December 3, 2000   

This Date's Issues:   4666 • 4667

Johnson's Russia List
#4667
3 December 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Charlie Rose Show: Transcript of interview with Stephen Cohen.
2. New York Times: Michael Wines, An Ailing Russia Lives a Tough Life That's Getting Shorter.]

******

#1
The Charlie Rose Show
PBS television
CHARLIE ROSE Transcript #2825
November 30, 2000
[This transcript has not been checked against videotape and cannot, for
that reason, be guaranteed as to accuracy of speakers and spelling of names.]
 
CHARLIE ROSE, Host:  Welcome to the broadcast.
  Tonight we begin with Stephen Cohen on the future of Russia.
STEPHEN COHEN, New York University, Author of ``Failed Crusade'':  The
anger of this book is about the opportunities lost.  Yes, there's hope.
Yes, there was an election.  Yes, that's good.  But there could have been
so much more.  The opportunities were there.
  Now, some people have liked book, but the point of the book is make
people pay attention to what I consider an enormous potential catastrophe
waiting to happen....

Professor Says U.S. Policy Destabilized Nuclear Power

CHARLIE ROSE:  Professor Stephen Cohen, a well-known Russian scholar, has
established himself as one of the most interesting voices on Russian
affairs.  As an author, his books have covered Russian history from the
Bolshevik revolution to the demise of the Soviet Union.  In recent years,
he's been an unapologetic critic of the United States foreign policy
towards Russia, calling it ``our worst failure since Vietnam.''
In his new book, Failed Crusade, he argues that American officials and
experts have been ineffective at instituting reform in Russia over the last
decade.  I am pleased to have him back on this program.
STEPHEN COHEN, New York University, Author of ``Failed Crusade'':  Thank you.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Failed Crusade--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --means what?
STEPHEN COHEN:  It means that a great tragedy unfolded in Russia in the
1990s, a human tragedy -- the impoverishment of a people -- a security
tragedy -- the destabilization of a nuclear country for the first time in
history -- and that we, all of us -- the United States -- are complicit in
that because we conducted a policy toward Russia that instead of being wise
and pragmatic was ideological.  It was missionary.  We attempted to
transform Russia into our own image.
And we can debate the degree of our complicity, but complicit we are.
Hence the failed crusade.
CHARLIE ROSE:  OK.  We did this out of the right motives or the wrong motives?
STEPHEN COHEN:  The right motives.
CHARLIE ROSE:  OK.  But the problem was--
STEPHEN COHEN:  But Americans always do things out of the right motives.
The results are the problem.
CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, whether it's Vietnam or whatever it is--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.  Sure.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --it comes from--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Sure.  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --an interest, an effort--
STEPHEN COHEN:  There's no malevolence there.  There's just a lack of wisdom.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Or even imperialism.
STEPHEN COHEN:  No.  I mean, a lack of wisdom.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Lack of wisdom.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  And essentially, at the core of your argument, is this idea
that we somehow wanted to turn Russia into--
STEPHEN COHEN:  A facsimile--
CHARLIE ROSE:  --an image of ourselves.
STEPHEN COHEN:  --of America.  Well, that's not my idea.  That's what the
Clinton administration said, and that was the assumption that much of the
mainstream media and mainstream scholars in my field acted on, that it was
possible to turn Russia into what we call a democratic capitalist system,
even though Russia had a different civilization and a different experience,
and that that should be done according to prescriptions that we knew that
the Russians didn't know.
In other words, we said to the Yeltsin leadership -- because that was
supposed to be the agent of the transformation -- ``Here's what you do to
become like us.''
And for complicated reasons, the Yeltsin regime bought into it.  And the
deal was, ``We give you money, and you do the policies we suggest.''  And
it was a calamity.  The money was stolen, and the policies wrecked the
country.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Goes back to what administration?
STEPHEN COHEN:  That's interesting because one of the reviewers of my book,
while agreeing with the thesis, said that I had made a mistake in not
dating it from George Bush, Father Bush, President Bush, in 1992.  I did
look at that very carefully, and there was this impulse, this missionary
impulse in the-- in the Bush administration.
But you know, Republicans and foreign policy are always less ideological
than Democrats when it comes to action.  I'm not sure the Bush
administration would have gone down this road.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Is what we did in Russia different than what we tried to do
with the Marshall Plan--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --after World War II?
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.  How smart you are, because that is really-- I mean, I
guess that's a generation because you and I have a dim memory of that.
That is-- I mean, to me, that is a very exciting remembrance of a wonderful
moment in American history.  You and I didn't do it, our fathers did it.
But after World War II, the American government said to the devastated
European powers-- they didn't say, ``Do this,'' they said, ``What is it
necessary to be done for you to recover?  Tell us what kind of policies
will work in your country, and then we will support them.''  And that's
what happened, and it was successful.
With Russia, we did exactly the opposite.  We said, ``We don't care what
you think will work in Russia.  We know what will work.  You do this, and
we'll give you the money.''
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.  Here's where some might divide company with you,
because everybody wants to talk about who lost Russia, as if Russia has
been lost, number one.  I've asked lots of Russians this very question,
``Who lost Russia?''  To a person, they don't blame the United States.
They say, ``Whether we have lost or not, we did it to ourselves.''
Now, are you saying that American public officials, who might not have
been smart and wise at every moment, wanted to dictate at every turn and
were not listening at any turn to what Russians were telling them about
what they needed to create a democratic-- or-- democratic institutions?
STEPHEN COHEN:  A capitalist system, right.  You overstated it just a bit,
but the answer's yes.  Basically, that's what happened, that we made all of
our political and financial help conditional on a set of policies which
were highly ideological and dogmatic, policies that prevail in the United
States today, but when I was in college were not the orthodoxy.
For example, it's clear that Russia's in a great depression, the greatest
depression in the 20th century.  They're still in it.  They can't get out.
When I went to college, we were taught that you get out of a depression
the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt got out of the American depression, you
throw money into the economy to get the people, the farms, the factories
back to work.
We told the Russians just the opposite: Starve the economy of money.  That
was a mistake.  It was the wrong thing to do.  Why was the Marshall Plan
different?  Because we didn't tell the Europeans how they could recover.
We asked them.
CHARLIE ROSE:  But this is some of the same kinds of issues that are
faced-- that the IMF is facing right now not just about Russia, but also
about Asia.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah, but the United States--
CHARLIE ROSE:  The question of whether we are too demanding--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --of control over their credit and how they operate their
