Johnson's Russia List #6001 1 January 2002 davidjohnson@erols.com A CDI Project www.cdi.org [Note from David Johnson: DJ: Happy new year! 1. Reuters: Further efforts needed for Russian well-being-Putin. 2. RIA Novosti: VLADIMIR PUTIN SAY 2001 WAS A SUCCESS STORY BOTH DOMESTICALLY AND EXTERNALLY. 3. Los Angeles Times: John Daniszewski and Maura Reynolds, After Fitful Start, Revolution Finally Underway in Russia. 4. The Globe and Mail (Canada): Geoffrey York, Corrupt Russian elections turning voters into cynics. Promise of democracy has been supplanted by bribery, ballot-stuffing and murder. 5. AP: End Sought to Cold War Law for Russia. (Jackson-Vanick) 6. Christian Science Monitor: Fred Weir, Russian spy trials raise red flag about human rights. A Russian journalist was sentenced last week to four years' hard labor for giving state secrets to Japan. 7. RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly: Julie Corwin, BEHIND THE SCENES OF PUTIN'S TELEPHONE CHAT. 8. BBC: Stephen Mulvey, Ukrainian memories of the USSR's death. (Leonid Kravchuk) 9. Interfax: Russian economy can develop on its own - economist. 10. openDemocracy.org: Susan Richards, Russia changing.] ******* #1 Further efforts needed for Russian well-being-Putin MOSCOW, Dec 31 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin told Russians on Tuesday that further efforts would be expended to improve their living standards and said Moscow had won the respect of the world community by helping confront terrorism. In a New Year greeting delivered against the backdrop of the Kremlin walls, Putin said hard work had helped Russia maintain its trend of economic growth and made political activity in the country more predictable. "We have achieved perhaps limited but tangible results. The year 2001 was significantly different from the previous year," Putin said in the message, first broadcast to Russians in far eastern regions several time zones ahead of Moscow. "We managed not only to maintain the trend of economic growth and at least to a small extent improve people's lives. We also showed that the good results of the previous year were no accident or a mere one-off instance in our lives." But not all Russians, he said, "are living better and not all can achieve this without the support of society and the state. We must bear this in mind when assessing what has been done and in drawing up plans for the future." He said Russia's parliament had already approved legislation necessary to foster a favourable business climate and create social well-being in the years to come. Putin had earlier on Monday signed into law two pieces of legislation critical to proceeding with reform -- the 2002 budget, the first in post-Soviet times with a surplus -- and a labour code adapted to post-communist conditions. The president had raised the notion of higher living standards at a weekend cabinet meeting, saying his administration had the duty to make Russians feel the benefits of improved economic performance. He repeated that economic expansion was likely to be 5.2-5.5 percent this year after record growth of 8.3 percent in 2000. Average monthly salaries stand at the equivalent of about $100, but many earn much less, particularly outside major cities. In international relations, Putin said Russia had joined forces with major world powers in the U.S.-led anti-terrorism coalition in order to "defend peace, calm and life itself. "The world has come to view Russia with great trust and respect. It became apparent that Russia's consistent fight against terrorism was predicated not only our national interests but a global danger," he said. "The world community responded to the terrorists' new challenge with unprecedented international cooperation." ******* #2 VLADIMIR PUTIN SAY 2001 WAS A SUCCESS STORY BOTH DOMESTICALLY AND EXTERNALLY MOSCOW, January 1. /RIA Novosti correspondent/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has described 2001 as a successful year both as regards domestic affairs and foreign policy. He said this in his New Year message to the people. Every day of the past year "was taking us away from the difficult times of economic and social upheavals". "We together did a lot to bring that about," Putin said. "We worked together to make our life more predictable. And we have reached visible if small results". As the president noted, "the year 2001 differed markedly from the previous one. We managed not just to maintain the tendency towards economic growth but also - if slightly - improve the life of our people. We have shown that the fairly good results of the previous year were not accidental. That they are not an episode in our life". "In the outgoing year an important backlog was laid down for the future," says the president's message. "We have created a legal framework for new and serious steps in economic and social policy. We have taken decisions that will influence the long-term business climate in the country for several years ahead". Russia is now treated in the world with greater trust and respect, Putin emphasised. According to him, ""we are better understood at present". "It has proved obvious that the consistent struggle against terror has been dictated not only by our national interests, but also by its global danger. And to the latest challenge of terrorists the world community responded with an unprecedented intensification of international cooperation. The states have rallied together and - together with Russia - have come to the defence of peace, calm and life itself," Putin said. ******* #3 Los Angeles Times January 1, 2002 After Fitful Start, Revolution Finally Underway in Russia By JOHN DANISZEWSKI and MAURA REYNOLDS, TIMES STAFF WRITERS MOSCOW -- Looking back over the 10 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, many Russians are apt to say it was a disappointing decade--their hopes for democracy were dashed by criminals and gangsters, and hopes for prosperity ended in lawlessness, poverty and despair. But that would not be the view of Alexander Maryagin, a walking symbol of how this land has changed. On Dec. 31, 1991, the day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics faded into history, Maryagin was a 21-year-old, wandering the grim streets of Moscow, a place of empty store shelves and long vodka lines. Back then, he would sometimes hawk calculators on the freezing pavement outside a railway station. "At that time, I couldn't even imagine that I would ever own a car, let alone drive it myself," Maryagin said recently, seated in a chic cafe as though he owned the place. (He does, in fact, own part of it.) "It was like thinking about flying to the moon." Maryagin did not have success handed to him. Instead, he lived the American dream--in Russia. He started with nothing, toiled 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He made countless shopping trips to Turkey to buy cheap goods to sell in Russian markets. He paid bribes when he had to. He plowed his earnings back into his business and seldom had time to look at his calendar or his watch. Today he owns shares of two cafes and a shopping center and is looking into acquiring cinemas. He has an apartment and a 4-acre estate, and when he wants to drive someplace, he can choose from his Dodge Durango, his Jeep Grand Cherokee or his Lincoln Town Car. "And I created all this from scratch with my own hands in my own city in my own country," the 31-year-old says in a voice that expresses more marvel than boast. "It seems to me that Moscow today is entering a stage which can be described as la