Johnson's Russia List
#7144
14 April 2003
davidjohnson@erols.com
A CDI Project
www.cdi.org
[Contents:
WARNING: The next few days JRL will be on vacation in Chincoteague.
There may be some JRL issues but time and Internet connection are
uncertain.
1. Luba Schwartzman: TV1 Review.
2. Reuters: Vatican working on papal stop in Russia-sources.
3. Washington Times: U.S., Russia set goals of reaching Red Planet.
4. pravda.ru: CEC Begins Preparations for Upcoming State Duma Elections.
5. The Guardian (UK): Nick Paton Walsh, Russia denies helping to train
Iraqi
intelligence.
6. The Guardian (UK): Nick Paton Walsh, Anger of Nobel winner's widow.
(Elena Bonner)
7. gazeta.ru: Russia to write off Iraq's debt on 'multilateral basis.'
8. Transitions Online/Vedomosti: Alexander Shumilin, Moving On.(re Iraq)
9. Moscow Times: Dmitry Trenin, One Summit Is Better Than Two.
10. Kommersant: Konstantin Smirnov, MIKHAIL KASIANOV DOES NOT FAVOR
MINISTERS
WITHOUT PORTFOLIOS. The challenge of identifying which state functions
ought to
be cut.
11. The Electronic Telegraph (UK): Barbara Amiel, It's time for Russia to
choose our side in the Great Game.
12. New York Time: Michael Wines, Crime Reports Defy Russian Claims of
Greater
Calm in Chechnya.
13. Radio Netherlands: Stalin's engineering projects.
14. Yezhenedelnyi Zhurnal: Yulia Latynina, RUSSIA'S TOP P.R. MAN.
Berezovsky lost because he was more human than the inhuman system he created.
15. AFP: Investors still shy away from Russia. (re banks)
16. The Gazette (Canada): Michael Mainville, Russian radical writer faces
terrorism charges: He's written 7 books in 22 months in jail. (Edward Limonov)
17. pravda.ru: Space Competition Between USA and USSR was Hard.
Peoples' lives were not valued at all, the competition was more important.]
*********
#1
TV1 Review
www.1tv.ru
Compiled by Luba Schwartzman (luba_sch@hotmail.com)
Research Analyst, Center for Defense Information, Moscow office
WEEKEND Highlights,
Saturday, April 12, 2003
- Russian President Vladimir Putin opened the “Peace, Security
and International Law” Conference, held at the St. Petersburg
University. French President Jacques Chirac and German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder attended the conference. Chirac
declared that the true power of democratic states lies in their
respect for the law. All three leaders agree that the UN should play
a central role in the restoration of Iraq.
- Before the opening of the conference, another ceremony was held
-- Schroeder was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School
of Law at the St. Petersburg University, Putin’s alma mater. The
German Chancellor thanked the University for the honor. He
promised to present the university with a language lab and a
collection of German books. Schroeder also noted that relations
between Germany and Russia are better now than they have been
over the last 100 years.
- Russians celebrate the 42nd anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s 108-
minute flight into space. Members of the presidential
administration and directors of the Russian Aviation and Space
Agency delivered wreaths to the graves of Yuri Gagarin and Sergei
Korolev.
- President Putin signed a decree awarding cosmonauts Mikhail
Tyurin and Vladimir Dezhurov, who took part in flights to the
International Space Station.
- President Putin attended the opening ceremony of the new
building of the Russian National Library. The Library first opened
on January 14, 1814. The new building is one of the largest in
Europe.
- Over 70 of the children injured in the fire at the special home for
the hearing-impaired in Makhachkala will be released from the
hospital in the near future. Doctors are concerned, however, about
the health of 22 other patients.
- A Chinese citizen died on the train heading from Beijing to
Moscow. The young man had no documents. The cause of death
has not been established. It is possible that he was infected with
the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
- Spring flooding is expected to reach its highest point in Russia’s
central regions in the near future.
- British sources report that several Chechens have been detained
near Baghdad.
- The Zvezda factory in Bolshoi Kamen is the second enterprise
that has been approved for processing nuclear waste. It will
convert waste from nuclear submarines.
- Deputy Prime Minister Aleksei Kudrin declared that Russia is
ready to participate in the restoration of Iraq.
- A Japanese news agency reported that vandals attacked the
Russian Embassy in Baghdad. The Russian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs has made no comment.
Sunday, April 13, 2003
- Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov ended his three-day
visit to Japan. He met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi and with representatives of the military leadership to
discuss military cooperation between the two nations. The leaders
also achieved “mutual understanding” on pressing international
security issues, including the problem of North Korea.
- Official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Aleksandr Yakovenko declared that Russia will not demand a
change in the personnel of the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow in
connection with the fall of the Saddam Hussein Regime.
- The Anti-Air Defense Forces celebrate their professional holiday
today.
- Two servicemen died when a federal forces automobile hit a
landmine in the Urus-Martanovsk region of Chechnya.
*********
#2
Vatican working on papal stop in Russia-sources
VATICAN CITY, April 14 (Reuters) - The Vatican is attempting to include a
stop by Pope John Paul in Russia, the first by any pope, on the way to a
planned visit to Mongolia in August, Vatican sources said on Monday.
The sources said the trip to the town of Kazan, which would be either a
brief stopover or a one-night stay, was still not certain but officials had
been working on it for the past few months.
The pope, who marks the 25th anniversary of his pontificate later this
year, is due to visit Mongolia for three or four days at the end of August.
A stop by the pope in Russia , however brief, would be historic, although
he already has visited other countries of the former Soviet Union.
Relations between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church have been
severely strained since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Russian Orthodox Church has criticised the Vatican for allegedly using
new-found freedoms since the fall of communism to poach away believers.
The pope has said he wants to visit Moscow but would not want to do so
without the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was not clear if
the Pope would want to visit Kazan unless the Orthodox Church agreed.
The purpose of a stop by the Pope in Kazan, 800 km (500 miles) east of
Moscow, would be to return to the Russian Orthodox Church the icon of Our
Lady of Kazan, one of the most venerated icons of Virgin Mary in the
Russian Orthodox Church.
The icon, which dates at least to the 16th century, was stolen in 1904 and
was kept in several European cities before winding up at the Vatican.
The Pope, who wants to mend ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, has said
several times that he would like to return the icon to the Russian people.
The possibility of the pope making a stop in Kazan was first reported by
Polish radio station RMF FM earlier on Monday.
*********
#3
Washington Times
April 14, 2003
U.S., Russia set goals of reaching Red Planet
From combined dispatches
NASA picked landing sites last week for twin rovers slated to land on
Mars in January, where the vehicles will look for geological evidence that
the planet was once warmer, wetter and more hospitable to life.
The sites, announced Friday, were selected after extensive analysis to
maximize the chances for safe landings and good scientific prospects. Data
gathered from NASA satellites orbiting the planet suggest both locations
once were abundant in water.
One is a crater into which a now-dry river apparently once emptied,
perhaps creating a lake. The other is a plain rich in hematite, an iron
mineral that typically forms in standing water. The sites, both near the
equator in the southern hemisphere of Mars, are halfway around the planet
from each other.
"They aren't the safest sites, they aren't the riskiest sites, they
are the best sites," the Associated Press quoted Steve Squyres, a Cornell
University geologist and principal investigator for the rovers' package of
instruments, as saying.
Meanwhile, Britain's Beagle 2 spacecraft is aiming at a third location
on Mars, Isidis Planitia, for a December landing. That area is thought to
contain sediments washed down from highlands to the south.
American scientists are confident the tools carried by the elaborate
$800 million pair of rovers will enable them to operate as robotic field
geologists in the hunt for evidence of past water activity.
The landing sites have been studied more closely than any other places
on Mars. Some 100 scientists and engineers took more than two years to
narrow them down from a field of 155 prospects.
Each of the rovers will land at about 40 mph, swaddled in cocoons of
air bags, as did 1997's Pathfinder mission with its much smaller Sojourner
rover. Engineers fear rocks taller than about knee-height could puncture
the air bags.
In choosing where to land, scientists relied on satellite images
acquired by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey spacecraft, as well as
older Viking data from the 1970s.
Sites too steep, windy, dusty or rocky were off limits. The locations
had to be at fairly low altitudes to provide enough atmosphere to fill the
parachutes that will help slow the rovers as they plummet to the surface.
The landing sites also needed to be within a narrow band of the
planet's equator to ensure the rovers' solar panels receive enough sunlight.
Each rover weighs 400 pounds and can move at a top speed of roughly 2
inches a second.
