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380 19 August 2002
Russia
A bandit state
Russia scares me. I have spent only ten days of my life in
Russia, this August, in St Petersburg, Novgorod and Moscow. And my
understanding of Russian, acquired as an Royal Navy Coder for the purposes
of radio espionage, was distinctly
rusty, albeit recoverable. But the whole experience was nevertheless
profoundly unsettling.
For Russia seems to be a dislocated, dysfunctional society. Social
structures are dissolving, status systems changing rapidly. The
fundamentals of civic order are in flux, contested, uncertain. The law of
private property is still a ahotbed of dispute, in spite of the recent
Duma land-privatisation legislation: it seems that there is to be
Referendum later in the year, to assess public reaction. Even
"facts" are difficult to come by: I was reminded of the Soviet era, when
rumour had it that, although Moscow had a working modern telephone system,
the Authorities refused to publish a telephone directory, so as to inhibit
personal communication. I found it impossible to buy, anywhere in
Moscow or St Petersburg, any map of the surrounding countryside, the wider
territory beyond Moscow. Eventually I found a map showing the
fishing rivers around Moscow, and the fish that could be caught - but that
was only for a limited area, and useless for my purposes. The best
factual website by far on Russia is
maintained by the
CIA - check it out.
The barriers of language are of course substantial. The Cyrillic
script used for written Russian seems aggressively alien to the Western
eye, as incomprehensible as Chinese or Japanese ideograms. In a
concession to international truck-drivers, place-names on the main roads
are now transliterated into Roman script, so that drivers can at least get
their bearings. But the whole verbal environment is otherwise
intimidating, strange. Russian is also a subtle language, with
gradations of meaning and vocabulary which are difficult for foreigners to
access. There are one or two English-language newspapers on Russian
affairs, although they rely heavily on cherry-picking (with proper
attribution) the leading UK and US papers (principally, the Financial
Times, Le Monde, the New York Times and the Herald Tribune.
But do take a look at The St Petersburg Times,
sister paper to The
Moscow Times... they do offer an insight into the daily flow of
news in both cities which is difficult to access in any other way.
And the French press also maintains better coverage of Russian affairs
than the UK - if you fancy practising your French, check out Le Monde.
For your German, the best current affairs website is probably Hamburg's
Die Welt.
- NB Both newspaper
sites have their own search function, like The Guardian and
The Telegraph - and like them, they retain free access. I
remain sad (and pretty annoyed, truth to tell) that the
Financial Times recently went over to paid-for access - which means
I cannot use use it for the purposes of this Weblog.
But to return to Russia.
The country is dysfunctional. The demoralisation of all public
services, and the State's failure to pay civil service salaries (including
doctors, teachers) is the subject of unremitting Press protest.
There are few Police on the streets, although uniformed "private" security
forces guard the hotel and club entrances, well-muscled bodybuilders.
The police forces themselves, so often unpaid, are primary
off-balance-sheet
providers of commercial security services, and the Press carry complaints
about unfair competition between them and the private firms.
Soldiers are much in evidence on the streets, and 1.25m are still under
arms, twice as many (proportionate to population) as the UK armed
forces.
Political debate, although
prolific, is not about the substance of any of the issue. It is about the
paraphernalia and timing of elections, voting systems (Russia moves to
the 50/50 List system in mid-2003, along the lines of the Scots and Welsh
assemblies), coalition-building, the corruption of the public service,
the emergence of new parties, new groupings around new powerful men.
Only the old Communist Party, still
publishing the newspaper Pravda
(The Truth) seems to retain, as a matter of style, a clear perception
that a "Party" is about a coherent policy, implemented by individuals and
consistently advocating a political philosophy - see Footnote, for a telling
Pravda leading article, in my very
own English translation...
Otherwise, "parties" consist of factions either backing individuals or
interest-groups. Yedinstvo ("Unity") consists of Putin's followers,
and with 18% support in the Gallup Poll (Yep! Gallup are in
Russia as well, using the same old quota-sampling technique, interviewing
their standard sample of 2,000 souls - I used to work Saturday mornings as
a Gallup pollster when I was at LSE)
Remember: in a system of multiple parties, 18% is a strong vote - after
all Chirac only got 19%, in the first round of the French Presidential
Election.
