Johnson's Russia List
#6138
16 March 2002
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org

[Note from David Johnson:
  1. Reuters: Russia central bank head resigns.
  2. Reuters: Outgoing Russian central bank head parried critics.
  3. The Guardian (UK): David Hearst, Russia's whistle blower. (Anna
Politkovskaya)
  4. Luba Schwartzman: ORT Review.
  5. RFE/RL: Nikola Krastev, Russia: Experts Say Not All Is Rosy In Flowering 
Economy.
  6. Moscow Tribune: Stanislav Menshikov, RUSSIAN MINISTER TALKS TO BUSH.
What did Sergei Ivanov learn from the horse's mouth?
  7. gazeta.ru: Russia Sends Law Enforcers To Guantanamo Bay.
  8. The Russia Journal: Gordon Hahn, Nationality plays growing role in
Russian 
elections.
  9. The Russia Journal: Matt Taibbi, A welter of Russia ‘experts’ serves up 
opinion on tap.
  10. Newsday: Kim Phillips-Fein, The War that Ate America. (review of Derek
Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory)
  11. Los Angeles Times editorial: E-moting by E-Mail.]

*******

#1
Russia central bank head resigns
By Samantha Shields
  
MOSCOW, March 15 (Reuters) - Russia's veteran Soviet-era central bank
chairman resigned abruptly on Friday, in a move likely to cheer investors
crying out for a weaker rouble and faster reforms in the banking sector. 

President Vladimir Putin asked parliament's lower house to accept bank head
Viktor Gerashchenko's resignation and nominated 54-year-old First Deputy
Finance Minister Sergei Ignatiev to replace him, the Kremlin said. 

"President Vladimir Putin sent a letter to the State Duma chairman, Gennady
Seleznyov, on Friday in which he recommended relieving...Viktor
Gerashchenko from his position in connection with his resignation request,"
a Kremlin statement said. 

The State Duma is controlled by parties loyal to Putin, and would therefore
be unlikely to reject his nomination. Sources at the central bank told
Reuters the Duma may decide on the nomination next week. 

Ignatiev had been a deputy central bank head in the early 1990s and held
several senior government economic policy posts. 

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin called the choice "very logical," saying few
candidates were as well qualified for the job. Russian television showed
soundless pictures of Ignatiev meeting Putin on Friday in the Kremlin. 

Foreign investors in Russia had long railed at Gerashchenko's central bank
for propping up the rouble, which they say hurts domestic producers, and
for being slow to reform a moribund and undercapitalised banking system. 

But analysts also said his replacement would have to show that he can act
independently of the Kremlin. The changes at the bank come amid debate in
the Duma over a new central bank law, with measures to ensure its
independence in dispute. Debate on the law's key second reading was
postponed on Friday. 

PUTIN SENDS "CLEAR SIGNAL" 

James Fenkner, strategist at Troika Dialog investment bank, said the ouster
of Gerashchenko was "very unexpected," as his contract was due to end in
September anyway. 

"Putin is sending a clear signal on improvement in monetary policy,"
Fenkner said. 

But Sergei Glaser, strategist at Alfa Securities in London, cautioned
against a loss in independence. 

"(Gerashchenko) made misguided policies but at the same time he defended
the independence of state monetary policy," he said. "Linking the central
bank too closely to the cabinet could be problematic." 

A Soviet-era holdover through the early 1990s, Gerashchenko had been fired
once before in the wake of a 30 percent single day fall in the rouble in
1994. 

He was reinstated as a steady hand in 1998 after the rouble collapsed and
Russia defaulted on domestic treasury bills in an economic crisis that
rattled markets worldwide. 

Under him, the central bank's bureaucracy swelled, and it held firm control
of commercial banking giant Sberbank, with a near monopoly of retail
deposits. 

Over the past few years, Gerashenko used the bank's total dominance of the
foreign currency market to maintain the rouble exchange rate against the
dollar despite double digit inflation. That meant the rouble appreciated in
real terms, which critics said undermined beneficial effects of the 1998
devaluation. 

Russia's banking system was also pilloried for having too many underfunded
small banks that are usually controlled by and serving just corporate
customers. The central bank was seen as doing little to promote reform. 

"I think Gerashchenko has been viewed as a block to banking reform, but he
has been independent and it will be interesting to see if that independence
remains," David Ross, an analyst at 4CAST think tank in London, said. 

*******

#2
NEWSMAKER-Outgoing Russian central bank head parried critics
By Clara Ferreira-Marques
  
MOSCOW, March 15 (Reuters) - Viktor Gerashchenko, Russia's Soviet-era
central bank head who stepped down on Friday, guided monetary policy
through most of the country's turbulent first decade of capitalism,
parrying constant criticism with wit. 

Gerashchenko, 64, was serving his second stint at the head of Russia's
Central Bank, a job he returned to in September 1998 after the collapse of
the rouble and the ensuing meltdown prompted Chairman Sergei Dubinin to
resign. 

Gerashchenko was often a target of critics. During his first term in the
early 1990s, Britain's Economist weekly called him the world's worst
central banker, a title he turned into the punchline of his own jokes. 

Despite what was widely seen as an improved performance in his second term
in office, many economists said Gerashchenko's old-school banking
philosophy would not be missed. 

"Gerashchenko was a do-nothing guy," strategist James Fenckner at Troika
Dialog investment bank said. "It's good to see the person with a vested
interest in not changing things does not have the support of the president." 

But others have credited him with jealously guarding the independence of
monetary policy. 

"I would say he was a controversial figure," strategist Sergei Glaser at
Alfa Securities in London said. "He made misguided policies but at the same
time he defended the independence of state monetary policy." 

A banker by training, Gerashchenko's 1998 candidacy was opposed by analysts
and politicians who would have preferred to see a macroeconomist pull
Russia from the financial ashes. 

During his first assignment, he was widely seen as too lax with monetary
controls and too close to powerful industrial and agricultural lobbies
seeking cheap credits. He publicly criticised the government's Young Turk
market reformers. 

Ahead of his second term, Gerashchenko had said he would focus on restoring
banking system liquidity, but Russia still has yet to develop competitive
banks, with the sector dominated by undercapitalised and inefficient minnows. 

Gerashchenko, who served as the chairman of the Soviet central bank from
1989, took the reins of the newly formed Russian Central Bank after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. 

He was forced to resign in 1994, after Black Tuesday, when the rouble lost
30 percent of its value in a single day. 

Gerashchenko was quoted in January as saying he was ready to leave Russia's
top banking job when his term of office expired in September. 

"I am 64, and I don't want to die behind a desk," he reportedly said. 

Born in St Petersburg into a banking family, Gerashchenko worked in London,
Beirut, Singapore and Frankfurt. 

He is well known for for a dry sense of humour, aimed at parliamentarians
or reporters. 

After one Davos summit meeting, pressed by journalists to comment on the
outcome of talks, Gerashchenko, who speaks English fluently, joked: "I
don't know, they were all speaking English and I didn't understand a thing." 

