October, 12 1999    
This Date's Issues: 4574 • 4575 • 4576

Johnson's Russia List
#4575
12 October 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com


[Note from David Johnson:
1. the eXile: Matt Taibbi, Pillow Talk: Secret Conversations of the 
Men Whole Stole Russia.
2. the eXile: Matt Taibbi, Press Review: Middle Crass."about the 
middle class articles in Business Week."]


*******


#1
From: Matt Taibbi <exile.taibbi@matrix.ru>
Subject: exile lead
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 


David--
Here's the lead from our next issue, a sampler of the phone transcripts 
from the Stringer book.


Pillow Talk
Secret Conversations of the Men Whole Stole Russia
by Matt Taibbi
Stringer/eXile


For years now it's been axiomatic that Russia is an extraordinarily corrupt 
place-a criminal oligarchy, run like a giant mafia clan, where thievery is 
the chief industry and swag the #1 export. It's a notion that's so 
widespread now that even the New York Times and the Washington Post 
reluctantly agree, between the lines. In fact, since the August crash two 
years ago, virtually everybody agrees that Russia's businessmen aren't 
businessmen at all, but mobsters who cruise around town in cars with 
rubber-lined trunks, their ears pressed to cell phones open permanently to 
hotlines with their banks in Antigua and Switzerland.


But knowing a thing is different than seeing it up close. It's one thing to 
know your wife is sleeping around on you, but it's easier to be haunted by 
the fact if you walk in on her doing a double-cowgirl with a pair of Miami 
Dolphin linebackers. The experience leaves you with images you'll never 
forget: that familiar pair of twitching pink ankles, buried under a 
groaning mass of black muscle; a balled-up pair of sweat socks at the foot 
of the bed, next to a shiny sea green Starter jacket; that little hand 
clutching a clump of blanket; a faint moan, then a cry of pain...


Should you have averted your eyes? For years to come, that question will 
ring in your ears round the clock, keeping you up at night. Maybe you 
should have, you think: it would have been better not to know. Then again, 
there is something strangely compelling about the whole thing, fascinating 
even, which leads to run the scene over and over again in your head. 
Horrifying at first, after a while it becomes... a sort of recreation.


If you're one of those people who would have chosen to avert his eyes, then 
stop reading now. If you're not, then you're in luck. A little over a week 
ago, the eXile's sister publication in Russian, Stringer, published an 
anthology in book form of taped phone conversations between the Russian 
oligarchs and their minions. Some of the transcripts had been published 
previously in newspapers such as Moskovsky Komsomolets and Novaya Gazeta; 
others had been posted on the web on sites such as www.flb.ru, while still 
others had never been released in all.


Taken as a whole, the Stringer book-- entitled "Yellow Pages: A Telephone 
Directory for Would-be Practioners of Big-League Politics"-reads like a 
Greatest Hits compilation of Russian corruption. All the famous phone calls 
are there: the phone call from Anatoly Sobchak to Anatoly Chubais, in which 
the former pleads to the latter to kill his criminal case; the 
obscenity-laden "Ye-Vs-Na Kh-" call starring Primoriye Deputy Governor 
Konstantin Tolstoshein; the "Grigoriyev sends everybody na kh-" call to 
Sergei Lisovsky from an angry Boris Nemtsov, whose "book advance" had not 
yet been delivered.


But more interesting even than those calls that are scandalous on their 
face are the ordinary, everyday calls between people like Alfred Kokh and 
Vladimir Potanin, Boris Berezovsky and Sergei Dubinin, Kokh and Oleg Boiko. 
In these calls the reader is able to see up close those balled-up sweat 
socks and those shiny Starter jackets-perceive firsthand how business has 
been done in this country in the past five years or so, and what the major 
players were thinking about while they were doing that business. You can 
listen in as they laugh off criminal investigations and casually discuss 
things like the manipulation of markets and the bullying of journalists. 
The very absence of drama and histrionics in these calls testifies to a 
level of cold-blooded cynicism that is impossible to conceive of by reading 
the distant, dry references to corruption in places like the New York 
Times. To understand what Russia's oligarchs were all about, you have to 
examine them up close, listening to their caveman-ish jokes they make on 
the connubial bed-all the while keeping your eyes open to watch the whole 
ugly act from beginning to end.


Beginning with this issue, the eXile will regularly publish excerpts in 
translation from the Stringer book, providing commentary to help readers 
make sense of the seemingly obscure references in the text. We'll commence 
the feature in this issue with a sampler of five or six phone calls, some 
notable for their humor, others for the insight they provide into events 
long past. We worked with Stringer editor Leonid Krutakov and staffer 
Alexei Fomin, who compiled the book, to draw out the context of these 
amazing conversations.


We begin with a call between former Central Bank chief Sergei Dubinin and 
that all-star of bugged-phone all-stars, Boris Berezovsky.