The 1990s were dominated by the profound ambivalence of a legal system
which could not accommodate conventional "western" concepts of
private property, falsifying the expectations of thousands of investors,
particularly foreign firms - and although Parliament (the Duma)
has recently passed reform legislation, the process of change is not yet
implemented, and there is still a Referendum to come. In this
lawless environment, crime has flourished. The reporting of
organised crime looms large in the Press and on TV. On almost
every page, there is some story of strong-arm gang action, or large-scale
fraud and deception. A current running story is the alleged
participation of a small-time Russian gangster Tokhtoukhtonov in "fixing"
the Olympic figure-skating results, for betting reasons - and his
subsequent arrest in Italy: the extradition process to the USA will, it is
reported take many months to complete.
The reportage of crime shades over into the reporting of "biznes"
- the business world, and its dominance by the top chairmen of the massive
nationalised industries, the men who won out in the 1990s scramble for
power and position. In the 1990s jungle, the scramble had clearly
been a vicious process, with many criminal dimensions. There is an
optimistic thread in current commentary, suggesting that now that the
power cards effectively been dealt, the corporate bosses will now settle
down to pursue legitimate objectives, realising that the business
establishment now has more to gain from the cultivation of law and order
than from the continuation of mayhem.
But for ordinary people, this whole imagery must be
profoundly unsettling,
destructive. Everyone needs a sense of civic social structure,
collective order of some kind. And there is a strong line of criticism, as
expressed in Pravda, of Vladimir
Putin's deal with the deadly combination of biznes and
the West.
I found a personal letter from an "old soldier" to Pravda very
informative, and
I have translated it.
What is to become of Russia? What can be done?
I see severe social depression - drug-consumption and alcoholism are rife ,
life expectancies are comparatively low - check out the
CIA
statistics. Over 3m acres are used for cultivating cannabis,
and the authorities are making no headway against increasing drug use. The
population is falling by 500,000 every year ( = one-third of one
per cent). The birth-rate is low, averaging only 1.27 per woman,
and the infant mortality rate high, @ 20 per 1,000 births. The
death rate substantially exceeds the birth-rate.
This argues collective pessimism, a real
reluctance to procreate. Male
life expectancy is only 62 (female=73) so that by the age of 65,
there are twice as many women as men.
The principal task of Government will be to
deliver confidence to the 20-40 age-group. Only if those age-groups
are confident, willing to stay in Russia, to procreate and spend, and
willing to work-to-spend, can the economy grow. The present narrow
preoccupation with "FDI" (foreign direct investment) must
be supplemented by the cultivation of indigenous business initiatives, on a massive
scale.
The future lies with young people like Alex, the young waiter
who served at the great restaurant One Red Square - he graduated in
English and business studies from Moscow University, and is also a Master
of Wine (sommelier) - he plans to have his own restaurant - "my
grandmother owned her own restaurant, my uncle worked in the trade, and
people must always eat - withing three years, if you come back, I will
have my own restaurant". We believed him.
He exuded confidence. He was drawing on family tradition, a good
education, and family ambition (he was already married). On our
second visit to the restaurant, we gave him half-a-dozen copies of this
photo, for his family.
But Russia cannot wait for its 24-year-olds. The need is for a
massive programme for the cultivation of honest indigenous entrepreneurs -
say, anyone under 40. The Russians must learn from the experience of
the Scots and the Welsh: "foreign direct investment" is not enough because
such investment is always footloose,
and cannot be coerced. While significant global wealth-differences
exist, the corporate sector will always gravitate to the lowest-wage
countries - indeed, there should be no impediment to their doing
so. The task of Government is to identify, and cultivate the initiative of,
those who want to stay. My observation suggests that there may
be 10% of any population (not more, certainly) who have the ability
and mindset to launch trading initiatives of their own. And in
Russia, many of these young men and women are pursuing enterprising
criminal careers.
