November 5, 2000   

This Date's Issues:   4621 • 4622

Johnson's Russia List
#4622
5 November 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. The Russia Journal editorial: Coming this Tuesday. (US election)
2. BBC Monitoring: Russian electoral chief leaves for USA to monitor presidential poll.
3. Interfax: Outcome of US elections will not affect Russian-US relations - expert. (Sergey Karaganov)
4. Interfax: Russian policy towards USA to remain unchanged regardless of who wins election. (Dmitriy Rogozin)
5. Interfax: Russian Liberal Democrat leader predicts Bush victory in US elections. (Zhirinovsky)
6. Interfax: Russia expects to continue dialogue with USA on national missile defence.
7. US News and World Report: Masha Gessen, From Russia with secrets. What will he expose? (Alexander Litvinenko)
8. Susan McIntosh: Re: Dr. Donald Jensen's piece/4620 (re Strobe Talbott)
9. BBC Monitoring: Russian energy chief threatens clampdown on debtors. (Chubais meets Lebed)
10. The Independent on Sunday (UK): Fred Weir, Draft dodgers who would rather have TB than be called up.
11. Reuters: Azeri head plays down son's succession on poll day.
12. the eXile editorial: Can’t We all Just Get Along? (re Moscow Times)
13.the eXile press review: Matt Taibbi, Above it All.]

******

#1
The Russia Journal
November 4-10, 2000
Editorial
Coming this Tuesday…

This Tuesday, in the culmination of what has been one of the closest races
in history, U.S. voters will go to the ballot box to elect their first
president for the 21st century.

Interestingly, good economic times and the growing irrelevance of the
federal government also mean voter turnout is likely to be very low – it’s
a shame that the Internet revolution still has not progressed far enough to
enable people to vote from their mobile phones or microwave ovens.

Moreover, despite a protracted campaign and three live televised debates
between Vice President Al Gore and Governor George W. Bush Jr., only one
thing is really clear: No one is too dull or too dumb to become the
president of the United States. All that is required is the raising of a
few hundred million dollars for a campaign.

In terms of Russia, considering all that has happened over the past decade,
it is surprising that apart from a half-hearted attempt by the Republicans
to drag Moscow – and Gore’s record here – into the campaign, the contest
has been relatively free of Russia-bashing.

In truth, American voters really couldn’t care less about Russia – and it
is hardly worthwhile for the Republicans to make it a cornerstone of their
campaign if the public doesn’t care.

Still, both the personality and policy of the next U.S. president will have
significant implications for Russia, both domestically and internationally.

It is clear that both candidates are ill-advised on Russia, and their
advisers offer little comfort for a future improvement.

Gore's devious little aide, Leon Freuth, recently said there was no
substance to allegations of corruption against former Russian Prime
Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin because there was no "smoking gun." He ignored
the fact that there was, in fact, a smoking country.

Bush's duplicitous adviser, Condoleezza Rice, in a recent interview with
the BBC, rounded on the Clinton-Gore administration's Russia policies, and
then admitted, rather quietly, shortly afterward that she had "supported
those policies up until 1998." So she stopped after the crisis? What
foresight.

That aside, there is also the growing school of thought in Washington –
among both liberals and conservatives – that the United States should
"forget Russia." American bureaucrats, it seems, have become completely
exasperated with the corrupt ways of their Russian counterparts – and are
increasingly unwilling to support any development or aid programs.

On the Russian side, among both the elite and the public, NATO expansion
and the war in Yugoslavia have created an impression that the U.S.
administration pays lip-service to cooperation with Russia – but when push
comes to shove, Russia is dismissed as an insignificant international player.

That view is compounded by the not-unfounded assumption that U.S. lawmakers
think that dumping excess wheat and chicken legs on the Russian market –
and keeping Russian agriculture in the doldrums – amounts to the fulfilling
of obligations toward enhancing relations between the two countries.
Congress, it seems, thinks such moves keep Russia "engaged," so it doesn't
run amok in its own backyard or begin making a nuisance of its massive
nuclear arsenal.

Indeed, after more than a decade of openness and attempts at reform, U.S.
policy toward Russia still largely remains hostage to the arrogance of
superpower status, and a decided short-sightedness.

For their part, the Russians, ever optimistic about their eventual
prosperity and renewed greatness, do not wish to be treated like the banana
republics that the United States so often pushes around. Russians consider
themselves "partners" of the United States and EU in international affairs,
and expect to be treated with respect.

Hence, the events of last two years have not gone down very well with the
Russian public and, after a period of hope in the late 1980s and early
1990s, there is, today, a severe lack of goodwill between the two nations.

The United States must rethink its approach to Russia, to understand that
its interests lie not in ignoring Moscow, but in taking a proactive
approach to the relationship by investing in the future of a prosperous
Russia.

Top U.S. officials need to think beyond the powerful lobbies in Washington
who know that there is profit in tension with Russia. These hawks know
that, in not engaging Russia, they can foster the misconception that
Russian is a threat.

The lobbyists can then push the line that it is indeed worth wasting
billions of taxpayer dollars on constructing space missile shields – rather
than spending it on peaceful scientific space exploration, something that
could be done in partnership with other leading countries.

In fact, the American taxpayer would be far better served by a U.S.
administration that invested in Russia's future. There is no doubt in
anyone’s mind here that Russia desperately needs U.S. investment to claw
its way out of its current mess.

Political will and good personal relations between the U.S. and Russian
presidents would create an atmosphere conducive for U.S. companies starting
to take a long-term view of business and investment in Russia. There can be
no doubt that if they see such goodwill, the current occupants of the
Kremlin will go all the way to creating that atmosphere of understanding.

Such a move will require respect for Russia’s history and culture, and an
acknowledgement of its geostrategic importance, with or without military
parity. Irrespective of who goes on to win the U.S. election Tuesday, the
new president will have to undertake a crash courses in sensitivity toward
Russia and Russians.

Still, the Americans also need to make one issue absolutely fundamental to
building a strong relationship – the confirmation of freedoms and
democratic values in Russia. The United States must make the continuation
of the democratic process in Russia a non-negotiable condition of future
financial relations between Washington and Moscow, and a cornerstone of its
policy.

******

#2
BBC Monitoring
Russian electoral chief leaves for USA to monitor presidential poll
Text of report by Russian Public TV on 4th November

[Presenter] Russian Central Electoral Commission Chairman Aleksandr
Veshnyakov is flying to the United States today as an observer at the US
presidential election. Here he is on the line from Sheremetyevo airport.
Good morning, Aleksandr Albertovich.

[Veshnyakov] Good morning.

[Q] Aleksandr Albertovich, in how will you study the US electoral system
and what is your status at the election?

[A] As an observer, I will go first to Chicago and later to Washington. In
Chicago, I will be meeting election organizers. Later in Washington, I will
meet the head of the federal electoral body. Also, I have several meetings
planned with US politicians.

[Q] Will you visit polling stations?

[A] Of course. I see two main tasks before me: to study the electoral
practice in the United States for anything useful to suggest in the Russian
Federation; and to tell them how elections are conducted in Russia and
answer any questions the American public may have.

******

#3
Outcome of US elections will not affect Russian-US relations - expert
Interfax

Moscow, 4th November: The results of the presidential elections in the
United States will not cause dramatic changes in Russian-US relations,
Sergey Karaganov, head of the Council for the Russian Foreign and Defence
Policy and deputy director of the Institute of Europe, told Interfax on
Saturday [4th November]. "The outcome of the elections will not bring about
changes in our destiny just because one can get along with republicans or
democrats," Karaganov said. The differences in the US policy in either case
will be subtle, he said.

"The [Al] Gore Administration will most probably not try to tell Russia how
it should go about its economic reform or domestic policy," Karaganov said.
The Gore team is made up of "people of a new generation who will try more
vigorously to involve Russia in the world of information technologies and
the new economy", he said.

"The [George W] Bush team that includes numerous experts on Russia,
enlightened knights of the late Cold War period, will judge Russia chiefly
by its foreign policy," Karaganov said. If Bush wins, his team "is likely
to get tough if differences over Iran, Iraq or the Middle East emerge", he
said.

On the other hand, "Bush may be expected to treat Russia with a lot of
respect, because he is a man of fairly traditional beliefs", Karaganov noted.

Asked whom he favours, Karaganov said: "On the one hand, Al Gore, but on
the other hand, the Bush team, because I have many friends there."

******

#4
Russian policy towards USA to remain unchanged regardless of who wins election
Interfax

Moscow, 4th November: Dmitriy Rogozin, chief of the Duma International
Affairs Committee, has said he believes that Russia will not cut back on
cooperation with the US, no matter who wins the presidential elections there.

"Basically, we are ready to work both with Republican candidate George Bush
and Al Gore, who represents the Democrats," Rogozin said in an interview
with Interfax on Saturday [4th November]. "We understand that for Russia
the main thing is to get a predictable US leader," he said. The US will
continue to play the role it is playing now for at least ten more years"
and we need to take this reality into account," Rogozin said. One must also
take into account the fact that the year 2000 has been an important year
both for Russia and the US, the deputy said. This year has clearly shown
that "no unipolar world has been formed, and Russia as a major Eurasian
power can clear itself a space for breathing and acting," he said. "Russia
has its interests, and these interests can successfully oppose the
interests of the US, this is also a lesson of the past year," Rogozin said.

As for the US presidential candidates, the Duma committee chief said he
does not think "Gore is a lesser hawk than Bush." "To us they are both
hawks," he added. He also pointed out that Gore "had a much tougher
standpoint" on the situation in Kosovo and on the Middle East issues than
current President Bill Clinton and that this has been "proven by documents."

******

#5
Russian Liberal Democrat leader predicts Bush victory in US elections
Interfax

Moscow, 5th November: Russian State Duma Deputy Chairman and leader of the
Liberal Democrat faction Vladimir Zhirinovskiy has said he believes that
the Republican candidate George Bush Jr. will gain 52.6 per cent of the
vote., although it would be more advantageous for Russia if Democrat
candidate Al Gore won the 7th November presidential elections in the US,

"The world's financial circles have made this very decision," Zhirinovskiy
said to support his statement in an interview with Interfax.

Russia would profit more from Gore's victory, as "we have already adjusted
ourselves to the Democrats and understand that they might refrain from
intruding in Russia's affairs too much and assume too tough a position
towards it," the Liberal Democratic leader said.

On the other hand, the Republicans "are more pragmatic and pay less
attention to human rights - they are more concerned about US interests, and
this could also be to our country's benefit," he said.

"I personally like Bush better, because Gore, inspired by [former Russian
prime minister and founder of Russian economic reforms Yegor] Gaydar, has
launched propaganda against the Russian Liberal Democratic Party and called
us an extremist party," Zhirinovskiy stated, adding that Russian Liberal
Democrats might enjoy better relations with the Republicans.

******

#6
Russia expects to continue dialogue with USA on national missile defence
Interfax

Moscow, 4th November: Moscow does not use its differences with Washington
over national missile defence as a subject of confrontation and wants the
dialogue with the United States on this issue to continue in a normal
constructive atmosphere, Russian diplomatic sources told Interfax on
Saturday [4th November].

Russia has not engaged and does not plan to engage in talks with the United
States on the adjustment of the 1972 Anti-Missile Defence Treaty, the
sources said. Indeed, there is not even a formal reason for talks, because
to start them US representatives must say so in the Russian - US permanent
advisory committee on the treaty, a kind of negotiating mechanism in place
since 1973, they said. "The United States has not officially applied to the
committee," they said.

Moscow is doing its best to cooperate with the United States on all
disarmament matters, including reduction of strategic arms, the sources
said. The issue of the observance of the ABM Treaty and US plans to deploy
a national missile defence system (NMD) may come up for discussion at the
Russian-US summit in Brunei on 15th November, they said. Before that,
consultations will take place on strategic issues between Russian Deputy
Foreign Minister Georgiy Mamedov and US First Deputy Foreign Secretary
Strobe Talbot. This will be a regular meeting in the framework of regular
Russian-US contacts in this field, they said.

Russia "makes an allowance for the transition period in the United States
following the change in US administration," the sources said. The teams of
Democratic candidate Al Gore and Republican candidate George W. Bush
include a good number of people with whom Russia has closely cooperated on
missile defence and strategic arms reduction, they said.

******

#7
US News and World Report
November 13, 2000
>From Russia with secrets
What will he expose?
By Masha Gessen

MOSCOW-Last Wednesday, an odd foursome--one American and a Russian married
couple with a 6-year-old son, who looked like they had been traveling for
weeks--asked to speak to the police at London's Heathrow Airport. Six hours
later, the Russians, temporary British papers in hand, left the airport for
an unidentified location, taking with them some of the darkest secrets of
their country's recent past.

The Russian man was Alexander Litvinenko, 37, a former lieutenant colonel in
the FSB, Russia's secret police. He first made headlines two years ago, when
he blew the whistle on an order he says he received to assassinate tycoon
Boris Berezovsky. He was fired and soon arrested on charges of mistreating a
detainee. He was acquitted and immediately rearrested on similar charges,
only to be cleared again. A new case was then started against him.

Litvinenko managed to clear his name in court--a most unusual event in
Russia--thanks to his photographic memory, which allowed him to prove exactly
where he was at any given time. It is precisely his memory that makes him
fear for his life now. "He has been warned that he should never have opened
his mouth about the agency," says Alex Goldfarb, a former Russian dissident,
now a U.S. citizen, who helped get the Litvinenkos to London. "Now the people
who used to be his supervisors at the FSB are in power. These are the new
times, when Russians will again be asking for asylum because the authorities
are using the law enforcement system to punish anyone who dares criticize
them."

Sound just like the old times? Not quite. What Litvinenko knows about is the
new Russia. He worked in the organized-crime department. He has said that all
of his investigations were fruitless because they ultimately led to key
federal ministries. He says he knows a great deal about corruption among FSB
leadership.

The real bombshell Litvinenko may drop concerns last year's apartment
bombings in Moscow, which killed over 300 people and sparked the second
Chechen war. People close to the case say he can prove what has been rumored:
that the bombings were organized by the FSB, which was then headed by the man
who is now Russia's president, Vladimir Putin.

******

#8
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000
From: Susan McIntosh <mcintosh@mida.com>
Subject: Re: Dr. Donald Jensen's piece (4620, #2)

It is difficult to understand how Strobe Talbott could possibly
be classified as someone "with little or no first hand
knowledge of Russia," as Dr. Donald Jensen does (4620, #2).
Saying he was just a journalist is like saying Mother Teresa was
just a nice person.

Translating Khrushchev's books, serving as diplomatic and State
Dpt. correspondent, writing numerous books on arms control and
changes in the Soviet Union---basically Strobe Talbott's entire
adult life has been a focus on Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. What more does it take to be an expert in Dr. Jensen's view?

Susan McIntosh
President, Russian Medical Fund
mcintosh@mida.com

******

#9
BBC Monitoring
Russian energy chief threatens clampdown on debtors
Source: TVK Channel 6 TV, Krasnoyarsk, in Russian 1300 gmt 03 Nov 00

[Presenter Natalya Zhabyko] [The head of the Russian Unified Energy System
power company Anatoliy] Chubays met [Krasnoyarsk Territory] governor
[Aleksandr Lebed] and coalminers while on visit to Krasnoyarsk Territory.
The chief of the national energy supplier did nothing to stop local power
companies from cutting supply to debtors, saying that nonpayment was theft
and that thieves should be punished. [Omitted: Chubays praised Krasenergo's
record; Lebed criticized Krasnoyarsk aluminium works]. Kseniya Cherepanova
has the details.

[Lebed] The fact that the situation is serious is proven by the latest
jokes: "If there is light in the Kremlin, Putin is working, if there is no
light in the Kremlin, Anatoliy Borisovich [Chubays] is working".

[Correspondent] [Omitted: Lebed stressed the importance of cooperation
between power suppliers and enterprises] Then followed fundamental
statements which were later included into the signed documents. Power
suppliers will deliver energy without interruption only when it is paid
for, which means no change [dashing debtors' hopes that Chubays's visit
would resolve their dispute between Krasenergo and its debtors]. If the
Yenisey chemical works fails to pay, there will be no supply. Lebed said
that he was not quite pleased with that, but Chubays is not going to give in.

[Chubays] Paying for a product is an elementary basis for any business,
should it be energy, breadmaking or any other kind of business in this
country. Consuming a product without paying is theft. We are going to fight
theft and will by no means let anything be stolen from us. Perhaps someone
finds this attitude too tough. Still, we are convinced that this is the
only way to bring order not only to the energy system and the
fuel-and-energy complex as a whole, but the entire national economy.

[Lebed] Energy is a product like any other. Resources are spent to produce
it. It is not fair to demand this product for free. [Omitted: repetition]
Those who must and can pay, will pay. The [Territory] administration never
did or will wipe their tears.

[Correspondent] [Omitted: repetition] Nobody cares what happens to those
who have no money to pay. Those who do, such as the Krasnoyarsk aluminium
works [Kraz], will face strict measures.

[Omitted: Lebed insists Kraz should pay the tariff imposed by the regional
energy commission.]

[Chubays] The electricity tariff is more than 0.01 dollar per kWh. Kraz is
paying 0.0068 dollars. It is not right, not fair and economically not
substantiated. We are not trying to drive the aluminium producer into a
corner. We only insist on the same terms of trade within the [Russian
Aluminium] aluminium holding company as outside it. [Omitted: Chubays says
he did not attend the Territory assembly because he had not been invited]

[During the visit, Lebed and Chubays signed a bilateral agreement between
the Unified Energy System and Krasnoyarsk Territory, according to Centre of
Russia TV, Krasnoyarsk, 1200 gmt 3rd November 2000.]

*******

#10
The Independent on Sunday (UK)
5 November 2000
Draft dodgers who would rather have TB than be called up
By Fred Weir in Moscow

Valery Chernyshev checked into a hospital last month with hopes that a bad
cough he had developed might turn out to be tuberculosis.

When that failed to happen, he stayed on as an outpatient while doctors
studied an irregular heartbeat that was revealed during his tests.

"There is a chance it could be something serious," said 21-year-old Mr
Chernyshev brightly. "But even if not, all these tests take up time." And
time in a doctor's care is one thing that reliably holds Russia's military
recruiters at bay.

Mr Chernyshev has been evading Russia's universal male conscription for three
years now, first with an educational deferral and now by various medical
dodges.

"What I need is a lasting disease, but they're not so easy to get," he said.

His goal is to make it to the maximum draft age of 27. "One way or another,
I'm not going into the army."

Every spring and autumn the Russian military takes in about 200,000 eligible
youths, but officials admit that fewer than 50 per cent show up voluntarily
at recruitment centres.

Even before the war in Chechnya made violent death a likely consequence of
military service, young Russian men were shunning the bankrupt, demoralised
and ill-disciplined army in droves.

"We estimate that about 4,000 conscripts die every year, excluding combat
deaths, due to accidents, hunger, disease and suicide," said Valentina
Melnikova, coordinator of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, a nationwide
organisation that works for military reform. "It's hell in the armed forces
these days, and every young man knows it."

For the well-heeled draft evader, there is a wide menu of choices. "Almost
anything can be bought in this country, and generals come relatively cheap,"
said Dimitry Shesterin, 24, a successful long-term draft dodger who advises
other young men on how to keep the military police from the door.

In Soviet times, choice military institutions, such as sports teams,
orchestras and theatres, used to select the most talented conscripts for
their own services.

Today, by many accounts, those places are for sale. "If I had $10,000
(£6,000) I could join the Red Army hockey team," said Mr Shesterin. "And I
wouldn't have to play. The team has hundreds of members like that."

For as little as $3,000 an evader can purchase the magic stamp in his
internal passport which says he has already completed his military service.

That scheme carries dangers, as Yury Ifronov, 23, discovered. "I was fine for
a couple of years, until the head of my local recruitment office was
changed," he said. "The new chief launched a check-up of all the files. In
the end, I had to pay again."

Medical certificates reportedly sell for up to $5,000. Fictitious positions
at accredited educational institutions – which carry automatic military
deferment – can be arranged for $3,000 to $4,000.

"The amount of money paid in bribes to escape military service is equal to
about 40 per cent of this country's annual military budget," former deputy
prime minister Boris Nemtsov, now a parliamentarian with the liberal Union of
Right Wing Forces, said recently. "If we simply legalised these payments, we
could solve the army's financial problems at a single stroke".

As a draft dodger's means fall, so do his options. "You can fake illness, or
you can make a run for it," said Mr Shesterin. "Chances are you'll end up in
jail, along with hundreds of others."

The Soldiers' Mothers Committee counsels young men to marry before they reach
18 and immediately get their wives pregnant.

"There is an automatic military deferral of two years for a new baby," said
Flora Salikhovskaya, a spokesperson for the group. "I can't think of anything
more patriotic than a Russian man who sires a baby every two years until he's
27."

Ironically, the least popular route for draft evaders is publicly to demand
their legal prerogatives. Russia's 1993 constitution guarantees the right to
alternative civilian duties for any citizen whose "personal or religious
convictions are not compatible with military service".

However, successive Russian parliaments, dominated by pro-military
hardliners, have refused to pass an enabling law for alternative service to
the armed forces. As a result, courts usually send self-avowed conscientious
objectors straight into the arms of military recruiters or, sometimes, to
prison.

"It's the hardest road to take, but its the only one that leads to the rule
of law in Russia," said Sergei Sorokin, who is head of the Anti-Militarist
League, which provides legal advice to draft evaders. "We have hundreds of
thousands of young draft dodgers with their heads down, running from the law.
Things will change here when more of them are ready to stand up and fight for
the law."

******

#11
Azeri head plays down son's succession on poll day
By Peter Graff

BAKU, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Azerbaijan elected a parliament on Sunday in a
contest that could lead to the former Soviet Union's first transfer of power
from father to son.

However, President Haydar Aliyev played down suggestions his son Ilham would
become new parliament speaker -- automatic interim successor if the ailing
77-year-old leader of the oil-rich state on the Caspian Sea leaves office
early.

But ruling party officials have openly said that is their plan and a
full-blown propaganda campaign has left little doubt that the younger man is
being groomed for leadership.

By 3:00 p.m., the central election commission reported 34.9 percent turnout,
beyond the 25 percent needed to declare the poll valid. Polls close at 7 p.m.
(1600 GMT), though official results may not be available until later in the
week.

Opposition parties said the vote was rigged. Many of their candidates have
not been allowed onto the ballot.

The president and his son voted together in downtown Baku.

Asked if he saw his son as a future president, Haydar Aliyev said: "He is not
a small child. He can decide for himself...As for my own preferences, that is
my business." He also reiterated his pledge to run for a final five-year term
in 2003.

But he also said: "As far as I know, Ilham Aliyev has no desire for the job
of parliament speaker." Yeni Azerbaijan's deputy secretary, Siyavush
Novruzov, had said last week that Ilham was the party's unanimous choice for
the post.

Ilham, standing behind his father, made no comment.

HEALTH SPECULATION

Speculation has surrounded the president's health, especially since a heart
bypass last year.

He was treated for severe flu in the United States in September and appeared
thin and sallow on Sunday.

Azerbaijan is already plastered with billboards bearing the president's wise
sayings, but in the past few months the ruling party's energies abruptly
turned toward promoting his son.

Ilham's round, moustachioed face peers down from signs across the capital.
Huge yellow party banners announce: "Yeni Azerbaijan brings INSPIRATION to
the people!" The Azeri word for inspiration is "ilham," printed in bold red
capital letters.

A Western diplomat called the campaign "not very subtle."

Still, critics have raised doubts about whether Ilham has the experience to
handle top level political intrigue.

Opposition Musavat party leader Isa Gambar, himself a former parliament
speaker, told reporters after voting that the idea of Ilham Aliyev as speaker
was "laughable."

Ilham has had trouble building a heavyweight's reputation despite a senior
post in the state oil company and a parliament seat. He was often spotted
gambling in Baku casinos before they were shut down three years ago.

But one Western diplomat said outgoing U.S. ambassador Stanley Escudero, who
has been Ilham's hunting guest, had spoken well of his host's maturity and
commitment to reform.

PREVIOUS VOTES CONDEMNED

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitored Sunday's
poll and its report will play a key role this week when European ministers
decide whether to admit Azerbaijan to the Council of Europe, a human rights
and democracy club.

The West has condemned previous Azeri elections as unfair. Diplomats say the
country has made improvements to some laws this time, but the exclusion of
many opposition candidates drew criticism even before voting started.

One group of Western monitors said it had seen irregularities early in the
day -- including ruling party officials telling people how to vote or
hindering access to polling stations, and suspiciously similar signatures on
voter lists suggesting people had voted more than once.

"Fraud has already started," Musavat party's Gambar said. "The Aliyev team is
preparing to falsify the election."

In all, 404 candidates competed for seats in 100 individual districts, and 13
parties and blocs vied for 25 additional seats decided by their proportion of
votes countrywide.

The ruling party says its main accomplishments have been luring billions of
dollars in international investment in oil and gas, guarding political
stability and steering a pro-Western foreign policy that counters Russian
influence.

Teacher Rasul Akhmedov, who cast his ballot at a polling station in central
Baku, said: "I voted for stability, which means I voted for Yeni Azerbaijan."

The opposition says oil money has been squandered, rights ignored, living
conditions are poor and corruption is ruinous.

******

#12
the eXile
October 26-November 9, 2000
Editorial
Can’t We all Just Get Along?

Next week, an era will end in Moscow. It will be marked by the relocation
of The Moscow Times from its legendarily luxurious newsroom on Ulitsa
Pravdy to a smaller, shittier, more inconvenient office next to the
Independent Media building on Vyborgskaya Ulitsa near Rechnoy Vokzal.

Since the early ’90s something of a public symbol of that confident “heady”
early period of the eXpat invasion, the Times’s gleaming modern
workspace—replete with happy middle-class Russians working side-by-side
over their whirring iMacs with smart, positive-thinking young Western
journalists—will soon be just a memory. Into the Times’s place will move
some dreary tenant of a building complex which already houses such
publications as Selskaya Zhizn, Komsomoslkaya Pravda, and Vek—and we are
willing to be that the sight of heady young Western newshounds racing up
and down the aisles carrying printouts of the Bloomberg wire will hereafter
be very rare events indeed.

The eXile can sympathize with what The Moscow Times is going though. Last
year, we were forced out (for reasons we’d rather not get into) of an
eminently comfortable pre-Revolutionary building in the Krasniye Vorota
area, a place with high ceilings, phone lines aplenty, and a view. On the
other hand, the new office we moved into, and where have remained to this
day, is a rank, miserable, stinking, rotting, closet-sized basement
property in something like armpit of an Aeroport region neighborhood. The
few windows we have are half-sunken into the ground, and the neighborhood
cats use the little concrete vestibules in front of them to leave piss and
turds there. We work like animals in there, piled on top of one another,
necks bent form constant negotiation of the low ceilings, the smell of cat
turds permanently in our lungs.

The Moscow Times won’t have it that bad, but sources tell us that their new
home is no lap of luxury either. Worse still, the paper’s staff now finds
itself permanently under the nose of their boss, Publisher Derk Sauer, who
keeps his comfy suite complete with cute secretary in the building across
the street. From his window, it is said, Sauer will be able to stand on
whatever telephone books he has handy and feast through his trademark
spectacles his pair of satisfied Dutch eyes on the savings he’ll be making
hereon in on the Times’s once-astronomical rent payments.

For obvious reasons the eXile is deriving some satisfaction from this state
of affairs. But by itself, this news wouldn’t warrant an editorial response
from us. Only when taken with the news that the Times’s humiliating move
might have come as a result of an intrigue by their moronic competitor, The
Russia Journal, does the story rise to an occasion worth commemorating. And
boy, is it worth it!

Two different sources with direct knowledge of the deal—one at the oil
company LUKOil (which owns a stake in the building as well as in
Komsomolskaya Pravda) and one at Komsomolskaya Pravda—told the eXile last
week that the real reason The Times was leaving Ulitsa Pravdy was that
their landlord, LUKOil, was forcing them out.

The version we heard from both sources is that LUKOil was approached by an
aide to Kremlin media advisor Gleb Pavlovsky, and asked to get rid of The
Times. The two sources then confirmed longstanding rumors that The Russia
Journal had originally been created as a Kremlin-friendly Pavlovsky project.

“Pavlovsky asked LUKOil to do this favor for The Journal,” one of the
sources told us. “The idea was to displace The Times from their home, and
emburden them with administrative problems.” He added that The Journal was
also counting on The Times to suffer the blow to its commercial reputation
which would inevitably occur with the loss of the newsroom facility, for
years one of the paper’s major selling points.

The incident is just the latest in series of squabbles involving the two
publications. For some time now, The Russia Journal has been quietly
complaining The Times has been scheming to weaken the Journal’s
distribution network, threatening some sites with the removal of The Times
if they continue to carry The Russia Journal. Their accusations are at
least somewhat believable, since the Times’s parent company, Independent
Media, was once well-known for using such hardball tactics with
distribution points who carried the short-lived Russian Elle—at the time
viewed as a threat to its own Cosmopolitan publication.

Furthermore, the folks at The Russia Journal strongly suspect that it was
Independent Media who first brought the Journal’s larcenous web-classified
site, loot.ru, to the attention of the Britain-based loot.com, one of the
world’s most successful such sites.

Loot.ru, as clear and obvious a product ripoff as there has ever been, was
(the last time we checked) the subject of a lawsuit against the Journal
management. It is said that the Journal people resent the feckless Times’s
quiet snitching, which led to this costly distraction for their business.
Of course, Independent Media, which actually paid for the rights to use its
famous brand-names (i.e. Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Playboy, and so
on), could be expected to take every measure possible to level the playing
field—although no one we know at the company is willing to say as much
publicly.

Probably the most ironic thing about the whole story is that the Journal’s
competitive ire was, for a long time, focused in entirely the wrong
place—at us. eXile readers may recall that just under a year ago, we ran a
feature entitled “Next week in The Russia Journal!” in which we claimed
we’d hired a mole in the RJ newsroom to leak the contents of the paper’s
next issue to us, so that we could apply the necessary even-handed
criticism in advance.

As we later heard, the management of the RJ was less than amused over the
issue. According to one source we have at their paper, they even went so
far as to take the extraordinary step of calling in the police and having
an employee they suspected of being the mole interrogated. We did nothing
to help this innocent party, of course, finding the whole incident
sufficiently amusing to make interference unnecessary.

But in retrospect we’re glad they made the mistake of taking us at our word
in the piece. We claimed we’d hired a mole at the RJ; this was not strictly
true. We hired a mole in a local English-language newspaper, all right, but
it wasn’t at the RJ. We won’t say much more on that score except to note
that The Journal is published at Ulitsa Pravdy, i.e., at the same building
that houses The Moscow Times and also prints their newspaper.

It’s a big building, that place, and there are more than ample
opportunities there for a Times staffer to drift downstairs after a beer
break, and inadvertently run into a mess of film templates belonging to a
rival publication…

So what’s the lesson in all of this? It’s hard for us to say. We certainly
feel for The Moscow Times, and express our condolences at the move. And we
do wish that everyone would try a little harder to just get along. Fair and
honest competition is good for everybody—for The Journal and The Times, and
even for us. That almost anything qualifies as fair and honest competition
in this country is a fact we guess we all must face.

It’s sad, but it’s the truth. And there’s probably nothing that any of us
will ever be able to do about it.

******

#13
the eXile
October 26-November 9, 20000
Press Review
Above it All
By Matt Taibbi (exile.taibbi@matrix.ru)

"As a result, the newspaper never gets too close to anyone beyond the elite
circles connected to the federal government. This distance is reflected in
many dimensions, but most clearly in the sociological tone and perspective
of the reporting. When The Washington Post examines a matter of community
distress, overcrowded prisons, drug violence or suburban overdevelopment,
it deploys impressive resources and its method of pursuit will be thorough
and cool. In college, its reporters studied sociology, political science,
and economics, and they are comfortable with academic techniques of inquiry.

"The one thing they cannot do is express the honest outcry of a situation.
They cannot speak in a human voice that is identifiably ‘of the people’
whom they are writing about. With so many disparate audiences to serve,
they are implicitly prohibited from embracing anyone’s complaint as their
own. They are very strong on digging out the facts, but weak on the
intangible dimensions of the human comedy. The Post’s angle of vision,
reflected in its language and style, resembles a hip social-science
professor’s—a fast-moving kind of pop sociology that seems to look downward
on its subject matter."

— William Grieder, “Who Will Tell the People”


Grieder here was talking specifically about The Washington Post, where he
once worked as Political Editor, but he might as well have been talking
about virtually every other major Western print publication. Newspaper
reporters today are bound by convention to write like robots, and robots
are weak when it comes to the intangibles. And intangibles become important
when there is nothing tangible to write about, which is the situation the
Moscow press corps has been facing in the last few weeks.

This has been a bad couple of weeks for Moscow’s finest. No object of any
significance has exploded, sunk, or burst into flames for more than a month
[Except the Russian jet that exploded, killing 75, as this issue went to
print—Ed.]. No personage with a strong Nexis/Lexis database presence has
lately been assassinated—in fact, in the case of the Anatoly Bykov murder
victims, a few people have actually been publicly de-assassinated. The
government has not been sacked, and no teams of masked police have seized
and jailed any high-profile Jews. In short, this has been a grim season for
the career-conscious Russia-watcher, a time of professional agony which one
suspects is compounded by envy of those former Columbia Journalism School
classmates whose chose Jerusalem or the U.S. campaign trail to start their
careers.

When there is no big story to keep them together, the press herd is forced
to disperse, the individual members left to forage on their own. As it is
for the herd animal in the wild, this time of separation from the pack is a
dangerous one for the foreign correspondent. Forced to provide his own
creative impetus for his reporting, he is every day in danger of sending
home what will appear to his editors as conspicuously forgettable material.
With every day that the rest of the Russian submarine fleet stays afloat,
he moves closer and closer to acting on long-dormant goofy feature ideas
about the trials of the Russian pet store industry, or about the world’s
fourth-largest waterfall in some little-known part of Siberia. If his
imagination is particularly bankrupt he may even give in to the temptation
to write an article about the state of the Russian supermarket—the Russian
supermarket being one of the three places in the entire country, aside from
his office and his apartment, where he’s ever actually seen in person. (The
Financial Times actually ran one such piece last week).

By any conceivable rational standard, Russia would have to rate as the
world’s greatest reporting beat. It’s eleven time zones of wall-to-wall
mass murder, catastrophe, thievery, idiocy, squalor, pestilence, war, evil
and suffering, a human comedy of awesome dimensions. Given enough leeway, a
journalist of even the faintest ability would never run out of things to
write about here. But journalists don’t have any leeway at all. Everything
they write about has to be news. The eternal isn’t news. It happens every
day and every year, over and over again. And even when it does so loudly
and colorfully and movingly, as it does in Russia, it can’t get into a
newspaper.

If you think about it, this general observation about the content of
newspapers—that timeless themes are not considered worth covering—reveals
the root dishonesty of the whole approach of modern media. The emphasis on
“news” leaves readers with the impression that something new is always
happening, that the truth is located in the moment, and not across all of
time. It creates a readership that is overstimulated and incapable of
putting things in perspective. And it forces its envoys, i.e.,
correspondents, to actively avoid perspective, as giving credence to
perspective and the eternal would tend to undermine the preeminence of
sensation that drives the entire business.

Journalists deal with this problem in two ways. One is to avoid the whole
question entirely by constantly seeking out “news.” The other is to give
the appearance of perspective through various non-news items sprinkled
throughout their publications. Generally these are columns, editorials,
analyses, and feature stories. Of these genres, only the last two are
really open to the ordinary staff writer of a foreign bureau or wire
service. Your Mitchell Landsbergs and Celestine Bohlens, when they’re not
writing news, generally have to rely on the feature for a change of pace.

But there’s a dual barrier to writing anything like a good feature built
into the profession. Grieder talked about the first, which is that the
audiences these writers are addressing are so disparate that the language
they use must necessarily be watered down, in order to avoid alienating any
of them. It’s the same problem that makes politicians so bland and
unappealing—because they’re after everyone’s vote, they can’t do anything
special to get yours.

But a politician can at least make a joke every now and then, or talk with
a Southern accent, or shoot a promotional spot with Vinny Testaverde…. He
can have some kind of personality. Journalists from big papers can’t. In
their tone and style, they have to be exactly like every other journalist.
This is the other half of the double-barrier–a feature has to be written by
everybody, from the point of view of nobody.

For Russia reporters, this means that covering even this insane and wildly
interesting place has to be written about in the language of a Hallmark
card. As a result, we get features like a recent monstrosity by Karl
Emerick Hanuska of Reuters, entitled “The waters of Russia’s Karelia hold
their allure.” It is hard not to share the agony of Hanuska’s professional
predicament when you read the lead to this piece, which goes as follows:

“LAKE ONEGA, Russia, Oct 24 (Reuters)—Crossing Russia’s vast Lake Onega on
a stormy autumn day, the steely grey sky is the only thing which seems still.

‘Just fix your eyes on something far off in the distance. That will calm
your stomach,’ an elderly woman advises a queasy tourist as the hydrofoil
packaged with passengers bound for the island of Kizhi lurches from wave to
wave.

“Glancing back at as Karelia region’s capital city Petrozavodsk fades from
sight and at the dark waves rolling ahead, one cannot help but be taken
with the enormity of Europe’s second-largest lake long enough to forget
about nausea for a few moments.”

I’d rather read just about anything than this kind of stuff. The
nutritional information on a box of Apple Jacks reads like Shakespeare
compared to Hanuska’s “stormy Autumn day,” his “steely grey sky,” his
“enormity of Europe’s second-largest lake.” Some 150 words into it, the
most interesting thing about this article is the fact that the author has
three names. Why does Karl get to have his “Emerick”? Why can he have
“Emerick,” while David Hoffman only has a last name?

We’ll never know, because we’ll never know anything about Karl Emerick
Hanuska—what he thinks, what he looks like, what his real impressions about
Karelia are. Hanuska’s perspective on his subject is predetermined. It’s
the same perspective every other reporter has about everything else. That
he is a significantly clumsier and less imaginative writer than most other
Russia reporters is immaterial. Even a good writer working for Reuters
would simply write more skillfully about the same crap. When you’re bound
to be impersonal and distant in your writing, even your non-factual
subjects end up being reduced to collections of facts. The size of a lake.
The color of the sky. The wave-like motion of a wave.

If you read the news often enough, you stop noticing how absurd this all
is. But if you stop to take a second look, it’s hard to avoid being amazed
that this stuff actually makes its way into print. Take this second passage
from Hanuska’s piece. At first glance, there’s nothing to it. But on second
glance, there’s REALLY nothing to it:

WATER EVERYWHERE

“Water is the defining characteristic of this vast region, which spreads
hundreds of kilometres (miles) along the Finnish border and is host to more
than 60,000 lakes and 27,000 rivers.

“A full quarter of its 40,000 square km (15,000 square miles) is covered by
water.

“‘The water is the most important thing to people here,’ said a little
bearded man named Viktor, taking a long drag on a cigarette before crushing
it out under a red rubber boot.

“‘We depend on the water for the fish we eat and the ships that sail into
our ports. The land is where we build homes and grow a few vegetables, but
out on the water is where we live.’

“Fair with blue eyes, he identified himself as a Karel — an ancient people
who now account for about seven percent of the region’s population of about
800,000.”

This is a grown man—addressing an audience of grownups—about this place
called Karelia where there is a lot of water, in which people fish for
food, and on which they sail their ships. Aside from the water in this
place, there is land, in which, by contrast, people do not fish, but
instead grow vegetables. Instead of piloting ships on this land, they build
houses there.

In addition, Hanuska introduces us to a person from this place. The person
is little, has a beard, fair hair, and blue eyes. His name is Viktor. He
smokes and has red rubber boots.

There are children’s pop-up books more thematically complicated than this
article. In fact, your average children’s book runs laps around Hanuska. A
children’s book would at least tell us that Viktor was a good Karel or a
bad Karel. His boots would be magic boots. A dragon would rise out of the
water, forcing people away from the fish. The story might even develop into
a tale of how the Karels discovered agriculture—who knows. But at the very
least, all of these details that Hanuska saw fit to include would be wedded
to some kind of emotional or rhetorical content. In the Reuters piece,
though, the details are unadorned by anything at all. They’re just there.

It would be easy enough to dismiss this article as one isolated example of
horrible writing. But it isn’t just one incident. This mania for distance
and emotionlessness pervades virtually every published article in the
mainstream press. When a newspaper writer isn’t being utterly moronic like
Hanuska, he usually opts instead for a more sophisticated form of
unevocative writing, i.e., glibness. Reducing a living human being to a
mannequin with a beard and blue eyes isn’t much different from standing at
a distance from some controversial dilemma and affecting to have no opinion
about it one way or another. In either case, you are, as Grieder puts it,
standing aside and seeming to look downward on your subject matter.

This extreme other end of Hanuska-esque frigidity was perfectly expressed
by a recent New York Times editorial run on the occasion of the death of
American Communist Party leader Gus Hall. The Times’s treatment of Hall in
this smug eulogy was no less absurd than Hanuska’s treatment of his Viktor.
The same paper that spent some 60 years eviscerating Hall every chance it
got could be observed last week flinging the following Hallmark card,
entitled “America’s Bolshevik,” at his corpse:

“Don Quixote himself might have despaired at the prospect of leading
America’s Communist Party during the cold war, but not the indefatigable
Gus Hall. Mr. Hall died last week at the age of 90. His life story,
improbably enough, is a genuine American tale…

“…The 1930’s were exhilarating times for a young Communist. The Great
Depression had revealed the frailties of laissez-faire capitalism, and
Stalin was then leading the fight against Fascism. But the next
half-century sorely tested his Communist faith. Mr. Hall’s advocacy of a
violent revolution earned him an eight-year stay at Leavenworth. He was in
prison when Soviet troops quashed the uprising in Budapest and Nikita
Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his show trials. But none of that cooled
Mr. Hall’s Bolshevik ardor…

“Mr. Hall was on the wrong side of history, and stayed there with what
ultimately became a comical consistency. His favorite Soviet leader was
Leonid Brezhnev. He condemned Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as ‘the
wrecking crew,’ and proclaimed North Korea the latest miracle to emulate.
He never wavered from his sclerotic orthodoxy, and never attempted to
transform the party of the proletariat into a more trendy leftist
alternative. That would have offended his native Midwestern stubbornness.”

You’d never know from the tone of this cutesy editorial, with its
affectionate salute to the deceased’s “Midwestern stubbornness” and his
“genuine American” life story, that The Times was writing about Gus Hall.
Cary Grant or Adlai Stevenson would probably have gotten exactly the same
treatment in the paper. On the other hand, The Times would probably take
the death of someone like Kurt Cobain more seriously. Cobain’s death was
news—he died at the height of his celebrity, when he himself was “news”; he
died a death that “meant something.” On the other hand, the modern media
beast doesn’t really distinguish between people like Gus Hall and Adlai
Stevenson, once their celebrity has passed and they are no longer “news.”
Like Karelia or a Moscow supermarket, their meaning is reduced to an
ironical collection of glib details. Commenting on them, the mainstream
media stands far above the fray, professing to no strong feelings one way
or the other, content to merely point out the blue eyes, the red boots, the
eight-year prison term, the sclerotic orthodoxy. If it’s not news, they’re
not there. They’re above it all.

There’s an implied message in this detached sociological approach, which by
now is thoroughly ingrained in Western reporting. The message is that
outside the news, life is a desert. The only thing that is really timeless
in the world the newspapers describe is the unwaveringly dispassionate eye
of our faithful observer, the press. To put it another way, the only thing
that’s eternal is the media’s refusal to engage its subject.

******

CDI Russia Weekly:  http://www.cdi.org/russia

Johnson's Russia List Archive (under construction):  http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson