Russian Presswatch /Is Boris Good Enough?
Bernstein, Jonas
Is Boris Good Enough? H ow desperately the Clinton administration has clung to the mythical character called Boris the Democrat. Even as the Russian attack on Grozny began to resemble Hafez...
...Its domestic functions will include "operations involving enforcing order among the population": it will also "bring armed formations scattered among different agencies under a single command," as well as incorporate "Cossack detachments...
...T he centrifugal forces go beyond simple regionalism...
...the powers of the authorities and the armed forces are not limited...
...Yeltsin was in the hospital for minor nose surgery when the invasion was launched on December 11, much as Mikhail Gorbachev had been conveniently absent when the Red Army moved into Tbilisi, Baku, and Vilnius...
...Q 42 The American Spectator March 1995...
...We offer our students a coherent and comprehensive course of liberal studies based on the original works of the greatest writers, scientists, philosophers, and theologians of our Western and Catholic tradition...
...The independent media have also risen to the occasion...
...There is little question that Boris Yeltsin is in poor health...
...Pavel Grachev...
...and the responsibility of officials has not been established...
...Society, alas, has no real mechanism to stop the bloodletting," Lev Timofeyev, the former dissident, wrote in a mid-January Izvestia commentary about Chechnya...
...Polls show that nearly 80 percent of the public opposes the war, and Yeltsin's approval rating is now 8 percent...
...Russia is becoming a nation of private armies...
...The Russian government was already embarked on its own version of Zhirinovsky's "last push to the south," meddling in Georgia's war with Abkhazia, Azerbaijan's war with Armenia, and the Tadjik civil war...
...According to recent reports, ex-Deputy Defense Minister Gromov has joined the MOST/Luzhkov constellation...
...The litany is familiar: there are no moral absolutes...
...Izvestia's December 22 front-page headline read: "Who Is Running the Country-Yeltsin, [Prime Minister) Chernomyrdin, or General Korzhakov...
...Boris Gromov, who commanded the Soviet forces in Afghanistan...
...State television now features the documentaries of Aleksandr Nevzorov, the rightist TV journalist who was thrown off the air following the October uprising...
...OF NIHILISIM holds sway in much of academic life today...
...Aleksandr Korzhakov, formerly of the KGB, currently chief of the Kremlin Security Service, and a close confidante since Yeltsin's days as Moscow CPSU chief...
...Vadim Bakatin, a Gorbachevera liberal who, as the last Soviet KGB chief, tried in vain to turn the agency into a normal, non-totalitarian institution, noted in Obshchaya Gazeta in December that the parliament has virtually no influence over the executive, "with the exception of doing a little trading on the budget...
...Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a nationalist, now advocates the granting of independence to Chechnya...
...The tension between the military and the Yeltsin administration dates back at least to October 1993, when he ordered the army to fire on his political enemies...
...The newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta recently referred to this as the "Comrade Stalin did not know anything" defense...
...truth is defined by power politics, or by gender or race-or by nothing at all...
...The parliament is also basically ornamental...
...Gromov, who maintained a low profile over the last several years while serving as a deputy defense minister, became a virtual media fixture following the move into Chechnya...
...THOI`AAS AQUINAS COLLFG L 41 The American Spectator March 1995 Yeltsin: on January 19, Gromov was removed from his ministerial post...
...AT THO MAS AQU I N,AS COLLIEG E THERE ARE: BUT I N THIS IS A /NO LECTURES /NO TEXTBOOKS /NO ELECTIVES VERY GREAT YES...
...In a year-end piece, Ludmilla Telen, Moscow News deputy editor-in-chief, predicted that the Chechen war will bust the budget and ignite inflation, triggering a "socio-economic crisis" that will in turn lead to censorship and a postponement of elections...
...It is of no importance by what exact name the president of this state will be called," she wrote, "Yeltsin, [counter-intelligence chief Sergeil Stepashin, or Aleksandr Korzhakov...
...Yeltsin's high-profile embrace last summer of the ultra-nationalist artist Ilya Glazunov was a reminder of his new direction...
...His criticism of the invasion finally elicited a response from Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Shakrai, have actually accused the military of deliberately sabotaging the campaign in order to undermine the government...
...With Russia vacillating between anarchy and authoritarianism, the mood of many in Russia's democratic intelligentsia is understandably dark...
...He also sits on a presidential human rights commission...
...The hope is that the good Yeltsin, the man who faced down the tanks in August 1991, will come back to life and throw the scoundrels out of his court...
...NTV must rent the state-owned airwaves, however, and the government has already threatened to change the network's time-slot and even revoke its license...
...The same day Hiatt's article appeared, the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS, in an item devoted to the absence of official comment during the ongoing bombardment of Grozny, noted that Yeltsin "has been busy with economic questions of late and hasn't appeared in public...
...On December 15, Nezavisimaya Gazeta published a leaked Kremlin document detailing plans to create a "national" or "people's" militia, also directly subordinated to the president...
...His criticism of alleged anti-Russian discrimination in the Baltic states and other ex-Soviet republics became shriller...
...It now turns out that even this new quasi-authoritarian constitution is decorative, like its Soviet predecessor...
...We say NO to the conventions of contemporary education so that we may say YES to truth, the truth that makes men free...
...The result...
...The military's disastrous performance in its New Year's Eve push into Grozny, when dozens of tanks were destroyed and hundreds of ill-prepared conscripts were slaughtered, has undoubtedly heightened the army's loathing of Russia's political leadership...
...Augusto Pinochet, whom he praised for "shutting up the loudmouths...
...One is Gen...
...Moral anarchy and intellectual chaos...
...Then the lobbying will take on an openly criminal nature...
...The Russian armed forces' poor performance in Grozny may embolden other mineral-rich or ethnically distinct regions of the Russian Federationsome of whom have already all but ceased paying federal taxes-to vie for more autonomy...
...Again, like many times before, the Russian intelligentsia has accomplished a moral feat, and again, like many times before, this feat has no direct influence on real policy...
...On January 12, liberals in the lower house tried to pass a law to prevent the Russian president from dispatching troops within the Russian Federation without declaring a state of emergency...
...It may be that Russia's rulers will simply do in Chechnya and elsewhere whatever they want and, rather than clamping down on their critics, simply ignore them...
...And there is an even deeper problem...
...While Ostankino, the main state television channel, quickly reverted to Soviet habits following the December 11 invasion-Kovalev called its reporting "worse than Communist and even Goebbels [propaganda]"-the news program of NTV, Russia's independent television network (owned by MOST Bank) has shown viewers the real results of their government's policy...
...Last summer, Lebed denounced Yeltsin, Gaidar, and Zhirinovsky equally: his only positive comment was reserved for Chilean Gen...
...He certainly faces problems from the armed forces...
...Even as the Russian attack on Grozny began to resemble Hafez alAssad's obliteration of the city of Hama or Saddam Hussein's war against the Kurds, the president and his secretary of state continued to praise the "road to democracy and the free market," on which the atrocities of Chechnya were a mere "bump...
...Yet ex-premier Yegor Gaidar, a key reformer and currently one of the leading anti-war voices, told Kommersant on January 11 that "on the eve of the Chechen campaign Korzhakov did everything he could to restrain the president, and that the general was not to blame for the fact that the president went ahead regardless...
...The striving of the sectorial elite for absolute complete access to the throne will be accompanied by bitter strife," the newspaper predicted...
...Sergei Parkhomenko, a political writer for the liberal daily Sevodnya, noted on December 20 that the procedure for establishing such a zone "has not been defined...
...Yet while Yeltsin continues to build his administrative power, countervailing trends are working against him...
...None of this is to say that Czar Boris's position is secure...
...Izvestia, in a December article examining the lobbying efforts of state industrial sectors, noted that they have begun to organize their own security forces...
...Whatever the case, the military may now represent a real threat...
...Our students learn-really learn-in small and rigorous seminars and tutorials...
...If you want to come along, call our Director of Admissions, Tom Susanka, at 800/634-9797, or write our Admissions Office, Thomas Aquinas College, Box 104, ioooo North Ojai Road, Santa Paula, CA 93060...
...While the Kremlin has been inscrutable, the Russian attack on Chechnya did not occur in a vacuum...
...Polevanov, a geologist by training but clearly a philosopher by avocation, declared: "Like day has night and life has death, privatization has nationalization...
...He runs a nationwide detective/protection agency known as Svoboda (Freedom), as well as a social organization called Yedinstvo (Unity), which incorporates Cossack units...
...In January, the newspaper profiled Vladimir Podatev, a financial power broker in the Russian Far East...
...Even the Russian capital appears to be splitting into rival fiefdoms...
...This could explain why Yeltsin's December 28 order to halt air strikes on Grozny was ignored...
...Throughout 1994, Yeltsin repeatedly spoke of his intention to strengthen "Russian statehood" and protect the 25 million ethnic Russians living in the "near-abroad...
...Yeltsin's Rasputin is said to be Gen...
...Even if Yeltsin is a democrat, they asked, what if someone like Zhirinovsky is elected president...
...Podatev, alias "The Poodle," is a major organized crime figure...
...They allowed the mafia and corruption to triumph over us...
...The other is Gen...
...Opponents of the war have found their Sakharov in Sergei Kovalev, Yeltsin's human rights watchdog, who stayed in Grozny throughout the aerial bombardment to protest the killing of civilians...
...Hiatt wrote that Chubais, now a first deputy prime minister and, in theory, Polevanov's boss, was unable to complain directly to Yeltsin about this latest threat to market reform because "the president is said to be distracted" by Chechnya and "has not paid attention to the growing feud over privatization...
...Many Russian observers accept the exculpatory explanation that Yeltsin, incapacitated by illness and alcoholism, has been reduced to playing front-man for hard-liners in his inner circle...
...L ebed is said to covet the defense minister's portfolio, and there may well be an opening soon: the military's bungling in Chechnya has given Yeltsin a pretext for dumping incumbent defense chief Gen...
...The attitude in Western capitals toward the constitution mirrored that of Gaidar and Co.: What Boris wants, Boris should get...
...The decision-making process in Moscow is once again as opaque as it was in Soviet times...
...Chechnya, for instance, has been declared a "zone of armed conflict"-a term which, unlike "state of emergency," exists neither in the constitution nor in federal legislation...
...As before, truth does not reign in Russia: neither in the courts nor in the Duma, nor in the government...
...Dreams die hard, but it is doubtful that this fantasy will outlive 1995...
...Lebed and Gromov are both reportedly very popular with junior officers and enlisted men, who are demoralized, destitute (some living with their families under tents), and disgusted by the kleptocratic practices of the senior military leadership...
...I n the wake of Chechnya, the president has been repudiated by his democratic allies and embraced by his blood enemies on the extreme right...
...On December 2, members of Gen...
...Prior to the passage of the constitution in the December 1993 referendum, a number of democrats outside Gaidar's pro-Yeltsin bloc worried that it 40 The American Spectator March 1995 concentrated too much power in the presidency...
...Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democrats, and Aleksandr Barkashov and his neoNazi Russian National Unity Party, whose paramilitary units fought Yeltsin's troops during the October 1993 shoot-out at the Russian White House, support Yeltsin's invasion...
...What we have is an army that has been driven into a comer and is becoming an increasingly uncontrolled and dangerous factor in THE DESTRUCTIVE No...
...The present politicians have already led us to civil war, local for the time being," Yelena Bonner told Obshchaya Gazeta on the eve of the Chechnya invasion...
...He reportedly plans to strip the defense ministry of operational control over the armed forces general staff and transfer it to the presidency...
...The measure did not pass, though it would not have mattered: Yeltsin has been ruling by decree for nearly a yearand-a-half...
...Thus far, however, the war in Chechnya has galvanized the Russian intelligentsia...
...But not at Thomas Aquinas College...
...Aleksandr Lebed, commander of the 14th Army stationed in the Trans-Dniester Republic, the ethnic Russian enclave within Moldova...
...Dubbed "Pasha Mercedes" by the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolyets, in honor of the two German luxury cars purchased for him with ministry funds, Grachev has been in hot water since October, when a Komsomolyets journalist was assassinated after writing articles detailing massive military corruption...
...Russia, of course, still has a democratically elected parliament and a new constitution: indeed, officials from Yeltsin on down have cited the need to "restore constitutional order" as one of the chief reasons for the-attack on secessionist Chechnya...
...the legal status, the periods, the criteria, and the conditions are not described...
...The path our students walk has a destination-wisdom...
...It is simply the latest in a series of right by Jonas Bernstein ward moves following Vladimir Zhirinovsky's strong showing in the December 1993 parliamentary vote...
...A road to nowhere...
...Korzhakov's Kremlin guards raided the offices of MOST Bank in downtown Moscow, resulting in a confrontation with MOST security guards (the bank has a force of a thousand) in which several of the latter were severely beaten...
...The newspaper and others accuse Grachev of complicity in the murder...
...Yeltsin tried to remove Lebed from his post following these comments but quickly backtracked...
...Yeltsin is apparently taking measures that would allow him to keep a more dynamic defense minister in check...
...Like Gromov's, his conversion into an anti-war activist is of recent vintage...
...Some Yeltsin administration officials, like domestic politics," Komsomolskaya Pravda wrote on January 5. There are two prime candidates to play the role of a Russian Bonaparte...
...On January 10, for example, the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt wrote from Moscow that Vladimir Polevanov, recently picked to succeed reformer Anatoly Chubais as privatization chief, had begun a campaign against the program widely praised in the West as the one clear success story of Russia's economic reform...
...Jonas Bernstein, a contributor to The American Spectator, writes frequently on Russian affairs...
...Vladimir Gusinsky, the bank's chairman, is linked with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who harbors presidential ambitions...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
