August 26, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4476 4477 4478

 


Johnson's Russia List
#4478
26 August 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com


[Note from David Johnson:
1. Los Angeles Times: Robyn Dixon, Small Villages Dying Out as 
Soviet Collectives Vanish. Russia: Market reforms have prompted an 
exodus to cities, fueling the rural settlements' demise.
2. The Russia Journal: Andrei Piontkovsky, The Dear Leaders of 
today.
3. Reuters: Russia's Putin honours dead Kursk sailors.
4. Reuters: Russian group to sue government over Kursk deaths.
5. BBC MONITORING: ESTIMATES OF "NATURAL WASTAGE" IN RUSSIAN ARMED 
FORCES VARY WIDELY.
6. The Guardian (UK): Jonathan Steele, Battleship Indifference. 
What the Kursk tragedy dramatised was the military's cruel culture 
of disregard for life.
7. Financial Times (UK): Man who feeds Moscow's rich and hungry: 
RESTAURANTS: Dining out in a new generation of chic Russian eateries 
springs more than a few surprises on Andrew Jack.
8. The Russia Journal: Ekaterina Larina, Putin political fallout 
seen short-lived. Mistakes likely to ‘be forgiven’
9. Moscow Times: Max Ognev, Captain Without a Ship. (Interview
with Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, former head of the State Committee 
for the Environment.)]


*******


#1
Los Angeles Times
August 25, 2000 
[for personal use only]
Small Villages Dying Out as Soviet Collectives Vanish 
Russia: Market reforms have prompted an exodus to cities, fueling the rural 
settlements' demise. 
By ROBYN DIXON, Times Staff Writer


TYUTCHEVO, Russia--When the last inhabitant of Tyutchevo village dies, 
the electricity authorities will snip the wire leading to the last house and 
roll it up before the thieves get to it. 
The flowers and grasses will thicken over the track to the village until 
it is lost. 
Tyutchevo, once a settlement of about 73 houses, has shrunk to a single 
person in a crooked wood-and-clay cottage: Maria Lyovina, age 82. She is cut 
off by road for seven months of the year, when, depending on conditions 
underfoot, the cross-country trek through mud or deep snow can take visitors 
anything from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. 
Her situation reflects a long-term contraction in Russia's rural 
population, a trend that experts believe is likely to accelerate in coming 
years, with huge upheavals predicted in the agricultural sector. 
Three villages nearby have died in the last 20 years, and four others 
are clinging on with seven to 15 elderly people left. 
"There were so many tractors here and so many combine harvesters," said 
Lyovina, whom the locals from Vednoye village, seven miles away, 
affectionately call Baba Manya. 
Vladimir Syomin, 48, head of Vednoye village administration, knows the 
frail pulse of each of the small villages scattered nearby like a broken 
string of pearls. He follows the uncertain health of all the surrounding 
cooperative farms, which were known as collective farms in the Soviet era. 
Through the Vednoye administration, Syomin is responsible for many other 
villages of 100 people or fewer. "Those little ones are fated to die," he 
said. 
In Vednoye, people fear that their own village of 367 people will 
shrink--and eventually disappear and have its name erased by Moscow 
cartographers. 
In 1913, the Vednoye district had 1,900 people. Today, there are 698. 
With the near collapse of the local cooperative farm, the young are moving 
away and no one wants to learn how to maintain the temperamental machinery at 
the farm or to learn the old songs or the harmonica. 
"So much has been lost in Russia already. What's a few more songs?" 
Syomin, who longs to pass on his harmonica skills, said wistfully. 
To get to Baba Manya's, visitors pass a sprawling graveyard of skeletal 
farm machinery and wend through the fields, taking the fainter track when the 
road forks. 
Her house seems devoid of any right angle. The kitchen smells of earth, 
as if the ground is impatient to swallow up the place. 
Faded candy wrappers serve as the wallpaper on one side. On another wall 
are two old tin clocks, one rusted into silence, the other ticking on 
importantly. Two turkey chicks fuss in a box near the window. 
People keep pressuring Baba Manya to leave, but she shrugs them off. 
"A man came and offered me a place in a nursing home. I said, 'Are you 
crazy? As long as I can walk I'll be here.' " 
She rises each day and milks her goat. She usually brings water from the 
well, feeds her turkeys, tends her bees, and in summer, she collects the wild 
herbal grasses that she makes into tea. She scythes grass for her goats. When 
she loses a button on her blue cardigan, she finds a safety pin to do the 
job. 
Relatives and visitors come twice or more a week, to help tend the 
vegetables, cut grass and carry water. 


Village of Her Birth No Longer Exists 


Baba Manya's voice is bright and plucky, but her words are about loss. 
The village where she was born, Likhorevshina, no longer exists. How far away 
it was she cannot tell. 
"I don't know about kilometers. I just know you walk by the pond and 
it's there." 
Her mother had eight children, but they scattered to the ends of Russia. 
Two of Baba Manya's grown children live in nearby villages or towns, and one 
lives in Moscow. A fourth died. 
"Everyone is just gone," she said. "They just gradually left." 
Her husband was a tractor driver at the collective farm. He died 42 
years ago. 
Baba Manya's father, a God-fearing man who read the Bible every day, was 
jailed for three years in Soviet times because he cursed under his breath 
when Communists destroyed the local church. 
She remembers the famine after World War II, when local people cooked 
grass to eat and her family was saved from starvation by a Moscow uncle. 
She remembers collectivization, when Danil Ivanovich, the shopkeeper 
from the next village, was jailed and the shop was turned into a cooperative. 
Her family had no property to collectivize but gave their milk and eggs to 
the state. 
"We just accepted our lot," she said. "We used to pay huge taxes, and we 
always paid on time." 
Standing by the well, Baba Manya gestures at the tall summer grass 
swaying all around. 
"Look, so much grass! It is all being wasted! No one is cutting it. 
Everything is drying out, and the trees are dying. 
"There are no spare parts for the combine harvesters. There's nothing 
left. When will there be such things again? When we're dead, probably," she 
scolded. 