economic system, in the interest of not seeing the money thrown away into a
deep pool of corruption.
STEPHEN COHEN:  That's right.  I mean, it's a complicated story, but I'm
only going to speak in headlines.  I believe that the policies that we
urged on the Russians and the Russians unwisely adopted created conditions
of corruption.  Corruption was built into the kinds of policies we were
recommending to them.  And that's why so much money, through insider
trading, was stolen.
But look, there are other issues here, other than economic ones.  Our
policies played a role in impoverishing roughly 70 percent of the Russian
population.  Do we bear a moral responsibility for that?  That's a
question.  I believe we do, but I'll entertain an argument that we don't.
CHARLIE ROSE:  OK--
STEPHEN COHEN:  But the worst of it-- the worst of it is that these
policies, whether we're the most guilty because we recommended them or the
Russian government's more guilty because it adopted them -- and let me
emphasize this -- for the first time ever, ever, ever in history,
destabilized a fully nuclearized country.  What does that mean?  We don't
know what it means, but it doesn't mean anything good.  We are in far
greater danger today because of what happened in the '90s than we ever were
during the cold war.  That's the American bottom line.
Even if it's not a moral issue, it's a security issue.  You and I, our
kids, our grandchildren, are living in a new nuclear era because a
nuclearized country -- nobody foresaw this -- has been destabilized.
Destabilized.  And now the nuclear risks are much greater.  I'm not a
nuclear expert, but I-- I'm not going to read it to you, but I got a list
here of nuclear scientists who tell us this, and nobody listens.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Well, they do listen.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Nobody listens-- [crosstalk]
CHARLIE ROSE:  Well, they-- not only do they listen, but there've been
commissions and there've been respected American officials have taken a
look at this.  I mean people like Sam Nunn.
STEPHEN COHEN:  That's right.  Yeah.  He wants a lot more money than
anybody's given him.  I mean, he's an exception.  He shows the exception--
former senator Nunn.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  A very wise man.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  He understands the danger.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Let me say one thing about that.  There are four nuclear
dangers that didn't exist during the cold war that now exist.
Proliferation is the sexy one.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  It's the poster child.  We make movies about it.  We
imagine people stealing -- what did they used to be called? -- football
nuclear bombs--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  --in suitcases and in the dark of the night, like a thief.
However, Russia's got several scores of unstable nuclear reactors on land
and the sea that are extremely dangerous.  There's a civil war in Russia,
in Chechnya, the first civil war ever in a nuclear country.  Each side has
threatened the other with nuclear retaliation.
And the worst danger probably is, is that these warning systems that the
United States and Russia built -- the Soviet Union and the United States
built during the cold war to tell us if the Russians have launched-- the
Russian system has broken down, the satellites and the computers, and
they're getting false signals.  They constantly think we're attacking them.
 And they're on hair-trigger alert.  And they don't have the money to fix
the system.
Personally, I think we ought to fix that system for them, $2 billion.
What a bargain, national security.
One of the guys I got in here says that he-- he wrote the report on this.
I mean, again, you know, I have to read the nuclear scientists.  But he
says-- he's asked ``How come there hasn't been such a disaster?''  And he
says, ``If you ask me, what's the main reason New York City hasn't gone up
in a mushroom cloud, I'd say the main reason is we've been very lucky.''
And this guy is a former official of the Department of Defense.  He's no
radical.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Who is this?
STEPHEN COHEN:  His name is John Wolfstahl [sp].
CHARLIE ROSE:  How bad are things today?  Beyond the destabilizing of the
second largest nuclear state--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --in the world--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --do you see any signs of stability?  Do you see any light
at the end of the tunnel?  Do you see under the seemingly autocratic hand
of Putin a possibility for stabilization?
STEPHEN COHEN:  You know, in the old days, when I used to on the show, you
used to allow me to ask you one question.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Let me ask you one question.  As you well know, back in
March of this year, there was a presidential election in Russia.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  What was the significance-- it's a rhetorical question.
But what was the significance of the fact that of the two candidates, one
came from the Communist Party and the other came from the KGB?  And that
was 10 years after the end of the Soviet Union?  Obviously, that's not a
good sign, that a communist ran against a KGB officer.  Putin won.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Spent his [unintelligible] So what kind of stability in
Russia are we talking about?  There's the stability of the graveyard, the
fist.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  If we had-- and that's why I'm so frustrated by this
stalemate in the American presidential election--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah.  [unintelligible]
STEPHEN COHEN:  --because I hope for a new policy.  But a new American
policy has to help Russia stabilize Russia, and that means stabilizing the
economy.
CHARLIE ROSE:  You bring the point-- [crosstalk] Let's assume that there's
no real answer in terms of whether-- but before I come to your point, which
is a good one, and where the focus ought to be, there is this question.
There are those who look at the experience and have great concern and
sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people because the economy has
collapsed--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --great understanding of the sense of frustration with
policies that failed.  On the other hand-- on the other hand, they will
say, ``Look, this is a place that's had to do something extraordinary,
which is become a democratic state, not withstanding the fact that there
were unfairness about the way the elections were done -- some people had
more power, more money, more media than the other side did''--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Right.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --``but there was a free election that took place, and
that's hope, and that's a sign that ought to be applauded.''
STEPHEN COHEN:  I applaud it.  See, I come at it--
CHARLIE ROSE:  But it's insignificant, you say.
STEPHEN COHEN:  No.  No, no, no, no.  I'm one of these people with the hope--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah.
STEPHEN COHEN:  And this is one-- this is an angry book.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  And this is a polarizing book.
CHARLIE ROSE:  And you'll agree with me this is the anger that you and I
have talked about over the years.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah, we've done it just the opposite.  Normally, you read
the book, and then you see the television show.
CHARLIE ROSE:  That's right! [crosstalk] Well, the book sums it up and puts
it in--
STEPHEN COHEN:  It does, indeed.  Look, this book is the most personal book
I ever wrote because I've-- I first visited Russia 40 years ago, when I was
a kid.  I've been studying Russia and living there for 30 years.  I've
always hoped for Russia.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah.
