#4
San Francisco Chronicle
November 21, 2002
Winning Bush over is one of Putin's few triumphs
Kremlin leader delivers for West but falls short re-creating Russia
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer

Moscow -- President Bush's visit to Russia on Friday allows Vladimir Putin to claim at least one solid success since taking power: the ability to rearrange the travel schedule of the most powerful man in the world.

The Russian president's conscious decision to steer his nation in a more Western direction, particularly after the events of Sept. 11, is all the more impressive when one recalls that Bush made clear on the campaign trail in 2000 that Russia would not be a priority for his White House.

When Bush interrupts his trip to Eastern Europe to spend a few hours in Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg, the U.S. leader -- grateful for Russia's support in the war on terror -- is unlikely to speak harshly about the issues that tick Putin off.

Such as the Kremlin's drawn-out, bloody war in Chechnya.

The rebellious republic is the one issue that causes the usually cool Putin to get hot under the collar. After all, the onetime director of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency of the Soviet-era KGB, rose to power by promising to defeat the guerrillas who have roamed Chechnya since 1994.

Instead, military triumph is nowhere in sight, and Russia continues to lose an average of 10 service members each week. Last month, the war spilled into Moscow, when a group of rebels took an audience of more than 800 people hostage in a theater less than 3 miles from the Kremlin. The crisis left 128 hostages and more than 40 rebels dead.

The mention of Chechnya during Putin's most recent appearance in the international limelight, in Brussels, prompted him to make a comment so crude it briefly left the audience in stunned silence. Responding to a French journalist's question about the Russian military's use of land mines in the breakaway republic, Putin suggested that the reporter "undergo circumcision" and promised to ask those performing the operation to do it in such a way "that you will never grow anything there again."

Many other shortcomings also mark Putin's two years in power, experts say.

His vow to rid Russia of its gangland image and turn it into an economic partner attractive to Western investment remains unfulfilled. Contract killers still routinely target powerful businessmen and politicians. Last month, Valentin Tsvetkov, the governor of the gold-rich region of Magadan in Russia's Far East, was gunned down in central Moscow.

Putin has also largely failed to curb the power of the oligarchs -- a small number of tycoons who control more than 60 percent of the economy and who exercised an inordinate degree of influence during the administration of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Despite his promise to "eliminate the oligarchs as a class," Putin has close ties with them and has countenanced their campaign to place themselves or their surrogates in key government positions.

Putin had to shelve his plan to transform Russia's impoverished, dilapidated military into a modern, all-volunteer army by 2010. And advocacy groups here and abroad widely criticize the campaign to crack down on the media and human rights under his administration.

Putin's efforts to improve life for Russians have been hamstrung in part by the failure of the country's bureaucratic machine to carry out much of his program, said Robert Nurick, head of the Moscow office of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Just passing legislation is not enough, you need all sorts of officials to implement it," Nurick said. " . . . Putin needs a lot of day-to-day things to happen in bureaucracies that he doesn't control. I don't see any groups or institutions that can hurt him, but there aren't any that can help him, either. "

Of the 543 orders Putin handed down to various officials last year, only 215 were executed, the Moscow Times reported recently. The rest, the English- language newspaper said, succumbed to red tape and a lack of understanding about how to implement the measures.

Last year, Putin announced a plan to transform the oversized conscript army into a smaller service by 2010, and ordered the top-heavy brass to trim its ranks. The military depends heavily on drafting young men but has more than 2, 000 generals -- a number experts believe should be cut by at least half -- and similarly huge numbers of other senior officers.

The generals are reluctant to abandon the Soviet-era military structure, and Putin's proposed test project for reform -- turning the 76th Airborne Division into an all-professional unit -- was dropped when it became apparent that the $84.5 million allocated for it would not permit pay scales high enough to attract volunteers.

"Serious reforms require a lot of financial resources, and there aren't any, " said Nurick.

On the upside, Putin has managed to regain control over Russia's 89 fractious regions, insisting that they must have a "single constitutional, legal and economic framework" -- in contrast to Yeltsin, who invited the regional governors to "take all the sovereignty you can swallow."

Putin has reduced the influence of the governors, many of whom have been repeatedly accused of corruption. He has ousted them from their guaranteed seats in the upper house (thus stripping them of immunity from prosecution), won the power for the president to dismiss them from office, and created a national superstructure of seven administrative districts headed by hand- picked presidential envoys.

The pro-Putin parliament has also made significant steps to strengthen the rule of law, passing comprehensive judicial reforms last year that aim to strengthen the system and bolster its independence.

Putin's Cabinet has successfully begun to reconstruct the Russian economy: introducing popular tax cuts; renegotiating, reducing and repaying external debt; guaranteeing property rights; reversing capital flight; and keeping the inflation rate low.

These measures, combined with the increase in oil prices in 2000, have made Russia's economy one of the fastest growing in the world. Personal income has risen between 5 and 8 percent a year since Putin took over and now stands at about $130 a month, allowing hundreds of thousands to join an emerging middle class. Putin's approval rating is sky high, hovering at above 70 percent.

But advocacy groups say Putin's campaign to turn Russia into a Western- style state is undercut by the poor human rights record under his rule.

Since Putin came to power in January 2000, the Kremlin has virtually taken control of all national television stations and cracked down heavily on any media critical of the government. Russian forces continue to round up Chechen civilians, and human rights groups say many are killed, raped and tortured in detention. Two environmental whistle-blowers, Grigory Pasko and Igor Sutyagin, have been charged with espionage and jailed.

Since he became president, Putin has unveiled a plaque honoring Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, hailed the history of Russia's security services and resurrected the old Soviet national anthem, commissioned by Stalin in 1943 and replaced by Yeltsin after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"Putin wants to do the best for everyone, to grant everyone their wishes: an anthem for the communists, a tricolor flag for the democrats," said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the oldest Russian human rights organization.

"Unfortunately, his former colleagues from the KGB have too much influence on him," she said.

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