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Jamestown Foundation
Russia's Week: 24 April 2002
24 April 2002--Volume VII, Issue 16
THE USUAL SUSPECTS....
President Vladimir Putin delivered his annual State-of-the-Nation address on
April 18, and, despite the official secrecy that had surrounded the speech's
contents prior to its delivery, rumors that his main theme would be the need to
streamline the state apparatus turned out to be true.
Indeed, while listing the achievements of his governance over the past
year--a modest reduction in unemployment, a modest growth in real wages and the
passage of measures to reform the tax and judicial systems, to cut red tape for
businesses and to permit the free sale of some land--the mood of the Russian
president was well short of euphoric. He also faced reality and made note of it:
Forty million Russians remain in poverty; the economy's slowing growth rate is
likely to prevent Russia from catching up with the developed world. Having
earlier castigated his cabinet for overly timid growth projections, Putin then
declared that the main obstacle to rapid economic growth is Russia's
"awkward, ineffective state apparatus." This, he said, remains "a
black box" for most citizens and is mired in corruption. The problem, he
continued, is not the state bureaucracy's size. He insisted, rather
unconvincingly, that Russia's state apparatus is no bigger, and perhaps even
smaller than those in other countries. The problem, he claimed, is that it is
"badly organized" and staffed by people unacquainted with "system
management." Calling for an "administrative reform" that would
turn the state apparatus into a "compact working instrument of state
policy," Putin ordered the cabinet to present restructuring plans
forthwith.
If all of this had a familiar ring, it's because it had all been said before,
in so many words. In his March 1997 address, then President Boris Yeltsin
assailed top state officials for their "lack of will and indifference,
irresponsibility and incompetence in dealing with state problems" and then
reshuffled his cabinet. The Russian media speculated at the time that Yeltsin's
next step would be to radically restructure the state apparatus. Izvestia even
reported that Anatoly Chubais had been transferred from the post of presidential
chief of staff to that of first deputy prime minister in order to change the
government's "size and functions." A year later, in June 1998, Yeltsin
that his administration had "begun to reduce drastically expenditure on the
state apparatus." Two months later, the country's financial system
collapsed.
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO....
A cynic might deduce that when Russian leaders hit a dead end in their bid to
reform the country, they start attacking officialdom. And while this is a
minority view in the case of Putin, whose popularity rating remains steady at
around 70 percent, it is still difficult to ignore.
One among this minority, Pyotr Aven, president of Alfa Bank and a former
foreign trade minister, critiqued the status quo in unequivocal terms during
last week's Russian Economic Forum in London. Providing one of the few sour
notes in an otherwise upbeat event, Aven declared that no economic
liberalization whatsoever was underway in Russia. "I am sure that the
majority of those present in this room hold accounts in foreign banks, that many
have real estate abroad, and that under Russian law all of us are
criminals," he told the audience, which included the leading lights of
Russia's political and business elite. Russian banks, Aven added, account for
only 3 percent of the country's domestic investment. "What is the largest
portion of Russian banks doing if they are not fulfilling their main
function--crediting?" he asked. "They are involved in money
laundering." He also lashed out at Russian government spending, saying that
it amounts to 33 percent of the country's gross domestic product--"a huge
burden on Russian business and a brake on economic growth." By way of
invidious comparison, he noted that government spending in China accounts for
only 13-17 percent of that country's GDP.
While Aven is himself a major beneficiary of oligarchic capitalism and no one
would ever mistake him for Mother Theresa, he has frequently been refreshingly
straightforward about post-Soviet Russia's economic realities. In 1994, for
example, Aven declared that in Russia, millionaires were "appointed"
by the state. In 1999, he wrote a devastating critique of Yeltsin-era economic
reform, noting, among other things, that the country's largest enterprises had
been "purchased with government money" and that the privatization of
one aluminum factory alone had been "accompanied by twenty murders."
A NEW THREAT....
A rather more unexpected subject in Putin's annual address to the nation was,
as he put it, "the rise of extremism." This, he said, was a
"serious threat" to Russia's stability and security. It was expressed,
he continued, "above all in slogans and fascist and nationalist symbols
that lead to pogroms, people being beaten up and killed." While "bands
of extremists" were acting essentially as organized crime groups and should
be treated accordingly, he said that prosecutors and police did not have
"sufficiently effective instruments" to bring the organizers of
extremist crimes to justice.
