May 29, 2000    
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Johnson's Russia List
#4332
29 May 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

*******

The New Republic
June 5, 2000
[for personal use only]
What stands in the way of Russia is Russia.
Putin and Other Parasites
By Stephen Kotkin (kotkin@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)
Stephen Kotkin chronicles Putin's fight against his biggest obstacle: Russia itself. 
STEPHEN KOTKIN is director of Russian studies at Princeton University and the author of a forthcoming book on the Soviet collapse, 1970-2000. 

First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait
by Vladimir Putin with Natalya Gevorkian, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolsenikov, translated by Catherine Fitzpatrick
Public Affairs, 207 pp.
(Click here to buy this book.)

Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life
by Leon Aron
St. Martin's Press, 934 pp.
(Click here to buy this book.)

Russia's Politics of Uncertainty
by Mary McAuley
(Cambridge University Press, 351 pp
(Click here to buy this book.)

Provintsial [A Provincial]
by Boris Nemtsov
(Vagrius, 149 pp.)

I. 

People say that there are two Russias: Moscow and the rest of the country. This is certainly the view of those who have not grasped that elite Moscow is itself two distinct worlds, the populous apparatchik nation (notably including the tycoons, who bleed into the executive power) and the rest. And even more overlooked is the fact that the insiders, too, divide into the mass of interconnected "natives" and the parvenus. Someday the history of the years since 1985 in Russia will be written not in terms of programs and parties, which exist primarily in the journalistic accounts of them, but in terms of the stunning influx of outsiders into Moscow's elite circles. 

The newcomers, whatever their ostensible political ideology, acquired fancy Moscow apartments and the lifetime use of state dachas; and they did whatever it took to get their children into the right schools, or to set themselves up in "private" business. Yet even the highest ranked provincials in Moscow are nothing compared with the capital's natives, because they lack the extensive familial, academic, and professional networks that transgress ministerial boundaries and outlast the rule of individuals. Formal office in Russia means little without cronyism and clientelism. 

In a system in which economics is politics, and politics is intrigue, Moscow's insiders, looking back over Boris Yeltsin's presidency, speak with surprise less about the triumph of democracy or the collapse of communism than about the absence of an enduring power group from Yeltsin's home base in the Urals. Leonid Brezhnev, a protégé of Khrushchev from Dnepropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine, brought an enormous "tail" with him to Moscow, including Konstantin Chernenko. But Yeltsin--like Mikhail Gorbachev, who was from southern Stavropol province--did not implant his own people throughout the Moscow apparat. This, the insiders say, partly explains the practical limits to their vast nominal powers, such as Yeltsin's authoritarian constitution of 1993, which he found himself unable to enforce. During Yeltsin's long reign, when the apparatchiks began to feel their oats like never before, the one outside group that managed to secure a permanent place inside the corridors of central power hailed from St. Petersburg. Now they are giddy with success. Vladimir Putin is one of them. 

Putin has now been inaugurated, and presented with Russia's umpteenth economic plan prepared by the latest "teamof reform economists." Readers may wonder not only why all the previous reform plans went awry, but also why, in his nine months as prime minister, acting president, and president-elect, Putin did little more than appropriate the initiatives that he inherited, such as the Chechen war, and stall. The answer is that, far from ruling the country, Putin has had his hands full figuring out how to subordinate the apparatus of power that is closest to the president: the Kremlin and the government. If Putin succeeds in this formidable challenge, he might then try taming the million-plus army of federal functionaries (which needs to be reduced, for the survival of the country, by at least 50 percent, with the remainder somehow transformed into a civil service). And there is also the matter of the non-functioning Russian federation, in which Moscow fails to meet its budgetary and infrastructural obligations, and elected regional leaders flout federal laws as they ruthlessly concentrate property and power in the local executive-gang. 

In sum, the Russian state is even less reformed than the time-warped heavy industrial Russian economy, which is the other principal inheritance from the Soviet Union. Russia's dysfunctional state apparatus is the world's biggest parasite. It has a self-serving culture that is inimical not just to the tasks of regulating a market society, but also to the commands of any would-be authoritarian ruler. Voters and commentators may hope for, or fear, that Putin will be a Russian Pinochet; but Putin--even after promoting a few dozen loyal St. Petersburg school chums and FSB (Federal Security Service) associates to significant posts--has limited levers of power at his disposal. The recalcitrance of the "leftist" Duma has been diminished by the parliamentary elections in 1999 and by Putin's adroit maneuvering (though a tax overhaul and legalization of land privatization still looms). The Duma's histrionics have always paled in comparison with the dithering and the smothering of any presidential or governmental action by the competing client-patronage webs of what in Russian is known as the chinovnichestvo, or "the slimy world of officialdom." Ironically, Russians and Russia watchers continue to look to the Russian state and its leader to solve the country's problems. But how is the state going to solve the country's problem when the state is the country's problem? 

It is more than seven hundred pages long, but Leon Aron's biography of Boris Yeltsin does not tell who came to power along with Yeltsin, and therefore it cannot explain who remains in power after Yeltsin. Nor does Aron explain the new institutions that took shape under Yeltsin. Instead Aron minutely details the scary views and actions of the anti-democratic opposition to Yeltsin. He also celebrates Yeltsin's anti-Communism and his support for electoral democracy, the market, and integration with the West--all worth celebrating, and all downplayed by Yeltsin's many unrealistic critics. But Aron, quoting sober commentators who invoke tough choices and the lesser evil, elevates Yeltsin to the status of history's greatest democratic leaders. 

