December 2004 Archives

By Yevgenia Albats

The Washington Post, Sunday, December 12, 2004; Page B03

MOSCOW

The Kremlin's rough intrusion into the Ukrainian elections, including its heavy-handed lobbying on behalf of a convicted criminal, has startled the West on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet for those who have been paying attention to Vladimir Putin's Russia, this should not have come as a surprise. Quite the contrary. The Kremlin's approach to Ukraine's elections is a logical extension of Putin's policies at home over the past four years.

Allow me to remind you of what Putin has accomplished since Boris N. Yeltsin left the presidency on Dec. 31, 1999, and anointed Putin as heir apparent. While declaring himself and Russia a friend of democracy and of the West, Putin has slowly and systematically extended the state's control over society and tightened its grip on Russia's most important institutions.

He has obliterated the media, leaving almost no room for dissent. The national television networks are under strict government control. Just as under the Soviets, editors are summoned to the Kremlin on a weekly basis to be given outlines of what news should be covered and what should not, which guests should be invited to appear on which (pre-recorded) shows and for how many seconds, and which should not. Nothing goes live; spontaneity would be dangerous. Even Kultura, the cultural affairs channel, was recently given a list of unwelcome guests, according to people inside the station.

The slightest deviation can result in punishment. The Kremlin decided that Raf Shakirov, the editor of the national daily Izvestia, covered the hostage crisis in Beslan too emotionally in September because he ran a photo of a dead child on the front page, and he was promptly fired.

No one dares criticize Putin or his politics to a nationwide audience. Thus, the Kremlin can prevent the emergence of an alternative to Putin who might challenge his politics. This absence of an alternative, by the way, is an important reason for Putin's high popularity rating inside the country.

Putin has abolished the system of checks and balances, turning the parliament into a body of yes men, by exploiting Russia's weak party system and manipulating media campaign coverage, determining which candidates get favorable news coverage and which do not. Dominating parliament was not enough for him. He used the fear sown by the Beslan attack to abolish the democratic election of governors. Now, he is going to appoint leaders of the 88 regions, violating the essence of the federation making up Russia.

The academic community has also been targeted, with the jailing of scientists Igor Sutyagin (15 years of hard labor for analyzing publicly available information) and Valentin Danilov (14 years in a high-security labor camp, without the possibility of pardon, for selling scientific information that his defenders say is in the public domain). Both were charged with treason.

Business is under attack as well. Putin has been at the forefront of an assault intended to redistribute the nation's most lucrative properties and cow any businessmen who might fancy too much power and independence for themselves. We are reminded of this when we periodically see Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, sitting in a cage in a courtroom.

Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos Oil, was arrested more than a year ago on charges of tax evasion. He has been in prison ever since, and his trial -- on most days a farcical reading of charges -- winds interminably on, as Yukos, the nation's biggest and most successful company, is slowly destroyed. In a matter of two weeks, its major assets are to be acquired for one-third their market value by the state gas monopoly Gazprom.

Much of this bears the shadowy but unmistakable imprint of the security forces. Putin has saturated the bureaucracy with former and current officers of the FSB, the Federal Security Service and successor to the KGB. Many people thought that these new strong hands would do something about the corruption of the Yeltsin years. They did. Things got worse: The cost of bribes went up by at least 30 percent. "They even charge us [former colleagues] more than Yeltsin's guys did," a retired KGB general who is now in a financial business told me in astonishment. Apparently, he expected his former pals at arms to offer him a discount. They haven't.

This record can be summed up in one word: Control.

By training, Putin is a man of control. He spent a major part of his life in the KGB, whose leaderships and agents were entrusted by the Communist Party with safeguarding the regime. The KGB taught its soldiers well; its institutional culture has not been easily thrown off and its imperatives have proved stronger than Putin's leanings toward democracy.

Democracy, which requires a ruling party to submit to the inevitable loss of an election, represents an unacceptable threat. A successful people's revolution in Ukraine is a threat twice over, serving as a dangerous example to the people of Russia. Putin and his entourage are perfectly aware of this danger. Regardless of what Putin says in public (or to President Bush in private) about his vision of the special way of democratic development in Russia, he is taking every precaution to ensure that true democracy never exists in his land.

Putin intends to reassert control over all aspects of life, turning the country back into "an ultra bureaucratic state," where bureaucrats are answerable to no one but themselves, in the time-honored Soviet tradition.

Why should national borders limit an obsession with control, when the Kremlin desires dominance over the former Soviet republics? Komsomolskaya Pravda, a widely circulated newspaper closely connected to top officials, states the goal clearly: "to reinstitute a great empire feared by everyone in the world," just as the U.S.S.R. was.

Why should a twice-sentenced criminal, current Ukraine Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, deserve such fierce support from Putin, who visited Ukraine on two occasions to publicly promote his presidential campaign? Because Yanukovych is easy to manipulate and control precisely because of his criminal record. His rival, Viktor Yushchenko, on the other hand, has proclaimed his intention to draw Ukraine closer to the European Union and NATO and would obviously resist the expansion of Kremlin-type politics into Ukraine. He would be difficult for "Big Brother" Russia to control.

Why do Russia's state-owned media relentlessly portray the democratically elected president Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia as an enemy of Russia while the Belarusan dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, comes across as a good friend (if a little bit out of his mind)? Because Saakashvili became a president as a result of popular revolution against a fatally corrupt bureaucracy. His first reforms have been aimed at broad change in administration, and a purge of old communist officials.

Saakashvili and Yushchenko are real threats to Putin -- leaders capable of inspiring democratic development beyond their borders, across the lands of the former U.S.S.R.

So, what is in the cards for us? If my reading of Russian politics is any good, we should expect much tougher policies coming from the Kremlin, both domestically and internationally, and a growing resistance to them in Russian society.

The former is already under way: A planned law on terrorism will allow for suspension of constitutional freedoms for as long as 60 days. As Ludmila Alekseeva, who leads the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights watchdog, says, "Russian authorities are taking precautions in case anything like the orange revolution in Kiev should come to Moscow."

A month ago, Mikhail Yuriev, chairman of the board of the Evrofinance group, a financial institution believed to be closely connected to the Kremlin's bureaucrats in epaulets, outlined the program for Russia. Two major goals lie ahead, he wrote in Komsomolskaya Pravda: The reconstitution of the Russian empire, and turning a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country into one nation, ethnically Russian and religiously Orthodox. "The interests of other nations should be of little concern to us," he said.

Both goals require a clear definition of "enemies of the state" (the euphemism widely used under Stalin). Such enemies are: those who speak in favor of negotiations to end the war in Chechnya; those who are receptive to the advice of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as "to the teaching of the West as to how we should construct our politics and economics." Russia's enemies also include those who speak in favor of a professional army; and those who are against the teaching of the Russian Orthodox religion in public schools; those who are in favor of a free media; and those who are against the scapegoating of business. To put it bluntly, anyone who stands against the regime and its politics should be pronounced an enemy of the state.

Yuriev's article would not be worth mentioning if it didn't reflect the thinking that exists in the Kremlin, according to those who have access to it. Yet as frightening as this sounds, the idea beneath all those harsh proclamations is a simple one: to prepare public opinion for the forceful redistribution of property from those not completely loyal to the Kremlin to those who are. (Some hawks suggest a variant, taking all "non-Orthodox" companies -- owned by Jews and Muslims -- and giving them to those who belong to the religious and ethnic mainstream.)

How far this politics of property redistribution will go depends upon Putin himself: whether he will be willing to resist pressure from the bureaucrats in epaulets -- affiliated with the security forces -- or whether he chooses to submit to the interests of the corporation that groomed him, the KGB.

As for the possibility that political resistance will spread from Ukraine to Russia, the odds are harder to predict. Unlike Ukraine, Russia stretches along nine time zones, which makes it much harder to mobilize the nation around an alternative politician if all electronic media are in the hands of the state. New and restrictive laws on political parties, as well as new rules for parliamentary elections, don't make the task any easier.

Still, I feel restiveness among listeners of Echo Moskvy radio, where I have a Sunday political talk show. Middle-sized businesses wonder whether they will be seized next. Intellectuals are unhappy about restrictions imposed on the press. The abolition of many state services, the trimming of the old welfare state, which hit the poorest the hardest, the luxuries provided to state officials, has made many formerly fierce Putin supporters think again. Despite what Westerners may think, Russians are not averse to democracy; time and again polls show that a majority of Russians would like to live in what they call "a normal country," meaning European-type prosperity and democracy.

Clearly, change won't come from the outside. Russians should not expect any help from big or small brothers in the West. The task of making the country free is in our own hands. I need to believe we can do it.

Yevgenia Albats is a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics, a Moscow-based university. She has a doctorate in government from Harvard University.

Newsmax.com Saturday, Dec. 11, 2004 3:10 p.m. EST

Despite his claim to be a friend of democratic government, Russian President Vladimir Putin is reviving the iron control the Kremlin exercised under the brutal Soviet regime, crushing all opposition and stifling voices of dissent to prevent the emergence of any potential rivals.

So writes Yevgenia Albats, a professor of political science at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics, who also has a doctorate in government from Harvard University.

In a scathing article in tomorrow's Washington Post the courageous Albats pens a meticulously detailed indictment of the Soviet-style Putin regime now plunging the nation deeper and deeper into what can only be described as a dictatorship-in-the-making.

Putin, Dr. Albats writes, "has slowly and systematically extended the state's control over society and tightened its grip on Russia's most important institutions." His aim, she says, is to solidify his power and prevent any potential rivals from challenging him.

According to Dr. Albats:

Putin has "obliterated the media, leaving almost no room for criticism or dissent. All the national television networks are under strict government control ... editors are summoned to the Kremlin on a weekly basis to be given outlines of what news should be covered and what should not, which guests should be invited to appear on which (pre-recorded) shows and for how many seconds, and which should not. Nothing goes live; spontaneity would be dangerous."

She cited the case of one editor who displeased Putin by running the picture of a dead child in a story about the hostage crisis in Beslan. He was fired.

The result: "No one dares criticize Putin or his politics to a nationwide audience. Thus, the Kremlin can prevent the emergence of an alternative to Putin who might challenge his politics."

Putin "has abolished the system of checks and balances, turning the parliament into a body of yes men, by exploiting Russia's weak party system and manipulating media campaign coverage, determining which candidates get favorable news coverage and which do not."

"He used the fear sown by the Beslan attack to abolish the democratic election of governors. Now he is going to appoint leaders of the 88 regions, violating the essence of the federation making up Russia," a move that would be similar to the president of the United States appointing the governors of all 50 states.

Albats says Putin has gone after the academic community, citing the cases of "scientists Igor Sutyagin (15 years of hard labor for analyzing publicly available information) and Valentin Danilov (14 years in a high-security labor camp, without the possibility of pardon, for selling scientific information that his defenders say is in the public domain)." Their crime? Alleged treason.

He has targeted business, ladling out "the nation's most lucrative properties and intimidating any businessmen" who seek too much power and independence for themselves. "We are reminded of this when we periodically see Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, sitting in a cage in a courtroom."
She cites the case of Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos Oil, who was arrested more than a year ago on charges of tax evasion and has been in prison ever since. She explained that Yukos, the nation's largest and most successful company, is slowly being destroyed. "In a matter of two weeks," she writes, "its major assets are to be acquired for one-third their market value by the state gas monopoly Gazprom."

One of Putin's motives for publicly and fiercely backing current Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, visiting Ukraine on two occasions to publicly promote his presidential campaign, was that he feared that if Yanukovych's opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, won power it would serve as an example to the Russian people that a freedom-loving, democratically elected candidate could successfully challenge and oust a totalitarian ruler.

Putin has used the nation's security forces to implement his policies, she warns, saturating the Kremlin bureaucracy with former and current officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor.
"Many people thought that these new strong hands would do something about the corruption of the Yeltsin years," she wrote. "They did. Things got worse: The cost of bribes went up by at least 30 percent. 'They even charge us [former colleagues] more than Yeltsin's guys did,' a retired KGB general who is now in a financial business told me in astonishment. "

It's all about control, Albats explained, noting that ex-KGB man Putin is "a man of control," having spent much of his life in the dreaded Gestapo-like secret police that protected the Communist dictatorship.

Putin recognizes the dangers of democracy to his dictatorial rule and "is taking every precaution to ensure that true democracy never exists in his land" and "intends to reassert control over all aspects of Russian life, turning the country back into "an ultra bureaucratic state, where bureaucrats are answerable to no one but themselves, in the time-honored Soviet tradition."

At the very heart of Putin's policy, Albats notes, is the belief expressed by Komsomolskaya Pravda, a widely circulated newspaper closely connected to top officials, that the goal is "to reinstitute a great empire feared by everyone in the world," just as the U.S.S.R. was.

She asks: "So, what is in the cards for us? If my reading of Russian politics is any good, we should expect much tougher policies coming from the Kremlin, both domestically and internationally, and a growing resistance to them in Russian society."

She adds: "Clearly, change won't come from the outside. Russians should not expect any help from big or small brothers in the West. The task of making the country free is in our own hands. I need to believe we can do it."