1. PROBLEM SOLVING


It goes without saying that a large part of the Russian oligarch's business 
involves heading off trouble posed by one's political enemies. Step one of 
that process involves seeing the trouble before it comes; step two involves 
conspiring with one's accomplices to decide upon the right course of 
action; and step three involves actually taking action. In this phone call 
between Dubinin and Berezovsky, we see the outlines of all three steps.


In September, 1997, Stringer editor Leonid Krutakov-then nominally a 
staffer with the new Berezovsky-funded paper Noviye Izvestiya-published an 
expose in Moskovsky Komsomolets detailing Berezovsky's scheme to embezzle 
funds from the state airline Aeroflot. The article asserted that Berezovsky 
had shipped Aeroflot money to Switzerland using forged hard-currency export 
licenses provided to him by Dubinin, then the head of the Central Bank. In 
the wake of that article, a criminal investigation was launched by the 
General Prosecutor's office into Berezovsky's activities. Part of that 
investigation included a tap on Dubinin's phone. This phone call was one of 
many that General Prosecutor Yuri Skuratov harvested from that wiretap.


Krutakov and Fomin place the time of this phone call at the end of 1998, or 
very early in January, 1999. Specifically, this was the time after Yevgeny 
Primakov had announced that he was issuing an order for Berezovsky's 
arrest, and just after Skuratov was derailed by the famous "Person 
resembling Yuri Skuratov" video. As you'll see from this phone call, the 
timing is important:


CALL: SERGEI DUBININ AND BORIS BEREZOVSKY


B: Hello there.
D: Hello. I wanted to have a quick work regarding our scuffles with the 
prosecutor's office. Everything's going along nicely now on television. I 
think that... thanks for that, we seem to have everything under control.
B: No need for thanks [inaudible word]. We were discussing [inaudible 
word].
D: Here's what really concerns me: obviously, it was no accident that he 
proposed moving the whole discussion to the Security Council. I think that 
the power ministers there have a certain prearranged position, and they 
want to take certain [?] political measures from that. They don't have 
enough to go for anything criminal, so they're pushing the political angle, 
and on behalf of the President no less. This is the Security Council, 
understand? If the President himself is being set up like this, then you're 
all in trouble.
B: I wasn't aware of how the situation had developed--I'm not in Moscow, 
I'm still in Switzerland.
D: Oh, I see.
B: I think in general there's a chance to [inaudible] on this process.
D: It seems to me that right now no one at the Security Council needs this 
judgment of the market economy.
B: Of course they do, Primakov needs it, everyone understands that 
perfectly. Primakov is playing an entirely different game, that's clear to 
everyone.
D: Of course.
B: This is where the Primakov's position fundamentally diverges from those 
of myself and the other members [inaudible]. That's why I'm going to 
[inaudible] on every lever to put a stop to this.
D: Generally, it would be better, roughly speaking, not to send it to the 
Security Council, to say that's not the right place to move it.
B: Where did you get this information that it's before the Security 
Council?
D: He said so in the press. He said that he's proposing going to the 
President with this thing. Apparently he sent some kind of document there.
B: The thing is, his days are also numbered, this Skuratov.
D: But as far as I know, he intends to behave differently. He's not going 
to submit his resignation.
B: If he doesn't submit his resignation, then he's creating a colossal 
headache for himself.
D: Nevertheless.
B: Well, do you have [inaudible] information?
D: Yes. So, even if...
B: If the President proposes, will he give in?
D: Yes.
B: Mm hmm, well...
D: He'll move off into clear-cut opposition.
B: Very good, that will do nicely.
D: Who the hell knows.
B: I'm serious, I tell you.
D: I think we'd be better off with a normal, accountable, competent, honest 
individual.
B: That last one is especially important, because this swine is a communist 
through and through.
D: Really?
B: Yes. All right. Thanks for telling me. I'll pass it on as well. And I 
think [inaudible word] there so they don't look into it.
D: Sure, you've got to defend yourself.
B: OK.
D: Thanks, Boris.
B: Thank you. So long.


This phone call highlights one of the remarkable features of these 
transcripts: the fact that some of the principals actually seem to believe 
that they're on the right side about things, and that their battles with 
each other are truly ideological in nature. Berezovsky here is anxious to 
see an "honest" Prosecutor-i.e. one who won't continue the criminal case 
against him-- replace Skuratov, who he seems quite sincerely to believe is 
a "communist swine" out to punish him, the honest capitalist. One could 
chalk this up to sarcasm, but this phenomenon surfaces often enough in 
other calls to make it seem at least vaguely possible that they mean what 
they say. "I very often have the suspicion that they actually believe this 
stuff," says Krutakov.


We all know how this story ended. Skuratov was eventually moved out, 
"honest" Vladimir Ustinov was brought in, and Berezovsky's case began 
gathering dust.


2. ENSURING FAIR COVERAGE


In the late nineties, Russia's oligarchs started buying up newspapers left 
and right. Astute observers saw right away that they were controlling the 
content of their publications and using them to attack their commercial and 
political enemies. By 1998, all sorts of commentators were beginning to 
complain that the free press was under siege by corrupt commercial 
interests. Journalists who wrote things the wrong way were beaten, even 
assassinated; once-respectable publications like Izvestia and Komsomolskaya 
Pravda went completely in the tank for their mafia sponsors.


