Asia Times: Russians fall for centralizer's magnetism


	June 23, 2000	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

Russians fall for centralizer's magnetism
by Julie A Corwin

Although it became a cliche during Russia's presidential election campaign to refer to then acting President Vladimir Putin as an enigma or ''black box,'' by then it was already clear what kind of president he would become. Just seven weeks after his inauguration, Putin's preference for centralization has been demonstrated in three areas: the media, the vodka industry, and policy toward the regions. And because such centralization promises order, if not law, it is popular with Russian citizens who are looking for a way out of the country's prolonged crisis.

Putin's tactics in each of these areas have been oddly similar: unleashing federal bureaucrats, via a reorganized or somehow empowered federal organ, and letting loose law enforcement officials and making a few high-level arrests - or at the very least, threatening to. All the while, the president seeks to justify his moves to increase central control by using the rhetoric of law and order.

Putin's policy toward the media has gotten a lot of attention, perhaps because those doing the reporting are directly affected by it. The Media Ministry recently announced that it will begin to enforce a 1998 law requiring media organizations to be registered as well as licensed. ''If one strictly follows the letter of the law, we could have shut you all down a long time ago,'' Media Minister Mikhail Lesin commented. Some six months earlier, one of Lesin's deputies announced that then acting President Putin had signed a bill amending the law on economic support for regional newspapers so that money for those newspapers comes directly from the federal budget rather than being channeled through local government organs. Presumably, one dependent relationship has been substituted for another, but with a key difference: now Moscow calls the shots.

Meanwhile, Putin's moves deploying law enforcement officials against the media have gotten even more attention. The arrest of RFE/RL correspondent Andrei Babitskii in Daghestan in February was followed by the raid last month on Media-MOST headquarters, and most recently, the June 13 detention of Media-MOST head Vladimir Gusinskii. If Gusinskii's case follows the same trajectory as Babitskii's, then the legal charges will hover over him for an indefinite period, during which he will be forbidden to travel abroad. The message to journalists without an impressive list of international contacts like Gusinskii's, or a high-level employer such as Babitskii, is criticize the Kremlin at your peril.

With regard to the regions, Putin moved even more quickly and decisively, unfurling at least three new bureaucratic layers to oversee Moscow's interests. First, he restructured the system of having a presidential representative in each federation subject by creating seven administrative macro-regions or districts. Each district has a presidential representative that some analysts have dubbed ''governors-general'': five of the seven are former officers with the intelligence service or army. Supplementing their efforts will be a newly created corps of seven regional prosecutors and seven branches of the investigative Audit Chamber.

In another saber-rattling exercise, just days after his inauguration Putin ordered federal prosecutors to investigate more than 200 cases of tax dodging, embezzlement, and other economic offenses in Smolensk Oblast. He then submitted legislation to the State Duma asking legislators to empower the Russian president to dismiss elected governors who violate federal laws on more than one occasion. While trying to persuade deputies of the bills' merits, Putin's presidential representative Aleksandr Kotenkov said that ''at least 16 governors'' face the prospect of criminal prosecution.

Putin's policy toward the vodka industry has attracted less attention but could have as great an impact on the country's development, given the importance of that industry as a revenue-earner and as staple in the citizenry's diet. As with the regions, Putin took a bureaucratic institutional leftover from the Yeltsin presidency and reinvigorated it. Late last month, he issued a resolution stating that all state-owned companies producing alcohol will be restructured into branches of Rosspirtprom, a holding company that will also manage all of the state's stakes in alcohol-producing companies. Rosspirtprom had been provided for in a Yeltsin decree that was never implemented.

Police have since targeted key facilities in the vodka sector. The offices of Soyuzplodimport, the company holding the rights to the names of about 50 of Russia's most famous brands of vodka, were raided several times by Interior Ministry police around early June. And Yurii Ermilov, the director of the Kristall factory, the country's leading alcohol producer, was sacked and a Rosneft vice president named in his place. Although the federal government owns 51 percent of the company's stock, Moscow city authorities were reportedly virtually running the factory. A number of analysts suggested that the removal of Ermilov represents an attempt by federal authorities to reassert control over a lucrative enterprise.

The vodka industry needed regulating, since the country has been overrun with bootleg manufacturers. And it is also true that some regional leaders have ridden roughshod over their population's best interests, suppressing any political opposition and pursuing an economic policy favoring local businessmen. Likewise, competing oligarchs have used the Russian media as vehicles to distribute ''kompromat'' against their enemies.

All these ''truths'' are self-evident to the Russian population, which gave Putin a 53 percent mandate. What's less evident, though, is how increasing central control will necessarily address these problems. Judging by the Soviet experience, hooch, a corrupt press, and feudalistic local leaders can all exist simultaneously with increased oversight from Moscow. In fact, they can even flourish.

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