dolce vita compared to the gray and cold Soviet times, which seem like hundreds of years ago." The revolution that has taken place in Russia, the largest and most populous part of the former Soviet Union, has been chaotic, drawn out and marked by false starts and retreats. Even today, few could argue that it is finished. But on the whole, most analysts and observers believe that Russia is well on its way to becoming what many Russians and almost everyone in the West would have wished for: a country of free markets, democratically elected government and private property operating under the rule of law. President Vladimir V. Putin heralded that assessment Monday night in his annual New Year's address to the nation. "The year 2001 differed significantly from those that preceded it," Putin said. "We managed not only to maintain the growth in our economy, but also to improve people's lives, at least to a small degree." Of course, each item on Russia's list of achievements can be debated: How free are the markets when bureaucrats and gangsters can demand bribes and protection money? How democratic are the elections when small parties have been limited and local governors use "administrative means" to shape voting results? Is private property really private when there is scant respect for ownership by courts beholden to those in power? Yet there is a sense that these phenomena are on the decline and that the country is slowly becoming more orderly. Surveys indicate that the 10th anniversary of the end of the U.S.S.R. finds the Russian people more optimistic than they have ever been in the post-Soviet era. "Today a majority of people are inclined to believe that the worst times are already over," said Vyacheslav A. Nikonov, president of the Politika Foundation, a Moscow think tank. "People are looking to the future with a greater optimism, though they regard the last decade as an epoch of huge failures." Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who started the reforms in the 1980s and sealed the end of the union with his resignation Dec. 25, 1991, said the process of building Russia is ongoing. "But it is already a serious, accomplished fact," Gorbachev said in an interview with The Times earlier this year. "People who have tasted independence and freedom will never part with it. And thank God for that!" Such an optimistic, albeit cautious, outlook might come as a surprise to Western pundits who sometimes used to argue over "Who lost Russia?" In the waning days of the Clinton administration, it had become a truism on the talk show circuit that the United States had made big mistakes in its policy toward Russia: It was said to have been inattentive, or too wanton with aid, or else had an overly personalized attachment to ex-President Boris N. Yeltsin. As Yeltsin's health and grip on power waned, the Russian currency collapsed and a generation of kleptocrats and robber barons fought in the courts and the streets over national assets. Vast, nuclear-armed Russia was widely thought to be in danger of disintegrating into anarchy or giving rise to a new authoritarian dictatorship. Common Wisdom Was Frequently Wrong "Never have so many people been so wrong about such an important issue in U.S. foreign policy," wrote Michael McFaul, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In his recent book, "Russia's Unfinished Revolution, Political Change From Gorbachev to Putin," McFaul describes Russia as being on a positive trajectory toward democracy and free markets. In earlier writings, he dismissed the notion that Russia could be lost by the West, assessing U.S. influence on Russia's internal politics as at best marginal. "At the end of the day, when we can finally make the determination if Russia has been won or lost, it will be Russians who should be blamed or praised, not Americans," McFaul said. Nikonov, of the Politika Foundation, agreed: "I always believed that a couple of our own idiots can do more harm inside the country than any Western aid or advice." But he and other Russians believe that some of the Western economic advice their country received just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only worsened the country's plight. "They came in here with recipes [that] in principle can be implemented only in countries with a developed market economy," Nikonov said. "They suggested Russia live by the laws of a normal market system when even the legal basis for a free market was not yet constructed, and when no one in the country had a clue what a market was all about." Anders Aslund, another Carnegie Endowment associate who has studied Russia's transformation, rejects arguments that the West harmed Russia by pushing it to reform too quickly. He also labels as mythology the official statistics indicating that Russian economic output plunged 44% between 1989 and 1998. Aslund, whose book "Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc" came out last year, says Soviet economic statistics were padded to make the economy look far better than it actually was. And much post-Soviet economic activity has been off the books to avoid taxes--making output look worse than it actually is. The result, as he sees it, is a wash. "Thus, the Russian economy hasn't collapsed. Rather, it is more accurate to say that, until 1998, the economy stagnated because of sluggish and incomplete reforms. Russia's level of economic development remains where it was during the Soviet era, roughly on par with Brazil," Aslund wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last summer. In the last three years, the Russian economy has begun to grow dramatically, which analysts say is a result of higher oil prices, less dependence on foreign-made goods and a firmer commitment to reforms by the central government. In 2001, Putin pushed through legislation that finally permitted private ownership of land, and a simple flat tax of 13% on personal income, which has led to higher tax collections. All along, Aslund said, the problem was not that Russia's reforms were too radical, but rather that they were too weak. There was "too little shock and too much corrupt state therapy in the form of subsidies to the country's elite," Aslund said. Nevertheless, for every winner like Maryagin, there are many who feel worse off. There are millions of people struggling to survive on a rudimentary wage or pension, eating state-subsidized dairy products and bread and the occasional home-grown vegetable. They are unable to travel or buy new clothes, and they lack the means to cope with sudden emergencies without borrowing from family or neighbors, says Yelena Bashkirova, who tracks living trends as director general of the Russian Public Opinion and Market Research Service. The entire Soviet-era society was relatively poor, with few differences in income, she says. Today, she estimates, about 10% of Russians could be called rich, 30% make up a newly emerging middle class, and 60% are poor, based on their consumption habits. Despite the large number of poor, she pointed out that only about one-quarter to one-third of the public is dissatisfied enough to support the Communist Party. Two-thirds or more supports Putin. Bashkirova sees public opinion moving in the direction of democracy. "We can feel a tendency already, though probably a small one. . . . Because this is now our life. Because no one can believe now, can't even think, that we would not have free elections. . . . This is very important." Paying a Price for Democratic Society What has changed in the last 10 years, Bashkirova said, is a