*******

#3
The Guardian (UK)
16 March 2002
Russia's whistle blower 
In Chechnya, there is now just one lone Russian voice remaining to
chronicle the lives of those embroiled in the killing and corruption that
have become the hallmark of President Putin's efforts to bring the province
under the control of Moscow. Her name is Anna Politkovskaya, and she is not
about to give up the fight 
By David Hearst

She is Russia's least wanted journalist. She's been held overnight in the
torture cells she was investigating, threatened with rape, and received
numerous death threats. Her reporting has stirred the wrath of Russia's
most powerful and unfettered institutions - the Kremlin, the Federal
Security Service (FSB) and the GRU, the military intelligence. She has been
forced to flee the country, work under the surveillance of round-the-clock
police bodyguards. She has been accused of being a western agent. And yet
she keeps on coming back for more. To be precise, she has returned to the
land that has caused her so much trouble, Chechnya, 39 times. 

It's not even as if Anna Politkovskaya is fighting a popular cause. Her
theme - crime and punishment in Chechnya - is as unpopular at home as it is
ignored abroad. Few Russians want to read about how 75,000 of their crack
troops are mired in a conflict against 3,000 active rebel fighters
(President Putin would like the world to believe that this is Russia's
contribution to the post-September 11 global war on terror). Still less do
they want to hear of atrocities carried out in their name by their own
army, as their arch rival America spreads its military tentacles just
across the mountains in Georgia. 

Politkovskaya could have taken that fat research grant, settled in America
and, like so many other generations of Russian dissidents, bemoaned her
country's stillborn democracy from a safe distance. "I could not do that.
There are practically no journalists working now in Chechnya," she says.
Andrei Babitsky, the Russian reporter working for the US-run station Radio
Liberty who stayed in Grozny under the Russian bombardment, was forced to
flee to eastern Europe. Natalya Kononova, the Novye Izvestia correspondent,
has gone into hiding in Russia. Two, formerly independent stations, NTV and
TV6, have now fallen under the Kremlin's long shadow. That leaves
Politkovskaya. 

"So each time I go there, people tell me things. They do so in the sincere
hope that, if I record what is actually happening, it will lead to change,
to peace. Obviously, I am not to blame for what is going on, but the more I
think about it, the more I would be betraying these people if I walked
away. The only thing to do is to take this to the bitter end, so that no
one can say that when things became difficult, I ran away." 

She sits bolt upright in the subsiding foam chair, her eyes shining with
intensity. She is on a mission. 

The mountain Chechen clans have been battling their Russian neighbour since
at least 1818, when a Russian general established a fortress called
Groznaya, meaning "terrible" or "formidable", in a vain effort to subdue
this wild North-West Frontier-type region. The Chechens survived Stalin's
mass deportations. And since the break-up of the USSR in 1992, they have
survived botched government by two Chechen leaders - first Dhokar Dudayev
and then Aslan Maskhadov - both ex Soviet army officers who yet managed to
bring the wrath of the whole Russian army down on their heads. The one
constant is that they know what they're fighting for, or at least whom
they're fighting against. There is misery in the land of howling dogs,
distant booms and deep silences, but no surprise. 

None of that collective ethnic memory applies to a Moscovite such as
Politkovskaya. She is a child of good times, the Brezhnev era, when the
Soviet Union was a world power and those fairy lights on the world map in
the operations room of the KGB meant that their net was cast globally. Her
parents were senior diplomats; she was part of the elite. For her family,
Vladimir Putin is not a distant object of fear and veneration, but a former
KGB staffer rather too lowly for them to have come across socially. So why
does a 43-year-old mother of two grown-up children, separated from her
husband, living in a flat in a privileged block on the Garden Ring in
Moscow, put her life on the line for a faraway people who hate the Russians? 

"I am not a war correspondent. All my working life I wrote about the state
of our orphanages, our old people's homes. I was interested in reviving
Russia's pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems.
That led me to writing about the seven million refugees in our country.
When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya." 

In 1998, Politkovskaya knew, like most of her compatriots, that something
had to be done about Chechnya, whose persistent calls for autonomy and its
complex ethnic and religious mix (Chechen/Russian and Muslim/Christian) had
brought it once again into conflict with Moscow. In the two years since the
withdrawal of Russian troops after the first round of fighting, it had
become a haven for bandits and rival warlords beyond the control of its
elected president, Maskhadov. When two of those warlords, Shamil Basayev
and Khattab, invaded Dagestan, another member of the Russian Federation, to
further their ambition of setting up a Muslim state across the North
Caucasus, Russia had to react. "But it was the way they did it," says
Politkovskaya. "It was clear to me it was going to be total war, whose
victims were first and foremost going to be civilian." 

And that is what she has been chronicling. Total war. Maskhadov generally
believed to be a moderate, is up in the mountains leading the rebels; and
Moscow has set up a puppet government in what remains of the capital,
Grozny. Meanwhile, Russia enjoys voting rights as a member of the Council
of Europe and, as a signatory to the European Convention For The Protection
Of Human Rights, is answerable to the European Court of Human Rights. 

As Politkovskaya foresaw, it is a dirty war. Take, for example, the minibus
that in January this year was travelling between the villages of Shatoi and
Nochkiloi during an operation known euphemistically as a "zachistka": a
security sweep launched a week after a Russian military truck had been
blown up by a landmine. There were six villagers on the bus, and the local
Russian commander, who enjoyed reasonable relations with Chechens in his
area, knew every one of them. There was Said Alaskhanov, the head teacher
of the village school; Shaban Bachayev, a forester; Zahab Yavadhanova, a
mother of seven children; Hamsad Toburov, the owner-driver; and two others.
Nine members of Russian military intelligence (GRU) special forces, who had
flown down from Khankala (the Russian military headquarters outside Grozny)
had other ideas about the occupants of the bus. 

The opening burst of fire killed three passengers, at which point the
special force team realised that they had fired on unarmed civilians. Then
they shot the rest. Afterwards, they set fire to the bus to make it look as
if it had been hit by rebels. The villagers said that the six who perished
left behind them 28 orphans. The GRU officers are under arrest - partially
because of the testimony of another Russian officer, a major, whose life is
now also under threat. It was this element of the story that Politkovskaya
brought to light. She returned to Grozny in the wake of the mas sacre: when
the bodyguards assigned to "protect" her, but who in fact monitored her
every move, disappeared. 

In another case, Politkovskaya revealed how a Russian major, indicted on
criminal charges, turned up to answer the prosecutor's preliminary
questions not with a lawyer but with his entire brigade."They set up their
heavy mortar outside the military prosecutor's office in Grozny and told
the prosecutor that if he did not let the major go, they would bring his
building down. They let the major go." 

"No one in the Russian military machine down there trusts each other," says
Politkovskaya. "Moscow does not trust Khankala. Khankala does not trust the
lads in Argun. That's what it's like down there. There is so much
corruption, so much information leaks out, such as that when the pension
money arrived in Gudermes [Chechnya's second city], it got hit by a rebel
attack. An accident?" What she's getting at is that Russian military may be
operating against each other - tipping off the rebels and sharing in the
plunder. 

The Chechen war was launched by Russia in order to establish
"constitutional order". In fact, matters have got worse. Politkovskaya
writes not least about the plight of Russian soldiers, themselves victims
of the war. "To whom does a dead body belong?" she wrote in one of her
early pieces. "Ask any normal person, and they will answer, without a
moment's thought, 'To the relatives, of course, and no one else.' " 

Try as he might, Colonel Slipchenko, the general director of Military
Commemoration Limited, could not clearly formulate an answer to this
question. Today, the remains of more than 400 soldiers and officers are
still lying in unmarked graves somewhere in Chechnya, and several hundred
other corpses are awaiting identification at Forensic Laboratory No 124 in
Rostov-on-Don, but Slipchenko, a military man, finds nothing particularly
shocking about this: "So they're lying there! We must work effectively, and
not rush things. It'll take many years yet to finish the job." 