New Settlers Didn't Stay Long 


There have been some efforts to try to save the dying villages. In the 
1980s, after an article in an agricultural magazine about Baba Manya and 
Tyutchevo--even then she was the only resident--a few enthusiasts moved to 
settle here. But none lasted much more than a week. 
"Maybe they were afraid of the isolation," said Syomin, the local 
administration chief. 
Maria Lyovina's 60-year-old son, Victor, blames the fate of Tyutchevo on 
the policy changes in the Boris N. Yeltsin era, which led to a salary crisis. 
Under Yeltsin, collective-farm workers got symbolic shares of their farms, 
but the relationship between managers and workers didn't change. Demand 
collapsed, and there was no incentive because there was no pay. 
"We didn't think there would be all these senseless reforms and the 
village would disappear. Everyone started to leave for the cities because 
there was no salary," Victor Lyovin said. 
When he thinks about the future of Vednoye, Syomin feels a clenching 
fear. If the struggling cooperative farms in the region collapse, then, he 
believes, the villages themselves will convulse and die and no one in Russia 
will even notice. 
Vednoye's collective farm used to run 20,000 sheep and 10,000 tons of 
grain a year in Soviet times. No sheep are left, and grain production is a 
third of what it was then. One bad harvest could break it, Syomin fears. 
Higher electricity prices could kill it in two or three years. 
"If the cooperatives collapse, the whole infrastructure will collapse. 
The machinery will fall into ruin, and everything will be left abandoned. The 
people will be left to help themselves," Syomin said. "We're totally 
dependent on the cooperative." 
Valery Patsiorkovsky, a professor at the Institute of Socioeconomic and 
Population Issues in Moscow, predicts major upheavals that will lead to a 
sharp contraction in the rural population, a change that he sees as necessary 
and inevitable for the sake of agricultural efficiency. 
"Young people watch TV and have access to computers, so they know 
there's another life outside the village. They also know they'd have to work 
very hard if they stayed in the village," he said. "We are in the Information 
Age, and the young people know it. I think in the Information Age we don't 
need millions of people in rural areas." 
There has been no census since 1989, but according to a 1997 demographic 
report by the State Committee of Statistics, about 27% of Russia's 147 
million population live in rural areas compared with 73% in 1939. Seventeen 
percent of Russia's population work in agriculture compared with 4% in the 
U.S. 
Patsiorkovsky argues that villages will inevitably suck up all the 
resources of collective farms, until the farms collapse. Eventually a new 
farming system will emerge, with each farm under a single owner and a dozen 
workers instead of 200 to 250 employees. 
In a study from 1993 to 1997, Patsiorkovsky examined the differences 
between villagers in Russia and farm families in Missouri. 
The striking difference, posted in bar charts on his wall, was their 
outlook. In the Russian villages, 65% suffered feelings of deep fear or 
depression, compared with 26% in Missouri. The most optimistic in Russia felt 
sadder and more pessimistic than the most depressed people in Missouri. 
In Missouri, the level of stress and depression was fairly constant 
through all age groups, except for higher levels among people in their 40s. 
In Russia, the numbers of village people who felt depressed or afraid grew 
steadily the older they got. 
Ask Baba Manya about her happy memories, and she pauses, considers and 
shrugs. Ask her about her regrets, and she says that she lost some bees 
recently and that her body aches nowadays. 
In her youth, she loved to dance, but her husband was "serious and 
strict." 
To a patient listener, she releases the ancient secrets of her heart. It 
is not a happy story--her mother forced her to marry a tractor driver, whom 
she never loved, because his family was well-off. 
Her one true love, remembered to this day, was a boy called Misha whose 
family was poor. "He was handsome, he was interesting. We were deeply in 
love," she said. "But we had to face facts." 
In the early 1960s, after her husband's death, Lyovina chose a spot 
above the pond to set her house and hired men to build it, imagining that her 
family would always be here. 
"I'm just thinking whom I built all this for," she said, standing 
outside the crumbling front wall of her house. "I built it for no one." 


*******


#2
The Russia Journal
August26-September 1, 2000
SEASON OF DISCONTENT: The Dear Leaders of today
By Andrei Piontkovsky / Director of the Center of Strategic Research
Is everyone just faking, or is Putin really a superstar?
"When he enters, they all stand;
some from service, some from joy"
"To a Tyrant" J. Brodsky 1972.


Hundreds of thousands of Pyongyang inhabitants lined up along the route of
Dear Leader Kim Jong Il and his great Northern Friend Pu Tin to greet the
great leaders. The front row was occupied by women in national costume
trembling in erotic ecstasy, flushed and not badly fed for the residents of
the hungry country.


These political harlots probably have a place where they are fed specially.
"Glory to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, glory to Dear Comrade Pu Tin," they
shouted in an exultant, releasing orgasm. If they were pretending, it is
repulsive. If they were sincere, it is far more horrible.


I remembered these exultant women when, not long ago, I saw on television
an exultant man with a bourgeois beard: Russian minister for the economy
German Gref. With nearly the same light in his eyes, he was talking about
how the liberal economic reforms in Russia would blossom under the wise
presidency of the outstanding contemporary reformer, Vladimir Putin.


Naturally, the show host asked the minister how he saw the blend of a
liberal economic system with a severe authoritarian political regime of
"guided democracy."


The minister answered intelligently, repeating, as it happens, the final
thesis of my article "Wrong Century for Little Colonel" (RJ No. 28) on how
the Internet economy is not digging trenches nor erecting industry giants,
but the economy of free people, demanding maximum realization of a person's
creative potential, which is categorically impossible in the conditions of
an authoritarian "guided democracy."