The reason this section of the presidential address was something of a
surprise was that Putin's accession to throne following the mercurial Yeltsin
was supposed to mark the advent of relative political tranquillity and
predictability. So, at least, went the conventional wisdom. Now, all of a
sudden, Russia's head of state was confirming what newspapers were declaring in
boldface headlines: The country was under threat from young white supremacists
sporting swastikas and buzz cuts. Indeed, last week Muscovites and foreigners
alike nervously awaited April 20, Adolf Hitler's birthday, with foreign
embassies receiving emails from "Ivan," a self-proclaimed skinhead
leader, warning that foreigners would be attacked, even killed, in memory of the
Nazi dictator.
The skinhead movement in Russia, in fact, is not new. Indeed, as the
newspaper Moskovskie Novosti noted last week, it was alive during the Soviet era
and has been growing steadily ever since. In April of last year, about the time
of that Hitler birthday anniversary, skinheads stabbed a Chechen man to death in
central Moscow. Last October, two "non-Slavs" were murdered during a
large-scale skinhead rampage on the Russian capital's outskirts.
EVEN PARANOIDS HAVE ENEMIES....
But is the growth of skinhead violence in Russia a more or less spontaneous
manifestation of socioeconomic dislocation and ethnic tension, as in other
countries? Or is it something more Byzantine?
--Communists
Russia's leading Communist says the latter. The day after Putin's national
address, Gennady Zyuganov claimed that media reports on the skinhead threat were
part of an organized campaign of "hysteria" designed to guarantee the
passage of a restrictive Kremlin-backed law on extremism aimed, he alleged, at
weakening "organized opposition forces"--meaning, of course, his own
Communist Party of the Russia Federation (KPRF).
If Zyuganov's comments could be dismissed as the kind of conspiratorial
ranting one would expect from the leader of the "national-patriotic"
opposition--particularly since the KPRF was kicked out of its leadership posts
in the State Duma earlier this month--the same could not be said about a pair of
articles that appeared in two leading Russian publications. Echoing Zyuganov,
the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said that one possible explanation for
"the antiskinhead outcry" was the need "to scare public
opinion" and thus ensure passage of the anti-extremism law. For its part,
Profil, the weekly magazine published in conjunction with Business Week, noted
the authorities could no longer rely on anticommunism to rally voters, as in
1996. With parliamentary elections set for 2003 and Putin up for re-election the
following year, Profil wrote, the fight against extremism could provide the
incumbent authorities with a compelling argument to the electorate voters on why
they deserved four more years.
--Skinheads
Whatever the case, the feared skinhead pogroms did not take place on the
Hitler birthday anniversary this year. But while some attributed this to the
heightened police and Interior Ministry troop presence in Moscow and other
Russian cities, other observers, including the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomlets,
warned that the skinheads had merely postponed their Gotterdammerung plans. In
addition, and more sensationally, that paper's reporter Svetlana Meteleva was
able to hang out with one of the capital's skinhead groups for a week in
mid-April. She described firsthand how its members received military-style
training in the headquarters of the Moscow OMON special police unit, from OMON
instructors.
If such official collusion with the skinheads has been authorized at high--or
even the highest--levels, it is a dangerous game. "If this genie is let out
of the bottle, it will not go back," Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote. "The
seeds of nationalism may be spread by the skinhead gangs throughout the country,
to create some horrifying offshoots. We do not know what Russian nationalism is,
and God help us if we should find out."
-- Religion
Those seeds may already be sprouting. Cossacks in Rostov Oblast called for
the expulsion from that region of foreigners and people without local residency
registration, and demanded that the authorities deputize armed municipal Cossack
detachments to battle illegal migrants. Meanwhile, Bishop Jerzy Mazur--a Polish
citizen who is one of four Catholic bishops in Russia and whose diocese is in
eastern Siberia--was refused entry into Russia on April 19. His visa was
canceled, effectively banning him from Russia. Earlier this month, Russian
immigration officers at Moscow's Sheremetevo Airport confiscated the visa of an
Italian priest, who had been working in Russia for more than a decade, as he was
catching a flight to Italy. In what is clearly part of the escalating battle
between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church over the
latter's activities in Russia, both men were told they were on a Russian special
services' blacklist.
-- Foreigners
While there is no obvious link between the Russian president and any of the
more blatant xenophobic tendencies increasingly manifest in Russian society,
Putin showed that he was not insensitive to the new mood by publicly taking the
side of those seeking to outlaw land sales to foreigners. "I understand the
concerns of those who think that probably at the current stage we should not
allow foreigners to legally buy land," he said. "I admit that for a
time, until we understand what is going on, maybe we should not act
hastily."
Compared with the skinheads' shenanigans, a ban on land sales to foreigners,
and even the expulsion of foreign clerics and Draconian measures against illegal
aliens, seem almost like reasonable measures. Precisely the point, the
conspiracy theorists would say.
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