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RFE/RL Newsline
April 24, 2003
REQUIEM FOR A POLITICAL HEAVYWEIGHT: SERGEI YUSHENKOV
By Julie A. Corwin

In a conversation with a reporter from "Vremya novostei" just hours before he was killed on 17 April, State Duma Deputy and Liberal Russia co-chairman Sergei Yushenkov, 52, confided that he was tired of being a legislator. He reportedly said he would not seek a spot on his party's party list for the December State Duma elections and that he would not run in a single-mandate district.

It's not difficult to understand why, after serving more than 10 years in the legislature, Yushenkov would decide he needed a break. If press accounts are accurate, Yushenkov was a man who underwent a major philosophical change at the beginning of the perestroika years, but after that his political values remained stable. He did not keep changing his views to fit current political fashions, and consequently he probably become disenchanted with the Duma as it metamorphosed from a feisty collection of colorful personalities in the mid 1990s to its present incarnation -- a quiescent club for rubber-stamping government initiatives.

Yushenkov began life in a family of collective farmers in what is now Tver Oblast. He studied first at an agricultural-technical college, but then transferred to a military-political school in Novosibirsk, where he trained as a political officer. In 1980, he entered the Lenin Military-Political Academy in Moscow, where he also pursued graduate studies. From 1987-90, he taught Marxist-Leninist philosophy at the academy. He achieved the rank of colonel and earned a kandidat's degree in philosophical science, according to nns.ru.

In addition to having an agile mind capable plumbing the twists and turns of dialectical materialism, Yushenkov was also graced with an exceptional sense of humor, RFE/RL's Moscow bureau reported on 17 April. He not only wrote short pieces and feuilletons -- many of them under the pen name Yegor Shugaev -- but he also wrote parodies of legislation -- one of which, entitled "on the hereditary succession for the office of Duma deputy," several of his colleagues took seriously.

In 1990 Yushenkov made the jump to a career in legislative politics. That year, he was elected to the Russian Congress of People's Deputies from a Moscow district and served on the mass-media committee of the Russian Supreme Soviet. Yushenkov played a prominent role in defeating the August 1991 attempted coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and, according to "Vremya novostei" on 18 April, Yushenkov considered that event one of the highlights of his life. In March-April 1992, Yushenkov was one of the founders of a pro-government legislative faction, and in September of that year he was one of the initiators of a campaign for the resignation of Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov.

1993 turned out to be another critical period in Yushenkov's career when he became deputy for Mikhail Poltarinin, who was then head of the Federation Information Center. At the time, Poltarinin was one of the most influential activists in President Boris Yeltsin's circle, and through him Yushenkov became acquainted with a circle of "elite democrats," "Nezavisimaya gazeta -- figury i litsa" reported on 22 February 2001. In 1993, when the pro-government Russia's Choice faction created its party list for the newly created State Duma, Yushenkov had a spot in the top 20 right after Poltarinin. In 1993, Yushenkov's career peaked in terms of political power, when he was given the chairmanship of the Duma's Defense Committee.

However, Yushenkov was unable to use his power as chairman to transform the committee into a real opposition force, not even on issues about which he cared deeply, such as the first war in Chechnya, "Nezavisimaya gazeta" argued. The publication commented that Yushenkov should have tried to make the committee into a kind of alternative to the Defense Ministry for information about what was really going on in the armed forces at the time and that Yushenkov should have been telling President Yeltsin what Defense Minister Pavel Grachev was not telling him. Denis Myuller, the author of a profile of Yushenkov in "Nezavisimaya gazeta" suggested that while Yushenkov might have been a very honest, principled -- and perhaps overly idealistic -- legislator, he wasn't necessarily that effective at the real, and sometimes dirty, work of politics. Yushenkov loudly and publicly declared his opposition to the first Chechen war. He even tendered his resignation but he didn't -- and/or couldn't -- do anything to stop that war.

But after eight more years in the Duma, by October 2001, Yushenkov had apparently learned enough to do battle with tycoon Boris Berezovskii and win. In that month, Yushenkov was able to maneuver the self-exiled Berezovskii out of the Liberal Russia party, which he co-founded and bankrolled to the tune of $1 million. Yushenkov not only expelled Berezovskii, but he also got rid of those regional party heads, who tried resist Berezovskii's ouster and apparently managed to locate alternative funding for the party. Within days of Berezovskii's departure from the party, the Justice Ministry finally agreed to register it, making it eligible to participate in the December State Duma elections.

The real danger might have been not that Yushenkov wasn't effective, but that Yushenkov was too effective, and this is what cost him his life. Politicians who do not try to make waves -- who accept, rather than trying to extort, cash gifts -- don't get killed. They try to avoid making anyone angry. But from fairly early on in his career, Yushenkov managed to antagonize people -- some of them senior officials. In January 1995, he annoyed Grachev enough to prompt the latter to call him a "vile toad" on national television. Months later, the former deputy chairman of the Russian National Unity party, Aleksei Vedenkin, also declared on television that he would execute Yushenkov and fellow Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev if he came to power.

The day after Yushenkov was killed, commentator Andrei Cherkizov on Ekho Moskvy identified at least three groups who might have "needed" Yushenkov dead: certain Defense Ministry officials, persons who profit from the continuation of the war in Chechnya, and persons who want to expedite the process of extraditing Berezovskii from Great Britain. Another group that could be added to that list are those Federal Security Service (FSB) officers angered by Yushenkov's well-publicized efforts to prove allegations that the FSB was involved in the apartment-building bombings that killed some 300 people in 1999 and which served to galvanize public support for the second military operation in Chechnya. According to "Izvestiya," Yushenkov frequently talked with reporters in the Duma about the bombings and would say, "It's all obvious, but no one will write about it." Perhaps too many people already have.

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