By the end of the Yeltsin era, everyone knew that the oligarchs were 
controlling the media. But just how hands-on was their involvement?


The phone conversation below, between Izvestia editor Mikhail Kozhokin and 
Oneximbank chief Vladimir Potanin, helps shed some light on the matter. 
Kozhokin, eXile readers may recall, was the bought-off hack eventually 
brought in to replace Igor Golombiyevsky, the previous editor of Izvestiya, 
who was fired after running an article (written by Krutakov, incidentally) 
which exposed a $3 million no-interest loan agreement between Alexander 
Smolensky and Potanin ally Anatoly Chubais. Golombiyevsky fought his 
removal but was eventually defeated in an event which signaled a sort of 
Alamo for the Russian free press. Potanin, whose Oneximbank held a large 
stake in Izvestiya, found the new editorial leadership of the paper to be 
much more compliant.


It is not clear just exactly which event in the Primoriye Potanin and 
Kozhokin are referring to in this article. But the depth of Potanin's 
involvement in the day-to-day affairs of Russia's print media is made very 
clear in this call:


CALL: MIKHAIL KOZKHOKIN AND VLADIMIR POTANIN


P: Hello, Mish.
K: Hello, Vladimir Olegovich.
P: I hope you're not fed up with late night phone calls?
K: No. It's just my wife. First she says I'm not here, then she asks who it 
is.
P: Something wasn't right.
K: Yes.
P: Mikhail Mikhalich, I was looking over the events planned for the week. I 
see that on the 5th in Vladivostok Nazdratenko is arranging some kind of 
event to solve the region's criminal problems. This is an official event, 
it's right up your alley. It seems expedient to me to coincide the media 
actions we had planned with this event. Specifically, we should gather up 
everyone right now and send them out there.
K: I already discussed this today, and some people from *Russky Telegraf* 
are going.
P: We should send people from everywhere.
K: All the same, it's better to break things up a bit. There's going to be 
a big interview with him in *Izvestiya* this week. They're going to call up 
this week and make arrangements.
P: Besides *Russky Telegraf*, who else can we send?
K: I think we'll be able to send somebody, but from other papers.
P: That's exactly what I mean.
K: Yes. I mean not from our papers, but from other ones.
P: We don't need to send anyone from ours. We should have, say, two or 
three publications be present and write something about it.
K: OK.
P: The writing--let them try to come up with something, as usual. In 
principle, I could outline a few ideas for you that would be interesting, 
for example, they do some research once they're there, and cover it if it 
seems good. We could probably do that tomorrow. When do you think they'll 
be flying out?
K: Well, tomorrow's the 4th.
P: They'll have to fly out tomorrow.
K: Yes.
P: Of course, we could discuss it all by phone. I'll give you a hint right 
now, you'll get the idea. So, along with coverage of the event as such, we 
also want what we discussed, the situation in Primorsky krai and everything 
else.
K: Yes.
P: The topic is criminal, so we can cover that topic a bit as well.
K: Yes.
P: Yes?
K: Yes.
P: A historical retrospective.
K: Yes, of course.
P: Good, that'll do. All right, I won't bother you about this any further.
K: OK. Did they pass on the information about that call with the fellow 
from [doesn't finish]?...
P: Yes, they gave me the info about the call. The only thing I gathered 
there was that it was on Channel Two at the end of December. Is that right?
K: Yes.
P: OK. That means we need two things now. Relatively speaking, a list of 
what will be done on the basis of this arrangement, i.e., roughly how it's 
going to look. Remember, you said there would be some specific touches?
K: Yes, on the news programs.
P: A list, so we can pick out our sort of "savior" [inaudible].
K: Yes.
P: So I can warn the fellow that such and such is going to appear, and that 
it's going to be in roughly such a fashion--that way he'll be able to keep 
track. That's the first thing. Second, let me know tomorrow who went to 
Primorye.
K: OK.
P: Agreed?
K: Agreed.
P: So long.


Probably the most interesting part of this call is the passage in which 
Potanin and Kozhokin talk about sending reporters "not from our papers, but 
from other ones." It used to be said that oligarchs controlled only the 
information in newspapers they themselves owned. Not so; there are other 
ways of getting the news out. Without knowing specifically what these two 
are referring to here, it seems logical to assume they were talking about 
arranging for "zakazukhi", commissioned articles by reporters in other 
publications.


Rumors abound these days that Vladimir Potanin is on the short list of 
candidates to assume control of parts of Vladimir Gusinsky's crumbling 
Media-Most empire.


3. PRESSING THE FLESH


Scary as they are, oligarchs and their friends can't make money on their 
own. In Russia, they need help from the state. Specifically, they need the 
ear of influential politicians, who can help them gain the contracts-or 
simply give them the properties and licenses-- they need to get by.


