#6159
[Second Issue of the Day]
#5
Russia Business List
#288
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
From: Ben Aris <benaris@online.ru>
1. Tom Adshead on political events
Troika
Wednesday, March 27, 2002
Putin will celebrate the second anniversary of his election to the presidency of Russia in Baikal, skiing. The main event of last week was the move to fire Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov , of which more later. The Borodin affair seems to be closed and there are yet more rumors of changes in the government. It does actually look as though Putin¹s vacation is a real vacation and not a tactical one. The president is probably working on his state of the union¹ address and may be thinking about a few personnel changes in the government. Like all the changes in the last ten months or so, these will mostly be at the margins and key effective personnel will not be shifted. The rumor mill points the finger at the ³social² bloc, Alexander Pochinok and Valentina Matvienko, but this looks like a routine rumor and we are not holding our breath.
We are not expecting great things from the state of the union¹ address , either. It has been delayed, as it always is, and there is apparently a lot of fighting in the Kremlin about it, but then that always happens, too. Putin will reaffirm his commitment to cleaning up government and the importance of liberal economic reform as a means to do this, but he did this last year and we have not made a lot of progress since. If there is progress, it has been incremental rather than revolutionary and much of it has taken place behind closed doors.
So we think that the address will contain the same well meant commitments and will be read to a group of senior government and Duma figures, most of whom spend their time trying to work out how to stop Putin carrying out those commitments. At some point, Putin will have to do something about this, but he probably does not have sufficient political strength for this right now.
It looks like Borodin is going to get away completely scot free . He had refused to pay the fine imposed on him by a Swiss prosecutor and the prosecutor was going to take the money out of a bail paid by the Russia Belarus Union. This would have laid Borodin open to the charge that he had misappropriated state funds for personal use. We are not sure that he has a problem with this, but believe it or not, this is a crime in Russia. In the current political environment in Russia, this is like handing several weapons to your enemies and presumably Borodin wants to avoid this.
So a ³private person² has been found to pay the fine and news reports suggest that it is one of Borodin¹s fellow accused, who wants the case to go away. Given that tens of millions of dollars appear to have been stolen out of the Russian state budget, this ³private person² is getting away with things cheap, at 300, 000 Swiss francs. It would cost much more than that to buy a Russian prosecutor .
The biggest political noise last week came around Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov . First, the centrist parties led a move to remove his vote on the Duma council. The council sets the agenda for the Duma¹s full sessions and is very powerful. It has representatives from all the main parties, but Seleznyov¹s vote means that the communists have two votes. The centrists do not like this and decided to change matters.
They had Seleznyov forced on them after the elections in 1999 , because they were too fragmented to mount a serious opposition. They had to content themselves with an unholy alliance with the communists which enabled these two groups to take over all of the Duma committees. This led to a howl of protest from the liberals, who had counted on getting a couple of committees, in line with their overall representation in the Duma.
Now the centrists are much more united and can outpunch the communists and their allies in the Agrarian Party by around 43%to 30%. So they decided to make a first move against Seleznyov, to reduce his power to set the Duma¹s agenda. This went through, while Seleznyov was on an official visit to Spain, and no one paid it much attention. In the final analysis, the agenda could always be changed by an open vote in full session, so the situation did not change that much.
However, the centrists showed that this was just a sighting shot and in the middle of the week asked the Duma¹s protocol committee to start drawing up a motion of no confidence in the speaker. Seleznyov, still in Spain, seemed to have been blindsided.
In fact, he has reacted to the affair with significant dignity. Over the weekend, he said that he would not leave the Communist Party in order to hold on to the speakership. This was a surprise, since he is not a diehard communist by any means. In fact, he had been moving closer and closer to the Kremlin over the last few years and had even set up his own fraction in the Duma. This fraction had seemed designed to entice some leftists away from the communists into a pro Kremlin group, which would have marginalized the communists even more than they are today.
The fact that Seleznyov was so close to the Kremlin made the move by the centrists a the more perplexing . They do not do anything without orders from the presidential administration. It was therefore bizarre for them to move against Seleznyov, who had as much pull with the administration as they do.
To us it looks as though the move to replace Seleznyov, which will probably be successful, is a reflection of the personal ambitions of the relatively unknown politicians who run the centrist parties in the Duma . They have seen one of their number, Boris Gryzlov, promoted to the post of internal affairs minister and no doubt would like to make the same type of career leap themselves.
They are mostly nonentities from the provinces and coming to Moscow is a big break for them. No doubt they want to show their masters in the Kremlin that they are more than just drones who organize votes whenever the administration needs it. Also, each of them wants to lift himself up above the others, because as far as the public is concerned, most of these centrists are just drones who organize votes whenever the administration needs it.
The move against Seleznyov may also reflect a shift of power inside the Kremlin . The speaker is closer to the Family side of things and as they weaken, they may not be able to defend him. Or they may have decided to abandon him, in order to have the Duma be even more compliant than before.
One thing is for sure: this does not really change the political scene in Russia. The Yeltsin era saw a perpetual struggle between the Duma and the government, because the former was dominated by communists, including Seleznyov. The electorate voted a much more centrist Duma in 1999, and the subsequent weakness of the communists has been as big a factor in Russian political life as the figure of Putin himself. Seleznyov¹s removal does not realy change anything, but one communist fewer cannot hurt.
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