Russia Watch / Stalin Grads
Bernstein, Jonas
Moscow I n preparing for their commemoration of V-E day, the Russian authorities took no chances with Moscow's unpredictable spring weather. On May 8, the day before the official celebration, they...
...Among recent victims was the six-year-old daughter of a prominent stockbroker...
...While Western leaders boycotted the afternoon parade of military hardware on Moscow's outskirts—Clinton retreated to his limousine—I watched the proceedings from an apartment balcony overlooking the parade route...
...Babich had recently written a piece for the Moscow Times entitled "Curse the Foreign Press," in which he denounced the coverage of Russia by foreign journalists...
...C hernomyrdin's new party—whose name is "Our Home Is Russia"—held its inaugural congress on May 12...
...If I were an American," he told me, "I would be a conservative...
...Nor is the new oligarchy a stable unity: it is, in fact, riven by clashing economic interests and personal ambitions...
...The meeting was attended by government ministers, regional leaders, and big business figures...
...But others among Russia's best and brightest are no less optimistic than Dmitri Babich...
...Babich is remarkably well informed about the West...
...So now the mood is (continued on page 82) The American Spectator July 1995 59 RUSSIA WATCH (continued from page 59) changing...
...The festivities here certainly had an inyour-face quality to them...
...C:1...
...This is perfectly understandable...
...official calling the Russian security people "pure thugs"—one of them Jonas Bernstein is a program officer with Freedom House in Moscow...
...The first rule for every foreign correspondent working in Moscow is simple," Babich wrote...
...Lenin's name was covered up with foliage, and Yeltsin took the trouble to denounce Stalinism explicitly...
...At the same time, he expressed dismay at the "anti-Russian" sentiment of leading Republican politicians...
...Babich also sees positive signs in the country's politics, including the rising fortunes of Viktor Chernomyrdin...
...Of course it's a real problem," he replied...
...Everything was criticized...
...Still, it was discomfiting to know that when Chernomyrdin invoked Stalin's name, his audience broke into applause...
...In April, Andrei Kortunov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' USA-Canada Institute, and head of a new private think tank, told me that we are now witnessing the winding down of Russia's wild, criminalized scramble for the property of the deceased Soviet state...
...But the display of military might, combined with an outpouring of Soviet nostalgia, was, well, troubling...
...Now you can have a lifestyle in Moscow on par with those of Western capitals...
...Korzhakov is a close Yeltsin confidante...
...The Red Square event was by invitation only, and I wasn't surprised not to be invited...
...In it he declared that it was impossible to erase the name of Stalin from the history of the war...
...Write about the mafia...
...The losers in the post-Soviet division of spoils are unlikely to rush to vote for the "party of power," and leading Russian democrats fear that the December parliamentary election—if it is even held—will be characterized by massive fraud...
...During talks in Washington with Newt Gingrich, Rybkin bemoaned the inadequacy of U.S...
...But these changes have come at a price...
...A kind of "neonationalism" has set in, he said, but added, "I hope this doesn't lead to things like the glorification of Stalin...
...The parade lasted about one hour, and featured 10,000 troops, fly-overs by some of Russia's state-of-the-art military aircraft and helicopter gunships, and hundreds of armored vehicles...
...He pointed to the emergence of a Russian middle class, and the sprouting of private businesses everywhere, as topics worthy of coverage...
...The troops weren't the only source of V-E day tension: Russian security guards reportedly roughed up some members of the Clinton entourage...
...She also claimed that democracy, or demokratiya, had degenerated into dermokratiya—crapocracy...
...Tight monetary policy has reduced inflation, and the ruble shows unprecedented signs of strength...
...Yelena Bonner, in a letter read at a May concert in honor of her late husband, Andrei Sakharov, wrote, "'Our Home Is Russia'—it is their home, not ours...
...The anonymous official noted that security for the celebration was organized by Aleksandr Korzhakov, the ex-KGB official who now runs the Presidential Security Service...
...But how would you like it if I visited your country and then wrote an article saying that America can be summed up by Snoop Doggy Dogg...
...Every revolution is followed by some kind of reaction...
...T he weekend before V-E Day, I made the acquaintance of Dmitri Babich, a 24-year-old reporter for Komsomolskaya Pravda who had just returned from Chechnya...
...Be negative...
...Once this process is completed, he predicted, the leaders of the new ruling elite will establish more civilized rules of the game, and put an end to the disorder that has characterized Russia's transformation...
...Her letter was one of the most blistering attacks on Russia's rulers since the break-up of the Soviet Union, calling the war in Chechnya, for example, an attempt at a "final solution to the Chechen problem according to the prescriptions of Stalin and Hitler...
...People are fed up with the constant critique of the past, from both the West and inside Russia...
...But there were lots of mobile launchers fitted with short-range missiles, similar to the unexploded one I had seen in a Chechen back yard in March...
...Babich was referring to a speech Chernomyrdin gave to veterans of World War II in April...
...The theme was maintaining the status quo, and it seems clear that the strategy of the Yeltsin administration and Chernomyrdin government is to create something resembling the Latin American corporatist model—one or two ruling parties that represent big business and the new bureaucratic nomenIdaturd, while squeezing out or co-opting extremists on the left and right, as well as meddlesome radical democrats...
...and though the Post article was reprinted in the English-language Moscow Times, there have been no reports in Russia's major newspapers about the incident...
...In his foreign coverage article, Babich wrote, "Tired of politics...
...He speaks English, French, and German, and recently visited Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to gather material for a television documentary on the U.S...
...The latter have generally not welcomed this recent turn of events: ex-finance minister Boris Federov said the prime minister's bloc should be called "Our Home Is Gazprom," a reference to the enormous natural gas monopoly that Chemomyrdin headed for years—and that appears to be his new bloc's primary financier...
...So," I asked Babich, "are you sayingthat organized crime isn't a real problem here...
...I smiled when I read this, having written extensively about Russian organized crime...
...In the 1980s," says Babich, "there was a kind of a revolution...
...The Washington Post quoted an unnamed U.S...
...apparently grabbed an assistant White House press secretary "in the groin" when the latter insisted on being allowed entry to the Red Square ceremony...
...The following morning started out overcast and miserable, but the clouds parted in time for the veterans' parade at Red Square...
...Newspapers here have covered in great detail the latest wave of contract killings since the March 1 murder of TV journalist Vladislav Listyev...
...It was, of course, a V-E Day commemoration, so the flags carried a measure of historical authenticity...
...Army...
...Like Stalin and Brezhnev before him, Yeltsin delivered his speech from the steps of Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square...
...The veteran Soviet bureaucrat, now prime minister, entered the political arena for the first time in late April, when Yeltsin announced the creation of two "centrist" blocs—one leaning to the right, to be led by Chemomyrdin...
...Gorbachev had such a good image in the West, and it is a shame that so many tourists came running over here during his period in office, when there was absolutely nothing here," he said...
...According to Pavel Felgenhauer, the authoritative military reporter for the Sevodnya daily, the parade included a group of veterans who had fought in Checluiya—despite Yeltsin's promises to Western leaders that these troops would not participate in the festivities...
...assistance to Russia...
...The Rybkin bloc has had some problems getting started, and Izvestia didn't help matters when it published two articles claiming that, on his way back from an official visit to the U.S., Rybkin loaded up his plane with furniture he bought for himself in Maryland, while ordering Russia-bound humanitarian aid to be offloaded to make room for his purchases...
...Chernomyrdin and his allies have already achieved a measure of stability in the economy...
...In fact, mafia horror stories have become a staple of the Russian press...
...On May 8, the day before the official celebration, they reportedly dispatched six planes to spray cloud-dispersing chemicals...
...The Russian labor ministry reports that 30 to 40 percent of Russians earn less than 249,000 rubles a month, or about $50—the average minimum subsistence level...
...Such weapons were pounding the Chechen village of Serzhen-Yurt, even while Yeltsin was assuring reporters that "no military actions are going on in Chechnya...
...Without a doubt, I thought to myself, the Russian people demonstrated their heroism and patriotism in the fight against Hitler...
...But old habits die hard—each unit of armor in the military parade across town was led by a vehicle bearing a flag reading: "For the Soviet Motherland...
...and one tilting leftward, to be headed by Ivan Rybkin, speaker of the Russian parliament's lower house...
...And I understood the comments of veterans who said that, even if the social system under which they were fighting was wrong, they had borne the worst of it in the fight to save the world from the Nazis...
...What the country's new rulers share, however, is a new mood, one increasingly evident among ordinary Russians...
...This military parade was not nearly as big as the November 7 displays of the Soviet era, nor did it feature, as in the bad old days, Stalin Grads by Jonas Bernstein 58 The American Spectator July 1995 strategic nuclear rockets...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
