Russian Presswatch/C/assified Information

...Two major farmers' markets have been shut down, and street vendors of shish-kebab and meat pies, common a year ago, are now a rarity...

...Nearly every Saturday," fumes Ivanova, "just when people want to sell and buy, vendors are chased away from the Tishinsky market: it's 'sanitation day.' The gates are closed on purpose so people have to squeeze in through some awful hole in the wall...

...So much for Communist ideals...

...Today, newspapers have advertising supplements, and there is even a weekly paper, Vsyo dlya vas The American Spectator April 1992 61 ("Everything for You"), where classified ads can be placed for free...

...Experience essential...

...The report is from Ekaterinburg, Yeltsin's domain back when it was still Sverdlovsk and he still a Communist, and the city that, as the president's home base, was supposed to become a showcase of reform...

...Other reporters might have set the record straight, but it would have taken a while...

...One such spot is outside the Child World, department store (across from KGB headquarters), but there, too, the crowd is often dispersed in the rudest manner, with police "swinging truncheons over the heads of veterans who are selling all or some of their special rations...

...Vending stalls and booths where tailors and knitters had peddled their wares, where onecould buy cheap lipstick and candy, are gone...

...Ivanova charges nothing less than that "the Moscow city government is determined to stamp out all real [private] trade in the city...

...Meanwhile, well-known political commentator Tatiana Ivanova suggests in Sem s plyusom ("Seven-Plus," January 1-7, 1992) that authorities in Moscow may not be very market-friendly, either...

...In an interview with the Washington Post, the Times's executive editor, Max Frankel, denounced the prestige press's supposed tabloid-like behavior: "I'm quite ashamed of my profession...

...There have been similar "cleanup" operations elsewhere...

...some specify that they want "a protector for my child...

...It could only have been Clinton himself...

...Hijacking Granny As I noted last month, the combination of commercialism and state controls gives bureaucrats unprecedented opportunities for self-enrichment, and they are not about to let go of such a lucrative arrangement without a fight...

...This role reversal of sorts was predicted on the very day of Gorbachev's resignation, December 25, by Komsomolskaya Pravda commentator Oleg Pshenichny, who even speculated that Gorbachev might someday shock everyone by defeating Yeltsin at the polls...

...While Russia's burgeoning pornographic press offers asmorgasbord of ads with matter-of-fact descriptions of desired activities, Vsyo dlya vas is reasonably tame, with nothing racier than: Willing and able to give intense sexual pleasure to a woman of any age...

...Clinton had achieved his purpose—at least for a few days...

...Clinton immediately held a press conference...

...A 21-year-old eccentric is so determined to marry "a military pilot, commando, [or] border guard (other military specialties also possible)" that she is "willing to move to any garrison...

...Inevitably, the sexual mixes with the social: many of the ads mention "living space," either as a requirement or as one's own asset...

...Apparently, says Sanatin, "the self-interest and ambitions of private entrepreneurs are less costly than those of state monopolies," and one need not be an economist to see who is threatened by that: "It's a bad omen for our officials if the village granny in the free vending row has cheaper cucumbers than the state sector...

...It's nice to know that the godless Communists were so concerned with the opinions of men of the cloth...

...In Ekaterinburg, quick-witted officials found a way out: they "simply hijacked the granny...

...He told the governor that he could not reveal his source but that his impression was that the source had received it from someone at the Pentagon...

...A few phone calls later, ABC determined that its information came from Col...

...Now It Can Be Told And speaking of the KGB: we all know how uncouth and unenlightened it was ever to mention the World Council of Churches and the like in the same breath as that august organization...

...n the last 1991 issue of the Russian weekly Novoye Vremya ("New Time"), émigré Kronid Lubarsky wrote that with Mikhail Gorbachev's retirement, the twentieth century itself was receding into the past...

...one of the nation's most energetic and sprightly journals of opinion...

...Love and Work in the Classifieds Perhaps one way of gauging the state of a country is to look at its classified advertising—a phenomenon unknown in the old Soviet Union, not because people didn't buy, sell, or exchange things but because such deals, even when legal, were supposed to have something unsavory about them, and were certainly not to be dignified through the medium of print...

...Koppel's task was eased by Jones's willingness to come forward, but I'd like to believe that he would have corrected his comments to Clinton in any event...

...Do Media Ever Talk About Sources...

...592970, who seeks "a kind, unliberated, nice-looking" bride, if it weren't for the fact that the gentlemanalso expects his pliant mate not to care about income and honestly warns that he has "no housing, or almost none...

...This much, if nothing else, is what New Hampshire revealed about Bill Clinton...

...But if, scanning the pages of Vsyo dlya vas, one were to choose the true ad of the year, it would be—no, not the one for Moscow's first school for striptease dancers, but New private detective agency is recruiting former employees of the KGB or the Ministry of Internal Affairs...

...Still, Gorby's chances for re-election may have lessened with the disclosure by an investigative commission of the Russian parliament that a month before the August coup, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union quietly signed a decree authorizing party organizations to invest their funds in private businesses...

...Typical "exchange" ads from a December issue go like this: Will trade dark, unpolished queen-sized bed (new) for woman's light coat, size 48, imported woman's boots, size 38, and winter coat size 48, with natural fur collar...

...Such invitations are still necessary for travel.] Or: Two-room apartment in downtown Moscow available in exchange for a job abroad, preferably in my line of work...

...She adds that flea markets are the only place where average Muscovites can find affordable goods nowadays...

...Detailing the concerted effort, from the earliest days of Soviet power, to make the Russian Orthodox Church a handmaiden of the secret police, Polosin writes that "KGB involvement in the international activities of religious organizations reached its peak in the 1970s...

...Time The American Spectator P.O...

...Now, in "Church and State Under the Soviet Regime" (Izvestia, January 22, 1992), Vyacheslav Polosin, a priest who chairs the Russian parliament's commission on religions, discloses some episodes of more than passing interest to us right-wing paranoids...

...the New York Times buried this event in a single graph within a larger story...

...This is the case all over the country...

...CI Soviet Union...

...Holder of Passport No...

...Polosin cites evidence that the Christian Peace Conference was likewise "tenderly cultivated" by the KGB...

...The latest of these interesting documents goes back only to 1989, and details KGB-sponsored "state security measures" as a result of which "the executive body of the Central Committee of the WCC has issued eight public statements and three letters that follow the political line of the socialist bloc...

...The vote went to Emilio Castro, whose candidacy was supported not only by the ROC but by the churches of socialist countries...

...To add insult to injury, the poor souls are told to go to an approvedlocation—a two-hour trip, counting the waits at bus stops in the cold...

...0 Subscribe to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Today...

...Instead, they found a perfect surrogate in the draft story broken by the Wall Street Journal on February 6. A too-clever Clinton added to the concern over his character by violating his own refusal to discuss Flowers: "A woman I never slept with and a draft I never dodged," he said of the accusations against him...

...Releasing a copy of the letter, he attacked its leak to ABC as part of a "dirty tricks" campaign by "George Bush and the Republican Party...

...In both cases we're talking about credibility...

...Just over a year ago, as the city's oh-so-radical new mayor Gavriil Popov was being toasted by American libertarians, the tolkuchka (flea market) at the Rizhsky Market was being eliminated in a crackdown on black-market dealing...

...In other words, authorities in the Lenin district (name changes go only so far) have decreed that the city's central farmers' market will be "reorganized" as a "trade center" owned by K. Arkhipov, former head of the district party committee and current head of the district council, in tandem with comrades from the local agricultural industry board...

...ABC's source then called up "Nightline" to say that his copy of the letter had not come from anyone at the Pentagon...

...A press that could not prove the adultery story now had every reason to zero in on Clinton's fishiness with the draft...

...But they could not prove it, nor did they want to...

...I don't think that's very likely, but then such criteria may not apply to the former Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields) and our regular Russian Presswatch (formerly Soviet Presswatch) columnist . Who Devised Clinton's Anti-GOP PR...

...The day after Clinton's "60 Minutes" appearance, Flowers held her own press conference to call him a liar...

...The other day, he let it be known that he will fully support Boris Yeltsin as long as Yeltsin stays the course of democracy and reform—an almost exact reiteration of what Yeltsin said of Gorbachev during Yeltsin's visit to the United States eight months ago...

...As one reporter told me, "The draft story wouldn't have had the impact without the adultery story...

...There was no reason for Koppel to talk about sourcing in his phone conversation with Clinton, but he was right to issue what amounted to a correction, precisely because his loose talk about the letter's origin had made him part of the story...

...It's gospel that the press never does, but ABC's Ted Koppel did after Clinton's 22year-old letter to an ROTC recruiter was leaked to "Nightline...

...Clinton Jones, a Democrat and former officer in the University of Arkansas ROTC unit who now was willing to be publicly identified...

...If he ever becomes President, I anticipate a highly partisan Democrat who'll try to work and spin the press, and whose politics, on social and moral issues at least, come right out of the cultural divide that opened in the late sixties—libertarian on matters of sex and personal behavior, opposed to institutional authority, and sanctimonious about opposing the Vietnam war...

...Some reporters felt Clinton was close to a lie: they were convinced Clinton and Flowers had had at least a dalliance or two...

...This sounds startling, but the commentator cites other recent cases in which top Moscow officials, including deputy mayor Yuri Luzhkov, effectively stopped peasants and entrepreneurs from bringing more food into the city by setting impossible—or at least highly inconvenient—conditions...

...Despite official denials, the journalist dug up a paper signed by the city privatization czar placing the market, formerly a municipal property, in the hands of the Lenin district government...

...That night, on national television, a defensive Koppel apprised Clinton of these facts...

...She might be a perfect match for No...

...630889 would like to meet "a man under 45 who believes that earning money and making decisions is a man's job...

...Perhaps, but Gorby is not acting like a man over the hill...

...Nearly two-thirds of the women have young children...

...As a result of price deregulation, the Classified Information by Cathy Young 60 The American Spectator April 1992 farmers' markets—traditionally far more expensive than state shops—are now offering higher-quality foodstuffs at lower cost: "In factory dining rooms, frozen, dried-up meat that lost its taste even before it was imported from the West goes for up to 140 rubles a kilo," while fresh veal at the farmers' market sells for 70 or 80...

...He cites declassified KGB reports, including one from July 1984: "Agents [code names follow—V.P.] traveled to Switzerland as members of the Russian Orthodox Church delegation to the Congress of the World Council of Churches, with the assignment to get a candidate acceptable to us elected Secretary General of the WCC...

...Planning a program for February 12, Koppel called Clinton...

...Once the market is in nomenklatura hands, says Sanatin, the price of that farm veal will be jacked up to 200 rubles or more...

...only a few, selling imported clothes and shoes at astronomical prices, have been restored...

...Forty years old, attractive body and face, with inexhaustible energy and fantasy, decent character...

...The management and staff of the market had applied in August 1990 to make it a semi-private enterprise on a leaseholding basis—but the same district government refused permission...

...And we'll have no choice except to shell out our money and support the invincible conglomerate of power, fraud, and greed...

...And more exotic ones, such as: Will trade invitation for personal visit to the United States for invitation to Switzerland, Denmark, France, Belgium, or Holland...

...Box 549, Arlington, Virginia 22216-0549 (or call 1-800-341-1522) Please enter my 0 new 0 renewal subscription to The American Spectator for: 0 12 monthly issues $35 0 24 issues $70 My check is enclosed Bill me later 0 Charge my C3 MasterCard 0 Visa Exp Date: Account #. MasterCard MEM VIS4 Signature: 1 L 62 The American Spectator April 1992...

...Then there are the personals, a good way to measure the progress of the Russian sexual revolution...

...Proof is found in an article by V. Sanatin in Komsomolskaya Pravda (January 24, 1992), "The Nomenklatura Comes Out of the Trenches—And Tackles the Market...