I am not assuming author's rights, and am ready to let Gref take credit for
this thesis, all the more that it is absolutely obvious and banal. But the
minister's blindness is remarkable. Can he really not see the iron tread of
approaching "guided democracy" — the castrated parliament, the encroachment
on free speech, the arbitrariness of the power structures?


Has he really not read the dozens of articles by politologists serving the
regime, from Gleb Pavlovsky to Sergei Karaganov, based on and foretelling
the inevitability of authoritarianism? Is he pretending, or is he really
all at sea?


In his case, as it happens, everything is clear. I saw him in Salzburg
where he gave the gathered investors an unpleasant surprise by beginning
his speech at the plenary session with an announcement not commensurate
with the responsibilities of a reformer-minister: "Malashenko's aircraft
was detained in Moscow because contraband was discovered on board."


The special forces refuted their own fabrication half an hour after Gref
made his speech.


Gref, who has already promised the death penalty to tax evaders, is one of
the right "liberals" who put their stakes on Putin. "He is an absolutely
modern person," says Anatoly Chubais of Putin. "He is an absolutely modern
person," says Putin in turn of Kim Jong Il.


Progress in the 21st century is seemingly being led by a constellation of
absolutely modern people — the Dear Leader of UES, Anatoly Chubais, the
Dear Leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the Dear Leader of North Korea,
Kim Jong Il.


The G-7 leaders at the Okinawa summit greeted Putin with nearly the same
enthusiasm as the Korean women or Gref and Chubais — he can walk without
assistance, reads with expression — the hero of the summit and a superstar.
I wonder if they are professionally faking it or if they truly feel a sense
of deep satisfaction.


*******


#3
Russia's Putin honours dead Kursk sailors

MOSCOW, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin signed decrees on 
Saturday awarding posthumous honours to the 118 crew members killed in the 
Kursk submarine disaster and commissioning a special memorial for them. 


Itar-Tass news agency said the memorial would be erected in the small navy 
town of Vidyayevo, the northern port where the nuclear-powered Kursk began 
its last mission before sinking in the Barents Sea on August 12. 


A memorial plaque will also be placed in the Moscow Central Museum of the 
Russian Armed Forces where exhibits relating to the Kursk will be put on 
display, the agency said. 


Tass said the Kursk's commander, Gennady Lyachin, was made a Hero of the 
Russian Federation ``for courage and heroism demonstrated while carrying out 
military duty.'' Other crew members were decorated with Courage awards. 


Putin was criticised at home and abroad for his handling of the first days of 
the crisis, which he spent on holiday in southern Russia, but he said later 
that he felt guilty and responsible for the tragedy, whose cause remains a 
mystery. 


The government has announced financial compensation for the families of the 
dead sailors and medical, education and other benefits. 


*******


#4
INTERVIEW-Russian group to sue government over Kursk deaths
By Adam Tanner


MOSCOW, Aug 26 (Reuters) - A Russian human rights group said on Saturday it 
would sue President Vladimir Putin and the government for a cover-up and 
inefficient action after the sinking of the Kursk submarine with 118 crew on 
board. 


``We want them to tell the truth about what happened to the Kursk,'' Veronika 
Marchenko, head of the Mothers' Right group, said in an interview. ``People 
are not fools. They know if you are lying to them or not.'' 


``Let a court judge them as guilty, so they must apologise before the 
court.'' 


The submarine tragedy has provoked a national storm of sympathy for the 
victims and anger toward the government, which was slow in giving details 
about the tragedy and in bringing in foreign help to try to rescue the crew. 


Russia's failure to mount an effective rescue was highlighted when a 
Norwegian team finally managed to open the submarine and discover that all 
118 crew members had died. 


Mothers' Right, which represents mothers of servicemen killed on duty, cannot 
sue the government by itself, but must team up with family members of the 
deceased. 


Marchenko, whose group has existed for 11 years, said the relatives had a 
good case against the government for ``moral damages.'' 


``There were violations of international conventions, such as between Russia 
and Norway on the Barents Sea, on making information public, on the 
president's activities in coordinating action and on many other points,'' she 
said. 


In recent days the government has promised relatives a far more generous 
package of compensation than usual in Russian tragedies, and Putin, who 
stayed on vacation during the early days after the sinking was made public, 
has said he felt responsible and guilty for what happened. 


RECOVERING THE BODIES 


For now, many of the families are concentrating on seeking to have the bodies 
of their relatives recovered from the Kursk, which went down in the Arctic 
Barents Sea on August 12. 


``The people are still not buried and many still believe that there are 
people alive there, so to sue now would just not be right,'' said Marchenko, 
adding that cases would likely begin in the coming months. ``Later we will 
speak to individual families, because each suit will have the details of a 
specific family.'' 


Mothers' Right has already written to the U.S., British and Norwegian 
embassies seeking details of when they first offered assistance in the 
tragedy and what Moscow said in return. 


Valentina Melnikova, an official at the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, 
another lobbying group, said it was too early to evaluate the chances of 
legal success against the government. 


``As long as it is not clear under what circumstances they died, it is 
impossible to evaluate the chances of winning a court case,'' she said. 


Marchenko said her group had filed 350 cases against the Russian government 
on behalf of families whose sons died during the first war against rebel 
Chechnya from 1994-96. One court has awarded damages of 100,000 roubles 
($3,610) and the other cases are all pending appeals in higher courts, she 
said. 