What emerges from Aron's important book is an infirm hero who rises from his sickbed for bouts of inconclusive "reform" and to hold the Communists at bay. In the presidential elections in 1996, Aron notes, the Kremlin's strategy for overcoming a low single-digit approval rating was to frame the vote as a stark choice between Yeltsin and a return to communism. Aron's biography, like Yeltsin's victory, testifies to the enormous success of that framing. Never mind that even under the odious Communist candidate a return to communism would have been impossible, or that the re-election of an invalid did little to advance the reform cause concretely. 

The signal achievement of Aron's biography comes in the early sections about "the Man from Sverdlovsk." He shows us a boy, born in 1931, who takes apart a hand grenade to see what was inside, losing two fingers in the process; and whose nose is disfigured by a board in an inter-village brawl. He shows us the young Yeltsin almost dying of typhus exploring a swampy forest, and hitchhiking across the Soviet Union like a hobo, telling bothersome police that he was heading to his grandmother's house "on Lenin Street" in whatever the next town happened to be. And he shows this same prankster earning entrance to the top-flight Urals Polytechnic University. 

In 1955--when Mikhail Gorbachev, at Moscow University's law faculty, was writing a senior thesis on the superiority of socialism over capitalism--Yeltsin wrote his thesis on the construction of coal mines. He then chose to begin his career not as a foreman but as a bricklayer, a truck driver, and a house painter. He got to work early and left late; he battled worker drunkenness; he was enraged when his crew was diverted to build a private garage for the big boss. After along climb, by sheer force of personality, through the upper ranks of the building trusts, Yeltsin was made party boss of Sverdlovsk province, a strategic industrial territory that produced tanks, aircraft, and nuclear and biological weapons. 

As a Brezhnev-era party chief of a major province, Yeltsin excelled at what Aron aptly calls the bain de foule, or bathing in the crowd. He rode mass transit conspicuously, appeared live on local television, and met with blue-collar workers and students, whose written questions he spent hours answering. Yeltsin's "favorite routine," Aron writes, "was to glance at a slip of paper calling for the dismissal of an especially incompetent or corrupt official, and then announce, to loud applause: `Already fired. Next question.'" Ham-handed populism, a widespread resort in the provinces, came naturally to Yeltsin, and he had some economic results to back up the theatrics. 

Yegor Ligachev, who was in charge of personnel in Andropov's Kremlin, visited Yeltsin's fief for four days in 1984. In an interview in 1991, Ligachev told me that "of course, I was well-informed about Yeltsin's populist tricks, but I verified that there were achievements" in the province, and "there was a need for new cadres who knew how to work." In 1985, after Gorbachev's elevation to power, Ligachev transferred Yeltsin to Moscow as Central Committee Secretary for Construction. By December, Yeltsin had replaced Viktor Grishin as boss of the Moscow party committee, which included almost the entire Soviet central elite on its rolls. 

Not even sverdlovsk was preparation for Moscow. Yeltsin's crowd baths and his public attacks on the perquisites of the elite made him anathema to the powerful apparat. Aron quotes an anonymous letter from the wife of a party official reprinted in Yeltsin's autobiography: "We are the elite, we'll tear the puny sails from your perestroika and you'll never reach the shore." Yeltsin confided to his college friends back home that "I have never been as lonely as in Moscow." In an infamous dust-up with Gorbachev and Ligachev in 1987, he offered his resignation and was humiliatingly purged. 

But the more the high-placed Communists attacked him, the higher Yeltsin's star rose with the public. In 1989, Gorbachev introduced a new Congress of People's Deputies, to which Yeltsin was elected in a landslide. Not long thereafter, he showed up soaking wet and bleeding at a police station, claiming to have been thrown off a bridge. The bridge was so high and the water was so shallow that no one could have survived such a fall. "Yeltsin's version was full of contradictions," Aron writes, and leaves it at that. Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin's bodyguard and bathhouse partner since the move to Moscow, has written--in a nasty and incisive book Aron dismisses--that a depressed Yeltsin had attempted suicide. 

Yeltsin survived, of course, to help bury the Soviet Union in 1991 and to abolish Russia's Supreme Soviet for a new parliament in 1993. Aron struggles to depict him as simultaneously conciliatory and decisive. From 1994, when Yeltsin launched the first war in Chechnya, until 2000, even Aron must concede that the president was rarely up to governing. He suffered from back and leg pain as a result of a crash landing in Spain in 1990, and from chest pain as a result of clogged arteries. He washed painkillers down with vodka. In 1995 and 1996, Yeltsin had several major heart attacks and then quintuple bypass surgery. Pneumonia followed. 

Aron, recounting one unfortunate development after another, writes that Yeltsin "cannot be absolved of responsibility." He compares Yeltsin to Lincoln and de Gaulle, explaining that he was neither a great thinker nor a master administrator, but he made choices and shouldered responsibility that would have crushed others. And yet, Aron concludes, "the flaws in the political system Yeltsin has bequeathed to Russia are great and many." Overall, it is a fair judgment (except for the comparisons); but Aron neglects to outline the features of that new political system. 

When and how did the sprawling Presidential Administration arise and come to take over the old Central Committee city-within-a-city? Who works in the Kremlin, and what do they do? What does the Kremlin Property Office manage, and how did it acquire its breathtaking holdings and powers? What is the balance of power between the Kremlin and the government, or the rump military, or the successors to the KGB? How many ministries does Russia have, what do they do, who staffs them, and how are they hired? How are Russian regions governed? How are powers shared, or not shared, between the regions and the federal center? In short, what has changed since Soviet times in the institutions and methods of governing? 

Perhaps such questions are beyond the scope of a biography. Still, by reducing everything to anti-Communism, and to a commitment to the market and to the West--and by making these commitments into the sole measures by which Yeltsin's historical achievement may be measured--Aron sidesteps a multitude of matters that are critical for an informed evaluation not only of Yeltsin's legacy, but also of the prospects for Russia. 

II. 

