Russia's internal politics are fuelled by greed. Will Boris Yeltsin's successor end the corruption that is now rife, or will he become an accomplice, asks John Lloyd
At the end of a century during which its secret police perpetrated a holocaust against its people, Russia has its third secret police chief appointed prime minister in a year. Blame it on greed.
Greed has been unrestrained this past decade - unrestrained by morality, law or custom. The most moving passage in Boris Yeltsin's memoir Against the Grain (1990) was his description of visiting a US supermarket for the first time during his 1988 tour; he wrote of his wonder and joy at the display of plenty. Thus did the new Russians apprehend the world they entered with the collapse of communism and of the ideology which had enjoined that such plenty was corrupt. They simply wanted it all - the cornucopia of good food, the racks of designer clothes, the newest stereos, the smoothest and fastest cars, the sex magazines and videos. It had been denied them for decades. In the eighties, when the cornucopias of the west bulged and the dominant politics recognised consumerism as its driving force, the west and its values could simply not be held back: greed for its products was a large part of the driving force for Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms. Soviet TV would ritually record the stuffed shop windows of western capitals at Christmas time and contrast them with shots of beggars on the streets; as good McLuhanites, however, the viewers knew that the medium was the message and the message was plenty, not want.
Greed best defines the activities of the new capitalists. They have grabbed assets, transformed them into cash and put the cash abroad. They have built themselves palaces wherever they settle. They have created archipelagos of high consumption for themselves, their families and their retainers and surrounded them with walls guarded by killers hired from the secret police - rather as Lenin and the early Bolsheviks were preserved from assassination by the Latvian riflemen. They have entered into compacts with the state which have meant that Yeltsin has preserved power in return for a distribution of the richest prizes at derisory prices. They have grabbed not just companies but whole communities; the Arctic Circle city of Norilsk, built by convicts who died by the thousands of cold and starvation, is now a kind of enserfed complex of the Sidanco group, which acquired the vast nickel plant and now squeezes it for profits without investing in either the plant or the people.
The first decade of Russian independence has been dominated by a vast, convulsive, greedy grab - of the kid in the empty sweetshop. But though the shopkeeper may have been absent, a pair of eyes watched through a hole in the wall. In the way of Russia, the secret police, deprived of a political force that would punish the evil-doers on the spot, has simply played it long. When that force appears, it will have the evidence.
The essence, in Russian power, is to know something about your enemies that can kill or at least maim them. In Russia, everyone in power has something on everyone else. All the large players have their own secret police - though Yeltsin, naturally, has been able to command the official security services, which he took care to subordinate directly to himself early on in his period of office. Everyone is guilty. The law remains, in practice, subordinate to power, not sovereign over it. It thus matters hugely who gets the power.
The time is now approaching when power should be transferred. The Duma, or parliament, is re-elected in December; the much more powerful presidency is open for re-election next summer. The presidency, underpinned by a constitution written by Yeltsin immediately after his 1993 victory over a parliament that had indulged in an armed insurrection, is a hypertrophied institution with literally untrammelled powers.
Thus the Duma elections are reasonably seen as a kind of primary for the presidency, an opportunity to see how the forces controlled by, or likely to be allied to, the presidential candidates will do. The communists and the nationalists are presently dominant; indeed, the Russian Communist Party, led by Gennady Zyuganov, remains the largest, best supported and best organised of any. But the communists are declining; they may be decisive in support, but not as a leading force.
This election will be the first truly post-communist election Russia has had. In 1991, when Yeltsin was elected president (of a Russia which was still a Soviet Socialist Republic), he was running against the Communist Party and easily defeated it. In 1996, he was fortunate that Zyuganov emerged as his main contender in the second round, since he could then dramatise the struggle as a fight for freedom (which in part it was; this Communist Party retains in its leadership Stalinists, virulent anti-Semites and supporters of repression). In 2000, the main contender will not be a communist; indeed, Zyuganov may not stand. The man who will claim Yeltsin's tarnished succession will be Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow; and though Yeltsin cannot constitutionally stand again, he is determined to ensure that Luzhkov is beaten. That drive determines the day-to-day tactics that the Russian president pursues.
