#3
Chicago Tribune
January 20, 2002
Progress, yes, but Russia far from `normal'
By Colin McMahon.
Colin McMahon recently completed five years as the Tribune's Moscow correspondent

MOSCOW -- Flag down a taxi in Russia, which usually is not a taxi at all but a private car driven by someone looking to pick up a couple of bucks, squeeze into the cramped back seat with the worn felt coverings and the broken springs, mumble a word of thanks and . . . get ready. "Thanks for what?" the good-natured drivers growl. "We haven't gotten there yet."

Such is the Russian sense of humor, a mix of fatalism, resignation and weariness that helps explain how the Russian people have put up with so much grief over the centuries.

This fatalism, though, masks a pleasant little secret. A lot of average Russians are romantic optimists. They just don't want anyone to know it.

President Vladimir Putin profits from this. He is so popular partly because people desperately want to believe that he can turn the country around.

Putin has racked up some praiseworthy achievements since taking over the Kremlin two years ago. He has pushed through changes in tax laws and land laws that should fuel investment. He has fired corrupt politicians, felled troublesome business titans and reined in regional leaders who had sought to set up their own private fiefdoms.

Most promising is Putin's recent cozying up to the United States and Europe. Many of the nation's top military, political and diplomatic leaders oppose Putin's initiatives to make Russia a true partner of the West, but the president vows to press ahead anyway.

Convinced that the only hope for Russia's economy is opening up to the West and joining the rest of the capitalist world, the dour and cautious former KGB agent is, finally, taking chances.

Still, before people in or outside of Russia bow down in gratitude to Vladimir Vladimirovich, they should keep in mind the taxi driver's warning:

"Thanks for what? We haven't gotten there yet."

Russia is a long way from its people's oft-stated dream of becoming a "normal country."

Independent media remain under constant threat. If Putin is not behind this, then at best he is indifferent to it. Public debate of issues and policies, complete with criticism of the authorities, has become less common since the Boris Yeltsin era.

Few Russians ever talk honestly and seriously about Chechnya, for example.

It would be good to say here, for instance, how many Russian soldiers have died since October 1999 battling Chechen separatists in that scarred and scary Caucasian land. But the Russian army, whose credibility is in serious doubt anyway, gives no official casualties figures for weeks at a time. Reporters who ask about dead Russian soldiers (at last count at least 3,500) are called ghoulish.

Westerners who suggest that maybe terrorizing civilians is not the best way to defeat terrorism are called hypocrites. Putin will hear none of it.

State intelligence agencies target civil rights groups and environmental activists. Police and prosecutors still wield immense powers, though recently passed legislation to overhaul the justice system finally offers some promise of fairness for the accused.

For all of Putin's stated zeal to modernize Russia, he has done little to disassemble the snaking bureaucratic machinery that invades so many aspects of Russian life. The bureaucracy is larger now in a supposedly free market Russia than it was under the socialist system of the Soviet Union.

Even small stuff, like customs rules, exposes big problems.

Foreigners trying to do business in Russia face tremendous challenges from the minute they land at Moscow's dank and depressing airport. A typical one is the rule on how much money one can take out of the country. A leftover from Soviet times that rankled people even then, the law changes so frequently now and so often without warning that business people fume.

When you come into Russia now with U.S. dollars or other foreign currency you have to fill out a form stating how much you have. Then you have that form stamped and signed by a customs officer.

Then in order to leave Russia with any foreign currency, even as little as $50, you have to present that signed and stamped declaration showing you brought money into Russia. You cannot take out more than you brought in. You can use the declaration only once, and then you must surrender it.

This plays havoc with foreign business people who travel frequently, particularly to other countries in the former Soviet Union where you need dollars. It encourages people to break the law. It forces them to disrespect it. It also makes little sense for a nation that Putin says should be run by a "dictatorship of law," for a nation that Putin says wants to draw investors.

That Russian customs or its railroads ministry or its security agencies or any number of other bureaucratic organizations can act pretty much as they choose with only rare interference from federal officials or oversight by legislators points up what is in fact Putin's greatest challenge.

Putin's greatest challenge over the next year, over the next two years of his presidency (or, as skeptics of Russian democracy suggest, the next 20 years of Putin's presidency) is not NATO expansion or the U.S. pullout from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It is not even how to participate in American-led efforts to counter terrorism.

Putin's greatest challenge will be to assert control over whole swaths of Russia and Russian government that now elude him.