falling away of illusions that the transition would be easy. Russians "now understand that they should pay the price for being a democratic society, that they should now rely more on themselves rather than on the state." Nikonov pointed out the contradiction that still persists in the minds of many Russians. "When you poll people with a question whether they regard the breakup of the Soviet Union as a tragedy or a mistake, naturally a majority will say yes. If you ask people whether they consider the reforms of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as wrong, a majority will say yes," he said. "But if you ask people whether they want to go back, a majority will say no!" Maryagin reckons that more than 30 families now earn middle-class incomes of at least $500 a month as a result of the business he started. He is proud of what Russians have achieved. He once considered emigrating, but is glad he did not. "My country is where I live now. And I hope my partners and I have somehow contributed to changing it for the better," he said. "I like what is happening now," he said. "I like it that laws are beginning to be obeyed. Life is becoming predictable, normal and comfortable--for the first time in many, many years." Sergei L. Loiko of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report. ***** #4 The Globe and Mail (Canada) 1 January 2002 Corrupt Russian elections turning voters into cynics Promise of democracy has been supplanted by bribery, ballot-stuffing and murder By GEOFFREY YORK MOSCOW -- It was a fairly typical Russian election. A bomb exploded at a Siberian polling station, killing one person. Another bomb exploded near the apartment of a controversial candidate, an alleged organized-crime leader and nightclub devotee known as Pasha the Disco Lights. A rival candidate, the notorious aluminum baron Anatoly Bykov, campaigned from the isolation of his solitary-confinement cell in a Moscow prison, where he was awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to murder his former business partner, the same alleged kingpin who was the target of the bomb blast. In the end, it turned out to be a happy week for both Siberian tycoons. Mr. Bykov captured 53 per cent of the vote in his Krasnoyarsk district in the Dec. 23 regional election, despite the handicap of his prison cell. His former partner, Pavel Struganov (a.k.a. Pasha the Disco Lights), lost his bid for office but survived the bomb and won a legal victory: Police freed him after he was arrested at a club on suspicion of planting the polling-station bomb. For many Russians, the Siberian election was an entertaining saga of crime and violence. But in a week that marked the 10th anniversary of the Soviet Union's collapse, the election was a reminder of the shabby and deteriorating state of Russian democracy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Russians flocked to the polls to support candidates who promised democracy and freedom. Today, Russian elections are routinely marred by cynicism, bribery, fraud, apathy and frequent state control of the outcome. Most Russians are so cynical about politics that they don't even bother voting. But since elections would be invalid if fewer than a required number (usually 25 or 50 per cent) of eligible voters went to the polls, authorities have resorted to a combination of bribery and fraud to ensure the minimum turnout. In an election last month in the Siberian city of Yakutsk, authorities blatantly gave away financial benefits to lure voters to the polls. City officials stood at polling stations, handing out coupons for a 100-ruble discount (about $5) on the electricity bills of anyone who voted. Voters could also enter lotteries for prizes. The head of the regional election commission said the Yakutsk handouts were a form of illegal bribery, but no one was prosecuted. Voters were equally apathetic in Moscow, where authorities offered free movies and cheap food to attract voters in city elections. In both elections, authorities later said that the number of voters had reached the minimum necessary -- but only after a mysterious last-minute surge of votes in near-empty polling stations, which led to the widespread suspicion that officials had manipulated the results. In both elections, the regional governments appeared to have fixed the results. Pro-government candidates won easily. In Moscow, supporters of the pro-Kremlin mayor won 33 of the 35 city seats after negotiating a power-sharing agreement. Most of the major political parties had agreed in advance to form a coalition, dividing up the seats among themselves. Faced with elections that never seem to matter, a growing number of Russian voters are alienated from the process. In the Yakutia region, 8 per cent of voters rejected all of the candidates, voting for "none of the above." In Moscow, 15 per cent voted against all candidates. Much of the alienation and apathy is because of the pervasive corruption and fraud that make a mockery of many elections. Russian governments, even at the highest level, are increasingly skilled at controlling results and manufacturing whatever vote tallies they want. Last year, a six-month investigation by a Moscow newspaper found evidence of large-scale fraud in Vladimir Putin's presidential-election victory. It concluded that Russian officials had used tactics such as ballot-stuffing, vote-buying, bribery and administrative pressure, and it said that at least 2.2 million votes had been falsified -- enough to ensure that Mr. Putin captured a first-round victory. Cynicism has reached such heights that Russians barely pay attention to the bizarre scandals and reversals of their politicians. The former bad boy of Russian politics, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, caused barely a ripple this month when he dropped his ultranationalist stance and announced that he supports the United States. Mr. Zhirinovsky, who had spent most of his career denouncing the United States and threatening to drop nuclear bombs on it, switched his position after Mr. Putin adopted a pro-Western foreign policy. Mr. Zhirinovsky said his party would abandon its anti-Western slogans, and he even suggested a U.S.-Russia merger. "The Cold War does not exist any longer," he declared. Russians paid little attention to that flip-flop. Most are convinced politicians routinely sell parliamentary votes to the highest bidder. There was an equally apathetic reaction to an astonishing comment by Boris Berezovsky, the powerful businessman who helped orchestrate the rise of Mr. Putin from obscurity in 1999. The well-connected tycoon recently said that the Russian secret services are the masterminds behind a series of violent events that led to Mr. Putin's rise in 1999, including deadly apartment bombings and a Chechen rebel attack on a neighbouring region. If true, Mr. Berezovsky's allegations suggest that the Russian authorities were willing to kill their own citizens to ensure victory for the Kremlin's favourite. But there was scarcely any reaction from voters or politicians. ******* #5 End Sought to Cold War Law for Russia January 1, 2002 By JIM ABRAMS WASHINGTON (AP) - After spending decades arguing just the opposite, a Holocaust survivor and human rights advocate now wants to free Russia from a Cold War policy that used trade to pressure Moscow to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. ``Clearly there are no restrictions on Russian Jewish emigration,'' says Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., a Hungarian Jew who escaped from the Nazis