Johnson's Russia List #5622 30 December 2001 davidjohnson@erols.com A CDI Project www.cdi.org [Note from David Johnson: 1. The Globe and Mail (Canada): Marcus Gee, Playing Russian roulette: the two faces of Moscow. 2. Interfax: Businessman linked to chief of Putin administration charged with bribery. 3. AP: Yeltsin Praises Putin's Performance. 4. Itar-Tass: More than one in four Russians live in poverty. 5. Reuters: Moscow's famous pet market closes. 6. strana.ru: Euphoria May Kill Russia. Konstantin Zatulin: Russian Policy Must Be More Vigilant. 7. BBC Monitoring: Deputy Duma Chairman says Russia is ally of civilized world again. (Zhirinovsky) 8. Washington Post: Masha Lipman, And Now He Loves America. (Zhirinovsky) 9. Toronto Star: Ken Ernhofer, West must not allow Russians free rein in Chechnya. 10. The Globe and Mail (Canada): Geoffrey York, World's rebels chilled by bin Laden effect. 11. the eXile: Matt Taibbi, Operation Enduring Sovok.] ****** #1 The Globe and Mail (Canada) December 29, 2001 Playing Russian roulette: the two faces of Moscow By MARCUS GEE (mgee@globeandmail.ca) Since Sept. 11, Russia has presented a new face to the West. Gone is the bitter, peevish Russia that used to make friends with anti-Western governments, sell arms to rogue regimes and complain about U.S. bullying. In its place, we see the co-operative Russia, an ally in the war against terror. Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to call U.S. President George W. Bush after the terrorist attacks to offer his help. A few weeks later, he was enjoying the comforts of Mr. Bush's Texas ranch. The two men seemed to get along famously. The change has been so remarkable that some Kremlin watchers are talking about a historic Russian "tilt" to the West, a change that would bring Russia into the Western community of nations and finally heal the East-West rift that yawned so wide in the Cold War. But Russia has another face -- the one it showed this week to Grigory Pasko. Mr. Pasko is a 40-year-old journalist and naval captain. In the mid-1990s, he was working for an armed forces newspaper when he found out that the Russian navy was dumping liquid nuclear waste into the Sea of Japan. He got a videotape of the dumping and handed it to a television network in Japan, where it caused a sensation. Russian authorities arrested Mr. Pasko in 1997, claiming he had made two pages of notes at a meeting of naval officers and tried to give the information to the Japanese media. The charges: treason and espionage. This week, a court found him guilty of one of the original 10 counts -- "intending to transfer" the information -- and gave him four years in jail. The judgment, like the trial, was a travesty, and it has been rightly condemned by human-rights groups both in Russia and abroad. Mr. Pasko was only doing his job as a journalist. Yet the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB, pursued him with zeal, refusing to say die even after lower courts threw out most of the charges. Mr. Pasko is only the latest victim of the security service, which has prosecuted several scholars and journalists on what look like trumped-up espionage charges. Another, Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at Moscow's U.S.A.-Canada Institute who has done work for Canadian universities, was told this week he must stay behind bars even though a court found the charges against him to be weak and confused. Cases such as these illustrate the two-faced nature of the Putin government. "Liberalism toward the West, a police state in Russia: this is the real nature of the Putin regime," Russian human-rights activist Lev Ponomarev said after the Pasko verdict. Western countries are well aware of the contradiction, but they have been willing to overlook it since Sept. 11. Washington is especially grateful for Moscow's decision to allow U.S. forces to use bases in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. In return, the Americans have softened their criticism of Russian brutality in Chechnya, the breakaway republic that has seen atrocity after atrocity by Russian forces. The U.S. reasoning is easy to understand. The United States needs help if it is to beat international terrorism, and if getting it means keeping quiet about an ugly little war in Chechnya or a few persecuted journalists and scholars, it seems a small price to pay. Mr. Pasko doesn't count for much in the mighty struggle against Osama bin Laden. But this may be a bad bargain in the end. Whatever Moscow may be saying and doing today, Russia will never really join the West until it learns the democratic habits and builds the democratic institutions that make the Western community what it is. Turning way from Russian misdeeds will only postpone that day. ******* #2 Businessman linked to chief of Putin administration charged with bribery Interfax Moscow, 29 December: The Russian Prosecutor-General's Office has brought a charge against Prominvest General Director Vyacheslav Aminov, who was taken into custody last week. Aminov has been released from custody on his own recognizance not to leave Moscow. He is charged with bribing an official (article 291 of the Russian Criminal Code), police sources have told Interfax. The businessman is suspected of handing over a 50,000-dollar bribe to Director of the Federal Security Service Nikolay Patrushev. Aminov's office, apartment and summer house were searched the day before his detention, and compromising video cassettes were confiscated, the press reports. Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov confirmed Aminov's detention and criminal proceedings against him in an interview with Interfax earlier in the week. Yet he abstained from giving any details and promised to supply complete information at the end of investigation. Aminov is a public adviser to head of the presidential administration Aleksandr Voloshin, according to several media sources. ****** #3 Yeltsin Praises Putin's Performance December 30, 2001 MOSCOW (AP) - Boris Yeltsin sometimes disagrees with his hand-picked successor, President Vladimir Putin, but Yeltsin said the two years since he left office have proven he found the right person for the job. In a television interview broadcast Saturday evening, Yeltsin also said his health is good and that the terrorist attacks on the United States have caused many in the world to wake up to post-Cold War reality. ``Many have opened their eyes after Sept. 11 and know where the main danger lies,'' Yeltsin told RTR state television's newsmagazine program Zerkalo in a taped interview. ``The main danger isn't Russia, or the evil empire as it was called. The main danger is world terrorism.'' Appearing relatively healthy with neat white hair and dressed casually in a blue sweater, the 70-year-old Yeltsin nonetheless mumbled slightly over his words and spoke with a very deliberate pace - lacking much of the dash he once displayed as Russia's leader. Speaking of a visit earlier this month to a Berlin hospital - five years after a major heart bypass operation - Yeltsin boasted that doctors said his condition was ``sehr gut'' - ``very good'' in German. ``I feel much better this year,'' he said. ``There