Two-thirds of the way into Aron's book, Yeltsin's presidency suddenly comes to resemble the Brezhnev-era Kremlin: "neglectful of policy-making, rife with intrigues and infighting, obsessed with the paraphernalia of power and rank, cloaked in secrecy and pomp, slack with incompetence and tainted by corruption." How did that happen? Aron writes only that poor Yeltsin seemed "as if seized by senility," and that his "hunting, eating, drinking and fishing buddies, as well as sauna companions," were the worst kind of people. But how did such scoundrels come to occupy a privileged place in what became an inner court? 

Aron does not say. Korzhakov, the bodyguard who oversaw the state during Yeltsin's extended sicknesses up to 1996, makes his first appearance on page 440, and arrives in the narrative out of nowhere. Valentin Yumashev, whom Korzhakov bought into the Kremlin to write Yeltsin's memoirs--and who, on that pretext, dominated access to the isolated president--receives a single innocuous mention, on page 666. Boris Berezovsky--who was introduced to Yeltsin by Yumashev, to arrange publication of the Yeltsin memoirs that Yumashev wrote--receives brief and dismissive treatment. From Aron's account, then, it is impossible to understand the patronage politics of Moscow, and the rise of Putin. 

Everyone loves to exaggerate Berezovsky's influence, Berezovsky especially. He has nothing near the wealth, or the sway over the economy of Russia and the neighboring countries, commanded by Rem Vyakhirev, the CEO of the monster gas monopoly. But as Putin discovered, Berezovsky maintains an office inside the Kremlin (in building 14), even though he has no state executive post. Like many others, but with far greater skill and clamor, Berezovsky has systematized the rampant "privatizing" of officeholders, spinning a "private" web throughout state institutions. His power derives not from the usual school connections or state employment connections, but from the ill-gotten ownership, or more often the de facto control, of major cash-generating businesses that he uses to buy important people. He also gathers, or manufactures, compromising dossiers on people, often at astronomical cost. And he has also acquired, or come to control, major media. Countless journalists and image people, current and former state officials, top financial and eavesdropping types in and out of government, work for Berezovsky not simply because he pays good money, but also because he keeps their enemies off-balance, and because he (and his enemies) tirelessly publicize his activities, real and imagined. The incessant talk about Berezovsky's power is itself power. 

If one side of the Yeltsin-era inner court--the Korzhakov legacy, or Yumashev and Berezovsky--is barely present in Aron's book, the other side of that court, which Aron calls "the young reformers," is mischaracterized. Aron lionizes Egor Gaidar, a specialist on the socialist reforms of Hungary and Yugoslavia, whom Yeltsin trusted "more than almost anyone else and often treated with utterly uncharacteristic, almost fatherly tenderness." In fact, Yeltsin's search for a surrogate son--he has two daughters--runs throughout his presidency, though it is not analyzed by Aron. At first the role fell to Gaidar, but the longer-lasting Yumashev displaced him. Before that, however, Gaidar managed to bring Anatoly Chubais to Moscow. 

Chubais was a Leningrad specialist on management with whom Gaidar had worked under Gorbachev. Americans liked to delude themselves that Chubais's enormous power derived from his good working relationship with the IMF's Stanley Fisher and the bosses at Treasury. The truth is that, as in the case of Berezovsky, Chubais's power flowed from his close ties to Yeltsin's younger daughter and confidante Tatyana Dyachenko; and, unlike Berezovsky, Chubais had frequent access to the President himself. (Yes, another surrogate son.) In contrast to the politically less-adept Gaidar, moreover, Chubais understood how to consolidate his good fortune into enduring power. 

It was not simply that Chubais was the "privatization tsar," and so collaborated in the creation of flim-flam financial-industrial groups with whom he exchanged favors. More important was the fact that, as a consequence of his successful management of Yeltsin's re-election campaign, Chubais was named Chief of the Presidential Administration. He proved to be an iron-fisted apparatchik. He mercilessly attacked ensconced patronage groups and jammed planeloads of loyal Leningraders (by then St. Petersburgers) into the Moscow agencies. He even managed to oust Korzhakov from the Kremlin. 

Chubais's main partner in the reelection campaign, Boris Berezovsky, was another matter. In retaliation for losing the "auction" in 1997 of a 25 percent stake in Russia's telecommunications monopoly, Berezovsky orchestrated a scandal over a $90,000 advance for a book that Chubais never wrote. Still, in leaving government Chubais wheedled Yeltsin into naming him the virtually unremovable head of Russia's United Power monopoly, which like the gas monopoly wields blackmail powers over the government. Moreover, the Chubais St. Petersburg clientele, like the private Berezovsky network, maintains connections to the Kremlin and crisscrosses all the key Russian state agencies. These two competing insider groups filled the vacuum in Kremlin politics that opened up because Yeltsin did not have his own people from the Urals; they were the groups, unsurprisingly, preoccupied with guiding the succession. Putin can try to decapitate these networks and claim them as his own. Or, like Yeltsin, he can try to pit them against each other, thereby seeming to preside over them, while simultaneously scheming to elevate some of the myriad lesser groupings. 

Yet another "young reformer" whom Aron and many others misinterpret is Boris Nemtsov; and his story, too, is directly relevant to Putin's. In 1997, the thirty-something governor of Nizhny Novgorod was appointed to the federal government, a move that Aron adduces as a demonstration of Yeltsin's renewed commitment to reform. Aron writes that Nemtsov took pride in a decree forbidding the central apparat to acquire foreign cars for state business, and mandating that they use domestic cars. Never mind that Nizhny Novgorod is a leader in automobile production. Aron also neglects to mention that state officials nominally subordinated to Nemtsov openly ridiculed the order. 

