Or so we thought. On June 16, the citizens of Russia will vote in the first round of an election that may yet stand on its head every assumption a smug, triumphalist West has made about the New World Order. Eleven candidates are running for Russia’s immensely powerful presidency. If no single candidate gets more than half the votes in the first round, the leading two will face each other in a runoff, most likely in early July. Those two are almost certainly going to be the ailing incumbent, Boris Yeltsin, under whose erratic leadership Russia has been transformed into something more or less like a market economy, and Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov, embodiment of the faceless party apparatchik. They are not just the front runners, and a face-off between them will not be just another horse race. Between them, Yeltsin and Zyuganov offer as stark a choice as history has presented since Germany in 1932. ““With all due respect,’’ says Dmitry Vasilyev, a 32-year-old reformer in Yeltsin’s cabinet, ““this is not like your American election this year. This is a choice between communism and capitalism. It will be of lasting, historic consequence.''
That is true, first, for the Russians themselves – but for the rest of the world as well. The consequences of the choice Russians will make this summer are almost beyond hyperbole. Sanguine foreigners like to point out that Zyuganov and the communists could not stuff the capitalist genie all the way back into the bottle, but that is beside the point. Their economic program is bad enough, a muddle of greater state planning, protectionism and budget-busting subsidies for all, and calls for the renationalization of the critical energy sector. Worse than the plan itself, though, is the cast of characters that comes with it. ““None of them knows the first thing about running a market economy,’’ says a prominent U.S. executive in Moscow. The result, if they’re elected, could be economic havoc on a scale that might tip the world’s second largest nuclear power toward chaos.
A COMMUNIST WIN, MOST noncommunist Russians are convinced, will provoke massive capital flight as foreign investors and rich Russians head for the exits; hyperinflation as the communists print rubles to pay for their campaign promises, price controls to combat the inflation, shortages as a result of the price controls and, ultimately, civil unrest, if not civil war. ““It’s a formula for the emergence of a Russian Pinochet – an authoritarian nationalist,’’ says Sergei Karaganov, an adviser to President Yeltsin.
Some of the most successful businessmen in the new Russia – good capitalists that they have become – are already hedging their bets. Fear, after all, moves markets. ““I don’t exclude the possibility that I’d have to leave,’’ says 50-year-old Boris Berezovsky, who runs a vast, Moscow-based conglomerate. ““I believe it’s more effective to defend my interests alive than dead.''
The possibility of a communist win seems to be concentrating a lot of other minds inside Russia. Most recent polls show a re-energized – and sober – Yeltsin finally drawing away from Zyuganov. But Russian polling has been notoriously unreliable, and Yeltsin’s men are still ominously restrained whenever journalists invite them to predict victory. ““I think there is better than a 50 percent chance that Yeltsin will win,’’ was the best Karaganov could do last week.
There is good reason for caution. Russia under Yeltsin is an economic mess – and will probably get worse. The pressure of a close runoff against Zyuganov may tempt Yeltsin to adopt more nationalistic policies: protection of domestic industry; stricter limits on foreign ownership of Russian assets. In the West, communism’s few defenders insist it’s not a bad economic system, it just hasn’t been done right. Yeltsin’s defenders today make essentially the same argument about free markets in Russia. At a pivotal moment in history, that is a weak position for the president and his advisers to be in. Then again, they have only themselves to blame. The transition to a market economy was inevitably going to be rocky. But as several of Russia’s newly free neighbors have shown, it didn’t have be as painful as this: industrial production in Russia is down by more than 50 percent in the last five years; gross national product has contracted for five years running; life expectancy – perhaps the ultimate indicator of a nation’s overall economic health – has plunged to 58 for Russian men.
The harshness of the transition has produced fury. In the coal-mining regions of northern Russia, men in the pits went months without getting paid earlier this year. Many pension payments have also been late. If capitalism doesn’t stand for a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work – or a commitment to make good on obligations to retirees – ““then what does it stand for?’’ asks a bitter Lyudmila Sakharova, a retired Muscovite who’ll vote for Zyuganov.