is not the tension and stress that I had every minute when I was president.'' Yeltsin said he has no regrets about his surprise decision to resign on New Year's Eve 1999 and turn over the presidency to Putin, who was then elected. He said he meets monthly with Putin, whom he described as ``honest, pure and democratically minded with a moral backbone.'' ``We may have disagreements on appointments, some other problems, but I feel my responsibility as a first president is that I must tell him about it,'' Yeltsin said. Putin is ``a fully rounded leader of the country and that's why he enjoys respect in the country and in the world, and I respect him,'' he said. Despite his keeping up with Putin, Yeltsin said he planned to keep the low profile he has mostly maintained since leaving office. ``I don't want to play the role of a public politician,'' he said. ****** #4 More than one in four Russians live in poverty Itar-Tass Moscow, 26 December: There are 39.4m poor people in Russia with an income below the subsistence level, according to the State Statistics Committee. They account for 27.2 per cent of the country's population, the committee said, citing the results of the third quarter of the current year. The number of poor people decreased by 5.8m from the second quarter of the year... ******* #5 Moscow's famous pet market closes MOSCOW, Dec 29 (Reuters) - Moscow's fabled pet market, where virtually any creature -- from the humble cat and dog to the exotic chimpanzee and parakeet -- could be bought, was closed down by Russian police on Saturday. The gates to the market in eastern Moscow were welded shut and its stands, normally teeming with caged or tethered wild life of every description, were deserted after police moved on traders. City officials said this was the definitive closure of the Stalin-era market which, in the post-communist period, has thrived on selling exotic birds, reptiles and other creatures to increasingly wealthy Russians with a taste for the extravagant. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has said the market, known as the "bird market" in Russian, fails to meet sanitary norms and has offered an alternative site far from the city centre. "This market no longer serves its historical purpose," city official Sergei Grachennikov told NTV television. "It has been turned into a rubbish bin." Distraught traders disagreed with the closure order "This is a mockery," Tamara, a woman in her fifties cuddling a pair of Chihuahuas, told Reuters Television. "People have come for years -- for a free zoo and for free advice on pets." Television footage showed riot police bundling away traders who resisted the order to disperse from the site, in use since Josef Stalin's rule in the 1930s. Dozens of traders, many with animals stuffed into thick sweaters, remained on the street seeking out customers for several hours before dispersing. Three previous attempts to close the market, backed by court action, failed to stop trading. But Interfax news agency quoted a city official as saying that the market was now shut for good. Anatoly, a longstanding resident, welcomed the closure. "This market should have shut a long time ago," he told Reuters Television. "Kittens have their throats cut in our very stairwells and our children are there to see all the blood." ****** #6 strana.ru December 29, 2001 Euphoria May Kill Russia Konstantin Zatulin: Russian Policy Must Be More Vigilant Speaking in an interview with Russian Observer.com, director of the Institute of CIS Countries, Konstantin Zatulin, said the feeling of total bliss against the background of what is in reality huge problems may kill Russia. Russia spent the outgoing year in expectation of what he called a real word from the Russian President, but it became clear near the year-end that the President was more preoccupied with foreign policy themes. He had a pretext for that, too: September 11 and everything connected with it. One can say that the President had a definite inspiration in connection with the change in the world situation and launched a creative drive of his own in the foreign policy field. In fact, people in Russia saw late this year that Putin should be judged primarily by his foreign policy actions, because matters of domestic policy were as before largely in the Government's hands. In respect of the foreign policy, the President really went far, at least rhetorically, in relations with the United States. As of today, the United States can be quite pleased, but the U.S. pleasure may cost dear to the President himself inside the country. Here Putin and a considerable mass of his voters start diverging in their attitudes to what has happened and in conclusions, which he has drawn from it. In fact, there are very few reasons for being euphoric. We live in the epoch of President Putin and he bears definite responsibility for not understanding, while fashioning a policy of his own, that he is plunging a considerable part of society in false illusions and that a big price will have to be paid for parting with them. As is much to be regretted, the parting with the illusions may cost dear to President Putin himself as it did to President Yeltsin and President Gorbachev. The euphoria has reached a point, where people started talking about the necessity of joining NATO. The operation in Afghanistan is practically over, there is considerably less need for Russia, and all manner of talk about NATO membership is petering out. Moreover, there are very unpleasant points on next year's agenda, which will cause another series of losses, already in addition to the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, to President Putin's foreign policy course. First, it is a continuation of the counter-terrorist operation in some other country, for example, Iraq, which will not meet with a delighted reaction inside this country. And, finally, a second trial, a decision to expand NATO, including into the Baltic republics. The main foreign policy failure is the fact that Russia, like in the Gorbachev epoch, has reverted to an impromptu kind of policy instead of having a calculated long-term policy. That gives cause for concern. As far as positive concrete results of relations with the U.S.A. are concerned, they are not obvious so far. An agreement on the reduction of strategic arms has not been achieved, nor has even the abolition of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, nor has the accession to the WTO. The results are not very optimistic. In Russia's foreign policy, there is a need for some more balanced point of view and for certain steps, which would indicate to voters that here the President sees a danger. Otherwise he will continue as a troubadour of unreserved relations with the United States. ****** #7 BBC Monitoring Deputy Duma Chairman says Russia is ally of civilized world again Source: Ekho Moskvy radio, Moscow, in Russian 1000 gmt 30 Dec 01 [Presenter] Russian Liberal Democratic Party leader [Deputy State Duma Chairman] Vladimir Zhirinovskiy has called 2001 a crucial year for Russia, just like 1917 [October revolution], 1945 [victory in World War II] and 1991 [end of Communism]. [Zhirinovskiy] We have once again become allies of the civilized world which unites the USA, Europe and Russia. We are cooperating with it in the battle against international crime. This is a noble objective. This is a noble fight against those who condone violence on the planet of Earth. Perhaps not everything will go smoothly in the next few years, but it is safe to say that we have passed the turning point. There has been a change in the people's psychology. We have realized that we live in common world. Everybody is afraid of weather, natural hazards, terrorists and various accidents. It is the same everywhere. People are always threatened. Casualties are not unusual. So we all should unite our efforts in order to move further smoothly. ****** #8 Washington Post December 27, 2001 And Now He Loves America By Masha Lipman Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the notorious ultranationalist monster of Russian politics, has once again attracted the attention of the press and the public -- this time by appearing as a lover of America. He praised the American operation in Afghanistan. Russia and America are partners, he said, the Cold War is over, and Russia belongs in the same civilization as Europe and the United States. It appears that this abrupt turn by one of the most passionate enemies of the West is more than another of Zhirinovsky's surprises. It signals important shifts in Russia's public sentiment and its politics. In fact, Zhirinovsky never was an ultranationalist. Or, rather, ultranationalist rhetoric was but one element in his highly sophisticated political persona. Indeed, during his career as a lawmaker he said enough aggressive, hateful and shockingly anti-Western things to deserve the ultranationalist label from the Western press. He talked about installing gigantic fans on the border between Russia and the Baltic states so as to blow radiation upon them. He bragged about his close friendship with Saddam Hussein. He visited the Iraqi leader and was shown engaged in joyful conversation with him. He demanded that America return Alaska to Russia. In one of his most notorious statements, he promised that one day the Russian soldiers would wash their boots in the Indian ocean. Zhirinovsky was viciously anti-American as recently as right after Sept. 11. His faction, which he led, refused to join other Duma deputies when they stood in memory of those killed in the terrorist attacks. But Zhirinovsky's shocking nationalism was both more and less than a political stand. It was in fact part of a skilled, perfectly calculated game by the best people's man Russian politics has ever had. Zhirinovsky's heyday was in the early '90s. He keenly sensed the frustration and confusion caused by the first post-Communist reforms -- the sense of being cheated, the helpless anger and humiliation of the Russian people who suddenly lost their secure, if shabby, routine lifestyles. Zhirinovsky instantly read these feelings, rationalized them and "returned" them to the public. He spoke with great energy and passion, but there was always an exaggerated and buffoonish quality to his speeches. His connection with the public was perfect, and his constituency somehow knew that he did not mean literally what he said. They looked at him with a mixture of shame and admiration, sometimes laughed at him and shook their heads -- but they voted for him. And then they went back home relieved of their anger -- enough so as not to take seriously Zhirinovsky's calls for violence and his invitation to wash their boots in the Indian ocean. Zhirinovsky's party came in first in the parliamentary elections in 1993, having won almost a quarter of the vote. Russian liberals were shocked, "Russia, you've lost your mind," a prominent liberal intellectual exclaimed on Election Day. But Zhirinovsky was the only one who knew how his people felt and how to capitalize on it -- in a nonviolent way. And he knew how to capitalize on his popularity. His big faction in the Russian legislature was always for sale to the Russian government, which needed votes to overcome the resistance of the Communists. Gradually, as the Russian people grew better adjusted to their new social and economic circumstances, the frustration and confusion have decreased and Zhirinovsky's constituency has shrunk. His penchant for buffoonery and scandal was unchanged. Moreover, he earned the reputation and the odd privilege of being an enfant terrible -- who can get away with just anything. He engaged in an ugly physical fight with a female deputy on the floor of the parliament and later claimed she had asked to be beaten because she was sexually attracted to him. He gave an interview to Playboy magazine and discussed his sex life in explicit detail. When a young woman TV reporter addressed him in the street with an unfriendly question, he grabbed her right before the camera, threw her in his car and drove away (she was safely released a couple of hours later). He had a vodka named after him with his face on the label. The list of his scandalous antics is virtually endless. But while he never lost the public's attention, after the first few years his perverse attraction for the domestic audience had very little to do with the political preferences of the Russian voters. Extreme rhetoric and shocking political speeches went out of fashion. At the parliamentary election of 1999, his party barely made it beyond the 5 percent minimum required for representation in the Duma. The next election, to be held in December 2003, may easily leave Zhirinovsky's party outside. Today stability, respectability and conservatism have become the new vogue. The Russian people have readily entrusted their lives to President Vladimir Putin, and would not question his politics. The general mood is that of indifferent conformity. The new pro-Western course announced by Putin may not be consciously shared by the majority of the Russian people, but openly and aggressively anti-Western rhetoric will not earn you popularity in today's Russia. Nor will any public expression of sharp discord with the president. Zhirinovsky sensed this new mood and declared surrender. But his unquenching desire to make a travesty of politics made his act of surrender look like a mockery. He announced his new political credo to his comrades-in-arms live on TV. Obviously embarrassed by this abrupt change of ideology, his fellow Liberal Democrats (this name for a party of extreme nationalists yet another act of mockery, no doubt) were exposed on TV mumbling incoherently. His sudden change may have been unexpected, but it must be the right one, one of them said. Was Zhirinovsky hinting at how the rest of the Russian public felt when Putin announced his new pro-Western course? Or did he mean to make his surrender sound like a joke so as to make his comeback easier if and when the public mood changes? Who knows? Masha Lipman, a Russian journalist, writes a monthly column for The Post. ****** #9 Toronto Star December 30, 2001 West must not allow Russians free rein in Chechnya By Ken Ernhofer Ken Ernhofer, a Toronto-based freelance journalist and media consultant, is a former Moscow correspondent for CTV News. The news is filled these days with hopeful stories about the resurgent closeness between the West — more specifically NATO — and Russia. However, we should be aware that the milder climate between these two historical adversaries could come at a great price: Western blindness, deafness, and even acquiescence to Russia's checkered record in its breakaway province of Chechnya. Chechnya has emerged as one of Russia's greatest tests since the collapse of the U.S.S.R. It is also a test for the West. The strategic Caucasus mountain republic has always rebelled against Russian colonialism, whether under the czars or the Communists. Stalin even tried to rid himself of the Chechens by breaking up the population and sending them away. The Chechens survived, but remained fractious, even among themselves. In the last decade, Chechnya became ungovernable. In 1994, Chechen separatists resumed their historic battle for independence against Russia, even as Chechen warlords battled each other. Russia has been mired in a renewed Chechen conflict ever since. It has cost Russia the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians. Chechnya is important to Russia because it is a vital transit point for Caspian Sea oil. Russians see also Chechnya as a potential domino; if Chechnya gains independence, other similarly nationalistic areas could also fall away and reduce Russia to a fraction of its current size. This terrifies nationalistic Russians who long for the day that their country will once again be a "great" power. Russia is also terrified that Chechnya could be a beachhead for a new fundamentalist, Islamist state in the Taliban mould. Chechnya may seem quiet these days, but Russia's war there rumbles on. The rebels are conducting a low-level insurgency, with sporadic explosions that more often than not send Russian boys home in body bags. Nobody talks much about it. The Russian press is virtually controlled by the Kremlin and dissident voices don't get much air time or editorial space. Last week Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that Russia would stage a winter offensive to smash resistance in Chechnya. Meantime, the story here was how the West and Russia were forming "a new relationship," creating a joint council to take action in "areas of common interest," such as peacekeeping, counterterrorism and arms control. It is ironic. When the Chechnya conflict broke out in 1994, the West was a vocal critic of Russia's tactics. It noted that Chechnya quickly became a very dirty war, replete with atrocities committed by combatants on either side. Russia, however, equated Chechen separatists with bandits and terrorists. In fact, it defined the entire Chechen campaign as a war on terrorism. Indeed, Ivanov repeated the contention recently. "This winter we will seek to finish off the remaining bandit groups and capture or destroy their ringleaders. This I promise you," Ivanov said in remarks reported by Reuter. Some Chechens are terrorists and bandits. Many others, however, are fighting what they perceive as an occupying Russian force that has subjugated their nation for hundreds of years. Throughout this campaign, Russia has secured agreements from Western politicians that terrorism cannot be allowed to flourish. When those agreements came, the Kremlin always used them to justify its Chechnya campaign. However, Russia's record is not so noble. International agencies report that there are many unresolved mass killings, cases of people who have "disappeared" and — with winter approaching — 170,000 refugees languishing in horrid camps. Now, Russia is poised to start a new offensive in Chechnya. The difference between now and 1994 is that Russia is fully engaged in another war on terrorism — one led by the Americans. Did Russia join the U.S. campaign partly to stifle criticism of its Chechnya strategy once and for all? It is an intriguing question. We may never know the answer, but it is interesting to note the Western silence about Chechnya these days. Where Chechnya is, indeed, a real fight against terrorism, this war is justifiable. The danger, however, is in neglecting the evidence that this is also a fight, littered with human rights abuses and multiple atrocities, by a fading colonial power. As a result, the downtrodden Chechen people are in danger of being victimized once again. This time, it isn't just through atrocities and colonialism, it is through Western neglect, blindness and expediency. If the West is to have any sense of morality, it must hold Russia accountable for its actions in Chechnya, even as both the West and Russia legitimately fight terrorism. Otherwise, our high-minded principles of justice and humanity are hollow shells. The innocents of Chechnya — and, indeed, everywhere — demand it. It is a test that the West cannot afford to fail. ****** #10 The Globe and Mail (Canada) December 29, 2001 World's rebels chilled by bin Laden effect By GEOFFREY YORK MOSCOW -- Within the space of a few months, Chechnya's separatist rebels have suffered a dramatic reversal of their image on the global stage -- and they can blame Osama bin Laden for their plight. For years, they were seen as freedom fighters whose human rights needed to be protected from Russian military abuses. But since Sept. 11, the Chechens have increasingly been seen as terrorists and bombmakers who represent the sinister spread of Islamic extremism. The same reversal of fortune is evident around the world today. In one of the lesser-noticed outcomes of the Osama bin Laden saga -- and yet probably one of his most important legacies -- a host of Muslim rebel armies have unexpectedly found themselves on the wrong side of the global propaganda battlefield. The result is more power for national regimes to attack their domestic enemies, especially Muslim rebels. These regimes have shrewdly exploited the global mood to justify their crackdowns on domestic insurgencies. The consequence, paradoxically, could be a rise in domestic wars and political violence. Mr. bin Laden's terrorist tactics have provided a pretext for military-style campaigns against Islamic separatists in Russia, China, Central Asia, South Asia and other regions. The rise of the "antiterrorist campaign," as an all-purpose rationale for war, is strengthening military commanders and damaging the fragile peace processes and political dialogues that were under way in these regions. Political leaders in most of these regions were already using their wars against Islamic rebels to help crush dissent and prop up their regimes. Now it is easier for them to pursue these tactics. They can gain foreign sympathy by portraying their wars as campaigns against terrorists. And there is much less international pressure to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel forces. Chechnya is an example. The Kremlin has relentlessly exploited its clients in the Northern Alliance, the most significant anti-Taliban force in Afghanistan, to spread the propaganda message that the Chechens are terrorists and extremists with close links to the Afghan training camps of Mr. bin Laden. This message has been constantly spouted by the Northern Alliance, even though there is little hard evidence of Chechens in the bin Laden network. Alliance commanders repeatedly proclaimed that large numbers of Chechens are rank-and-file fighters for the Taliban and Mr. bin Laden, equating them with the hundreds of Pakistani and Arab radicals who helped the Taliban. The message was echoed in the world's news media, without verification. Yet few Chechens have been discovered among the thousands of Taliban prisoners captured in the fighting so far. Most analysts now believe that only a handful of Chechens have ever had links to Afghanistan. But since the Northern Alliance was heavily dependent on Russian weapon supplies, it was probably not coincidental that the alliance was doing Russia a favour by trying to discredit the Chechens. Since Sept. 11, the United States has muted its previous criticism of human-rights violations by Russian troops in Chechnya, including alleged mass murders, torture and other atrocities. Instead, it has allowed Moscow to portray the Chechen war as just another front in the international battle against terrorism. U.S. President George W. Bush declared that some of Mr. bin Laden's terrorists are based in Chechnya, although he did not provide any evidence. And Russian President Vladimir Putin seized the chance to link Chechen rebels to Mr. bin Laden's terrorists, saying: "These people are virtually from one and the same organization. They were jointly trained in the same terrorist centres. They regard bin Laden as their teacher." Mr. Putin's spokesman on the Chechnya issue, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, boasted that the U.S. campaign against terrorism has been "a good service" to Russia. Islamic radical groups have gained support in autocratic countries in Central Asia and South Asia when other dissident groups have been largely crushed, leaving the Islamists as the only form of organized opposition. By portraying their opponents as terrorists, the regimes in these countries can seek a military solution to their domestic problems, rather than having to make compromises to deal with the underlying political issues. In Central Asia, the global antiterrorism campaign has strengthened the authoritarian regimes of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, where the U.S. military has set up bases or used local airspace for its warplanes. Uzbek President Islam Karimov used the Sept. 11 attacks to justify his imprisonment of more than 7,000 Muslims over the past two years. Many were arrested for nothing more than praying or attending mosque. After Sept. 11, the United States publicly condemned the largest Islamic rebel movement in Uzbekistan as a terrorist organization, boosting Mr. Karimov's power to crack down on Islamic activists in the country, whether they are terrorists or not. Washington has abruptly reduced its criticism of his human-rights violations, and Uzbek dissidents are afraid that Washington will stop pressuring Mr. Karimov to release activists from jail. A similar trend is spreading across Asia. In China, for example, Beijing has cited the Sept. 11 attacks to justify its campaign against Islamic rebels in the restive Xinjiang region. "China is also threatened by terrorism," Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan told the United Nations last month. He said the Xinjiang rebels are "trained, equipped and financed by international terrorist organizations." His government also declared that about 1,000 separatists from Xinjiang were trained in Afghan terrorist camps. In Indonesia, the government began a lobbying campaign to persuade the United States that Mr. bin Laden's people were supporting Islamic militants on the island of Sulawesi, where hundreds of people have been killed in clashes between Muslims and Christians. "We will wage war on terrorism," Defence Minister Matori Abdul Djalil said. There has been no evidence, however, of any al-Qaeda bases in Indonesia. Western analysts believe the Indonesian government is exaggerating the threat in an effort to persuade Washington to reverse its two-year-old ban on military sales to Indonesia. In the Philippines, the government has switched tactics to portray a leading rebel group as a terrorist organization with links to Mr. bin Laden. Before Sept. 11, it called the group a bunch of bandits. Now, by linking the group to the Afghan-based terrorists, it has secured U.S. military help for its crackdown on the rebels. And in the disputed Kashmir region on the border between Pakistan and India, the Indian government alleges that Islamic rebel forces are terrorists with links to Mr. bin Laden and the Taliban. ****** #11 the eXile December 13, 2001 www.exile.ru Operation Enduring Sovok By Matt Taibbi (taibbi@exile.ru) While researching this story last week, the eXile made an important scientific discovery. We found out why God made Russia cold. Two of our operatives had stationed themselves outside the outdoor take-out booth at the McDonald’s at Novokuznetskaya. This was their post in our paper’s Operation Enduring Sovok— a vast effort aimed at measuring the distance of cultural erosion since the end of the Soviet era. The specific mission of the staffers at the McDonald’s take-out window was to record the number of instances of a certain kind of conversation, a conversation only possible in Russia— the old Russia, anyway. It takes place when a middle-aged and usually overweight person makes his way to the front of a long line at McDonald’s. The person has had as long as five full minutes to read the menu before getting to the front of the line, but he’s waited until he actually reaches the front to do so. Now that he is at the front of the line, and six or seven people are safely camped behind him in impatient agony, he squints up at the menu, scanning the letters some 4-6 minutes longer than it is physically possible to actually read the information. From there, he starts asking questions of the cashier: “A Royal Cheeseburger, what’s that?” “Which is the sandwich that comes with tomatoes and horseradish?” “Why should I order the meal if it’s not cheaper than ordering the items separately?” “Can I get an extra box with the McNuggets?” And so on, and so on. There is no way to stop such a person, no way to make the process go faster. He is progressing at maximum speed. Any attempt to speed him up will only cause behavioral spillage in any number of new and ugly directions. You are at his mercy. Our operatives had been standing outside in the snow, in temperatures nearing -16, for almost thirty minutes. Not one such conversation had taken place. One man stood outside the line and scanned the menu for at least three minutes longer than it was possible to read it, and then, after checking his pocket and discovering only twenty rubles, walked away— but this was a minor incident. The real sovki were staying away. One Russian after the other made his way to the front of the line, mumbled curt one or two-word orders, and dutifully forked over his money. That’s when it hit us. Cold deters sovok. When people are very cold, even Russian people, they do not like to linger. They don’t like to waste time. God covered Russia in snow and ice for one reason. He did it to get Russians to shut the fuck up. And it works. Against all odds— it works. It’s about the only thing that does. Or is it? Is sovok under siege? When the West fell in love with President Vladimir Putin last month, it occurred to us to ask: is this country’s leader a traitor? Because what America calls reasonable and Western-looking also very frequently means, precisely, not a zanuda and not sovok. What the West praises in Putin is the quantity of anti-sovok in him. And on the surface, there seems to be a lot of it. Is it an act, or the real thing? Is there a real rollback underway, or is it just another Potemkin job? We set out last week to found out. WHAT IS SOVOK? Sovok— literally a dustpan or a little shovel, figuratively something much more involved— is one of the hardest concepts to explain to the new visitor to Russia. Sovok itself makes sovok hard to explain. One of the key aspects of the Soviet mindset, which is roughly but not exactly the definition of sovok, is the instinct to volubly offer a totally unsubstantiated opinion or fanciful historical analysis on any and every given subject. Therefore there are scores of different opinions and theories about the origins of sovok. Some people say it’s just a play on words, a funny-sounding noun form of the adjective sovietsky. Others say that it comes from Trotsky’s famous phrase about the Mensheviks being “consigned to the dustbin of history.” Here’s an explanation we like. This one comes from an internet diarist named “Grisha” who dedicated several pages of his site (www.grisha.ru) to sovok. His version of the origins of sovok goes like this: “They say that there was a Soviet film director in the seventies who made a movie. They paid him an honorarium for his work. A big one, a government one. He and his friends bought some expensive cognac, and went looking for a place to drink it. This was taking place on a Sunday, when everything was closed. Finally they went into a children’s playground and sat on the edge of a sandbox. There, in the sand, they found a set of children’s toys, a little shovel and a bunch of pails of various sizes... And they started to drink the expensive cognac out of the various items in the set. The director got the little shovel. He drank and drank, and finally suddenly said, ‘But in fact, guys, we all live v sovke [in a little shovel].’ The director himself told this story on television. I don’t remember his name.” Bullshit? Clearly. But it’s a good story. Ironically, this removes it from the sovok tradition. A sovok story would be bullshit and a bad story. And it would have taken four times as long to tell it. Sometimes it’s hard to keep tabs on all the nuances of sovok— but once you get it, you’ve got it. It’s like riding a bicycle. In brief, here are some of the primary characteristics of sovok: 1) Advice-giving The concept of sovok goes hand-in-hand with another famous Soviet play on words— strana sovetov (“Country of Soviets” and “country of advice”). Actually, the tendency to express oneself in semi-self-derisive popular expressions is, itself, very sovok. The gangster character in the maroon sportcoat in Brat 1, who expressed himself entirely in proverbs, was one of the very first post-sovki: as a brutally successful arch-capitalist who traded in violent deeds instead of words he was, by definition, an anti-sovok (a sovok being a market-averse talker), but his sarcastic use of pogovorki was an ironic dig at the culture his type of person was replacing. Anyone who has lived in this country for any length of time knows this phenomenon. Mention Bulgaria, and the sovok immediately reminds you that a chicken is not a bird, and Bulgaria is not abroad. Hesitate before you drink, and some off-duty petty bureaucrat relaxing at home in Chinese knock-off Adidas sweatpants, a man who has never had an original or truly risky thought in his entire life, will remind you quickly that “He who does not risk, does not drink champagne.” Don’t feel like working? Work isn’t a wolf— it won’t run into the woods. You can see it coming from a mile away, but you can never get out of the way. Strana sovetov is self-explanatory and everyone who has lived here longer than ten minutes knows it in his bones. Sit on the ground and without fail, someone will come and tell you that you will catch cold, cancer, or render yourself infertile. Try to unobtrusively take out an aspirin or drink a cup of Theraflu on your own time, in your own space, and someone in this country will inevitably rush up to you, ask you what you’re sick with and what medicine it is that you’re taking, and then explain to you why you’re doing yourself harm and what remedy you ought to be taking (mustard in your socks, vodka on your back, etc.). You didn’t ask for that advice; you got it. This is the essence of sovok. Again, this is closely related to yet another expression: what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is also mine. Your own space, your own body, your own decisions all belong, in the sovok’s mind, to the sovok himself as much as they do to you. At least partly. This is one of those aspects of sovok that has a direct explanation. In a culture where whole families frequently lived crammed into one room, husbands and wives with children and smelly grandparents, all peering out at each others’ beds at night from different walls, fighting tooth and nail over twenty centimeters of space in which to store a pair of slippers, and so on, it was pretty easy to lose one’s grasp on the distinctions between your own business and someone else’s. People still live like this all over Russia, and this is why sovok is surviving. But in places like the center of Moscow and St. Petersburg, in the apartments of the “emerging middle class” and the upper strata, there is a growing population of people who sleep in their own rooms and do not share bathrooms with strangers or the elderly. There are young Russian children, in fact, who have lived their entire lives without the benefit of this experience. When these children grow up, they will not know the necessity of accosting the person in the next seat over on an airplane— they may even genuinely want to read or sleep instead. These children are a threat to sovok, because by definition they will be likely to belong to the ruling class, a class which will mistakenly focus on things like macroeconomics as opposed to things that really matter to the sovok segment, things like worthless tin medals and special discounts on trips to shitty crumbling resorts in Bulgaria. Which brings us to Putin. Putin is a very different creature than the other recent Russian rulers, all of whom grew up in extreme sovok conditions. Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin both knew all about sharing little corners of shacks and dormitory rooms with ten other people and fighting, literally fighting, over scraps. Both came from villages and moved to big cities only very late in life. Putin grew up walking the same streets as Karenin and Onegin. He had his own car by the time he was nineteen. He not only went overseas, he lived there— and not in Angola or Romania, but Germany. There’s no sovok proverb that applies: a chicken isn’t a bird, but Germany, even East Germany, sure as hell was overseas. The previous Russian leaders all resembled pigs late in life mainly because, well, they had lived like pigs. Putin is thinner than your average pig. The animal he most closely resembles is a weasel or a jackal. Not a sty animal. A forest animal. Putin’s vision of an ideal world, like that of some Germans we know, is an endless series of landscapes without people, birch trees and snowy plains, maybe with the sound of high-grade crude gurgling up a well far off in the distance... Because he grew up with space, Putin clearly values it. Any psychologist will tell you that the opposite urge is at work with the sovok: having grown up living in a pile of people, he will for the rest of his life be drawn to human piles, no matter how much inner rage and incoherence this costs him. The sovok gives you advice because he wants to be given advice. And then he wants to hate you for giving it to him, and give you more advice back. From there the cycle begins all over again. This is why the sovok cannot be prevented from giving advice. There is no place to stop in a circle. Some other characteristics of sovok: 2) Inexplicability and intractability. The sovok is an animal that can annoy you with a dizzying array of weapons: envy, nosiness, verbal restlessness, exaggerated hospitality. But his lead punch is his inexplicability. You can combat what you can explain, but the sovok eludes counterattack because he very often makes no sense at all— and then won’t budge from his spot no matter how hard you push. The best place to see this is in the area of sovok architecture and interior design. This is the best place because these professions put the sovok’s premeditated illogic on display. Take the classic design of the Soviet food produce store, with its attendant kassa system. Taken separately, each of the characteristics of the system make a kind of sense. All the food products are behind counters, inaccessible to the shopper, because they might be stolen otherwise. The cash registers for each section are kept separate so that it is easier to keep track of sales in each section. Then the cash registers are kept separate from the sections they belong to, to make theft on the part of the staff more difficult— theoretically. Whatever the rationale behind all of this, the result is a system in which you must make six or seven separate purchases in each trip to the store, keeping complex sets of figures in your head in between trips to each counter and cashier, inciting rage and impatience from the always-overweight salesladies at each step— all of which certainly cost the state and even the store network system itself more in aggravation and man-hours than it could ever have possibly lost due to theft. There is no place in Russia that sets off the sovok Geiger counter more reliably than the area around a free-standing kassa in a food produce store. Some of the world’s purest human hatred and incoherence is on display every single day in the earshot range around these little misery-cages containing the cashiers. “Girl, give me 120 rubles at section five.” “For what?” “Doctorskaya Kielbasa.” “Doktorskaya Kielbasa is section four. Next kassa.” “But it’s under the sign for section fiv—” “NEXT KASSA, I SAID!” The kassa system does not make logical sense, but it does make sense in terms of sovok. The sovok will go to a 7th Continent and sincerely miss the Meat-Fish kassa-hell-hole on his corner on Kashirskoye Shosse. He’ll look at the pre-sliced shrink-wrapped meats and think to himself that fat-fisted Svetlana Viktorevna of section 6 (meat), who he was loudly calling a suka yebuchaya just that morning, makes the cleanest cuts of steak in the entire world, that nothing beats a Svetlana Viktorevna steak. Life to the sovok is emptier without the intense human interaction around the kassa. This is why modern check-out counters seem inhuman to him. Vladimir Putin’s Moscow is steadily filling up with Western-style check out counters. It is easier to imagine him shopping at one of those than at Meat-Fish #6. 3) Filth There’s something about sovok: it can never quite get clean. When it polishes and lacquers a wood floor, it always leaves bubbles and skewed angles. Its hair is always disheveled. It decorates itself in the colors of dirt and seaweed. This is another striking anti-sovok characteristic of Vladimir Putin. He is obviously a naturally clean person. He exudes fastidiousness and hygiene. In this he is, again, set apart from Russia’s former leaders. In all of Russia’s history since the revolution there has only been one leader who approached Putin’s level of personal cleanliness: Vladimir Lenin. But Lenin was a bourgeois pre-sovok. He took hikes in mountains and felt at home in Switzerland. He didn’t have the chance to really live in the sovok world he created, and it certainly didn’t affect his upbringing. Sovok really began with Stalin. Stalin’s outward appearance was manicured, but one gets the impression of barely-restrained odors and hairs. That helmet of waxed hair must have raised the surface temperature of his scalp to uncomfortable levels. His mustache undoubtedly stank. And Stalin’s survived to an age and a level of relative leisure in which his inner corruption began to pollute his appearance. Lenin never had that luxury: he died before he rotted from within. After Stalin comes a series of leaders with a nearly identical inability to wear a suit: Khruschev, Brezhnyev, Andropov, Chernenko. There is a brief interruption with Gorbachev, and then the trend continued with Yeltsin, who looked uncomfortably simian and poorly-fit in the most expensive suits money could buy. Gorbachev could wear a suit. And he looked clean. And yet, even here, in the area of hygiene, Gorbachev was far more sovok than Putin. Gorbachev’s flair for expensive foreign suits was, even more than Yeltsin’s, a symptom of another extreme form of sovok, the grasping Europe-envy sovok. Sovok in the old days occasionally sold “German beer”— not German light beer or German dark beer, just “German beer”, because the only thing that mattered was that it was German. Gorbachev with his palaces on the Black Sea and his furs for Raisa and his Italian and French suits was pathologically sovok. In his student years, Mikhail Sergeyevich might have committed murder to shop at a store called “Finnskaya Mebel’”. Yeltsin would not have. The effort it would have taken to get into one would have cut into his drinking time. Putin, on the other hand, was clean and comfortable in Soviet suits back in the day, and clean and comfortable in Italian suits now. There is nothing grasping about his look. His suits do not appear to be suffering on his body. This might be because he has class— or it might be because he is not wholly human or even warm-blooded. A cobra would look good in a suit as well. Whatever it is, it isn’t sovok. 