STEPHEN COHEN:  The anger of this book is about the opportunities lost.
Yes, there's hope.  Yes, there was an election.  Yes, that's good.  But
there could have been so much more.  The opportunities were there in 1991,
a decade ago.  And moreover, the hope could be destroyed at any moment
because of the condition of the country.  That's the anxiety.  That's the
anger.
This book has made a lot of people very angry, a lot of people very--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Well, I can name some--
STEPHEN COHEN:  But I--
CHARLIE ROSE:  I can name some of them-- the Clinton administration, some
professors from Harvard and other places, who went over there--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --doing what you accuse them of, which is having the wrong
idea and trying to impose American values and American structures--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --on a system that was unfamiliar and ill-equipped to handle
it, and opened itself up to corruption and--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Impoverishment.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --impoverishment.
STEPHEN COHEN:  The looting of the country.
CHARLIE ROSE:  And instability.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  All right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.  And this--
CHARLIE ROSE:  So you made the Clinton administration unhappy.  You made
Jeffrey Sachs unhappy.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Who else?
STEPHEN COHEN:  Well--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Ought to be unhappy with this?
STEPHEN COHEN:  Well, I'm more--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Boris Yeltsin.  But you've been beating up on him for a long
time.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Well, I-- well, we were talking before, I showed you what a
young professor wrote about it.  He said it's the worst book he ever wrote.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah, but--
STEPHEN COHEN:  But I would-- [crosstalk] I would have felt that-- that I
had failed if I hadn't aroused that kind of response.
Now, some people have liked book, but the point of the book is make people
pay attention to what I consider an enormous potential catastrophe waiting
to happen.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Two things.  I mean, your anger comes from, other than the
fact that you have a love affair with Russia, as most people who make it a
life's work to study a place--
STEPHEN COHEN:  I guess.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --have a love-- come on!  You do!
STEPHEN COHEN:  I guess I do.  I don't know.  Love-- but I'm attached.
CHARLIE ROSE:  You don't just go over there for academic reasons.  You go
there--
STEPHEN COHEN:  No, I--
CHARLIE ROSE:  --because this is a place you care about.
STEPHEN COHEN:  I've devoted a lot of my life to it.
CHARLIE ROSE:  You care about the literature.  You care about the people.
You care about--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  It's your--
STEPHEN COHEN:  It's my second home.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Your second home.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yes.  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  So you love it.  And you're angry because you believe it's
been done a huge disservice.
STEPHEN COHEN:  And it pains me enormously that even if it isn't true,
anti-Americanism, which scarcely existed during the cold war, is now so
widespread, that so many Russians blame us, even if it isn't true.  That
really hurts more than anything, for somebody like me.  I want a change of
American course.  That's what I want.  It's not too late, but it's close to
being too late.
CHARLIE ROSE:  All right, I'll go to that and then come back to my other
points about your own anger and-- and who--
STEPHEN COHEN:  I don't like the word ``anger,'' ``love''-- [crosstalk]
CHARLIE ROSE:  You used it, not me.  ``This is an angry book.''
STEPHEN COHEN:  It's true.  It's true.
CHARLIE ROSE:  What should be-- what would you hope to be a policy of an
incoming administration in the United States, the bilateral relationship
with Russia?
STEPHEN COHEN:  The president would send publicly or privately a trusted
adviser to Putin and say, ``We understand the policies we urged on you in
the '90s haven't worked.  Please tell us what you think will work.  Tell us
what you think will stabilize your economy and therefore stabilize your
nuclear infrastructure, get your people back to work, end the misery, end
the demographic catastrophe, stabilize the country.  Tell us how you-- what
you think will work.''
Those policies from Russia are brought back to this country and then
serious economists evaluate them.  And if they make sense, the United
States leads an effort to fund them, $50 billion a year for 10 years.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Five hundred billion dollars over 10 years.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Over 10 years, yeah.  That's what the moderate Russian
economists think is necessary to put in-- to put into the economy to
stabilize the country.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Suppose-- suppose in 1991--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah?
CHARLIE ROSE:  --beginning with the inauguration in 1993-- [crosstalk] I
always get that confused, but let's say-- Bill Clinton came in in January
'93, I assume--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Exactly.  Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Seven years ago.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.  Eight years ago.
CHARLIE ROSE:  --they made a commitment to spend $50 billion a year at that
time and agreed to listen, would Russia today be dramatically different, in
your opinion?
STEPHEN COHEN:  If they had done it the way the majority of the Russian
economists had proposed to do it, the answer's yes.
CHARLIE ROSE:  And what would that be?  I mean, tell me how the Russian
economists would have proposed something so dramatically different than
what was proposed at the time?
STEPHEN COHEN:  OK--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Albeit nobody thinks they were perfect.
STEPHEN COHEN:  No.  The proposal would have been different in two
fundamental respects.  The proposals that we adopted said you have to do it
immediately, and that became known as ``shock therapy.''
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  That was a mistake.  It's always a mistake in a country
like Russia.  So the first recommendation would have been gradualism,
piecemeal.  The second would have been, at the risk of inflation, which is
always bad but not necessarily the worst thing, we got to put people back
to work.  People have to have wages.  They have to be able to feed their kids.
As we talk today, literally as we sit here, three northern provinces of
Russia, where it's 40 below zero, have no heat. The schools are closed.
The school teachers have not been paid.  And everybody's on strike,
including nuclear maintenance workers, because there's no money.  There's
no salary.  People can't buy food.
They can't-- 86 percent of Russians said in a poll about six months ago
they couldn't buy elementary medicine for their families.  That's the sort
of thing that should have been avoided because you don't want desperation
in the land in a nuclear country of any kind.  Now you got a former KGB
official as president of the country.  The people voted for him.  He got a
big majority.  They cooked the vote.  Two million votes they cooked.  But
still he won overwhelmingly.
There was a reason why the people thought that a guy who had been in the
KGB all his life would be good for the country, and that's because they
were desperate.  It's not complicated.
CHARLIE ROSE:  They thought he would bring the authoritarian arm that they
needed?
STEPHEN COHEN:  They don't want to give up democracy, but they wanted--
see, what's interesting is all these polls in Russia show that they want a
strong hand.  But you need to ask the next question -- in the poll, why do
they want the strong hand?  They don't want to end democracy, they want
