#5
Moscow Times
January 22, 2002
The Washington Post: Off Target or Spot On?
By Gregory Feifer
Russia is much praised these days. Even the director of Washington's conservative Nixon Center, Paul Saunders, recently took The Washington Post to task for its editorials condemning the policies of President Vladimir Putin.
Watching out for double standards is never a bad thing. Russia is not a country that can be seen in ideal tones of black and white because, simply put, there are relative degrees of good and bad.
Saunders attacks the Post for its "relative comfort with Russia's Yeltsin-era oligarchy" and refers specifically to the partnership between Gusinsky's Media-MOST and Post-owned Newsweek Magazine that created the Itogi weekly news magazine.
It never occurred to me to see Itogi's existence as something to criticize, despite Gusinsky's deservedly dastardly reputation. The magazine was one of Russia's leading news publications.
Saunders goes on to say that the current attempt to shut down Boris Berezovsky's TV6 television channel has nothing to do with the government, but involves a court battle between two private entities. He rightly criticizes Berezovsky for his manipulation of Yeltsin's Kremlin.
Nonetheless, to say that Putin "was determined to break the relationship of mutual parasitism between his country's government and so-called oligarchs like Berezovsky" is another exercise in painting things in black and white. What is clear is that Putin has essentially sent into exile those oligarchs who were opposed to his mission of consolidating power. Those who quickly fell into line and publicly pledged support for the president's growing political machine (in the name of "strengthening the state" and "fighting corruption') are still very much prospering today.
Russia's best hope (albeit far from perfect) for further democratization would have been for the existing elites -- including Gusinsky, Berezovsky and others such as powerful regional leaders -- to act as checks upon one another, to prevent the excessive concentration of power in one center and allow the country to gradually evolve toward the rule of law enforced by functioning institutions. Sure, it's easier said than done. But as the authors of Russia's mass privatization program insisted, institutions cannot exist when there is no need for them.
Under Putin, there seems to be increasingly less need for them. Through various means, he and those supporting him have coopted the opposition, built up their own authority at the expense of other elites, and crippled the independence of parliament and the judiciary.
Meanwhile, the atrocities in Chechnya continue with civilians being raped, tortured and murdered each week. Saunders says "no serious Russian politician argues that atrocities are a matter of government policy." But what of the policy of silence on the issue? What of the fact that Moscow's disgusting attack on the Chechen population only provides fertile ground for the terrorism that the Kremlin says it is fighting to eradicate?
Putin's actions may be called reform, but it's certainly not in the direction of greater democracy. Indeed, The Washington Post should be commended rather than being taken to task for the zeal of its ongoing criticism of the Putin administration at a time when so many are applauding the temporary and superficial successes of the government's so-called reform policies -- especially after Sept. 11, when so many voices fell silent on Chechnya. To its little-deserved credit, even the ham-fisted Bush administration recently managed to raise a voice in protest at Russian soldiers' brutality in the breakaway republic.
Things in Russia are not black and white. For all his faults and all the paradoxes that emerged from the discrepancy between his stated aims and his actions, Yeltsin symbolized a break with the past. As Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov -- who was frequently vociferous in his criticism of Yeltsin during his presidency -- once said, "Under Yeltsin, we may have been slowly fumbling our way through a thick jungle. But at least it was in the right direction. Under Putin, we're building an autobahn, but it's headed the wrong way."
Gregory Feifer lives in Moscow and is writing a book about the rise of the Putin presidency. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
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