($1-27.70 Rouble) 


******


#5
BBC MONITORING
ESTIMATES OF "NATURAL WASTAGE" IN RUSSIAN ARMED FORCES VARY WIDELY
Source: 'Izvestiya', Moscow, in Russian 24 Aug 00 


The loss of K-141 [the Kursk submarine] during the Northern Fleet's
large-scale exercise again raised the question - do the infamous norms for
"natural wastage" of servicemen during exercises really exist? The Ministry
of Defence and the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office contend in one voice
that there is nothing of the sort, and they call this blasphemy. For their
part, public organizations, after analysing the lists of martyrs coming in
to them, come to the conclusion that such "black" percentages are recorded
by the military. Anton Yelin summarizes the facts. 


Translating from military into human language, "natural wastage" means
death: during exercises one is run over by a tank, a soldier fails to throw
his grenade on time, one suffocates in his gas mask and so on. 


"Yes, at one time such norms did exist," chief of the Russian Interior
Ministry's Internal Troops' information centre Vasiliy Panchenko tells
'Izvestiya', "but our army did away with them back in 1989. Since that
time, all talk of pre-planned losses of personnel is pure and simple
absurdity. However, there are losses of course..." 


In order to prevent such instances, the army has departments for creating
conditions for safe service. If a gate crushes somebody, stops are
installed - that is what these departments do. 


The files of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office contain discouraging
statistics for the death of our soldiers as a result of tragic
carelessness. The military people always want to boil the essence of the
problem down to personal lack of discipline in those killed in peacetime. 


"In 1997, more than 1,100 servicemen departed this life for this reason,"
senior assistant to military prosecutor Sergey Ushakov told 'Izvestiya'.
"About the same number in 1998. Today, on the average, three people die
every day - and I'd like to emphasize that this is without taking military
operations into account." 


Public organizations cite different figures. Secretary of the information
and analysis commission and member of the coordinating council of the Union
of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia Ida Kuklina stated that
although the army has been reduced from 4m to 2m men, up to ten people per
day still die during peacetime. 


'Izvestiya' has at its disposal a list of those who died this year just
during military exercises (prior to the catastrophe with the Kursk nuclear
submarine). In it are 40 names, with twenty of them attributed to the
Northern Fleet. 


Here are a few of them: 
\ \Valeriy Arkhipov, unit 33104 "K", cause of death: vehicle overturned
during exercises. 
\ \Yevgeniy Gladchenko, unit 44758 "G", died from bullet wound during
exercises. 
\ \Vladimir Gorbunov, unit 23626 "P", died as a result of an explosion
during exercises, open craniocerebral injury. 
\ \Nikolay Matsuk, unit 35613 "BU", spontaneous explosion of an explosives
package... 


*******


#6
The Guardian (UK)
25 August 2000
Battleship Indifference 
Jonathan Steele in Moscow: What the Kursk tragedy dramatised was the 
military's cruel culture of disregard for life


The downing of the Kursk brought Russians of all ages and backgrounds 
together in a drama of solidarity that the country has not known for a 
decade. 


Behind the facade of the collective motherland with its serried ranks 
parading through Red Square on May Day, the main feature of Soviet society 
was its atomisation. Fear of the informer as well as the crushing power of 
unaccountable bureaucracy left people cut off from each other and bound only 
to family and trusted friends. The chaos of post-communism increased 
alienation as budget cuts devastated free health and education services and 
grab-grab-grab privatisation destroyed the last vestiges of the headline 
Soviet culture of equality and civic concern. 


Like a tragic television soap-opera, the Kursk disaster created a national 
focus for years of pent-up frustration. As the days went by, viewers became 
familiar with the cast of characters. While the heroes struggled for their 
lives underwater, the constant replaying of the video of them on deck before 
they sailed off for the last time, and interviews with their desperate 
relatives, turned them into icons. 


Not since the televising of the first freely elected Soviet parliament's 
two-week opening session in May 1989 had the nation united so intensely. But 
that was a good-news fiesta of glasnost. The Kursk encapsulated all the 
subsequent disappointments and loss of faith - an inferiority complex in 
relation to the west, depression over poor living conditions, the collapse of 
the armed forces, technological backwardness, and a feeling of national and 
individual humiliation. 


Russians have always had a love affair with pessimism. The hackneyed epithet 
"long-suffering" has been much in use this past week and rarely has it seemed 
more true. Over-riding it all, in a refrain which long predates communism and 
makes government by consent so hard to achieve in Russia, the feeling 
persists that vlast (the authorities) were, are, and always will be the 
enemy. 


Every Russian citizen knows Sergei Eisenstein's magnificent film Battleship 
Potemkin, with the scene where Tsarist troops disband a revolutionary 
protest, kill men and women with equal ruthlessness and send a pram with a 
baby careering to its doom down the Odessa steps. This week, in a devastating 
comment on President Putin's initial reaction to the Kursk disaster, Russia's 
highest-circulation weekly carried a front-page cartoon of a huge boat with 
its superstructure shaped like the Kremlin. The name on its mighty prow was 
Battleship Indifference. 


For younger people who hope for a new and more democratic Russia, this was 
the biggest element in the tragedy. Vladimir Putin appeared even more 
stereotypically "Soviet" in his frigid remoteness than his two predecessors. 


At a personal level, his inadequate behaviour was a reminder that, unlike 
Gorbachev and Yeltsin who were experienced politicians, he was no more than a 
mediocre KGB colonel until his unexpected rise to power. 


Politically, his ill-judged reactions marked the eclipse of the "family" 
which surrounded Yeltsin and nominated Putin last year as his successor. 
Yeltsin's coterie of advisers in the media and big business kept his image as 
polished as possible given his ill-health, impetuosity, and alcoholism. Since 
managing Putin's successful election, some of this team have left. Others 
have been sidelined and the new president is surrounded by cronies from the 
KGB and the military. Schooled in secrecy, their forte is not image-making. 