justice restored.  They want the looters put in prison -- the people
looting the country.  They want their wages paid.  They want their social
entitlements, which people 50 years old worked for all their life and don't
exist anymore, back.  Their benefits.  Their pensions.
I mean, we have a debate in this country about prescription medicine and
social security and health coverage.  Russians have lost all that in one
decade; all of it.  They want it back, plus democracy. 
There's no great rebellion against democracy.  This is about something
else.  This is about social justice.  Russians feel that very strongly.
But you'd feel that way too if you couldn't feed your kids or get baby
aspirin.  You'd be an angry man.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Well, that's why revolutions are born.
STEPHEN COHEN:  And you'd vote for Putin too.
CHARLIE ROSE:  That's why-- perhaps so.  Let's-- where was the leadership
in Russia that should have come to the fore?
STEPHEN COHEN:  Well, I know--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Who was it?
STEPHEN COHEN:  I don't know.
CHARLIE ROSE:  You know what--
STEPHEN COHEN:  I know what you want me to say.  You already assume it's
Gorbachev.  His moment--
CHARLIE ROSE:  I want you-- you think I want you to say that because I
think that you look through him with rose-colored glasses.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah, I have a reputation of being a Gorbachev lover, to
make this crude.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Right.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Let me tell you what I love about Gorbachev.  The fact is I
do know him.  I do like him.  He's been nice to me, but I don't love him
for that reason.  What I love about Gorbachev is he believed in gradualism.
CHARLIE ROSE:  The only thing I want to disagree with a little bit, then
I've got to move on, is this notion that people who had the responsibility
for doing something were not listening and simply did not hear any voices.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Here or there?
CHARLIE ROSE:  Here, mainly.  Did not hear any voices from Russia and did
not consult them.  Did not ask them.  I don't have evidence of that, but I
believe that there are people in positions of influence in the Clinton
administration who wanted to do the right thing and did listen.  They may
have made the wrong judgment.  May or may not in some cases.  Yes, in some
cases; no.  But they did--
STEPHEN COHEN:  Try.
CHARLIE ROSE:  They didn't go over there with a closed mind, that I
believe.  You and I disagree on that, I think, most fundamentally.
STEPHEN COHEN:  I suppose it's nuances.  Look, in the book I present the
evidence in their own words and what they said and the media said and
officials said and academics said during these 10 years.  You've got to
read the book and decide if my case is persuasive.
However, I'm not interested in indicting these people forever.  I want to
persuade them to change course.
CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, that's where I want to leave on.  Where do you find
optimism?  This is called-- The New York-Washington Post Book World and
you'll see this in the New York Review of Books has this kind of stuff all
the time -- ``Who stole Russia?'', which is a play off of ``Who lost China?
 Who lost Russia'' right?  But it's ``Who stole Russia?''  And then it's a
series of books that have been written about it in-- I mean, one by
Berezovsky; one by you; and one by Chrystia Freeland, called Sale of the
Century.
Yours if very different from the other two and somebody ought to make that
point very clear.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah, yeah.  Though I've dragged a lot of people down.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah, exactly.  In-- on some small note of possibility for
optimism about this great country, Russia, other than a new president
committed to make a difference and committed to go to the ends to spend--
to ask them what they needed and give them $50 billion a year.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Wondrously talented, skilled country.  Educated country,
Russia.  A country that deeply believes in doing the right things -- social
justice.  A very rich country, controls enormous quantities of the world's
natural resources, has been mismanaged.  A president who's 48-years-old and
therefore could become something other than what he originally was.  He
could grow.  He could burgeon history.  He's now waiting, I believe, for an
American president, which we don't yet have.
Now on the American side, just briefly.  Vice President Gore was the point
man for the policy that I believe was the wrong-headed policy.
CHARLIE ROSE:  With the relationship-- the now-famous relationship with
Chernomyrdin and all that?
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.  But more generally, he was the front man for this
guy.  He believed in it.  I think it would be very hard for him to change
course.  The Russians, by the way, are debating this at this very moment --
who would be better for Russia -- Gore or Bush -- as they watch the saga
unfold here.
CHARLIE ROSE:  But Bush, I assume, they depend on who they think is
advising him.
STEPHEN COHEN:  No, they remember his father.  You see, Russians like his--
CHARLIE ROSE:  Is that good or bad in terms of them?
STEPHEN COHEN:  It's good for them.  And they also remember Nixon and
Reagan, whom they think were good presidents in regard to Russia because
they changed their mind about Russia and they met Russia halfway.
And so, the-- I won't get into the details of the debate, but Russia's
having a debate at the moment as we're counting votes, which man would be
better for Russia -- Gore or Bush.  And it's very interesting.
Also, of course, they think we're a little nuts with all this vote counting.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Who do you think?
STEPHEN COHEN:  Would be better for Russia?
CHARLIE ROSE:  Uh-huh.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Well, I was raised a Democrat.
CHARLIE ROSE:  From Kentucky.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah, from Kentucky.  A Franklin Delano Roosevelt Democrat.
 And when I vote, I usually vote Democratic, but not always.  But--
CHARLIE ROSE:  I hear a ``but'' coming.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.  But just on the question of Russia policy, if that's
all I cared about -- unfortunately I care about other things -- I believe
Bush would probably be most likely to take a fresh start.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Well, fresh start, of course.  But I think that's true
because you are so opposed to what you think Al Gore has been part of as
eight years as vice president and before that as a senator.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Yeah.  But a couple of things--
CHARLIE ROSE:  It's more an indictment of Gore than it is some sense that
Bush himself is party to some brilliant new ideas.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Well, but Bush has said a couple of things in the campaign
that are kind of unusual and Gore got angry at him about.  Three things.
First of all, he said the policy was rife with corruption.  Secondly, he
said we've got to build down nuclear weapons very rapidly and I will do it
the way my dad did it.  I will try to do it unilaterally.  Right?
And then he said something very interesting in the presidential debates.
CHARLIE ROSE:  About Serbia?
STEPHEN COHEN:  No, he said America must not be arrogant in imposing its
way of life on the world.  So I don't--
CHARLIE ROSE:  No, he made that as a principal part of his talk about the
engagement of the world.
STEPHEN COHEN:  I'm desperate for hope.  Maybe it's hope in a dark corner.
CHARLIE ROSE:  Failed Crusade:  America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist
Russia, Stephen Cohen.  An interesting book.  You should read this as part
of your own understanding of what's going on in the world.
Thank you.
STEPHEN COHEN:  Thank you.
CHARLIE ROSE:  We'll be right back.  Stay with us.