These were the dead from the first war (1994-96), and the reason for
Slipchenko's lack of haste was obvious. The longer the exhumations and
identification took, the more money his company, a privatised arm of a
state business, received from the federal budget. 

"During the period that you have been receiving budget funds, has your
company buried one of the soldiers whose remains were exhumed in Chechnya?" 

"No." 

"So what have you been doing with the money?" 

"We are in possession of the entire database for soldiers missing in action." 

"Could we take a look at your database?" 

"No, it's a commercial secret." 

In the absence of a functioning state, journalists such as Politkovskaya
have become used to taking on the villains themselves. People such as the
butcher in Semikarakorsk who flogs rotten meat to the army: "'You are a
real bastard, aren't you? Are you really too thick to understand that your
rotten meat may be the last thing one of those young soldiers ever eats?'"
Politkovskaya reports herself as saying. And she proceeds to give the man's
full name and telephone number so that readers could reach him. 

Occasionally she bites off more than she can chew. In February last year,
she visited a detention centre where Chechens were being tortured. She was
detained overnight by the Russians and threatened with rape by senior
officers. In September, six days after the attack on the World Trade
Centre, Grozny was in a feverish state. The checkpoints were preventing
anyone getting in or out of the city centre, not even bureaucrats with
official passes. Politkovskaya was in the office of Stanislav Ilyasov, the
Chechen prime minister, a Moscow placeman. He was striding up and down,
grabbing telephone receivers, cursing the whole incomprehensible business.
Only one-fifth of his civil servants had made it through for his regular
Monday morning briefing. 

A young Russian general sitting in his office, Anatoly Pozdnyakov, gave
sympathetic nods, and it was obvious the two understood each other very
well: it was time to put a stop to the lawless behaviour in the province.
Pozdnyakov confided in Politkovskaya that he was that day returning to
Moscow with a report he had written on corruption in Chechnya. He was the
head of a new military investigative commission, acting, he said, on the
personal orders of Putin. An hour after the interview, the general was
dead. His helicopter, and his top secret report, were shot out of the sky
by a Stinger missile directly over the city centre - which was unusually
empty, thanks to the military at the checkpoints. "The official version,"
says Politkovskaya, "is that a Chechen fighter ran out on to the street,
launched the missile and ran away. It could not have happened like that. He
would have been shot the moment he popped his head out." Ten days after
writing that it was, in fact, colonels in Chechnya who had shot down their
own chief of staff, Politkovskaya, under threat of her life, was forced to
flee the country. 

Politkovskaya works for a small biweekly liberal newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.
Its editor, Dmitri Muratev, breathes fire at the latest tactic invented by
the state to silence Politkovskaya - a smear that she has been secretly
working for, and paid by, western benefactors, including the Soros
Foundation. "Well, we are suing the FSB [the Federal Security Service] for
saying that. You must understand what our Chekisti, our KGB, have become."
he said. "They think that Politkovskaya is Bin Laden. They don't have
anything better to do than to pursue a newspaper and the grants it gets.
Now they are threatening to withdraw her accreditation. If you read our
constitution, there is nothing written there about the FSB. Nothing is said
about their right to withdraw accreditation or to close newspapers. It's
none of their bloody business. It is up to the courts to do that, and let
them bloody well try." 

This is what motivates them both."I am not fighting the FSB," says
Politkovskaya. "I'm only doing my job. I explain to my readers what I see.
The FSB, or whoever wants to fight with me, are fighting not with me but
the constitutional principle that we should have freedom of press. It is
obviously not terribly pleasant..." Her voice tails off. She remembers
those gooks outside her window, hanging around in the courtyard. She
remembers the comments of her neighbours, some of them regarding her as a
traitor to Russia, or her son, Ilya, "looking under his car every single
time he gets into it", believing his mother should pursue a less dangerous
career. "But in time of war, I already learned to fight, never to surrender
and to try to survive. I can say that now I really want to survive and stay
strong. Up to the very end." 

I tell her that her editor says he'd back her up to the very end, as well.
She laughs: "That depends on what he means by the very end..." 

Anna Politkovskaya has been nominated for the Most Courageous Defence of
Freedom of Expression award, to be presented by Index On Censorship, on
March 21. 

******

#4
ORT Review
www.ortv.ru
Compiled by Luba Schwartzman (luba7@bu.edu)
Research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology and
Policy at Boston University

[Note: Dear JRL readers,
In May I will graduate (MA: Contemporary History; BA: International
Relations) and move to Moscow (my family emigrated from Moscow in 1989;
I'm a US citizen).  I will continue doing the ORT Reviews, but I'm also
looking for part-time (15-30hrs/week) work -- translating, news analysis,
PR, or any job directly related to current information about Russia.  For
a copy of my resume and/or more information please e-mail me at
luba7@bu.edu.]

HEADLINES,
Friday, March 15, 2002
- Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the Middle East peace process
over the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat.
- Kremlin Press Secretary Aleksei Gromov announced that, on President
Putins initiative, Sergei Ignatiev may replace Viktor Gerashchenko as the
head of Russias Central Bank.
- Activists of the Russian Movement of Ukraine picketed the State House in
Kyiv, demanding the resumption of Russian television broadcasts.  They
accuse former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko of "trying to
build an information wall between Ukraine and Russia."
- International Day of Consumer Rights was celebrated in Saratov with an
exhibit of defective and low-quality products. 
- Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad visited the testing base of
Sukhois design bureau.  Sukhoi is one of the leaders in a contest for a
contract to supply Malaysia with fighter jets.
- In 2002, 10 echelons of used nuclear fuel will be taken out for storage
from the Kolsky Peninsula to a floating repository.
- The Russian State Duma rejected a presidential bill on military
remuneration in the second reading.  The bill proposes the cancellation of
certain benefits (housing, utilities payment) in return for increased
wages (in accordance with rank, term of service, security level, etc).  
- A hearing concerning the illegal adoption of Russian children by Italian
citizens has begun in Volgograd.  Five hundred such adoptions have been
arranged by Nadezhda Fratti, who is being charged with bribery and
falsifying documents.  Two orphanage directors and a former member of an
oblast committee on education are accused of accepting these bribes.  
- The Russian Security Council discussed strengthening cooperation among
CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) nations in the fight against
terrorism.  Security Council Chairman Vladimir Rushailo noted that this is
important for Russia in light of the events in the North Caucasus as well
as in Central Asia.
- Arkady Muratov, the soldier who deserted a military base in Partizansk
yesterday, has been detained.
- President Putin met with the director of the federal tax police, Mikhail
Fradkov.  The tax police was established ten years ago.  Fradkov and Putin
discussed measures to improve the effectiveness of the service as well as
ways of creating a condusive environment for the development of Russian
business.
- Sergei Yakovenko, the director of the information department of the
Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Russia would welcome a decision by
Israel to withdraw its troops from Palestinian-controlled areas.
- In the Far East, prices for meat are expected to rise following a ban on
imports of meat from China.
- Russian-American consultations on the import of poultry should end
today.  Representatives from the Agriculture Ministry announced that a
time-out will be institutes and a new protocol on imports will be
prepared.  The ban on American poultry will remain in effect during the
time-out.
- Police officers in Sterlitamak, Bashkiria, stopped Adam Soltakhanov from
taking Minnigayaz Musinin, his former slave of 15 years, back to Chechnya.
Soltakhanov has been detained and an investigation is underway.
- Another round of Russian-American consultations on the limitation of
strategic offensive arms will be held in Geneva on March 21-22.
- Russian Energy Minister Oleg Gordeev will be an observer at the next
Vienna meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC).
- President Putin met with Oleg Tabakov, the Artistic Director of the
Moscow Art Theatre, to discuss the development of the performing arts in
Russia.  

