From Lenin to Lebed
GLASS, ANDREW J.
IN SEARCH OF SELF-ESTEEM From Lenin to Lebed BY ANDREW J. GLASS MOSCOW IN THE EARLY 1960s, the Kremlin spent a fortune in state funds to erect a 390-foot obelisk at the northern end of Mira...
...A lot of money has been sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see whether it's safe to fully commit to this country," notes Thomas Pickering, a veteran diplomat who serves as the U.S...
...Resentments have been fed by the calamitous war against the Chechen rebels, by the high-profile emergence of capitalist "cowboys" in Moscow and St...
...In a less promising scenario, soaring prices and a runaway ruble would be accompanied by widespread lawlessness and growing class strife...
...In this guise, Lcbed's true political agenda appears closer to Lenin's than to that of the post-Soviet reformers...
...Had Zyuganov won...
...No," Martinova replied...
...Despite the election results, Russia's 89 "federations"—governed, in many cases, by recycled Communist bosses—will strive to break free of Moscow's grip...
...Even without such pressures, the situation here gives the government every reason to press its jingoist hot buttons...
...Western-style democracy any time soon," says Roger Fontaine, an analyst who served on the National Security Council in Ronald Reagan's White House...
...The onetime proud Kosmos Pavilion, for instance, is an indoor used car lot...
...IN SEARCH OF SELF-ESTEEM From Lenin to Lebed BY ANDREW J. GLASS MOSCOW IN THE EARLY 1960s, the Kremlin spent a fortune in state funds to erect a 390-foot obelisk at the northern end of Mira Prospect...
...Nearly 80 percent of the Russians living in Estonia voted for the Communist candidate...
...The charismatic former general says he backs reforms that would move Russia toward a full market economy...
...Instead, we'll have a proper museum where we can show journeys by Russians to Mars and beyond...
...These Yeltsin supporters would have fiercely resisted a Communist-led bid to turn back the clock to Soviet times...
...artisans from all over the Soviet Union were drawn there in a nationalistic drive to rebuild...
...MEANTIME YELTSIN, who made expensive promises to seal his election victory, is being pushed by his Western creditors to slow the ruble printing presses...
...Beginning with the initial Sputnik, visitors could gaze upon the full panoply of Soviet spacecraft...
...The trio was politely rebuffed...
...Tens of millions of Russians—tired of having to wait on long lines to buy shoddy goods in state-run stores—have become proprietors of small private businesses or hold shares in larger ones...
...Russians comprise more than a third of the people who live in Estonia, the northernmost of the three Baltic republics...
...It costs the equivalent of $1 to roam about inside the spacious capsule...
...Practically every kind of (mostly imported) consumer goods is for sale at supposedly bargain prices...
...But what really sent the Baits around the bend was a recent amendment of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty allowing Russia to sharply increase its heavy weapons near Narva...
...In all probability Yeltsin lacks the clout to drive home the tough economic reforms begun during his first five years in office...
...for an extra $2 you can take pictures...
...In due course, I believe, when there is more money available, we'll no longer have our Vostok [a replica of Gagarin's spaceship] rusting outside this place with cars being sold under its very fins too...
...Even as Communism was losing its luster in the 1980s, the most popular place within what Stalin named the Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the USSR was the Kosmos Pavilion, dedicated to space travel...
...Gennadi A. Zyuganov, rather than Yeltsin...
...It saw some of the fiercest battles of World War II, as the city switched hands between the Nazis and the Red Army...
...But that is like say ing it is possible for any American college student to become a Rhodes scholar...
...Not everyone in these parts possesses Martinova's patient pride, or confidence...
...By showing their passports to the guards on either side, Estonians and Russians walked freely across the bridge that spans the Narva River, the dividing line between the two countries...
...But the dynamics being played out on the fairgrounds that Stalin built are precisely what energized Aleksandr I. Lebed in his still not fully defined, yet potentially powerful, new role as the Kremlin's national security chief...
...In tune with Lebed, Yeltsin says that Russia will "never leave the Baltic states," and that it will never accede to their membership in nato...
...did not enter the United States as occupiers...
...NARVA, an ancient city in Estonia, provides a good example of the last...
...His comfortable margin of victory over Zyuganov notwithstanding, Russia's 148 million people face a continuing period of political instability and economic uncertaintySince Peter the Great, another would-be reformer, ruled from the Kremlin, power in Russia has swung between a strong center and regions bent on going their own way...
...Though they sought to make Moscow the nerve center of a new world order...
...Narva is Estonia and Estonia is Narva," Meri told the local throng...
...Estonia remains defiant...
...To be sure, the Yeltsin era has seen a huge spread of private ownership...
...Petersburg, and by the shabby treatment of the previously dominant Russians in breakaway parts of the old empire from the Far East to the Baltics...
...Despite his saying he would abide by the Russian Constitution's designation of the prime minister—who continues to be Viktor S. Chernomyrdin—as president should the elected officeholder die or become disabled, Lebed has clearly cast himself as the ailing Yeltsin's heir apparent in vowing to pursue a strong nationalistic course...
...When the fighting finally ended, Narva lay in ruins...
...We are going through a stage here where this kind of thing is necessary...
...Moscow has escalated its complaints about the treatment of Russians in the so-called "near abroad...
...Estonians technically permit Russians to become citizens...
...I asked Martinova, who has a recent university degree in museum administration, whether she minded sharing the premises with used Cadillacs and other fancy cars that are being hawked by assorted unsavory types for five or six times what they might fetch in the United States...
...Indeed, any attempt to institute another broad wave of reforms must run the gauntlet not only of the strong Communist contingent in the Duma, or lower house of parliament, but also of the tens of thousands of entrenched old-think bureaucrats around the country...
...If Pickering is right, then the yellow caution flags will stay up...
...On the other hand, with Yeltsin's victory the struggle between the reformers and the Communists has merely entered a new phase...
...Reduced to being second-class citizens, and feeling a sense of shame and betrayal, Russian residents of the glum border city liken their lot in life to that of African Americans...
...It is hard to tell what might come of this, yet even Lebed concedes that at present Russia lacks the wherewithal to deploy 600 tanks in an area where it now has perhaps 30 such weapons...
...At the entrance to the 553-acre complex of pavilions, statues and spouting water fountains stands a giant triumphal arch, surmounted by the gilded figures of a tractor driver and a woman collective farmer...
...It is mostly those people, and their progeny, who live in the city today...
...Ambassador here...
...Along with his Lithuanian and Latvian counterparts, Estonian President Lennart Meri visited the White House in June to press for early admission to nato...
...Those problems, plus the despair caused by the reality that the rest of the world no longer respects Russia, could spark fresh waves of unrest...
...By their votes, the Russians revealed that they remain torn between their aspirations for a better life and their loathing for their present fate...
...Washington should abandon the illusion that Russia will be a stable...
...At the same time, he views what has happened in the shadow of the Space Obelisk?hardly an isolated phenomenon—as a desecration of Russia's lofty heritage...
...After the War...
...ANDREW J. GLASS, a longtime contributor, heads the Cox Washington bureau...
...As the West fiddles with a nato enlargement timetable, officials in Washington fret about the consequences of pushing the Russians too far...
...There is also a full-scale mockup of Mir, the orbiting Russian space station...
...Yakoslava Martinova, 24, collected my rubles...
...But if governments have changed in this part of the world, the geography has not...
...The Communist influence will remain in these parts for the foreseeable future, Fontaine adds...
...Lenin and his successors countenanced a certain amount of Russian nationalism...
...Hav ing shed their Sov iet masters in 1991...
...A dozen or so giant financial and industrial enterprises control everything in Russia from banks and oil fields to arms factories and TV networks...
...Well, not entirely...
...This delicate balance between hope and fear is likely to be a central fact of life here for a long time to come...
...Blacks, hovvev er...
...getting rid of these interlocking f iefdoms and reimposing some form of state control would not have been an easy task...
...The resulting economic growth could give Yeltsin the means to crack down on rampant crime and corruption without endangering basic civil liberties...
...During my trip there, the border crossing was quiet...
...In its recesses there still hangs a picture of Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut...
...Hence the agreement to let the Russians "thicken" their armor on their Baltic frontier...
...Nowadays it has become a focal point for responding to affronts, real and imagined, to Slavic self-esteem...
...Made of solid titanium, the monument marks Soviet space triumphs...
...On June 23, when Estonians marked a key military triumph in 1919 over the Bolsheviks, a military success that brought them a few decades of independence, the Victory Day parade was conspicuously staged in this most non-Estonian of Estonian cities...
...Key posts in civic, academic and commercial life are virtually closed to Russians—although the Baltic branch of the Russian Mafia is said to hold sway over the docks in Tallinn, the Estonian capital...
...Should the Russians seek to return once more, Estonians wonder how far Washington would go to help them...
...On a Sunday afternoon in July, in the shadow of restored castles and bastions, a dog show was held on the grassy plain where some of the most horrific battles in human history took place...
...So it seems—at least for the moment...
...As Lenin's successor, Joseph V Stalin built a fairgrounds to boast of Soviet glories on the site that now includes the Space Obelisk soaring into Moscow's sky...
...Of Narva's 80,000 residents, all except 3,500 were born in what was the Soviet Union...
...Today, while its name remains unchanged, the fairgrounds has been converted into a commercial bazaar...
...The Baltic states were kept out of the loop when that deal was struck...
...In the best of circumstances, Yeltsin's victory would usher in another wave of private investment and see the repatriation of huge sums that the new rich have stashed abroad...
...In spirit, it reflects the grandiose themes so beloved by the first Soviet leader, Vladimir I. Lenin, who proclaimed that Communism would someday spread from this capital to encompass the whole world...
...Nor did they ever pack the natives off to distant prison camps in the Arctic Circle...
...Over the centuries Narva, the strategic gateway to northern Russia, has been held by the Danes, the Swedes, the Teutonic Knights, the Nazis, and the Soviets...
...The day after Boris N. Yeltsin handily won a second term as Russia's President, Lebed warned that people's expectations must now be met or the country will explode...
Vol. 79 • July 1996 • No. 4