Nemtsov's brief run in the government made him a laughingstock. It brought no lasting reform of any substance, by Nemtsov's own admission. His autobiography, A Provincial, written around the time he was named First Deputy Prime Minister--and Yeltsin's likely successor--opens with Nemtsov recalling how a gypsy once told his mother that "hers on would be world famous. My mother laughed heartily." So would you, after reading these scribblings. 

Nemtsov, whom Aron calls "an intellectual," writes that in office he committed "many brainless acts." But "I forgive myself a lot," he explains. "Sometimes I'm ashamed of things I do, but I wouldn't call this self-hatred." He offers reflections on censorship (it is bad) and on reading (it is good). He says he first met Yeltsin during the president's visit to Nizhny Novgorod in August, 1994. "Precisely at that time, at that meeting, he suggested that I become the next president of Russia. A joke, of course. A clown's act. But all the same, this joke acquired wide resonance." 

When Yeltsin suddenly dismissed Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in March 1998, he nominated as his replacement Sergei Kiriyenko, a bright political unknown who had been a lower-ranking official under Nemtsov in Nizhny. In Moscow, Kiriyenko, like Nemtsov, completely lacked a web of clients. Government officials rarely bothered to follow his directives. Yumashev addressed him with the informal "you" (ty), and Kiriyenko, the Prime Minister, responded with the formal (vy). He was mocked as a Kinder Surprise, the brand name of an egg-shaped chocolate and Russian slang for the child of an unwanted pregnancy. 

In 1999, Kiriyenko, along with Nemtsov and Gaidar, founded a political "party" of "young reformers" and got elected to the Duma. But Nemtsov writes that, whereas in Nizhny as governor he felt "like a fishin water," in Moscow "it was a different level for me." He felt overwhelmed by "the number of actors, the number of factors influencing the situation." In Moscow, he concludes, "it is not possible to do anything productive," adding, by the way, that he "dislikes shopping" and "takes delight in women." His memoir includes his favorite joke: 

Ivan [the Russian everyman] is preparing to go to Paris on a business trip. His wife says to him, "Vanya, buy me a French bra." He says, "Manya, I'd buy you one, but you have no chest. What's the point?" 

"Well," she responds, "I buy you briefs." 

Nemtsov's autobiography--he wrote it himself--rather resembles Kiriyenko's three-month premiership. It, too, is a weightless thing. Yet it can profitably be read as part of the answer to the question of how Vladimir Putin became Boris Yeltsin's successor. 

III. 

Among those who were considered over the years to follow in Yeltsin's footsteps, Vladimir Putin stood out--way out. He was of the new generation, but he was not childlike. He was competent at whatever job he was assigned. He never displayed ambition openly, let alone a shameless grasping for power. He was loyal to the president, but his loyalty was free of sycophancy. He spoke the vocabulary of patriotism, and he seemed to mean it. He did not use foul language and he did not abuse alcohol or a microphone. 

Putin worked for years as the number two man in St. Petersburg, which had been the country's "democratic" stronghold, and then quietly rode the Chubais-led St. Petersburg wave into the corridors of central power. He was also from the one institution--the KGB--that Russian voters saw as the least enmeshed in the great corruption bacchanalia. Putin was not personally linked to substantial privatized state property or to offshore bank accounts. He was the anti-Yeltsin without being anti-Yeltsin. 

He appeared, in other words, as the humbly reliable type who is called upon, after a down-home Russian-style excess, to clean up the mess, and who does the job without complaint or self-promotion. Putin was the inside candidate (even if he beat out others for that role); but he won a legitimate election. Unlike the case in Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and other countries that surround Russia, which the United States supports almost as if they can do no wrong, the Russian elections were not rigged. Real opposition candidates were neither jailed nor murdered. No major fake opposition candidates were promoted to give the false appearance of choice. There was some press coverage of opposition speeches, and even some unfavorable coverage of Putin. 

Putin opportunistically laid claim to the generals' Second Chechen War, support for which skyrocketed after the highly suspicious and still-unsolved bombings in Moscow. (They might come to haunt Putin's presidency.) As an incumbent, he had very many things in his favor, including the support of state television. But the official media's deflation of the pre-election "outsider" favorite, Yevgeny Primakov, proved easy, given Primakov's advanced age, and his blunder of making his anti-corruption image vulnerable by his alliance with the Moscow city boss Yuri Luzhkov. Putin also had the advantage over the old KGB boss of himself coming out of the KGB, and of cleverly appropriating the Primakov script: uncorrupt, patriotic, and reticent. (His inscrutability allowed people to see what they wanted to see in him.) Still, Putin won the vote for three basic reasons: the Communist candidate Gennady Ziuganov, the liberal candidate Grigory Yavlinsky, and the faux nationalist candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky. An election, after all, is not about an ideal choice, but a choice among actual people. 

The Russian edition of First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin bore the more modest subtitle of Conversations with Vladimir Putin. It is the product of six interviews conducted by Natalya Gevorkyan, an accomplished journalist with Russia's leading daily newspaper, Kommersant (which is owned by Boris Berezovsky). Gevorkyan also interviewed Putin's wife, grade-school teachers, and family friends. (During the interviews, a male journalist, Andrei Kolesnikov, was asked by Putin's people to be added to the process; and a third journalist, Natalaya Timakova, is credited in the book.) Excerpts from the book were published in Kommersant and in its weekly magazine Vlast (or The Powers That Be); but some "excerpts" that showed Putin in a particularly unflattering light were missing from the Russian book, and they have been restored in the rush-job English translation. (I have emended some of the quotations below.) Gevorkyan told me that some statements by Putin were ordered suppressed even before the Kommersant digest, and have not seen the light of day in any form. In any event, the book is part spin and part journalistic interrogation, and it is most revealing. 