******

#5
Russia: Experts Say Not All Is Rosy In Flowering Economy
By Nikola Krastev

High oil prices have helped keep the Russian economy humming over the last
year. This and the political stability in the country led to a resurgence
of interest among Western investors. Moscow is now making regular debt
payments and is even pre-paying some of its financial obligations. These
trends were highlighted during an investors' conference in New York on 14
March. But experts warn that Russia continues to function on shaky
foundations.

New York, 15 March 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Russia is attracting the interest of
investors, based on steady economic growth, but concern remains about the
country's failure to enact deep-rooted reforms.

A conference that attracted more than 300 investors in New York heard
experts on the Russian economy warn about the need for further reform.

Among those balancing optimism with caution was Boris Nemtsov, a former
reformist deputy prime minister of Russia and now leader of the Union of
Rightist Forces in the Russian State Duma.

Nemtsov spoke about the importance of Russian membership in the World Trade
Organization, which he expects will occur in the next few years. Nemtsov
expressed great confidence in the vibrancy of Russia's private sector. He
told the conference that in terms of private-sector productivity, Russia
rivals or even exceeds the most powerful Western economies.

"The private sector in Russia generates about 80 percent of GDP [gross
domestic product], which is larger than in France, larger than in Germany
and, of course, larger than in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia is a
more capitalistic country than most European countries, and it looks [more
like] the United States," Nemtsov said.

But other participants in the conference pointed to strict government
control on crucial aspects of Russia's financial system. 

Dominic Gualtieri, who is managing director of Alfa Bank in Moscow, said
Russia's central bank has done relatively little to push forward banking
reforms. He said mandatory deposit insurance is key to placing both the
commercial banks and big state-owned banks under more equal footing. 

He said it will be at least two years before mandatory deposit insurance is
implemented and that once it is done, it will help shift more assets from
the giant state savings bank Sberbank and diversify the banking systems'
strongest players.

The move to international accounting standards is another sticky issue in
Russia's banking system, Gualtieri said. Russian companies want to access
the international capital markets, but Gualtieri said Russian banks are
only moving in that direction -- that is, toward more transparency and
reforms -- in those instances where they want to attract capital through
eurobonds and syndicated bonds.

"If you compare, for example, Poland, in [its] top 10 banks, there's not
one Polish-owned bank. In the top 10, they are all controlled by foreign,
international banks. In Russia, it's a completely different picture, and it
will be some time before foreign banks come in a meaningful way into the
Russian banking system," Gualtieri said.

Another conference participant, Helena Hessel, is a director at Standard &
Poor's, a major U.S.-based credit rating company. Hessel said that for 15
months (December 2000 to March 2001), Standard & Poor's improved Russia's
credit rating five times. But she said that for the next year, Russia's
credit rating will be a solid BB- rather than the more favorable BB rating
anticipated by Russian bankers.

The Standard & Poor's rating system evaluates creditworthiness from AAA,
the highest, through BBB to CCC, the lowest, with a "plus" for an improved
outlook or a "minus" for a worsening outlook.

Hessel said the main reason for Russia's credit improvement is the
Judiciary Law Reform proposal introduced in the Russian parliament in 2001.

"We at Standard & Poor's believe that Russia's judiciary system is so
corrupt and so bad that unless it will be reformed and the reforms
implemented, the various reforms which Mr. Nemtsov and other people
mentioned will not be implemented, which is necessary for this rating to go
to double B minus rating and then maybe even higher," Hessel said.

Nemtsov, a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, told the conference
that political stability in Russia should not be confused with democracy.
For most Russian people, he said, there is a difference between stability
and democracy. Nemtsov said the real hope for Russia's re-emergence as a
world power lies with the so-called "new generation" -- those not tainted
by the old Soviet system.

"The private sector generates not only growth but a new style of
management. Fortunately, there are a lot of 'new generation' people in
businesses, not only in big business but in small and average businesses,
[and] not only in Moscow but in the rest of the country. And I think that
this is the real hope of Russia. I don't believe that Putin and KGB guys
are real hope of Russia. The real hope is the new generation," Nemtsov said.

Nemtsov said two major reforms have to be implemented to attract a large
number of Western investors in Russia. The first, he said, is tax reform
that looks like a "real revolution." He expressed confidence in a reduction
of the value-added tax from 20 percent to 16 or 17 percent during the
course of the year.

The second point, Nemtsov said, is legal or court reform, a crucial point
for business development in the country. 

Leonard Sachs is the managing director of Sachs Associates, a London-based
company that helped organize the conference. He told RFE/RL that, to many
Western investors, Russia continues to be an "oil prices story."

"I think the interest in Russia is completely non-correlated to other
emerging markets. So the fact that Argentina has blown up has actually no
impact on Russia. I think Russia is a very unique economy. I think people
understand that it is not in any way a typical emerging market, and it is
still in the perception of many investors very much a story linked to oil
prices," Sachs said.

Other participants in the conference noted that Russian land reform and
improvements to the bankruptcy law are of interest to Western investors.
There is a new proposal for a bankruptcy law that does not provide 100
percent transparency but which investors believe is better than the
existing one.

******

#6
Moscow Tribune
March 15, 2002
RUSSIAN MINISTER TALKS TO BUSH
What did Sergei Ivanov learn from the horse's mouth?
By Stanislav Menshikov

The Russian Defence Minister's visit to Washington earlier this week was
anything but routine. The low-key statements he made after spending five
hours in the Pentagon and two hours with George W. Bush do not reflect the
substance or tone of these discussions. Sergei Ivanov did not travel all the
way across the Atlantic to hear the US president express his warm feelings
towards Vladimir Putin and hopes of enjoying the beauties of Saint
Petersburg with his own eyes. Ivanov did hear assurances that Russia's
interests would be taken into account by the US in Georgia. But one does not
spend two hours on such subjects. So what was it all about?

The visit came at a difficult time in US-Russian relations. Georgia apart,
the Pentagon had just leaked details of the secret Nuclear Posture Review
(NPR) about the possible use of nuclear weapons against seven countries,
mostly in the "evil axis" group but also including Russia. Many in Moscow
saw it as a threatening gesture meant to make the Kremlin more pliant in
strategic arms talks, which had reached an impasse. The leak could also be
considered a provocation intended to ruin any possibility of reaching
meaningful agreements at the Bush-Putin summit in May. Three decades ago, in
June 1972 a Nixon-Brezhnev summit in Moscow was nearly torpedoed when US
planes bombed a Soviet ship in Hanoi harbour. It did not work. Brezhnev gave
Nixon a scolding in private. In public, the two signed SALT-1 and the ABM
Treaty, both historic milestones in detente.

So what did Ivanov hear in Washington from the horse's mouth? He was hardly
interested in the fact that US nuclear weapons are targeted on Russia or
needed explanations about it. That is no news to the Russian top brass who
have their own missiles targeted on the US. Despite assurances to the
contrary, nuclear parity and mutual assured destruction (MAD) are still very
much with us. This legacy of the Cold War will take many years to dispose of
if both sides really want to. The purpose of the current strategic arms
reduction talks is to make it possible.

What Ivanov wanted to know more about were US plans for developing and using
nuclear weapons. Presumably, that was the subject of his meeting with US
Defense Undersecretary for military technology Pete Aldridge whom the
Russian minister saw along with Pentagon chief Rumsfeld. Some aspects of
these plans directly relate to Russia's national security interests. For
instance, how serious are US planners about using nuclear-tipped
interceptors in their National Missile Defence program (NMD)? Such a
development would significantly increase the efficiency of the Missile
Shield and present a threat to a radically reduced Russia's nuclear
deterrent. If Moscow is now Washington's friend rather than an enemy, there
should not be great sense in keeping details of the Nuclear Posture Review
secret from a trusted partner. According to Rumsfeld, Ivanov did indeed
receive some of that information. How much is anybody's guess.

More important were the minister's attempts to break the impasse on cutting
strategic nuclear warheads. While Putin wants that agreement to be worked
out and signed in May, he is not prepared to risk unilateral disarmament.
Because that is exactly what the US position on the issue implies  -
reducing Russian warheads and keeping American ones stored. However, if the
US stores its warheads, Russia will do the same. To counter further
development of US nuclear weaponry Moscow could also pursue what it calls
"asymmetric responses", for instance deploying more MIRVed warheads on its
missiles. It would be a resumption of the nuclear arms race, albeit in a
somewhat modified form.

Convincing Rumsfeld and Bush to change or modify their stance in just three
days of talks would have been a miracle. The most Ivanov could have
realistically achieved was to demonstrate that the Russian side was not
about to yield on the warheads issue. It looks like he has talked the US
side into accepting limits to the storage idea and accepting the principle
that warheads are to be eventually destroyed. But the devil always hides in
details. Further talks might not bring a compromise soon, at least not
necessarily before the May summit.

Bush badly wanted Putin to cut the Russian nuclear arsenal unilaterally and
he believed that Moscow was not in a position to resist. Bush's advisers
told him that his adversary was too poor to maintain a credible nuclear
deterrent and that it could not develop its economy without massive
infusions of US capital. These would not come, they alleged, if Putin
refused to accept US foreign policy, including strategic matters and its
military plans for Iraq. But Ivanov in Washington demonstrated that Russia
would not yield on these points, Iraq included. Proving that Bush's advisers
were all wrong.

Sergei Ivanov brings back home proof that a principled stance on Russia's
part is productive even in talks with such a formidable partner as the Bush
administration. Putin should continue in the same vein.

******

#7
gazeta.ru
March 15, 2002
Russia Sends Law Enforcers To Guantanamo Bay
By Yelena Shishkounova 

Russia has decided to send a group of law enforcers to the US base in
Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), where al-Qaida prisoners are held. Some of the
Guantanamo prisoners may be Russian citizens and the visiting Russian
officials are planning to establish ''the real nationality of a number of
people held at Guantanamo and their possible involvement in terrorist
operations,'' Russian Foreign Ministry said in the statement released to
the effect.

According to the Foreign Ministry’s department for information and press,
Moscow has decided to send a group of Russian law enforcement officials to
ascertain the identities of the so-called Russian Taliban fighters,
transported to Cuba from Afghanistan together with nationals of 25 other
states. 

The ministry’s statement contains no information as to who exactly will
enter the delegation and when the trip will take place. Russian officials
will visit the base “on the basis of the previously reached agreement with
the US side”. 

The key goal of the group is to find out the real nationality of Taliban
fighters of Russian origin and to investigate the degree of their possible
involvement in terrorist activities. 

First reports alleging there were Russian citizens among the Guantanamo
prisoners emerged in early February. US media cited a high-ranking Pentagon
official who suggested those prisoners were ethnic Chechens. 

Chechen rebels have long since been suspected of ties with the
international terrorist network. Nonetheless, Moscow officials seemed
astounded by the US media reports. Russian Foreign Ministry officials said
that even if those reports prove true Russia knows nothing about Chechens
in Guantanamo. 

Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Russia would verify the reports and
decide on further action. 

Later it transpired that, indeed, among the fighters taken prisoners in
Afghanistan during the US counter-terrorist operation there were Russian
citizens, but those are not ethnic Chechens. 

Gazeta.Ru has received a letter from Mairbek Vachagayev, the spokesman for
the separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, whereby he charged that five Russian
citizens transported to Guantanamo Bay along with other Taliban fighters
were Circassians, Tatar, Bashkir and Balkar – these peoples inhabit North
Caucasus and Tatarstan. Vachagayev claimed that neither them was ethnic
Chechen. In his letter Vachagayev also claimed that the US reported the
fact to the authorities of the separatist Ichkeria even before the Russian
Foreign Ministry was notified. 

During the past month Russian and foreign media abounded with numerous
speculations on the matter until Russia eventually moved to initiate a
special probe and to send a group of investigators to Guantanamo. Judging
by the ministry’s statement the delegation is all set to depart. 

Nationals of 25 countries are currently held in the individual open-sided
wire cells in Guantanamo. Reportedly, most of them are Saudi nationals.
 
*******

#8
The Russia Journal
March 15-21, 2002
Nationality plays growing role in Russian elections
By GORDON M. HAHN

In some of Russia’s republics, where the authorities no longer can
manipulate elections through their mastery of "administrative resources,"
the ethnicity/nationality factor is playing a growing role.

In elections in January in the national republics of North Ossetia and
Kabardino-Balkariya, former communist party bosses Alexander Dzasokhov and
Valery Kokov, respectively, retained power with first-round electoral
victories of about 90 percent each. They were able to aggressively wield
their presidencies’ vast organizational and financial resources.

The Kremlin overlooked the clearly undemocratic character of the ballots
because they were taking place in the tempestuous North Caucasus, where the
Kremlin desperately needs to keep the lid on ethnic passions. Another
Chechnya it does not need.

However, in the republics of Komi, Yakutia and Adygeya a very different
pattern emerged. Elections were contested, while incumbents were defeated.
Moreover, the nationality factor emerged as a significant, even important,
factor in the election campaigns. Both Russian and non-Russian ethnic
groups were more mobilized than in recent elections and lined against each
other behind opposing candidates. Previously, this pattern had been
observed only in the North Caucasian republics of Dagestan and
Karachai-Cherkessiya.

Republic of Komi

In the fall of 2001, a conflict broke out between the executive and
legislative branches in the Komi Republic. The executive branch was headed
by President Yury Spiridonov, an ethnic Russian, while the Komi
legislature, the State Council, was chaired by Vladimir Torlopov, an ethnic
Komi. Each branch put forward competing sets of amendments to a republican
constitution that had been protested by prosecutors and ruled
unconstitutional by Russia’s Constitutional Court. 

During the conflict over amending the constitution, the State Council added
a clause designating the Komi nationality as the source of the republic’s
statehood. This clause clearly discriminated against non-Komi residents in
the republic and was similar to one in Tatarstan’s constitution already
ruled unconstitutional by Russia’s Constitutional Court. As in Tatarstan,
political and institutional interests in Komi were being infused with the
explosive ingredient of inter-ethnic competition.

The conflict over institutional design took place on the background of
approaching presidential election scheduled for Dec. 16, in which
Spiridonov would face off against Torlopov. The constitutional conflict
waged between branches of government led by officials of the different
nationalities had already mobilized the republic’s Russians and Komis. The
presidential campaign now mobilized the Russian and Komi electorates behind
their respective ethnic candidate-compatriots. 

Surprisingly, the Kremlin secretly threw its weight behind Torlopov by
sending officials to ensure that the election was not rigged by
Spiridonov’s minions. Torlopov won, receiving the overwhelming majority of
votes from Komis, who make up only 23 percent of the republic’s population,
and sufficient number of votes from Russians, who comprise 58 percent.

Republic of Adygeya

In Adygeya, the incumbent president, Aslan Dzharimov and his top rival,
Khozret Sovmen, a prominent local gold-mining magnate with good ties to
Moscow, dominated the playing field, especially among Adygs, as both of
them are ethnic Adygs themselves. Sovmen’s money and connections won him a
victory with 70 percent of the vote. Although his election’s results have
been touted as part of the growing phenomenon of prominent businessmen
taking political office in the regions, they were also an indication of the
growing role of nationality in electoral politics. 

Nina Konovalova, the leader of the Slavic Union in the republic won the
support of ethnic Russians and Cossacks. Her union has been a strong voice
against republican laws passed under Adyg Dzharimov’s authoritarian rule
that discriminates against Russians. 

Despite being a woman, Konovalova won 10 percent of the vote; the highest
vote ever given a woman in a Russian regional presidential or gubernatorial
election. 

Sakha (Yakutia)

In Sakha, after a series of court battles between Moscow and Yakutsk, the
incumbent president Mikhail Nikolayev agreed to withdraw from the race
under apparent pressure from the Kremlin in a bid to break the republic’s
sovereignty over the diamond business. In return, he was later appointed as
the Sakha executive branch’s senator in the Federation Council by his
successor and victor in the election, Vyacheslav Shtyrov, who also happens
to be the head of Russia’s diamond monopoly Alrosa-Sakha.

But the major sub-plot of the campaign revolved around the nationality
question. Ethnic Russian Shtyrov’s chief challenger was Yakut businessman
Fedot Tumusov, president of the SAPI industrial group. Shtyrov, even with
the Kremlin’s backing, was unable to win in the first round, falling short
of the 50 percent threshold with 45 percent of the vote to Tumusov’s 18
percent. Russians make up 50 percent of Sakha’s population, Yakuts 33 percent.

The ethnic issue was highlighted in a campaign scandal with origins that
remain murky. A pair of Moscow journalists was arrested in the republic and
charged with preparing campaign materials that "whip up interethnic
antagonism." In the course of the campaign pamphlets were in fact sent to
residents throughout Yakutsk. One such pamphlet was signed by a group
identifying itself as the Russian Imperial Battalion and declared: "Our
Shtyrov is the beginning of our war for a Yakutia that is Russian."

As Moscow’s interference in the election became clearer in the wake of
press reports after the first round, Yakuts rallied around Tumusov in the
second. Although he fell short of victory, he garnered 35 percent of the
vote to Shtyrov’s 60 percent, with 5 percent voting for neither candidate.

The growing role of the national factor in regional elections has potential
positive and negative implications. The good news is that civil society is
not dead; national minorities are willing and able to mobilize and express
their voices. The potentially negative consequence is that the
authoritarian regimes in many regions could limit the resonance of those
voices. In this case, muffled ethno-national voices could reach a
crescendo, demanding exit from the federation.

(Dr. Gordon M. Hahn is The Russia Journal’s political analyst and a
visiting research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.)
 
******

#9
The Russia Journal
March 15-21, 2002 
A welter of Russia ‘experts’ serves up opinion on tap
By MATT TAIBBI

In the journalism world they’re known as "talking heads" – eminently
respectable "experts" who sit by their phones all day, waiting for
reporters to call and ready to offer an opinion on the record on any topic.

How much will Monica Lewinsky affect Bill Clinton’s legacy? Call the
Heritage Foundation, they’ll give you a numerical figure. What’s the mood
on the ground in Sierra Leone? There’s a Brookings Institution analyst who
can fill you in, even as he sits in an office just around the corner from
yours in Washington.

Talking heads are more than a journalistic convenience. In an increasingly
complex world, where neither governments nor businesses have time for
adequate diligence, information is power. And with a problem as complicated
as the establishment of policy toward a huge country like Russia, the side
of any issue that can claim the allegiance of the greater number of experts
usually wins. The approval of experts confers legitimacy on any policy or
any politician. The question is, how much does that approval cost, and by
what process does it come to be given?
 
In the Russia arena, the A-list of experts is fairly well-known, and most
of them can be found grouped together in the Rolodex of any Moscow
correspondent. From the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the top
of the pitching rotation typically includes Stanford University-based
Michael McFaul and Swedish-born Anders Aslund. From the American Enterprise
Institute, you have Leon Aron, perhaps best known for his recently
published hagiography of Boris Yeltsin. Jerry Hough is typically described
as a Duke University professor, but he also works for Brookings. Heritage
Foundation fellow Ariel Cohen is a frequently quoted presence on the Russia
scene, as is harrumphing Sovietologist Dmitry Simes, now of the Nixon Center.

In addition to the foundation-employed analysts, there are a few noted
academics whose pronouncements attract attention without the benefit of a
privately funded PR apparatus. Most notably these include Peter Reddaway of
George Washington University, Stephen Cohen of New York University and
Janine Wedel of the University of Pittsburgh. Only one well-known Russia
expert can claim anything like a countercultural background – author Anne
Williamson, who did a stint in Moscow for the iconoclastic Spy magazine,
which is now defunct.

Who these people are and what their positions have been on the Russia story
over the years will be the subject of another series of columns. For now,
the subject is the profession of punditry itself, how it works and how
factors other than the defensibility of an argument can lead to the
ascendancy of certain opinions and opinion makers.

Most phones wins

Unless you’ve worked on one side of the news or the other, you have no way
of knowing that the power over what goes into news reports very often comes
down to seemingly irrelevant logistical factors – whether or not you have
an established place to hold a news conference, how many fax machines you
have and how often you use them, how many people you have answering phones
at your office, whether the people answering the phones are able to help
journalists instantly, and so on. It comes down to a battle of resources
and numbers. In the battle of ideas, he who has the most telephones and the
most stamina wins every time. 

In the United States, by far the largest producer of news is the Pentagon.
The military has thousands of full-time information officers, publishes
hundreds of magazines and sends out literally millions of press releases a
year. (In 1980, the last time any branch of the armed services released
such information, the Air Force alone reported it had sent out 615,000
press releases.) The military lends informational support not only to
traditional news outlets like newspapers and television, but to the makers
of television dramas and Hollywood feature films – it has dozens of
staffers who are assigned full-time to help America produce saccharine
propaganda movies like "Pearl Harbor" and "Top Gun." No corporation,
industry group or chamber of commerce comes close to matching the
propaganda power of the U.S. military. 

But next in line after government information sources like the military are
the think tanks. The largest dozen or so of these privately funded
"research institutions" have an immense impact on public discourse. The
Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato
Institute exist solely to produce research and commentary that will
influence public opinion. They have fancy halls in which to hold press
conferences and roundtables and their hired help – people like Heritage’s
Cohen and Carnegie’s McFaul – wait virtually around the clock for
journalists to call.

Most of these organizations have either tax-exempt or tax-reduced status,
which forces them to pretend they’re not lobbyists. Heritage for instance,
includes a disclaimer on each on of its press releases and reports
indicating that this or that report is "not intended to influence
legislation" in any way. But in fact Heritage often promotes itself as the
"unofficial research arm of Congress," helping elected officials draft
legislation and position papers. The contradiction generally goes unnoticed
in the media, which seldom takes any time to describe these sources at all.
Cohen, for example, is usually described simply as "an analyst for the
Heritage Foundation," leaving the impression he is an independent academic
and not a creature of huge corporate interests like right-wing beer tycoon
Joe Coors.

In fact, most of the often-quoted Russia specialists have massive corporate
funding behind them. The ubiquitous Thomas Graham of the Carnegie
Endowment, for instance, last year received a $100,000 grant from the
Smith-Richardson Foundation, which is really the Vicks cough-drop company,
one of America’s largest companies and a frequent and enthusiastic
contributor to right-wing research organizations. Analysts from the Cato
Institute can boast of having AIG, the insurance giant, as their largest
contributor – which may affect Cato’s position on privatization of health
care in the United States and abroad. The Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies, another big producer of Russia
commentary, has companies like Exxon, British Aerospace, TRW, Citigroup,
Cisco Systems and Raytheon backing it.

The Russia policy generally favored by these institutions has generally
followed a familiar plotline, i.e., favoring privatization, deregulation,
tariff reduction, the relaxation of rules for foreign investment,
elimination of social spending and so on.

Do experts matter?

Opinion is divided as to whether experts have a significant influence on
policy. This division generally mirrors the split over the question of
whether public opinion matters in the setting of policy. 

Ariel Cohen, for instance, says the opinions of experts come into play only
when there is a division of opinion among policy-makers themselves.

"Except for Russia experts who become government officials, as several have
over the years," he says, "they play a significant policy role only when
the U.S. political class is itself divided over Russia, and even then only
in a limited way defined largely by others."

But one Moscow-based journalist I spoke to, who asked not to be identified
for this column, had a different take.

"If there is a reason why most Americans have believed that privatization
and free-trade agreements are a good thing for Russia," he said, "it’s
because almost every expert they hear from in the news tells them that’s
the case. If you believe that experts don’t matter, then what you’re saying
is that what the public thinks doesn’t matter."

The example Cohen cites as an instance when the policy-making class was
divided was the late 1980s, with Washington divided over whether to take
Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms at face value and work with him or take a
harder line.

Cohen was a proponent of taking Gorbachev seriously, and there was
political will in some circles in Washington behind a like-minded approach.
Though he can’t say that there was a direct connection, he notes that once
he took that position, he was eagerly sought out by television talk shows
and influential newspaper op-ed pages to promote his view.

Cohen’s position on Vladimir Putin has been somewhat less enthusiastic. It
may be a coincidence, but his phone has not exactly been ringing off the
hook during Putin’s presidency. 

The Putin question – more or less the only Russia issue Americans know well
enough to be interested in these days – has been the main focus of most
expert analyses of late. But as we’ll see, many experts have not exactly
been consistent about Putin. But neither has our government. Whether the
two phenomena have anything in common is a question worth looking into.

(Matt Taibbi is co-editor of the Moscow alternative newspaper the eXile.)
 
MAJOR WASHINGTON THINK TANKS

• Heritage Foundation (founded 1973)
Russia Analysts: Ariel Cohen, Kim Holmes
Corporate Funders: Board includes Steve Forbes, Richard Scaife
(Carnegie-Mellon fortune), Holland Coors 
Comment: Favors scrapping ABM Treaty and believes Russia "must not demand
any concessions" in exchange for strategic cooperation with U.S.

• Brookings Institution (founded 1927)
Russia Analysts: Ivo Daalder, Fiona Hill, Clifford Gaddy, Phillip Gordon,
Alexander Lukin
Corporate Funders: Board includes William Ford; Teresa Heinz; Michael
Jordan, CEO of CBS-Westinghouse; and Vincent Trosino, former CEO of State
Farm Insurance; as well as executives from Fannie Mae and AT&T.
Comment: Position on NATO enlargement ranges from favoring a "pause" (i.e.,
waiting a short time for a more advantageous moment to enlarge) to a "big
bang" policy (accepting all candidates at once). Does not consider not
enlarging NATO as a serious option.

• Cato Institute (founded 1977)
Russia Analysts: Charles Pena, Ted Galen Carpenter
Corporate Funders: Board includes media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and John
Malone, CEO of Tele-Communications Inc.
Comment: Published report (later denied by Russian government) that
concluded Russia's early warning missile detection system was faulty and
therefore a risk to U.S. security.

• American Enterprise Institute (founded 1943)
Russia Analyst: Leon Aron
Corporate Funders: Board includes Edward Rust, CEO of State Farm Insurance;
William Stavropoulos, chairman of Dow Chemical; Christopher Galvin, CEO of
Motorola; and Harvey Golub, CEO of American Express; received donations
from the Bradley Foundation, established by the Allen-Bradley Co., now a
subsidiary of Rockwell International
Comment: Typical AEI Russia article – "Three Cheers for Russian Democracy"
by Aron in January 2000

• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (founded 1910)
Russia Analysts: Michael McFaul, Anders Aslund, Anatol Lieven
Corporate Funders: Established with $10 million grant from Andrew Carnegie;
does not list its donors
Comment: Has greatly expanded its Moscow office since 1993. A leading
supporter of free-market "reform" in Russia; both McFaul and Aslund have
advised the U.S. government.

*******

#10
Newsday
March 17, 2002
The War that Ate America
By Kim Phillips-Fein

IN JUNE 1978, Soviet emigre and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered
Harvard's commencement address. The faculty that invited him might have
expected a typical celebration of American freedom. Instead, the author of
"The Gulag Archipelago” took the opportunity to rail against what he
believed was the inept, half-hearted commitment of the West to fighting the
Cold War. 

He castigated the United States for abandoning Vietnam, fumbling Angola and
letting the country's approach to the Soviet menace be determined by
cost-benefit calculations, and he denounced college anti-war protesters,
accusing them of deserting millions of Vietnamese to rot under Soviet tyranny.

Underneath the accusations, Solzhenitsyn's speech was tinged with a deep
disappointment. For Solzhenitsyn, as for many Cold War crusaders, any
hesitation on the part of the United States in the war against Communism
was a depressing sign of spiritual deadness, the failure of modernity to
rise to a grand cause. Despite the millions of dead in Vietnam and Central
America, the regimes toppled in Guatemala, Iran and Chile, the hundreds of
millions of dollars spent on nuclear weapons, the Cold War never quite
lived up to their expectations for it. This wistful sense of failure led to
a deeply conservative politics; a few years after Solzhenitsyn's speech,
Ronald Reagan took up his challenge and led the United States into another
decade of military buildup and dirty wars, cutting budgets and busting
unions on the way. Though some think that Reagan led the United States to
triumph over the "evil empire” at last, the Cold War of the 1980s -- like
that of the '50s and '60s -- was primarily an exercise in retrenchment,
shifting American politics far to the right and cracking down on popular
political movements around the world.

Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address also echoes through the 600-plus pages of
Derek Leebaert's "The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold
War Victory.” Leebaert, a Georgetown University professor, is a Cold War
veteran -- he is a founding editor of the journal International Security
and is a board member of the Army Historical Foundation -- who is just now
questioning his longtime mission. Totalitarianism, he still believes, was
the greatest curse of the 20th century. But instead of confident
triumphalism, victory seems to have led Leebaert only to self-doubt. The
Cold War involved the United States in seamy relations with brutal
dictators, cost tens of thousands of American lives in Vietnam and ate up
economic growth for decades. During the Cold War, Leebaert writes, "Lies,
overly clever manipulations, and even killings at one remove policy.” But
despite his criticisms, Leebaert writes out of deflated hopes, not out of
anger. Like Solzhenitsyn, he is most bothered by the contradiction between
the aspirations of the Cold War and its nasty reality. What should have
been a glorious battle for the free world was instead a bungled parody,
simultaneously covert and heavy-handed, breeding cynicism, suffering and
despair, marred by "inexcusable ignorance, political intrusions, personal
opportunism and crimes.”

"The Fifty-Year Wound” spans the entire postwar period, covering everything
from McCarthyism to the civil rights movement to the economic patterns of
the great boom years. At times, the wide lens of the book leads to a style
of argument reminiscent of that which a paranoid anticommunist convinced of
the omnipotence of the Soviet Union might have used at the height of the
Red Scare, even though all the particulars are reversed. Leebaert wants to
blame the Cold War for literally everything he dislikes in the modern
United States, from poverty (defense spending made it impossible to devote
enough to the peacetime economy) to grade inflation (which began as a way
to keep students safe from the draft).

This Burkean argument about the dangers of unintended consequences leads to
some strange historical leaps. Leebaert starts by saying that the Cold War
was responsible for the war in Vietnam, which is true enough. But then he
goes on to argue that it was therefore also responsible for the antiwar
movement, and that without the Cold War, the United States would have been
spared the destructive, nihilistic impulses of 1960s counterculture.

In an especially overeager passage, Leebaert asserts that the faculty
gender gap in higher education today is yet another of the Cold War's
remnants: "How many mediocre, draft-dodging male applicants to graduate
school [during Vietnam] shut out promising young women?” He imagines a
platonic America, from which the Cold War was a sad aberration. "Splendid
cities of the mind and spirit have been lost -- ones that might have
towered in place of missile silos, command centers and barracks.”

But while Leebaert may dream of an alternative history, "The Fifty-Year
Wound” is a product of the Cold War imagination. Leebaert adopts the
Manicheanism of the Cold War worldview at face value. The United States saw
Russia as "vast, ancient, pitiless, unfathomable ... with its own (unlikely
to be pleasant) agenda,” and that's how Leebaert sees it, too. The Soviet
Union, for him, was an inscrutable, malign presence hulking over the
postwar world, while the United States was virtuous, if naive, its
well-meant efforts gone mysteriously awry in the streets of Santiago and
the jungles of Southeast Asia. So while Leebaert regrets the mistakes of
the Cold War, his arguments with it are ultimately quibbles. He may not
like the Cold War logic that led the United States to back apartheid
instead of Mandela, but he also thinks that the regimes that America fought
-- in Vietnam, for example -- were necessarily tyrannical, soul-destroying.
If "the Stalinist reality that descended on Indochina was every bit as evil
as had long been predicted,” it's hard to see how fighting it could really
have been a mistake.

Ultimately, Leebaert is less critical of the Cold War than he is nostalgic
for what might have been. Had the Cold War been fought in a completely
different way, it might perhaps have produced an entirely different country
-- one without Watergate, Iran-Contra, El Salvador, COINTELPRO and the
besmirching of America's reputation throughout the world. This forgiving
elision of what the fight against Communism actually meant and
unwillingness to confront the reality of the Cold War head-on is what makes
"The Fifty-Year Wound” unsatisfying. The fall of the Soviet Union has
surely freed scholars to criticize the Cold War in ways that were hardly
possible two decades ago, but the shadow of anti-Communism continues to
cloud their interpretations of the past and visions of the future. Even
Leebaert's conclusion -- in which he suggests that the "most useful
aftermath” of the Cold War is that the world today is governed by "private
causes and individual initiatives” -- seems to have been churned out of a
1950s propaganda mill.

It will fall instead to future generations of historians to write
narratives of the Cold War that depict it not as a metaphysical battle of
good versus evil, but instead as a political conflict. They may argue that
the Cold War was driven not only by the Soviet Union, but also by the
desire of the United States to affect and influence the globe. Then again,
this project may remain out of bounds for a good while. For "The Fifty-Year
Wound” is published just as the United States embarks upon another likely
protracted global struggle, one that threatens to make criticizing American
foreign policy as taboo as it was in 1955. What's especially ironic is that
the current conflict has its roots in Reagan's jihad against the Soviets
and so must be counted in the tally of the Cold War's loony realpolitik. At
a time like this, one can't help but be glad for "The Fifty-Year Wound's”
reminder that when it comes to grand crusades against evil, the battle is
rarely noble -- and that even after wounds heal, they leave deep scars. 

******

#11
Los Angeles Times
March 16, 2002
Editorial
E-moting by E-Mail
         
Ever had an argument via e-mail? :( Wanna have one now? Well, be very
careful. E-mail disagreements are not only more likely to escalate than
person-to-person discussions, it seems they also leave a written trail for
hard feelings to follow. A couple of little-noticed new studies indicate,
first, the growing importance of e-mail communications in everyday business
and personal lives beyond the superficial "How R U?" messages and, second,
the invisible dangers increasingly inherent in the informal, intimate and
yet strangely disconnected format of e-mail. As the use and depth of e-mail
mature, the implications for society and individual relationships mount too.

In the early days of e-mail, way, way back late last century, personal
e-mail was merely a hasty electronic postcard not used for subtle or
sophisticated messages but just for reaching out to someone quickly and
simply. It's perfectly suited for hectic superficial times when really
listening is so rare that statements often require repeating. It's
perfectly suited for hectic superficial times when really listening is so
rare that statements often require repeating. Such stamp-free missives do
survive during times of crisis: A UCLA study found that immediately after
Sept. 11, 100 million Americans--around 57% of all e-mailers--sent or
received expressions of concern. But as Internet use and e-mail familiarity
have grown, so has the expectation for and content of e-mail. New research
by the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds the Internet less a
novelty now and more a purposeful tool for work and communicating more
weighty, urgent contents to colleagues, friends and family. E-mail is easy,
quick, informal. That's the appeal--also the danger. E-mails invite
assumptions about casualness, understandings, confidentiality. Assumptions
are the land mines of communications. Few invest the intellectual effort
composing e-mails that they would, say, a formal letter. Ray Friedman was
intrigued with e-mail protocols and disputes, especially after escalating
exchanges with an editor sundered a friendship. He teaches conflict and
negotiation at Vanderbilt University.

Beware, his new study lists many dangers. Conversations provide instant
audio and often visual feedback; e-mails don't. When talking, people take
turns point by point, adjusting their presentations and responses as they
read their partner; e-mails are unidirectional, delivering 12 firm points
quickly but in a peremptory lump. By No. 6 the recipient is livid, by No.
12 apoplectic, which shapes his or her thermonuclear response. Nor have
emoticons, those terribly cute little punctuation marks misused to depict
sideways smiley faces :), crying :~(~~ , anger >>:<< and Marge Simpson
*****:-), proved all that effective, especially among males. Instead, they
can seem forced and, well, stilted :I === 

******

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