Can Putin recover? His courage in finally facing the relatives has helped 
fill some of the sensitivity gap. It was done behind closed doors, but a 
reporter from Kommersant, who sneaked in posing as a relative, said the 
president managed to win grudging support. Putin's television interview on 
Wednesday was also effective. Electing to be questioned rather than give a 
formal speech which would have required eye contact with viewers, he kept his 
head lowered and chose his words slowly. This reinforced a picture of 
contrition to accompany his verbal acceptance of blame. 


Beyond the improvement in style, what lessons of substance has he drawn? The 
answer is not encouraging. Without naming them, Putin attacked the forces 
"who have brought about the collapse of the army, the navy, and the state". 
His views chime with a typically doom-laden "appeal" this week in Sovietskaya 
Rossiya, the mouthpiece of the "national-patriotic" and Russian Orthodox 
forces. In it the Communist party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, and a dozen other 
well-known figures raised the spectre of "enemies within" who are trying to 
destroy Russia. Putin's remarks were ostensibly a rebuke to all the 
oligarchs, but he had in mind the media tycoons who have been criticising the 
Kremlin. 


In promising money to make the army and navy more compact and efficient, 
Putin will also have disappointed those Russians who felt the Kursk disaster 
highlighted a more profound problem which he has not touched on, and cannot, 
given his record in Chechnya, without a massive change of heart - the 
military culture of cruelty and disregard for human life, even of one's own 
servicemen. 


The navy's refusal to give anxious relatives the names of the stricken crew 
was a terrible feature of the disaster. Next month, in the regular 
half-yearly call-up, this cannon-fodder mentality will be repeated in centres 
across Russia as 18-year-olds are dragooned into barracks rife with bullying 
and corruption. Until Battleship Indifference understands that the state 
belongs to the people rather than people to the state, Russia will not 
achieve contentment or strength. 


jonathan.steele@guardian. co.uk 


*******


#7
Financial Times (UK)
26 August 2000
FOOD AND DRINK: Man who feeds Moscow's rich and hungry: RESTAURANTS: Dining
out in a new generation of chic Russian eateries springs more than a few
surprises on Andrew Jack


Russia's President Vladimir Putin might have warned recently that his
country risked becoming part of the third world, but you wouldn't think so
from the perspective of Le Duc, one of Moscow's more chic restaurants. 


Beneath the arches and period decor of a fake Loire chateau, the tables are
all occupied, and guests are indulging in dishes such as frogs' legs on a
bed of Bayonne ham, and carpaccio of veal with red berries and tarragon.
The maitre d' is French, as is the chef, who prepares his food from 100 per
cent French ingredients, right down to the salt and pepper. You are
unlikely to emerge with a bill for less than Dollars 100 a head. 


If English, French and German are to be widely heard, that is because, as
Andrei Dellos, the owner, argues, "the Russians have not yet learned to
make reservations". 


Judging by the black Mercedes 600s and box-like Jeeps parked outside - the
preferred transport of bosses and their bodyguards respectively - it is not
because of a lack of local money. "There is no real poverty in Russia, and
certainly not in Moscow," he says. "It's a 100 per cent exaggeration. No
one is dying of hunger in this country." 


That may seem a somewhat narrow view, as we sip on a dessert of pureed red
fruit which alone costs more than the monthly wage of many Russians. But in
a city with a population of 15m, and where a disproportionate amount of
Russian wealth has been concentrated for many decades, there are more than
enough people to fill Le Duc. And tips of up to Dollars 2,000 apiece to the
coterie of ever-attentive waiters are apparently not unknown. 


In fact, Dellos stresses that foreign clients are simply an added bonus in
a restaurant that he designed for Russians. He says he is glad Moscow is no
great package tour destination, the bane of discriminating cuisine.
"Tourists kill restaurants," he says. "The battle for customers is much
fiercer without them." 


The quantity of eager Muscovite mouths goes well beyond Le Duc. Pass across
the stone-clad corridor at the entrance to the restaurant, and you enter
another of Dellos's creations. Shinok is kitted out like a Ukrainian
courtyard, with most tables overlooking a central atrium containing a
working farm, complete with aged babushka, chickens and a horse which is
let out via a specially constructed lift twice a day to sniff the real
Moscow air. 


Next door is Bochka, with its homely kitchen offering grilled salmon, veal
brains with mushrooms baked in a pot, and a pig roasted on a spit once a
week. A few minutes' drive away is the first in a chain of fast-food
restaurants called Mou Mou (the sound of a Russian cow) springing up around
the city and offering similar fare. 


"With slightly lower prices, I could build hundreds of restaurants across
Moscow and there would still be demand. It doesn't interest me. I don't
want to build something industrial and I don't want to be a slave," says
Dellos, who has received 40 offers to take his concepts to the west,
including Los Angeles, Paris, London and Berlin. 


Trained in the fine arts, construction and foreign languages, thanks to the
rich education system of the former Soviet Union, he says he still
considers himself primarily an artist. 


The proof, and his pride, is Cafe Pushkin, a multi-floored fake 18th
century townhouse complete with decorated ceilings, antiquarian books and
waiters in period garb a few minutes' drive away from Le Duc. 


The restaurant was an empty patch of land near Pushkin Square until late
1998. When Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, gave him the chance to
develop the land if he could complete it in time for Pushkin's bicentenary
last summer, he spent five months on three hours sleep a night to do so,
scouring antique shops around the world for the interiors. Many of the
guests today have no idea that the paint is hardly dry. 


The subject of lyrics by the singer Gilbert Becaud, Cafe Pushkin was a
tribute to Dellos's French connections. A fluent French speaker, he says he
has aristocratic forebears from Paris, the city where he settled as a
painter and married in the mid 1980s after Mikhail Gorbachev's regime
started to ease travel restrictions. "Russians were a`la mode, and I wanted
to breathe the air," he says. 


