Johnson's Russia List
#6111
3 March 2002
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org
[Note from David Johnson:
1. BBC: Robert Parsons, Russia - a nation in search of itself.
Russians feel at once a sense of superiority and inferiority towards
the West.
2. Newsweek International: Christian Caryl, St. Petersburg’s Revenge.
The beautiful old imperial nerve center isn’t about to topple Moscow as
Russia’s defacto capital city. But it’s set to give its old rival a serious
run for the money.
3. AFP: Pope makes virtual visit to six cities, including Moscow.
4. Chicago Tribune: Colin McMahon, Russia: Some truth is busting out all
over. (re Kursk)
5. AP: Georgia Plunged Into Security Crisis.
6. Los Angeles Times: John Daniszewski, Former Russian Rainmaker Tries Role
of Dissident. Politics: Self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky sees himself as a
defender of free speech. But to some, he is the epitome of 'robber
capitalism.'
7. Newsweek International: Christian Caryl, Books: How the Mighty Fell.
Tracking the troubles of the Russian oligarchs. (re Hoffman's The Oligarchs)
8. New York Times: Patrick Tyler,In Stalin's Town, a School Divided.(Gori)
9. New book: Albert L. Weeks, STALIN'S OTHER WAR: SOVIET GRAND STRATEGY,
1939-1941.
10. New book: Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy.Richard D.
Anderson, Jr.,
M. Steven Fish, Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip G. Roeder.
11. The Russia Journal: John Helmer, When Russian banks fall, they also
fly away.
12. New York Times book review: Jonathan Rosen, 'Summer in Baden-Baden':
Crimes
and Punishments. (re SUMMER IN BADEN-BADEN by Leonid Tsypkin)]
******
#1
BBC
2 March 2002
Russia - a nation in search of itself
Russians feel at once a sense of superiority and inferiority towards the West
By Robert Parsons
Moscow correspondent
The traffic cop is a figure of fun in Russia - scorned, laughed at, mocked
and, on a bad day, cursed and reviled.
Miserably paid, they operate what can only be called a form of
state-licensed highway robbery.
Ambush is their modus operandi. They are ubiquitous - hidden behind every
bend in the road. Once apprehended, it is best not to argue with them.
It never does you any good - although in this as in many things, I have
never learned to take my own advice.
Russia's traffic regulations are both arcane and subject to the arbitrary
interpretation of the police. In other words, you have got no chance.
A friend of mine was once naive enough to ask why he had been stopped. The
policeman pondered this for half a millisecond before replying without a
flicker of a smile: "I didn't like the way you pulled over."
My final week in Moscow was a bad one - ambushed five times. The last time,
I discovered I had left my driving licence at home - a heinous offence here.
Rules is rules
In Russia though there is a solution to everything. A very corpulent
sergeant pulled me over. He looked stern. I looked suitably contrite.
"You know this is a serious offence," he said. "You realise I'll have to
confiscate your car."
This is a standard opening gambit. Rules is rules. Except that in Russia
rules are there to be bent - it's what makes it possible for society to
function.
"Mr Robert," he said, avoiding my eye, "how about a little present from
England?"
Russia muddles on in this sort of way. Yes, the police are venal and
corrupt but everyone knows they cannot live on their official salaries.
Nor, for all the talk of economic recovery, can the majority in this vast
and deeply traumatised land.
In the nine years since I first came to live in Moscow, Russian society has
been through the sort of dislocation that would have most of us committed
to psychiatric care.
Lost generations
Generations who had believed in almost nothing but the eternity of the
Soviet state found when it disappeared that they had lost everything.
These are the lost generations of professors and engineers, teachers and
doctors, who today beg for a living or, if they are lucky enough to own a
car, drive around Russia's urban wildernesses from morning to night in
search of passengers prepared to pay for a ride.
They live in the squalid suburbs, in the vast, soulless and uniform housing
estates that are the communist party's contribution to Russia's
architectural heritage.
They are the babushkas, who stand bundled in baggy jumpers and ancient
coats outside the metro stations with buckets of potatoes and strings of
dried fish.
Ageless figures with bodies swollen shapeless by bad diet and vodka, their
round, wrinkled-apple faces wrapped against the bone-dry, icy cold.
They are the abandoned generations who lost everything the day they woke up
and were told: "The Soviet Union is no more."
Their bitterness eats at Russia with a corrosive, acid rancour.
In the provinces, away from a head-spinning pace and aggression of Moscow,
there are parts of Russia which could belong to the third world. The great
spaces of Siberia are emptying of people, cities are dying.
The Russian complex
What sort of country is it that is emerging from the ruins of the last
great empire of the 20th century? Russians themselves are far from sure.
There is a crisis of identity.
In a recent opinion poll, most said they saw themselves not as European but
Eurasian - but nobody is quite sure what that means, what implications it
bears.
Russians, themselves, talk about the Russian complex - a simultaneous sense
of superiority and inferiority towards the West.
Superior - because Westerners supposedly cannot grasp the depth and
complexity of the Russian soul, inferior because materially Russia lags so
demonstrably behind. The combination makes for an unpredictable, volatile
partner.
It is perhaps this complex that lies behind the messianic streak that
periodically grips Russian society.
Twentieth century Russia's gift to the world was Bolshevism. This century,
an older ideology is already dressing up in new clothes.
A year ago, I visited a monastery on the edge of the Arctic circle.
Outside, snow devils whirled along the ancient battlements, inside I sat in
complete darkness, while a senior cleric expounded on the favourite theme -
Russia's mission to save the world.
And all this in terms that evoked a very recent past: iron fist, obedience,
absolute authority.
But this vision is not all Russia has to offer. Not long ago, I watched a
TV chat show hosted by a man, who was once a star propagandist of the
Soviet Communist Party.
Today, he has reinvented himself. At the end of a show which had focused on
the closure of Russia's listening station in Cuba and flood relief in
Siberia, he summed up by asking whether it wasn't time for Russia to
re-examine itself.
Didn't the pictures of poverty and devastation in Siberia expose the
absurdities of Russia's obsession with power and status?
Wasn't it time to forget past pretensions to greatness and start building a
society in which the welfare of the individual at last counted for something?
As ever, Russia seems unsure which path to take.
********
#2
Newsweek International
March 11, 2002
St. Petersburg’s Revenge
The beautiful old imperial nerve center isn’t about to topple Moscow as
Russia’s defacto capital city. But it’s set to give its old rival a serious
run for the money
By Christian Caryl
“The Russian Ark” may just be one of the craziest movies ever made. It
was set entirely in the famed Hermitage art museum, with hundreds of
period-costumed actors romping through three centuries of Russian history.
But the real madness in its method is that its director, Aleksandr Sokurov,
filmed the whole one-hour-and-28-minute extravaganza in a single take on an
HDTV digital camera. No cuts, no edits. It’s the first time anyone has shot
a feature movie in one breath, says Sokurov. “We just kept on going.”
IT’S SCARCELY AN accident that he did it in St. Petersburg. Not so
long ago, no one in Russia would have tried such a stunt, with or without
the Kremlin’s permission. But suddenly the former tsarist capital is
bursting with unaccustomed pride and confidence. Next year will mark the
300th anniversary of its founding by Peter the Great, and Russia’s most
beautiful city is already preening for the occasion. The economy is finally
showing signs of recovery after decades of decay and communist-era neglect.