Too many citizens in Yeltsin’s Russia have a ready answer: it stands for crime. The Russian mafia has practically turned the motherland into a thug-ocracy. The mob’s oppressive presence suppresses competition throughout the economy, sapping the economic vitality that comes from legitimate entrepreneurship. Getting a grip on the mafia is vital for Russia to have even a chance of economic normalcy – and there’s little reason to suspect that Yeltsin will. The mobsters pitilessly rub their extorted gains in the faces of the have-nots, and have made banking in Russia a higher-risk profession than leading tours up Mount Everest. Last year about a dozen high-ranking Russian bankers were gunned down in apparent mob hits, and none of the murders has produced arrests. For those reasons – more than Yeltsin’s debacle in Chechnya, more than any pining for the days of empire – Zyuganov’s communists can probably count on at least 25 to 30 percent of the vote in the first round.
That will not, in the runoff expected against Yeltsin, be enough. That’s why both Zyuganov and Yeltsin are wooing the support of the candidates likely to trail them: hard-right nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who could get 10 to 15 percent of the first-round votes, and Gregor Yavlinsky, free-marketer (and darling of the West) who’ll be lucky to win 10 percent of the vote. Both men are, in their own ways, fierce anti-communists; that’s part of the reason Zyuganov has tried frantically to put as benign a face as possible on his economic program. Last Thursday he declared that there would be no seizure of newly private property under his government – a flat reversal of the economic plan issued two weeks earlier. At least Zyuganov, in contrast to some of the hard-liners behind him, seems to understand that there is great political risk in trying to turn back the clock too far.
In this, he’s right. It’s easy, given the daunting economic problems Russia now faces, to forget how far it’s come under Yeltsin. Andrei Kushnarev, for one, hasn’t. At 26, he’s a deputy director of an oil and gas consulting firm in Moscow. He knows if the government takes over the industry, ““we’re all out of jobs.’’ He also knows, under Yeltsin, that ““inflation’s down sharply. Private property has been ratified by presidential decree, and the stock market has been soaring now that it looks like Yeltsin may win.''
A Yeltsin victory would not mean immediate stability in Russia, let alone prosperity – as the president’s more honest advisers admit. Yeltsin has made profligate spending promises during the campaign that he can’t pay for. Late last week he got into a fight with Russia’s independent central bank when he tried to ““borrow’’ $1 billion worth of rubles to start paying pensioners. Still, an awful lot of Russians, like Kushnarev, cannot fathom going back. And they’re right. Now, on the cusp of a historic election, the West desperately hopes they turn out to be Russia’s silent majority.
title: “Russian Roulette” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-14” author: “Lamont Steadman”
One week earlier, Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrossian was forced to resign in a bloodless coup. Hard-liners in oil-poor Armenia had been furious at his efforts to settle the decadelong dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. Days after Ter-Petrossian urged Armenia to be “realistic” about Western pressures to settle the conflict with oil-rich Azerbaijan, he paid with his job. As Shevardnadze might say, he was lucky.
title: “Russian Roulette” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-06” author: “Kathryn Hanson”
The Kremlin called Litvinenko’s allegation “nothing but nonsense.” Putin himself dismissively suggested that Litvinenko might have been “sacrificed” by his dissident allies as a ploy to cast blame on Moscow. British investigators last week cautioned that they had turned up nothing that led to any particular suspect. Some suggested that Litvinenko’s poisoning was done too sloppily for the culprit to have been the FSB, the successor to the fabled KGB. Professional hits are supposed to be neat, quiet affairs. But so many traces of polonium 210 were found in London restaurants, hotels and posh neighborhoods like Mayfair that British tabloids began to run radiation scare! headlines. Authorities said some 33,000 British Airways passengers may have been exposed, though the health risks were considered minor.
Still, the fears in London reflected the unease in many Western capitals about the kind of place Russia has become. Grown richer on gas and oil profits, an increasingly haughty Russia has begun to behave like an international bully, U.S. and European officials complain. After a decade in which it meekly accepted its status as a second-rate power, Russia has cut off fuel supplies to the Europeans, strong-armed former Soviet satellites like Ukraine and Georgia, obstructed Washington over sanctions against Iran and harassed U.S. companies in Russia.