Tapping that resource in turn means cultivating a total societal
environment which is attractive. The law of private property must be
rapidly reformed, for without that supporting institutional structure,
enforced peacefully through the Courts, no markets can flourish. But
the need is for a socialist market system, in which market
mechanisms are allowed to operate within a clear framework of fair play
and the equitable distribution of wealth. There is, after all, no
such thing as a market economy - all economies are managed
economies, in which market mechanisms are accorded varying degrees of
priority, with varying degrees of regulation. It is not enough for a
Government to get the economy right. The famous Clinton dictum
It's the economy, stupid! was partly true, for Governments must
certainly deliver economic growth.
But if such growth is to be
achieved, the entire societal system has to work well, in both its managed
and its market aspects. Proper consumer protection is essential. For the public servants,
fair salaries must be assigned and paid on time. To every
citizen, the state must offer an adequate basic state old age pension, to
dispel the universal, corrosive fear of impoverishment in old age.
Everyone must be offered state healthcare, even if they are wealthy enough
to pay for their own privately. And everyone having the courage to
bring children into an increasingly hostile world should be given the
absolute state assurance that their children will be give a fair start in
life, enjoying their fair share of society's educational resources.
Putin has not yet got that right. Too many elements of the managed sector
have simply been abandoned. He is too preoccupied, as Tony
Blair is, with big business, with the superficial global success of the corporate
sector, and is blind to its amorality and inherent deceits. And
while he stumbles, it is inevitable that the Communist Party should
continue to snipe and dream of the Good Old Days. The Communists are
of course wrong, but for as long that Putin flounders, their message will
get a respectful hearing.
The final dislocation is one of culture,
ultimately of allegiance. Even though many provinces have been
"lost" to independence, Moscow remains the unmistakable capital of an
"Eastern" empire, with close links to its Eastern territories. The
distinct sense is of looking westwards to St Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Poland, and
the EU-oriented Baltic States, as if upon another country. Yet Putin
himself comes from St Petersburg, and his wife comes from Kaliningrad:
they are clearly both at home in the westernised environment of "western"
Russia. Is it thinkable that Russia might break up yet again,
reducing internal tensions,
re-absorbing the chaotic state of Byelorussia, and creating a new State of
West Russia, centred on St Petersburg? If you have any thoughts on
that, will you let me know?
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381 21 August 2002
A thoroughly
modern diary
If you are intent on browsing, you may wish to meander through
this selection of past thoughts which I selected for August 2002, while we
were away in Moscow.
But I have since taken further the idea of the Weblog as an accessible
historical record or diary of developing views, and and prepared a
day-by-day summary of items which I have posted since Christmas Day 2001 -
check out
Living Diary
Drop me a line >
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382 21 August 2002
dangerous Flattery
Socialists commonly exaggerate the strength of the
corporate sector. We flatter its potency, we attribute to it a vital
role in world affairs, we have high expectations of its influence, and
express disappointment when it fails us. In all this, we are wrong.
The corporations constitute a fragile institutional network, whose
managers are for the most part narrow-minded, pedestrian and
unimaginative, seriously dedicated to making money but with little to
contribute to the wider society in which their organisations operate.
Their hangers-on, their lawyers, bankers and accountants the world over,
have even less to offer public life.
Socialists have for too long demonised “the 100 top
multinational corporations” (that was the Labour Conference left-wing
jargon of the 1960s... ) That demonisation has both wrongly
strengthened “Them” - and wrongly weakened “Us”. The intellectual error
runs very deep, probably back to Karl Marx and his mistaken designation of
Das Kapital as the prime mover of the modern world. In the
UK, the close links between Labour and the trade unions has contributed to
the error, for Labour has traditionally sided with the Unions against
their principal protagonists, namely corporate management.