The son of two factory workers, Putin, who comes from St. Petersburg, the most proudly Western city in Russia, was born in 1952. Which is to say, he missed the purges and the war. The future Russian president grew up in a rat-infested communal apartment wracked by kitchen warfare among families. He says he "was a hooligan, not a Pioneer [Communist cub scout]." His main ambition was to become king of the 'hood. He took up boxing, and had his nose broken. Next came wrestling, and then judo. He went to practice everyday. He didn't smoke. "If I hadn't got involved in sports," he says, "I'm not sure how my life would have turned out. It was sports that dragged me off the streets." One of his teachers says that he showed little interest in girls, though they noticed him. 

In all, a tough guy who learned discipline and respect. He studied German. He wanted to be a pilot, then a sailor, and finally a spy. At the age of sixteen, he showed up unsummoned at KGB headquarters in Leningrad and announced that he wanted to join. A grizzled operative supposedly told him that they didn't take "volunteers," but that they recruited army veterans and college graduates, especially law majors. Immediately Putin set his sights on the law department at Leningrad University, and supposedly after a strong senior-year performance he gained one of the coveted slots. 

Occupied with judo and his means-to-an-end law studies, Putin waited and waited to be tapped for the KGB. Finally, during his next-to-last year, he says, the operative in charge of university oversight approached him. Pressed by his interviewer about the KGB's sordid past, Putin says that his "notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories." Calling himself "an utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education," he praises the work of secret informants, in a passage excised from the Russian edition; and he makes a distinction between those who inform for money or grudges and those who help the state out of "idealistic principles." The only principle evident in the book is the principle of state power. 

At first Putin worked in the KGB secretariat, and then he moved to "counter-espionage." He had some additional training, spent four and a half years at a desk in Leningrad, and was sent back to Moscow for further study. He says that at the Andropov Institute (or the KGB Academy) a teacher of spy techniques singled him out to be a group leader, owing to his integrity and his sincerity. He married a stewardess and told her falsely that he worked as a regular cop. 

In 1985, nine years after joining the KGB, Putin was posted to East Germany. He might have been sent to West Germany, or at least to East Berlin; but he was sent to Dresden, where he and his family lived in a Stasi building. He claims that he gathered political information on NATO--from Dresden. German and Russian press reports have speculated that he worked in industrial espionage. He denies this, pointing out that he had no technical background. He also denies that he kept an eye on the East German party elite, which was resisting Gorbachev's perestroika, though he remarks that he did collect information on "how our partners would react in disarmament talks." He also says he was twice promoted while in East Germany, rising to first deputy assistant of the local KGB chief. In other words, he was a nobody. 

In those days East German shops were relatively full, and beer was plentiful, and Putin gained twenty-five pounds. Then, one day in 1989, an agitated crowd surrounded their building. His boss called Moscow for instructions and got none. They called the local commander of Soviet troops, and he sent over a group of officers who helped to disperse the crowd. But the Berlin Wall soon fell. Ludmila Putin says that the wife of one of their Stasi neighbors cried for a week. "She cried for her lost ideals, for the collapse of everything that she believed in her whole life." 

Putin evinces no nostalgia for communism. He concedes that he "regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That's what hurt. They just dropped everything and threw it away." He remains bitter. "What we did turned out to be unneeded by anyone. Why did we bother to report, recruit, pursue information? In Moscow no one read it. Didn't we warn them about what was coming? Didn't we provide them with recommendations on how to act? No reaction whatsoever. Who likes to work for the circular file? To spend years of one's life--for what?--just to get a salary?" And he continues: 

For example, my friends, who worked in industrial-technical espionage, obtained for several million dollars information about a valuable scientific advance. For our country to develop the science on its own would have cost us billions of dollars. My friends got hold of it, and sent it on to Moscow. There they took and look and said, `Excellent. Super information. Thanks. We kiss you all. Everyone to be recommended for a medal.' But they didn't even try to use the work. The technical level of industry didn't permit it. 

Allowing direct Western investment would have been a better idea. 

Before withdrawing from Dresden in January 1990, Putin and his colleagues burned so many files that the furnace broke. Then they went home with their tails between their legs. Offered a post in the central KGB in a collapsing Soviet Union, Putin, who had a wife and two daughters to support, went back to where he started, Leningrad University, to write a doctoral dissertation on international law. He says that he did not leave the KGB and was hired as the university president's deputy for foreign liaison. Soon, an unnamed acquaintance asked him to quit and go to work for the high-profile chairman of the Leningrad City Soviet, Anatoly Sobchak. 

Putin had once attended Sobchak's lectures at the university. He told Sobchak that he was still in the KGB, but the leading Leningrad "democrat" waived that off. "Screw it," he said. Putin told his KGB boss about the job switch, and offered to resign. "Why resign?" he was told. "Go work for Sobchak." He continued to draw his KGB salary, which exceeded what he was paid by the city government. His KGB ties later became a matter of controversy, but Sobchak, who by then was mayor, stood by his loyal deputy. Putin says that he resigned from the KGB during the putsch in August 1991. "Only during the days of the putsch did all my ideals, all the goals I had when I joined the KGB, collapse." He also observes that the putsch organizers had the right idea, which was to save the Union, but that they used the wrong methods and thereby hastened the Union's demise. One wonders how this lesson applies to the Russian Federation. 

In Sobchak's administration in St. Petersburg, Putin passed six years trying to figure out how to foster and regulate a market economy out of the grim Soviet bequeathal. It was an education. To bring order to the unregulated gambling businesses in St. Petersburg, for example, he traveled to Hamburg to study its supervised red-light district. Back home, however, the financial reporting procedures that Putin tried to enforce with a government-imposed monopoly in gambling proved toothless. "While we were estimating their profits and deciding where to allocate the funds--to develop the city's businesses or support the social sector--they were laughing at us and showing us only losses. Ours was a classic mistake made by people encountering the free market for the first time." The result was the widespread criminalization of the market economy. 