In this phone call, we see an old oligarchical hand who been roughed around 
a little-Alfred Kokh-sucking up to Yeltsin aide Ruslan Orekhov (at the 
time, head of the Presidential Legal Department) in the wake of the August 
crisis. Kokh had only a year before been head of the State Property 
Committee, only to lose his job after being caught in the infamous "book 
advance" scandal. He left his government job to join the infamous Montes 
Auri fund, which is where he is working at the time of this call.


There's nothing particularly illegal being discussed in this call from 
Kokh's side-just some good old-fashioned intelligence-gatherting. If you 
work at an investment fund, it of course helps to know which way the wind 
is blowing regarding the possible dissolution of the parliament, which of 
course affects the market. Here Kokh and Orekhov discuss Viktor 
Chernomyrdin's chances of being confirmed as Prime Minister:


CALL: ALFRED KOKH AND RUSLAN OREKHOV


K: Ruslan Gennadyevich, hello.
O: Hello.
K: How's it going?
O: As usual.
K: Admit me [for a visit], please.
O: What if it's not today?
K: Tomorrow then.
O: OK, tomorrow. Call me in the morning.
K: Ruslan, let's set the time now. You're hard to reach.
O: I'm always hard to reach. The problem is, we're deciding on the problem 
with the dismissal of the government tomorrow. So you see, I just won't be 
around.
K: I don't insist. Let's agree on Friday, but firmly.
O: I'd rather deal with all that after today's voting. You called today, so 
call again tomorrow.
K: What a bastard you are.
O: I just want to find out how this whole business [lit. song] is going to 
turn out for us.
K: How's it going to turn out. Tell me what you know.
O: Fuck knows. I don't know. Today, for example, an hour ago the prime 
minister's analysts gave him their report. They count anywhere from 210 to 
240 votes.
K: So it's still dangling in the balance.
O: Yes. They're anywhere from 15 under to 15 over.
K: What's he so worried about. No matter what, BN isn't going to dismiss 
the government, he'll dissolve the parliament first.
O: As I understand it, first of all, the prime minister isn't so sure about 
that. Second, to all appearances, they're going to resign if the vote 
passes today. And if they resign, this creates all kinds of problems for 
us, purely technical things--for example, they'll have to submit their 
candidacies to the Duma, write it all up. Write up how the government is to 
be run during this time. This only bothers me from one viewpoint. I don't 
care how they work things out among one another, what concerns me is the 
share of things I'll have to handle after all that. You know how lazy I am. 
K: Don't be so hard on yourself.
O: So let's get in touch tomorrow morning. Then I'll know for sure.
K: Join up with me. I understand that you're not much interested in petty 
investment bankers. I'll tell you all kinds of interesting little things, 
how our market's operating.
O: I heard something about the market starting to fall on Friday.
K: Yes, it's falling. It was up, for about three days it was up the week 
before last, then it stabilized. And today it's fucking... another three 
tenths of a percent. But it's hardly fucking.... Let's just say that it's 
stable. It was up, then it went back down. But it's still above the August 
peak.
O: That's good. I guess that means we should send Dima Vasilyev his bonus.
K: What's Dima got to do with it?
O: Who's responsible for the market then, you?
K: He's not responsible for the market. He's responsible for regulating the 
market, but not for the quotations and not for bringing in Western 
investments.
O: But things can be regulated in such a way that nothing comes of it. You 
know yourself.
K: OK, OK. We'll give Dima his bonus.
O: All right.


Obviously it's funny that Orekhov, a government official, would be talking 
about giving Federal Securities Commission chief Dmitri Vasiliyev a bonus 
for "regulating" the market in way that "nothing comes of it." It's even 
funnier to see Kokh, the private businessman, as it were, reluctantly 
giving Vasiliyev his due-and agreeing to his bonus.


Within two years Kokh would be a big-time heavy again, this time as the 
head of Gazprom-Media, the quasi-governmental group set to move in on 
Vladimir Gusinsky's media empire. Gusinsky was an ally of Kokh ally Anatoly 
Chubais throughout most of Kokh's tenure in government, although Kokh did 
arrange things in such a way that Gusinsky lost the auction for the state 
telecommunications company Svyazinvest.


Vasiliyev, incidentally, would soon be out of government himself. According 
to Stringer, part of the kompromat materials uncovered in the Media-Most 
raid this past spring (a source of many of the taped phone calls in the 
book) included a videotape of Vasiliyev, naked except for his glasses and 
his socks, in bed with... a young man. Unfortunately, the print format 
prevents us from elaborating on that story.


4. GLOATING


When all's said and done, and a hard day's work is in the can, it's Miller 
Time. In this phone call, Boris Berezovsky snickers on the phone with an 
unidentified associate about the downfall of the abovementioned Kokh, a 
downfall Berezovsky-who was another Svyazinvest loser with a gripe against 
Kokh-had almost certainly engineered himself.