In all this, we are woefully naïve. The corporations
do not possess the power we attribute to them. Their internal power
systems are primitive, their capacity for cooperations very limited. We
are the victims of our own political propaganda. We are wrong
to expect corporate management to behave high-mindedly. We are
wrong to regard them as job providers or job preservers when their
interests always lie in minimising the use of labour, and seeking the
cheapest competent labour resources. We are wrong to expect
them to act decently, as employers. We are wrong to use
them as tax-collectors: we should use public servants to gather tax. We
are wrong to rely on their role as pension providers: they
will always put the interests of their pensioners second. And this week
we are wrong to expect them to sign up to the Johannesburg
Earth Summit. The world of corporate management is amoral – neutral as
between good and evil. It is up to us, as socialists, to generate a
proper framework for this amoral system of power, exploiting its undoubted
advantages, while minimising its adverse side-effects.
In all these respects, it is socialist governments
that must take the lead, setting standards by law and enforcing
those standards through the Courts. Corporate management will behave well
only if constrained by law to do so. That’s the bottom
line. To rely on the “social responsibility” of corporate management is
to whistle in the wind.
Socialists should work for the principled
disentanglement of the processes of government from those of the corporate
sector. Corporate management should be set free to pursue their trading
objectives, within a socialist legal framework, and trade unions
encouraged to counter their power, in the market-place. We should not be
relying on the corporate sector for the performance of any critical state
function, not even the operation of PAYE. That is my image of a
socialist market system.
How do you respond to this socialist
market theory?
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382 -- July 2002
Take a look around you. Where could democratic participation be
extended?
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Footnote one
Extract from Pravda for 9-12 August (now
published only twice a week, Mondays and Fridays) - the leading article
mocked the Referendum Commission, whose lawyers were reported to be
finding it very difficult to formulate appropriate questions for the land
privatisation Referendum, and went on to give Pravda's own, heavily
loaded, Referendum questions -
"This is what we would ask -
ONE: With the exception of plots owned by individual Russian citizens
(for businesses, private homes, smallholdings, allotments and garages)
do you consider it is necessary for the land, the mineral resources, forests,
waterways and other natural resources, which are declared by the Russian
Constitution to be essential to the life and activities of the Russian nation,
to be transferred into Government ownership?
- NB A distinction is drawn between (on the one hand) these assets
being held
in common,
without being the subject of any ownership rights at all, and (on the other
hand) passing into the ownership of the Government. This is
an important distinction, because Putin's Government is in the process of
privatising everything in sight, just to balance the books.
TWO: Do you agree that the cost of essential public services, including
electricity, should always be limited to 10% of combined household income?
THREE: Do you consider it to be essential that Russia's railways, fuel and
energy plants, ferrous and nonn-ferrous metal industries, together with the
military-industrial complex should be in public ownership, as they are integral
to the national security of Russia?
FOUR: Do you consider it essential that the death penalty should be
retained, for serious crimes which threaten human life?"
These questions reflect the character of the contemporary Communist Party -
Yes, they are principled traditional socialists, rejecting the deployment of
market mechanisms in key sectors, but they are also (a) conservative and
traditional in orientation, (b) closely identified with war and military service
veterans, (c) intensely nationalist - and (d) giving high priority to the
retention of the death penalty...
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Footnote two
Letter to the Editor Friday 9 August 2002
Dear Sir,
On 31 July I had sight of an official document from
the President of the Kabardino-Balkar Regional Assembly. It was
asking the Veterans Council of the Republic to join the UNITY Party.
They have been playing silly games, in our area.
Powerful forces, having created this "Party" to suit themselves, and they
are trampling on all ethical norms and proprieties, trying to impose their
will on the Veterans' Associations. It was crude proposal,
tactlessly trampling on freedom of thought and belief. It was a
brazen attempt to drag the Veterans into an anti-national party of
lackeys, which has no bearing on the everyday life of veterans...
But it is still not clear what the position of the
All-Russian Veterans' Association, and of the Russian Veterans' Committee,
will be. As we already know, this "Unity Party" is a party of
turncoats. In the Duma, they simply rubber-stamp
decisions which are against the wishes of the nation. They certainly
do not protect the interests and needs of ordinary people - they pursue
policies just to please the West. it is truly bizarre to push the
Veterans into the embrace of this alien, servile Party. Veterans of
war, and of military service generally, are not "cosmopolitan" people -
they will decide for themselves, what their political positions will be."
Yours sincerely
K.M.Albetov
Old Soldier
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