In 1996, after Sobchak lost a brutal campaign for governor to a different deputy, Putin resigned. He was out of work for months, during which time he finally finished a modest country house that he was having built for six years. Unfortunately a fire in the first-floor sauna burned the house to the ground. The firemen came, and there was a lake nearby, but Putin says that they had no hose. Russia's "rebirth" was coming to look no less ignominious than the Soviet collapse. 

Suddenly, in August 1996, after his fifteen years in the KGB and his almost six years in city government, and after his little country house had all gone up in smoke, the unemployed Putin landed a top job in Yeltsin's presidential administration. He reports that he made the rounds of the numerous St. Petersburg officials in high posts in Moscow. Almost all of them owed their positions to Chubais, who had just been made head of the presidential administration; but Putin makes it seem that Chubais attempted to block his move to Moscow. This might be an unsubtle effort to distance himself from an unpopular figure, someone he calls "a very good administrator" but "a Bolshevik in his methods" who "has a poor credit history with the population, unfortunately." 

Whatever the truth, Putin was named deputy chief of the Kremlin property office under Pavel Borodin, who employed more than 100,000 people and owned or managed property valued at around $600 billion, including all the government dachas distributed to, or taken from, the Moscow elite. Not much need for Yeltsinesque "crowd bathing" or populist attacks on elite perquisites in that post. Once in Moscow, the subservient Putin's star ascended abruptly. 

In 1997, he became chief of the Presidential Administration's main control department (or the inspector general), which collected files on corruption. In 1998, he was named first deputy chief of the Presidential Administration responsible for Russia's regions, traveled the country, and met the governors. That same year, he was named head of the FSB (the domestic successor to the KGB). In spring 1999, when Yeltsin was contemplating dismissing Evgeny Primakov as prime minister, there were rumors that the post would go to Putin. Instead it went to Sergei Stepashin, another Chubais man from St. Petersburg; but after three months Stepashin was cashiered. Elections to the Duma were coming up, and Stepashin failed to forestall an alliance of the "opposition" (Primakov and Luzhkov), or to form a powerful alternative coalition. Also, a Chechen warlord named Shamil Basaev, evidently encouraged by a Moscow-controlled provocateur named Nadirshakh Khachilaev, invaded neighboring Dagestan. 

In August 1999, Yeltsin announced the elevation of Putin on television, and proclaimed the new prime minister his successor as Russian president. The entire Moscow elite took the surprise announcement as Putin's political death sentence. They were wrong, of course; but winning a presidential election against a dullard and two egomaniacs, as well as a miscalculating septuagenarian who chose not to run, was but the beginning. Compared with Moscow, "St. Petersburg is provincial, at least politically," President Putin now states. 

IV. 

From the perspective of Russia's eighty-nine regions, Mary McAuley poses the question of whether 1991 really constituted a revolution. With the end of the old rules of closed politics, a new era of uncertainty opened in the early 1990s. But by the time the "soviets," or Communist-era legislatures, gave way to "dumas" in late 1993, Russian regions had experienced a re-aggrandizement of local executives, whose power was not grounded in social constituencies even though they submitted to elections. The Communist party ceased to be the ubiquitous shadow to the state, but most Soviet-era personnel endured, along with many earlier practices. "If earlier an unaccountable elite ruled a mute society," McAuley explains in her admirable book, "now a partially accountable elite ruled a noisy one. Both authority and repression had gone, to be replaced by freedom and lawlessness." 

McAuley, who runs the Ford Foundation office in Moscow, offers a rare comparative analysis, based on the local press and on her own interviews, of six well-chosen Russian regions: Krasnodar, Perm, Tomsk, St. Petersburg, Tatarstan, and Sakha (Yakutia). In red-belt Krasnodar, the old Communist party elites lost scarcely a step after 1991, even if their intrigues were flushed out into the open. A national-populist rose to power locally, and he maintained his position not by writ of Moscow, but by doling out goodies and pitting rival political "clans" against each other. Tomsk, by contrast, was convulsed by a strong democratic movement in the early 1990s; but by 1994 the pluralist politics of Tomsk had faded. The reconstituted Tomsk executive, an amalgam of some outsiders and many insiders, ran roughshod over the legislature and spent its time fighting over the spoils of power. A similarly unresponsive and expanding executive formed in Perm province, although there they "skipped" the interlude of democratic movements and went directly to assembling and dividing the spoils of office. 

For Krasnodar and Perm, and even for Tomsk, McAuley writes, "the re-establishment of executive dominance can be attributed to the continuation of old practices by incumbent politicians, by the weakness of the democratic opposition, or by presidential moves against [legislatures]." In St. Petersburg, however, the political community was far more galvanized. St. Petersburg's democrats dominated both the executive and the legislature, unlike in Moscow, where the parliament (or the Supreme Soviet) and the president went to war with each other. The St. Petersburg soviet was one of the most professional in the country, but it, too, never managed to make policy effectively, and the city failed to create lasting organizations founded on popular support. 

Many blame Boris Yeltsin's abolition of the treacherous national legislature in 1993, an act eagerly replicated by executives in numerous regions. But McAuley notes that executive supremacy in St. Petersburg emerged "before presidential intervention." She points to the personality of Anatoly Sobchak, the head of the St. Petersburg executive, and persuasively portrays him as autocratic, vain, fearful of competition, incompetent, gratuitously offensive, and impetuous. She also shows that Sobchak, who was a law professor, occasionally contravened the law in his war with his opponents. 