CALL: BORIS BEREZOVSKY AND AN UNIDENTIFIED MAN


B: That's not important, I'll wait for you as long as is necessary.
M: After the Kremlin, I'm coming right to your place.
B: All right.
M: No, not to your place, rather "Sh-1" [Sheremetyevo-1 airport].
B: OK. Second, did you hear BN's [Yeltsin's] statement about Kokh?
M: Not yet.
B: A fantastic statement.
M: A good one?
B: Staggering. He said that Kokh was compelled to leave because he too 
obviously displayed a preference for one or two banks, which is 
intolerable.
M: A splendid statement.
B: It's even more serious.
M: I'll take it now.
B: Take it.
M: Don't you want to tell me the third thing?
B: No. It's regarding Ivan Petrovich's visit to "B."
M: Good news?
B: Absolutely.
M: Thank God. Well done. But that's of no consequence. I'm on my way to 
Tanya and Valya, then I'll hurry to Sheremetyevo-1.
B: If it's not a problem, call when you leave from there.
M: I'll be there by eight.
B: Agreed.
M: Business aviation, right?
B: Yes. "Sh-1," business.
M: Take care. Thanks, Borya.
B: So long.


Another interesting aspect of this conversation is the oddly subordinate 
tone Berezovsky takes with this person. It is hard to imagine just who in 
Russia would pull enough weight to get Boris Berezovsky to wait "as long as 
necessary". The phone call recalls the old Soviet joke about Mikhail 
Gorbachev waking up one day to find his chauffeur asleep, drunk, in his 
limousine. In a hurry, Gorbachev puts the driver in the back seat and takes 
off himself for the Kremlin. Two cops stop him for speeding. When the first 
cop takes his license and walks back to the car, the second cop asks: 
"Who's that?"


"I don't know," the first cop says. "But Gorbachev is his driver."


5. EVERYONE'S A COMEDIAN


Another striking feature of the Stringer book are the jokes. Russian 
wiseguys, it turns out, have A-list senses of humor. In one call, for 
instance, Oleg Boiko accuses Kokh: "So, Reingoldovich, you've been hiding 
from me, you toad." In another, an unidentified conversant says, "I'm 
eating your liver about TNK." Here Alfred Kokh-an ally to the Chubais crew 
which once hauled the notorious "Xerox" box out of the White House-plays a 
friendly prank on Vladimir Potanin:


CALL: ALFRED KOKH AND VLADIMIR POTANIN


P: Alik, hi. What do you have there?
K: I can't find them.
P: You can't find them?
K: No.
P: Where'd you lose them?
K: Who the hell knows. It seems they got lost in the move.
P: During the move from where to where?
K: From the White House.
P: You had them in the White House?
K: Yes.
P: I see. OK then, what now? To hell with them. If you lost them, then you 
lost them. We'll just assume it was....
K: (interrupting) April Fool's joke.
P: Yeah, that's a parody.


It's unclear just exactly what Potanin wanted from Kokh, but whatever it 
was, Kokh agreed later on in the call to hand it over when they met at a 
dacha that weekend. "We'll relax to the Max," Potanin promises. Things are 
fun, when you're running things. Or just listening in...


Anyone interested in acquiring the Stringer book should contact Alexei 
Fomin at stringer@stringer-agency.ru


*******


#2
From: Matt Taibbi <exile.taibbi@matrix.ru>
Subject: press review
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 


David--
Here's the press review from the new issue, about the middle class articles 
in Business Week.


Middle Crass
Press Review
by Matt Taibbi
the eXile


Think hard now: have you ever met anyone who wanted to be middle class? 
Whose dream in life was to be able to just barely make his SUV payments and 
to work in a cubicle all his life? Who fantasizes about becoming a 
dot-com... middle-income earner?


No, of course not. These days, if an American is middle-class, chances are 
he feels he's only middle-class temporarily, or by mistake. What he really 
wants, and secretly feels he deserves, is to be rich. Only the most squalid 
and insipid spirit would want it any other way; you've got a lot of 
problems if your big goal in life is to be nothing more than the bearer of 
a perfectly typical consumer profile.


The readers of business publications like "Business Week" don't want to be 
middle class more than anyone else. In fact, the consumers of financial 
media tend to be upper middle-class already, if anything. Which begs the 
question: if their readers aren't middle class and don't want to be, why do 
they like reading so much about other people who are?


The publication last week of a massive two-part feature report by Business 
Week writers Paul Starobin and Olga Kravchenko marked the triumphant return 
of one of the ugliest and most condescending genres of Russia-reporting, 
the so-called "Tracking the elusive middle-class" story. There is a long 
and storied tradition behind these dumb ethnocentrist reports. A few years 
back, Andrew Kramer wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle which 
identified a Moscow family as being part of the new middle class on the 
basis of the fact that they were able to afford not one, but two VCRs. 
Virtually every big-league reporter in town has done at least one such 
report since then, usually finding the middle class anywhere where crowds 
of Russians listen to Brittany Spears or correctly identify a bagel with 
cream cheese as food. To watch these articles come out over the years, one 
senses a peculiar logic at work which will eventually discover the Russian 
middle class in fat, sexually unreceptive young Russian women who watch 
"E.R." in translation, or Russian men who wear baseball caps backwards, 
identify themselves as members of American fraternities, and prefer beer to 
vodka.