******

#2
New York Times
December 3, 2000
An Ailing Russia Lives a Tough Life That's Getting Shorter
By MICHAEL WINES
 
PITKYARANTA, Russia - When the chest pains first gripped him that February
day in 1998, Anatoly Iverianov was driving a tractor through one of the
birch-and-pine forests that carpet Russia's border with Finland, dragging
fresh-cut logs to a wood lot.

"I had a glass of vodka," he said. "I thought that would help."

It didn't. Mr. Iverianov was having a heart attack. Within six months he
suffered another. Two years later, he is disabled, impoverished, embittered
and sick - so sick he has been in the local hospital three times since August.

Standing in his crumbling hillside apartment, in a Brezhnev-era block
overlooking the paper factory, Mr. Iverianov added up the negatives: his
disability pension is a pittance; he is bored and useless at home;
hospitalization gives him no respite from illness.

"I've been drinking and smoking a lot," he said defiantly. "And I'm not
alone."

Quite the opposite: two years after two heart attacks, 45-year-old Anatoly
Iverianov is a Russian Everyman.

In a country whose most overworked word is "krizis" - crisis - here is a
genuine one: Russian life expectancy has fallen in 6 of the last 10 years.

It fell every month last year alone, to an average of 65.9 years for both
men and women - about 10 years less than in the United States, and on a par
with levels in Guatemala. Moreover, government statistics through last
August point to a further drop in 2000.

It is a sore-thumb symptom of a precipitous decline in Russia's public
health, a spiral not seen in a developed nation since the Great Depression,
if then. Life expectancy is not just a medical issue but a barometer of a
society's health. In a sense it is a lagging indicator of poverty, of
stress, of cohesion and stability - and of a government's ability or
willingness to take care of its own.

Since 1990, according to the most recent figures, the death rate has risen
almost one-third, to the highest of any major nation, and the birth rate
has dropped almost 40 percent, making it among the very lowest. Mortality
from circulatory diseases has jumped by a fifth; from suicides, a third;
from alcohol-related causes, almost 60 percent; from infectious and
parasitic diseases, nearly 100 percent.

Not all the toll was registered in deaths. The rate of newly disabled
people rose by half.

When Russia's death rate surpassed its plunging birth rate in the mid-90's,
demographers called it the Russian cross and suggested that it had profound
implications.

By a United Nations estimate, Russia's population of 145.6 million could
shrink to 121 million by 2050. In a report early this year, the Central
Intelligence Agency forecast that by 2002, 1 in 70 Russians will carry
H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS - almost twice the United States rate.
Tuberculosis, once nearly under control, is epidemic, and the C.I.A. says
shortages of money and medicine "are creating the context for a large
increase in infectious diseases."

Infections are only one factor in Russia's premature deaths. The leading
killers are cardiovascular disease and violence, and the victims are not
the elderly so much as young and middle-aged men. They are the working
backbone that in theory should be available to help rebuild this nation.
But the average citizen downs a world-record 4.4 gallons of alcohol a year.
Reflecting that, accidents and violence have passed cancer as the leading
cause of death after heart disease, something unthinkable for a modern nation.

Russian leaders sound increasingly apocalyptic. President Vladimir V. Putin
has warned of an emerging "senile nation," too old and feeble to compete
globally.

And the intelligence agencies in the United States believe that the
deteriorating public health picture in Russia, and in the hospitals and
clinics struggling to deal with it, could lead to political upheaval at
worst and relief emergencies at best.

Such gloom is not unrelieved. After plunging in the early 1990's, life
spans rose steadily from 1995 to 1998 before sliding again. Drinking has
declined from mid-1990's highs. And in cities, there is growing - and
crucial - awareness that good health is no longer the state's problem, but
an individual duty.

Nor is the problem irreversible. Soviet health improved greatly, if
briefly, after Mikhail S. Gorbachev cracked down on alcohol abuse in the
late 1980's. Russia's current health minister, a cardiologist, favors
reshaping medicine to emphasize prevention as well as treatment - and
appears to have Kremlin backing.

One senior Clinton administration official who is a Russia expert says dire
scenarios of a shrunken nation fragmented into feuding fiefs or at war with
a growing Islamic minority are overstated. But his forecast is little
better: an ever-poorer, more miserable land, running down slowly like a
clock long unwound.

Thomas Graham, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
in Washington, says the decade's trends are markers not just of bad health
but social crisis.

"In a word," he said, "it means that we have a Russia that's in decline.
The long-term tasks facing Russia now are quite daunting. And Russia, at
this point, just doesn't have the resources to deal with that."

Poverty has hastened the decline. Russia's elaborate system of state-run
health care is even more desperately underfinanced now than in Soviet
times. Hospitals are critically short of money, drugs and even syringes.
The Soviet concept of free and universal medical care, however desultory in
the past, now exists in name only. Paying for care, on or under the table,
is the norm.

But money is only one problem.

The greater problem, far more difficult to gauge, is the collapse of the
Soviet framework, which essentially propped up society: the guaranteed pay
envelope, the free housing and child care, the cheap vodka, the numbing
relief of having no responsibility for the future because the state carried
it all, the sense of being part of a great empire.

Especially outside the big cities, that crumpled framework has left behind
a wreck of despair, deep insecurity, poverty and even shame. And the
ravages of the Russian loss are evident in the self-destructive quality of
the mortality data: wholly preventable accidents, heart attacks, homicides
and suicides whose rates, always high by Western standards, abruptly
vaulted off the charts with the arrival of freedom.

"There was a psychological shock," said Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, a Russian
demographer at the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, Germany, and a leading
expert on his country's mortality crisis. "It's the pace of reform. It's
labor force turnover, the magnitude of change in the labor market. It's
life style and alcohol, because alcohol consumption is a very important
force in the large jump in mortality."

Vodka, Cigarettes and Death

Robust health has never been this land's defining trait. Soviet medical
care was rationed by party rank and loyalty. As befit a system that saw
people as cogs, the masses got enough to get them to farm or factory - and
little more. The Communist solution to high infant mortality was to
subsidize births. Vodka and cigarettes, red meat and butter were
state-promoted balms for a cruel life.

And when such policies began reaping a harvest of rising death and illness
in the 1970's and 1980's, the Kremlin's response was to stamp the damning
statistics secret. It is clear now that Russian life expectancy peaked at
68.8 years in 1965 and, but for a brief aberration in the 1980's, had
fallen about nine months by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The Soviet government bears much blame for that. Western nations spent one
in eight dollars on health in the 1980's. The Soviet Union spent barely 1
in 30 dollars of a far smaller income - and walled itself off from
breakthrough drugs and devices that Western investments reaped.

Not that Anatoly Iverianov sees it this way. Asked when his life took its
turn for the worse, he did not hesitate. "The moment the Union ended," he
said.

>From Mr. Iverianov's four-story stucco apartment block in the center of
Pitkyaranta, the capital of a verdant, lake-flecked swatch of northeast
Russia, it is barely an hour to the Finnish border.

But that is the wrong yardstick. The true distance from Pitkyaranta to
Finland is measured in years, not hours.

In Pitkyaranta, a newborn boy can expect to live just past age 57 1/2,
about as long as a boy in Yemen or Nepal. An hour north, a Finnish boy can
expect to live nearly 15 years beyond that, almost as long as an American.
A Pitkyaranta girl can look forward to living 72 years - as long as a girl
in Peru. A Finnish girl should make it past 79, roughly as long as an
American.

"You won't find any other land border in the world where there's such a
sharp difference," said Pekka Puska, a doctor and expert on Russia at
Finland's National Public Health Institute.

Much of Pitkyaranta's district could be mistaken for Finland: lakeside
dachas besieged by snow-covered potato vines; hillside boulders discarded
by retreating glaciers.

But it is a surface likeness. Pitkyaranta and the Missouri-size province
that surrounds it, Karelia, are among the unhealthiest places to live in
western Russia. The Russian cross is on full display here: twice as many
people died in Pitkyaranta last year as were born, almost precisely the
reverse of the situation 20 years ago.

To see why, talk to Galina Pritchiyev, 55, dark-haired, stout and stoic,
who lives in Ryaimyalya, a bankrupt collective-farm village of unpainted
cabins and untethered cattle about 25 miles south of Pitkyaranta.

Mrs. Pritchiyev has hypertension. So does her husband, a retired tractor
driver who had a heart attack in 1992, at 53. So do half the men and women
in Pitkyaranta district, which includes her village.

That makes sense. High blood pressure is caused by a fatty diet, obesity,
excess alcohol and lack of exercise, all in abundance here. The Pritchiyevs
get pensions totaling about $50 a month - enough for milk, butter, bread
and oil from the market, and little else. A few calves provide beef; a
garden produces potatoes and tomatoes.

Exercise for its own sake is unheard of, and with jobs scarce, she said,
few even benefit from farm labor. The young people have all left; nobody
will work for the 500 rubles (about $18) that a dairymaid or other
unskilled worker makes in a month.

"So a lot of people have started to drink," Mrs. Pritchiyev said. "They
drink samogon, spirits, whatever," she explained, using a word for a
poisonous-smelling home-brewed vodka. "They drink from boredom. There's no
work. And there is very little hope."

The Pitkyaranta hospital physician who works with alcoholics, Dr. Mikhail
Lipovetsky, echoes that. "The samogon made here causes very serious damage
to the liver and heart," he said, but added that drinking it was "one of
the few ways families without any money can entertain themselves."

The consequences are evident at the local morgue. Compared with numbers
from 1990, the rolls of last year's dead make telling reading.

In 1990, 277 people died in Pitkyaranta district. Last year, 422 died. In
1990, cardiovascular disease claimed 147 lives. Last year it claimed 220.

In 1990 there were 38 alcohol-related deaths, from homicides and suicides
to accidents and poisonings. Last year there were 90 - overwhelmingly among
men under 60.

Not least, 7 of Pitkyaranta district's 26,800 souls died last year of acute
alcohol poisoning - one more than the previous year's total fatal alcohol
poisonings in Illinois, population 12.1 million.

"There's no simple answer as to why male life expectancy is so short in
Russia," said Dr. Mikhail Uhanov, 56, the hospital's chief physician. "But
you could probably say drinking is in first place. In every courtyard, you
can buy a bottle of vodka made of who knows what, even here in this little
town.

"Sometimes people realize how harmful it is to their health. And they don't
value their health enough to care."

Officially, vodka is not a problem for Pitkyaranta district. The number of
registered alcoholics - those who seek treatment from Dr. Lipovetsky -
totals 164. Privately, however, officials say the number is closer to 4,000.

In the 1980's, doctors seldom saw more than two or three cases of alcoholic
psychosis a year. This summer, during Pitkyaranta's two-week-long White
Nights Festival, there were 14.

Vladimir was one of them. During White Nights, he passed out drunk on the
floor of the town's huge lakeside paper mill and woke up in the hospital.
He has been back three times since then, each time to dry out from two-week
binges on 80-cent liter bottles of samogon.

"I wouldn't say it's that hard to quit," he said recently, with the
rheumy-eyed conviction of a man who has quit many times.

What is more interesting, however, is why a 45-year-old man with a wife and
two children binges at all. One answer is that his life crumbled along with
the Communist experiment.

In 1990, Vladimir had been at the paper mill 20 years and was making 300
rubles a month, then about $180. His wife held a high-ranking job at the
local food depot. In Soviet society most essentials were free, so their
life was comfortable.

The Soviet Union vanished in 1991. So did the old rules: Vladimir's wife
argued with her bosses and soon found herself jobless, an impossibility in
Soviet times, when the unemployed either accepted new work or were exiled.

"She wasn't able to find anything for a year," Vladimir said, "and then she
tried to start a private store. That worked for two years or so, and then
that went bankrupt."

It was about then, in 1995, that alcoholic psychosis first sent Vladimir to
the hospital. Things got worse. Money problems shuttered the paper mill,
and for perhaps a year there was no pay. The mill reopened, but in 1998,
Russia's economy crashed and Vladimir's salary, 1,000 inflated rubles, was
suddenly worth $35.

His wife found work that year as a sales clerk. Vladimir, by then a
hospital regular, was moved off the papermaking line and handed a broom.

One child is away at school now. The rest of the family lives in a two-room
apartment in a brick-and-wood tenement, on a diet of macaroni, potatoes and
cucumbers, the occasional herring and "only a little bit of meat."

"They don't pay me anything like pay," he said. "It's like kopecks. And the
prices in the stores - my pay would go into a kilo of sausage."

Would that it did. A typical binge can eat up a third of Vladimir's monthly
wages.

It is an old story, said Dr. Uhanov, the chief physician. "There are many
men who lost their jobs, or if they kept their jobs, they were not paid as
much. Their alcohol consumption increased despite the fact that they didn't
have enough money. It's typical of Russia."

Ask Vladimir why he drinks, and the answer comes slowly.

"I can't explain it straightaway," he said. "I have a home. But I have
nothing to do."

Ask Dr. Lipovetsky, and he answers readily: "Social reasons. That, and a
lack of belief in the future. A lot of people drink from a loss of belief.

"It's the same way across most of Russia. You don't need a lot of
statistics to show that. It's obvious."

Neighbors, Decades Apart

Two hours north of Pitkyaranta, in the pristine Finnish town of Joensuu,
Vesa Tuominen has a markedly different idea of how to spend his time. The
thermometer has yet to hit 45, and a cold drizzle soaks the bike paths that
weave through town. Mr. Tuominen, oblivious to the rain, is stretching
after a brisk 25-minute jog.

He is not finished. Shortly, he will strip from his sweats to a swimsuit
for a dip in one of Joensuu's frigid lakes, indulging in a predilection he
shares with about 900 others in the local Ice Bears Club.

Of course, not all of them are like Mr. Tuominen, a retired schoolteacher,
65. Some are considerably older.

"We have some swimmers who are 80," he said.

Joensuu, population 51,000, is the capital of North Karelia, the Finnish
district directly opposite Pitkyaranta. It seems everything Pitkyaranta is
not. Crowds of cyclists ignore rain and even plow through snow; a lit
cigarette draws stares; the usual drink is beer, not vodka. The average man
in Joensuu can expect to outlive his Pitkyaranta neighbor by 15 years.

Yet three decades ago, the life span difference was measured not in years
but months.

Joensuu was then the center of an impoverished region dependent on timber
for survival. In both towns, people drank heavily, ate poorly and smoked
ceaselessly. And both towns recorded the highest rates of cardiovascular
disease on earth.

In the 1950's a Finnish researcher noticed that lumberjacks in North
Karelia suffered frequent heart attacks despite jobs that kept them
exceptionally fit. A 1970 study found that exercise was not the only key
factor in cardiovascular health. Diet and smoking made it onto the radar
screens.

Finland's response was the North Karelia Project, a five-year effort to cut
heart deaths by changing people's habits. It was a scorched-earth campaign
against cigarettes and butter, a combination of modern medicine and
state-of-the-art propaganda.

Local legislators passed one of the world's first bans on smoking in public
places. To accentuate the positive, no-smoking areas were renamed
smoke-free zones. Shopkeepers and trade groups joined to spread the
message, then novel, that heart disease was preventable.

Dairy farmers were converted to growing the sweet berries that flourish in
Finland's 20-hour summer days, simultaneously reducing artery-clogging milk
fat and adding heart-friendly vitamin C to diets.

The results were so remarkable that the program was adopted nationally. The
latest survey, in 1997, showed North Karelians had cut death from heart
failure among working-age residents by some 70 percent in just 25 years,
and slashed lung cancer deaths by 70 percent.

>From 1974 to last year, life expectancy in Joensuu rose almost eight years
for men and almost six for women. And little North Karelia now has nearly
300 berry farms, compared with only a few 30 years ago.

The program is now so ingrained that it is a point of local pride, its
director, Vesa Korpelainen, said during a recent chat in his downtown
Joensuu office.

And that is part of its secret. "We've done this work boots-in-the-mud," he
said. "We've gone all around North Karelia. People come to us when we have
an activity in a grocery store or some other place and say, `I'm also
participating in the North Karelia Project.' "

Until this region fell under final Soviet control after World War II,
Pitkyaranta was largely Finnish. Its name is Finnish. While most Finns fled
north when the Red Army moved in, Finnish blood still flows here.

It is tempting to believe that what worked in North Karelia will work in
Pitkyaranta. And in 1992, Finnish researchers came to Pitkyaranta with
precisely that in mind.

Dr. Uhanov is the point man for Finnish research here, the leader of
perhaps 20 hard-core volunteers trying to re-create Joensuu's success. They
have plastered the walls of the hospital, the open-air market and other
public places with posters, and begged for television time so they could
condemn butter and praise fruit.

They have held health fairs, delivered lectures and staged quit-smoking
contests, awarding Finland vacations to the lucky few who can stay off
tobacco for a month.

And they have scored modest successes. The last detailed survey, in 1997,
showed that smoking fell about 10 percent among younger men. It also leaped
almost 50 percent among young women, a rise nevertheless lower than in
Russia at large.

Residents used less butter and more cooking oils - largely because times
are harder, and margarine and oil are cheaper than butter. More were eating
fruit daily, though still barely 10 percent, and women were eating more
fresh vegetables.

"The men say salads are not a man's food," said Dr. Svetlana Pokusayeva, a
leader of the Pitkyaranta effort. "But nevertheless, there are changes.
It's a combination of economic factors and our propaganda."

The most important change, says Tiina Laatikainen, a researcher on the
Pitkyaranta project at the Finnish Public Health Institute, is that
residents' knowledge about their health has increased remarkably.

That said, eight years of evangelizing have not reaped a quick conversion
as in Joensuu. That speaks to the depth and tenacity of Russia's health
problems, Dr. Laatikainen said - and to its economic ones, too.

"The most difficult things have been the social and economic pressures,"
she said. "People are not willing to change their life styles when they
have to struggle to survive a normal life."

Many Links in a Chain of Misery

No one could expect Pitkyaranta to match Joensuu's early success. The Finns
had merely to raise life expectancy. The Russians must stop it from
plummeting.

"The big message is that there isn't a single cause," Martin McKee, a
leading scholar on Russian public health at the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine, said in a recent interview. "It's a chain of
causation, with alcohol and stress playing major roles. We need to
understand, why do people drink? And why are the consequences so grave? And
a decade, 15 years after it all started, we're still floundering around,
with far too little information."

In many nations, the response to such shocks would be addiction treatment
and psychiatric help. Russia has few such cushions to offer.

Psychiatry is still emerging from the Soviet dark ages, when a diagnosis of
mental illness was a political weapon. That remains true in parts of
Russia, according to an October report by Moscow Helsinki Group, the human
rights watchdog.

Mental hospitals, even more grossly underfinanced than the rest of the
health system, are often true warehouses: St. Petersburg Psychiatric
Hospital No. 3, for example, is 130 years old and houses 2,000 patients,
twice its capacity. Alcoholics Anonymous, long banned from the Soviet
Union, established programs in some Russian cities in the 1990's, and its
12-step treatment method is emulated by some churches and charities. But
only a tiny fraction of alcoholics get intensive treatment. The majority
are left, with their families, to fend for themselves.

The director general of the World Health Organization, Gro Harlem
Brundtland, said in an interview that there was no reason for pessimism
about Russia's situation, despite alarming rises in disease and an
admittedly inefficient medical system. She said that political leaders
understood the scope of their nation's crisis and the urgent need to
address it, and that a mending economy would provide money for health
programs and improve living conditions.

And she said there were quick fixes to some problems: ending 24-hour vodka
sales and curbing cigarette advertising, for example.

Of course, alcoholism and disease are not confined to Russia. Poor health
habits place American life spans squarely in the middle range of developed
nations. For all its leading-edge technology, the American health care
system is no model of efficiency for Russians to emulate.

But building a modern health system takes years and billions of dollars
that Russia does not have. And as for weaning the country from ingrained
habits, when President Gorbachev imposed a series of restrictions on
alcohol, he was nearly toppled from power. Any such undertaking would pose
a formidable challenge for leaders today.

Mending Russia's shattered health will take all that and something more
difficult: surgery on millions of dark Russian souls like that of Anatoly
Iverianov, the 45-year-old heart patient and former woodsman. Mr. Iverianov
is a caricature of what ails the country. He treats chest pain with vodka.
He smokes - not much, he contends, though "just sitting around, I can smoke
a whole pack, especially after a good drink." His diet is "whatever you got
- no delicacies, of course," which translates into bread, potatoes and the
occasional chicken.

Household life is hard. Mr. Iverianov receives a $35-a-month disability
pension. His wife gets about $18 a month for cleaning a local school. That
must feed and clothe the two of them and two sons, 23 and 7.

It is not enough. "I've got three specialties from school, and already I
can't get a job in any of them," said Viktor, the elder son, already an
angry, arm-waving clone of his father. "In the last two years we've moved
three times to smaller places to save money."

This is what independence gave the Iverianovs: the ability to sell their
home in order to survive. But with two rooms and a kitchen for the four of
them, they have little left now to sell.

To more than a few experts, Russia's problem is not just whether a rising
economy will lift the boat. It is whether a society that has demolished a
thousand-year compact - a loaf of bread and a bed in exchange for the loss
of all individuality - now regards its masses as people, not expendable
parts in some vast machine.

In that respect, the experts say, a decade of falling life spans, so far
unaddressed, is not encouraging.

"In a sense, Russia has a life expectancy which we've managed to earn,"
said Sergei Ermakov, a principal demographer at the Research Public Health
Institute in Moscow. "Russia has never spared resources. There has always
been lots of wood, lots of water, lots of iron ore, lots of land and lots
of people. And the attitude taken by the Russian leadership toward the
people wasn't any different."

Mr. Iverianov would not argue with that. "In general, this isn't working,"
he said. "Basically, the country itself has fallen apart and into
bankruptcy. And now I'm waiting for them to turn the lights off here."

Mr. Iverianov's story does not have a happy ending.

Just before 3 p.m. on Nov. 21, he was brought once more to Central Clinical
Hospital by ambulance, this time displaying a weak pulse and almost no
blood pressure. Doctors suspected a heart attack. Three hours later he died.

An autopsy concluded that he had been killed by fluid in the lungs and
heart failure due to chronic alcoholism.

Mr. Iverianov would have turned 46 this month.

*******

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