And for the first time since the tsars fell, a St. Petersburg native is
running the country. Not that Vladimir Putin is doing it alone. Since
coming to power he has boosted hometown friends into key positions. It’s a
sign of the times, says Yakov Gordin, editor in chief of Zvezda, St.
Petersburg’s most respected literary journal: “We’re back. After years in
the provinces, we’re finally regaining our self-awareness.”
Reversals of fortune are getting to be a habit in St. Petersburg. A
century ago it was the nerve center of one of the biggest empires the world
has ever seen. Then came 1917 and the Bolsheviks. Lenin chose Moscow for
his capital, and Stalin and his successors, mindful of St. Petersburg’s
history as an incubator of revolts, made sure that Leningrad (as they
renamed it) became a picturesque little backwater, safely removed from the
levers of power. Even today 80 percent of Russia’s banks, and most of its
biggest companies, are headquartered in Moscow. Citizens of the “northern
capital,” as Petersburg styles itself these days, mutter darkly about
Muscovite arrogance.
Now it’s payback time. Russians make wisecracks about the “Northern
Alliance,” a.k.a. the Petersburg Group, a tight-knit coterie of Putin
confidants who share not only his hometown but his ideas on economic and
social policy. They include all the president’s key economic advisers, from
free-market reform guru Andrei Illarionov to Trade and Economics Minister
German Gref and Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin. Two of the country’s
biggest business empires, the natural-gas monopoly Gazprom and the national
electricity company, are now held by Petersburgers, as are the top post at
the Defense Ministry and the governorship of the Northwest Federal Region.
Many come from the KGB, like Putin himself. “Some of these guys
interrogated me back in the ’70s and ’80s,” says Petersburg journalist Lev
Lurie, appreciating the ironies of events. “They were always more
sophisticated than the people in the Communist Party. They wanted private
restaurants, clean toilets. Above all, they didn’t want to be ashamed in
front of the West.”
So far, the Petersburgers have refrained from settling scores—though
there have been moments. In 2000, for example, Putin scotched a proposal
from one Petersburg deputy to move the lower house of the National
Legislature, the Duma, to their hometown. Still, whenever the president and
his colleagues find a chance to do the city a favor, they try. A region
that once languished is suddenly attracting big infrastructure projects
like the Baltic Pipeline System. After the Soviet collapse, much of
Russia’s oil was exported through the old pipeline terminal at Ventspils,
Latvia—a nice source of income for the newly independent Latvians, but not
for the Russians. Then Putin got involved, asking at a meeting one day:
“Why hasn’t this project happened? Perhaps some Moscow bureaucrats haven’t
been doing their jobs.” Eighteen months later, it was done.
He invites foreign heads of state to St. Petersburg at every
opportunity. Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder have toured the city; Tony
Blair has come twice. George W. Bush is scheduled to visit in May. Putin
has invited European leaders to combine business with pleasure by staging
one of their summits in the city during next year’s tercentenary. The
government expects to spend $387 million on the festivities this year, with
much of the money going into basic improvements like new roads and building
renovation.
Cultural leaders are also looking abroad. Valery Gergiev, director of
the Mariinsky Theater (the local opera and ballet powerhouse formerly known
as the Kirov), has upstaged his competitors at the Bolshoi with stunningly
internationalist fare. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage,
has broken similar ground, seeking sponsorship from private companies,
foreign and domestic, and forging arts partnerships overseas—among them a
collaboration in Las Vegas with New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
Foreigners have always played a major role in St. Petersburg, from
the Italians who designed its magnificent buildings to the French who
brought fashions and ideas. Just so, Putin has made closeness to Europe a
cornerstone of his foreign policy. No less significant is his talk, with
Chancellor Schroder, of building a “Baltic Bridge,” a transport corridor
connecting Hamburg’s huge container-ship port with smaller-capacity ports
to the east. St. Petersburg would be its eastern terminus, with rail links
spanning the Eurasian interior.
Meanwhile the city is developing industries to feed the network.
Regional GDP rose by 6.8 percent in 1999, and 10 percent in 2000. Once at
the center of the Soviet defense industry, Petersburg’s old industrial
giants finally seem to be adjusting to a changed market. One shipyard
recently clinched a big order from the Greek Navy—the first time a Russian
company has signed a defense contract to meet NATO specs. And the city is
becoming a back office for Western high-tech companies like Elcoteq, a
Finnish electronic-components maker employing 170 workers locally.
Breweries like Baltika and Bravo, which dominate the thirsty Russian beer
market, have also attracted foreign investors. The province around the city
is doing even better. Production has grown 50 percent over the past three
years. Ford, Caterpillar, IKEA—all do business there and give officials
high marks for making life easier.
But Petersburg is still Russia—and that means problems. “The criminal
capital,” Russians call it. (By all accounts, the city’s powerful Mafia
clans have fused so seamlessly with the local government that it’s almost
impossible to separate the two.) The city’s demographics aren’t too sunny,
either; a third of the city’s 4.7 million people are of retirement age. And
for all St. Petersburg’s potential, the most capable and ambitious young
natives still move to Moscow. Yet somehow the city’s transformation is so
dramatic, you could almost make a movie of it. Just ask Aleksandr Sokurov.
********
#3
Pope makes virtual visit to six cities, including Moscow
AFP
March 3, 2002
Pope John Paul II made a virtual visit via satellite link-up to several
European cities as part of a Vatican experiment, but the inclusion of
Moscow further strained already tense relations with the Russian Orthodox
Church.
The link-up, part of a prayer vigil with university students, was broadcast
live from the Vatican to Roman Catholic churches in Athens; Budapest;
Strasbourg; Valencia, Spain; Vienna and Moscow.
Hundreds of young people sang, chanted and applauded as the 81-year-old
pontiff sent his messages in Italian, French, German, Spanish and Russian.
"Ask Mary to help you to understand deeply the mystery of her Son, that he
be your joy and your strength," said the pope, who appeared in good
spirits, despite earlier being forced to cancel a scheduled visit to a
parish in Rome for the second week in a row because of a painful right knee.
"Remember that in following his example you will overcome all your
difficulties and find real happiness," he told the gathering.
In Moscow, over a thousand Russian Catholics cheered the pope as the
broadcast took place and called on him to come to this overwhelmingly
Orthodox country in person.
"Zhdyom v Moskve," ("we are expecting you in Moscow"), the faithful chanted
in the Russian capital's Catholic cathedral after the pope had greeted and
blessed them in Russian.
A handful of them also carried a banner emblazoned with the same message,
which Moscow's archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz translated into Italian for
Vatican Catholics gathered around the pope back in Rome.
During the mass that preceded the link-up, Kondrusiewicz called on
Christians from all Churches to unite.
Referring to the euro, which recently became the single currency of 12
European Union countries, he said that if economic and political unity had
been made possible, then surely spiritual unity among all Christians could
also be achieved.
In fact, different brands of Christians, and not only Roman Catholics,
attended Saturday's link-up in Moscow.
A Ukrainian Uniate woman, belonging to a brand of Catholicism that is loyal
to the pope while observing the eastern rite of Greek Orthodoxy, said that
the live broadcast inspired her with hope.
"We (Catholics) often feel lonely here, but today, it is different," she said.
Three dissident Orthodox priests were also present at the Catholic
cathedral, saying that "the pope can do no harm in Russia" -- in a stark
contrast with the Russian Orthodox Church's official line.
And a man sporting athletic looks and a three-piece suit who introduced
himself as an "Orthodox businessman" told AFP he "found the Catholic
message simple, clear and attractive."
The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, had earlier
made clear that the broadcast would offend the Russian Church.
His spokesman earlier this week criticised the "irrational insistence and
determination with which the Vatican proposes various methods of marking
the pope's presence in Russia."
Relations between Rome and Moscow, which have been cool for centuries, hit
a new low last month when the pope announced the creation of four new
dioceses for the Roman Catholic Church's one million strong congregation in
Russia.
The Orthodox Church has condemned what it terms the Roman Church's
proselytism.
*******
#4
Chicago Tribune
March 3, 2002
Russia: Some truth is busting out all over
By Colin McMahon. Colin McMahon is the Tribune's foreign editor. He spent
five years in the Moscow Bureau
The news from Russia late last month that a torpedo explosion almost
certainly doomed the Kursk submarine failed to shock anyone who had been
following the investigation since the nuclear-powered vessel sank in August
2000.
The shock came when Russian officials acknowledged, on the record, that the
Kursk had not collided with a NATO submarine.
Most of the world had figured that out long ago, probably on Day 2 of the
Kursk affair. The torpedo theory was deemed the most credible from the start.
But Russian admirals and politicians clung to the collision theory and the
conspiracies that went with it. Some vowed to make the coldhearted
Americans pay when it was proven that a mystery U.S. sub was to blame.
Never mind, the Russians now say. No one else was there.
Such openness is not the Russian government's way.
Particularly in the military, which remains one of the most Soviet sectors
of Russian society, officials are more likely to manipulate information
than disseminate it, flout the truth rather than tout it.
The breakaway southern republic of Chechnya is the best if bloodiest example.
Russian generals routinely lie about their so-called mopping operations and
about the abuses that occur as troops search for separatist rebels hiding
among civilians. They give casualty statistics infrequently and then only
grudgingly. Even those numbers--more than 4,000 Russian servicemen killed
since October 1999--are greeted with skepticism.
Others in government also put the citizenry on a when-we-need-you-to-know
basis.
Journalists, environmentalists and rights activists routinely must find end
runs around bureaucrats to get even the most basic statistics or reports.
And it is not just the government: Western investors trying to read a
Russian company's balance sheets furrow their brows over what has been
excluded and drop their jaws over what has been invented.
In good company
Of course, Russia's military is not the only one to lie. Its energy
companies are not the only ones to play with the accounting.
Yet it must have been difficult for some in the Russian brass to follow the
controversy over the Pentagon's short-lived Office of Strategic Influence,
which considered feeding false information to the news media and putting
out made-up news stories as a weapon in the fight against terrorism.
Why, the Russians must have asked, would anyone have to create an office to
do what comes so naturally?
This is one reason that the Kursk reports are so gratifying and so
encouraging.
Yes, President Vladimir Putin had already fired the top navy officials who
concocted or embraced the NATO sub theory.
Yes, there were a lot of Russian political battles going on internally that
probably smoothed the way for such a public admission of what some saw as
such a painful truth.
But so what? The fact is that Russia's top law-enforcement official went on
national television and said Russia had no one but itself to blame for the
loss of the Kursk and all 118 men aboard. There was no conspiracy, just
laziness and sloppiness and other sins that are the more constant and more
real dangers.
Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, after touring the Barents Sea shipyard
where remains of the Kursk are being studied, did not muddle the message.
"We have no evidence of a submarine of another state having been there,"
Ustinov said. "Nothing was recorded by surface ships, which monitor such
occurrences from noises. On board the Kursk itself, we found a log with
records of all the hydro-acoustic information regarding the presence of
foreign bodies. . . . The study of all these records indicates that nothing
out of the ordinary was taking place either on board the submarine or near
it. . . .
"You will ask me: `What about the buoy of that alleged foreign submarine
seen approaching by eyewitnesses?' That could be big jellyfish, which
colonize the Barents Sea at that time of year," Ustinov said.
Jellyfish!
The "foreign submarine's buoys," reportedly sighted by sailors aboard a
Russian warship in the area for training exercises, were a key piece of the
so-called evidence pointing to NATO.
Somehow, the story went, an American or British sub collided with the
Kursk, setting in motion two explosions that sent the Russian vessel
plummeting to the Barents Sea floor. The NATO sub was damaged but was able
to send up some sort of distress buoys before slinking off--probably to
Norway--for repairs.
Evidence to the contrary
All manner of real evidence was brought to shoot down this theory, not to
mention official denials from Washington and London.
A NATO sub would lose badly in a collision with the mammoth Kursk, which at
about 17,000 metric tons was more than twice the size of the American or
British subs that might have been shadowing it. Russia's Northern Fleet was
conducting exercises in the Barents Sea when the Kursk went down. With
dozens of surface ships and other subs participating, the Russians would
have been easily able to detect an intruder.
None of this shook adherents of the collision theory. Their answer was
conspiracy: Putin knew, but President Bill Clinton had made the Russian
leader a deal. Russia would not tell the world about Kursk until after
Election Day of 2000. That way, former Vice President Al Gore could be
elected and . . .
The rest of the details varied and, not regrettably, are beginning to blur.
Most troubling was that some senior officials encouraged the game of
blaming NATO despite offering no evidence. The deputy prime minister who
headed the Kursk investigation talked of suspicious video footage. He spoke
of the distress buoys whose colors did not match those of the Russian navy.
He repeatedly said the collision theory could not be ruled out.
That deputy prime minister, Ilya Klebanov, has since been demoted.
Lives may be saved
More important, the navy has pulled from service the type of torpedo
believed to have been responsible. That torpedo uses a liquid fuel made of
hydrogen peroxide, which no other nation still employs because it can be
unstable.
Navy officials finally acknowledged last month that the issue of what
doomed the Kursk affected not only Russia's image but also the safety of
its sailors and submariners. In the end, by coming clean, the navy may have
saved some lives.
As for Putin, he, too, has come a long way since the first days of the
Kursk affair, when the navy and the Kremlin either clammed up or spewed out
tales and half-truths that outraged most Russians. Yet Putin shows no
inclination to transfer any of the lessons from Kursk to Chechnya or other
sensitive topics.
One of the ironies of the latest Kursk report is that the news media, which
in August 2000 played such an important role in getting out the truth and
forcing the navy and government to act, has since been cowed. The voices of
the journalists many Russians regarded as heroes for their Kursk coverage
have been muffled or have disappeared.
********
#5
Georgia Plunged Into Security Crisis
March 2, 2002
By MISHA DZHINDZHIKHASHVILI
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - A vacation paradise in communist times, Georgia has
spent much of its post-Soviet life in hell.
Separatists in two regions defeated the army, leaving the areas essentially
independent. A coup laid waste to the capital. And police failure to stem
banditry in the Pankisi Gorge has purportedly made that area a terrorist
haven, raising alarm from Washington to Moscow.
The security breakdown has brought Georgia to the breaking point it faces
today: The United States is planning to train and equip Georgian troops as
a new front in the anti-terrorist campaign. Russia said Friday it will
support the American operation, but remains wary of U.S. military action on
its southern border, its most sensitive and volatile flank.
Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze helped end the Cold War peacefully
as Soviet foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, but has spent the last
decade trying to save his South Carolina-sized country from anarchy. An
imposing 74-year-old, he has survived two assassination attempts and is
clearly weary, but determined to keep trying.
Shevardnadze blames Moscow for its most pressing security problem - the
troubles in the Pankisi Gorge, which is next to Russia's breakaway Chechnya
region. Tens of thousands of refugees from the Chechnya conflict have
flooded into the gorge since 1999 and the impoverished area has plunged
into lawlessness.
Ordinary Georgians agree they are suffering unfairly for Chechnya's woes.
But they also say Shevardnadze has failed to protect them from destitution,
kidnappers and separatist violence in other areas.
Russia resents Shevardnadze for wooing the West and snubbing Moscow.
Russian officials have accused him of turning a blind eye to Pankisi's
troubles to annoy Russia.
Russia's military claims its opponents in Chechnya are Islamic terrorists
linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, not freedom-minded
separatists. Washington recently said rebels with al-Qaida ties are
operating from Pankisi.
But Georgia's security forces have been unable to deal with a host of
troubles, from Pankisi to the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia and the impoverished area has plunged into lawlessness.
Shevardnadze hinted Thursday that his country was in danger of crumbling.
U.S. officials ``understand perfectly that if a country from the military
point of view is not strong and cannot defend itself, its sovereignty could
become a fiction. Therefore they made a decision to activate cooperation in
the military sphere,'' he said.
Outside Pankisi, Georgia's biggest security threat is Abkhazia, a lush
Black Sea province where Muslim separatists believed to have Russian
backing fought off the Georgian army in a 1992-93 war. Abkhazia was left
with de facto independence but scattered violence continues.
Across a mountain range to the east is South Ossetia, where rebels pushed
out government troops in 1991-92 and tensions still simmer.
Both Abkhazia and South Ossetia border Russia and have cultivated ties with
Moscow. They were buoyed Thursday when Russia's lower house of parliament
suggested Russia could recognize them as independent.
Shevardnadze dismissed the possibility. ``The Abkhazians have nowhere to
go. Abkhazians and Georgians should live together,'' he said. ``That goes
for the Ossetians, too.''
Shevardnadze, who had been Georgia's Communist Party chief in the
prosperous 1970s and '80s, found a host of challenges when he returned in
1992.
He arrived after Georgia's first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia,
was ousted by a weekslong coup that battered the capital, Tbilisi.
Gamsakhurdia failed in an ensuing battle to return to power and died in
1994 under suspicious circumstances, and his followers remain staunchly
opposed to Shevardnadze.
Shevardnadze's government had little money to build a sturdy army and
battled paramilitary groups that had sought to fill the power vacuum after
the Soviet collapse. The fiercest of those were the Mkhedrioni, or
Horsemen, who helped oust Gamsakhurdia and bring Shevardnadze to power -
but later turned against him. The group was officially disbanded in 1995
amid accusations it was involved in a car bombing aimed at Shevardnadze.
By the late 1990s, political violence subsided, but other troubles
flourished - primarily kidnapping for ransom and crippling corruption.
Hundreds of people are believed to have been kidnapped in Georgia in recent
years, including some foreigners, such as U.N. workers and Spanish
businessmen.
The kidnapping of four hermit monks in the Pankisi Gorge in October
galvanized public anger, prompting protests that prodded the government to
order a crackdown by federal police in the gorge.
The police operation freed a few hostages but had little effect otherwise,
and Shevardnadze is now pinning his hopes on U.S. aid building the army
into an effective force.
*******
#6
Los Angeles Times
March 3, 2002
Former Russian Rainmaker Tries Role of Dissident
Politics: Self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky sees himself as a defender of
free speech. But to some, he is the epitome of 'robber capitalism.'
By JOHN DANISZEWSKI, TIMES STAFF WRITER
LONDON -- A few years ago, he was Mr. Inside, one of Russia's most powerful
businessmen and politicians. He was at home in the thick of shadowy Kremlin
deals, helping to make and break prime ministers and presidents.
Today, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky has been shorn of two media empires, is
accused by Russian security services of funding Chechen terrorists and is
sought for questioning by the general prosecutor's office. The 56-year-old
multimillionaire no longer feels safe in his homeland. President Vladimir
V. Putin's Russia, he says, is becoming a dictatorship whose leader can do
anything to his enemies.
What does the consummate insider do when he is on the outside? From an
office on London's stylish Savile Row, Berezovsky has plunged into a new
and unaccustomed role: as a dissident and self-styled defender of free
speech. He would like to offer himself as a rallying point for the liberal
opposition, in what he says is a fight to protect the democratic values of
the 1990s from being subverted by a new generation of KGB apparatchiks.
Berezovsky's detractors--and there are many--sneer at this white-hat role.
They say he is no icon of liberty but rather a former insider seeking a
route back in. During a recent interview in London, where he has taken up
voluntary exile, Berezovsky agreed that the majority of people in Russia
dislike him, but he claimed that a small and important segment is starting
to listen.
He warned of a creeping climate of fear in his homeland that he says would
have been unimaginable under former President Boris N. Yeltsin.
Berezovsky cited the Kremlin's moves since Putin's ascent two years ago to
bring to heel three privately controlled television networks, put Kremlin
appointees in power over elected governors and prosecute what he called
political enemies of the regime.
"Laws count for zero in Russia today because everything is controlled from
the Kremlin, including the court system," Berezovsky declared.
Berezovsky reiterated his accusation that Putin's meteoric rise came about
through a tawdry conspiracy orchestrated by the Federal Security Service,
or FSB, the domestic successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
Berezovsky has alleged that the FSB is responsible for apartment-house
bombings in 1999 that stoked public emotion and provided the reason for
Putin--then prime minister and a veteran of both spy agencies--to launch a
war in the separatist republic of Chechnya.
If an FSB role in the bombings can be laid bare, Berezovsky said, the
scandal would dog Putin's presidency and eventually might help pull it down.
In recent weeks, FSB operatives have fired back, accusing Berezovsky of
backing anti-Russian terrorism in Chechnya and threatening to demand his
extradition to Moscow to face unspecified charges.
Resented by Russians for his money, and notorious for intrigues during the
Yeltsin years, Berezovsky hardly seems the ideal candidate to serve as the
white knight of liberal values.
"Berezovsky is the embodiment of robber capitalism," said Andrei A.
Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Independent Institute for
Strategic Studies. Berezovsky was also part of the establishment at the
time of many alleged misdeeds for which he now blames authorities.
"Such a person, by definition, cannot be the leader of the democratic
opposition," Piontkovsky said.
'Healthy Opposition'
On the other hand, Berezovsky's defenders say he is practically the only
public figure to openly challenge Putin and therefore the battle could
prove important for the country's future.
"Russia needs healthy opposition very badly now. . . . It would be simplest
to say that we don't want to listen to Berezovsky because his credibility
is marred," said newspaper columnist Pavel I. Voshchanov, a onetime Yeltsin
spokesman. "But if we don't have him, we won't have anything."
The 1999 bombings killed more than 300 people and set off waves of panic.
Chechen terrorists were blamed by the authorities, yet the bombers were
never caught.
To Berezovsky, a strange silence has settled on the case and the mystery
itself is damning to the authorities.
"You know the terrible explosion in Oklahoma City? All America was involved
in trying to find out who did that and to put him in jail, and then finally
to execute him. And at least relatives were sure that that was the person
responsible," Berezovsky said. "In Russia, to the contrary, relatives still
don't know. Those who live in Russia are afraid to even ask questions."
Berezovsky has told the media that he has launched his own investigation
into the case, the results of which will be released soon. But in the
recent interview, he seemed to step back from promising to offer proof of
FSB involvement.
"I will present the facts, and for me it is proof. But I don't insist that
for everybody it will be proof," he said.
The most troubling thing about the case, he said, is that it "leads to the
question of who controls Russia. And if it turns out that it is the same
people who organized this terrible crime, then that is terrible for the
state and for the nation."
"I have a lot of problem for myself to understand it and what to do," he
added. "I think that it happened because the KGB was not destroyed and,
moreover, Putin himself and [FSB chief Nikolai P.] Patrushev, they are
proud that they continue the tradition of the KGB."
Berezovsky said he first began to have his doubts about Putin in 1999, when
the little-known FSB director was promoted by Yeltsin to prime minister. In
Putin's FSB office on Lyubyanka Street, there was a small bust of Felix
Dzerzhinsky, founder of Cheka, the KGB's predecessor. Berezovsky said he
did not think much about it at the time. But when Putin moved into the
prime minister's office, the bust went with him.
"It was the first time I felt something was strange," Berezovsky said.
Berezovsky, who was a close advisor to Yeltsin and served as deputy
chairman of the Russian Security Council, said he and Putin had a cordial
relationship until the latter became president.
Berezovsky said he disagreed with legislation appointing representatives of
the president to oversee the work of regional governors.
Chechnya Policy Clash
The two men also clashed on policy in Chechnya.
Berezovsky, who had been highly involved in the Chechen issue under
Yeltsin, said he believed that Moscow should have followed up on its
military operations by holding early negotiations with the separatist
republic's leaders. Putin has rejected talks, even after more than 3,000
Russian soldiers and an uncounted number of Chechen fighters and civilians
have been killed.
Their break, according to Berezovsky, came when Putin complained after the
August 2000 sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk about the coverage of
the disaster on ORT television. The oligarch controlled the network through
his 49% ownership share.
Putin suffered in public opinion when he initially did not cut short his
vacation to take charge of the Kursk rescue effort. Meanwhile, ORT
broadcast enraged statements by the wives and mothers of the doomed crew.
Shortly after, Berezovsky said, Putin summoned him, accused him of ordering
deliberately biased coverage and announced that the state would take
control of ORT. Berezovsky said he was told by a presidential aide to give
up his stake in ORT or "follow Gusinsky to jail."
It was a reference to Vladimir A. Gusinsky, another oligarch, who already
had been briefly arrested. Gusinsky's NTV television irritated the Kremlin,
and a court ruling ultimately gave control of the network to Gazprom, the
state-controlled gas monopoly.
A third private network, the Berezovsky-owned TV6, was stripped of its
broadcast license in January.
Following the so-called media wars, Berezovsky said he is working with
Gusinsky--who also has gone into exile--to broadcast television news into
Russia via satellite. In addition, Berezovsky is launching a
Russian-language magazine, Kolokol, that he says will be a forum for
independent thinking.
Anything to break the monopoly of power, Berezovsky said, adding that he
has no problem referring to Putin as a dictator.
"What do we mean by dictator? A person who concentrates power in his hand
and who is able to do everything that he wants, in spite of the law," he
said. "I am sure that it is so today in Russia."
Although polls of late have given Putin a popularity rating of between 70%
and 75%, Berezovsky predicted that his foe's career as president will be
short.
Popular opinion matters little in Russia, he said; the important thing is
keeping the trust of the elites, of which he named six: regional governors,
mass media, oligarchs, intelligentsia, the military and part of the
security services. All of them, he claimed, are growing disenchanted with
Putin's policies and the growing concentration of power.
Berezovsky acknowledges that the feud might escalate and that he might yet
face extradition. Nevertheless, he said, he will press on.
"Maybe it is strange, but I enjoy what I am doing, even in this difficult
position," he said. "I don't feel I am masochist, but I feel myself strong
enough to continue on this way."
*******
#7
Newsweek International
March 11, 2002
Books: How the Mighty Fell
Tracking the troubles of the Russian oligarchs
By Christian Caryl
Russia’s oligarchs were outsiders who became the ultimate insiders.
Some of them started off as furtive traders in contraband goods. A few
years later they morphed into multimillionaires, emerging from their lavish
villas and chauffeured Mercedeses to call the shots at the highest levels
of government. Then came the punishment for their hubris. The economy
collapsed and their former friends in high places turned against them.
These days some of them are back on the outside, tasting the bitter fruits
of exile.
RUSSIA’S OLIGARCHS WERE outsiders who became the ultimate insiders.
Some of them started off as furtive traders in contraband goods. A few
years later they morphed into multimillionaires, emerging from their lavish
villas and chauffeured Mercedeses to call the shots at the highest levels
of government. Then came the punishment for their hubris. The economy
collapsed and their former friends in high places turned against them.
These days some of them are back on the outside, tasting the bitter fruits
of exile. In terms of sheer drama, it’s an irresistible tale, and David
Hoffman’s new book, “The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia” (
564 pages. PublicAffairs ), milks it for all it’s worth. He’s right to do
so. You just can’t tell the story of how Russia staggered from the
centrally planned command economy to the imperfectly market-driven business
world of today without dwelling on the exemplary fate of characters like
Alexander Smolensky. As Hoffman (full disclosure: a former colleague and
friend of mine) describes him, Smolensky was a “rebel against the system”
who ran afoul of the Soviet authorities in the early 1980s for printing
black-market Bibles. As Mikhail Gorbachev began edging the Soviet Union
away from socialism, Smolensky amassed a fortune by building private houses
for the Communist Party elite. By 1997, he had put together Russia’s
biggest private banking empire—only to see it crumble in the wake of the
1998 crash.
But like most of his oligarch colleagues, Smolensky had already moved
the money into other, less vulnerable companies, salvaging much of his
fortune but leaving his investors—ordinary Russian depositors as well as
Western business partners—in the lurch. As Hoffman writes, when Smolensky
is interviewed about the mess, the diminished tycoon says unrepentantly
that anyone who was stupid enough to put money in his bank deserved “dead
donkeys’ ears.”
The leading characters in this book make Donald Trump look tasteful,
unassuming and well-behaved. Soviet mathematics professor Boris Berezovsky
survived a gangland assassination attempt to appoint prime ministers and
bend Boris Yeltsin’s entourage to his will. Finally, at the peak of his
power, he ran afoul of his protege, Vladimir Putin, who unleashed a flood
of corruption charges that soon drove the magnate into luxurious London
exile. Small-time theater director Vladimir Gusinsky built up the new
Russia’s most formidable media empire, but met a fate similar to
Berezovsky’s when Putin took offense at the critical reporting of
Gusinsky’s television station and print media.
To be sure, Hoffman’s narrative ranges well beyond the simple
rags-to-riches story. Some of the tycoons, like Vladimir Potanin and
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, started their careers as well-connected members of
the Soviet elite who exploited the chances offered by Russia’s shift toward
a market economy. And certainly not all of them were ruined by the 1998
financial crisis, when Moscow simultaneously defaulted on its debt and
devalued the ruble; after all, the government gave the oligarchs three
months to hide their assets before creditors could descend. While Hoffman
gives some of the oligarchs points for sheer chutzpah, he also shows how
most of their fortunes were built by exploiting state-managed resources
rather than creating new businesses. Their triumph was a victory of
cronyism rather than competitive capitalism.
Hoffman deserves credit for providing one of the most vivid and
well-researched accounts to date of this tumultuous period in recent
Russian history. By the end, though, I found myself wishing that he’d gone
just a bit further. Western governments and businessmen were clearly
complicit in some of the funny business he portrays, but, he writes, “this
issue is beyond the scope of this book.” A pity. Perhaps more seriously,
he’s often coy about the oligarchs’ complicity with organized crime.
Throughout the book, the oligarchs are portrayed as corrupt but still
somehow distinct from the “unsavory gangs” who are competing with them. In
fact, you could argue that murder was as much a tool of Russian business
life in the 1990s as share dilutions and pyramid schemes; Hoffman’s book
prefers to focus on the latter.
I am sure other critics will argue that Hoffman’s book is simply
passe. After all, Putin has gone a long way toward cutting the oligarchs
down to size. Aside from driving Berezovsky and Gusinsky out of the
country, he’s essentially told the tycoons who remain that they can keep
their ill-gotten gains as long as they stay out of politics. And yet it was
the oligarchs who brought Putin to power, and the system that reigns in the
country today is the legacy of what they created in collusion with their
patron saint, Boris Yeltsin. For that reason, I’m sure that many future
readers will find themselves returning to Hoffman’s book to find out what,
exactly, makes Russia tick.
*******
#8
New York Times
March 3, 2002
In Stalin's Town, a School Divided
By PATRICK E. TYLER
GORI, Georgia — Spend half a day at Public School No. 4 here in the center
of post-Soviet Georgia and it becomes a little clearer how an old way of
life is dying and a new way is taking root.
Georgia's school system is collapsing. Better to say it has collapsed.
There has not been electricity in this three-story building for 12 years.
The indoor temperature hovers around 40 degrees. Wood-burning stoves have
been added but the wood supply is limited — the whole country is cutting
down the forests. The judo instructor splits wood between classes.
"His salary is so low he cannot get married," the deputy principal said,
raising an eyebrow.
Most students have no textbooks. There are no computers. Among a dozen
students asked, only one had ever been on the Internet — once.
Students study English from Soviet-era texts that extol the virtues of
Marxism and Leninism.
But a course has been added called Declarations, as in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the manifesto issued in the wake of the
horrors of World War II reaffirming that "all human beings are born free
and equal in dignity and rights" and are "endowed with reason and
conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
The repudiation of Hitler and of Stalin runs deep in the principles that
are read out in lectures by the teacher, Markvala Razmadze, and copied down
by students in tattered notebooks, part of a United Nations-sponsored
program to promote enlightenment in the generation coming up in the newly
independent states.
But it is not clear that those profound lessons are fully understood here.
Stalin came out of Georgia; in fact, he was born here in Gori, and a
distinct reverence still attains to the man who sent millions of innocent
people to their doom and defined totalitarianism in the Soviet Union as Mao
did in China.
"I think he is a hero," said Georgi, a 10th grader who is the school's best
hope to play soccer on the national team someday. "He was born here and we
are very much proud of him."
A dozen students gathered around him all agreed.
Yet in 1986, it was a Georgian director, Tengiz Abuladze, who with his film
"Repentance" rendered a sweeping and realistic portrayal of official evil
under Stalin, a film that won acclaim from overflow audiences in Tbilisi,
and the rest of the Soviet Union, at the time.
Today, in Gori and in many parts of the country, Stalin is a far more
popular historic figure than the current president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze,
who as Mikhail S. Gorbachev's foreign minister negotiated a largely
bloodless dismantling of the Soviet empire.
Mr. Shevardnadze's presidency is known here, as in much of Georgia, for
corruption and nepotism. It has created a class of elites who live well,
send their children abroad to school while much of the country shivers
through winter and ponders how much better life was under Communism, when
there was heat, jobs and vacations at the beach.
Still, many of these students now see the world as it is outside of Georgia
and aspire to something not connected to their parents' nostalgia.
"Sure things were fine and good in the past when everyone had work and
could afford to live well, but now we have freedom, freedom of speech and
more possibilities in our lives if a person has brains," said Helen, a 10th
grader who is preparing to enter a foreign-language institute to learn
English so she can go into business — any business.
"We are hoping that Georgia will improve and get out of this situation like
we have under Shevardnadze, where everything is done for himself and his
relatives," she said.
Ms. Razmadze, who teaches the course on human rights, said the
contradiction between the admiration for Stalin that lingers among
Georgians and the principles of freedom and human dignity that are
enshrined in her course material was not something she dwelled on.
"Of course some innocent people were victims because in every city people
reported on each other," she said. "Repression was necessary for the
Communist system to prosper and all the members of the Central Committee of
the party were involved in repression. It was not done by Stalin alone.
"It was bad for him to sign decrees ordering the execution of people," she
added. "This was wrong, but the criminal code allowed for executions at
that time."
Another teacher interjected, "Some repression wouldn't be bad even now."
She shook her head as she spoke, in complaint about some members of the
Georgian Parliament who were Communist apparatchiks a dozen years ago and
are now presumed to preside over the corruption that is universally reviled
here.
The jumble of emotions and conflicting assessments that are heard here are
hard to make sense of, even for the people who live here. They seem to
understand that they are living through a long transition that has reduced
Georgia from a semiprosperous Soviet republic to a newly independent state,
now economically degraded and beset by splintering ethnic tensions and
prodigious corruption. A credible national strategy has yet to emerge,
which is why so many Georgians seem to have one foot still planted in the
past.
Yet many students appear full of hope and a measure of enthusiasm for the
future. Their principal, Nanuli Darsavelidze, said it was difficult to
sustain that enthusiasm — some students drop out after the ninth grade
because they do not see how a diploma can give them any prospect beyond
selling meat in the local market. The best students, she said, stand out,
as they did in Soviet times, and move on to college in Tbilisi, Moscow or
the West.
But she fears that unlike in Soviet times, when vocational schools were a
safety net that caught those who dropped out and trained them for factory
work, today's dropouts will be lost to drugs or crime or simply "the wrong
path." Most factories are shuttered.
Nina Mtsuravishvili, 15, wants to be a doctor. Despite the fact that she
believes that her parents lived in a better time under Communism, she says
the times are not so bad now for those who have aspirations and are willing
to work for them.
"I feel lucky, too," she said in English.
*******
#9
From: "Albert L. Weeks"
Subject: New book
Date: Sat, 2 Mar 2002
May I announce the appearance of my new book--
pub date this coming mid-June?
To be published by Rowman & Littlefield, it is entitled
STALIN'S OTHER WAR: SOVIET GRAND STRATEGY,
1939-1941. It contains an exhaustive analysis of Stalin's
offensive-war plans, how Hitler, as it were, got the jump
on Stalin, who was planning his own "liberation war."
The Soviet dictator, as the documents show,
reasoned that the Western Allies and the Axis
would exhaust themselves in fratricidal "imperialist" war--
a war which Stalin welcomed and, in fact, abetted--after
which the Soviets would conquer Europe for Communism.
The book relies on the latest archival documents as well as
the scholarship of the new generation of Russian historians,
some of whom are affiliated with the Institute of Military
History attached to the RF Ministry of Defense.
No book in the West to date has brought all this new evidence
together in an objective effort to discover just what were Stalin's
plans following his agreements with Nazi Germany up until the
German invasion, June 22, 1941; the meaning of his accelerated
buildup of the Soviet armed forces in 1940-41; the offensist tactics
and strategy that underlay Stalin's war plans.
More about the book may be found at:
http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com Click on "What's New."
******
#10
Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002
Subject: Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy
From: Julie Haenisch
Below you will find a brief description of a new title published by
Princeton University Press. We hope that you will find this title of
interest to your members and will post our message to your discussion list.
Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy
Richard D. Anderson, Jr., M. Steven Fish,
Stephen E. Hanson, and Philip G. Roeder
Why did the wave of democracy that swept the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe starting more than a decade ago develop in ways unexpected by
observers who relied on existing theories of democracy? In Postcommunism and
the Theory of Democracy, four distinguished scholars conduct the first major
assessment of democratization theory in light of the experience of
postcommunist states. Richard Anderson, Steven Fish, Stephen Hanson, and
Philip Roeder not only apply theory to practice, but using a wealth of
empirical evidence, draw together the elements of existing theory into new
syntheses. To read more, click here:
http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7217.html
Paper: $19.95/ £13.95 ISBN: 0-691-08917-5
224 pp. | 6 x 9 | 13 tables, 2 line illus. (2001)
*******
#11
The Russia Journal
March 1-7, 2002
When Russian banks fall, they also fly away
By JOHN HELMER
When a tree falls in the forest, everywhere in the world the same thing
happens. It makes a loud noise; it drops to the right or left; it crushes
the life below unpredictably. But when a Russian bank crashes, it comes
down in a way that’s unique – less like a doomed tree, more like a rat
escaping into a warren of tunnels that were dug in advance.
Alexander Smolensky, the proprietor of SBS-Agro, Russia’s largest depositor
bank in 1998, is probably the only banker in the world to escape scot-free
from the consequences of what he did to bring his bank down. As he shuttles
between homes in Austria, England, Russia and elsewhere, he has never been
held accountable for his actions, which led to the billion-dollar losses of
the bank, nor has he answered to the charges that he and his cronies
stripped the assets of the bank, both before and after the crash. He has
not been charged with any wrongdoing. He has paid nothing. He continues in
the banking business as if nothing had ever happened. His net worth may be
as good, or even better today, than it was before he and his bank parted
company.
In most forests, fallen trees attract woodcutters. But the liquidation of
SBS-Agro has proceeded with no accountability from the Central Bank, which
holds all the evidence of what happened, or from ARCO, the government’s
special agency for bank insolvencies. There has been no parliamentary
action, no review by the Accounting Chamber, no General Prosecutor’s
report, no statement by President Vladimir Putin or any of his officials.
SBS-Agro has been cut apart without a sound.
Compare the circumstances in South Africa over the past month, when Saambou
Bank, one of the largest lenders to black Africans, was forced to close
after there was a run of depositors to withdraw their funds. As in Russia,
there was immediate suspicion that those who controlled the bank had
started to bail out when they realized a crisis of confidence was
inevitable. As in Russia, there is widespread suspicion that the state
banking authority, the Reserve Bank of South Africa, had been dealing
secretly to sustain Saambou’s liquidity while it continued adding to its
loan book, sustaining the bank’s insiders but ultimately abandoning the
bank’s depositors and clients.
The political consequences have obliged both the South African and Russian
liquidators to offer small depositors some hope. Within days, Saambou’s
300,000 depositors, with accounts averaging $261, were offered the chance
to withdraw the balance up to the average total. In Russia, it has taken
almost four years for the government to offer SBS-Agro’s depositors to
return part of their money. But by the time the former dollar accounts have
been converted into rubles at last year’s exchange rate, and the Finance
Ministry bonds into which the cash has been swapped can be redeemed, the
value of the depositors’ balances will have shrunk to around half of what
they were in August 1998. Today, Alfa Bank, one of the government’s
designated agents in the settlement, is offering to buy up depositors’
paper at just 54 percent of their face value. Russians would say getting
that much back from a bank crash is a good deal.
There are big differences, too. What brought Saambou down was its huge
exposure to a practice known everywhere else in the world as loansharking.
In South Africa, since the end of apartheid, that has been called by the
name "micro-lending." That is what happens when poor people with unstable
jobs and unpredictable cash incomes are encouraged to buy consumer goods on
short-term, high-interest credit they can barely afford. To fill its
micro-lending book, Saambou’s management and salesmen abandoned the normal
credit checks of a regular bank. They also dropped the harsh
debt-collection practices of the black townships. Instead of threats to
break legs and cut off fingers, Saambou offered loan rollovers. But lacking
even accurate names and addresses for their debtors, the bank was first
forced to rely on crooked intermediaries, and then on shareholders and the
Reserve Bank to accept increasingly large loan loss provisions. In short,
Saambou crashed when depositors began to suspect that the losses might
outstrip the income or the realizable value of the bank’s assets.
Russians would be mystified by the Saambou crash. For one thing, those who
are poorest are benefiting quickest and most from the cleanup. Not only
poor depositors will get their money back. Poor borrowers in the
micro-lending program are likely to have their loans written off. South
African critics of the Saambou liquidation process are complaining that the
solvency statutes do not allow the official liquidators to favor one group
of creditors over another. It’s difficult, politically speaking, in South
Africa to complain when poor blacks benefit from the misfortunes of
wealthier whites. But there is no doubt that apart from a few insiders at
the top of Saambou, it will be the white shareholders that will suffer most
from the crash – and not only Saambou shareholders. The crash has triggered
a loss of confidence that in four weeks has wiped up to 10 percent off the
value of other bank shares.
The ordinary Russian depositor in SBS-Agro would be astonished to learn
that in his predicament in South Africa, he might emerge from the wreckage
more or less intact, while Alexander Smolensky, the controlling shareholder
of SBS-Agro, would suffer most. In Russia, most Russians would say, if
banks are like trees, they never fall down. They always fly up and away.
******
#12
New York Times
March 3, 2002
book review
'Summer in Baden-Baden': Crimes and Punishments
By JONATHAN ROSEN
SUMMER IN BADEN-BADEN
By Leonid Tsypkin.
Translated by Roger Keys and Angela Keys.
146 pp. New York: A New Directions Book. $23.95.
Isaac Bashevis Singer once recalled that as a boy in Warsaw he read a
translation of ''Crime and Punishment'' and came to the conclusion that
Dostoyevsky was a Yiddish writer. It may seem odd that a Jewish boy could
appropriate an anti-Semitic novelist for his own, but great literature has
strange, identity-bending powers. No doubt there were other Jews who read
Dostoyevsky in Russian and decided that they themselves must be Christian.
Leonid Tsypkin's extraordinary novel, ''Summer in Baden-Baden,'' grows in
part out of the weirdness of a Jewish writer's obsession with Dostoyevsky.
The book is haunted by the meaning and nature of unrequited literary love --
unrequited not simply because books do not love us back or because
Dostoyevsky is dead and gone but because, were he alive, the Russian master
might well have viewed Tsypkin as one of those Dostoyevskyan characters who,
in Tsypkin's words, ''are not even fully portrayed but simply mentioned as
little Jews or some other term implying the lowest and basest qualities of
the human character.'' And behind this painful fact, a larger crisis drives
Tsypkin's book: the predicament of Jews in love not merely with a writer who
despised them but with a language, a literature and a society that has never
truly been able to accommodate them.
Tsypkin was a Soviet Jewish physician who died in 1982 and who -- despite
seeing none of his fiction published in his lifetime -- turns out to have
been a magnificent writer. ''Summer in Baden-Baden'' was literally inspired
by Dostoyevsky's life: the novel is, in part, a recreation of Dostoyevsky's
tumultuous stint in Europe, beginning in the spring of 1867 and lasting for
four productive if chaotic years. (The manuscript was originally smuggled out
of the Soviet Union by a journalist friend of Tsypkin's, and came to the
attention of a German publisher; the first English translation appeared in
1987 in Britain.)
This short book manages to touch on most of Dostoyevsky's career -- his years
in a czarist prison when he was a young man, his run-ins with critics and
fellow writers like Turgenev and Goncharov and, most movingly, his death in
St. Petersburg in 1881, described in splendid and stirring detail. But most
of the action takes place in the summer of 1867, a time when Dostoyevsky was
tormented by creditors, grinding poverty, an urge to gamble, his own
overweening ambition and a wide array of imaginary demons. He is
simultaneously submerged and buoyed by his love for his second wife, Anna
Grigoryevna, an 18-year-old stenographer who had taken down ''The Gambler''
in her own peculiar shorthand.
Tsypkin describes in riveting detail the couple's days in Baden-Baden --
Dostoyevsky feverishly gambling, pawning his wife's belongings, losing
everything, begging for forgiveness on his knees and starting the whole cycle
again. All the while his wife struggles to keep afloat, emotionally and
financially, clinging to and warding off the enigmatic, tormented man who,
for all his abuse and equally taxing remorse, she is mysteriously in love
with.
Anna Grigoryevna is central to the novel because the narrator -- unnamed but
in many ways Tsypkin himself -- begins his book in the Soviet Union, riding a
train from Moscow to Leningrad while reading Anna Grigoryevna's diary of her
early years with Dostoyevsky. The diary is a sort of portal to the past for
the narrator, who begins to refer to Leningrad as St. Petersburg, the name it
bore when Dostoyevsky lived there. He is making a pilgrimage to see the
building where Dostoyevsky died, as well as an imaginative pilgrimage into
the past.
But he is also going to stay in the Leningrad apartment of an old family
friend, Gilda Yakovlevna, whose husband, Moisey Ernstovich, was a doctor who
had studied in Germany ''before the Revolution, as all Jews did who wanted to
receive higher education.'' Gilda, whom the narrator calls Gilya, is lovingly
described, as is the book-filled apartment with its crowd of elderly tenants.
We are suddenly in the world of Soviet Jews, whose surnames and patronymics
have a Hebraic ring -- the narrator half expects Gilya to ''jump up and begin
talking, or rather, shouting in Yiddish, as her parents used to do in the
place near Kiev where she herself was born.'' He loves hearing Gilya's
stories, about Moisey's arrest and miraculous release during the Great
Terror, about the Leningrad blockade, when frozen corpses were dragged
through the streets on toboggans.
There is a gentle air of understated suffering in the lives of these Soviet
Jews, to which we might add Tsypkin's own, having learned in the introduction
that his grandmother was murdered by Nazis in the ghetto in Minsk, that his
father was arrested during the Great Terror and attempted suicide in prison
and that Tsypkin himself, despite a distinguished career as a medical
researcher, lost his job in 1977 when his son emigrated to America. ''Summer
in Baden-Baden'' was composed during a time of penury and isolation.
That night in Gilya's apartment, the narrator finds on the shelf a
prerevolutionary copy of Dostoyevsky's ''Diary of a Writer'' and reads with
''a pounding heart'' an article called ''The Jewish Question,'' which turns
out to be nothing but a litany of anti-Semitic accusations -- about the
destruction of Russia by Jews and about a global Jewish conspiracy involving
gold and jewels sent to Palestine. ''It struck me as being strange to the
point of implausibility,'' Tsypkin writes, ''that a man so sensitive in his
novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and
the injured who fervently and even frenetically preached the right to exist
of every earthly creature and sang a passionate hymn to each little leaf and
every blade of grass -- that this man should not have come up with even a
single word in the defense or justification of a people persecuted over
several thousands of years.''
He then wonders about the strange fascination Dostoyevsky has held for Jews,
noting that Russian Jews have a virtual monopoly on Dostoyevsky studies and
speculating that their devoted dissections of his work might be a
''cannibalistic act performed on the leader of an enemy tribe.'' He also
wonders, less flatteringly, if it might not be ''the desire to hide behind
his back, as if using him as a safe-conduct -- something like adopting
Christianity or daubing a cross on your door during a pogrom.''
One of the things that makes this book so remarkable is that alongside all
this speculation is an intimate, minute and loving -- if unsentimental --
portrait of Dostoyevsky and his wife. This dual motion is what gives the book
its tension and power.
Susan Sontag, in her excellent introduction, suggests that the two stories
-the love of Anna Grigoryevna for the impossible Dostoyevsky, and the
literary devotion of Tsypkin to a writer who ''despised me and my kind'' echo
each other. While that seems true to an extent, ''Summer in Baden-Baden''
seems to be about something more complicated than love.
Tsypkin puts on the great writer's life like a bearskin, making the novelist
move and dance with such persuasive force that when he slips off his heavy
costume and appears before the reader at intervals in the book as a modern
Soviet Jew reimagining the past, the sense of doubleness and deception is
disconcerting and mysteriously moving. In the Dostoyevsky Museum, housed in
the apartment where the writer died, the narrator notes casually the ''museum
employees, young men and women with educated faces, making you think
instinctively that they must be of Jewish origin.'' The ''you'' who thinks
that instinctively is not a Dostoyevskyan ''you.''
''Summer in Baden-Baden'' participates in the power of Russian literature
even as it revises it, assimilates it and even assimilates Dostoyevsky
himself into Tsypkin's world, where intelligence and introspection and
rationality are not antithetical to invention but are vital literary
elements, instruments of the imagination. Tsypkin's stream-of-consciousness
prose style is associative, inclusive, allusive, detached and yet humane.
Tsypkin grapples with Dostoyevsky in this brilliant novel the way Dostoyevsky
grappled with a God who, as Ivan Karamazov points out, allows the suffering
of children. ''Summer in Baden-Baden'' is simultaneously an act of literary
homage and revenge. Tsypkin, who describes Anna Grigoryevna's diary as
sitting on his desk ''like the Bible,'' has found the same solution to the
problem of Dostoyevsky that the scribes of the Hebrew Scriptures found for an
unpredictable and terrifying creator: he has transformed him into a literary
character.
Jonathan Rosen's most recent book is ''The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey
Between Worlds.''
*******
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