During the 92-day missions, each vehicle is expected to travel about
2,000 feet and make close-up observations of at least a half-dozen rocks.
The first rover, scheduled for launch May 30, will be directed to
Gusev Crater, 15 degrees south of the Martian equator. The second robotic
scout, scheduled for liftoff June 25, is targeted to land at Meridiani
Planum, about 2 degrees south of the equator and halfway around the planet
from Gusev Crater.
The first rover should reach its landing site Jan. 4 and the second
Jan. 25. Each is expected to last for about three months before dust
blankets the rovers' solar panels, cutting off their power.
The rover masts will carry remote-sensing instruments, including
high-resolution color cameras and infrared spectrometers for studying the
minerals in rocks and soil. The rovers also will be equipped with a
microscopic imager to see micron-size particles and textures, an
alpha-particle/X-ray spectrometer to determine what elements the samples
contain, and a Moessbauer spectrometer for determining the mineral
composition of iron-bearing rocks, United Press International reports.
Each rover will carry a rock-abrasion tool, similar to a geologist's
rock hammer, to remove weathered surfaces from rocks and expose their
interiors for analysis.
Also last week, the European Space Agency announced it will send an
unmanned mission to Mars in 2009 to put another roving vehicle on the
planet to search for evidence of life.
It will use a solar-powered vehicle to drill holes into the Martian
surface and take soil samples from sites where scientists believe primitive
life forms may have existed.
The ESA hopes the mission, known as ExoMars, also will provide insight
into the planet's surface and atmosphere. The trip is part of the agency's
preparation for eventual manned missions to Mars.
Russia, meanwhile, said last week it will confine six cosmonauts in an
imitation spacecraft for nearly a year and a half to prepare for a possible
manned flight to Mars in 2018, and foreign cosmonauts could be invited to
join in the isolation project.
The experiment will be designed to simulate conditions that could be
encountered during a journey to the planet that is under preparation,
Dmitry Malashenkov of the Institute of Biological and Medical Problems told
Agence France-Presse.
"The experiment to be carried out at the institute will involve six
people spending 500 days in an enclosed space inside the ground module of a
space station, where certain conditions of a Mars flight will be
simulated," he said.
The participants, who will be given 3 tons of water and 5 tons of
food, will undergo training on how to act in hazardous situations, the
official said. Water and oxygen for the "flight" will be generated by means
of the participants' own life processes.
"If a crew member falls ill, the other members will have to provide
aid on their own," Mr. Malashenkov said.
If the experiment has to be interrupted to evacuate a crew member —
perhaps because of serious illness or psychological stress — "it would be
considered a defeat, as if that person had died," he said.
The six participants have not yet been chosen, and the selection
process will be rigorous, Mr. Malashenkov went on, saying an all-male crew
was likely.
Foreign cosmonauts could be considered for the experiment, which is
expected to begin next year, he said.
The overall space in which the participants will live comprises some
4,500 square feet formed from three modules linked by airlocks, but each
crew member will have a personal space, he said.
A round-trip journey to Mars, whose distance from Earth varies
considerably, would take more than a year.
Russian space authorities have pencilled in 2018 for a Mars launch
because that year would see a combination of optimum conditions: The two
planets would be relatively close, and the sun would be passing through a
phase of low activity and radiation, Mr. Malashenkov said.
Last year, Russian space experts urged their U.S. and European
colleagues to join them in launching a manned flight to Mars by 2014.
Many analysts believe January 2014 would be a more propitious date for
a Mars exploration bid because an exceptional alignment of Earth, Mars and
Venus that year would provide an escape route back to Earth in the event of
a breakdown by means of a gravitational slingshot effect.
NASA is engaged in small-scale studies on manned flight to Mars but
has no plans for a mission.
*********
#4
pravda.ru
April 14, 2003
CEC Begins Preparations for Upcoming State Duma Elections
Russia's Central Electoral Commission has initiated preparations for the
upcoming December elections to the State Duma, or the lower house of the
Russian parliament, CEC head Alexander Veshnyakov told journalists after
yet another session of the commission.
"We have set down to consider simple issues," he said.
During the Monday session, the CEC approved the certificate of a candidate
member of the State Duma of the fourth convocation and the certificate of a
State Duma deputy. It also discussed the certificates of members of
electoral commissions of different levels, as well as certificates of
persons empowered to act for political parties, electoral blocs and
candidate members in electoral districts.
The CEC also considered the candidates for heads of regional electoral
commissions. By September 1st, the beginning of the State Duma election
campaign, electoral commissions must be set up in 75 members of the Russian
Federation, said Veshnyakov, referring to those of the commissions whose
authority expires this year and to Siberia's Krasnoyarsk Territorial
Electoral Commission, which was dissolved by court decision.
According to Veshnyakov's account, the CEC has approved amendments to the
Regulations of the Central Electoral Commission. All members of the CEC
pledged not to become members of the governing bodies of political parties.
"We must not be connected with party decisions, we must be guided by law,"
concluded Veshnyakov.
*********
#5
The Guardian (UK)
April 14, 2003
Russia denies helping to train Iraqi intelligence
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Russia has dismissed reports of cooperation between its foreign
intelligence service and the feared Iraqi mukhabarat, ranging from
espionage training to passing on sensitive information about Tony Blair's
meeting with the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
The reports follow months of suspicion about the historically strong
relationship between Russia's armed services and their Iraqi counterparts.
Washington has accused the SVR - Russia's MI6 - of colluding with the
mukhabarat, and said the Kremlin had turned a blind eye to Russian
companies selling hi-tech military equipment to Baghdad.
An SVR spokesman said yesterday: "We do not comment on baseless and
unproven assertions published in the tabloids".
Yet the Guardian can reveal that two former generals in the Soviet military
went to Baghdad in the weeks immediately before the war. Gen Vladimir
Achalov, a former deputy defence minister and a former commander of
airborne and rapid-reaction forces, and Gen Igor Maltsev, an expert in air
defence systems, left Baghdad six days before the war began.
Gen Achalov, an expert in urban warfare, declined to comment on the visit,
but told Russian media that he and his colleague "didn't fly to Baghdad to
drink coffee".
The Iraqi defence minister, Sultan Hashim Akhmed, decorated the two for
unspecified services to Iraq during the visit. The ex-Soviet hardliners
plotted to oust Mikhail Gorbachev in an abortive coup, but are now retired,
and it is not clear if their visit occurred with the Kremlin's knowledge.
The visit will heighten suspicion over Russian-Iraqi cooperation. The
Observer reported yesterday that it had found training certificates at the
Iraqi secret service headquarters from a course at an unspecified training
centre in Moscow last September. Agents were trained in "photo-technical
and acoustic surveillance".
The Sunday Telegraph reported on the discovery of files in Arabic which
said Moscow gave Baghdad a list of assassins who could be used for "hits"
in the west. The documents also confirm what Moscow does not deny - that
the SVR and mukhabarat signed commitments to share intelligence.
They also agreed to exchange information on the activities of Osama bin
Laden, the al-Qaida leader, whom Moscow pursued as part of the fight
against extremists in Chechnya. Russian secret services have built strong
relationships in the Gulf during a decade-long fight against Islamic
separatists in the republic.
One document contained an Iraqi agent's report of what a Russian
counterpart had told him of a private conversation between Mr Blair and Mr
Berlusconi in Rome in February last year. Mr Blair was reported as
referring to "the negative things decided by the US over Baghdad", and
Downing Street's reluctance to go to war in Iraq before an Afghan
government was formed.
*********
#6
The Guardian (UK)
April 14, 2003
Anger of Nobel winner's widow
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
The widow of the Nobel Prize winning Russian academic Andrei Sakharov has
objected to a statue being erected in his honour in central Moscow because
she feels the human rights abuses, poverty and political life of Russia
today do not correspond to the principles and memory of her late husband.
Sakharov, who helped to develop the first Soviet hydrogen bomb in the
1950s, became a key opposition figure during communist rule, and was the
first Russian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his work on
human rights.
He died in 1989, but now the Moscow government has said it will provide a
prominent site for a monument in Pushkin Square, where Sakharov joined
protests in the 1980s.
Leading politicians have lobbied wealthy businessmen to contribute to its
funding.
The campaign's initiator, Sergei Yushenkov, an MP and leader of the
political party Liberal Russia, said the monument was important "to
preserve the memory of the great son of Russia".
But Elena Bonner, Sakharov's widow, wrote to the organisers, bitterly
opposing the monument.
She said that plans for a memorial were appropriate in the years
immediately after his death as Sakharov's memory was properly understood by
the Russian public, still reeling from years of communism.
But she wrote: "Today we live in another country, and the attitude to
Sakharov's memory has changed.
"What is Russia today? It is a country in which a third of its population
lives below the poverty line... a country waging a bloody war in Chechnya
... a country where nearly every day free mass media are being destroyed by
political or financial pressure."
She added: "Such a Russia does not correspond with the idea of a monument
to Sakharov."
Mr Yushenkov said he would delay the creation of a fund for the memorial so
as not to go "against Elena's will".
*********
#7
gazeta.ru
April 14, 2003
Russia to write off Iraq's debt on 'multilateral basis'
By Alexandra Petrachkova
During his 3-day visit to Washington, where he was taking part in a meeting
of finance ministers from the Group of Eight leading industrialised
nations, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin suggested that Russia may
consider writing off Iraqi debt and taking part in the post-war
reconstruction of Iraq. Moscow would be willing to drop Iraq’s debt only if
Russia’s foreign debt is written off, he said. At the same time, Kudrin
explained why Russia has defied US calls to freeze Hussein’s accounts in
Moscow and why it is interested in stable oil prices.
Formally, Iraq was not a priority issue on the agenda of the G8 Foreign
Ministers’ meeting in Washington. Nonetheless, following the US Deputy
Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s speech last week in which he urged
Germany, Russia and France to write off Iraqi debts, thus contributing to
the post-war restoration of the country’s economy, Baghdad’s debt dominated
the meeting’s agenda.
During a meeting with his US counterpart, John Snow, Alexei Kudrin
reiterated Vladimir Putin’s statement made in St. Petersburg during a
meeting with the leaders of France and Germany. Putin said that Russia
would consider dropping the Iraqi debt to Moscow, estimated at about $8
billion (some analysts put the figure at nearer $12 billion). However, the
decision must be taken ''on a multilateral basis'' under the rules of the
Paris Club, an informal forum of creditor-nations to which Russia itself
belongs.
Kudrin, also a deputy PM, said that Russian companies are interested in
taking part in the reconstruction of Iraq. So far it has not been decided
yet who will restore the destroyed economy of Iraq. However, the US
officials have repeatedly said they could not guarantee that Moscow will
keep its contracts in the country.
Kudrin recalled that before the war began Russian companies had been
operating ''dozens'' of contracts for construction of thermoelectric power
stations, hydro-technical facilities, elevators and other installations.
All of them are civilian objects that are being built in the interests of
the population. No one is interested in the construction of these
facilities being dropped halfway, Kudrin said.
It would be logical for Russian companies to take part in the restoration
of Iraq. Russia believes it is important that it should participate on a
proportional, parity basis and be confident of effective appropriation of
funds. We believe that post-war restoration should be conducted under the
auspices of the United Nations and other international organizations that
would substantially enhance the legitimacy of such aid. This is the way we
are prepared to go, Kudrin declared.
Furthermore, Kudrin is convinced that Russia could help Iraq with blood
donations. Russia donated blood to the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
and the head of the Russian Finance Ministry noted that Russia was ready to
render assistance to Iraq provided, however, that such assistance was
rendered under the aegis of the UN and other international organizations.
The vice-premier did not miss the chance to boast about the achievements of
his ministry’s financial intelligence agency before explaining why Moscow
has defied US calls to close Iraq’s accounts in Russia. ''The Russian
committee for financial monitoring has already detected dozens of
organizations and persons suspected of transferring money to accounts
linked with terrorism [networks]. The Prosecutor General’s Office has
compiled a list of all organizations whose activities are banned in Russia
and whose accounts must be frozen.''
Kudrin then drew his colleagues’ attention to the fact that at present such
lists are being compiled by different states independently and calls from
certain nations to freeze somebody’s accounts require additional
confirmation. Kudrin therefore proposed the establishment of multifaceted
norms in international law to combat the financing of terrorism. Such norms
could help coordinate the fight against the phenomenon, in particular, in
freezing bank accounts of individuals and organizations that cooperate with
terrorists, Kudrin said.
In the first days of the US-led campaign in Iraq Moscow defied Washington’s
call to freeze Baghdad’s accounts in Russia. The Russian finance minister
explained then that according to Russian law, Moscow could only take such
action if it had substantial evidence that those accounts were being used
for money laundering or financing terrorist networks. In Saddam’s case
Russia had no such evidence, Kudrin said then.
Kudrin also explained to his colleagues that it is in Russia’s best
interests to ensure that oil prices are stable and not too high, because
the capital inflows can make the rouble too strong. He said he had
discussed oil prices with US Treasury Secretary John Snow. ''From the point
of view of our countries, we are interested in having stable, moderate oil
prices because our economies suffer from both low and high oil prices, and
the world economy suffers,'' Kudrin told reporters in Washington.
''That is why we need to ensure stability. Russia supports stability of oil
prices and we have reiterated this view on a number of occasions.'' He said
he expects oil prices to fall next year and said that the government is
planning next year's budget to include the assumption that oil will be
$18.50 per barrel.
On Sunday Alexei Kudrin took part in a session of the executive bodies of
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Commenting on the data
contained in the World Bank report published on Sunday, which puts Russian
foreign debt at $152 billion, he pointed out that Russia's total foreign
debt is not excessive. Kudrin reiterated that ''the debt does not have to
be repaid today'', it can be restructured and payment deadlines can be
adjusted. ''This is normal practice,'' he said. The deputy prime minister
recalled that Russia's foreign debt currently amounts to 40 per cent of
GDP, which he said was even lower than the criteria applied in the European
Union.
*********
#8
Transitions Online
www.tol.cz
14 April 2003
Moving On (from Vedomosti)
By Alexandr Shumilin. Translated by Kevin Krogmann. The author is the
director of the Center for Analysis of Middle East Conflicts at the
Institute of USA and Canada Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences.
MOSCOW, Russia--Coalition forces had only just taken control of the port of
Umm Kasr when it became known that the American company SSA (Stevedoring
Services of America) had been awarded a series of reconstruction orders
worth about $5 million. The total sum of such contracts that are reserved
for American companies is expected to amount to $1.5 billion. On the one
hand, that’s not a small amount; on the other, it’s a drop in the ocean
compared to what is being spent on the war, which might amount to more than
$100 billion.
This episode was received in Russia as bearing witness to the “root” causes
of America’s war: people say that the Yankees want to take over Iraq,
especially the oil wells, and then get the contracts for reconstruction.
Or, people say, the Americans want to push as many Russian companies out of
Iraq as possible.
A main goal or not, it will probably happen just like that, if not for
political, then for commercial reasons. It’s unlikely that all the Russian
companies, comfortably entrenched in Iraq, will be able to withstand the
competition from American and British corporations. And if you consider
that reconstruction contracts so far are being paid from the U.S. federal
budget, then Russians and Europeans might not have much of a chance.
The history of American companies’ success is not just because of market
forces, but closer to the White House’s military-political campaign using
economic means--in order not to lose the support of homegrown enterprises.
Nonetheless, the prognosis that Russian companies will be able to retain
(at least in part) their share of the Iraqi market is not that far fetched:
the White House might be more interested in having the Russians--instead of
the French or Germans--getting a piece of the pie in post-war Iraq.
U.S. President George W. Bush promised Russian President Vladimir Putin
that the United States would respect Russian economic interests in Iraq,
but that wasn’t all. There are other factors: even if the Americans,
despite European and Russian objections, take it upon themselves to do the
dirty work of getting rid of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the transformation of
Iraq into a U.S. protectorate over the long-term is very risky. It would be
reminiscent of the colonial past and create a corresponding relationship
with the Arabs. Statements by the U.S. president and Secretary of State
[Colin Powell] about their desire to get the UN involved in the post-war
rebuilding of Iraq follow from this logic. Moreover, the Americans are not
predisposed to share power in the new Iraq and therefore the process of
awards under UN programs will be controlled by the victorious superpower.
That might mean that the chances for the “active opponents of war”--France
and Germany--to return to Iraq through a UN program will be minimal.
Instead the Americans will reward “close alliance partners.”
Curtailing Russian contracts in Iraq is a more delicate question for the
United States. What’s more, the United States can gain serious political
dividends by taking Russian economic interests into consideration: the Bush
administration would have a lever for transforming relations with Russia to
a more constructive basis; there would be less criticism from Moscow on the
military operation; and the loud anti-Washington “united peace front” of
the old Europeans and Russia would be significantly weakened.
The results of a U.S. rapprochement with Moscow regarding post-war Iraq
might also turn out useful for Washington in the region. Due to inertia,
the majority of Arabs believe that the Russians are prepared to stand up to
the United States. The inclusion of Russia, therefore, in the
reconstruction of Iraq may give the process a different, anti-colonial
feeling and lessen anti-Americanism in the Middle East.
WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
Washington understands this and that’s why Powell called [Russian Foreign
Minister] Igor Ivanov with an offer to think about participating in the
post-war reconstruction of Iraq. Of all the possible schemes, Washington
has chosen the one that creates a window of opportunity for Russia.
Moving away from the possibility that would create and give power to an
“Iraqi” government--made up of opposition-exiles and/or internal
anti-Saddam opposition--which would have horrible relations with Russia,
Bush’s team has chosen the option in favor of an open American management.
The plan is as follows. In the first stage, power in Iraq will be given to
a “temporary civil government” formed by the United States under the
leadership of retired Gen. Jay Gardner, head of the Pentagon’s Department
for the Reconstruction of Iraq and Humanitarian Aid, and in close
cooperation with U.S. and British military command. Within the department,
Iraqis will be used as consultants and specialists. In the second stage, a
transitional Iraqi government will be created as a quasi-government with
limited competence. This government will be in charge of civil and
humanitarian ministries and the so-called power ministries will be under
the full control of the military administration. In the third stage,
elections will be held to form a fully empowered national government and a
gradual reduction in the U.S. presence.
Supposedly, Iraq’s oil complex will be controlled by the Americans and
Iraqis via a specially formed Iraq oil committee. There are already signals
coming from the White House that the Bush team “is trying to convince
Iraqis to retain as a minimum contracts that have already undergone the
process of registration and legalization by the UN sanctions committee.”
That is a clear gesture in the direction of international law and,
importantly, in the direction of Russia. It is high time that the Russian
government begins thinking about how to combine its “principal rejection of
war” in Iraq with much more pragmatic tasks to save its economic interests.
********
#9
Moscow Times
April 14, 2003
One Summit Is Better Than Two
By Dmitry Trenin
Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, contributed
this comment to The Moscow Times.
More than three weeks into the war, transatlantic divisions over Iraq
continue. After the Bush-Blair summit in Belfast last Monday, the leaders
of France, Russia and Germany met in St. Petersburg over the weekend. The
issue on the table at both summits was Iraq's postwar reconstruction, in
the broadest sense of the term. The views expressed, despite some recent
fence-mending, are still far apart.
Yet, the time has come for the coalition of the willing and the coalition
of the unwilling to work hard to narrow the divide. As the military
operation is entering its final phase, the United States and Britain -- de
facto in control of much of Iraq -- are thinking increasingly in terms of
winning the peace. They are right to stress that an allied military
government is only a short-term proposition. Any succeeding Iraqi
administration, however, will need international legitimacy, which can only
be supplied by the United Nations.
The France-Russia-Germany troika, of course, is coming from the opposite
end. The three nations are seeking to assert a measure of international
autonomy vis-È-vis the United States by restoring the UN's role in postwar
Iraq.
However, they can only succeed if the United States agrees that they can
have a piece of the action on the ground -- on certain conditions. Thus,
they will have to let the United States and Britain finish the job, and
accept the outcome of the war as the starting point.
In the postwar environment, in fact, the central interests of the United
States and the other major world powers largely overlap. No one is
interested in the destabilization of Iraq and its possible break-up. No one
can hope to benefit from ethnic, religious or clan-driven conflicts; and
all will suffer from the rising wave of Islamic extremism, which will be
difficult to contain within the borders of Iraq. Thus, all have a major
stake in seeing to it that the end of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is not
followed by the scourge of civil war.
Initially, this will be the responsibility of the United States and
Britain, subsequently shared by the Iraqi authorities. A UN administration
is not in the cards. Iraq is neither East Timor nor Kosovo. It is not a
nation to be built. Rather, it is a state that has to be thoroughly
overhauled. And as a state, Hussein's Iraq was closer to the former East
Germany than to neighboring Saudi Arabia. To prevent a dangerous deficit of
legitimacy, it is vital that a new interim Iraqi government emerges in time
to take that nation's seat at the UN General Assembly, so that it is able
to speak for Iraq early in the reconstruction process.
The exact composition of the interim government will probably reflect the
judgment of the Americans and the British more than anything else.
Hopefully it will stretch way beyond the well-known group of ÎmigrÎ
figures. The key to success is to recruit those pragmatic and patriotic
Iraqis who see in the fall of Hussein a chance for their country to move
ahead to become the Arab world's genuine leader in modernization. This
means promoting secular Iraqi nationalism for the task of domestic
transformation.
As a means toward that goal, a Bonn-type conference, along the lines of the
one that followed the end of the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, makes
little sense. It is best if the interim administration is composed of
capable and respected people, rather than representatives of the warring
factions. Elections to a constituent assembly should be set now, but not
take place too soon, to allow the Iraqi authorities and the allied
government to win a measure of credibility, and to allow Iraqi society to
come to terms with the trauma of war and (even if partially) the preceding
decades of despotism. Organizing elections and certifying their results
could be the UN's first major responsibility.
Inevitably, in the run-up to this one would expect a certain amount of
horse-trading between the United States and the France-Russia-Germany
group. The United States would be unwise to rule out the three countries'
participation in the reconstruction effort completely. It needs partners in
peace even more than in war. It is unlikely, however, that the French,
Russians and Germans will in the end get more than a token consolation
prize. Tactically, they must know they have lost through miscalculation,
and they have to accept this. They must also know that they will lose much
more heavily if they continue opposing the United States, and attempt to
keep their axis going. The troika has run its course.
Next time, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council should be
meeting together, and getting down to business.
*********
#10
Kommersant
April 14, 2003
MIKHAIL KASIANOV DOES NOT FAVOR MINISTERS WITHOUT PORTFOLIOS
The challenge of identifying which state functions ought to be cut
Author: Konstantin Smirnov
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]
PRIME MINISTER MIKHAIL KASIANOV IS DETERMINED TO SPEED UP THE
DEVELOPMENT OF ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM PLANS. THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
MINISTRY HAS BEEN INSTRUCTED TO PREPARE A COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF
SURPLUS AND DUPLICATE FUNCTIONS OF STATE AGENCIES. HOWEVER, THE FIRST
ATTEMPT TO GET RID OF THESE PROVED UNSUCCESFUL.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov is determined to speed up the
development of administrative reform plans. As we reported on April 9,
the Economic Development Ministry has been instructed to prepare a
comprehensive list of surplus and duplicate functions of state
agencies, by May 5. However, the first attempt to get rid of these
proved unsuccesful: the Economic Development Ministry adopted a
mechanical approach of eliminating some state agencies and expanding
others. We have obtained copies of government documents which analyze
the reasons for this failure.
The government aims to launch administrative reforms by the end
of this year, and one of the goals is functional restructuring of
state service. The government intends the elimination process to be
gradual. For example, First Deputy Economic Development Minister
Mikhail Dmitriev has proposed reducing the number of ministries from
24 to 15-17 at the first stage. However, the Russian Union of
Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE) wants a more radical approach,
proposing to halve the number of ministries immediately.
Actually, the number of state agencies is not the main issue.
Powers and authorities must be distributed within and between agencies
in a way that rules out any conflicts of interest. Each level of
government should carry out only one administrative function. The
Cabinet and the ministries will retain the function of issuing
regulations and directives. Supervision will be exercised by agencies
and services - many of which may be subordinate to ministries, but
independent in organizational terms.
Most importantly, the ability of state officials to intervene in
the economy must be reduced to a minimum. To do this, the state needs
to identify the functions it can hand over to organizations such as
the RUIE. All this is required in order to make the state apparatus
efficient, uncorrupt, and relatively inexpensive to run. The Kremlin
and the Cabinet hope this will accelerate economic growth.
However, that is only theory. In practice, there has been no
significant progress on administrative reforms as yet. On September 3,
2002 Kasianov stated that it was time to determine exactly how many
state functions there are, and which of them could be discontinued. By
February, the Economic Development Ministry had counted over 5,000
state functions, dividing them into three categories: setting
regulations, applying regulations, and providing state services. After
that, matters ground to a halt. Not a single state agency proved
willing to give up any of its functions. It was an example of tried
and tested bureaucratic reasoning: the fewer powers we have, the less
funding we get.
Then the prime minister ordered the Economic Development Ministry
to conduct an experiment: choosing three agencies and identifying
their duplicate or obsolete state functions. Mikhail Dmitriev,
responsible for administrative reforms at the Economic Development
Ministry, considered this an impossible task, since reforming only two
or three out of several dozen state agencies could only have the
reverse effect. However, he resolved to try it, proceeding to identify
surplus and duplicate functions of the State Meteorological Service
(Rosgidromet), the Russian Patents Agency, and the State Fisheries
Committee.
This produced not only outrage from the agencies facing the axe,
but the displeasure of the prime minister. He had not instructed
Economic Development Minister Herman Gref to abolish any agencies -
only to weed out some of their functions. A number of Cabinet staff
departments analyzed the Economic Development Ministry's proposals and
found the reason for the error: incorrect cuts. According to Vsevolod
Vukolov, head of the state service department, the Economic
Development Ministry had proposed "what was essentially a mechanical
redistribution of functions between the specified agencies, without
changing or abolishing those functions".
However, despite this failure, the prime minister has instructed
the Economic Development Ministry to continue identifying surplus
state functions - but this time, across all federal government
agencies. The deadline is May 5. On May 15, the Economic Development
Ministry's proposals will be discussed at a Cabinet meeting. If Gref's
subordinates once again propose to abolish as many agencies as
possible, while mechanically transferring thousands of unabolished
functions to the remaining state officials, then Russia - like
Djibouti - might end up with agencies as exotic as a Ministry of
Justice, Muslim, and Penal Affairs.
(Translated by Andrei Ryabochkin)
********
#11
The Electronic Telegraph (UK)
April 14, 2003
It's time for Russia to choose our side in the Great Game
By Barbara Amiel
The players take their positions for the "Great Game", Kipling's name for
the geopolitical contest between Russia and other powers for influence in
southern Asia and the approaches to the Middle East.
In leaderless Baghdad, daily life is nasty. Saddam Hussein's regime had the
monopoly on looting and lawlessness, but now it is in the hands of
disorganised private interests. This is lost on BBC commentators, who blame
everything - SARS, if only they could - on the coalition. About the only
thing in Saddam's favour was that you could get the death penalty for
listening to the BBC.
UN humanitarian agencies wrongly predicted over a million Iraqi refugees,
hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the severe disabling of
electricity and water in the country. Unperturbed by their logistical
errors, the same UN agencies now insist that they must be involved in the
reconstruction of Iraq. The unsinkable UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan,
explains that "above all, UN involvement does bring legitimacy" to the task
of reconstruction.
Given that the UN is little more than an assembly of clapped-out tyrannies,
just how it can possibly confer legitimacy on anything is a delusion the
now vanished Iraqi minister of information might envy. Having first tried
to prevent regime change, the UN and Jacques Chirac now wish to preside
over the choice of Saddam's successor. This is one better than the cuckoo
that only steals other birds' nests for its offspring: the UN, as
super-cuckoo, tries to block attempts by other birds to build a nest, and
then takes it over.
In America, people are desperate to blame regimes, rather than the Arab
people, for the strong anti-American sentiments they hear. The fact that a
number of Arabs are unhappy with the United States is shunted aside. It
would be comforting to think the Arab world was like eastern Europe waiting
for liberation, but it both is - and isn't.
The Arab world has a split personality over our help: it wants clean water
and prosperity, but not us. Having another nation clean your befouled nest
is humiliating. But they can't do it themselves and so, like the goat in
one of Orwell's essays, try alternately to take a bite of a piece of bread,
then to butt the man offering it, hoping that, if the man is driven away,
the bread will somehow remain suspended in the air.
The news from Moscow comes via Baghdad. The Sunday Telegraph claims that
documents found there reveal that Russian intelligence had been briefing
Iraq on British and American secrets before the war. Whatever role in the
Great Game President Vladimir Putin is playing, one question must be
echoing in St Petersburg and Moscow. Why has the Russian army fought for
years, flattened Grozny, taken heavy casualties, and yet not achieved in
Chechnya what the Americans achieved in three weeks?
We don't know yet whether the West has achieved all it needed to in Iraq,
never mind the Arab world. But in Chechnya, the Russians have only managed
to be brutal. They operated on the notion that if you grabbed a people by
their vital parts, the hearts and minds would follow. That crude assumption
left Russia at the wrong end of asymmetrical warfare - the current term for
the guerrilla warfare between a low-tech power and a high-tech one. The
Russians are just sufficiently high-tech to have the disadvantages of that
status without its advantages, which explains the disaster of the Chechnyen
hostage episode in a Moscow theatre. Mr Putin's team had enough technology
to rescue hostages by introducing gas into the theatre's ventilation
systems, but not enough to do so without asphyxiating a good number of them.
Asymmetrical warfare may become the legacy of Iraq. Fighting the Americans
in that country through low-tech terrorist tactics is the next logical step
for Islamists, Wahabis, Ba'athists and other anti-American elements in the
Middle East and Third World. Already, the strange disappearance of so many
of the Ba'athist leadership, what John Keegan referred to as the "chief
mystery", has led to a mixed bag of rumours. Did Saddam send his sons and
his entourage away to Syria before the war or in its early stages?
Some intelligence networks postulate a route for them through Syria or Iran
to Moscow. Conspiratorial as this sounds, it could make some, small sense.
Given the various Ba'athist factions in Syria, Tariq Aziz et al would find
Moscow a better base from which to direct operations than Damascus. The
relationship between Moscow and Baghdad has many strands, including the $8
billion of debt Iraq owes Russia. Yevgeny Primakov's lengthy visit to
Baghdad last February also brought unconfirmed reports of a bizarre Russian
proposal to prevent war by allowing Saddam to keep his wealth and live in
an internationally protected palace compound in Iraq, if he would agree to
resign after one year of a transitional government.
Giving succour or asylum to some Ba'athist enemies of America could only be
in Russia's interests as a joker in Mr Putin's hand that he could quickly
discard. In 2002, the deputy head of Russia's international affairs
committee wrote of the possibility of Germany "threatening US domination of
world affairs". Mr Putin must decide whether the best opportunity for
Russia to counter American uni-power is by joining France and Germany in
opposing it or forming an alliance with the US.
In Washington, the Great Game is better understood as football than as
realpolitik. President Bush certainly wants to make a deal with Mr Putin,
but has failed so far. The White House believes there is a shared interest
in deposing Middle East radicals, given Russian problems with Islamists and
Chechens. Perhaps Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, has
focused too much on the moral and strategic value of the Iraqi operation,
rather than its tangible benefits to Mr Putin. Russia, after all, might be
more interested in oil contracts and a pay-off. Its president comes from a
KGB culture and Mr Bush and Miss Rice, when all is said and done, are not
KGB sort-of-thinkers. Possibly, in spite of Mr Bush's background as an
oilman, the deal Mr Putin wanted was too far out of the moral ballpark.
In London, Mr Blair, having won his hand, seems to think it is time now to
give it away. His support of the UN and his apparent desire to plant
Britain squarely back in the Franco-German camp seem perverse. For all Mr
Blair's stellar qualities, his attraction to the miasmic notion of nation
states joining together in an international jamboree is junior common room
circa the 1960s. Indeed, those holding sway in Europe now, from Gerhard
Schröder to Mr Blair, remind me of what Dostoevsky observed about Russian
novelists when he said "we all came out of Gogol's Cloak". This lot all
emerged from Tom Wolfe's "quasi-Marxist fog".
But Mr Blair stands above most European leaders in having the true courage
of his convictions. If the 21st century is going to be less ideological
than the 20th, there must still be a place beyond the cynicism of
Palmerston's "no eternal friends, only eternal interests". Perhaps what the
Great Game needs - and may have in Mr Blair - is a George Canning in
Downing Street to help coach Baghdad, Moscow and Washington and win for all.
********
#12
New York Time
April 14, 2003
Crime Reports Defy Russian Claims of Greater Calm in Chechnya
By MICHAEL WINES
MOSCOW, April 13 -- Statistics that came to light today about violence in
the Russian republic of Chechnya and related crime reports detail a parade
of disappearances, killings and beatings that run contrary to Russian
government assertions that life in Chechnya is slowly returning to normal.
The civilian murder rate in Chechnya is at least two to three times as high
as in Moscow and the abduction rate is almost double the murder rate,
according to the previously unreleased statistics compiled by the region's
pro-Moscow government.
The statistics do not include deaths in the region's low-level guerrilla
war, in which roughly a dozen to two dozen Russian fighters and an unknown
number of antigovernment guerrillas die each week.
The crime statistics, ostensibly public information but never formally
released, were provided by a person close to the pro-Moscow government who
disagrees with the government's assertions.
Chechnya's pro-Russian leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, is reported to have begun
circulating similar reports in high levels of the Russian government in an
effort to win support for reining in the patchwork of militias, special
police forces and military units operating there.
According to the reports, 70 murders of civilians were recorded in Chechnya
in the first two months of 2003. That translates to an annual murder rate
of 38 to 60 killings per 100,000 Chechnya residents, depending on the
republic's population. By comparison, the murder rate in Moscow is about 18
per 100,000 residents.
Russia's recent census placed Chechnya's population at nearly 1.1 million,
but many experts place the actual number closer to 700,000.
During the same two months, the Chechen report states, there were 126
abductions, 19 reports of missing persons and the discovery of 52
"fragments of bodies."
A separate tally from the republic's emergencies ministry records the
unearthing of the bodies of 2,879 civilians in apparently unmarked graves
in 49 locales, ranging from the discovery of 699 bodies in the village of
Goyskoye to one or two dead in places like the former Soviet Collective
Dairy Farm No. 15 and the hamlet of Orekhovo.
The data is presented without comment, making it impossible to determine
how the civilians died or who might have killed them.
In recent months, the Russian government has claimed to have all but wiped
out organized guerrilla resistance within Chechnya and has said it is
beginning a large-scale program to restore life in the region to normal.
Many thousands of refugees in nearby Ingushetia are being prodded to
return, sometimes under protest. The government said Chechens voted
overwhelmingly in favor of a pro-Russian constitution re-establishing civil
rule in Chechnya in a referendum in late March.
In an interview today, Oleg Orlov, an official of Memorial, a Russian human
rights group, said that his organization had seen the crime reports and
that the data, while accurate, failed to include a number of crimes
documented by rights workers in the same two-month period.
Taken as a whole, he said, the reports "describe a region where there is a
guerrilla war in full swing, with all the accompanying horrors."
"In my view," said Mr. Orlov, "this region is, unfortunately, not on the
path to peace."
For that, he said, both Russian and guerrilla fighters are responsible, for
both have engaged in crimes and acts of retribution that have kept a
low-level war seething long after the major conflict had ended.
A sheaf of individual crime reports provided with the statistics suggests
as much. The reports briefly describe scores of incidents in late 2002 and
early 2003, some of which bear the earmarks of Russian military forces, and
others suggesting activity by guerrillas or criminals.
On Feb. 2, for example, the Chechen police were told that 15 to 20 men in
camouflage and masks and riding in armored personnel carriers burst into a
house in Grozny's Staropromyslovsky District at 3:20 a.m. and abducted a
30-year-old man.
Two more armored vehicles, again carrying men in camouflage and masks,
carted away another 30-year-old man in Grozny's Zavodsky district the next
night.
Such disappearances are an almost nightly occurrence in Chechnya. The use
of armored vehicles, which are all but unavailable to guerrillas, points to
abductions by the Russian or Chechen military, human rights workers say.
But guerrillas also appear to engage in kidnappings, as on Feb. 5, when
unidentified men in Russian jeeps broke into a house in Pervomayskaya,
outside Grozny, and took away two brothers.
The United States has frequently criticized Russia's conduct of the war in
Chechnya, citing reports linking pro-Russian forces to human rights abuses.
But the State Department said on Friday that it would break with past
practice and decline to sponsor a resolution criticizing Russia when the
Chechnya conflict comes before the United Nations Human Rights Commission
this week.
An official of the monitoring group Human Rights Watch called the decision
"shameful" and charged that American officials had "muted their own moral
clarity."
A State Department spokesman said that the United States had yet to decide
whether it would vote in favor of a resolution censuring Russia, but that
it believed that the s referendum last month on re-establishing civil rule
in the republic offered at least a chance for progress toward a political
solution to the conflict.
*******
#13
Radio Netherlands
April 13, 2003
Stalin's engineering projects
by Marijke van der Meer
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin,
dictator of the Soviet Union for over a quarter of a century. Under his
regime, the Soviet Union became the world's second largest industrial
power, but at an enormous human price. His gigantic collectivization and
industrialization schemes showed little regard for human life or for the
humanly feasible. It is estimated that Stalin was ultimately responsible
for the deaths of tens of millions of people through deportation,
imprisonment, execution, starvation and hard labor. He harnessed and
imprisoned an entire nation in order to construct a new physical and a new
human landscape.
Writers forced to sing praises
One of the lesser known chapters of the era is the story of the colossal
waterworks projects undertaken by Stalin and how he forced many of the
country's leading writers to sing the praises of these grandiose, partly
unworkable, engineering schemes. This is the subject of a fascinating book,
called "Engineers of the Soul" by Dutch journalist Frank Westerman.
Stalin's hydraulic engineering plans included a gigantic network of canals
linking Moscow to five seas and the never completed "project of the
century", or perebroska, which involved reversing the flow of five Siberian
rivers to the arid south (designed to end the Soviet Union's dependence on
cotton from Texas for its Red Army uniforms). Westerman draws a parallel
between Stalin and Karl Wittfogel's classic study of oriental despotism, in
which he argues that wherever water is manipulated on a massive scale, the
state tends toward despotism. It is hard to know what came first: Stalin's
desire to change geography or his desire for absolute power, but it is
clear in Westerman's book that Stalin's ambitious waterworks projects
demanded cheap and compliant labor on a mass scale, and thus the creation
of a network of prison camps, secret police, and a censorship apparatus.
"Production of souls"
There is, therefore, a close link between Stalin's desire to transform
Soviet geography and his desire to reshape the Soviet mind. For this he
needed the artists: writers, film-makers, composers and architects.
"Engineers of the Soul" focuses on Stalin's mobilization of an entire
generation of talented writers who were left little choice but to
participate in this propaganda project. The title of the book refers to a
speech that Stalin gave to a gathering of writers at the home of Maxim
Gorky on October 26, 1932, in which he exhorted the writers to reshape the
souls of men: "The production of souls is more important than the
production of tanks….And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the
engineers of the human soul." From that day until Stalin's death, there was
not a sluice or dam that did not have an heroic poem or novel devoted to
it, no matter how devastating the cost in human or environmental terms.
Through a combination of investigative journalism and literary history,
Westerman visits several of Stalin's giant hydraulic engineering sites in
present-day Russia, such as the Volga-Don and the Belomor canals, and
contrasts what actually happened there with the false heroics depicted in
what he calls Stalin's "waterworks library". This well-researched book is
full of surprising details and anecdotes about the lives of writers under
Stalin—writers like Konstantin Paustovski, Boris Pilnyak, and Andrei
Platonov. And then of course there is Maxim Gorky, who was lured back to
Russia to become Stalin's chief propagandist and himself became a victim of
this "society of illusions" when he was brought an individually censored
edition of 'Pravda' on his deathbed.
Self-perpetuating spiral of falsehood
The writers, referred to as the "liriki", found themselves in the
schizophrenic position of having to paint a grotesquely glorified picture
of the work of the 'fisiki', the actual physical engineers, who in turn
felt they were being pushed to design ever more ambitious projects in
keeping with the heroic depiction of their work by the 'liriki'. In this
self-perpetuating spiral of falsehood, writers were denounced, censored,
and forced to write in secret. Pilnyak, for example, after falling out of
grace with the authorities for publishing a novella abroad, tries to redeem
himself by writing a fantasy about a dam that would reverse the course of
the Moscow River. Later, after Stalin's death, a writer like Paustovski
found himself compelled to disown his own novel about the Volga-Don canal
and even prevent its publication. These works of socialist realism are
generally overlooked and eclipsed by our attention for the famous dissident
writers like Solzhyenitsin. Yet, within the extreme restraints under which
they worked, some of the 'waterworks' writers managed to produce works of
literary merit, says Westerman, and he cites Platonov's satirical portrayal
of overly zealous state-planners, the subtleties of which escaped the censors.
"They are exceptional in the history of literature. Rereading these books
and comparing them with the actual places gives you the possibility to
unravel what happened to the people who built them, to what extent writers
felt trapped or supported the creation of a new society, and at what point
they discovered there was no way back and that they had actually supported
the insupportable."
Frank Westerman's "Engineers of the Soul" is published in Dutch by Atlas,
and will be published in English by Harvill Press.
*********
#14
Yezhenedelnyi Zhurnal
April 8, 2003
RUSSIA'S TOP P.R. MAN
Berezovsky lost because he was more human than the inhuman system he created
Author: Yulia Latynina
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]
BORIS BEREZOVSKY IS ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO MADE RUSSIA WHAT IT IS
TODAY, BUT HE IS ALREADY PART OF HISTORY, OF THE TURBULENT YELTSIN
ERA. IT IS BEST TO SPEAK OF HIM IN THE PAST TENSE. ONLY THE EFFORTS OF
THE PROSECUTOR GENERAL'S OFFICE ENSURE THAT HE REMAINS IN THE NEWS.
Court hearings have begun in London for the extradition of Boris
Berezovsky. The Prosecutor General's Office is requesting Berezovsky's
extradition over his alleged involvement in the theft of two thousand
Zhiguli cars from AvtoVAZ. Britain has refused to grant Berezovsky
political asylum, although he remains at liberty for the time being.
Actually, Russia has a track record of humiliation in similar
extradition requests: suffice it to recall the cases of Gusinsky,
Zhivilo, and Zakaev.
Let's not venture to predict how the impartial court will rule in
this case. Be that as it may, everyone in Russia knows perfectly well
where Berezovsky's real fault lies. He has not ended up in London due
to two thousand Zhiguli cars, nor to the Aeroflot case, nor to the
privatization of Sibneft.
Berezovsky did everything he could to ensure that Putin would
become president. However, when he presented his bill for services
rendered to Putin after the election, Berezovsky followed his usual
habit of adding a couple of extra zeroes to the sum.
Boris Berezovsky is one of the people who made Russia what it is
today. It was Berezovsky who thought up the idea of using the
government as the most profitable financial instrument. If LogoVOZ
hadn't been involved in a protection racket with Chechens, the history
of Russia would have been different. If Berezovsky hadn't been friends
with Korzhakov, the Sibneft oil company wouldn't exist.
But Berezovsky didn't value the people who served to facilitate
his rise to the top. Like discarded stages of a rocket, they would
burn up in the upper atmosphere as Berezovsky climbed higher and
higher. He dropped Kadannikov after being introduced to Korzhakov. He
forgot about Korzhakov once the latter had introduced him to Tatiana
Diachenko. However, despite all this Berezovsky trusted his junior
partners to an astonishing extent - apparently, he never imagined that
Roman Abramovich might use him just as Berezovsky himself had used
Korzhakov.
Berezovsky had a great deal of power - and created the impression
of having even more. Rumor has it that whenever he learned of a state
official's impending promotion, Berezovsky would phone that person to
offer his congratulations, leaving them under the impression that they
owed their promotion to him. Berezovsky, responsible for the
appointment and dismissal of prime ministers, wasn't above using such
petty tactics.
He was Russia's top PR man rather than its foremost oligarch.
Berezovsky never saw a single business project through to completion.
He didn't manage to purchase AvtoVAZ; he couldn't be bothered to
privatize Aeroflot; and he couldn't hold on to Sibneft, which was
essentially handed to him on a plate thanks to Yeltsin's decree on
deposit auctions. Berezovsky's record included only two complete
projects, and these were both in the field of public relations: the
"Yeltsin rather than Zyuganov" project, and the "Putin rather than
Primakov" project. The third PR project was Berezovsky himself.
He became the model for a movie called "The Oligarch", in which
the hero, in a key scene, reverses his car and returns to Russia - but
Berezovsky himself is unlikely to return. He publicly promised to pay
the legal bills of Zakaev, but two of Berezovsky's former friends -
Glushkov and Krasnenker, senior Aeroflot executives - are paying for
their own attorneys.
Berezovsky lost his business empire because he spent more time on
politics than on business, and more time on women than on politics.
Rumor has it that Berezovsky's stake in Sibneft dwindled as he
recklessly spent money on his private life. At the end of the
financial year, the meticulous Roman Abramovich would present him with
an itemized list of extravagances: here's a villa, there's a yacht,
here's an endless chain of charters - what do you intend to do about
it? And Berezovsky would reply: Oh, take it out of my shares!
There turned out to be no place for Berezovsky in the new Russia:
not only because of his limitless thirst for power, but because he was
a gambler rather than a businessman. Earning money wasn't what
interested him; he wanted to win it, and his empire was built on his
skill in bluffing. But the empires which have endured in the new
Russia are those built on oil and aluminum.
Berezovsky tried to take revenge on the president by accusing him
of involvement in the apartment building explosions of 1999. This
seemed a fearful blow - especially from the person who had ended
Primakov's career simply by pointing to his tendon operation. But
Berezovsky forgot that there is only one kind of assertion more
dubious than those which emerge from the Kremlin, and that is any
assertion made by Boris Berezovsky.
His crimes against Russia are not limited to the theft of two
thousand Zhiguli cars, even as the crimes of Al Capone were not
limited to tax evasion. And his services to Russia may be no less
substantial than his crimes. Berezovsky is too colorful a figure for a
nation where the dull and grey wins out. He is already part of
history, of the turbulent Yeltsin era. It is best to speak of him in
the past tense. Only the efforts of the Prosecutor General's Office
ensure that he remains in the news.
(Translated by Arina Yevtikhova)
*********
#15
Investors still shy away from Russia
April 14, 2003
AFP
MOSCOW - Foreign investors remain reluctant to invest in Russia's banking
sector, which they still see as being fraught with risk despite rapid
growth and long-awaited reforms, analysts say.
Local banks are only now beginning to reap the benefits of radical
restructuring instituted after Russia's 1998 financial meltdown.
The number of deposits and loans has doubled over the past two years, while
consumer credit and homebuyer loans, which barely existed in Russia several
years ago, are beginning to develop.
With people in Russia's main cities stashing an estimated 21.15 billion
dollars (19.6 billion euros) under their mattresses, the banking sector
still has huge potential for expansion, a study by the Synovate market
research firm recently found.
And last November, Russia's central bank finally lifted restrictions
banning foreign financial institutions from owning more than 12% of the
global stock of Russian banks.
Yet all that has so far had remarkably little impact on foreign investors’
interest in the Russian banking sector. Far from skyrocketing, foreign
ownership of Russian banks has stayed below 10% overall, with little chance
of that changing soon, industry insiders say.
"The level of foreign capital in the sector will remain stable," said Allen
Hirst, president of the Russian branch of US bank Citibank.
Sergei Leontiev, president of Russia's Probusinessbank, agreed, saying that
while large Russian banks were likely to buy out smaller regional
institutions in the near future, no major purchases by foreign banks should
be expected.
Russia's banking sector remains dominated by state-owned Sberbank, Russia's
largest financial institution, which holds 40 percent of all deposits and
nearly 70% of private deposits.
The main reason for foreigners’ lack of enthusiasm is the perceived high
level of risk attached to Russian banks, analysts say.
"Seventy-five% of the loans granted to companies by Russian banks,
representing 43 billion dollars (39.9 billion euros), still entail a high
level of risk," the Standard and Poor's rating agency noted in a recent
study.
What's more, many Russian banks have close ties to oil majors and large
corporations, and their financial health is often directly linked to
international oil and raw material prices.
While Russian banks have made genuine efforts to reform, they are still a
long way from adopting international standards and practices, said
Yekaterina Trifimova, who co-authored the Standard and Poor's study.
********
#16
The Gazette (Canada)
April 14, 2003
Russian radical writer faces terrorism charges: He's written 7 books in 22
months in jail
By Michael Mainville
Moscow
Once a darling of the intelligentsia and hailed as one of Russia's greatest
contemporary writers, Edward Limonov now sits behind bars, awaiting the
verdict in a trial that saw him facing charges of terrorism, illegal arms
possession and calling for the violent overthrow of the government.
Known for the sharp political edge to his largely autobiographical writing,
Limonov finds out tomorrow whether he will spend the next 14 years of his
life in prison.
A charismatic, ultra-nationalist radical, Limonov has made scathing attacks
on Russia's new regime since returning in the early 1990s after 20 years in
exile and founding the extremist National Bolshevik Party.
He has been particularly venomous toward Russian President Vladimir Putin,
who he has variously labelled a criminal, an idiot, a loser and "a vampire
sucking Russian blood."
Limonov was detained in April 2001 by a squad of security officers in a
remote part of southern Russia near the border with Kazakhstan.
The Federal Security Service (FSB), the former KGB, had earlier arrested
four NBP members on weapons charges, including three men alleged to have
been carrying six automatic weapons, 83 rounds of ammunition, two
detonators and nearly a kilogram of powerful explosives.
The FSB alleges that Limonov, who was denied bail, planned to lead armed
groups into neighbouring Kazakhstan and to incite an uprising among
Russians there to establish a "Second Russia." Prosecutors say Limonov then
planned to wage a partisan war against Russia.
The accusation is based on an article published in the party's newspaper
called Limonka (a play on Limonov's name and a slang word for hand
grenade), which the government says provided a blueprint for the plan.
Limonov denies writing the article and any involvement in purchasing arms.
He says the charges against him have been fabricated in an effort to
silence dissident voices in Russia.
"This case is aimed at immersing our society in fear," he said during his
trial last December.
A number of prominent Russian and French intellectuals have supported
Limonov during the course of the trial, though all have been careful not to
endorse his radical politics.
But unlike in past cases of writers being jailed in Russia, few major
international organizations have interceded on Limonov's behalf. The only
group to do so has been writers' lobby group PEN International, which had
demanded his release while he waited for trial.
"We are against his (political) persuasions, against National Bolshevism,"
said Alexendar Tkachenko, the general secretary of Russian PEN. "But
holding him in jail before he has been convicted is ridiculous."
Born Edward Savenko in Ukraine, Limonov - who changed his name to make it
sound like "lemon" for unexplained reasons - settled in Moscow in 1966 to
try his hand at writing. Expelled from the country in 1974 for his
anti-Soviet views, Limonov moved first to New York and eventually to
France. In 1980, he published his best-known work, It's Me, Eddie, which
sold 1.5 million copies and has been translated into 15 languages. Upon his
return to Russia, he began to espouse radical nationalist and Stalinist
views, founding the NBP "to revive Lenin's revolutionary spirit." As a
political party, the NBP has remained on the fringe in Russia, but has
attracted attention through a variety of high-profile stunts, such as when
NBP members lobbed tomatoes at NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson at
last November's NATO summit in Prague. The party has recently been at the
forefront of protests in Moscow against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Despite his 22 months in prison, authorities have had little success in
silencing Limonov. He's written seven books since he was arrested, four of
which have been published.
And while Limonov turned 60 on Feb. 22, few expect him to go quietly into
retirement if he is acquitted. Writing in The Diary of a Loser, published
in 1983, Limonov was prophetic about how he would spend his old age:
"Retirement Insurance Policy! Indeed! Me, fishing at some creek in
Oklahoma, drinking Schlitz-lite, wiping my bald skull ... Oh, no! It's
better to be a lone wolf, to have a clear vision of the rubber-insulated
electric chair in your future, and in spite of that, rejoin my guys and cry
out in a hoarse voice: Kill 'em! For that is life! Kill 'em all!"
Harassed Journalists
In recent years, a number of high profile Russian journalists have faced
official harassment:
Grigory Pasko was arrested in 1997 following his reports for a Russian Navy
newspaper on the dumping of radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan. He was
found guilty of divulging state secrets and sentenced to two years and four
months in jail. He was released earlier this year for good behaviour.
Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for Novaya Gazeta and author of A Dirty
War in Chechnya, was arrested while reporting on refugees in Chechnya in
February 2001 and expelled from the region. She was forced to go into
hiding in late 2001 after receiving repeated threats due to her reporting
on Chechnya, but has since returned to Moscow.
Andrei Babitsky, a reporter with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was
arrested by Russian troops in Chechnya in January 2000, allegedly handed
over to a pro-Moscow Chechen group and detained for more than a month. He
eventually resurfaced in Dagestan, where he was arrested and fined $300 for
allegedly using a false a passport.
********
#17
pravda.ru
April 14, 2003
Space Competition Between USA and USSR was Hard
Peoples' lives were not valued at all, the competition was more important
They did not feel sorry for people, a political priority was far more
important. A launch once killed about 300 hundred people. The Soviet city
of Gorky (currently Nizhni Novgorod) was a city of space technologies.
Specialists of the city started revealing their secrets about two years
ago. A lot of Nizhni Novgorod residents were surprised to know that they
lived next to the people, who worked with Yury Gagarin, the first man in
space, launched the first satellite and controlled missiles during most
acute moments of the Cold War.
Those people say that they did not realize that they were doing something
that grand v only radio news helped them to think so. Yet, they often
experienced pity instead of pride. Romuald Suglobov, the chairman of the
Nizhni Novgorod Veterans Council, the then senior engineer to test
propulsion systems, said that there used to be a good joke amid space
technology specialists:
The Central Committee of the Communist Party calls a cosmonaut:
- You will fly to the Sun.
- But I will burn there!
- We have thought of that too - you will fly at nighttime.
Specialists remember that the space exploration competition with the United
States was immense. "We are not sorry for the fact that the Soviet Union
was not the first country, whose people landed on the Moon. We are sorry
about the fact that the moon program was abandoned after American
astronauts walked on the Moon. We were about to complete the program, we
just needed some more time, but we could not do it. A lot of other programs
had the same fate. Huge funds were invested in space programs, but then
they were simply abandoned. They did not feel sorry either for cosmonauts
or for test-pilots. I remember I once worked for 96 hours non-stop.
Sergey Korolev, one of the founders of the Soviet space program, picked out
his team of specialists personally. They say that Korolev had a lot of
ideas, which he shared with everyone v he even started getting ready for
travelling to Mars and Venus.
Colonel Valery Andropov was in charge of a lot of technical secrets at the
Baikonur cosmodrome. Andropov says that the first artificial satellite
originally looked like a ball: "They brought it to us, but there was only a
transmitter and storage batteries there - no circuit, nothing. We launched
the satellite on October 4th. It was just a ball for us, a piece of our
everyday work, nothing much. When they announced the news on the radio, we
realized that we did something grand," Andropov remembers.
Talking about Yury Gagarin, Andropov remembers that his intuition prompted
him to pick out that smiling and social young man for the first ever manned
space flight. "I realized that at once - it was Yury Gagarin to fly into
space. However, some of my colleagues perceived it as a joke, they even
laughed at me. Yet, Sergey Korolev took my opinion into his consideration.
I remember that Korolev paid his attention to Gagarin, when Yuri took his
socks off before stepping into the ejection capsule. Technically competent
people always take their shoes off before examining something from the
inside. Korolev liked Gagarin's respect to the space technology. And of
course, everyone liked the way he smiled."
Colonel Valery Andropov was in charge of the first satellite in space, the
first man in space, as well as of the control desk of the missiles, which
were aimed at the United States during the exacerbation of the Caribbean
crisis. Andropov remembers the day, when WWIII could start: "We were all
working as usual on that day. Nuclear P-7 missile was ready to be launched.
We did not have any fear, since we all believed that the war was not going
to happen, taking into consideration the fact that it would take four more
days to finish all necessary works in order to launch the missile. Later,
we were told that Kennedy and Khruschev managed to settle problems down, so
we could relax."
Valery Andropov says that most severe moments were connected with people's
deaths. About 300 people were killed as a result of an unsuccessful launch.
Valery Andropov said that Valentina Tereshkova's flight (the first woman in
space) was the most successful one of all. The fact that people were dying
was simply ignored. Soviet leaders Nikita Khruschev and Leonid Brezhnev
visited the Baikonur cosmodrome on several occasions. They kept on
convincing Soviet space specialists that the USSR was supposed to be the
first in the field of space exploration. However, communist leaders'
instructions did not play the decisive role for space specialists. Soviet
space pioneers were interested in their work, in creating something
absolutely new, despite the lack of the country's technical development.
Valery Andropov invented the way, which allowed a rocket to reach the
ground on its way back to the Earth. Rockets would burn in the air before,
on account of their high speed. "At first we made up a 150-kilo lead
bullet. It reached the Kamchatka peninsula, and hit a rock. All the
information was scattered around the rock. People brought me piece after
piece of those tapes. I studied all records and realized that rockets were
not supposed to be pointed. I invented several devices to measure technical
and biological parameters. We needed new data, but landings would make all
antenna burn, the telemetry did not work. I put a device like that on
Gagarin's stomach. No one knew that, by the way."
A Japanese cartoon has recently compared the American and the Russian way
of the space exploration. As it was pictured in the cartoon, Russians
launched their rockets manually: dragging a rocket to the launching site,
starting the engine, and then having a sandwich after work instead of going
to strip bars, like American scientists did.
By the way, former Soviet space pioneers have a rather negative attitude
towards various sensations, which say that Yury Gagarin was not the first
man in space, but the first man, who was lucky to return back to the Earth,
that he fainted during his flight, that there was a breakdown during the
flight, and so on and so forth. They say that Gagarin was the first man in
space and there were no breakdowns. Period.
Natalia Rezontova
Nizhni Novgorod
Especially for PRAVDA.Ru
********
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