Returning in the early 1990s to deliver some of his paintings to an unnamed
Russian bank which "no longer exists", he says he was soon drawn into the
atmosphere of rapid and exhilarating change, and had no desire to go back
to France. "Moscow is chaotic, but it's the most democratic place in the
world. There are no laws, but money is easy. If you have a brain, you can
do miracles." 


With backing from a Japanese businessman, he launched Soho, a private club
for the artistic friends of his mother in 1992, designed to draw them out
of that Soviet focal point for discussions, the family kitchen. He soon
added Pilot, a night-club, and the Institute of Beauty with a gym. "Some
people would go from one venue to another and never leave the building for
days." 


Within three years, he was exhausted by his efforts in trying to entertain
those most difficult of clients, entertainers themselves. And he was
frustrated by the "columns, lobsters and frogs" of grandiose
perestroika-era restaurants. "I was the first to notice that people were
fed up with it. It was not our cuisine. I wanted rustic decor, traditional
food, things that you could cook at home." 


By September 1996, Bochka had opened, setting the pattern for his
subsequent restaurants, all of which operate day and night. Shinok soon
followed, after an exhaustive search in Kiev for a chef who went beyond the
dominant "Russo-Soviet" legacy that had been left behind. 


That left him ready to pay tribute to the French with Le Duc. But
adaptations were required for Russian palates, not least increasing the
quantity of food, and reducing the richness of the sauces to prepare for
palates brought up on "smoked sausage as the highpoint of Soviet cooking". 


He says Russians play the game, requesting wine instead of vodka when they
notice the shock on the sommelier's face, and not repeating the apocryphal
tale of one New Russian who poured the two most expensive French red wines
on the menu into a single glass, arguing that they must be twice as good if
mixed together. 


With Soho, he says he avoided the ubiquitous racketeering by the new
Russia's emerging mafia by stressing that he was entertaining artists, a
milieu that they traditionally left alone. 


As his restaurants grew and his clientele became more prestigious,
including leading politicians, officials and businessmen, he ended up with
a form of implicit protection so powerful that no thugs dared try to
intrude. Now unsolicited and unwelcome offers are nor mally in the form of
potential partners offering cash to buy a small share of his company -
including one who proposed Dollars 380m. 


Today, on top of his recently opened kitchen laboratory for developing new
dishes, he is contemplating opening a school for waiters. 


"We are in a country where service was killed for 70 years," he says. "A
superhuman effort is required. The most difficult challenge here is to
restore the links with the 19th century, and everything that we lost with
the Revolution." 


He has acquired a building next to Cafe Pushkin that will host an
Indo-Chinese restaurant to be opened next spring; followed by an Italian, a
Greek, and then maybe one offering nouvelle cuisine. Then there is his idea
of a night-club that shifts venue every few months to cater to Moscow's
restless night scene; a restaurant in which decor and food alike are only
in black and white; and a hotel in which every room has a different style. 


It has to be said that the food in Dellos's restaurants does not always
live up to the elaborate decors. But - unlike a number of his more recent
imitators - it is generally consistent, frequently good value, and on offer
in an atmosphere that beats the drab Soviet interiors still so common
across Russia without veering too far towards kitsch. That helps make
eating in Moscow chez Dellos a rare pleasure. 


* Cafe Pushkin, 26A Tverskoi Blvd, Moscow, tel: +7 095-229 5590 or 9411. 


* Bochka (+7 095-252 3041), Le Duc (+7 095-255 0390) and Shinok (+7 095-255
0204 or 0888) are all at 2 1905 Street, Moscow. 


*******


#8
The Russia Journal
August 26-September 1, 2000
Putin political fallout seen short-lived
Mistakes likely to ‘be forgiven’
By EKATERINA LARINA
Criticism of the president unlikely to have far-reaching consequences.


Russian President Vladimir Putin took a beating in the domestic and
international press last week over his handling of the Kursk submarine
tragedy, but political experts and sociologists say the crisis is unlikely
to have a long-lasting impact on the president’s relationship with the
Russian people.


Despite initial charges of inaction and a cold-blooded response to the
plight of the 118 men trapped on the sunken sub, observers say the
reservoir of voter trust Putin had built up will provide him with a soft
landing. As evidence, many cited a new VTsIOM poll taken during the crisis
showing his approval rating still hovering around 65 percent.


"He hasn’t really lost any support," said Georgy Satarov, a former adviser
to Boris Yeltsin and now head of the INDEM Foundation. "There won’t be any
great loss. He has made considerable mistakes, but they have been forgiven.
He has a comfortable margin for error ­ the trust voters put in him. This
isn’t political trust, though ­ it is the faith of the people in their
hero-leader."


Still, political analysts were unanimous in the view that no matter what
the impact on Putin’s rating, both the president and his team made serious
mistakes in handling the crisis. The public might look the other way and
find justification for a still-popular leader, they say, but that doesn’t
absolve Putin of responsibility. 


"He should have come back from his holiday and showed his concern and
support," said Yury Kobaladze, a former chief of the SVR (Russian foreign
intelligence service) press bureau and now managing director of Renaissance
Capital. "That he didn’t is his mistake and that of his team."


But Kobaladze doesn't think Putin should have gone to Severomorsk, the site
of the tragedy. He agreed with the president's explanation that being there
would only have hampered the rescuers. 


However, he said, the contrast of Putin relaxing in sunny Sochi while 118
men were trapped at the bottom of the Barents Sea was a public relations
disaster.


"How could they have shown him with his glowing tan; with smiling
academics; and in short-sleeved summer shirts?" Kobaladze asked. "Obviously
the meeting had been prearranged. But so what!"