4) Blabbering. You hail down a taxi and get inside. The driver asks you the address. You tell him and tell him which way you want to go. He tells you you’ve chosen the wrong way, and that he knows a short-cut. “Why would you want to go that way?” he asks. “That’s ridiculous. Along the boulevard. Why, you can go through Lubyanka!” Now, you know that it’s actually faster to take the Boulevard, because, unlike the driver, you’ve taken this same route to your office a hundred times. So you try to insist once. The driver replies angrily: “I’ve been a taxi driver in this city for fifteen years. I know this city, after all.” So you decide to let is slide and go his way, so as to avoid argument. Here is where sovok really kicks in. As soon as you concede in your argument about the route, a silence will fall over the car. But it is a false silence. Because sovok dictates that once an argument is over, it must necessarily be revisited later on. A minute, two minutes, three minutes pass. You are watching the driver out of the corner of your eye. Finally he turns to you and says: “Because the problem with the Boulevard is that there’s traffic. Now, if I go through Lubyanka, there’s no traffic...” This is another aspect of Sovok that has a direct explanation. In Soviet times whole ranges of conversational subjects were taboo. The only thing to talk about was nothing. Worse, silence actually was an indicator of private inquiry and examination. If you were intermittently quiet, it mean you were occasionally taking real stock of the situation. This was dangerous during lengthy stretches of the Soviet period. It was safer to show absolute cooperation out loud at all times by always talking— about nothing. This is why Russian television is filled with shows that feature a single person sitting in front of the camera talking open-endedly about some idiotic topic, or reminiscing about some forgotten matter that was not particularly interesting even to contemporaneous observers. “My Conversations with Paustovsky” is the kind of thing that makes good television in Russia. Sovok is found in great breadth and volume in the printed work of twentieth-century Russian writers and scholars. A Soviet professor never wrote, V mire (In the world)... He always wrote v nastoyashyem mire (In the current or real world)... The pages of Russian books are littered with utterly meaningless filler phrases: kak govoritstya, v obshei slozhnosti, tak skazhem, v dannom momente, etc., etc. This tradition of verbal diarrhea, so familiar to foreigners who have worked hard to grow accustomed to it, was what caused such freakish phenomena as the anchorman Yevgeny Kisyelov, a man physically incapable of speaking a simple declarative sentence. Mark Twain once said that to read Fenimore Cooper’s books was to believe that people once lived in a world where words meant nothing at all, where four-foot pigs of thought were routinely pounded into twenty-foot rails of conversation... Twain never lived long enough to see the Soviet Union. He might have thought Cooper’s books more realistic. This is one area in which Putin scores a mild Sovok rating. In most cases he’s an anti-Sovok even here: he usually speaks directly and to the point. The famous line about the Chechens— if they’re in the outhouse, we’ll whack them in the outhouse— was probably the bluntest sentence to come out of the mouth of a Russian leader since the Stalin era (and even Stalin’s utterances were usually fraught with ugly double and triple meanings). There was Khruschev’s “We will bury you” line, on the surface not sovok, but actually fairly sovok close-up, because he was just posturing. It’s a characteristic of sovok to make idle threats, boasts, and promises, and to do so confidently, precisely because they are meaningless. Putin, on the other hand, apparently actually meant it about whacking the Chechens. However, Putin is guilty of one sovok verbiage crime: flattery. Whenever he talks about the “professionals” in the army or honors a famous artist or actress or singer, he reverts into streams of sickening, saccharine compliments. Compliments are very sovok. Though the sexual orientation of sovok is located squarely between the neuter and passive-homosexual poles, the sovok man prides himself on his compliments to women. He takes the female target by the hand, caresses her hand, gets on his knees, sings to her, calls her a queen and a princess, and so on and so on, before going to the banya or disappearing into his garage for ten long hours. Putin routinely indulges in this kind of behavior. His threadlike thin lips will sputter out endless paeans to minor bureaucrats and aristocrat Presidents of the United States alike. He gets carried away. It is one of the few worsening cosmetic tendencies of his Presidency. As Prime Minister, he was all business, all the time. Now he enjoys chairing celebrity panels and presenting things— bunches of flowers, plaques, medals. This is one of the few things about the Putin presidency that directly appeals to the sovok constituency. It should be noted that sovok in general supports Putin— for now. Putin in many ways has been to sovok like the proverbial Svetlana Viktorevna steak that is second to none in the world. Sovok recently has gotten to watch Putin outmaneuver his Western counterparts and has been able to say to itself sincerely: we’re no worse than the Europeans. When Putin and Bush went to China for the Asian economic forum, Putin looked just as much and no more extremely foolish than did George Bush in those Chinese chamises— something sovok was undoubtedly proud of. Sovok is always superficially nationalistic. U nas lusche (it’s better at home) is its official foreign policy. But sovok also secretly dreams of divorcing his wife, moving to America, and returning ten years later to show her how he’s “risen up” (podnyalsya). It likes to talk about the power of Russian industry, but it doesn’t want to work more than two hours a day. The first sovki were probably Gaev and Ranevskaya from The Cherry Orchard, who did a lot of talking in the provinces but panicked when the market invaded from the city. Sovok likes posturing. It is not particularly interested in actual conflict. That is why Putin’s popularity in Russia may be fleeting. In the beginning, his thuggish KGB agent act just gave sovok a chance to thumb its nose at the West. But when it takes a closer look at what Putin’s all about, it might not like what it sees. The click of a leather heel on an uncarpeted hallway. Open spaces. “Professionals.” Circumspection. Goons at the door instead of babushkas. Procreation instead of compliments. Sobriety. Jogging. Hygiene. Moral fastidiousness. Viciously regressive labor attitudes. A rapidly-growing oil empire. Except for his height, Putin really has much more in common with John D. Rockefeller than he does with Yuri Nikulin. If anyone was the ultimate anti-sovok, it was Rockefeller. The ruthless old miser even left behind a poem establishing the fact. Can anyone imagine a Russian over-reciting this little quatrain on the Kultura channel? A wise old owl lived in an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard. Why can’t we all be like the wise old bird? Oaks. Owls (sova, not sovki). Silence. Oil. With every step Putin takes in their direction, a way of life fades further into the background. What a great punchline. Disappearing might be the first thing sovok has ever done quietly. *******