Still, McAuley argues that the explanation for "the failure of representative assemblies to hold their ground, and the inability of political movements or parties to sustain themselves or attract a following," is broader. She alludes to the movement of officials from the Communist party to the elected soviets in the years between 1989 and 1993, and then from the soviets to the new regional executive bodies, which smoothly established themselves in Soviet-era Communist party headquarters, which had the best offices and the best communication equipment. The executive's management of huge property transfers also undermined constitutional provisions about the role of the legislature. The legislatures, for their part, became bogged down in fruitless debate and set out to acquire for themselves some of the perquisites of power, which were distributed by the local executive. 

Did anybody expect anything different? The answer is that almost everybody did, including McAuley. She has now concluded that democratic politics requires more than anti-communism, and that democracy must be institutionalized. This seems true, indeed obviously true; but McAuley does an effective job elaborating it. "For democracy to work," she writes, "people need to be composed of distinct political constituencies." Politically, privatization encouraged the formation of interest groups, but it did not encourage the formation of effective national parties. 

McAuley also identifies another problem, which she nicely calls the "the absence of identity-making ideologies." She points out that democracy came to mean many contradictory things, and this led to confusion. She could have added that communism, even if it was discredited ideologically for most people, persisted for them in many forms, including the organization of communities around enterprises and "free" housing. Soviet-era apartments may be the main reason that so many Russians live below the official poverty level and yet somehow survive. Most Russians who managed to obtain apartments under communism still pay only nominal rents and fees far below world prices for utilities. This inherited "safety net" is simultaneously an obstacle to further marketization (inhibiting the creation of a national labor market), and the firewall against monumental catastrophe. The result, as McAuley shows, is that Russia is a capitalist-communist mishmash. 

McAuley also rescues the much-misunderstood ethnic factor in Russian politics from the conventional overemphasis on separatism. The Russian Federation, which is around 80 percent ethnically Russian, has thirty-three of its own ethno-territorial units. Of the latter, twelve are so-called autonomous districts, and twenty-one are ethnic republics. Only in six ethnic republics, however, does the titular nation account for more than half the population. Thus Tatars are a minority within Tatarstan. In fact, three-quarters of the five million Tatars in Russia do not live in Tatarstan. 

McAuley examines how the Tatar leadership, goaded by a strong nationalist movement, pushed for independence. But Tatarstan had nowhere to go: the republic was deeply inside Russia, and it did not have a demographic majority or support from the outside world. All sixteen Tatar institutions of higher education offered instruction in Russian, and Tatar-language programs occupied just a four-hour slot on local TV. 

Another ethnic republic, Sakha (Yakutia), also had a minority nationality. But Sakha, unlike Tatarstan, remained loyal to Moscow even while it asserted its own "autonomy," eyeing local property. By 1994, however, Sakha's relations with Moscow were very similar to Tatarstan's. Both were part of Russia. Both had increased control over resources on their territories. And both saw local elites consolidate their rule in strong executives. 

Across Russia, then, "the party of power" emerged as dominant, in some cases with the involvement of competing alternatives, in other cases without. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of the elected chief executives of Russian regions and ethnic republics re-emerged from thepre-1991 political system. In many cases they had never really been eclipsed. McAuley misses an opportunity to analyze the local patronage politics inside these patterns, but her central finding--that politics in "democratic" St. Petersburg came to resemble politics in "Communist" Krasnodar--is very sobering. It cannot be explained by the usual invocation of the baneful influence of Moscow's robber barons. Nor can the blame fall primarily on the Kremlin, since the triumph of an executive-dominated, winner-take-all patronage system, rooted in control over property allocation, took place all over the country with minimal, or no, prodding. Indeed, the Moscow story presents a variant, on a much larger scale, of the regional processes that McAuley describes, except that Moscow is nominally responsible for the whole country. 

Russia's federation is broken. The problem is less ethnic-based separatism, even in the violent Causcasus, than the failure of the state to function as a state. Commentators speak of "decentralization," but Russia has become a collection of eighty-nine highly centralized and largely disconnected fiefs. Their relations with Moscow are semi-regulated by bilateral treaties or separate understandings, many of which contradict the Russian constitution. Their relations with their constituents are regulated by nothing. Regional executives must submit to elections, but they use candidate registration, state budget funds, the tax police, and other executive levers to intimidate or destroy potential opponents. Only disaffected patronage groups, sometimes aided by powerful outsiders, can dislodge a leader or a ruling group. Of course, regional executives, like the Kremlin, no longer completely control the press and all property, but that does not stop them from trying. They collaborate with regional "robber barons," who are indistinguishable from the executive power, to extort or confiscate revenue-generating businesses, to subsidize friendly media, and to buy off or to choke off hostile media. In sum, the regional administrations behave like deadly parasites. But under Putin, the grand parasite in Moscow, the central state, wants to reassert its unreformed rule over the misbehaving regional executives. 

V. 

On January 22, 1999, NTV, Russia's highly professional and only fully private television network, held a gala fifth-anniversary celebration at the Radison-Slavyanskaya Hotel in Moscow. The capital's internecine inner circles generally do not gather together, beyond an occasional major theater or film premiere, or the narrower state receptions in the Kremlin; the central elite, just as in Soviet times, socializes mostly in small groups, making discreet visits to the dachas of trusted allies. At the NTV celebration, however, with an open bar and almost no one drinking in style, all eyes surveyed the intoxicating scene of court society. "Oh my, look who's here! I haven't seen you in ages," said one recently promoted Kremlin insider to a man in an ill-fitting expensive suit. "Did you survive the arrival of the new minister over at the Ministry?" "No," came the reply from the excess cloth, "I was reduced [fired]. Now I'm a department head on the Presidential Administration." And so it goes. Ministers come and go. Governments come and go. Now even presidents come and go. But the apparatchik merely shifts, this way and that, temporarily sideways or even downwards, keeping his head low and watching his back, and cultivating his network. 