We are not there yet, thank God. But thanks to Starobin and Kravchenko, 
we're now pretty damned close. Their "Russia's Middle Class" article 
represents a major advance of the disease on virtually every front.


First and foremost, the style they write in is an extreme amplification, 
almost a grotesquerie, of the already-revolting "elusive middle class" 
format other reporters have used before them. It has always been a 
distinctive feature of these stories that reporters approached their 
would-be middle-class subjects they way Marlon Perkins did in Mutual 
Omaha's "Wild Kingdom"-from a distance, preferably from a moving 
helicopter, making contact only after the subject has been shot and tagged 
as he races across the savannah in unsuccessful pursuit of his shitty 
two-room Khruschevka apartment. You can almost hear the reporter's airborne 
conversation with his ray-ban wearing assistant Jim: "Look! Down there! A 
member of the new middle class!" "You're right, Marlon. Let's get a closer 
look." The helicopter descends; the camera catches the end of the 
dart-rifle poking out of the copter window; the owner of a small bread 
cooperative in Saransk races across the street, his frightened white 
herd-animal eyes now obscured by the copter shadow, now not...


The Business Week lead, a classic "elusive middle class" lead, begins as 
follows:


'Irina Lyakhnovskaya is a go-getter. Her hometown of Samara in central 
Russia straddles the Volga River and is surrounded by miles of fertile 
grassland and the Zhigulevskiye Mountains. In 1996, she started a tourist 
company, with seed capital supplied by herself and three friends, that 
specializes in arranging hunting and fishing trips for visitors from 
Finland and Norway. She drives a Russian-made Lada that she purchased new, 
for $3,500, two years ago, and she spends weekends at a country dacha that 
has an apple orchard she harvests to make her own wine. Last year she took 
vacations in Hungary and Romania, and this year she plans to get to 
Britain. In a country where the average factory worker is lucky to make 
$150 a month, she makes as much as $500.'


The writers here couldn't have followed the nature-show format any more 
faithfully: in the first graph, you get the animal's habitat (grassland, 
mountains), its genus ("go-getter"), its diet (seed, the spoils of hunting 
and fishing, apples, wine) and its territorial range (Hungary, Romania, 
hopefully Britain).


Marlon Perkins, when he tagged a wildebeest, was never, of course, 
interested in the individual wildebeest. He was interested in the animal as 
a typical example of the whole species. He'd poke a stick in its turds and 
say, "These are the typical turds of a wildebeest." "Elusive middle class" 
writers are the same way. They're never interested in the individual 
person. They want to descend from sky, tag the beast, reduce it to a 
cultural stereotype, then throw back the cage door and send it back out 
into the wild. The Business Week reporters reduce their subject animal to 
the broadest possible stereotype in the very second paragraph-just moments 
after descending from their copter:


'Lyakhnovskaya, 38, embodies a major shift in Russia's economic landscape. 
Boosted by a resurgent national economy and by its own bootstraps, a middle 
class is taking root in the former land of the proletariat. They're 
concentrated in the big western metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg. 
But millions of others, like Lyakhnovskaya, are sprinkled across Russia in 
provincial cities from Samara and Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River, to 
Perm and Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, to Vladivostok in the Far 
East.'


These, folks, are the typical turds of the new middle-class Russian. If you 
concentrate hard enough, you can see the stick.


No one ever accused reporters of being particularly caring people. There's 
no law which says you have to be particularly interested in the individuals 
you write about; nor is there a law which bars the making of 
generalizations about a society on the basis of a meeting with one member 
of that society. But common decency dictates that reporters should try to 
avoid being as abject about their work as Starobin and Kravchenko are in 
their article. Ask yourself honestly: would you like to see yourself 
described in the way "middle-class" Irina is described in this piece? See 
yourself "sprinkled across Russia" in the millions, and irreversibly 
shackled to a crude anticommunist rhetorical line before you've even had a 
chance to open your mouth?


No, of course you wouldn't. You'd want to be described as a peculiar 
individual, which of course you are. But these kinds of reporters don't see 
individuals. They only see, in human form, varying degrees of proof of a 
point they've already decided to make. Mssr. Starobin sure as hell didn't 
go to Samara to discover that there wasn't a middle class. He went there to 
find it, and once Irina helped him, he jumped right back in the copter. She 
might have whipped off dozens of Oscar Wilde-style epigrams and derived pi 
to 3,000 places before his very eyes, and he wouldn't have noticed-so long 
as he already knew that she made 500 bucks and dreamed of flying to 
Britain.


These "elusive middle class" stories always share three distinct features-a 
sort of creepy propagandistic trinity. On the one hand, there is always a 
disturbingly overt and undisguised loathing for poor people. On the other, 
there is a revolting worship of Western materialistic values, a gross 
celebration of the Western way as the only true path to happiness. And last 
but not least, there is always an overabundance of gleeful anticommunist 
rhetoric, which buttresses the entire structure of the article.


This piece has all three components in plenty. Take, for instance, this 
passage:


'Families in the center of the new class enjoy what most citizens can only 
regard as a dream lifestyle. They can afford to own a foreign car, as 
opposed to a more breakdown-prone Lada. They can escape to a country dacha 
that, unlike the makeshift shacks typically kept by poorer people, has 
indoor plumbing and heating. They can afford private medical care in an 
emergency, whereas those below are confined to the abysmal care meted out 
by public clinics. Such an existence breeds what analysts view as a 
distinguishing psychological feature of the sturdiest members of the new 
middle class--a sense of empowerment.'


Owning a foreign car-a "dream lifestyle"? Imagine the spiritual bankruptcy 
of a person whose dreams include owning a foreign car! Then there is the 
phrase about the "makeshift shacks" kept by poorer people. You can almost 
see Starobin's nose scrunching at the thought of ever visiting such people. 
Poor people are not even people in this article, not even subjects worth 
being tagged, but something lower-like insects. This comes out later in the 
piece as well.


But the passage about medical care is the most revolting of all. Rather 
than condemn a society where poor people can't afford basic medical care 
(when, incidentally, they once could, under a more just system), Business 
Week chooses to applaud the members of the new class for feeling 
"empowered" by their ability to pay to keep themselves alive. This is the 
kind of rhetoric that sends mobs of unemployed people reaching for their 
pitchforks.


Business Week's hatred of the poor is expressed more clearly farther down 
in the article:


'There can be no better news for Russia than the emergence of a middle
class. Such a cadre of stakeholders is this troubled country's best hope 
for
building a stable, civilized, prosperous society. Above them, in income if
not manners, are Russia's notorious oligarchs, who have plundered the 
nation. Below them are Russia's working poor. Although these lower-income 
citizens are extremely resourceful, they are in no position to assert their 
interests against an overweening state or to create the sturdy civic 
institutions that Russia so badly needs.'


It takes a writer of some ability to suffuse a single word with as much 
condescension as these writers have put into the word "resoursceful", when 
describing "these lower-income citizens" (even the terms they use when 
describing the poor are impersonal and sanitary, implying a set of rubber 
gloves to protect them from germs!). Beyond that, they're simply wrong. 
Russia's working poor, as they've proven several times in this century, are 
very much in a position to assert their interests. It sure as hell wasn't 
the "middle class" which tossed Gorbachev out of office. It was the miners 
and workers whose mass strikes crippled the state. You didn't see the 
"middle class" sitting on the train tracks in 1998. But these are factual 
issues, which are secondary offenses in the scheme of the Business Week 
piece. The really offensive part of the article is its slavish tone, its 
arrogant sense of righteousness, its meanness-all of which are captured in 
the very next passage:


'If such a thrust is going to come at all, it will likely be spearheaded by 
the new middle class. And despite the best efforts of the old Soviet regime 
to annihilate the very idea of a middle class, the dream of attaining just 
such a status is the central animating vision for its legions of 
strugglers. ``Everyone wants to be middle-class,'' says Leokadia 
Drobizheva, director of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy 
of Sciences in Moscow.'


Yeah, okay, the Soviets wanted to annihilate the bourgeoisie, but as far as 
producing citizens with middle incomes, a small amount of spending money, 
job stability, and benefits... well, forget that, that's a different 
argument entirely. But this phrase, "central animating vision for legions 
of strugglers"-well, this is just plain snobbery. This is the kind of 
language you'd expect a 19th-century English lady to use when describing 
the poor over tea at a meeting of her local relief society. "We must do 
something about those poor legions of strugglers," she says, sip sip. Only 
people who do not struggle and don't plan to would ever call whole 
populations "legions of strugglers."


But that isn't enough for the Business Week reporters. From there, they 
have to go to some hack talking head in Moscow, who tells them that 
"everyone wants to be middle class"! Again, this is just plain bullshit! 
What everyone wants is to be rich. If these reporters were writing about 
Americans, they would never dare run a quote like that. It's only in 
Business Week, where Russians are considered a lower order of animal, that 
this kind of passage is possible. You would never find an article in 
Business Week celebrating, say, Russians' urge to be a richer and more 
powerful country than America. Instead, they are to be commended and 
cheered on only when they have extremely limited ambitions, particularly 
when those ambitions involve buying foreign cars and saving up enough money 
to visit some dreary Western Mecca like Britain.


Over and over again, Starobin and Kravchenko pound home the idea that 
Russia's progress is to be measured in terms of its ability to Westernize. 
In the second part of its "Elusive middle class" report-published under the 
vile headline "So far, the mobility is all upward"-- they even state 
explicitly that in order to be middle class, a Russian must first achieve a 
certain level of Westernization.


"The ability to speak English is a must," they write. Later on, they cite 
investment by Coca-Cola, plus an improved rating by Standard and Poor's, as 
evidence of improvement of life in Samara. And of course no article 
celebrating Russia's new transformation would be complete without mention 
of that ultimate beacon of wonderfulness, the new Ikea store in Moscow:


'Back in March, traffic backed up for two miles as some 40,000 middle-class 
Muscovites, in their Ladas, Volgas, Volkswagens, and Skodas, attended the 
opening of Russia's first IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings store, in a 
suburb just outside the city.'


Well, this is paradise, isn't it? Domestic cars, clogging traffic hand in 
hand alongside foreign cars, their middle-class drivers beating down the 
entrances of a Swedish chain store to buy cheap panel furniture. Russia, 
you sure are on your way. Incidentally, Khimki is not a suburb. It is a 
shithole. A minor distinction, maybe, but probably a necessary one to make 
when writing for an audience that might otherwise imagine a Russian version 
of Newton or Englewood Cliffs.


The Business Week writers' mania for brand-name dropping as a means of 
providing evidence of social progress doesn't stop with Ikea. Not once but 
twice do the writers point to the appearance of "Dolby-sound" movie 
theaters as evidence of the emergence of a middle class. About Moscow they 
write: "There are at least ten Dolby-sound movie complexes."


Not ten movie-complexes, but ten Dolby-sound movie complexes. Considering 
that they are writing about a country where huge chunks of the population 
don't have enough money to eat, much less go to the movies, this is a 
striking detail to include. Then there is the second "Dolby-sound" passage, 
about Samara:


'Samara is, as Americans would say, a nice place to raise a family. In the
heart of the city is a mile-long beach and riverfront promenade graced by
ashberry trees, ice cream stands, and outdoor cafes. Pensioners in bathing
suits bat around a volleyball on the beach. Young men and women in business 
dress stroll the walkway alongside mothers with baby carriages. Up the road 
is the town's new entertainment center, a mall featuring a Dolby-sound 
multiplex cinema, a billiards hall, a video arcade, and a children's play
area.'


Samara, a nice place to raise a family. Uh-huh. I dare Joe Starobin to 
raise his kids there. I fucking dare him! It'll never happen in a million 
years, I guarantee you. This recalls the time that Carol J. Williams of the 
L.A. Times called the Nizhni Novgorod region "prosperous", when it was 
obvious that she wouldn't even get out of the plane there unless she had a 
surgical mask on. But this kind of disingenuous argumentation is all over 
the Business Week article; they tell you over and over how wonderful the 
lives of these middle class Russians are, whereas in reality you know 
they'd find a way to shoot themselves in the head twice if they ever found 
themselves in similar straits.


Business Week wasn't the only publication to go searching for the middle 
class in recent weeks. The Moscow Times, continuing its reversion to its 
dumb old ways, also did such a piece a few weeks ago, one that was 
virtually identical to the Business Week piece. The articles were so 
similar, in fact, that it is hard to escape the suspicion that Business 
Week simply stole the Times story wholesale. Written by Anna Raff and 
published on September 26, the Times piece actually exceeds the Business 
Week version in its brand-name worship. Here's an example:


"The middle-class Russian in 2000 is 32 years old, smokes, holds a 
university degree, takes vacations abroad and can smell the difference 
between Christian Dior and Kenzo perfumes, according to the survey, 
released late last week."


If you boil down all of these articles, what they all come down to is the 
following assertion: [insert country name here] will achieve all it needs 
to achieve as a society once it has enough people in the population who 
have a little more money than they need to survive, and plenty of consumer 
choices-- choices which include foreign products. That's really what it 
comes down to.


More than that, though, these articles reveal how Western reporters view 
their own society. In their attempts to show how much progress Russians 
have made towards paradise, they reveal just how bankrupt the Western 
lifestyle ideal really is. The vision of the world as presented by Business 
Week is one where everyone is happy once they have their choice of economy 
car, a place to go on a low-cost vacation, a Dolby-sound movie theater, an 
arcade, a "play area" for children, a furniture store... If you didn't know 
any better, you'd think that they were describing the benefits of living 
under Soviet communism. Remember, Russia once had more movie theaters than 
any country in the world. And they had plenty of "play areas."
The only difference, was, they were free.


Lacking a positive ideal to promote, the Business Week reporters ended 
their first piece by blasting the old Soviet ideal-which, in case you 
hadn't noticed, has been dead a long time:


'Russia remains a laggard among post-Soviet empire nations in building a
middle class. But it can't be forgotten that Russia was ground zero for the
Bolshevik Revolution, for the doomed project of building a classless 
society.
Lenin, the lawyer who led that cause, was a man of bourgeois origins, a
native, in fact, of the Samara region who came to despise his own roots. He
still lies entombed in a mausoleum on Red Square, but an emptier symbol is
hard to imagine. For all around him, Russians have resumed their quest,
frozen in time, for a middle-class society. And slowly, with no doubt more
stumbles to come, they are getting there.'


Can I imagine an emptier symbol than Lenin's tomb? How about an Ikea store? 
For my money (and it's all about money, after all), I'll take Ikea. And the 
empty articles which attend it.


*******