Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Russian oligarchs are being harassed and jailed in a crackdown that's raising eyebrows in the West. But most Russians thinks they're guilty -- just like everybody else.
Jul 20, 2000 | "Our position is extremely clear. Only a strong ... and effective state and a democratic state is capable of protecting civic, political and economic freedoms ... Strong government has an interest in having strong opponents, [and] without a truly free mass media, Russian democracy simply will not survive."
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered these heartening words about a strong state, democracy and free media in his recent address to the Russian parliament -- one month after government officers arrested media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, the director of Russia's main independent television station, NTV. At the same time, masked, gun-wielding agents from the successor agency to the KGB, the Federal Security Service (which Putin once headed), raided the Moscow headquarters of MEDIA-Most, the parent company of NTV, seizing documents and causing an international uproar.
Gusinsky was detained for three days in Moscow's czarist-era Butyrka Prison, charged with defrauding the government of $10 million, then released, pending trial. Two days after Putin's July 11 speech, state prosecutors and officers of the FSB returned to MEDIA-Most and took away more documents, warning that Gusinsky may be arrested again. No one has seen the evidence that the prosecutors say they have gathered against him.
Western reporters and political commentators on NTV have equated Gusinsky's arrest with a Soviet-style attack on freedom of the press. They say NTV is being persecuted for its frank coverage of the war in Chechnya and its failure to endorse Putin in presidential elections. Putin's KGB past, and his pledge to strengthen the state and its control over the media, seem to bear out the direst suspicions.
But the events are a bit more complex than that. Gusinsky's arrest is part of a campaign to fortify the state, a campaign with one overriding aim: an assault on the oligarchs -- Gusinsky being one of them -- who oppose chief oligarch and Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky.
Berezovsky happens to own 49 percent of the main state television channel, ORT, which is NTV's main competitor. Berezovsky, who was the most influential member of Yeltsin's court, is thought to have engineered the rise of Yeltsin protigi Putin to the presidency through a combination of intrigue and financial and media support. His choice of Putin may well have been based on the latter's KGB background. As a spy chief, Putin presumably had the dirt on all the other presidential candidates (witness the speed with which they withdrew from the race, and the fawning alacrity with which they pledged him their allegiance), and on Berezovsky's rivals as well.
Hardly a day now passes without the announcement of raids and indictments against Berezovsky's rivals (alleging, for the most part, tax evasion and embezzlement). Recently, for instance, government auditors announced an investigation into Anatoly Chubais, head of the electricity monopoly Unified Energy System. Chubais, who designed many economic reforms under Yeltsin, said the charges that he allowed foreigners to invest illegally in the company were "absolutely laughable."
The oligarch hit list also includes former untouchables Vagit Alekperov, head of LUKOil, Russia's leading oil company; Vladimir Potanin, former deputy prime minister and the owner of Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia's most profitable enterprises; and Vladimir Kadannikov, the boss of AvtoVAZ, the producer of the country's most popular car, the Lada. AvtoVAZ may, in fact, be partly owned by Berezovsky, which illustrates the complexity of the matters at hand. (The raid against AvtoVAZ could have been a feint designed to convince the public that Putin is acting independently of the widely hated Berezovsky. Berezovsky's announcement on Monday that he is quitting the state Duma in protest of Putin's moves against the oligarchs may be another such ruse.)
All in all, the pressure on Berezovsky's rivals suggests that Putin's state and Berezovsky are redistributing between them the spoils of privatization auctions held in the mid-1990s. As the loot is redivided, the last voices of opposition need to be silenced. (I say "last" because many of the current restrictions on the press stem from the Yeltsin-era Ministry of the Press, from acquisition of media outlets by oligarchs, who use them to advance their own agendas, and, where the provinces are concerned, from the tight control imposed by tyrannical and unreconstructed local administrations. Putin is simply continuing a process begun under his predecessor.)
But such dissent is not being silenced -- at least so far -- on a scale recalling Soviet times. Today, as during the Yeltsin years, Russians on the street excoriate, ridicule and inveigh against their government. And despite Gusinsky's arrest, NTV still broadcasts damning reports about Chechnya, official corruption and Putin's plans to smother the press. Shutting up NTV will not be easy, if only because Gusinsky is wealthy and determined to stay out of prison. He will use his media to save his skin.
Few Russians, besides journalists, seem to care about Putin's move against Gusinsky. Their apathy has a simple, two-part explanation. First of all, the media, for decades a tool of propaganda, elicits no special sympathy from a public whom it routinely duped and led astray in Soviet times, or dupes and leads astray now in the service of the oligarchs and state. Second, and most important, Russians possess a sophisticated, firsthand knowledge of what their country has become since 1991.
On hearing about Gusinsky's arrest, my Russian friends said, "Well, he must be guilty of something -- all our businessmen are!" They are alluding to the Byzantine nature of laws and the malleability of justice here -- the core problems that have turned the "reforms" much touted in the West into a nefarious and often bloody farce.
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