with the help of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. ``I am delighted with this outcome.'' Lantos, the top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, said that even before he was elected to Congress in 1980 he worked in support of the Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1974 Trade Act, which withholds normal trade relations with communist states that restrict emigration. The law, named after the late Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., and former Rep. Charles Vanik, D-Ohio, was ``one of the most important pieces of human rights legislation in our nation's history,'' Lantos said. ``It had bite, it had power, it had punch,'' he said. But now, he contends, the law is no longer relevant. Russia is now a diplomatic partner and ``it disturbs and humiliates the Russian government because it is part of the Cold War,'' Lantos said. Lantos, 73, carries weight on the issue because of his own flight to freedom. Born in Budapest, he fought in the underground against the Nazis and escaped from a slave labor camp. He made his way to the United States in 1947 and is the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress. He heads the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. With White House backing, Lantos said he plans to move legislation through Congress by March, just in time for President Bush to present it to Russian President Vladimir Putin when he visits Moscow next spring. While not requiring annual presidential reviews as the Jackson-Vanik law provides, trade relations would continue to be linked to Russia observing emigration freedom and human rights. Just last Friday, Bush signed a proclamation ending the application of Jackson-Vanik to trade relations with China. Jewish emigration actually fell for a few years after 1974 because of Soviet anger over Jackson-Vanik, but over the years the legislation is credited with forcing the Soviets to give exit visas to more than 1 million Jews. The late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, writing President Ford in 1974, said the U.S. pressure on the Jewish emigration issue was ``causing great joy to the people of Israel and to Jewish communities everywhere.'' More recently, Jackson-Vanik has been at the center of annual debates over the human rights records of China and Vietnam, with lawmakers challenging presidential waivers of Jackson-Vanik made to promote trade. Lantos consistently voted against giving that waiver to China because of its human rights record. Putin asked Bush at an October meeting in Shanghai to exempt Russia from the law. A month later when Putin was visiting the United States, Bush announced he would work with Congress to lift the application of Jackson-Vanik, saying, ``Russia is a fundamentally different place than it was during the Soviet era.'' David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, said after Bush's statement that, with the dramatic changes in the lives of Russian Jews, Russia warranted the end of trade restrictions. He said Jackson-Vanik was ``one of the most important contributions America made to gaining the freedom of Soviet Jews.'' Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said his group agrees that Russia deserves exemption but it was also ``perfectly legitimate for the United States to ask for fundamental progress before it gives up this leverage.'' He added that Jackson-Vanik was still relevant for a number of former Soviet states in central Asia that have not moved toward democracy. ``People think Jackson-Vanik is a Cold War relic, but these countries are also relics of the Soviet past,'' he said. ******* #6 Christian Science Monitor January 2, 2002 Russian spy trials raise red flag about human rights A Russian journalist was sentenced last week to four years' hard labor for giving state secrets to Japan. By Fred Weir Special to The Christian Science Monitor MOSCOW - Russian human rights activists say harsh rulings in two court cases last week could mean that the country's security service is flexing new muscle. The cases of Grigory Pasko, a military journalist who revealed illegal nuclear waste dumping by the Russian Navy, and sociologist Igor Sutyagin, who produced a press digest for a British firm, have been described as a barometer of Russia's progress toward an open, rule-of-law society under former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. "What is happening involves a secret police revival, not the pursuit of justice," says Yury Schekochekin, a liberal parliamentarian and member of the Duma Security Commission. Both defendants were prosecuted by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, under a secret decree that has been ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. Both have been subjected to lengthy imprisonment while the FSB tried unsuccessfully to marshal evidence that they betrayed their country. Some experts charge that a wave of spy trials in the past two years has been orchestrated by the FSB to intimidate intellectuals. A year ago an American businessman, Edmund Pope, was convicted of espionage and later pardoned by the Kremlin. Another US citizen, exchange student John Tobin, was arrested for alleged drug possession - but publicly accused by the FSB of being an American spy. He was released after serving six months in prison. Last summer a Russian diplomat, Valentin Moiseyev, was convicted of treason and given 4-1/2 years at hard labor for giving published materials to a South Korean colleague. Valentin Danilov, a Siberian physicist, faces treason charges for allegedly passing rocket secrets to China. All of the trials were held in secret, and human rights workers claim all were marked by gross procedural errors and FSB pressure on the judges. "All these trials at one time are not a coincidence; they constitute a campaign," says Ernest Chorny, an expert with Ecology and Human Rights, a coalition of independent groups. "The defendants have been chosen not on the basis of their guilt, but to send a particular message to a certain social group. Hence we've had spy trials involving a journalist, an academic, a scientist, a diplomat, and a foreign businessman in barely a year." Mr. Pasko, a former naval captain turned journalist, was convicted of "high treason in the form of espionage" by a military court on Dec. 25, and sentenced to four years' hard labor. The FSB maintained that Pasko had attended a secret military council in 1997, took notes, and had intended to pass information about "secret naval maneuvers" to the Japanese media - though he was never accused of actually having done so. In 1999, the same court had convicted Pasko of negligence for passing film to Japanese TV journalists of the Russian Pacific Fleet illegally jettisoning nuclear wastes. Pasko was subsequently amnestied by Russia's Supreme Court, but appealed the decision anyway. The unexpected result was a new trial on fresh charges of treason, which his lawyers claim were fabricated by the FSB. The Pasko case has raised doubts about the role of President Putin, who has repeatedly pledged to reform Russia's abuse-ridden justice system, curb the arbitrary powers of the security services, and open trials to public scrutiny. Some human rights activists believe the Kremlin is merely saying one thing and doing another; others fear Putin may be powerless to rein in the FSB. "We have a policy of proclaimed democratization but practical activization of the security services," says Alexei Simonov, head of the Glasnost Defense Fund, an independent human rights