Moscow's executive and legislative apparatuses, in the year and four months since NTV's party, have added yet another 100,000 people, and nobody is better off as a result--except, of course, the new functionaries. Russia's state gets bigger and bigger, and weaker and weaker. Vladimir Putin likes to remind Russians that he is not just the heir of Boris Yeltsin, but also the heir of Yuri Andropov. He is right, but he neglects to mention that in 1982 Andropov assembled a team, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, to combat Brezhnev-era sloth and corruption--and that, once in power, they ended up removing the remaining obstacles to official malfeasance, which flourished in the Yeltsin era. 

The possibility that Putin will preside over a great revival of the KGB or the Russian military exists only in the minds of the huge population of deluded generals and apocalyptic liberals. Putin's show of sometimes resorting to the former KGB is an act of obvious desperation. He entered the once-mighty organization precisely when its top analysts began secretly warning the Politburo about Soviet vulnerabilities and urging orderly retrenchment. His main life-experience has been one of collapse: first of the Soviet Union and its empire, then of the democratic and market transformation in St. Petersburg. What's next? Putin wants to arrest the ongoing decline, which threatens far more than Russia. As police in ski masks raid the debt-ridden parent company of the somewhat critical (and extremely valuable) NTV, Putin insists that he stands for "effective authority," not authoritarianism. Either way, it is hard to see where his leverage will come from, and how the dysfunctional Russian state is going to transform itself. 

Considering the enormity of the tasks and the less democratic, less market-oriented record of most other post-Soviet republics, Russia has done well. Still, Leon Aron's rehabilitation of the wrongly dismissed Yeltsin years is not fully borne out. Russia still needs its de Gaulle, though it seems unlikely to get one. As post-Yeltsin Russia continues to struggle with the Soviet collapse and the Soviet inheritance, it is more and more urgent to ask what, if anything, the West can do. 

The answer is that the West can do quite a bit--if the West finally begins to think and act selfishly. President Clinton, following his push to win Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, arrives in Moscow in early June. Despite the Chechen fiasco and Putin's sweeping inactivity on almost all other fronts until now, his statements about policy have pleased Western governments eager for a new "partner" in Russia; and the Start II ratification vote in the Duma certainly seems auspicious. But the potential for another round of mutual disillusionment is great. 

Far too much power is attributed by American policymakers to Putin, who are thereby repeating their pattern with Yeltsin. Far too little is still being made of the special challenges that Russia presents. If an aggrieved Russia were suddenly to sell or to give away several beakers of anthrax to the North Koreans, what would the United States do? Expand NATO into Romania? If Russian scientists and engineers were suddenly instructed to profitably make Iran, or Iraq, a nuclear power like France, what would the United States do? Cut off irrelevant IMF loans to Russia that have totaled less than what was loaned to Mexico or South Korea? Start World War III and incur the annihilation of the Bay Area and New York? Russia has 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons. (Remember the chaos caused by a single vial of sarin gas released in the Tokyo subway.) 

American policy toward Russia is not geared to furthering American interests. Russia should have never gotten "aid" in the form of loans to a parasitic state that are now owed by its people. Nor does Russia need any more advice from "proconsul Strobe" on how to become a democracy. Rather, Russia needs today what it has always needed: massive direct foreign investment by cynical multinational corporations. It is the responsibility of the Russian government to solicit private foreign capital on the massive scale required. 

Still, the United States should welcome, rather than reflexively resist, Russia's inevitable economic re-integration with its former possessions, and the transformation of the CIS into another kind of NAFTA dominated by the region's largest economy. And the United States could offer favorable access to American markets for value-added Russian imports. In other words, it should be an objective of American policy not just to refrain from the delusion of micromanaging Russian politics and policies, but to stand back and allow the ruthlessness of the world-market economy to compel hard choices inside Russia. Self-interest, not hectoring or wishful thinking, should be the driving force for both sides. 

Russia also does not need insincere stroking for its unrecoverable superpower status or the humiliation of phony "partnership," but formal integration into a new architecture. Russia has no chance of joining NATO or the European Union, and it will not become a part of the American-Japanese alliance or even the Pacific Rim economy. Yet a Russia allied with no one, and inside nothing, and apparently surrounded makes everyone insecure. If Bismarck were alive, he would know what to do. 

Preposterous as it might sound, the United States, with Germany, Europe's great power, should offer to form a tripartite political-defense alliance with Russia, locking in existing borders in the former Soviet lands, compelling a restructuring of the Russian military establishment, transcending the lingering idea of a solo Russian sphere of influence, and ensuring tight control over Russia's vast doomsday complex. The threat from Russia is not aggression; it is crippling weakness, and Russia's isolation and frustration. 

President Clinton, before leaving office, should point the way toward what should have been done long ago: making Russia policy look more like China policy (Russia certainly deserves a China-like policy more than China does), while also taking advantage of democratic Germany's power, and far more aggressively preempting the staggering harm that could come from the mischievous sale or leakage of even small portions of the unique Soviet-era arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and perhaps biological weapons. The model should be the enormous success of Nunn-Lugar and the administration's various nuclear cities initiatives, which have engaged a broad Russian scientific public and generated mutually beneficial programs and enormous goodwill, rather than the IMF-delegated escapade with a group of "young reformers." Just as the prospect of membership in the European Union (or NATO) affected internal developments in Slovakia or Hungary, so a real alliance could make the real reform of the parasitic Russian state seem advantageous to Russia's self-indulgent elites. Regardless, the Pentagon could shift the astronomical sums for new weapons systems still being developed to fight the Soviet menace over to a program that actually increases American security. The Cold War would finally be over. 

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