Kobaladze said the behavior of Putin's officials was a hangover from the
Soviet era ­ the thinking that: "The boss is on holiday; it’s not worth
bothering him and we’ll make do somehow."


One senior Kremlin official who accompanied Putin to Sochi told The Russia
Journal that the advisers did not immediately realize the full extent of
the tragedy. 


"From where we were, everything looked different," the official said. "The
military said they were working out the situation, that rescue work was
under way and so on."


But Kobaladze didn't accept the lack of professionalism, particularly
because, he said, a proper handling of the situation could actually have
brought Putin some political dividends.


"I headed the press service of the foreign intelligence service for 10
years. I know from the inside what a sensitive and difficult a job it is.
But what has happened there was a failure. It was lamentable. 


"They had a splendid opportunity to strengthen the president’s authority,"
he said. "Putin could have come across as a wise, understanding and
sympathetic leader. But he lost that chance, and he lost a part of what he
had."


That aside, in explaining the lack of political fallout for Putin, INDEM's
Satarov harked back to the very beginning of the 1990s when a now-disgraced
Yeltsin was at the height of his popularity. 


"Remember Yeltsin in 1990-91? Whatever happened, a justification was always
found; it was always enemies, attacks and so on," Satarov said. "The same
with Putin. Whatever he does, his version of events will be right and will
inspire the greatest trust. This is a psychological phenomenon ­ belief in
a leader, a hero."


Alexei Grazhdankin, a sociologist and deputy director of the respected
VTsIOM polling institute, said that even the small drop in Putin’s rating
reflected in some surveys was linked more to the president’s inactivity
than to his callousness or lack of concern for the victims of the Kursk.
Russians, he said, were more willing to forgive insensitivity than
indecisiveness. 


"His behavior in this situation didn’t have a direct impact on the basic
source of his support ­ voters’ hopes that he will improve their lives,"
said Grazhdankin. "People aren’t looking for humanity from him; they’re
looking for state decisions."


Grazhdankin conceded that in this tragedy, not only the authorities had
adhered to a Soviet system of values, but the people, too. 


"We’re not used to considering losses," Grazhdankin said of the public's
reaction to the Kursk and to conflicts like the one in Chechnya. "Perhaps
we’ve become callous, but certainly few here place a high value on human
life." 


He said that to a large extent, people were more worried by whether or not
Putin would improve their lives. "[Concern for human life] is important in
a prosperous society, but unfortunately, it’s not yet the case here," he
said. "If Putin has half the elite shot, but living standards rise, people
will carry him in their hands."


Nonetheless, many experts said they still thought that the Kremlin would
have to do something to smooth over the negative effect of Putin’s behavior
and show some decisiveness. 


In an interview with state-owned RTR television, Putin hinted at something
to that effect. He assailed those "with villas on the French and Spanish
coast," a thinly veiled reference to Boris Berezovsky ­ who had just set up
a fund and collected over a million dollars for the Kursk victims’ families
­ and other media owners. 


"This would be the saddest thing," said Kobaladze. "It would be dreadful if
the authorities divert attention to the ‘hostile’ press and start clamping
down on the media. 


"The only achievement of democracy in Russia has been freedom of the
press," he added. "They have to realize it’s better to have the media make
mistakes than to gag it and not let it show its own mistakes."


Aida Shakaryan of the ROMIR polling center said she thought that time would
be Putin’s best ally in this situation.


"Everything is forgotten with time ­ all the more so as Russians have such
difficult lives today that their own problems keep their thoughts more
occupied than would any propaganda maneuver. For the most part, Pushkin
Square has already been forgotten." 


However, Satarov said that, though there would be no immediate impact on
Putin, presidential errors build up in a cumulative fashion, and once an
irrational belief in the hero leader evaporates, the public mood changes
quickly.


"When the belief disappears, the accumulation of mistakes will come to the
fore in people's minds," he said, although he added that while the hero
status remains, anything is possible. 


"Let's take the April 1993 referendum. That came after a year of a severe
reform. But more than 50 percent of voters continued to support Yeltsin. So
even economic factors don't initially affect a hero."


"But what is necessary for such support to continue is for the hero to work
wonders," Satarov added. "While Putin manages to do this, people will
accept Chechnya and the economy. They will find excuses for Putin in his
boyars; in enemy plots and so on."


*******


#9
Moscow Times
26 August 2000
Captain Without a Ship 
By Max Ognev 


Since the Kremlin liquidated the main agency responsible for monitoring 
environmental activity in Russia last May, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, who 
formerly headed the committee, has been a captain without a ship. Vowing to 
have left public service for good, Danilov-Danilyan was recently appointed 
the president of Moscow's Ecology and Political Science University, where he 
plans to continue his research on climatic changes. He met with Max Ognev to 
discuss the reasons behind the committee's dissolution and his environmental 
forecast for Russia's future. 


Q: 
On May 17th, President Vladimir Putin abolished the State Committee for the 
Environment. What will be the consequences of this action? 


A: 
The answer is very simple. Environmental activity will become less effective, 
if not die down altogether. Now the leadership of the Natural Resources 
Ministry, which has inherited the functions of the abolished committee, has 
some alternatives from which to choose. One of these choices is to 
discontinue all of the functions of the committee [including industrial 
monitoring] altogether. That would be very convenient [for the authorities]. 


Our raw material giants could not survive any seriously conducted ecological 
expertise. That is why our committee was abolished. It was not convenient for 
those who want to exploit natural resources without considering the 
environment. The nefteviki [oil industry magnates] tell us some pretty 
stories about the oil industry investing up to 30 percent of its profits in 
environmental protection. But that is just lies. That sector's environmental 
allocations have never exceeded 8 percent. 


Q: 
The committee may have been inconvenient for the nefteviki, but it turned out 
to be inconvenient for the authorities as well. 


A: 
That is because the authorities have placed all their bets on raw materials. 
They have an economic prejudice. They believe that by selling oil, gas, gold, 
diamonds and metals on world markets [rather than developing other 
industries], Russia will be able to pull itself out of this crisis. This 
prejudice is stuck in the heads of our government and it is difficult to beat 
it out of there. 


Q: 
Originally your office had the rank of ministry until it was demoted to that 
of a committee. Is the liquidation of the committee just a continuation of an 
earlier policy? 


A: 
Definitely. Abolishing it was just the final blow. [Former Prime Minister 
Viktor] Chernomyrdin deflated the ministry's status under pressure from the 
natural resources magnates, but he did not want to liquidate it altogether. 
As the head ofthe so-called Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, [which, among other 
things, examined environmental issues], he was well aware of the West's 
attitude toward the protection of natural resources. So it was clear to him 
how the West might react to abolishing the committee altogether. 


Q: 
Why, in your opinion, did Putin decide to disband the committee? 


A: 
I don't think it was Putin's decision. He was the one to sign the decree, but 
he signed what was prepared for him. Putin had neither the opportunity nor 
the inclination to sort out the details. I am certain that the natural 
resource magnates, along with the government and maybe even the presidential 
staff, worked on it. 


Q: 
Do you think that going after environmental activists is part of this policy? 
I am referring to the cases of [Alexander] Nikitin and [Grigory] Pasko, 
former navy officers who exposed the nuclear dangers of Russia's aging fleet? 


A: 
Of course. The special services are worried by the information drain. Sure, 
they want to stop it. Of course, everything connected to submarines and 
military activity should get them alarmed. But pursuing [the case against 
Pasko and Nikitin] was stupid. 


Q: 
Was this attack targeted specifically against environmental whistle blowers? 


A: 
I don't think it was a direct attack on environment activity. The special 
services are not happy about the cooperation between Pasko and Nikitin [who 
both served in the navy] and foreign organizations. They are uneasy about 
them releasing even the least bit of information. But uneasiness and criminal 
activity are quite different things. 


Q: 
What are the most critical areas of environmental concern for Russia today? 


A: 
Polluted drinking water is the number one environmental factor damaging the 
health of the general population. But in our country, the whole population is 
not served by waterworks,and those areas that do have them do not always have 
the cleaning systems needed to keep the water safe. Waterworks that meet all 
the safety requirement are very expensive. At the same time, transporting 
drinking water for sale is not feasible for 80 percent of the population [who 
cannot afford it]. 


Q: 
What about storing nuclear waste? 


A: 
Saying that the majority of the population today suffers from exposure to 
nuclear waste would be wrong. However, this is a potentially dangerous 
situation. There is no orderly system of storing nuclear waste in our 
country, nor do we have such a system for processing spent nuclear fuel from 
our nuclear power plants. We don't have modern storage facilities that meet 
even the most basic of safety requirements. 


Q: 
What areas are the most environmentally dangerous areas in Russia? 


A: 
Fifteen percent of Russia's territory is considered to be ecologically 
dangerous for inhabitants. These areas include the industrial belt in the 
Urals, the regions of Saratov, Volgograd, Moscow, St. Petersburg, 
Arkhangelsk, Norilsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Bratsk. This list is to be 
continued. 


For the 61 million Russian citizens living in these areas, the toxins in the 
air and water account for 25 to 30 percent of all illnesses f so every 3 of 4 
illness is caused by the environment! This figure is more an opinion than a 
scientific statement. It refers also to allergies and weakened immunity 
systems caused by pollution. 


Several years ago, the Moscow agency that monitors sanitary conditions and 
epidemics tried to calculate what would be more effective to improve the 
population's health f investing in the environment or in the health care 
system. According to their research, investing in environmental protection 
would be much more effective. This does not imply that you should not invest 
in health care, but if you have 3 rubles left, 2 of them should go to the 
environment and one to the medical system. 


Q: 
What do you think about the federal environment laws and the government 
bodies that enforce them? 


A: 
The laws we have are not complete. They need to be developed. Also, in some 
cases they contradict each other. It is easy, for example, to show how the 
water code contradicts the law on maritime territory. 


But in order to make people follow the laws, a lot should be changed in this 
country. I would start with the courts. Our courts don't have a tradition of 
hearing environmental cases at all. They want to hear nothing but cases of 
poaching f a habit that dates back to the Soviet era. Violations of laws 
protecting our national parks or problems of compensation for anti-ecological 
activities f this is unexplored territory for the courts. We must change the 
system in order to make the courts face these ecological problems. They have 
to realize that this is not the caprice of a few mad people, but an ongoing 
need of the state. 


As for the enforcing agencies, there is, within the Prosecutor General's 
Office, a division on environmental protection, but it is always under threat 
of liquidation. These people do their best, but in order to achieve what must 
be done we need to enlarge the staff and provide them with money for 
computers and equipment. We have only one nature inspector for every 3,000 
square kilometers! While in Luxembourg, for example, they have a staff of 
more than 300 inspectors for a territory of less than 3,000 square 
kilometers. 


Q: 
Are the punishments for ecological violations severe enough? 


A: 
They must be more severe. Most fines are just symbolic. It is easier for a 
company to pay the fine than to invest money in the equipment needed to stop 
polluting the environment. 


Q: 
Is there a chance that the environmental protection committee will be 
restored? 


A: 
Of course. Even the Soviet government, under strong pressure from society, 
issued a decree in 1988 on improving the ecological situation in the country. 
The Soviet Union's state environmental committee was founded on the basis of 
that decree. So, if those [communists] understood that [environmental 
protection is important], this [current government] will also realize it one 
day. 


*******




Web page for CDI Russia Weekly: 
http://www.cdi.org/russia
Archive for JRL (under construction):
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson