayev's fighters crossed the border Aug. 7 into a
district of Dagestan, Stepashin was fired and and replaced by Putin.
Stepashin said he did not think the timing was connected to Chechnya but
rather to his perceived weakness as a potential successor to Yeltsin; the
parliamentary elections were looming and Yeltsin's critics were growing
stronger.


Putin, in responding to the Dagestan incursion, turned for support to
Russian military generals who were eager to avenge their defeat in the
1994-96 war. Putin invoked the domino theory to assert the Dagestan attack
threatened Russia disintegration. "I was struck dumb" by the consequences,
Putin said in a recent interview with Russian journalists published as an
election campaign book. "It would have spread to Dagestan, the whole
Caucasus would have been taken away, it's clear . . .. Russia as a state .
. . [would] cease to exist."


Chechnya Unravels


Maskhadov had signed a treaty with Yeltsin in 1997, but two years later had
little to show for it. He was under intense pressure from his rivals.
Basayev, who led the successful rebel campaign in the earlier war, had quit
Maskhadov's government and was increasingly implacable. He was joined by a
warlord named Khattab, the Jordanian leader of the radical Wahhabi Islamic
sect who had come to Chechnya in 1994 for the first war.


According to several officials, Russia's leadership tried to help
Maskhadov, and for several years quietly supplied him with weapons and
money. Interior Ministry troops were training some of Maskhadov's men in
special operations as well, and Russian officials sent cash for salaries
and other purposes to Chechnya, although they feared the money was being
stolen.


However, the Kremlin strategy to help Maskhadov was doomed. He was unable
to rein in the kidnappers or warlords. Several assassination attempts were
made against him and he was saved twice, Stepashin said, by an armored
limousine Russia had provided him.


Maskhadov continued to pin his hopes on the meeting with Yeltsin that never
materialized. He and Stepashin last met on June 11 in Ingushetia, the
Russian region bordering Chechnya to the west. Stepashin recalled that he
implored Maskhadov in the meeting to "separate yourself from the bandits."
If he did not, Stepashin said he told Maskhadov, "then you are finished."


After a band of Chechens besieged an Interior Ministry outpost in Dagestan
in late May, Russia took a step that it had not considered since the end of
the first war ­ helicopter gunships fired 10 missiles on a rebel base along
the border. Stepashin said 44 ministry troops were killed in border clashes
in early 1999.


In this mountainous region, Basayev and Khattab had built fortified bases,
according to Anton Surikov, a former Russian military intelligence officer
who is now staff director of a Russian parliamentary committee. Surikov has
known Basayev since the rebel leader led a group of Chechen volunteers in
Abkhazia's war for independence from Georgia.


Surikov said Russian officials had indications that Basayev was planning
something on the Dagestani border. "It was not being hidden," he said.
"There was a certain panic here. There was a feeling of complete
helplessness."


A senior Kremlin official close to Yeltsin said in an interview in August,
"The dates [of the Basayev assault] were definitely known several days
before." But, he added, "the . . . area is hilly and difficult to guard.
There are hundreds of different paths, plenty of canyons, mountain paths.
There is no border, actually. . . . That is why it is not possible just to
line up soldiers to guard the border."


Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Moscow and a military analyst, said the Russian leadership was
conflicted about what to do in Chechnya. "Part of Russia was supporting
Maskhadov and another part was against that," he recalled. "There were two
theories. One said we had to support Maskhadov, and the other said this is
the surest way to see Chechnya become independent ­ let all the scorpions
in the can kill each other."


Basayev's reasons for staging the dramatic cross-border incursion, and his
reading of how Russia would respond, are not clear. He declared at the time
that he hoped to trigger an uprising in Dagestan, rallying support for the
creation of an Islamic state. But it was a futile effort. The raid
triggered alarms in Dagestan, which is a mosaic of ethnic groups, and many
villages began arming themselves to fight the Chechens. Eventually, Russian
troops beat them back.


According to Stepashin, the planning for a crackdown on Chechnya was
already underway. He said the Russian authorities had intelligence in June
of a possible attack, and "we were planning to implement these measures"
for a cordon around Chechnya "irrespective of Basayev's assault."


Stepashin said he chaired a meeting of the Kremlin security council in July
and "we all came to the conclusion that there was a huge hole on our border
which won't be closed if we don't [advance] to the Terek. It was a purely
military decision."


Stepashin said that after his dismissal, Putin merely picked up the plans
he had put in place and continued with them.


"We were planning to reach the Terek River in August or September,"
Stepashin recently told the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. "So this was
going to happen, even if there had been no explosions in Moscow. I was
working actively on tightening borders with Chechnya, preparing for an
active offensive. So Vladimir Putin has not invented anything new here."


******




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