watchdog. Last week the Kremlin abolished the presidential pardons committee, created as a check on the post-Soviet justice system, and replaced it with local panels subject to regional authorities - a move that experts say further removes the Kremlin from direct responsibility for often corrupt and misfiring courts. The case of Mr. Sutyagin, a researcher with Moscow's Institute of Canada-USA Studies, has human rights workers even more worried. Sutyagin, who never had access to classified materials, was accused of passing military information gleaned from the Russian press to the British public relations firm Alternative Futures, which the FSB claims was a front for the secret service of "a NATO member state." On the last day of Sutyagin's treason trial, Dec. 27, the judge cancelled the proceeding, noting there had been "substantial violations of legal procedure, which deprived the defendant of his constitutional right to defend himself." Under a Russian judicial practice, which has been repudiated by the Supreme Court, the judge sent Sutyagin back to prison - where he has already spent more than two years - while the FSB returns to the investigation stage to reformulate the case. This means that a Russian defendant is basically guilty until proven guilty, say Sutyagin's supporters. "The judge admitted the case was fabricated, but did not have the courage to stand up to the FSB," says Pavel Podvig, an expert with the independent Center of Arms Control Studies in Moscow and presently visiting scholar at Princeton University. However the trials turn out, say human rights activists, the FSB is succeeding in limiting public debate and inhibiting contacts between Russian intellectuals and foreign colleagues. "The media is already actively censoring itself," says Mr. Simonov, "and refusing to report on any sensitive military or environmental issues." ******* #7 RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly Vol. 1, No. 33, 31 December 2001 BEHIND THE SCENES OF PUTIN'S TELEPHONE CHAT. On 24 December, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on ORT and RTR television networks, fielding questions submitted by telephone and the Internet from citizens all over Russia. The Kremlin had opened up a free telephone hotline on 19 December which took about 2,000 calls within a few hours, and the call center remained open until the end of the broadcast on 24 December. According to RFE/RL's Moscow bureau, Putin answered some 47 of the several hundred thousand questions submitted. Although the broadcast was live, neither Putin nor the broadcaster appeared ruffled, a feat which RFE/RL's correspondents suggested might be attributable to the fact that the show was perhaps not as completely spontaneous as it appeared. RFE/RL's Vladivostok correspondent, Marina Loboda, reported on 24 December that all participants in the telelink were gathered in the city's main square an hour before the beginning of the broadcast. And according to local organizers of the event, everything was pre- programmed and rehearsed twice. The questions to be submitted to Putin were sent from Moscow, and Vladivostok residents then asked them. One local journalism student asked Putin to explain housing reform; that the well-to-do student was so keenly interested in such a topic came as a surprise to some of his acquaintances. One local newspaper journalist who wanted to ask Putin about official corruption and whether the Far East needed to be part of Russia was unable to reach an open microphone, as were many other would-be questioners, including some local legislators who arrived after those chosen to ask questions had already been gathered. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, in St. Petersburg, RFE/RL correspondent Viktor Rezunkov noted that the broadcast from Isaakievskii square attracted about 100 locals. However, according to observers, only a group of about six were actually allowed to ask questions, which had already been discussed with the local RTR correspondent, Sergei Pashkov. Local policemen watched over the proceedings so that no person who was not pre-screened could shove through to reach Pashkov. In Rostov-na-Donu, RFE/RL correspondent Sergei Sleptsov reported that about 40 people -- most of them students from nearby institutes and universities -- gathered outside a local theater. They were joined by an equal number of men in law- enforcement uniforms. Commenting on the regional dispatches, media analyst for RFE/RL's Moscow bureau Anna Kachkaeva noted that the complexity of such a broadcast required some advanced engineering and pre-screening of questions, and the resulting program came off without a hitch. There were no awkward moments and no disruption of telephone or TV links. She also observed that the total cost of the production was probably considerable. The telelinks to the 10 cities alone must have cost $50,000-70,000. Additional expenses were incurred by the purchase of special equipment for Ostankino and the creation of a special website, along with wages for the hundreds of technical workers and telephone operators. But presumably it was all money well spent, since it contributes to the impression that Russia is now a democracy -- one in which Russian citizens can simply trot down to their local square and get answers from their head of state about what's really bothering them. That the event was not spontaneous should simply be expected. Writing in "Obshchaya gazeta" (no. 51), analyst Dmitrii Furman argues that "battles and events" are disappearing from public politics in Russia. And what the current regime finds most disturbing is "anything independent and spontaneous" -- "regardless of whether it is dangerous or not." Furman notes that is why representatives of nongovernmental organizations were "summoned for the Civic Forum," an event which he said "marks the beginning of the formalization of that sphere." Likewise, according to Furman, "the TV-6 network is not dangerous either, but it is uncontrollable." And, he continues, "when uncontrollability and spontaneity are to be driven out of the sphere of public politics, they have to be driven out of public politics as well." Writing in "The Moscow Times" on 18 December, commentator Aleksei Pankin echoed Furman's comment, noting that programs such as "Vremena" and "Segodnya" on ORT and NTV, respectively, are currently more critical than TV-6. But TV-6 poses a threat nonetheless, because it could become critical in the future: "Everyone understands that it is a time bomb that [chief shareholder Boris] Berezovsky will detonate when the time is right," he noted. And that is apparently intolerable for the Kremlin. In the meantime, Russia's television- viewing public may no longer see TV-6 in the future, but Russians can look forward to another television chat with Putin next year, since the nationwide call-in show is expected to become an annual event. (Julie A. Corwin) ******* #8 BBC 30 December 2001 Ukrainian memories of the USSR's death By BBC News Online's Stephen Mulvey The two men who played the lead roles in the collapse of the Soviet Union - Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin - get short shrift from one of the supporting actors - the former Ukrainian President, Leonid Kravchuk - in memoirs written 10 years after the event. Mr Kravchuk describes the Soviet leader of 1991 as an overbearing politburo dinosaur, who deludes himself that hectoring phone calls and bombastic speechifying might be enough to prevent Ukraine and other republics splitting away. The Russian president he