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DANCES WITH BEARS
Oligarchs: A
vulgar repeat of Russian history
By
John Helmer
MOSCOW - The English and North
Americans have never been much good at analyzing Russia,
and they haven't gotten better. A long time fighting an
enemy can make you wary, without becoming wise. But in
war neither time nor experience need make any difference
to who wins, who loses.
Kremlinology was a
wartime industry, and like the gathering of battlefield
intelligence or the production of ordnance, it was only
as good as its impact on targets, and the collateral
damage. The Kremlinologists were bound to fail at
long-term prediction. They weren't capable of detecting
underlying causes or trends. They never got close.
Since 1991, the journalists who have replaced
the Kremlinologists - especially those who worked for
the so-called journals of record of London, New York and
Washington, and their bastard offspring, The Moscow
Times - began the tale of the Russian oligarchs with a
colossal mistake that they still haven't corrected, more
than a decade later. The oligarchs, they claimed with
all the excitement of a cub reporter hoping for a
Pulitzer prize, were a brand-new Russian phenomenon. But
the oligarchs aren't new. They aren't originally or
uniquely Russian either.
To begin, it's
necessary to go back in Russian time, following the only
American analysis of Russia that gets close to the
truth, Woody Allen's film Love and Death.
Set in the time of Napoleon's march on Moscow,
Woody's character is Boris Dmitrievich Grushenko, the
frail third son of provincial landowners who is
reluctant to follow his two brawnier brothers into the
Russian army, still less into battle with the French.
"What's the difference if Napoleon wins?" Boris
asks, suggesting that replacing Tsar Alexander I with
Emperor Napoleon might not be a bad thing; and in any
case wasn't worth risking his life to stop. "Ooohhh!"
gasped a group of fellow Russian officers. "You wouldn't
want to be forced to eat French food, would you? Not
with all those heavy cream sauces."
If you
believe the elements of the Russian press feted by
Western embassies in Moscow, and echoed by Western
journalists, that's the trouble with Russia today. One
tyrant has replaced another, they claim; the only
difference between them is that Russia is eating better,
at least compared with 1998. The line of criticism is
that President Vladimir Putin is nothing more than Boris
Yeltsin, with a coating of barnaise.
Sociologically speaking, there's no doubt that
Putin's approval among Russian voters tracks very
closely with how well they are eating. But more
surprising is the fact that Putin's trust rating among
voters is often higher than his approval. In other
words, Russians expect Putin to do better in future than
he is doing at the moment. When trust sinks below
approval, this is the signal the voters see good but
little alternative in the future.
At the same
time, the dwindling of voter support for the pro-Kremlin
factions in the Duma, and the rise of support for the
Communist Party - the preoccupying political problem for
the Kremlin between now and the presidential election of
2004 - show that the Russian electorate doesn't believe
Putin can manage to do better by himself, by feats of
political willpower motivated by what is right and good
for Russia. The voters suspect, as they have always
suspected since 1991, that the oligarchs - those with
the cash to corrupt, and the power to control - can bend
Putin to their will, not the other way round.
To
prevent that, Russian voters back the president against
the oligarchs. To hedge against the likelihood he will
fail, they back parliamentary opposition on the left.
This balance of power has been the basic conception of
Russian democracy, as the voters have understood it; and
when the balloting has been relatively free of
manipulation and fraud, they have voted for it
consistently since 1991. This was what Yeltsin's attack
on parliament in 1993; his rewriting of the
constitution; and his election tactics of 1996 all aimed
to destroy.
His failure was Putin's opportunity.
But as we all know, Yeltsin didn't fall. He was
persuaded to step down. The terms of that power transfer
meant that those with wealth and political influence -
identified as oligarchs in public opinion - were granted
the status of co-guarantors and collateral holders for
the Kremlin. In his first term Putin has been able to do
no more than pick off the two oligarchs who made
themselves easy targets, because their media had the
weakest of financial foundations, and were the most
directly threatening to the Kremlin - Vladimir Gusinsky
and Boris Berezovsky. In their arrogance and folly, that
duo also missed the opportunities to save themselves
with Putin.
Viewed sector by sector of the
economy, the signs are there that not all wealth has
been able to buy the protection of the state, let alone
dictate state policy, as compradors, the Hispanic name
for oligarchs. There has been a partial cleanup of the
corruption that has plagued arms trading, railways,
ports, shipping, vodka production, customs collection,
meat importation, diamond sales and the precious metals
trade.
In oil, gas, steel, aluminum, timber and
pulp, telecommunications and auto production, there is
much less clarity of outcome, and hence considerable
doubt about presidential policy. The only way to judge
what the oligarchs are up to is industry by industry,
case by case. Is Kremlin policy a case of sureness of
purpose meeting weakness of means? Or does vacillation
and insecurity produce indecision? Russian insiders
can't answer with more confidence than foreign
outsiders, because the game is far from being played
out.
In the climax of Love and Death,
Woody Allen's Grushenko becomes embroiled in a plot to
assassinate Napoleon. The wily French fool him with a
double, and in any event Grushenko isn't ruthless enough
to kill.
Grushenko is nabbed and sentenced to be
shot. He believes that an angel of God will appear to
say that he will be pardoned at the last moment, but
that doesn't happen. His lawyer wins him an hour's stay
of execution, and Grushenko can't negotiate out of his
date with the Grim Reaper. It's an unhappy ending for
Grushenko, but not exactly pessimistic for Russia.
"What's it like to be dead?" Grushenko's love
Sonia asks his ghost. "You know the chicken at Tressky's
restaurant?" he replies. "Well, it's worse."
And
the message for Russia, says Woody in the epilogue:
"Don't think of death as an end. Think of it as a very
efficient way of cutting down on expenses."
If
this is to be the metaphorical, commercial or literal
outcome of Putin's policy for the oligarchs, Russian
voters should continue to trust him for a good while
yet. But since it was, and remains, the oligarchs and
their political placemen who continue to run the Finance
Ministry, it is just as likely they will continue
deciding whose deaths are most efficacious for cutting
down on expenses. It's possible that the election
campaign of 2003 and 2004 will sharpen public focus on
this choice, but even if it does, the outcome is
unlikely to be decisive. In Love and Death, who
is it that ends up dead at the end?
Twenty-seven
years after Napoleon left Moscow, in the middle of 1839,
a Frenchman named Astolphe de Custine arrived in the
city. He spent 10 days there; Napoleon had spent 34. But
Custine also visited St Petersburg, Yaroslavl and Nizhny
Novgorod for a total of 78 days. If you count the time
Napoleon spent on Russian territory from his first
frontier crossing to the last, the days add up to 165.
Napoleon produced a good many dispatches and letters
about Russia, most of them preoccupied retrospectively
with his own mistakes and misjudgments. (The biggest of
them, he concluded later, was that he "should have
married a Russian".)
With less than half the
time Napoleon had at his disposal, and none of his staff
intelligence, Custine - alone, and without being able to
speak a word of Russian - produced a study of Russia so
accurate Alexander Herzen, the 19th century Russian
philosopher, called it the most intelligent ever
written. George Kennan, the American diplomat who
created the rationale of American Cold War policy,
called it the best on the Russian condition that had led
to the Russian revolution. In Russia, Custine's book was
banned by the Tsar until 1910, and then banned again
after the revolution. The penalty fitted the crime -
Custine understood too well what was happening, and
anticipated too precisely what would transpire, so the
book should cease to exist, at least in Russia. It's
been forgotten almost everywhere else.
When
Chrystia Freeland, a Canadian who was the Moscow
correspondent of the Financial Times from 1995 to 1998,
came to rewrite all she had misreported for her
newspaper, she couldn't manage to define the men she
called the oligarchs, except to name them, and describe
what they looked like to prove how close she had been
able to get to them.
"The oligarchs," Freeland
wrote in a book published in 2000, "wear $100,000
wristwatches and their wives wear $100,000 fur coats.
They travel in motorcades of armored Mercedes and Jeeps,
employ small armies of bodyguards, and maintain a
collection of homes. They spend $1 million on a birthday
gift for a helpful politician as casually as you or I
would send a card to a friend."
To Freeland, her
predecessors and successors, this combination of wealth
and political corruption was the Vogue magazine version
of power - seemingly big, mesmerizingly new. By making
that newsworthy, the reporters have made themselves
reputations, as well as money.
But in 1839
Custine had already met the Russian oligarchs - the
concessionaires, compradors and title-buyers of the time
- disdained their celebrity, and saw through the
captivating show. "Such ill-bred and yet well-informed,
well-dressed, clever and self-confident Russians," he
reported in his Letter 19, "tread in the steps of
European elegance, without knowing that refinement of
habits has no value except as it announces the existence
of something better in the heart of its possessor. These
apprentices of fashion, who confuse the appearance with
the reality, are trained bears, the sight of which
inclines me to regret the wild ones: they have not yet
become polished men, and they are already spoiled
savages."
Here they are - the old become new
again.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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