Russian Hardball
Russian Hardball While I share Anders Aslund's puzzlement over what Al Gore admired about ex-prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin ("Yeltsin Fires the Right Guy," April 6), I have been equally puzzled...
...Manners Matter In his otherwise interesting piece, James W. Ceaser creates a comic-book libertarian straw man ("In the Court of Sultan Bill," April 13...
...Guess who said the following: "Much of what was achieved in the Soviet system, within the party system, needs to be restored, adjusted, of course, for the present-day conditions...
...During the Cold War, American conservatives rightly denounced as dangerously deluded the Sovietological game of identifying "hawks" and "doves" in the Kremlin...
...The subsidized credits, imports, and exports in 1992 cost 75 percent of GDP...
...And this is not all that perplexes me: Aslund's account of key events in Russia over the last six years bears little resemblance to what I saw as a journalist there over roughly the same period...
...Later that year, Chernomyrdin, Kulikov, and Chubais worked together to get Aleksandr Lebed, the "hardliner" who secured peace in Chechnya, fired from the government...
...Libertarians believe, in the words of that prince of prudence and eloquence, Edmund Burke, that manners are more important than laws...
...Russian Hardball While I share Anders Aslund's puzzlement over what Al Gore admired about ex-prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin ("Yeltsin Fires the Right Guy," April 6), I have been equally puzzled by Aslund's admiration for ex-first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais, the main hero of his article and a man with whom he worked while advising the Russian government...
...Bernstein seems to equate a slightly high book fee with billions of dollars made on all sorts of crimes...
...This strife does not become less real because of the prior alliance...
...The current value of the three most valuable loans-for-share privatiza-tions—Yukos, Sibneft, and Sidanko (which I certainly do not support)—is still less than 3percent of Russia's GDP...
...But all libertarians I know strongly endorse custom and the operation of civil society as agents of restraint and decorum...
...The main sin of Aslund's chronology is one of omission...
...Conservatives sort of grasp this notion, but Ceaser's comments leave me somewhat dubious...
...He states that the libertarian idea ("the personal is personal") holds that "consensual sexual relations are private matters that should be beyond the reach of law or custom...
...Liberals, of course, do not believe in manners at all, supposing that the absence of manners constitutes a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice...
...Its essence is that Russia needs a functioning state...
...And while Aslund would have us believe that the 1997 auction of a stake in the telecommunications holding company Svyazinvest was fair, thanks to putative "Chubais-Nemtsov reforms," George Soros (who was part of the winning consortium) has conceded that describing it as such "would be an overstatement...
...Finally, in politics you need to form alliances, and alliances change...
...Who would dispute that but an anarchist...
...People who like neither complications nor hardball should stay away from Russian politics...
...Aslund also refers to an unholy alliance Chernomyrdin formed earlier this year with the tycoon Boris Berezovsky and the hard-line (now former) interior minister Anatoly Kulikov...
...In the loans-for-share privatizations in late 1995, Anatoly Chubais insisted on two principles: The minimum price should at least match the going market price, and the auctions should be competitive...
...Control of the Norilsk Nickel plant, which produces more than a quarter of the world's nickel and more than a third of its cobalt, was handed over to Uneximbank in an equally fraudulent tender...
...A second issue is morality...
...While Aslund, in a previous article in The Weekly Standard, downplayed the significance of the assets dispersed through this scheme, they were very significant...
...All anti-Communists joined hands against the Communist threat in 1996, but soon this alliance broke up, pitting crony capitalists against free marketers...
...David West Los Angeles, CA...
...Who was good, who was bad, and when...
...These auctions played a key role in consolidating the "government-monopolistic, mafia-corrupt model" of capitalism that Boris Nemtsov, Aslund's other hero, admitted last year was being "realized on a grand scale" in Russia...
...He conveniently skips over 1995, the year in which the "loans-for-shares" privatization scheme was carried out under Chubais's auspices...
...As the lone reformer in the government, Chubais had limited power...
...Yet in the summer of 1996, Berezovsky and Chubais worked in tandem to oust Yeltsin security chief Aleksandr Korzhakov and to get Yeltsin reelected...
...First, in serious analysis, you must establish what a person actually stands for...
...It may be less dangerous today, but it's no less deluded...
...Anatoly Chubais, in a September 1996 interview with Izvestia...
...For example, two oil companies, each with reserves comparable to those of Exxon, were handed over to a pair of banks (including Un-eximbank, Chubais's favorite) in rigged auctions...
...The quote by Chubais is taken out of context...
...Jonas Bernstein Washington, DC Anders Aslund responds: Jonas Bernstein's comments are a telling illustration of the problems that arise when Western correspondents cover Russia...
...Aslund refers to "Chernomyrdin and his old Communist apparatchiks" as representing "the last lingering Soviet practices...
...Ethically dubious—but legal—transactions cannot be equated with murder...
...A third issue concerns magnitude...
...Libertarians would not have private matters fall within the purview of the political process...
...He won on the first point and lost on the second...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 32