portrays as a man driven by personal ambition to sweep away the USSR - and hence his rival, Mikhail Gorbachev - while hoping to preserve as much as possible of Russia's "imperial" domination of the ex-Soviet states. The way he tells the story, in two long excerpts from a forthcoming book published in a Ukrainian newspaper, his own motivation was very different. "He [Yeltsin] was interested in me as an ally in the struggle for power. I attempted with his help to make our country's independence fully-fledged at last," Kravchuk writes. Slow Evolution He does credit Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, with the sense to realise that the USSR was destined for oblivion - however it is not completely clear when Kravchuk himself, let alone Yeltsin, came to this realisation. It seems to have been an understanding that slowly gelled, for both of them, in the autumn of 1991. "Even after the collapse of the [August 1991] coup the Union still had a chance of salvation," Kravchuk writes. "Gorbachev... acquired a new decisiveness. Only the preservation of the Union would give him the chance to remain in big-time politics." Improvisation This was why Gorbachev kept badgering Kravchuk over the telephone. He wanted him to sign up to the idea of a "renewed" union, but Kravchuk refused to discuss the issue until after a Ukrainian referendum on independence on 1 December. In October, Gorbachev organised an appeal to the Ukrainian parliament calling on Ukraine to back the new Union treaty - and got Yeltsin and several other heads of republics to sign it. But only the next month he records having prolonged discussions with Yeltsin and the leader of the Belarusian republic, Stanislav Shushkevich, in which they agreed "that the USSR was doomed, and should be replaced by a temporary non-state structure". It was another month again before this structure, the Commonwealth of Independent States, was created - a historic step that was taken, as Kravchuk tells it, "with a significant degree of improvisation". Pushcha accords He got a call from Shushkevich on 7 December, who told him that Yeltsin was going to be in Belarus for other reasons, and inviting him to join them at a hunting lodge near Brest, known as Belovezhskaya Pushcha. He assumed it was going to be just another round of discussions, and indeed the first evening was devoted to eating rather than making history. (Kravchuk does not comment on rumours that alcohol flowed in great abundance.) But when the next morning Kravchuk briefed the others on Ukraine's decisive vote for independence, they began almost immediately to draft the famous Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords, which begin: "The USSR ceases its existence as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality." Kremlin brush-off A furious Gorbachev summoned all three authors to Moscow the next day, but only Yeltsin went. The Soviet leader continued to bawl down the telephone at Kravchuk, refusing to face facts until he finally resigned on 25 December. In no time at all, Kravchuk says, Yeltsin was taking an equally high-handed line. "Undoubtedly, Yeltsin reckoned that would Moscow would continue to dominate one sixth of the globe," Kravchuk writes. "Wherever we subsequently met, at numerous CIS events, he always considered himself fully in charge." The point was brought home to Kravchuk on 30 December, when Yeltsin announced that he had already given instructions for a rapid transformation to market economics. When Kravchuk reminded him that the founders of the CIS had agreed to co-ordinate their reforms, in order to minimise the disruption to their interlinked economies, he got the Kremlin brush-off. Yeltsin simply replied, Kravchuk says, that the others should follow Russia's example. ******* #9 Russian economy can develop on its own - economist MOSCOW. Dec 31 (Interfax) - The Russian economy demonstrated in 2001 that it could develop on its own without foreign donations, said Yevgeny Yasin, a noted economist in charge of scientific research at Russia's High School of Economics. He regards past year results as sound "above all because the pessimistic forecasts made at the start of the year have come false and additional factors of quite high rates of growth have been at work actually throughout the year." GDP by the end of the year statistics is expected at a level of 5.6%, although no more than 3% were predicted at the start of the year. One of the growth factors is above all increased domestic demand, which was a propellant for the Russian economy throughout the year. "This is very indicative because when internal demand is switched on, this means that the development propellant is in motion". "This means that for the first time this year we see a situation with the economy advancing by its own resources," said Yasin. National currency devaluation or higher oil prices are external factors, which are stimulating, but "they peter out once the situation changes." At the same time, "internal demand is a far more stable thing," said Yasin. Andrei Neshchadin, the executive director of the Institute of Experts, believes that the overall slow down of world economic growth has hardly had any effect on Russia. "The year has been not bad at all but it cannot be said that all opportunities for successful economic growth have been tapped." "The lack of a sufficient array of financial and economic instruments has had its impact," said the economist. He explained that an attempt had been made this year to infiltrate inn the grain market, however, nothing has come out because there has actually been no market. "There has been no grain stock, no forward deals, no regulative legislation and lots of market instruments have existed on paper so far. Andrei Klepach, deputy head of The Development Center has told Interfax that "this year has proved to be much better than most economists expected. "GDP growth is at 5.5% and may be at 5.8% by the end of the year and this is a good result," said he. "If not for the favorable situation on the foreign market, the results would have been much worse," he added. There is also a significant internal factor that influenced annual results. "Central policy taking incomes out of shadow and hiking budget workers' wages and pensions, playing a very substantial role," stressed Klepach. He noted that "the population has provoked a consuming boom." In this respect, the government by its program of increasing wages in the budget sector and raising pensions have done quite a lot for making the consuming boom spread not only to high-income earners but to the majority of the population," said the economist. Klepach believes that "in regard to the investment process, the government has made no positive contribution at all." Despite the continuing growth of investments, expected at around 9% by the end of the year against 17.4% last year, their structure is very alarming since throughout these two years investments have been growing at the expense of the oil and gas sector, steel-smelting, transport, and housing construction," he remarked. He believes that "the growth of budget revenues, which has been received and which is a significant government achievement indeed, is being used above all for solving the foreign debt problem, which is wise, but it is making no direct contribution to economic growth." The economist recalled that the government had made a number of strategic decisions, crucial for the country not only this year but within the coming ten years. These decisions have given rise to reforms in the banking sector, Russia's Unified Energy System, Rail Ministry, and Gazprom. "Although the strategic decisions basically make sense, their implementation arouses many questions and could seriously slow down economic growth within the coming years," Klepach predicted. The natural monopolies' investment programs are one of the key levers the government has for 2002 and years ahead to maintain investment growth and economic growth as a whole. ******* #10 openDemocracy.org 12 December 2001 Russia changing By Susan Richards Susan Richards is senior editor of openDemocracy The impoverishment, corruption and violence of Russia’s first post-Soviet decade reinforced the fatalism in people’s hearts. In a recent visit to Moscow and Saratov, openDemocracy’s senior editor senses a shift. Political stability, modestly growing businesses, the respect of the West, and a leader who doesn’t shame people, are some ingredients of the mood. The inner change, palpable if not yet widely rooted, says: we can embrace the future and still be Russians. Ten years ago, when I was setting out on my travels, looking for places which were going to prosper in provincial Russia after the fall of communism, a wise Russian warned me: “Never forget that foreigners come to Russia and expect to see change. But nothing in Russia ever really changes”. The argument was one I knew well: in Russia change never goes more than skin deep; whether the regime be Tsarist, communist or capitalist, nothing alters the Asiatic, authoritarian character of power in this vast, northerly land. I did not argue, but I wanted to prove the man wrong. The 1990s seemed to confirm that fatalist view. As the economy of the old superpower broke up, its people surrendered to poverty and mob rule. President Yeltsin himself bemoaned that he presided over “a mafia state on a world scale”. In the early 1990s the top twenty-five banks were all controlled by, or involved with organised crime. By January 1997, Russia’s interior minister himself declared that forty per cent of all business was in criminal hands. The following summer, when the market crashed, it looked certain that neither I nor my children would live long enough to know whether Russia was going to be able to change or not. The hard road to independence Yet when I returned to Russia recently, my expectations were ambushed once again. I caught a new mood of optimism, one which is mirrored in the stories of two men whose fortunes I have been following for the last decade, Aleksandr and Nikolai. Both set out to become businessmen after the fall of communism, and both were without capital, connections or any real notion of what business was about. Aleksandr had been a successful Soviet journalist on a national newspaper in Moscow. After the collapse of Soviet power his marriage fell apart, as many did. He had nowhere to live, and no job. He was penniless. Prices, which had risen by only eighteen per cent in thirty years, shot up when the rouble became convertible. With inflation spiralling, his savings melted. He was not young, he had no capital and he had none of the instincts of the born businessman. But he picked himself up and started making documentaries for Russian television. People liked and trusted him, and the business grew rapidly. By 1998 he was riding a wave, negotiating to buy a provincial television network. By now he had bought a house in Hungary, and was just moving into a brand new dacha outside Moscow. Then, in August 1998 the market crashed and he was left $40,000 in debt. Rather than declare himself bankrupt, his new wife agreed to sell her Moscow apartment and their house in Hungary. The couple moved into his mother-in-law’s one room flat. Living off his wife’s salary, threatened by thugs operating on behalf of his creditors, he resolved to pay off his debts. Today, he is back making documentaries, almost out of debt, and he and his wife are back in their own drafty (rented) home. He will never be rich, and he will never be a good businessman. But that is the point. The time has come in Russia when you do not have to be brilliant, or a thug, to make an independent living. Nikolai, on the other hand, did have the instincts of a businessman. Ten years ago he left his job working as an engineer for a military factory in a small country town near Saratov. Together with two friends he started trading in the only product they could afford to buy – chewing gum. Those were the days when the Russian word biznismen was synonymous with violent racketeering. Nikolai was not like that at all. He was gentle and educated and honest. His friends used to fall about laughing when over a drink in the evenings he used to talk about how he was going to become a big industrialist. To them, he was a figure of fun. He and his friends had nothing like an office or a mobile telephone. From morning to night they spent their time racing around in their battered Zhigulis, dodging the authorities (like everyone else, they could not afford to pay the impossibly high taxes) and doing deals for their survival with the protection racketeers. As soon as he had saved up enough money he bought a machine from Latvia for crushing sunflower seeds into oil. He kept it locked up in a shed, unused. For with inflation still raging, it was still not possible to go into production. When I went to visit him in 1998, the machine was out of mothballs and Nikolai was supplying sunflower oil to the region’s shops. But he was still living with his wife and two small children in a tatty two-room flat. The only sign of the family’s comparative affluence was that they could afford to eat fresh meat and vegetables from the market. This time when I visited Nikolai in Saratov I found that he and his partners had become established. One imports goods from Europe; another runs an excellent restaurant and a clothes shop in Saratov, while Kolya’s sunflower oil business is booming. In order to secure more supplies, he has decided to grow sunflowers himself. Unable to rent the small amount of land he needs (land reform being unresolved), he has been obliged to take over a six thousand hectare farm, together with its entire, wretched, workforce. He will turn it round. He is on his way. His family has finally moved into a brand new flat, with a conservatory and parquet floor, and he is grooming his eighteen-year old daughter to take over the business. What was special about Nikolai was that even when Russia was at its most violent and lawless, he believed in the future. “You may think we’re just ropey traders in cheap goods,” he said to me in the early days, “but you wait – the West is going to have to watch out. The people who come through these years – there’ll be no stopping us! We may have started by lying and cheating off the state – but what else could we do? The state owned it all! That won’t last. Things are already settling down. It’s tough, of course, but it’s such fun! I wouldn’t want to do business in the West. Here you build your own world every day of your life – it’s a game of skill, and there are no rules, only ways of getting through”. The political wheel turns Now, up and down Russia, hundreds of thousands of small businessmen and women are beginning to share his visionary confidence. For last year, the country’s domestic economy, which had crashed in the summer of 1998, finally grew by 7.7 per cent. This year this trend has continued, though more modestly, with growth of four per cent. Salary arrears have fallen; real incomes and foreign investment are up; and there is less trade by barter. The figure who personifies this could hardly be less expected. Eighteen months into his presidency, the “grey cardinal” from the secret services is emerging as someone of whom Russians are proud. For the first time in most of their lifetimes, the country is being run by someone who is neither decrepit, drunken nor deluded (as Gorbachev is judged to have been by his fellow countrymen). Ruthless he may be (who exactly did perpetrate the spate of ‘Chechen’ bomb attacks on civilians in 1998 which served as Putin’s pretext for renewed military engagement in Chechnya?). But few people accuse him of being crooked. He is a modern man, who speaks foreign languages and is perceptibly brighter than America’s President. In his first eighteen months, he has already clawed back control of the provinces (Chechnya apart), begun to rein in the banks, introduced tax reforms and a more Western European approach to the judiciary. Russia’s own great oligarchs have responded by beginning to invest in their domestic market. Where they have done so in new equipment in farms in the famous black earth regions of the south, for instance, the returns have been good: harvests have leapt by fifty per cent. Now, everything suggests that Russia will indeed be a great gainer in the global fall-out from the events of 11 September. Putin is using the opportunity to move against the corrupt old guard which still encircles him. Suddenly, the fact that oil in exploitable quantities lies under some forty per cent of Russia’s territory potentially rescues the developed world from its crucial dependency on Saudi oil. Suddenly, there seemed nothing foolish about the rash of articles I was reading in Russia’s national and provincial press which expressed confidence that Western capital would now start preferring to invest in Russia’s decrepit infrastructure, rather than in the West’s own jittery, saturated markets. Some Western investment analysts are saying the same. On top of all this, the terrorist attacks on America have left the Russians feeling that at last the West has been forced to understand what they have been up against in Chechnya. Even genuinely democratic Russians have been inclined to be impatient with the trail of liberal delegations from Amnesty to Human Rights Watch which have made their way to the Caucasus in recent years investigating their abuses in Chechnya. “You just don’t understand,” they used to say, shaking their heads: “The Chechens – they’re different from other Muslims.” The NATO powers certainly seem to agree. After the dark decade, cautious patriotism The Moscow I visited at the end of this year certainly looks a world away from the drab, monumental vistas of the old Soviet capital. The authoritarian scale of Stalin’s city centre is tricked out now with bright Western brand names, gentled with azure and gold onion domes. The militant severity of the capital’s skyline is interrupted by new residential ziggurat in pastel shades, which sprout extravagant conservatories; de luxe hotels, smoked-glass office blocks. Those wide through-ways designed for military parades are now clogged with BMWs. The streets where bulging babushkas wearing medals used to shout at young couples if they necked in public now shimmer with girls in long furs and stiletto boots. But when I left Moscow for the Volga city of Saratov I was reminded how little the rest of Russia has changed. Saratov is a city of nearly a million people. In Soviet times it was a rich place, a closed city whose industry was devoted to the military complex. Now those factories stand empty, at best small cells live on and are producing something – saucepans, prototypes for combine harvesters which someone, someday might order. Here too you can see smart new tower blocks going up. You can buy Max Mara and Hugo Boss in the high street and you can eat at delectable restaurants where the waiters treat you with elaborate deference. However, here in Saratov these bright spots do not conceal the poverty, but rather show it up. The only people with the money to shop in such places are local government officials (all living on oil money), traders, and employees of the local tobacco factory, which has been taken over by British American Tobacco. The streets are full of potholes; ex-employees of arms factories, and pensioners (living on fifty dollars a month) creep along them, lethargic from malnutrition. As for the countryside around – land which a hundred years ago was producing finest hard wheat for the European market – a terrible stillness prevails. Land reform has stalled. Each old collective farm still belongs jointly to the people who used to work it. On these farms no one has paid them for years. The enterprising have long since left. Those who have stayed have reverted to subsistence farming and the bottle. From the vantage point of Saratov, or of almost anywhere in provincial Russia, does my optimism about change look premature? After all, it is arguable that the achievement of Putin’s first eighteen months only proves the point of the person who warned me against looking for change in Russia. Has Putin not reasserted control by confirming the age-old pattern of centralized, authoritarian power? Putin himself is well aware of this problem. Just as I was leaving the country, the Kremlin and other branches of government were inviting some five thousand representatives of NGOs to a two-day Civic Forum, to discuss how to create the conditions for the development of a civic society. “Everyone understands that a civic society cannot be formed at the initiative of government officials,” Putin said disarmingly to the delegates. “I think it is absolutely unproductive, practically impossible and even dangerous to try to create a civic society from the top down.” How indeed can a civil society be created where there was none before? Ten years ago, when the Soviet regime ended, many hoped that its fall would somehow, magically, result in change. Their naivety was understandable. For throughout their lives they had been protected from reality by a regime which had taught them that only obedience deserved to be rewarded. Now, Nikolai and Aleksandr and others like them have come through Russia’s dark decade believing in change as a practice, not as an item of faith. After surviving in business through ten years of anarchy, these men and women know that the infrastructure of a civil society is what they require in order to run their businesses. They need regulated banks which will hold their money, not steal it, taxes they can afford to pay, law courts which can deliver enforceable judgments, land which can be bought and sold, government officials who can be held to account. Ever since Peter the Great aspired to turn his backward country into a European power, Russia’s progressives have looked West. They have therefore been caught in a state of almost permanent disaffection with their motherland. To be patriotic has meant to be conservative. Suddenly, to be a Westerniser and to be patriotic no longer feels like such a contradiction. If I were a Russian, I think that I too would be a cautious patriot today. Enjoyed this article? Receive our weekly content updates via email by sending your full name to subscribe@opendemocracy.net Copyright © Susan Richards, 2001. Published by openDemocracy. Permission is granted to reproduce articles for personal and educational use only. Commercial copying, hiring and lending is prohibited without permission. If this has been sent to you by a friend and you like it, you are welcome to join the openDemocracy network. ********