Equally worrisome, Russia has become a nation where corruption is systemic, where the only order and security come from bribes and protection rackets and contract killings are as common as buyouts on Wall Street. Politics and profits are so intertwined that top Kremlin officials control some of the country’s biggest companies. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev is also chairman of Gazprom, the $220 billion gas monopoly. Presidential administration deputy chief Igor Sechin is head of the giant state oil company, Rosneft, and Putin aide Viktor Ivanov chairs national air-carrier Aeroflot, as well as the main air-defense contractor, Almaz-Antei. “We used to have a private oligarchy–now we have an oligarchy drawn from the secret police,” says former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, referring to the KGB background of many of Putin’s advisers. Indeed, some U.S. and European officials suggest that Putin’s Russia now has the characteristics of a fascist state. “There’s no longer a sense that Russia is just on the other side of the divide but still within the family,” says Stephen Sestanovich, a former top Russia adviser in Democratic and Republican administrations. “The Russians are no longer the errant cousins. They’re looking like a different gang altogether.”
One thing is certain: enemies of the Kremlin and its many business interests have been turning up suspiciously dead lately. A month before Litvinenko’s murder, journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Putin’s war in Chechnya, was shot to death at her Moscow apartment. The Litvinenko poisoning was the most brazen attack yet, occurring in the heart of London in early November. Despite the failure to find a culprit, intelligence assessments sent to the White House by last weekend indicated that most theories pointed back to Russia.
Most experts agreed that the killer’s use of polonium 210 was the hardest evidence tying the assassination to elements inside the Russian government. In the quantity that killed Litvinenko, the obscure isotope could be obtained only from a nuclear reactor or a nuclear-powered sub. “It is not at all easy to get hold of,” says Boris Zhukov, head of the radioisotope laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Nuclear Research Institute. “And absolutely impossible outside state control, at least in Russia.” Some U.S. and British intel sources, however, suggest the polonium 210 that killed Litvinenko could have come from some place besides Russia.
According to a classified U.S. intelligence bulletin on the case that was described to NEWSWEEK, one theory among many is that the culprits could be rogue elements of the FSB. A possible suspect is a quasi-mythical group called Dignity and Honor, an alleged organization of ex-spies who target Kremlin critics on their own initiative. “We are talking about death squads here, like the ones they had in Latin America, of former KGB special units who are experienced in war, intelligence and murder,” says Aleksei Venediktov, director of Ekho Moskvy, a prominent radio station, and one of Moscow’s best-connected commentators. “These people lost everything in ’90s. They felt betrayed first by [Boris] Yeltsin and then by Putin. Beginning in about 1998, they formed private groups, radical and militarized. Their aim is to kill enemies of the motherland.” (One case is under investigation, though no murders have yet been conclusively tied to such groups.)
But if Putin was blameless in the Litvinenko killing, he didn’t exactly jump into the investigation, either. “Why isn’t Putin saying, ‘This is awful and we will help you track the responsibility wherever it goes’?” asks Sestanovich. “Their own words and actions here convict them, if not of direct responsibility then at least of an approach and attitude toward a crime like this that is way out of the mainstream.” Asked about the possibility of rogue FSB killers, one senior U.S. official who deals with Russia cautioned against making the same mistake President Truman once did when he remarked that “poor Stalin” was a “prisoner of the Politburo.” Putin, a former KGB colonel, “is a very smart man; he keeps his eye on detail,” said the official, who would speak about the case only anonymously.
Even if the Russian president weren’t directly involved in Litvinenko’s killing or other assassinations, it is clear that extremist elements in his security apparatus think they can act with impunity. Last June, after the murder of Russian diplomats in Iraq, Russia’s rubber-stamp Parliament authorized assassination of “terrorists” anywhere in the world–not that the lack of such a law stopped the KGB (or indeed FSB) in the past. Vladimir Ryzhkov, a deputy in Russia’s Duma, believes that the motive in murders like Litvinenko’s is “not to just get rid of individuals, but to lead a psychological campaign to threaten the mass of people back home. The message is, ‘You are next’.” But most contract murders in Russia tend to be disputes over money, not politics, investigators say.
U.S. officials caution that not all is going bad with Russia. Moscow is cooperating on nuclear nonproliferation and recently agreed to terms for entry into the World Trade Organization. President George W. Bush still has “a very good personal relationship” with Putin, says a senior Bush administration official who would talk only on condition of anonymity. “They can discuss anything.”
Even so, U.S. officials fear that corporate interests have become so dominant in Russia that the West can no longer depend on statesmanlike behavior out of Moscow. Many senior Kremlin figures, for example, have strong financial interests in continuing to trade nukes and conventional weapons with Iran. “The only institution that works in Russia anymore is the Kremlin,” says the U.S. official who deals with Moscow. Whether the Kremlin is also working to silence its critics may be a secret that dies with people like Alexander Litvinenko.