Yuri Luzhkov rose to prominence as Yeltsin did - by riding the democratic revolution of the late eighties. But he has always been a democrat of power. Serving as a deputy mayor under Gavriil Popov, he saw the chaos over which the academic Popov ineffectually presided and moved on becoming mayor to neuter the unruly Moscow council and to set up a government in which the heads of departments were called ministers and the economic governance was made de facto independent of the Russian government. Privatisation proceeded according to his, not Russian government, dictates; appealed to by his government to bring Luzhkov to heel, Yeltsin was forced to recognise the power of a boss whose city controlled 90 per cent of Russian finance capital, and let him go his own way. He has built up, in the corporation Systema controlled by his wife, a financial base which funds his bid for power; he has founded a TV station which can broadcast to most of Russia; and he has attracted senior figures from the Yeltsin camp such as Andrei Kokoshin, the first civilian to serve as a deputy defence minister. Kokoshin now runs Luzhkov's party, Otechestvo (Fatherland).
Kokoshin told me in Moscow recently that Luzhkov was neither anti-western nor anti-capitalist, and that he was the best chance for democracy Russia had. He told me that Luzhkov had spoken out against anti-Semitism, that he had advised against breaking off relations with the west over the Nato intervention in Kosovo, that he had attracted more foreign companies to Moscow than all the other cities in the former Soviet Union combined and that he favoured an alliance with Grigory Yavlinsky and his party Yabloko - the only significant liberal political force left in the Duma, or in Russian politics.
All of this is true, or partly true. Luzhkov, who spent some time in 1998 trying to woo a nervous Tony Blair - he went so far as to attend the Labour Party conference and to call himself an aficionado of the Third Way - now appeals more and more to western governmental and business circles. A sizeable and quite powerful pro-Luzhkov lobby now exists in Washington; and at a meeting recently in the City with analysts, I was told that he looked to them like a man with whom they could do business.
The contrary case was put to me by Yegor Gaidar, the former prime minister and economic reformer. Gaidar said that Luzhkov was indeed capable of recognising that Russia was dependent on western aid and that this constrained financial adventurism; but he feared Luzhkov's determination to unpick the distribution of property over which Yeltsin had presided, and hand it out to his own people. This would be, said Gaidar, "crony capitalism taken to the highest level; corruption in power".
Gaidar may well be right; but the problem with his analysis is that corruption already is in power. To protect himself, his family and closest aides from the consequences of their corruption, or permissive view of corruption, Yeltsin discards prime ministers like unwanted cards in a poker deck. It is the need to get the best possible advantage over Luzhkov and his associates that pushes him towards the men who guard the bulging files of the secret services. The Yeltsin clan's greed must be protected against the Luzhkov clan's greed; that is the background to the forthcoming struggle for power, and the rationale for the latest change of prime minister from Sergei Stepashin to Vladimir Putin.
Stepashin had been put on probation; if he showed himself able to construct a coalition round himself which made him a credible anti-Luzhkov candidate, he would be anointed the Kremlin's presidential candidate. He did not do so: worse, the regional governors' group, probably the most powerful vote-getting machine in Russia, decided to come out for Luzhkov. These men are pork-barrel merchants; they need Moscow less because there is less pork to share, but they still need it enough to be savvy about the best- looking candidate.
Putin - whom Yeltsin has already, in effect, anointed without a probation period - must now seek to put things right. His key task, as far as Yeltsin is concerned, is to stop any redivision of the spoils, or any examination of the past eight years that might see the first family itself - and its closest backers, the businessmen Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich - arraigned before a court. He must do this as prime minister, and must credibly promise to do it as president.
He must run with the protection of, and in order to protect, the Kremlin; yet he cannot win if he is too close to it. Yeltsin may not be aware of the extent of his unpopularity in the country, or may think that money and media can again turn the tide on any opponent, as they did in 1996. But Luzhkov has money and media, too; the capitalists who backed Yeltsin because he had made them rich are now demoralised, relatively impoverished and scared. The people are impoverished. The country is bankrupt - kept going only because the west dares not allow it to default, because of the effect on global markets (this is a new version of Russian roulette, of which the Russians have quickly become masters). Nato has attacked an ally with impunity, and is expanding up to its borders. Can Putin, or anyone else, construct a winning platform from this? It will be some trick if he does.
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