#4
The Russia Journal
December 14-20, 2001
Same old story for Russian market reform
By ANDREI PIONTKOVSKY

Russia’s most prominent political-business figures were baring their private lives and the products of their bodily functions long before it was done by the sorry guinea pigs from the popular "Za Steklom" show, the Russian equivalent to Big Brother. The politicians and businessmen were at it at least from 1997, the birth year of the first great information war.

Back then, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky used their TV channels to tell us in great detail, with documents and diagrams to help, how Vladimir Potanin stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the state coffers. Potanin did not have his own TV channel, but he did have many newspapers, which he put to work telling us in convincing detail about his colleagues’ similar acts of theft.

Tasteless flaunting

It never occurred to anyone to deny these scandalous revelations. On the contrary, Berezovsky told the Financial Times: "We hired [Anatoly] Chubais. We invested a lot of money and assured [then-President] Boris Yeltsin’s victory. Now we have to get government posts and enjoy the fruits of our victories."

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was just as frank when he said to Nezavisimaya Gazeta: "The most profitable business in Russia is politics. We met in our circle and drew lots to see who would get to join the government. Potanin was the first, but he was so busy looking after the interests of his Onexim. Now, other people are getting their turn."

But how could they have been, and still be, so flagrantly shameless? In part, it is the nouveaux riches’ love of tasteless flaunting. On the lower rungs are raspberry-colored jackets and fat gold chains, while on the upper rungs, it is: "We control half the economy and appoint ministers." Partly, these people at the top wanted to incite fear and convince the public of their might and immunity from punishment. And then there was one other factor – the matrons of ancient Rome thought nothing of going around naked in front of their slaves, because they did not even see the slaves as people.

This shameless merger of Power and Money is more than just a moral or legal problem now. Diverting this amount of budget money to private companies has created above all a macroeconomic problem. The formula "Money-Power-Money" has made big business dependent on budget money for a narcotic high. The country’s economic life is not about developing production, but about establishing control over financial flows.

This is not new in Russian history. The Marquis de Custine, in his travel memoirs about Russia, related how Tsar Nicholas I complained to him, "Everyone in the country steals except me, and I cannot do anything about it."

Chekists vs. the Family

Lonely and helpless President Vladimir Putin is in an even more tragic situation than Nicholas I. Unlike Nicholas, Putin did not accede to the Russian throne by birth, but was put there by the country’s most notorious thieves.

This is why, when he timidly and imploringly asks, "Where’s the money?" the only response is the knowing smirks on his collaborators’ faces.

These same collaborators continue to organize new rounds of public stripteases from time to time, baring the intimate financial details of each others’ lives for us all to see. Now, for example, the remains of the vanishing intelligentsia have their faces pressed against the Kremlin glass, eyes glued on the great race between the Family clan and the Lubyanka clan. And as they watch, they slip in quotes from Joseph Brodsky such as "But thieves are dearer to me than the drinkers of blood."

But please, gentlemen, in what way are today’s "clean-handed, cool-headed and warm-hearted" Chekists so particularly deserving of the label "bloodsuckers?" It wasn’t they, but the Family, who unleashed two PR Chechen massacres to get their appointee elected president, while assuring us that this was the way to reinvigorate the Russian Army.

And just who are the tyrants and crushers of freedom? It wasn’t the Chekists, but a crack team of super-liberal marauders from SPS (Alfred Kokh, Boris Jordan, Anatoly Chubais, Boris Nemtsov and Irina Khakamada) who carried out the purge at NTV.

The last bastion?

These are not leather-garbed Bolsheviks, shooting the Deripaskas and Abramoviches of 1918 just for their class origins and then distributing the fruits of their plunder to an oppressed world proletariat and the downtrodden toiling masses of the East.

They are respectable people, who own Mercedes, wear Cartier and Cardin, possess all the other attributes of the market economy and thirst to multiply these attributes. These worthy people are continuing the cause of market reforms in Russia in the spirit of their predecessors.

And do you really think that the Misha 2-percents are the last bastion of liberal values in Russia? Do you really believe that we should answer the call of Yeltsin’s new son-in-law and take to the streets to defend these sacred pillars of democracy?

(The writer is director of the Center for Strategic Research.)