Russia Watch (I) / Bardak Shadows
Bernstein, Jonas
Bardak Shadows by Jonas Bernstein L ast summer, a reporter for the English-language Moscow Tribune witnessed the following incident: An elderly man, one of Moscow's legions of pensioners, was...
...Tarasov won...
...Yeltsin's government is going to have to turn its attentions to the bardak question—now...
...The daily landscape is littered with such acts...
...Want to hear another statistic...
...In a big country, there are, of course, honest cops, who try against all odds to do their jobs...
...Frustration with the impotence of the authorities certainly motivated those who backed the LDP...
...Prior to their capture, the Rostov kid80 The American Spectator February 1994 nappers, flying in a commandeered helicopter with the $10 million they received in ransom, dropped a portion of their loot out the door as they passed over the breakaway Chechen Republic, base for some of the most powerful mafia groups in Russia...
...R ussians have a name for the situation they now find themselves in: bardak (literally "brothel"), which is used as a term for disorder and chaos...
...It was a nice gesture, marking a break with the ministry's KGB forebears...
...According to press reports, the murder rate in Russia (11 per 100,000) is now higher than that of the United States, which, with its rate of 9 per 100,000, has long been the most violent of the developed democracies...
...In late December, Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Security Ministry...
...The cop shrugged his shoulders and answered, "This is what democracy brings...
...Several strapping young men jumped out of the car and proceeded to beat the old man senseless...
...But in Moscow, the face of the police the populace most often sees- is that of the GAI traffic cop pulling over cars in order to extract bribes...
...The bloc led by reform economist Gregory Yavlinsky included a plank in its platform calling for the "removal of the mafia from the city markets" as one way to ensure genuine competition and thus slow down skyrocketing prices...
...Still, while there are active and vicious Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Chechen crime gangs in Moscow, police officials report that the majority of crime groups operating there are Russian...
...When the light changed, he was still hobbling across the intersection in the way of a BMW—one of the makes that have become a status symbol for Russia's nouveaux riches...
...If the thugs in this incident were a little more horror-show than the norm, their act of violence was just one of many in the spiral of crime that is accompanying Russia's stagger towards the market system...
...Today, however, the average Russian sees an omnipotent mafia as a much greater concrete threat than an omnipotent secret police, and most people would undoubtedly like to see a housecleaning at the Internal Affairs Ministry as well...
...He campaigned on a law-and-order ticket, calling for a new tax to raise the salaries of Moscow's 120,000 police officers to $1,000 a month—a princely salary that should certainly be enough to leave them bribe-proof...
...One of the victims had headed a large bank...
...The average "militiaman" is underpaid, undereducated, and unsuited for other work—a prime candidate for corruption...
...Which means, in essence, no protection at all...
...They showed that the typical Zhirinovsky voter—generally either a 25-to-40-year-old worker or a pensioner, male, living in a small city—considered "weakness of government power" problem number one...
...Following the violence of October 34, a two-week state of emergency was imposed in Moscow, including a curfew...
...More than 2.5 million crimes were registered in Russia in 1993, 70 percent of them acts of larceny...
...Russians won't wait that long...
...This does not, however, appear to be in the works...
...The exasperated reporter finally asked the detective, "But isn't it your job to deal with situations like this...
...This act of feudal tribute was a powerful sign of the times, and such incidents only reinforce the feeling of many Russians that their country is controlled by crime lords...
...On December 30, Izvestia published the results of two surveys carried out by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion (VTsIOM...
...Haven't you read Plato...
...The operation, executed by special riot police, was performed with a predictable degree of professionalism: according to Russian human rights groups, there were numerous incidents of violence and pillage on the part of the law enforcers...
...The merging of the mafia and other criminal elements with those who are supposed to be fighting them has changed from a theoretical premise into a practical reality, right before our eyes...
...Zhirinovsky represented most of these, and many people undoubtedly believed that he would do a better job of eradicating crime and disorder than the current administration...
...Since market reform was instituted in January 1992, it has been de rigueur to argue that, after all, we are in a phase of "primary accumulation," like the Wild West or Chicago in the twenties...
...Destitute pensioners rooting through trash cans, cars driving on sidewalks to avoid red lights: Muscovites shake their heads and mutter, "Bardak...
...The unduly long paralysis of the government and the total helplessness of the police and the public prosecutor's office in solving crimes have led to a catastrophic escalation in violence, and have awakened a feeling of defenselessness in the population," wrote Moscow jurist and veteran crime observer Arkady Vaksberg in the English-language Moscow Times on December 30...
...Burglaries of flats, car thefts, muggings and vandalism on the elektrichka commuter train, which ferries into Moscow those too poor to afford a car, no longer even raise an eyebrow...
...Bardak Shadows by Jonas Bernstein L ast summer, a reporter for the English-language Moscow Tribune witnessed the following incident: An elderly man, one of Moscow's legions of pensioners, was crossing a street in the center of the city...
...After the New Year, police reacted to bad press by agreeing to meet with the bankers...
...The reporter and another Good Samaritan took the victim to a nearby police station, where they were told that they had come to the wrong place and otherwise given the runaround...
...The mafia" came in first, ahead of the president, the army and police, foreign capital, etc...
...N of all of the democrats ignored the issue...
...For government inaction is drawing Zhirinovsky voters to the polls and, according to Arkady Vaksberg, "clearing the way for his rise to power...
...Zhirinovsky's voters cited "corruption" and "bribery" as their number-two concerns...
...But Yavlinsky and Tarasov aside, Russia's new democrats and capitalists need to reconsider some of their basic attitudes...
...Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, with Yeltsin's blessing, used the opportunity to deport from the city nearly 10,000 people from the Transcaucasus 'and Central Asia who were residing in Moscow without residence permits...
...Zhirinovsky, meanwhile, promised summary execution of mafia bosses, among other things...
...The anti-reform mood of Zhirinovsky's voters, according to VTsIOM, was aroused "not by the worsening of their material base, but by the growth of disorder, anarchy...
...While everyone from Boris Yeltsin to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov is blaming poverty for the electoral fortunes of ultra-rightist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (1,DP), their Jonas Bernstein, a contributor to The American Spectator, is a writer living in Moscow...
...Some of them are spectacular, like the recent kidnapping of schoolchildren in Rostov-on-Don (there are ten to fifteen hostage-takings a month in Russia) and the separate murders, apparently mafia hits, of two leading businesspeople on December 2 (there were thirty-eight such assassinations in 1993...
...Money for the purpose of professionalizing the Russian police (if the Russian government is willing) is an idea Western aid donors should seriously consider...
...But it is above all episodes of violent crime that arouse Russian ire and disgust...
...but don't worry, the market will become civilized after a few generations...
...Indeed, in November, the weekly Argumenty i Fakty published the result of a poll in which the respondents were asked to name who, in their view, holds real power in Russia...
...In its current usage, it refers to more than just crime...
...Following the two murders on December 2, the Russian Association of Commercial Bankers called a strike to protest the indifference of the Security and Internal Affairs ministries...
...If Boris Yeltsin is insensitive to the bardak issue, one can hope that the democrats who contested the election have learned a few lessons from Zhirinovsky's success...
...Argumenty i Fakty claimed in its year-end issue that the level of bribe-takers had increased 15 times during 1993...
...The issue was ignored by Russia's Choice, the pro-market bloc headed by Yegor Gaidar, which followed a stay-the-course electoral strategy, with dashes of Commie-bashing (largely unnecessary) and macro-economic analysis (largely boring...
...Artyom Tarasov, a businessman who fled Russia three years ago after facing KGB persecution, returned to run as an independent for a seat in the new parliament, representing Moscow...
...It is regrettable but not surprising that a large number of ordinary citizens who feel unprotected should turn to the knout, and to scapegoating...
...And the police detective in the above incident, if more erudite than most of his colleagues, was typical in his indifference...
...The move was wildly popular in "liberal" Moscow: its residents have long blamed Caucasian nationals for the city's crime wave...
...And it was clear even before December 12 that the public mood was growing ripe for authoritarian solutions to the bardak problem...
...Officials of the Internal Affairs Ministry, which is in charge of Russia's police forces, admitted that the murdered entrepreneurs had probably been killed after resisting mafia attempts to muscle in on their business, but argued that businessmen deserve no more protection than the average person...
...success can be seen more as a backlash at the country's increasing lawlessness, and frustration at the authorities' inability (or unwillingness) to stop it...
...T he Russian police are conspicu- ous in this regard...
...One was taken ten days before the December 12 parliamentary election, the second immediately after it...
...0 The American Spectator February 1994 81...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
