EASTWEST INSTITUTE

NEW YORK • PRAGUE • MOSCOW • KYIV
BRUSSELS • HELSINKI

August 7, 2000

AUG 0 8 2000

Dear Henry,

I deeply appreciate the time you took to read the manuscript of *Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes: Voices of the New Generation* and comment so incisively and eloquently on these young Russian leaders' observations about their country's future. Your approbation of the project is the best of all rewards. You shall of course be the first to have the book itself in November, duly inscribed to one of the great mentors -- and architects of our own country's future.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
President, Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue, 26th Floor
New York, New York 10022

EWI, NEW YORK 700 Broadway, New York, New York 10003 Tel: 212 824-4100 Fax: 212 824-4149
E-mail: iews@iews.org website: http://www.iews.org
Formerly the Institute for EastWest Studies

OFFICE OF
HENRY A. KISSINGER

August 2, 2000

Dear Ambassador Isham:

Dr. Kissinger is happy to provide you with the following comment for
<u>Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes: Voices of the New Generation:</u>

"<u>Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes</u> makes an important
contribution to the West's understanding of the profound
disorientation which the political, economic and social
upheavals have had on the lives of ordinary Russian citizens.
These essays by rising young leaders of the post-Soviet
generation, as yet largely unknown in the West, speak with
unusual candor of the frustrations and deprivations, the
loneliness and yearning for leadership that pervade all
regions and walks of life. Heyward Isham has provided
valuable insight into the issues that must be faced by the
architects of Russia's future."

With best wishes for much success with your publication and
Dr. Kissinger's warm regards,

Ambassador Heyward Isham
Vice President
EastWest Institute
700 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003

TWENTY-SIXTH FLOOR • 350 PARK AVENUE • NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 • (212) 759-7919

DRAFT

Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes makes an important contri-
bution to the West's understanding of the profound disorien-
tation which the political, economic and social upheavals
have had on the lives of ordinary Russian citizens. These
essays by rising young leaders of the post-Soviet generation,
as yet largely unknown in the West, speak with unusual candor of
the frustrations and deprivations, the loneliness and yearning
for leadership that pervade all regions and walks of life.

Yet they convey as well a sense of prevailing, even of opti-
mism, a recognition of what needs to be done and the deter-
mination to do it. Heyward Isham has provided valuable insight
into the issues that must be faced by the architects of Russia's
future.

OK as edited

(Book on Rebecca's credenza)

ssm

RE: "Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes":
Voices of the New Generation", edited by
Amb. Heyward Isham of the East-West
Institute

Amb. Isham sends an advance copy of his anthology and hopes for "a word from you that we might use on the cover and related public information about the book". Publication is scheduled for November.

The major thematic rubrics covered in the book are:

* Reshaping the Russian State

* Coping with New Economic Rules

* Striving Toward Rule of Law

* Civil Society Building Blocks

* Preserving the Culture while Modernizing Education

Have you any interest in providing a line or two for the cover and for publicity?

Yes, have Suzanne draft something ✓

No, regret nicely ____

EASTWEST INSTITUTE

June 29, 2000

## BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Co-Chairmen of the Board
Martti Ahtisaari
George Russell

John Edwin Mroz
President and Founder

Robert J. Bernstein
Jan Krzysztof Bielecki
Henryka Bochniarz
Maria Livanos Cattauji
James W. Crystal
William D. Dearstyne
Olga Dergunova
Esther Dyson
Gabriel Eichler
Dieter Feddersen
Francis Finlay
John B. Hurford
Donald M. Kendall
John W. Kluge
Mustafa V. Koç
Andrei Kortunov
Maria-Pia Kothbauer
Jacques de Larosière
John Lloyd
William H. Luers
Mark Maletz
Klaus Mangold
William E. Murray
Andrei Nechaev
Harold J. Newman
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
Zoe Petre
Antti O. Piippo
Condoleezza Rice
John J. Roberts
Daniel Rose
Jana Ryšlinková
Leo Schenker
Alexander Shaknovich
Mitchell I. Sonkin
Rita Süssmuth
György Surányi
Boris I. Tarasyuk*
Liener Temerlin
Robert Verrue
John C. Whitehead
Robert Ziff

## CHAIRMEN EMERITI

Berthold Beitz
Ivan T. Berend
Hans-Dietrich Genscher
Whitney MacMillan
Ira D. Wallach
Co-Founder

*on leave for government service

To: The Honorable Henry Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10003

JUN 30 2000

Re: *Russia's Fate Through Russian Eyes*

Dear Henry,

To paraphrase Shakespeare, the quality of leadership is not strained, but droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven on the parched earth beneath, and the qualities of leadership exhibited by the 30 young men and women represented in this anthology cannot be explained by rational calculations alone. These witnesses to Russia's troubled, episodic, contradictory transformation have much to tell the West, particularly those observers who tend either to deprecate the importance of Russia as a nation after the collapse of the USSR, or who perceive some incorrigibly self-destructive element in their national psyche. But these personal histories of both accomplishment and frustration offer a much more complex-- and ultimately heartening-- picture than the one the average Western newspaper reader is accustomed to seeing. Adaptability to the new, harsh conditions of the market, initiative in the face of bureaucratic obstacles, clarity in the choice of objectives while overcoming Soviet-era stereotypes, and perseverance even when the odds seem insuperable, are all strikingly present in these reports from the field.

I hope that you will find in these accounts, which are diverse and in some cases mutually contradictory, new reasons to look upon Russia's evolution with a greater measure of confidence than you might otherwise have had. In particular, I suggest you take a look at the reports of Yurii

Plyusnin, Vladislav Grib, Nadia Seriakova, Hilarion Alfeev, and Vladimir Mirzoev. But you will undoubtedly want to delve into this anthology as the mood strikes you and in accordance with your interests in the five major thematic rubrics:

* Reshaping the Russian State, Coping with New Economic Rules, Striving Toward Rule of Law.
* Civil Society Building Blocks, and Preserving the Culture While Modernizing Education.

You should also know that, as I explain in the acknowledgements, I received invaluable assistance in selecting these witnesses from the US Embassy in Moscow and a number of the leading Western foundations in that city. The 30 contributors were only a fraction of those whom we interviewed in preparation for the book. In the next phase of this project, I want to focus on young leaders representing Russia's regions, particularly the Urals, Siberia, the Volga region, and the Far North. There is a wealth of talent and experience out there in the provinces, and representatives of these regions as well have much to tell the West, not only about their own country's future, but about issues that transcend national boundaries and affect citizens in the West in equal measure.

I should greatly appreciate a word from you that we might use on the cover and related public information about the book, which is due for publication in November of this year, with a launching at the annual meeting of the AAASS in Denver, Colorado.

With warm regards,

Amb. Heyward Isham
Vice President
EastWest Institute
700 Broadway, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003
Tel: 212 824-4115/16
Fax: 212 824-4149

Dedicated to the memory of Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev (1906 - 1999), intrepid investigator of the Old Russian literary heritage from the 10th to the 17th century as a source of contemporary inspiration and wise counselor to the new generation of Russian leaders of all ages. "Our future lies in openness to the entire world and in enlightenment."

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many friends and colleagues in this country, Europe and Russia endorsed the concept of publishing a second *sbornik* or anthology of Russian "voices from within," suggested potential contributors, and in some cases helped arrange meetings. Their support and encouragement were invaluable. Special thanks go to John F. Tefft, Deputy Chief of Mission in Embassy Moscow, Thomas Graham, former head of the Embassy's Internal Political Section, Sharon Hudson-Dean of the US Information Service in Moscow, Mark Koenig and Lisa Petter of the USAID mission in Moscow, Melissa Hudson, Second Secretary of the Embassy, Elena Nemirovskaya, founder and director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and her project director Igor Gorely, Masha Gessen and Masha Lipman of *Itogi* magazine, Tatyana Zhdanova, director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Moscow office, and Alan Rousso, director of the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Center.

I am grateful as well to Celestine Bohlen of the *New York Times* Moscow Bureau, Irene Stevenson, director of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity in Moscow, Bernadine Joselyn, director of the Eurasia Foundation's Moscow office, Susan Wobst, director of the IREX office in Moscow, Aleksei Barabashev, deputy director, Institute of Public Administration and Social Studies, Moscow State University, Maksim Shevchenko, religious editor of *Nezavisimaya gazeta*, Evgenii Semenov, general director, Russian Scientific Foundation for the Humanities, Susan H. Gillespie, director, Institute for International Liberal Education, Bard College, Natal'ia B. Romanova, managing director, Jupiter Investments, Moscow, Ekaterina Genieva, director of the Soros Foundation, Russia, and Sergei Basov, director of the Soros Foundation's St. Petersburg branch.

To my program associate Natan Shklyar go my special thanks; he has been an indefatigable, resourceful and highly knowledgeable editorial partner and has made major contributions to the book, including the recording and translation of four interviews and the care and feeding of our authors. As one who was born in the USSR in a military family, came to America to get a college education in the Midwest, and then forged his way brilliantly to a respected position among Russia specialists, Natan epitomizes the entrepreneurial spirit and intelligent altruism characterizing the authors in this collection.

We were fortunate in having an experienced team of translators, Antonina W. Bouis, Marian Schwartz, and Anya Kuchareva, who dealt expeditiously and lucidly with texts that seldom reflected Anglo-Saxon notions of brevity but always conveyed the thoughts of the authors forcefully.

Beyond the unflagging intellectual and operational support of my colleagues at the EastWest Institute, particularly John Mroz, the president, and Stephen Heintz, the executive vice-president from 1990 to 1999, I owe an incalculable debt of thanks to the foundations and individuals who supported this project: the Annie Laurie Aitken Lead Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Kennan Institute, and the Alida and Steven Scheuer Foundation. To all of them, the many other friends, colleagues, mentors and family members who have lent me their encouragement and wisdom over the years, and especially to my beloved wife, Sheila, my profound thanks.

Heyward Isham

PREFACE

The young Russian men and women who record in these pages the hopes, fears, triumphs, and tragedies their country has undergone in recent years--altering their own lives profoundly in the process--all come from the first post-Soviet generation to achieve positions of leadership in Russia. They report on five challenges central to Russia's survival and stabilization: reshaping the state, coping with new economic rules, striving toward the rule of law, building a civil society, and preserving the national culture and educational capacity.

They love their country, while understanding all too well the crippling psychological legacy of seventy years of a dictatorship that was both cunning and cruel in dispensing a plausible utopian myth and exacting extraordinary sacrifices in the name of that myth. They understand the acute sense of disorientation that overcame all generations when the USSR abruptly dissolved in 1991 and the Communist Party simultaneously lost much if not all of its power. As several of our authors recall, it was as if you woke up one morning and found yourself a citizen of an entirely different country, meanwhile discovering that your parents were not your real parents at all and that you had acquired a brand new surname.

But these young Russians waste no time in historical retrospectives. Unencumbered by fears of either a Communist restoration or a right-wing coup, they have no taste for recrimination or resentment: they go about their business briskly, boldly. From the voice caught in these pages we learn what the young generation of Russians is doing to help their country recover from its precipitous decline, and how they see the future. For example:

* a grain dealer deftly navigates the newly demonopolized commodities market and competes on the world market;

* a real estate developer, responding to pent-up demand, builds functional and affordable housing in the Moscow suburbs;

* an opponent of the compulsory registration system operate the first center for the homeless in St. Petersburg and publishes a newsletter advocating more humane treatment;

* a public policy lawyer, using his advocacy and legislative drafting skills, protects consumers (unaccustomed to having a choice of goods and services) from buying defective equipment or succumbing to false advertisements;

* an anthropologist grounded in biology and philosophy explores the radically changed outlook among Siberia's urban and rural inhabitants as they struggle with fortitude and ingenuity to adapt to the pervasive economic crisis, discounting any help from local authorities and meanwhile turning to the worship of nature as an archaic source of unity;

* an entrepreneurial couple organizes an agency to inform, educate and support those engaged in the long process of building a civil society through a growing network of professional non-governmental organizations;

* an independent publisher introduces readers to a wealth of undiscovered and unorthodox literary talents;

* a constitutional law scholar warns about the potential for totalitarian abuses inherent in many provisions of the 1993 Constitution;

* a journalist directs a watchdog agency that publicizes reprisals against investigative journalists by government officials or businessmen exposed as corrupt;

* two scholar-administrators in St. Petersburg pioneer the country's first undergraduate program offering a cross-disciplinary liberal arts curriculum.

These are only a few of the articulate young leaders we meet in these pages.

The Russia they set their mind and energy to restore and modernize is a country that does not turn its back on the Bolshevik and Soviet past, but acknowledges enduring bonds, common interests and ethical values shared by every generation. It is a Russia that sets aside raw envy of others' entrepreneurial success, renounces the habit of subservience to the state, and distinguishes between universal principles of justice and the cynical distortions of the law by bureaucrats. A Russia that can be roused from inertia to activism by reports of institutionalized torture, whether occurring under police interrogation, in Russia's overcrowded prisons or in the army.

It is above all a Russia borne up in its many travails by a stubborn will to survive and by a capacity, especially in the new generation, to adapt ingeniously and swiftly to changes imposed by the need to compete at home and abroad under unforgiving market conditions.

It is, finally, a Russia that wants the West to demonstrate its interest in a more informed, balanced and respectful relationship, shedding disparaging stereotypes and *a priori* assumptions.

Although increasingly confident of its regenerative capacity (the 1998 crisis was surmounted) the new Russia, our authors believe, welcomes an intelligent, sensible helping hand as its citizens, with the new generation in the lead, rebuild their country "from under the rubble." The poet Boris Slutsky has written about the Russians: "worn out, like rails over which all the engines of the world have driven, they can still receive any signals sent out by good."

***

The genesis of this collection of original essays on Russia's future was probably my service as Second Secretary in Embassy Moscow during the mid-1950s, when I discovered at first hand that Western assumptions about the totalitarian controls imposed by the Soviet system failed to take into account the marvelously ingenious protective devices developed within society against secret policy informers and other forms of political intrusion into their private lives.

In those years, apart from chance (and often very instructive) encounters and conversations in parks, restaurants, markets, or train compartments, diplomats seeking the reality behind the stage props had, for example, to plow through Politburo speeches or Party Congress transcripts, note a change of emphasis here or a telling omission there in the official press reports, and compare how news was handled in Moscow and in the provinces. The evidence of political disillusionment and intellectual resistance even then was greater than many Western observers assumed. I was struck, for example, by the buzz of debate among Moscow University students caused by the publication of Vladimir Dudintsev's *Not By Bread Alone*, a novel that portrayed a Party apparatchik in subtly unflattering tones altogether inconsistent with approved iconic forms. Although Dudintsev's indictment pales when compared to the torrent of revelations about Stalin's repressions and the Party's degeneration that emanated from both official and *samizdat* sources during the 1960s and 1970s, the reaction to the book reflected the passing of an illusion and foreshadowed the role that opposition-minded intellectuals, some of them allied with Gorbachev and his team, would play in the eventual destruction of the Party's monopoly on power and legitimacy in 1991.

The task of interpretation and analysis that faces foreign observers almost 50 years after Stalin's death and some 15 years after the start of Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika is of course altogether different. Deciphering post-Soviet puzzles requires a method that takes into account the proliferation and tendentiousness of print and electronic information, to the point that there seem to be not one but many Russias. Our authors Sergei Vasil'ev and Vladimir Mirzoev observe this phenomenon from the perspective of economic policy maker and theatrical producer. Fragmentation characterizes those who live in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the provincial cities, and rural villages and settlements; those over 50 and those under 40; citizens residing in republics or oblasts that border on West Europe, Central Asia, and the Far East, and those living in regions which are largely cut off from foreign ties, as in the

(u)

Siberian North. Among the 89 regions of Russia, a few are relatively stable and growth-oriented but most are seriously impoverished and backward. And all such differences, of course, are compounded and manipulated by recurrent "information wars," the use of compromising material (kompromat) to crush political opponents, the hidden agendas of oligarchs who control much of the media, the intertwining of bureaucracy and organized crime, and mercurial changes in patterns of patronage. At the same time, the Internet links among universities and individual subscribers (some 3 million) are increasingly important in providing independent sources of information, although government monitoring is a latent threat. The rise and fall of confidants and courtiers, scoundrels and scholars, reformers and restorationists--such is the context in which these reflections, reminiscences, and observations must be viewed.

The approach I have taken in this book, therefore, follows that taken by my earlier volume, *Remaking Russia: Voices From Within*, published in 1995, which presented the views of some 20 outstanding intellectual figures of the older generation. For the present collection, I have concentrated on 29 representatives of the new generation of Russian leaders, those between the ages roughly of 25 and 40. Their perspectives find an arresting counterpoint and commentary in the epilogue contributed by one of Russia's most respected scholars, the historian and Slavicist Vyacheslav Ivanov.

My suggestion to the authors, once they were selected, was straightforward: using your personal voice, as if you were writing a letter to American friends, share with us your professional evaluation of the profound changes in your country; note the implications for the future development of Russia; and describe what is necessary to move Russia toward a more civilized, responsible and vibrant society. The classic questions: "Who are we? Where are we going? How do we get there?" are within your power to answer.

The authors responded well to these proposals. Indeed, their written contributions (in some cases interviews) convey effectively the troubled, shocking, perplexing, contradictory evolution of their country from a coercive imperial system asserting a monopoly on faith and power to a national condition that seems far less clear, less predictable, less equitable and certainly less effective than that which had preceded it, but one which increasingly offers new opportunities for independence of thought, collegiality of action, entrepreneurial boldness--and, above all, new hope for Russian society as a whole.

What these young leaders have to say also offers new ideas for the design and implementation of foreign assistance programs, for much has changed, and continues to change, since those programs were first initiated; and a resurgent Russia under a new and younger president will present problems and opportunities of an altogether different order. The West more than ever will need to study the particular historical and psychological context, the nuances of words and actions, the smoke screens put up to mask weakness and confuse the potential antagonist -- and it will also need to assess at its proper value the defiantly resilient and tenacious Russian character imbued as it is with memories of a more coherent and authoritative past.

Heyward Isham

New York City

May, 2000

On the Path to a New Russia: The Youth Movement

Nadia Seriakova*

Russia. The end of the twentieth century. What names will historians eventually find for this period!

Every society has a set of accepted or inherited basic ideas that determine public
morality, relations among people, and the government's policy toward other states. When linked
to a propaganda system, these basic ideas turn into ideology.

The basic idea that determined the path of the Russian people for almost 150 years was the idea of revolutionary violence. Today new ideas are gradually crystallizing and the soil is being prepared so that they can turn into action.

Russia's young people define this as an era of contrasts.

Democracy in Russia "happened" suddenly, as did many other important things in our
country. The people who had lived for many years in a Communist space awoke one day to find
that they had been duped. It is only the West that thinks the entire Soviet people built
Communism. Everyday, normal life went on, with all its joys and sorrows. It was the usual
round. I don't think that a Soviet person, whatever position he held, woke up in the morning and
said to himself, "Good morning! I'm off to build Communism."

I consider myself part of the generation of Russians who managed to grow up under two
different systems. What did I get from my "Communist past?" My childhood Pioneer
organization was a good school for life, strangely enough. I believed in what I did, but there
wasn't a word of Communist propaganda in it. The Pioneer organization in my school, which I
headed, did honor the memory of the heroes who died in the war, and our groups were named for
them. But there wasn't anything Communist about it. We helped old people, cleaned streets,
learned to sing, read poems, and wrote poems of our own. Perhaps it all seems so rosy because
it's part of my childhood?

When I grew older, my friends and I pondered changing our lives. Since we had no other
historical experience, we dreamed of a revolution that would give us something new. What
bothered us the most was the absolute predictability of life in our country. We all knew what
would happen after graduation, where we would work, and even what our salaries would be.

We didn't even have a serious understanding of what democracy was. The world was
divided into two unequal parts: our Socialist part and the Capitalist rest. We couldn't imagine
that life could be worthier in that other world, solidly hidden by the heavy, creaking curtain.

Perestroika meant so much--and yet there was nothing understandable about it.
"Freedom" was bandied about in every square. From whom or for what? We weren't slaves.
The only thing I remembered during all those years from my early childhood was my parents
listening at night to the Voice of America and secretly talking about Sakharov. They asked me
never to tell anyone about those conversations. I didn't even understand them then.

* Nadezhda ("Nadia") Aleksandrovna Seriakova - After graduating from the Culture University with a degree in arts administration in 1990, Seriakova worked in the USSR Ministry of Culture. In 1993 she became a program manager in the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute, an American organization, and eventually became its executive director. In 1995 Seriakova founded the New Perspectives Foundation, which she now heads. She also works with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a group providing technical assistance to countries organizing democratic elections.

Young people felt the avalanche of democracy with even greater force. Just imagine the situation. A growing child, living in a family, loving her parents. One fine day she's told the truth, that she's not related, that they are not her parents at all. For a start, they suggest changing her surname. What happens to such a child? What feelings should she have? At best, hatred and anger, emotions which make her apathetic and incapable of trust for a long time. This is what happened to our youth. The homeland they loved became alien in one day. To trust and love a new homeland--can that be possible in such a short time?

The seeds of democracy fell on infertile soil. It's like sowing wheat in the winter into the snow. Of course, the seeds will germinate sometime, but they won't be as well-tended and evenly planted as expected. I am absolutely certain that this eminently just idea of democracy was doomed from the start in our country, for one small reason--people didn't know anything about it before. (I don't mean democracy in the philosophic sense.) It will take time, perhaps several years, for the idea to be accepted in our country, for people to see for themselves, to listen and read about the possibilities inherent in democracy, to understand its reality.

But instead, we had what we had. "Everything was upside down in the Oblonsky household..." Truth turned out to be brazen falsehood, freedom a free-for-all, and civic rights an expensive commodity. The talk was only of price. People quickly remembered the formulas like "commodity is money is commodity," and things got going. Now the situation did not depend on a person's natural abilities (nor had it in the past, come to that). Everything could be bought, and just as easily sold.

Probably no other country in the world has a real explanation for the concept of "selling air." A few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while looking for work, I took a job "selling air." It wasn't very profitable. I never saw the goods, the sellers, or the buyers; my job was to know who wanted to buy what and who owned it. I had constant calls from sellers: "There are several carloads of sugar at this price," and I would write the information down in a notebook, under the heading "Sugar." There were similar offers there already, and my task was to find the cheapest prices. Then buyers called who urgently needed metal. I didn't have a notebook heading like that, but I knew a lot of people who had information on those goods. And so on, till I got a headache. I'm still not sure if any of my sellers sold what they had, or if even one of the purchasers found what he needed. And whether they actually had what they wanted to sell.

## Real Democracy

Real Democracy for me began in 1993, when quite accidentally I was asked to organize a seminar in Khabarovsk for the International Republican Institute of the United States. I had never been there, I didn't know anyone there, but my organizational zeal performed miracles. The seminar wasn't at all bad, there were six Americans and about forty local democrats. The seminar topic, on how to organize political parties, had been sent out to us earlier. The American consultants related their experiences and the Russian participants learned and adapted what they heard.

Thus I became a staff member of the Institute and later its executive director. The three years I worked there I recall with great warmth and consider them the years in which I became a citizen of my new Homeland -- Russia.

In those years, American participation in similar programs was welcomed. The opportunity to have contact, ask questions, and speak openly soaked down like moisture in

2

parched soil. Of course, the American experience was not always appropriate to our conditions. But those who could hear, heard; and those who could accumulate ideas, did. The rest complained quietly that it was useless.

The many questions of those years at the seminars boiled down to one: "Why are you (Americans) doing this?" Really, it wasn't that easy to understand why people would travel so far to help build democracy in Russia. Wasn't it easier to stay home in your big house, where there were no problems and you didn't have to risk your money or your reputation? One American friend told me about herself. In the bygone days of the Cold War, when Americans didn't even think about friendship with Russia, she had asked herself, "Who are these scary Russians? Is it true that there is nothing human about them?" The Russian classic novels had astonished her with their human understanding and profound philosophy. However, this only added to her incomprehension of the Russian soul. Then she decided to learn Russian. Neither her parents nor her teachers could understand this passion for all things Russian. It must have been an act of youthful protest, when adolescents act differently from everyone else and find meaning in that.

We met in Moscow and I was stunned by her good Russian and her ability to invent words. It was in the fall and we were traveling by train to a distant Siberian city. "This is my favorite time of year," I said, "except for the slush." The Russian word for slush ends like an infinitive verb, and she decided it was a verb, which she then proceeded to conjugate most amusingly.

"When I am a grown up woman, and I have my own children and grandchildren, I will tell them who the Russians are. And for sure, not I, not my family, not my descendants will dare live in such alienation from Russia." That was my friend's reply to the question, "Why do you do this?" This may be the simple answer that makes it possible to understand. If not, so be it.

## Formation of Civil Society

Two years ago I returned to my university to write a dissertation on youth and its participation in civil society. My interests ran to the civil education of young people, which my Foundation works on to this day. However, I was very surprised by the scientific discovery a philosophy professor announced: there was no such concept as "civil education" in Russia. This discouraged me greatly. What was I doing, then?

In fact, if you ask my peers, people on the street, older people about civil society, you will hear a thousand different answers. And not because people are removed from the topic. The reason is the same. There are no basic concepts of democracy.

It seems fairly obvious. There is a nation-state where people are organized into various societies; these societies have problems which have to be solved by someone, and there are the "someones" who must solve these problems. There's just one thing left to do: identify the people who can be entrusted with solving one's problems: Easy to say.

In Russia, this stage has not been reached. Only one thing has been understood: it pays to be among the chosen. But no one is interested in actually solving the problems. The ones doing the selecting haven't understood their part, either. In this pre-election era, and you can't call it anything else in Russia, people somehow got hooked by those who wanted to become parliamentary deputies. And they were happy and even knew all the Western techniques of enticing voters. Everything seemed quite proper. Groups of possible voters were studied, their problems defined, dialogues between candidates and voters organized, promises made, and so

3

on. On election day the deputy still remembered his voters, some even wrote thank-you notes, just in case they should run again. And then this delicate connection was severed.

But I would not rush to blame people elected to high office for the fragility of the connection. Everyone realizes that the problems that come along with high office, the level of responsibility that falls like a heavy burden on the shoulders of the newly elected official, do not allow him to think constantly about his electorate. He has to deal with much more important matters.

Democracy cannot be established just on the basis of holding elections. There are quite a few examples in history of a dictatorship coming on the heels of elections. From the point of view of civil society, political freedom rests on the citizens' broad exercise of their social and civil freedoms and on the existence in the country of deep-rooted values of freedom and self-confidence. In order for these values to be strong, people must be able to make a free choice and voluntarily take on responsibility, based on their social and civil priorities. Democracy flowers in those countries where the law effectively protects the right of citizens to enter into associations with each other in the name of common civil goals and to form groups that reflect their common opinions, values, and interests.

The civil society that my colleagues and I are building, and trying to protect, has itself not yet understood what it needs. I do not refer to those non-governmental organizations working in our country today. They simply deserve to have monuments erected in praise of their work, under incredibly severe conditions, just to exist, to defend the rights of a certain segment of society, and at the same time, to defend democracy.

There are obvious difficulties in the development of civil society in our country today. The main problems include:

* Dependence on external financing, which complicates the independence of action and the responsibility of the organizations' members;

* Inadequate dissemination of information and communications technologies, which hampers the development of networks;

* The low level of social capital necessary for effective activity of democratic nongovernmental organizations;

* Insufficient guarantees of constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech, press, assembly and association, which hamper the activity of independent NGOs.

The last problem may seem farfetched, but only because the concept of freedom of speech in our country has been turned into the concept of "everything is permitted." Only the lazy do not berate the government, the parliament and the president for being the cause of all of Russia's ills. Of course, there are plenty of problems, but blaming them all only on officials at the highest levels of government is not fair--if only because we elected them. That is the paradox of democracy that we stubbornly refuse to accept.

The rest of the problems are obvious. We depend on foreign sources of financing. It is absurd to try to explain to others how noncommercial structures survive in Russia. And one more thing. Everyone who works in a noncommercial organization comes to realize that what he does is needed by no one but himself. It was with that thought that I went to a meeting of partners in the International Youth Foundation in the Philippines in the fall of 1999, where I met many people working for the good of their civil societies. Nani, a young woman from India, had a simple answer to my moaning. "Fine, but it's very good that you are doing what you need to

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do. That means you are happy." Perhaps that is the truth. I am doing what I need, first and foremost, and I am happy.

## On the Path to a New Russia

People are so made that they like to tie the most important things to certain dates. I dare say you don't know anyone who hasn't said at least once, "On Monday I will stop smoking," or "On New Year's Day I will start a new life," or something like that. The new millennium is even more appropriate for new beginnings and resolutions. How lucky we are to be born at the cusp of not only two centuries but of two millennia! Naturally, we can't get by without a little drama.

Our organization decided to keep up with the epochal inspiration and organize something global. We deal with youth and its civil education; according to the rules of distribution of universal duties, we ought to be leading youth into the new millennium. We appointed ourselves in charge of that, because we needed to do it.

We called our undertaking "On the Path to a New Russia"--a symbolic transition of young people into a New Russia, the new millennium. For a start, we created a virtual "youth state," with all the attributes of a civilized government: its own seal and flag, constitution, government and parliament, and naturally, president. We even had our own anthem and our own currency. And in order to make ourselves believe it, we gathered one hundred fifty young people from all over Russia and marched from Moscow to a city with the lovely name of Novorossiisk (or New Russia).

I must say that preparations for the march took several months. We had to study the route thoroughly, select the participants, send out letters, coordinate our presence with local authorities, buy tickets, make arrangements for hotels and food, and most importantly, come up with the content of the program. For that, we convened the "new government," which included, besides the main staffers of our Foundation in Moscow, representatives from regional structures, in other words, young people from other cities. This was a very good opportunity to work together as a team. And the first thing we did together was to do research to find out the ten most important problems of young people in Russia.

There are plenty of problems, but for young people, the top ten are what I consider the most serious: crime, education, drugs, unemployment, money, recreation, health, prostitution, human rights, and homeland. Problems that we inherited from the former regime, and problems that appeared quite recently. Crime keeps demonstrating its priority over education, drugs stifle health, money does not agree with unemployment, entertainment is too expensive, prostitution demands legalization, and the new homeland remains an alien place for most young people. Not the lightest of baggage.

In our youth state, it was clear, we would try to avoid the mistakes and errors we observed in Russia. Therefore, in devising the political structure of our state, we decided to free ourselves once and for all from any state-imposed priorities. We had to start somewhere, say, by forming political parties that would propose their candidates for the parliament. But since we were starting from square one, and since our state had no history, we decided to let the computer do it.

Out of the one hundred fifty participants of the march, the computer first selected the three leaders who had to organize their political parties. The leaders were given equal opportunities to contact the other participants, both through the media and directly, to persuade them to join their parties, to gather signatures, and to register their parties. And when this ended

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up with a division of all the citizens into three parties, we headed off on our route, first by plane from Moscow to Krasnodar, in the south of Russia. And then along the coast of the Black Sea to our dream: New Russia.

All sorts of things happened along the way, on our path. The youth state went through various periods. Every day we lived through several years. The full schedule quickly cut off the participants from real life; after the first day, people began confusing reality with the game. At first it seemed part of the game that every young person received a loan from the state in the amount of one thousand "hopes" (the name of our currency). When the state tried to collect its first taxes, however, everyone thought that this was reality. It seemed funny at first that radio and television showed only youth news, but when the election battles started, the participants had no time for jokes, they had to fight for real candidates. They approved the constitution jokingly, too; but when the president was the first to violate it, the citizens protested in all seriousness.

The elected parliament started writing real laws, based on the real needs of the youth state. Behind this difficult game stood the harsh truth: we were presenting our demands to real politicians; they couldn't overlook our interests, blow off the youth, trick us with their sweet promises. We were different. The new times demanded that from us. We could not allow the fictional capabilities of those elected by people to abandon the hope for our opportunities in the new millennium, in the New Russia.

You may ask, And what is that? It is probably the mastery of democracy. The very beginning of understanding it.

## *The Future*

And what will the New Russia be like? What awaits us all in the future? We continue to be the same old dreamers, who link the "future" with the "beautiful." People can't give up their dreams. No matter how hard it may be today, no matter what suffering people must bear, they hope for something better.

Many years ago, I read in *Hour of the Bull*, by the great Russian science fiction writer Ivan Efremov, that the sciences that will transmit basic values into the future will be mainly teaching and medicine. Medicine, because people will be physically healthy; and teaching, because more attention will be paid to the education and upbringing of people. I think that this time is already here. Today, more than ever, it is very important for people to be ready for harmony. It is impossible to speak of a beautiful future that is mutilated by poisonous flaws, whether physical or spiritual. Someone who is given the gift from nature to see the world, to create it, to enjoy it, and simply to live, cannot continue to scorn his opportunities.

We truly are lucky. We are very lucky to be born in these times. Historians will write and rewrite history a thousand times, endowing our contemporaries with capabilities and flaws that will be understandable only to the inhabitants of our planet a thousand years from now. I am absolutely certain that among the many words that will be said about our times, there will be words that define us as people who had common sense and who strove for freedom and love. May that be so.

*Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.*

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# Empowering Russia's Women:
Will Their Potential Be Tapped?

## Nadezhda Azhgikhina*

I recall very clearly my first conversation in Moscow with a University of Pittsburgh professor, Helena Goscilo. It was 1989. All intellectual Moscow was discussing the latest political sensation in the monthly journals *Ogonek* and *Znamia*, a civil war in literature raged between the "Westernizers" and the traditionalist "village prose" writers; and the air was charged with the desire for change and renewal. We talked of the new Russian women's prose. Helena was finishing a book on Russian women writers; and I had just written an article on new and interesting women authors. She asked about the prospects of the women's movement in Russia. I told her that I saw no future for it: women had suffered as much as men under the totalitarian state; all the problems of my female peers would be solved with the coming of democracy and a free market economy. I was utterly certain that I was right--just like most of my colleagues, friends, and peers. We did not simply *hope* that democratization would bring everyone happiness, we simply did not concede that it could be any other way. My new American acquaintance warned me, though, that when it came to equal rights between men and women, I should not overestimate what democracy could accomplish.

Thereafter I had many discussions with women in Russia and the United States, as well as at international conferences on the state of women held in Cairo, Beijing, Delhi and Toronto. In each debate, discussion, and chance encounter, I discovered new facets of the problem.

Today, I have to agree with my American friend: even in a democratic state, much more work is required if the idea of equality of the sexes is to become a reality. It turns out that the transition to democracy in post-Communist states takes eccentric and unexpected forms; gender inequality can become even stronger, quite markedly so. For Russia, in particular, "the women's issue" is a litmus test of reforms.

Over the past decade in Russia an independent women's movement has emerged that joins in debating the most important public policy issues and in helping improve the lot of women. In 1998, according to Ministry of Justice data, the country had over 600 women's organizations registered. Another statistic may be more telling: in 1998 alone over forty thousand public associations were registered in the Russian Federation. According to experts, at least two thirds of all non-governmental organizations, even though they may not call themselves women's NGOs, deal with issues relating to the lives of women and have memberships consisting primarily of women.

Today, every major Russian city has several dozen organizations drawing together hundreds and thousands of women of varying ages, status, and education. Almost every region of the country, from the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok, has a well-developed network of the women's movement, itself a sign of a new democratic era in society. This phenomenon has received (and still receives) very mixed reactions, ranging from the delight of its activist proponents and

* Nadezhda Il'inichna Azhgikhina - After completing studies for a doctorate in literature from the Moscow State Univeristy, Azhgikhina worked as writer and editor for the national daily *Komsomolskaya pravda* in the 1980s and for the weekly magazine *Ogonyok* in the early 1990s. Since 1996 she has been a correspondent of the daily *Nevzavisimya gazeta*, where she is editor of the women's issues column. Active in the international women's movement, Azhgikhina co-founded the Association of Women Journalists and has written numerous books and articles on Russian politics, culture and society.

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comrades-in-arms to open skepticism of its adversaries, coupled with assertions that feminism in any form is alien to the Russian national soil and that the new movement is nothing more than an artificial Western graft.

In fact, though, an attentive look at Soviet and post-Soviet history in Russia shows that the women's movement, and "Russian feminism" as one component of it, have long traditions, are profoundly unique, and have a serious potential.

## *The Sources and Meaning of Russian Feminism*

Works on the history of women in Russia are rare. One of the best is Richard Stite's study of women revolutionaries and nihilists of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, *The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism*. The first Russian compendium on the topic (Svetlana Aivazova's *Russkie zhenshchiny v labirinte ravnopraviya* [*Russian Women in the Labyrinth of Equality*]) saw light only in 1999, while Mariia Kotovskaya's monograph on the place for women in Russian history is still in preparation. Although most scholars of the Soviet period paid little attention to the topic, almost all contemporary historical sources confirm that women played highly significant roles in Russia's public life. For example, Princess Olga, the first ruler to embrace Christianity, left a vivid mark in Russian life and promulgated a series of wide-ranging reforms. Princesses and women boyars participated in the rule of principalities and the political struggles accompanying feudal internecine warfare. Some historians note that as Christianity took hold in ancient Rus', women gradually became recluses, isolated from social activity. Other historians stress that their isolation followed the establishment of the Tatar yoke: the *Domostroi* codified the submissive position of women and their separation from family property rights, while justifying the need to punish them for disobeying the head of the family. For several centuries, the phrase "the wife shall fear her husband" was an axiom. The *Domostroi* provided detailed descriptions of the punishments to be imposed upon disobedient wives. The tradition of being sequestered in the *terem*, the women's part of the house, continued until the reforms of Peter the Great. Among other radical innovations, Peter made mandatory the presence of noblemen's wives and daughters at court social occasions ("assemblies"). It was only later, during the reign of Catherine the Great, that the first school for young ladies of the nobility (known as the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens) was opened in St. Petersburg, together with its counterpart school for daughters of the bourgeoisie.

That same period saw the first woman to be elected president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ekaterina Dashkova, one of the most illustrious representatives of the Russian enlightenment, the publisher of the best journal of the period, *Sobesednik ljubitelei rossiiskogo slova* [*Interlocutor for Lovers of Russian Writing*], and a brilliant memoirist as well. Many aristocratic ladies of the era liked to wear male garb; others, like the empresses Anna Ioannovna, Elizaveta Petrovna, and Catherine the Great--liked to hunt. The historian Mariia Kotovskaia points out that the eighteenth century presented an image of woman that combined social brilliance and ambitious mannishness. That century also gave rise to yet another image, that of the professional woman serving typically as governess or actress.

Many authorities consider the true predecessors of Russian feminists to be the wives of the Decembrists (conspirators who in 1825 sought to introduce a limited monarchy to Russia). These women followed their husbands to exile and hard labor in Siberia; their selflessness inspired more than one generation of writers and researchers. However, it would be difficult to

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speak of a struggle for women's emancipation in the early and even the mid-nineteenth century. Society saw woman primarily as a helpmeet for man, as mother and educator of children. All activity outside this stereotyped framework met public condemnation. Even the creative work of writers or artists in skirts elicited suspicion among the intellectuals. Some specialists (for instance, Svetlana Aivazova) consider Alexander Pushkin, who praised free love in his narrative poem *Aleko*, a proponent of relative independence for women.

The question of women's emancipation arose on the agenda in Russia only during the political debates of the 1860s. The first bourgeois reforms were maturing in Russia; many minor estates of the nobility were going bankrupt; and young women from aristocratic families had to find a job or a profession, because work was the only way to feed a family for many of these women. Women's education and their right to work were the topics of the day. Almost every journal of literary and social commentary, as well as outstanding writers in every field, gave great attention to the issues of the state of women, the family, and family relations. The points of view expressed were extremely varied. Works of fiction depicted very different types, ranging from romantic heroines, model mothers, and passionate lovers prepared to share the torments of hell with their beloved, to independent, active women.

Interestingly, it was men who first defended women's equality in Russia. In 1860 *Sovremennik* magazine published an article by the critic Mikhailov, entitled "Women, their Education and Significance in the Family and Society," which for the first time formulated the concept of sexual equality. Dmitrii Pisarev and Nikolai Chernyshevskii, among others, took up the themes. Pisarev's phrase "A woman isn't guilty of anything" became popular. Chernyshevskii declared that women had the right not only to education and work but even to free love; he painted a picture of a working women's commune as a prototype of the happy future.

Discussions about equality were a sign of the times. Major scholars like Botkin, Pirogov, and Sechenov defended the idea of education and professional activity for women.

The historian Svetlana Aivazova considers that the active participation of men was the most significant factor defining the importance of Russian feminism in the nineteenth century. Herein lay the fundamental difference between Russian feminism and European feminism, which was formed in the whirlwind of bourgeois revolutions. "After the French Revolution, women found themselves stripped of those rights which men had won for themselves, and that gave the impetus to feminism in France. In the middle of the nineteenth century in Russia, by contrast, neither men nor women had bourgeois freedoms; men together with women fought for the right of women to education and work as the start of civil independence for everyone."

The first female students were enthusiastically welcomed by the democratic community. Periodicals conveyed a new image, that of a student who was notably modest in dress and in manner, serious and focused. Of course, the idea had its opponents--the rules of 1861 blocked women's access to the universities for a while. And yet in 1870 the government gave permission to introduce higher women's courses in the main university cities. In 1878, thanks to the efforts of four selfless fighters for women's equality, Mariia Trubnikova, Anna Filosofova, Nadezhda Stasova, and Elena Beketova, the doors opened at the Besstuzhevskie Higher Women's Courses, in St. Petersburg. It was here that Russia's first teachers and doctors in skirts were educated.

Some women went to Europe to study. Among the first was Nadezhda Suslova, who received a diploma as a doctor of surgery and midwifery in Zurich. Others, like the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaia, contracted fictitious marriages in order to continue their education abroad.

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The idea of women's emancipation comported well with the revolutionary mood in the second half of the century. Many young women from bankrupt noble families became nihilists, workers in garment factories, members of the radical "People's Will" organization or simply members of revolutionary circles. The largest revolutionary organization, "Land and Liberty," counted eighteen women among its members, and in the 1870s women comprised almost twenty percent of all revolutionaries and belonged to almost all the secret organizations. Sofia Perovskaia was the first woman to be executed in Russia on political charges; Vera Figner spent a twenty-year sentence in solitary confinement in the Shlisselburg Fortress; Vera Zasulich opened fire at the chief of the St. Petersburg police; and Mariia Spiridonova later headed the Social-Revolutionary Party.

Their contemporaries remembered these women revolutionaries as obsessed, uncompromising, and fearless. They are probably the only activists demanding the full participation of women in society who were written about during Soviet times.

But there were other women of whom my peers knew nothing. Often these were profoundly pious women, rather high-ranking noblewomen, or women from wealthy merchant families. They were united by the desire to do charitable works and help their neighbors. Many women became well-known as philanthropists and sisters of mercy, creating communities all over Russia, caring for the elderly and the sick, arranging shelter for single mothers, and helping fight epidemics.

By the time of the 1905 Revolution, thousands of women were working in village schools, hospitals, factories, and enterprises. Civil and political rights became part of women's agenda.

The First All-Russian Women's Congress convened over a thousand delegates from throughout the country in St. Petersburg in December 1908. Besides Anna Shabanova (a professional doctor and confirmed feminist), the other organizers included Olga Shapir, a popular author, and Anna Filosofova, a public activist and defender of women's rights. The Congress delegates represented the entire political spectrum, including Ariadna Tyrkova, a member of the Central Committee of the Constitutional Democratic Party, Mariia Spiridonova, the "Social-Revolutionary Madonna," and Alexandra Kollantai, the Social Democrat. Hereditary noblewomen as well as simple laborers came to discuss the economic and civil condition of women and the functions of women's organizations. The main resolution under debate concerned equal voting rights for women. Passions ran so high that the police observers at one point forbade further discussion. In any event, a unified position eluded the Congress. The "workers group" headed by Kollontai walked out, claiming that it was impossible for the proletarian women to cooperate with members of the bourgeoisie.

The Congress had enormous resonance. Politicians reacted with either delight or outrage. Contemporaries had to admit that "the public's opinion of women has changed." In 1910 yet another women's congress was convened in St. Petersburg, the First All-Russian Congress Against the Selling of Women. The First All-Russian Congress on Education for Women took place in the city in 1912. The Second All-Russian Women's Congress, planned for 1913, did not take place. In 1917 Anna Shabanova finally brought about the creation of a national woman's organization--but by then there was no time left for the All-Russian Women's Council to function. The last echo of the Congress was heard on March 19, 1917, when forty thousand St. Petersburg women marched through the streets of Petrograd demanding equal political rights. Among the organizers were the famous feminists Shabanova, Tyrkova, and Mariia Pokrovskaia, as well as Poliksena Shishkova-Iavein and Countess Sofia Panina of the All-Russian Equality

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League. These events led to the declaration by the Provisional Government of universal political
emancipation without limitation as to gender.

The Grip of the Soviet Myth

As one of its first legislative acts, the Soviet regime proclaimed the equality of men and women in all areas of economic, political, and cultural life. The regime sanctioned abortion in the early 1920s. Thousands of Russian women left the villages to work on construction sites in the Five-Year-Plans, enter universities, and train as activists and agitators for building a socialist society. Many women from Western Europe and North America rushed to the country of the "great socialist experiment," inspired by the ideals of equality. However, the position of women under the first years of Soviet rule disclosed the reverse side of revolutionary transformations: the yawning gap between declarations and reality, between promises and daily life, foreshadowing the basic political contradictions in Russia, and later in the USSR.

Soviet laws on equal rights and women's capabilities were probably the most progressive in the world in the 1920s. But mechanisms for guaranteeing equality were developed neither then, nor later. In fact, for many decades the Soviet woman had to bear a double burden. On the one hand, she was required to work, master men's professions, and participate in mandatory public political activities. On the other hand, once she came home she had play the traditional role of wife and mother. Social experiments--communal kitchens, workers' dormitory communes, and other innovations of the 1920s--soon became history, as did the discussions of the 1920s on freedom of creativity, free love, and freedom in general. The state became more harsh and totalitarian. The government needed cheap labor, thus women working on construction sites served its interests.

At the same time, the transmission of the ideas on women's emancipation that the educated classes (liberal or revolutionary) had developed to a multimillion population of primarily illiterate peasants required a long period of planned preparations. A law passed in the 1920s required nothing more from a husband than a postcard mailed to his wife in order to get divorced. Thousands of men then decided to divorce their wives; but no one had thought to prepare a social safety net for abandoned or pregnant women and their children. The law did not last long. In the 1930s, as a result of the "leveling" of Party leadership, political repressions, and the consolidation of dictatorship, a peasant patriarchal lifestyle began to take root. It was also in the 1930s that abortion was banned (until Stalin's death in 1953), on the grounds that population growth had declined. Soon thereafter, divorce became more difficult, and a citizen's personal life fell under the intense scrutiny of state and Party organs.

Nevertheless, the Stalin Constitution of 1937 declared that the total equality of men and women had been achieved. All the achievements of the pre-Revolutionary feminists disappeared from the history books, feminism was pronounced a bourgeois deviation, and the Party's policy became the only correct line. The Politburo decreed that women's departments be opened in every region, replacing all other women's initiatives (no non-governmental, public organizations were possible then, of course). In later Soviet years, these departments were reconstituted as divisions of the Union of Soviet Women, designed (like the Young Pioneers and the Komsomol) as leashes to the government and schools for training female members of the nomenklatura. Actually, many of those who worked in the local women's departments (all on the state payroll, of course) did try to help women who applied for aid. But in general the public regarded

women's departments as another set of feeding troughs for the nomenklatura stratum that grew to
inordinate size during the Brezhnev years.

Opinions diverge about the meaning of Soviet policy on women's issues. Among the
liberal intelligentsia of the Brezhnev period there was the feeling that the very idea and practice
of women's emancipation was a great mistake, a violation of a woman's "natural predestination."
Unfortunately, many reformers of the post-Soviet period also held this view.

The first article written in the perestroika spirit and characteristically entitled "How Are We Solving the Women's Issue?", appeared in the journal *Kommunist* (1989). The authors, Natal'ia Rimashevskaya, Natal'ia Zakharova, and Anastasia Posadskaia, contended that all the undertakings aimed at the country's women had a paternalistic nature, by definition, consigning women to passive, dependent roles. In their opinion, a Russian woman was doubly humiliated by a "post-socialist patriarchal renaissance," that in turn was derived from an unjust division of gender roles from the start. Another scholar, Elena Zdravomyslova, is certain that the Soviet regime had drawn up something like a secret pact with the country's women: the woman in a family conflict was as a rule supported by society, women received family benefits and quotas in representative bodies, while men in the social structure were second-class citizens, dependent at work on the boss and the Party representative, and a home on the all-powerful wife.

But I do not believe that it is just an issue of a secret pact or paternalism. The utopian experiment undertaken in the USSR over a lengthy period of time presupposed a fundamentally new type of relationship among people, between citizens and the state, between the ordinary man and local officials.

For decades millions of men and women believed sincerely--and sometimes fanatically--
in the justice of what was happening to them and the people around them. This hardly could
have been possible without the unique phenomenon known as the Great Soviet Myth. In *How I
Understand Philosophy*, the renowned philosopher Merab Mamashashvili describes the character
of the Soviet person, yearning for "paternal" advice and fearing to take independent decisions or
engage in personal reflections. This special psychological type was hewn out of the great purges
of 1937-38, the cruelties of war, and the constant efforts of the best Soviet artists and writers,
directors and journalists. The Great Soviet Myth gave rise to another dimension that replaced
reality--the "word factory" that produced millions of books, penetrated everywhere, and became
more real than life itself. For example, the film *Cossacks of the Kuban* depicted a land of
abundance, at the very time that postwar Russia was starving.

The Great Soviet Myth would not have been so powerful and could not have supported
the monstrous state machine if it had not had at its heart the Myth of the Soviet Woman. It was
she who acquired unimaginable harmony by building an unknown future, she who was free to
reject a real man or forget him, as Liubov' Orlova's heroine did in the film *The Circus*. The most
celebrated works of Soviet literature gave new mythological interpretations: the "mother of a
hero" (Maxim Gorky's novel); the classical heroine who chooses duty over love (Trenev's
*Liubov' Iarovaia*); and the romantic girl friend of the dying fighter for a better life (Ostrovsky's
*How the Steel Was Tempered*). Such works, and their innumerable feeble imitations, shows how
the traditional plot in Russian classical literature, revolving around relationships between spouses
or lovers, is replaced by the daughter-father conflict--where the father can be Comrade Stalin, the
Soviet secret police, the army, or indeed the entire nation. Instead of a spectral and ephemeral
union with a man, the father promises the daughter noble service on behalf of the great idea of
creating paradise; moreover, he is prepared to adopt all the children and turn them into heroes.

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Is it then surprising that thousands of women enduring difficult lives, who lost their husbands, or never found them, during the years of political terror and war, believed in this myth--sacrificing their strength to the restoration of the ruined economy, learning to operate new equipment, and losing their hearing in factories and mills? The myth served a mobilizing function for the solution of state goals. And in fact, it manipulated the consciousness and the lives of men no less than those of women. Only in a different way.

Some people feel that Soviet rule hurt women in general and gave them nothing good, that everything introduced by the Revolution was artificial and not important. This is not so. If we look at history without an unprejudiced eye, we see that Soviet legislation really was the most advanced and consistent in terms of the declaration of sexual equality. Women truly did receive significant quotas as elected officials--as much as thirty percent of parliamentarians. Women truly did hold management positions, received free education, and used the services of a wide network of children's day care institutions, (which, by the way, like all similar institutions in the social sphere, were formed before the Revolution by Russian activists and feminists). Women in the Central Asian republics truly were freed from many centuries-old prejudices and removed the veil. Women truly had guaranteed vacations and social benefits, particularly in the final Soviet period.

True, no woman ever headed the state in the Soviet Union, and only a few women served at the highest levels of government. It is also true that the thirty percent of parliamentarians who were women were just as obedient as the other seventy percent in the totalitarian system. It is also true that very few medieval traditions were done away with and that our most educated women in the world were paid very low salaries. The leaders of the perestroika era, had they been wise, could have made a serious analysis of social policy with respect to men and women, supporting a creative reformulation of everything of value that had been done. But that did not happen. The leaders of the country, like the rest of its citizens, were hostages of the myth--turned inside out.

In one form or another, the Soviet myth lasted right up until perestroika. But then it melted and cracked. Alternative images of men and women appeared in literature, movies, and the public consciousness. Young writers (Vasilii Aksenov, Anatolii Gladilin, Vladimir Voinovich, and others) offered a change from images of activists, shock workers, and "girls with a temper" by introducing feminine and sexy girls who were interested not in politics but in clothes. The "village school" writers (Valentin Rasputin, Vasilii Belov, Viktor Astaf'ev) offered the ideal of a patriarchal peasant women living a natural life, like a tree or a cow, and having no interest in social life for its own sake. Both images sparked lively debate in the 1960s and 1970s, representing as they did opposite poles of the discourse on alternatives to the official female images created by Soviet iconography. Right up to the Gorbachev period the Party newspaper *Pravda* continued to describe the woman's role as a "work unit" or a "worker and mother," after the fashion of Nadezhda Krupskaia and Aleksandra Kollontai. Even liberal publications (*Literaturnaia gazeta, lunost*) began writing that "a woman must be a woman," not striving for a career and success at work, but waiting for a good husband. The village-oriented conservative publications (*Moskva, Nash sovremennik*) propagandized the "bearer of the national moral source"--the peasant woman. None of these images, and I remember them well, had anything to do with the real life of Soviet women in the final Soviet years.

## Stereotypes and Reality

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In the mid-1960s Aleksandr Tvardovsky's *Novyi mir*, the most progressive journal of the era, published a small novella by Natal'ia Baranskaia, "A Week Like Any Other." Although successful abroad, and studied today as part of the curriculum on Russian literature, the novella went almost unnoticed by Russians. It deals with the ordinary life of a working woman who is torn between work, two children, and a sweet but useless husband, never finding enough time for all her chores. Although Western critics found it a good description of the daily hell of Soviet life, Soviet critics paid the work no attention: there was nothing special there, this was the way everyone lived. By the way, the author herself did not intend to give a harsh appraisal of the husband or the situation--she was merely describing it.

And yet, the novella did its job. Magazines began printing more pieces describing people's personal lives, events no less significant than fulfilling a five-year plan. Official critics berated these authors, the men for creating such unheroic characters and the women for sticking to "minor themes" such as birth and abortion, sick children and drunken husbands. And yet, the curtain shielding the myth, the conspiracy of silence about women, began to crumble.

The first feminist breakthroughs in the Soviet period were the legendary almanac *Zhenshchina i Rossiia* [Woman and Russia], published twenty years ago by Tat'iana Mamonova, Natal'ia Malakhova, Tat'iana Goricheva, and Iul'ia Voznesenskaia, first in *samizdat*, and then in the *samizdat* journal *Mariia*. They first published women's protests against the invasion of Afghanistan, materials on abuses in maternity hospitals and the humiliation of female prisoners, and many other original texts that could not have been printed elsewhere. Interestingly, the feminist authors were not welcomed warmly by the dissident community: the dissidents believed, along with the rest of society, that the women's issue as such did not exist in the country; as soon as the system and the regime were changed, everything would be all right.

Persecuted by the KGB, all four women were forced to leave the USSR. The next *samizdat* magazine, *Zhenskoe chtenie* [Women's Reading], edited by Olga Lipovskaia, appeared almost ten years later, once again in Leningrad. The magazine was the first to translate texts by Western authors and to attempt to understand what was happening to men and women in our country, without watching the censors and the ideologues.

At approximately the same time, the late 1980s and early 1990s, groups began forming in Moscow, primarily at academic institutes and laboratories. The women members (the early Moscow associations included LOTOS and Sappho) were interested in Western feminist texts and gender research, so they did translations and discussed philosophical and sociological questions. This activity coincided with the lifting--rather timidly at first--of the Iron Curtain and the appearance of women's issues not only in the dissident milieu (which had nurtured Olga Lipovskaia and her Leningrad predecessors), but among the quite respectable Soviet elite as well. These people knew foreign languages (this at first was a requirement, since there were no feminist texts in Russian) and held good jobs in academic institutes, assets which later allowed them to combine their growing interest in the topic with their professional work.

On the whole, however, the women's issue never came up in the discussions of perestroika. Women who had stood in the front ranks of demonstrations for democracy and demanded that the memory of the victims of Stalin's terror should be honored, or who had collected signatures on petitions to free Andrei Sakharov from internal exile and open Russia's borders--these women found themselves shoved aside by loud-voiced men. Dissident thought, which had captured people's minds for a while, did not accept talk of women. And women themselves followed the line taken by the democratic newspapers of the period: it was better for men to be in charge.

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The discourse about political power gradually became dominated by men. Mikhail Gorbachev's role here is interesting. In many of his speeches he articulated a thought popular among the intelligentsia: "Women must be freed and given the opportunity to spend more time at home." I am certain that he meant the right to choose whether to stay at home or have a career. But the democratic press, unused to pluralism, began a consistent campaign to promote the image of a pretty housewife, helpmeet of man, unburdened by profession or work. Needless to say, there were almost no women like that in the USSR--because of forced employment and the low salaries of men. So a gender stereotype gradually replaced the ideological one--and once again real women were left outside the scope of discussion.

And in fact, there really wasn't any discussion. In all the years of perestroika, the best magazine of the era, *Ogonek*, carried only one article about women (not prostitutes, addicts, or murderer--there were plenty of those), just ordinary contemporaries. It was published on the eve of International Women's Day, March 8, 1988, and the author's notion (a woman, by the way) was that the only problem Soviet women had was their husbands' low salaries.

Alas, many women shared that conviction, not so much because they believed in the "natural predestination of women," but because they felt that anything that had been banned or discouraged in the dreary Soviet period now had to be good.

Political newspapers and magazines did not discuss the problems of women. Gradually an ironic tone became acceptable when speaking of women's independence. Television started showing films about wealthy, indolent women and their husbands. Many men, who had suffered from inferiority complexes during Soviet times because of their low earning power and their inability to live up to their potential, found the easiest form of compensation to be humiliating women simply because they were not men. Some politicians allowed themselves to say things like, "It's not for women and children that we write laws." A famous director told the entire country, "By nature the Asiatic man considers the woman a lower creature"--and no one was outraged (at least in public) by manifestations of this new sexism.

The market--or rather, its first steps--brought to Russia the concept of a woman's looks as a consumer product (pictures of half-dressed women appeared not only in cheap publications but in what were once considered respectable ones), along with new images of heroes and heroines. A hero in Russia had to be a "superman, with money, girls, guns, and cars" (so wrote Aleksandr Kabakov, a prominent liberal author). The best women were deemed to be models or wives of businessmen. Working women were depicted as boring failures; the first businesswomen, it was said, were women who despaired of having a personal life. Thus the Soviet myth once again had its revenge, offering new stereotypes even farther from reality to replace the poster image of the model Soviet person.

Sadly, political and social realities did little to counterbalance this image. The popular liberal point of view, held by many young reformers (including Gaidar), did not anticipate establishing any social guarantees for the population undergoing the transformation to a market economy: they did not want to "execute a social-democratic agenda." Hence the tragic situation that marks Russia today: impoverished people, a sharp decline in life expectancy, epidemics, orphans, starving old age, and homelessness on the scale not seen since the Civil War.

This process began with a sharp decline in the status of women. The first official census of the unemployed found that over seventy-four percent were women, most of them well-qualified, and that it was much harder for them than for men to find new jobs or start a business. The stereotype of the wild Russian market economy was at work, with women being considered (unspoken) second-class citizens. Experts estimate that women's salaries in the Soviet period

9

were about seventy percent of men's; in Russia today, women make only forty-five percent as much as men do. Only twelve percent of women are able to take regular care of their health--the system of affordable health care has been destroyed. Kindergartens and day care centers are too expensive and too few. Many women with children are unable to pay for expensive services and stay home instead. Children's benefits (enough to buy a kilogram of cheese a month) haven't been paid in years, and forty-two percent of the country's children live below the poverty line. I could go on with the terrible statistics.

Cruelty in families is growing--more than 14,000 women die annually from domestic abuse, and there is still no appropriate law. After a slight decline, abortions are on the rise again, and so is sexual harassment, especially in the private economic sector.

I could continue the terrible facts and figures for quite a while, adding only that there are still not enough women in public life and that women's abilities are not being used by society.

All this gave impetus to the women's movement that awoke in the north and south, east and west, in university towns and mining villages. It was primarily a reaction to the changes going on in the country--a desire to counteract the negative consequences of reforms that had appeared so quickly.

*East and West. The Journal Vy i My as a Form of Dialogue Among Women*

Processes analogous to those that took place in Russia after the disintegration of the USSR also took place in virtually every former Soviet republic. Women were pushed out of power structures and the labor market, and the ideas were bandied about of "woman's natural place" and "real Latvian women," "real Armenian women," "real Uzbek women," and so forth. The social support network was destroyed; women joined the ranks of the poorest strata of society; and under the guise of resurrecting national culture in many newly independent states, religious fundamentalism grew stronger. In some of the newly independent states, young girls were forced to wear the veil, access to education for them was made harder, and discussion began on introducing polygamy.

All these events, which began in 1991 and exist today, lead to the conclusion that in all the post-Soviet states, the old Soviet tradition continues: overcoming the difficulties of a transition period--this time the transition to a market economy and national independence--at the expense of women. That's how it happened in the years of the early five-year plans, and it was the same in the years of re-establishing the Soviet economy after World War II. And it is the same now in the transition to democracy--and this circumstance makes one seriously doubt the consistency of democratic development.

But it is also a fact that in all of the newly independent states the first independent women's organizations appeared in the early 1990s; in the ensuing years they formed networks, movements and centers; and today they try to help not only the needy but to influence politics. These movements and organizations do not form a single unity yet, and they are in many ways self-sufficient and unlike one another. At the same time, they thirst for an exchange of information and contact, harboring interest in the work of women in neighboring states and in the international women's movement as well.

This process began in the early 1990s and went through several stages. Svetlana Aivazova, Natail'ia Abubikirova, Marina Regentova, and Elena Kochkina, researchers of the Russian and post-Soviet women's movement, divide it into three periods: 1990-1993, 1993-1995, and 1995 to the present. This division seems appropriate, reflecting the development of the

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women's movement and the sociopolitical status in the Russian Federation. Every period has its characteristic traits, contradictions and hidden wellsprings, as well as special forms of dialogue between women's associations and the regime, among women's groups, and between Russian feminists and Western activists.

The first period (1990-1993) was marked by the disintegration of the USSR--the beginning of market reforms, a shortage of goods and services, the first wave of unemployment, and other acute social consequences of the economic restructuring of society. The interrelationship between women and the regime was extremely insignificant (as already mentioned, in 1991 only five percent of women were in governmental organizations). The idea of "woman's place" reigned, and Western and Russian pornography began expanding into the magazine and film market. There were three groups of women's organizations in the country. The first consisted of activists of regional sections of Union of Women of Russia (the former Committee of Soviet Women), trying to find a place in the changing structures of society and bureaucracy. Preserving serious Soviet echoes in their rhetoric, they did not reveal any familiarity with Western feminist texts, although they did retain the traditional Soviet ties with representatives of the international women's movement (even though only Committee members had the opportunity to participate in international conferences until the 1990s).

The second group consisted of adherents of the Women's League and organizations close to it--women who had started their own business or worked in business or administration, who were rather well off and sought a new niche in life. They wanted to make contacts with Western colleagues, primarily in business; feminism interested them, but it was not a way of life.

The third--and most interesting--group consisted of organizations linked with the First and Second Independent Women's Forums, which took place in 1991 and 1992 in the city of Dubna, near Moscow. Over two hundred women attended the first, and around one thousand women attended the second forum, coming from many regions of Russia, countries of the former Soviet Union, Europe, and America. A prominent role in the leadership of the Organizing Committee was played by members of the new Moscow Center for Gender Studies (a laboratory of the Institute of Socio-Economic Problems of the Population, under the Russian Academy of Sciences), leaders of the education organization Falta, and women cinematographers. The attendees were varied in age, education, and interests. Severe workers from defense industry enterprises and relaxed young artists, Ph.D. candidates and policewomen, former Komsomol activists and dissidents--all were united by the desire to understand what was happening to women in a changing world.

This was the first meeting of Russian women with Western feminists. The word "feminism" was out of favor in Russia, not everyone understood what it meant, and the dialogue did not move easily. But it did take place! The result was the start of a women's network, the appearance of new groups, new friendships abroad, new ideas and plans. The forum's motto, "Democracy Without Women Is No Democracy," became integral to the Russian women's subsequent work and struggle.

One of the results of the meeting was the magazine *Vy i My*, dedicated to the dialogue between Russian and American women, the idea of Colette Shulman and Katrina vanden Heuvel, American journalists who had come to Russia. The magazine was published in Russian in the United States and brought to Russia, where it was distributed to women's organizations. At the time, it was the only true feminist magazine accessible to a Russian audience printed in Russian, expanding the horizons of Russian readers, and offering fresh information on the women's movement in America and how various issues of concern to women were solved.

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This magazine's contribution to the development of the Russian-American women's dialogue is truly priceless. It became the place where opinions and issues meshed, a platform where opinions clashed and a real and lively dialogue, which had never before existed, began. The early 1990s completely destroyed the barriers of the Cold War, destroyed the image of the enemy in the eyes of Russians or Americans, and laid the tracks for people's diplomacy. The women's dialogue added an important and essential note to the process.

The 1990-1993 period saw the start of personal contacts among specialists from various countries, the discovery of foreign literature, and the first translated articles on feminism in Russia. Russian researchers started taking part in international conferences, planning joint projects with Western colleagues, and mastering the new methodology. This was particularly important in social sciences--particularly in gender studies, about which little was known in Russia. During this period the first research was conducted on the place of women in the labor market and on gender relations and political power. The first anthology on this topic was published. Unfortunately, these materials were known only to a narrow circle of interested specialists in Russia and had no public resonance.

Journalists were only beginning to show an interest in gender issues. The "women's issue" concerned a narrow group of Moscow's writers, who met for seminars and discussions at the Foreign Policy Association or at *Ogonek's* offices. That group was the start of the future Association of Women Journalists. Women active in cinematography and the arts also started meeting. They invited Western colleagues to speak, they argued a lot, but only within their small circles. They were accumulating experience.

In the early 1990s Western foundations began to show an interest in gender issues in Russia. The Soros Foundation sponsored a meeting of Russian and American women writers in New York, the MacArthur Foundation gave the first grant to support the work of the Moscow Center for Gender Research and then added women's issues to its priorities in Russia and the former USSR.

The next stage (1993-1995) was marked by a deeper inculcation of market reforms, the Westernization of the way of life of many people, and new national elections. It was then that the Women of Russia group, formed by the Union of Women of Russia, Union of Women of the Navy, and Union of Women Entrepreneurs, began campaigning. Politically centrist (not a recognized position in those years), the group formulated no clear economic and political platforms, but it did vigorously press for social security and improvement of women's status. The group passed the necessary five percent barrier and entered the State Duma.

The parliamentary fraction managed to secure passage of a new family code and numerous laws on the family, but it did not finish its work on family planning and domestic violence legislation. At the start of the military intervention in Chechnya, the fraction was too slow in making contact with the Mothers of Soldiers of Russia movement, which spoke out forcefully against the war, and started losing its popularity. It also ignored the initiatives of many independent women's organizations. Internal conflicts within the fraction led to its defeat in the following elections and loss of a presence in the Duma.

The work of the Women of Russia fraction should not be underestimated, however. It was the first time that women had appeared in politics as a distinct group with its own interests (they represented a total of 13 percent of the deputies, including other political blocs) and their very standing as deputies led to discussions of the state of women in society. In any case, women journalists raised the issue of domestic violence quite starkly and managed to change

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public opinion, persuading people that this was no private matter but shameful behavior that
required state intervention.

At the same time, the women's movement revealed more clearly the differentiation
among its members. The elitist Moscow and St. Petersburg groups today comprise highly
educated women, most of them researchers with a knowledge of foreign languages who receive
grants and travel around the world. Women's groups in the outlying regions of Russia, which
started as self-help groups, include the formerly unemployed, single mothers or mothers of many
children, mothers of soldiers, and physically disabled women. These associations exist in great
numbers all over the country. In addition, there are the large regional organizations with
thousands of members, for instance, the Union of Women of the Don, the Congress of Women of
the Kola Peninsula, and the Confederation of the Businesswomen of the Urals. These
organizations had no support from abroad and lacked both literature and knowledge pertaining to
gender studies, women's rights, and human rights.

The contact between these two different kinds of women's associations was not always
smooth; mutual misunderstandings arose. The elitist groups began competing among
themselves. An attempt to create a single umbrella group, an independent organization (a kind
of alternative fraction in the State Duma) proved unsuccessful. There was not a single bridging
dialogue among women, but rather a series of embattled islands that rarely connected. This was
partly because most of those involved in the new independent women's movement lacked public
and organizational experience. Moreover, the culture of civilized discourse in society was not
developed; people had not yet learned, during the few years of democracy, how to argue without
insulting one another.

The influential Association of Women Journalists, for its part, felt that the meeting place
of the debaters, the platform where opponents could meet and perhaps find points of constructive
cooperation, should be the press. Numerous discussions, round tables, and open conversations
on the varied topics dealing with the life of women, regional, international, and national
discussions, characterized that period. Intense arguments, truth-finding, discovery of paths of
cooperation--the journalists took part in these sessions as well, whether in Moscow, Sergiev
Posad, Naberezhnye Chelny, Irkutsk, Murmansk, or other cities.

The magazine *Vy i My* participated in this dialogue with redoubled resolve, explaining
many crucial issues: reproductive health, child rearing, family planning, the struggles of notable
feminists, the lives of ordinary American and Russian women. The magazine did not come out
often, but every issue that arrived in packages and boxes at women's organizations all over
Russia was read until it literally fell apart, going from hand to hand. A new magazine appeared,
published by a Russian-German women's group (*Zhenshchina* +), a website appeared called
Women's Network East-West, and the women's informational network expanded in the newly
independent states.

An enormous role in building this coalition was played by Western colleagues and
friends who had experience and knew how to use modern technology. Many of them, like Sara
Harder (Peace Foundation) and Martina Vandenberg (Consortium of Women's Non-
governmental Organizations of the CIS-USA), traveled around the country giving training
sessions, teaching women leadership techniques, creating crisis centers and hot lines, sharing
their experience and know-how. Many volunteers worked at the hot lines, helping Russian
researchers and the unemployed. Western colleagues helped Russian women better understand
themselves, supported the creation of libraries and translations. *Our Bodies Ourselves* and *The
Feminine Mystique* were published, and many related articles translated.

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The period from 1995 to the present day has brought a change. There is no women's
fraction in the parliament; the women deputies are not united, but support their parties first and
foremost; they compete with one another; and their number (eleven percent) does not suffice to
influence decisions on improving the lot of women. The leaders of the former women's bloc
have gone their separate ways, creating two competing organizations, one of which joined the
new election bloc called Fatherland in 1999, while the other created an independent association
only in September 1999, too late for a serious chance at success in the December 1999
parliamentary elections. The lists of candidates from the other blocs and parties show a
significant decline in the number of women as compared to 1995. Party programs say almost
nothing about women, even though their situation remains dire.

The women's movement itself has undergone changes. Today there isn't a single
organization in Russia representing the intellectual, creative, and political potential of women
that is capable of influencing the government. Nor is there a charismatic leader who could get
others to follow her--even though there are striking personalities in every region who have come
up through the public women's movement. The movement resembles a series of coalitions that
do have some influence on specific goals--alas, not political ones. Women's voices are heard
more vociferously on TV and in the press, however, and women in general are being heard,
which is good.

Nevertheless, an analysis performed by the Association of Women Journalists showed that in 1998 only 1.5 percent of all newspaper space was devoted to women and their problems (by comparison, in 1995 it was just one percent). However, new and realistic images of women have appeared in the press, on radio and TV--images of women who work, create, and can change life in Russia. You can hear them on Radio Nadezhda, you can read about them in the column called "Women" in *Nezavisimaia gazeta*, which has appeared regularly for the last three years.

Today Russian feminists no longer regard the West as the only true model, or Western women as missionaries. On the contrary, the Russian women's movement is looking for its own paths, its own solutions, while working creatively with the international experience it has gained. The All-Russian Conference held in 1998, dedicated to the ninetieth anniversary of the women's movement in Russia, represented an important step along this path.

The nature of the relationship with the West has changed. Today many regional
organizations receive support from Western foundations--the Open Society Institute, Eurasia,
MacArthur, Ford, Böll, and others--and many regional leaders have joined the coordinating
boards of international women's organizations. After the UN conference on Women in Beijing
in 1995 (attended by over 200 Russian women), thousands of Russian women have articulated
the problems of Russia at international forums and brought back possible solutions to activists
back home. Women's rights groups, crisis centers, and other forms of protecting women's
interests have increased in number tremendously. There are gender studies centers in St.
Petersburg, Naberezhnye Chelny, Arkhangelsk, Ivanovo, Kareliia, and other places; gender
courses are becoming part of university curricula, and there have been three summer schools on
gender studies.

The independent women's press is expanding. The magazine *Vy i My* has been transformed from a Russian-American dialogue into a dialogue among women from all countries. It is now published in Russia with a circulation of 5,000 and is called *WE/MBI*. Besides articles on topical issues (globalization, health, feminism, age, the stages of a woman's life), it carries reports on Russia's regions and on women's movements in other countries. Other

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publications include *Devochki prosiat vnimaniia* [Attention to Girls] (Naberezhnye Chelny), *Posidelki* (St. Petersburg), *Chego khochet zhenshchina* [What a Woman Wants] (Murmansk), *Zhenshchina* + [Woman Plus] and *Aksin'ia* (Rostov-on-Don), *Vera, Nadezhda, Liubov'* [Faith, Hope, Love] (Novgorod), and *Pskovitianka* [Pskov Woman] (Pskov). There are women's electronic networks. The number of feminist periodicals in the newly independent states that are available to the Russian reader is expanding.

In all these ways, Russian women continue to enrich their experience and seek new ways to realize their power and their capabilities. And these women have not lost hope that their potential will be needed in a democratic Russia.

Translated by Antonina W. Bouis.

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# A Pioneer in Russia's First Open Grain Market

## Arkadii Zlochevskii*

### Interview

Monday, May 31, 1999

Moscow

I consider myself a very lucky man. Most of the important things that have happened to me in life have resulted from fortunate coincidences. In my early life I was a professional musician and composer, but when the reforms began I quickly realized that I could not feed my family that way. When in 1991 a friend told me about a job opening at OGO Company, I applied just to make some money. At that time, OGO bought and sold a wide variety of goods. I was hired as a salesman of strollers and cribs, but to this day I have not sold a single stroller. For whatever reason, selling merchandise did not click with me. Right away I was afraid that if I did not produce any revenue during my probation period, I would lose my job.

Fortunately, I came across a unique opportunity. OGO was one of the founding companies of the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange (RTSB), and as such we regularly received market price information for the goods that were trading at the exchange. At that time, in early 1991, enterprises across Russia were allowed for the first time to sell their product at market prices--but nobody really knew what a fair market price for their product was. They were used to state planning agencies determining prices by decree. When I realized that, I started selling printouts of RTSB price quotes to various producers, and I discovered a huge demand for this service. I started bringing buyers and sellers together and helped them strike market deals. At one point our operations accounted for half of all the activity on the RTSB exchange. Ironically, another stroke of luck for me was the August 1991 coup. A few days earlier we had taken out advertising space in the *Pravda* issue for 19 August. When the coup took place, all newspapers in the country were shut down except for *Pravda*. When it came out, we were the only firm in the entire country advertising our services. That day we could not handle the volume of incoming phone calls and deal offers. Between May and September 1991 I made more money for the firm than the rest of the firm put together. In fact, eventually only my department survived. The rest of the firm's operations died out. Needless to say, I did not lose my job.

The shift in our work from selling market price information to grain production also happened in September 1991. That month two major grain deals fell through, for no apparent reason--the sellers simply failed to deliver on their contracts. When we analyzed this phenomenon we discovered that the country's grain market had collapsed, along with the demise of the state planning bodies that until then had been charged with bringing producers and consumers together. Chaos resulted. On the one hand, collective farms and independent farmers were not familiar with market conditions. On the other hand, traders had no idea about agriculture. OGO saw a market niche. We began running training seminars for traders, educating them in the basics of grain production. We also bought information on collective farms and compiled their profiles, which we then sold to traders.

* Arkadii Leonidovich Zlochevskii is the president of OGO Corporation and the chairman of the Grain Union of Russia.

Officially, OGO began grain operations in January 1992, and completely gave up our activities on the RTSB, since we did not see much future there. Production and processing of grain, and to a lesser degree oil, became our main focus. Together with other managers I went to study in Zurich and Chicago, where we learned how Western commodity exchanges operate. Upon our return to Moscow, we ourselves even tried to speculate on the Chicago exchange, but lost money, although we learned most valuable lessons. With the start of privatization in Russia in 1993, we bought shares of many agricultural enterprises. Although we did not participate in the first round of privatization, we bought the shares from financial companies, which had purchased the enterprises using voucher schemes. At the same time, once we had diversified our holdings with various enterprises, we began investing capital in production facilities. In many cases we outsourced production to other firms: for example, we pay them to process our grain into flour, and we retain the final product.

In assuming ownership of these enterprises, we immediately confronted the issue of human resources. Whenever we had to replace plant managers, we found that we really had to replace the entire staff in order to effect real change and boost productivity. Also, we soon realized the importance of creating a brand for ourselves, and we tried to invest in advertising. However, our experience showed that advertising by itself did not bring us more business, since our real market was out in the countryside, where sometimes people were not exposed to our ads. Advertising would generate a good response, but not from the people we wanted to reach.

We made a name for ourselves in 1993, when Americans were distributing grain as humanitarian aid in Russia. Grain auctions were held in Saratov, and we were invited to participate. When we arrived on the scene we found that the auction organizers had imposed conditions on the process which put buyers like ourselves at a disadvantage. At a meeting of buyers the night before, I stood up and sharply criticized these conditions. Virtually everybody else rallied behind me. The organizers backed down and agreed to our conditions, which included payment on delivery with assurance of high quality of grain. I was the one who stuck out of the crowd, and Americans and others observers present at the auction noticed me and OGO for the first time.

Ironically, on the day of the auction I realized that my earlier actions, although good for the buyers as a group, were hurting my company's interests. As a result of the conditions we won there was sharp competition among buyers, driving the prices of grain above OGO's top limit. It seemed that I had made a huge mistake and wasted much time and money. I have one guiding principle, however: every defeat is an opportunity. When I learned that the next auction of American grain would take place in Moscow two months hence, I decided to make up for my earlier mistake. In these two months we researched all potential buyers for this auction and struck deals with them, selling them grain at premium prices, thus making sure they would not come to compete at the Moscow auction. When the auction finally took place, representatives of only seven or eight companies, ourselves included, had a brief meeting where we decided who would get how much, and we also agreed not to drive the prices up. As a result of this collusion, we all bought the grain at a nominal price, much below the market level. For comparison, in Saratov the largest amount any company got was 30,000 tons of grain, whereas in Moscow our company got 180,000 tons out of the 500,000 tons sold.

Consequently, OGO made a name for itself in the Russian market and on the world scene. American observers were present all along to see how their foreign programs on agriculture would help Russia develop a fair market economy. However, my actions showed how one can twist and turn the market to one's advantage. On the one hand, the Americans were

upset that the ideas behind their assistance were being subverted, but on the other hand they were amazed how quickly I was making money right before their eyes. I think this earned me a certain amount of respect among them. They were also surprised to learn that somebody besides government agencies could operate with such a large volume of grain. Finally, Americans assumed that my actions in Saratov were a part of an elaborate premeditated plan to make my competitors pay top dollar for their grain, thus exhausting their cash reserves and later enabling me to suck up the remaining grain in Moscow. Actually, all these events were coincidental, but we nevertheless made a name for ourselves as astute business operators.

Now that we had a name for ourselves in the Western business community, we were able to make contacts and begin working with several large Western companies. Having a respected brand name means that Western partners do not even ask for bank guarantees on deals: our name and my signature on a contract is enough for our partners to give us money and assets. Our foreign partners include Continental Grain, Carolina Turkey, Cargill, Dupont, U.S. Wheat Associates, Exxon, Shell and British Petroleum. We also became famous enough on the domestic market, since we handled such impressive amounts of grain at the Moscow auction. Today, OGO is one of the largest grain companies in the country, employing over 3,200 people all across Russia. We store, process and sell grain and grain products. We are also one of the largest producers of mixed fodder in Russia. In the petroleum sector, we supply our partners with various oil products and inputs used in refining oil.

OGO is one of the founding members of the Grain Union of Russia, although at first I was among the skeptics: I thought Russia needed to develop a civilized grain market, and only then could we talk about an association of grain market professionals. However, for whatever reason members of the association elected me the chairman of the organization. One of our main priorities now is to develop lobbying skills, since we have clear interests and it is important to influence the policymaking process. At first we tried to stay away from political authorities, and we have never accepted any financial involvement by the state. With time, though, we realized that it is impossible to exist completely autonomously from the state. Although we still take no public money, we have to find common ground with regional authorities. For instance, the Astrakhan Bread Factory is a local monopolist: although we own it, regional authorities have a keen interest in its work. At the same time, our refusal to accept any credits or subsidies from regional authorities, which many companies choose to accept, means that we can behave much more independently. Conflicts with regional authorities usually emerge when they owe us money and refuse to deliver on the contract.

It is true that political decisions are often taken without keeping in mind the interests of affected parties. And we can no longer simply rely on personal connections or our specialized knowledge of the grain industry. For instance, a government decision to raise pensions across the board seems at first glance far removed from the grain industry, but in fact it affects the demand for grain products. Thus, in this instance we must have professional knowledge of pension issues to be able to influence policymaking. At the same time, we in the Grain Union try to stay away from party politics. We do not ally, for example, with the Agrarian Party, which represents the interests of collective farms. We are ready to address economic problems using political methods, but not the other way around. We would never finance any electoral campaigns and would make no political alliances. But we do work to educate legislators by helping them draft laws and programs on development of a sophisticated grain market. Several Western organizations, like the U.S. Grains Council, help us. We also promote professional

education in the area of grain production, and we keep our members informed about latest developments on the grain market in Russia and the world.

I have mentioned one of my guiding principles: try to treat failures as opportunities. It is part of my general philosophy of life, and it has become OGO's philosophy of business. This philosophy rests on several tenets: efficiency and the drive to perfect it in our work; assumption of responsibility--"always blame yourself." If in a particular situation we cannot work or operate, we do not blame "circumstances beyond our control," but instead we always look for ways to adapt to the situation and make it work. Thus, it makes no difference how unfavorable conditions may be, whether taxes, regulations or exchange rates--we simply need to find a way to cope and make it work. We never ask the question "What?" We prefer to ask "How?".

A good example how this principle works in practice is our involvement in the barter system of exchange. Among economists and politicians barter has earned a bad name for itself, but for us it is just another method of doing business. We do not sit around and blame barter as an obstacle to doing business-- instead we use it to make a profit. We have developed very long and intricate chains of barter exchanges; our experience shows that the longer the chain and the more links it has, the better return we get on our investment, because with every transaction we accumulate profit. I cannot think like a politician, only like a businessman, so everything is a potential tool for making money. If I should encounter an instrument that I cannot use to make money, our guiding philosophy would tell me that I simply do not know how to make it profitable, although surely there is a way, and I need to discover it.

The third principle of our philosophy is a constant drive to learn and educate ourselves. We encourage initiative and we penalize the lack thereof. We also believe in constant turnover of personnel; as a result we rotate staff frequently, since some cannot handle the demanding nature of our business. Our system is designed to encourage talent and competitiveness. For example, in contrast to many companies, our employees compete not for salaries or positions, but for each other's clients. We encourage internal competition among sales staff, so that everyone is always alert to opportunities and dangers. We even have subsidiary companies that exist and work independently and even compete with us on the market. Our company was not built from any blueprint design, but has evolved in response to the constant problems and challenges that confronted us. Some of our principles worked for a while, but occasionally they had to be dropped later in response to new challenges.

The August 1998 financial crisis hurt us considerably, mostly because we depend heavily on Western credits, since they are cheaper than those obtainable in Russia. However, all our investments were tied up in domestic projects, and when the crisis hit, many of our partners simply refused to pay us, and many banks ran off with our money. Also, the rise of the dollar's value relative to the ruble increased our debt to foreign creditors. To be able to pay our creditors we were forced to use some of our cash reserves, although several credit deals were successfully restructured. At least we were able to stay afloat and retain most of our business, although our ability to invest in more production capacity has declined. Although many Western grain companies fled the scene after the crisis, it hardly helped our business, since we never saw much competition from them anyway. By now, though, we are firmly entrenched in our particular niche, and it would be very difficult for foreign competitors to get us out of it.

*Interview recorded and translated by Natan M. Shklyar.*

# Fighting for Labor Rights in a Transitional Economy

## Aleksandr Sergeev*

### Interview

Friday, May 21, 1999

Moscow

## *The Making of an Activist*

I am 39 years old and serve as the president of the All-Russian Confederation of Labor, one of Russia's independent unions. We are not allied with any partisan or ideological group. I also head the Independent Miners' Union, with 100,000 members employed at some 180 enterprises. Originally I am from Siberia, from Kemerovo Oblast, also known as the Kuznetsk Coal Basin (Kuzbass). I have been a labor movement activist since 1989, when the Soviet Union first experienced miners strikes and I worked in the first strike committees.

I have had the good fortune to witness and participate in all the developments that marked the end of the Soviet Union and the formation of Russia. I was one of the organizers of the March 1991 strike demanding the resignation of President Mikhail Gorbachev. Ironically enough, our union held another strike in 1988, picketing the White House in Moscow and this time demanding the resignation of another president, Boris Yeltsin, whom we held accountable for the government's chronic delays in salary and pension payments. For four years I served on the Presidential Council as one of Yeltsin's advisors. Needless to say, it was a difficult choice for me to make when in May 1998 I had to lead striking miners against the president.

At that time, radical leftist forces tried to use this action to advance their political interests. We insisted, however, that we supported the policy of economic reforms, but demanded social justice in executing them. Then as now we understand that we too must take responsibility for the nation's future, although our political elites don't see it this way and often try to use us. In 1996 our union had supported Yeltsin's bid for the presidency, although we realized then that his course of reform was not ideal.

## *An Independent Labor Movement Arises*

During the perestroika era, as more and more dissidents spoke out against the existing regime, government bureaucracy and human rights violations, independent labor unions emerged in the Soviet Union. Dissidents, however, were only individuals. Many of their principles nonetheless influenced the formation of the independent labor movement in 1989, with miners across the country taking the lead. In some regions for about a year all the government and Party authorities had to secure the approval of the local labor unions if they wanted to make any important economic decisions. Naturally, the KGB and the party tried to infiltrate and control us.

Our discussions then turned to the future of our organization. First we tried to create a political organization which we called the Laborers' Union, but it gained limited support: most workers care more about their own parochial issues than larger political objectives. Region by

* Aleksandr Andreevich Sergeev is former president of the Independent Miners' Union. Since the end of his term in the fall of 1999, he has been a member of Union's governing council.

region the miners came to realize that they needed to create a miners' union as an alternative to
the official trade unions. Earlier, we had tried to reform the old Soviet-era unions from within,
but they proved to be too bureaucratized and were tied to the Party and enterprise managers.

In July and October 1990 we held two large congresses, bringing together representatives of every mine across the country. Immediately we came under Party and KGB pressure. However, we were strong enough to resist. At these congresses we decided to form an independent miners' union. In the old mineworkers union, working miners made up only about 30 percent of the members; the balance were from administrative and support staff. Naturally, a structure of this kind did not represent and defend our interests.

In another breakthrough, we demanded the introduction of country-wide tariff agreements for each industry. Concluded through negotiations rather than imposed by fiat, as before, agreements were drafted on the basis of similar legislation adopted in Germany, the United States--and even the Soviet Union, during the reformist New Economic Policy of the early 1920s. In October 1990 we formally established the new union and endorsed a draft tariff agreement to be submitted to the Soviet government.

In 1991 we took part in a largely political strike to secure bargaining rights and won. The Soviet government had signed a tariff agreement and although it was not with us, but with the old unions, the precedent had been established. Thereafter, the government had to negotiate with the unions as partners and jointly sign framework agreements covering labor safety and social benefits. In a country where Party decrees regulated all aspects of labor and social life, we had never seen anything like that.

Using our union agreements as a model, independent unions emerged in many other industries, including those representing railway workers, air-traffic controllers, and merchant marine sailors. This period, between 1991 and 1993, was a time of great expectations and high idealism everywhere. However, disappointed by the results of economic reforms and by the dirty political infighting going on at the time, many Russians withdrew from activism.

Earlier, in the 1980s, the KGB had foreseen a surge in political activism and had moved to preempt it by establishing two organizations that still play a role on the political scene. The first was Vladimir Zhrinovskii's ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), designed to channel public frustration and extremist tendencies. The second was a puppet, quasi-alternative union, the so-called Socialist Labor Unions, which proclaims that it is a truly independent labor organization and loudly criticizes the old labor unions, the Federation of Independent Unions of Russia (FNPR). Although advocating legal methods to advance workers' interests, they play the same role in labor affairs as the LDPR does in politics. In point of fact, the Socialist Labor Unions prevent workers from creating a single effective center of the independent labor movement.

## Record of Accomplishment

Two of our major accomplishment were (1) to have established a precedent for negotiations between the government and the workers, and (2) to have introduced and practiced the concept of an industry-wide tariff agreement. We helped create a Tripartite Commission on Social Partnership, which brought together representatives of government, management and workers. We broke the monopoly that the old unions had exercised over the distribution of social benefits when we successfully lobbied the government to allow independent unions to take part in the process.

In the early 1990s we pushed through what were for those times groundbreaking laws on collective bargaining. In 1995 we secured an amendment to the federal Criminal Code that made it a criminal offence for an employer not to pay employees' salaries. These laws were adopted by the old Supreme Soviet, where we had sixteen of our own deputies. Since then, however, the State Duma annulled all these legislative accomplishments.

Beginning in late 1995, the momentum of democratization and liberalization of the labor movement began to flag. The bureaucracy started to recapture lost ground. Between 1995 and 1999, the bureaucracy took its revenge: the government began devising a state monopolistic variant of capitalism. As a result, the labor movement had suffered enormous setbacks, although we have managed to retain some key accomplishments.

## Innovative Approaches to Serve Emboldened New Constituents

In the early activist days, we worked with a number of scholars who specialized in various game methods for helping organizations realize their internal potential, develop mission statements and set specific goals. With their help, we organized seminars to focus on these issues. For example, the main goal of our labor union, as formulated during these exercises, was not to protect workers' interests at the outset, but first to identify these interests, articulate them, lobby for them and if necessary strike to attain them. Only then would we try to protect these interests. The first priority, we realized, is to find out what our constituents want, instead of inventing some artificial goals.

Under the Soviet system, many miners were rejected because of their political convictions. Although I have an advanced engineering degree, I had to work as a simple miner because I could not work in the old system. On my team I had a mathematics teacher and a military helicopter pilot. Very few of my team members had only a high school education; most were very well educated, but they too could not live within the values imposed by the old system. Because they refused to fight the system actively in their professional fields, they chose to opt out and resort to simple manual labor. Just as in Moscow many dissidents had to work as cleaning staff and stokers, so in the provinces the same kinds of people chose to do manual labor that made good money and provided relative freedom, without forcing them to be hypocrites. When Gorbachev opened up the system a little, all these alternative thinkers came out in the open to voice their views. All along, it appeared, many miners had within them a hidden potential for political action; they proved very receptive to the new methods of political activism.

## Bureaucracy Resurgent, Public Trust Diminished

The main obstacle, and one we have been unable to surmount, is the former Soviet bureaucracy, which now prevails everywhere. This problem does not apply to our organization, since we have built it from scratch. I refer to the federal government itself. Those in power have failed to create a responsive government system reflecting the vibrant structures of a civil society. Instead, they chose to use macroeconomic policies to sell off state property as a means of facilitating the transition from a command to a market economy. Although this strategy worked well in Eastern Europe, where both the memory and the experience of private ownership were relatively fresh, and only one generation had lived under Communism, it was unsuited to Russia, where several generations had lived under totalitarian rule. Not to mention the fact that we have a huge territory and a large population. We used to have sixteen million members of the

Communist Party, of whom about ten million held administrative positions. These people did not go anywhere. The reformers decided not to enlist the help of the broad public, although most people supported them. Instead, they decided to work with the middle-level bureaucracy, assuming that it would be receptive to reformist ideas. And the reforms were halted precisely there.

Bureaucrats were indifferent as to which group they should service, the old Soviet regime or the new Yeltsin regime. They began providing support for the Yeltsin regime, using the only methods they had always known--political and economic coercion. The result: a rift between the public and the reformers in government that is unbridgeable. I find it particularly frustrating that the reformers do not want to take responsibility for their actions. Instead, they blame the Communists for not having repented for seventy years of repression. In fact, the reformers often try to instigate anti-Communist hysteria among the population, including our union membership, in order to promote their own political careers.

## Dealing with Owners, Large and Small

Our union works with the federal government, which still owns part of the mining industry; private managers, who many also run other enterprises; and large industrial holding groups, which many own shares of some mines. We have found our work to be most effective with the large corporate owners, mainly because they depend on interrelated links within their financial empires. If they supply nickel to Western markets, for example, we could call a well-prepared strike and sabotage the entire supply chain--an important bargaining chip. The smaller owners, who privately own and run mines, have much more limited financial resources and less exposure, a factor that minimizes their susceptibility to union pressure. Smaller owners, moreover, often have ties to local criminal structures, frequently resulting in assassination attempts on our activists by privately hired thugs. Finally the government, more often than not, appoints a bureaucrat to run a government-owned enterprise, but does not check to see how profitably or efficiently he is running it. Often these officials are corrupt, which sometimes gives us leverage in blackmailing them.

At one point there was an attempt to create so-called "social partnership commissions," which would bring together representatives of management, labor and government around one table to work out labor problems. However, like every other reform effort in Russia, this was done in a haphazard way. Indeed, these are pseudo-commissions, in large part because employers have not identified their own interests and have not organized among themselves. Although we have a law on social partnership commissions and a law on labor unions, we have no federal legal framework allowing employers to organize. Sverdlovsk Oblast alone does have such a law, although it does not stipulate that an employers' union should negotiate with labor on social disputes. On paper a model has been created, but in reality it does not work. At the same time, the independent labor movement must share the blame. We are still quite embryonic in our development--and the old unions do not want to reform at all.

We do not believe that owners of enterprises automatically have the best interests of labor at heart, as the highly ideologized market reformers would have us believe. The owners need to be taught and conditioned to treat workers with dignity. Take Norilsk Nickel as an example. Oneksimbank bought the controlling shares from the plant's "red director" and came in as owners, all these bean-counters from Moscow. Half year later, they were facing workers wage arrears greater than before. They were thinking of restructuring and expansion, but did not share

this information with the workers or the union leadership. Naturally, we wanted to know how
management planned to spend its money, especially when employees had not been paid in a long
time. We tried to warn them, but they would not listen. When we threatened to strike, they told
us to go right ahead. We could not afford to have the entire staff of 80,000 people go on strike,
since we did not have enough money in our strike reserve fund to help people survive. However,
we did put a hold on the port which ships out the final product, thus preventing the company
from selling its output, and forcing it to lose money in the process. At that point management
felt the real threat and the ramifications of a strike. They sat down at the negotiating table and
began talking to us.

Restructuring the Industry, Retraining the Miners

A special division in our union helps members find new jobs or learn new skills in case of layoffs. However, only the government has the resources to make a real impact in this area. We, therefore, see our main goal as lobbying the government to approve the budget funds allocated to these ends. In the past, the money from the federal budget allocated for retraining disappeared in corrupt government structures; workers never saw any of it. As you know, the coal industry is under major restructuring right now, with the help of international credits. We were able to create supervisory boards on the ground, involving representatives of labor, local governments, and employers. These boards decide how to use the restructuring money allocated to this particular town or enterprise. In Rostov, under a pilot project, we had all miners who were laid off from the closing coal mines receive monetary compensation; this could then be invested in retraining or starting a business.

Another idea under consideration today is to pay miners with housing vouchers, like the ones received by retired military officers and people resettled from the Far North. These government-backed vouchers could be used to purchase housing from realtors, who could then claim the monetary value of these vouchers from the state. We also plan to establish a non-profit foundation that would raise financial capital and we will lobby the government to have this foundation distribute budgetary funds allocated for retraining.

Although most regional officials understand that restructuring the mining industry has a great impact on social conditions, many still depend on federal subsidies rather than take the initiative themselves. Often they seek our help in pressuring Moscow to get more money, but if we agree, they want to distribute the subsidies. We tell them: "We will help you, but let's distribute it together." Officials who accept our terms make cooperative partners; others do not. Occasionally, to be sure, we do have to make temporary alliances with obstreperous governors.

Russia's Economic Integration: Does the West Really Want It?

The most painful question right now has to do with buttressing Russia's competitive advantage in world markets. We have relatively cheap labor. In addition to natural resources, we have advanced technologies. When Russia tried to integrate with the world markets, we faced the problem of competition from Western companies, which saw Russia as a threat and would rather not see Russia integrate. After all, cheap labor combined with high technology makes for serious competition.

Additionally, during the Cold War period, when the two economic systems were
competing, we had a certain level of integration with other countries of the Communist camp. I

often meet with representatives of the labor unions of Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. Now they have the problem that their products are barred from entering the West European markets. In the past they would work for the Soviet Union's market. One of the strategic questions right now is reintegration among the former socialist countries, as well as Russia's integration with the Western economy.

Two years ago I met with several high ranking U.S. officials, including staff members of the National Security Council, the official responsible for aid distribution to Russia, and USAID officials, as well as with Republican and Democratic members of the Senate. They asked me: "Why does Russia trade with Iran?" I told them: "Our military-industrial complex has high technologies developed during the Cold War, and we have rare metals as well. If you do not allow us to compete in your markets, what does our industry have to do to survive?" Russia's enterprise directors, backed by millions of workers employed in the military-industrial complex, constantly pressure the government to find new markets for their products, irrespective of any political motivations. The question of Russia's integration with the world economy is a question of acknowledging Russia's interests and needs.

Consider the coal mining industry. We had a serious conflict with the German miners union. Our union supported the comprehensive restructuring of Russia's coal industry. The German miners union, which belongs (as we do) to the International Union of Coal, Chemical and Energy Workers, supported the position of our rival, the coal mining union affiliated with the Federation of Independent Labor Unions of Russia (FNPR), the heir to the old Soviet labor unions. The rival miners union opposed restructuring. This was understandable. Today the federal government subsidizes Russia's coal industry with 1.5 percent of the national budget. If we could make our coal mines competitive and reduce production costs it would force German mines out of business, because our coal is of superior quality. The lessons? On the one hand, fellow labor unions should show solidarity and support each other. On the other hand, market forces align us on the opposite sides of issues.

I see the future following this direction: Russia has its own proprietary technologies, which should remain under government purview, insuring the nation's competitive advantage. Let us use these technologies to make things that we build well. We are not good at making cars, so let us welcome Ford, BMW, Daimler-Benz to build assembly plants, use our cheap, educated workforce for production and develop our huge consumer market. We also must keep in mind the special Russian mentality: after all, we used to be a great country, respected in the world at large, but today everybody orders us around. It's ridiculous for a great power to have a $20 billion budget.

I have also met many times with officials from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Take the "greenhouse effect," which was discussed at meetings in Kyoto and Buenos-Aires. The conclusion was that countries need to limit their carbon dioxide emissions, so they established country quotas of 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide. However, it is not realistic to expect our coal based electric power industry to stay within these quotas. A main priority for global financial institutions should be to invest in restructuring the energy producing sector, not some macroeconomic reforms.

Premature Conclusions about Civil Society Formation

In general, I think at first there was much euphoria between Russia and the West, both within the governments and among the civil society organizations, including labor unions. Western unions

actively worked with us, partly out of solidarity, partly to get grants from, U.S. Government designed to support civil society development in Russia. However, several years later some people in the West decided that democratic transformation had taken strong root in Russia, and that no further help was required. Everything now would develop on its own. However, they were judging Russia's level of democracy and economic freedom by very superficial factors: privatization, emergence of a class of owners, several successful elections to the parliament and the presidency, freedom of the press. If all the elements of democracy and market are in place, they argued, there is no need to support the development of civil society, since it should be able to develop on its own.

I have spoken about this to U.S. and European government funders. I told them that today we have a dramatic increase in nationalistic outbursts and wide popular support for ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskii. All because civil society in our country lacks structure. There is now great danger that Russia will develop not along the route envisioned by our leaders, but along some much more menacing road.

Western labor unions are still working with us, although the nature of their work has changed. They tend to focus on specific problems, realizing that Western capital is penetrating the Russian market. Although Western European labor unions do not make a great distinction between truly independent unions, like ours, and the unreformed FNPR, American labor unions are much more aware of the challenges facing Russia's labor movement. They actively try to educate us on methods and technologies used in modern labor-employer relations, collective bargaining, for example. Their guiding principle is that we should work on building unity and labor solidarity. In contrast, Western European labor unions think that the reforms are over and that there is a kind of status quo in the Russian labor movement today.

At the same time, as a result of the devastating impact of the reforms in Russia, the West and the very concept of democracy have been largely discredited in the eyes of the Russian public, a feeling perpetuated by the Communist press. Naturally, many Russians tend to view any kind of American attempt at helping with suspicion. However, those who have overcome such suspicions and have worked with American labor leaders see how useful and beneficial the practices they teach us are. For instance, the Moscow center of the AFL-CIO does terrific work in providing legal analysis and counsel. Other Western organizations that help the Russian labor unions include Freedom House, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Germany), and the European Union's TACIS (mostly in the regions). Western investors have little contact with Russian labor unions, because they work mostly through national and regional governments. However, they should work with us directly as well.

*Surveying the Future: Dangers and Opportunities in Abundance*

Looking to the future, we must realize that our number one priority is organizational work. Unions in general face a tough future in Russia: private owners of enterprises are now less susceptible to lobbying and less receptive to change. Moreover, most workers still belong to the old, unreformed unions, and are too docile to join a truly independent union. Our union tends to attract the most activist workers. Another important factor in our future development is forming a coherent political identity; that is now only in an embryonic stage. At this point, it seems that we as a nation are most likely to take the social-democratic route. We anticipate face-offs with the criminal elements, which no doubt will try to take control of our union if and when they assume ownership of individual enterprises.

In the near future, three main centers of the labor movement will emerge in Russia: the Federation of Independent Unions of Russia, the All-Russian Confederation of Labor, and the Socialist Labor Unions (at one time created by the Soviet KGB and now still maintained with tacit government support). In some twenty years, though, only two organizations, in my view, will remain on the scene.

Much will depend on how Russia's overall economy develops. One scenario: Russia will continue along the route of monopolistic capitalism; in this case, owners might be able to simply buy out the unions. Another scenario: Russian capitalism will develop along lines of greater social equality--but for that to happen, we would have to see domestic capital assets flow back into the economy from abroad. Naturally, much rides on the new president and on the team that will run the governmental apparatus.

Two big questions for the post-Yeltsin era remain: Will the bureaucracy overtake and solidify its grip on in politics and the economy? Or will civil society and the private sector resist this force successfully? Unions today must organize politically and take an active role to make sure that workers are not left out of the transition process.

There is a key difference between us and, say, the Socialist Labor Unions. They think that the main goal of a workers' movement is to collectively "sell" labor to employers. We believe that the main goal of labor unions is to help form a civil society. Indeed, a well-organized union in a small town could be a powerful force to make enterprise directors comply with the law, to enforce administrative transparency on local authorities, and to make the courts and the police follow legal guidelines instead of taking bribes. In other words, labor unions can be agents of positive change for the country as a whole, extending their reach far beyond the narrow interests of workers alone.

# Transforming Russian Political Mores: Key to Economic Evolution

## Aleksandr Auzan*

It is common knowledge that radical reforms are undertaken when various societal groups come to a new understanding of the world. Anchoring the effects of these reforms and forming new societal structures, however, become possible only if there are changes in the behavior, standards, laws and mores of the general population. The most striking changes in behavioral norms involving many millions of people in Russia may have occurred in the consumer market in the 1990s. If one recalls the rules governing the old deficit economy, one can readily see that they have nothing to do with the present-day Russian economy. In those days personal connections served as the basis for attaining personal wealth; rumors were the major--and practically the only--source of information, not so much about the quality of goods but about their availability; and finally, consumer problems (which could hardly have been called contractual disputes in the context of Soviet life) were resolved through written complaints to newspapers or Party organs. In the early 1990s, this entire system ceased operating and executing the functions to which virtually everyone in the nation had become accustomed.

Two circumstances made changes in the behavior of the general population pressing first, the collapse of the customary way of life, and second, the emergence of a radically new economic situation. Shock therapy reforms in late 1991 and early 1992 brought about an unusual situation--an abundance of goods and a deficit of money. Brought up under the Soviet system, where the reverse problem prevailed, Russians had no previous experience of how to act under such conditions. And changes in conventional behavior did not come about as they usually do in countries where market economies have developed through a process of evolution. In the developed countries, standards come first, are then secured by laws, and subsequently crystallize into the appropriate administrative mechanisms. In Russia, under conditions of radical economic reform, the reverse was true. In the USSR in 1991 and in Russia in 1992, the Consumer Rights Protection Law was passed, but it was not based on people's habits or skills in using the law as practical instrument. The experience, knowledge and understanding of how to live in the new situation and take advantage of these new mechanisms were gained only later. At the end of the 1990s, one can authoritatively state that the overwhelming majority of Russians have learned how to resolve contractual disputes through legal means and how to make use of information before transacting business. In Russia the first sphere of life in which the new standards gained a foothold and developed most rapidly may have been the consumer market.

The critical results in this sphere did not occur spontaneously but were achieved through the energetic activity of small groups of people whose objective was the establishment of new civil relationships in the consumer market. These people worked both within the state apparatus and outside it.

At first the most formidable challenge seemed to get the new laws passed and translated into a legal code for Russian society, but this turned out to be one of the easiest problems to solve. The Consumer Rights Protection Law encourages direct action. People can read and understand its text without a lawyer and can put it into action directly, because the consumer has the advantage in disputes with entrepreneurs or with federal or municipal agencies delivering paid services. Under this law the judicial process was greatly simplified: in order to start legal proceedings, anyone can file a complaint locally without paying any fees and can sue either a vendor or a manufacturer, whomever he prefers. The next problem that arose was convincing consumers to use this convenient tool.

* Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Auzan - Born in 1954, Auzan studied and taught economics in the Moscow State University. He has written many articles and books addressing the problem of organizing consumers to protect their rights. Since 1992 Auzan has headed the International Confederation of Consumer Organizations (KonfOP). He serves on boards of numerous organizations, including the Russian branch of the Open Society Institute and several research institutes.

To be sure, certain rules protecting consumer interests had existed since the early 1980s-- and even then it was clear that the biggest obstacle to their use was not legal but psychological. The first clients whom we urged to defend their own interests legally were visibly afraid of using the courts. We would literally grab the person by the hand and bring him to the courtroom where his right to have his substandard refrigerator replaced was being defended, and he would ask, "But what if they should sentence me?" Overcoming this psychological barrier was a difficult process, but it was essential if the whole new system of legal defense were to function at all.

And this is how it was accomplished. In the early 1990s, legal precedents were established through the actions of lawyers representing consumer associations. Every few months the courts would hand down a ruling that previously would have been unthinkable. For instance, in January 1992 the court for the first time awarded compensation for "mental distress" suffered by a consumer who had purchased a defective microwave oven. Initially the awards paid out for mental distress were not large--about 50 percent of the price of the merchandise--but they began to increase with every passing month, and by the mid-1990s they had turned into fairly substantial sums. Publicizing the outcomes of lawsuits played a very large part in the rapid shift of public awareness in the area of consumer behavior. We knew that a skeptical attitude toward using the law is characteristic of the Russian mentality. A number of Russian sayings (such as "The law is a sieve, it leaks whichever way you turn it") are evidence that legal nihilism has been the prevailing attitude in our society for centuries, because the law was nearly always used against the individual.

Therefore, encouraging the public to accept the opportunities afforded by the new law was absolutely futile. It only made sense to publicize the practical results attained by specific individuals. If a Russian were told that the Law of Consumer Rights Protection guaranteed him certain rights, he would not believe that it was possible to get justice in any government office, least of all in court. However, if he heard over the radio that a Mr. Ivanov was awarded four million rubles compensation for material and psychological damages resulting from the substandard car he had purchased, he would clap his hands, recalling that he had been in exactly the same situation but got nothing: "That Ivanov got his money, but I didn't get any. Next time, I'll get mine."

The years from 1992 to 1995 were a time of a triumphal procession of consumers through the courts. It became fashionable to file lawsuits. All the media were writing about consumers' victories, and 99 percent of the disputes in courts really were resolved in consumers' favor. One of the factors contributing to this was the attitude of the judges themselves; their incomes and living standards at the time were just like those of the claimants in their courts, so they sympathized with the consumers. Let me immediately add that, at this point, the end of the nineties, the state of affairs has changed radically. I will talk about this in greater detail below.

New standards are developing in the individual's attitude to the courts, the courts' attitude to consumer affairs, and the attitude of businessmen to court decisions (from total disregard of laws and courts in the early 1990s to an acknowledgment that improper business conduct could have serious consequences for them).

Consumer-business relations are also changing. A new culture of contractual relations between consumers and business must presume that a consumer will familiarize himself with the text of an agreement, enter into negotiations to modify any of its conditions, and conduct business in a way that protects his interests in the future, including resort to the court system. It was not enough to talk about the standards stipulated by the law to convince entrepreneurs and consumers to adopt such a culture: action was required. In my opinion, the campaigns that consumer associations waged during the 1990s played a key role. Three campaigns in particular had a tremendous impact on the way business in Russia was conducted.

The first campaign began in late 1991 and continued until the summer of 1993. In the autumn of 1991, the joint stock company "Luks," one of Russia's first private trading companies, sold 20,000 pairs of jeans which were advertised as Levi's and had Levi's labels on them, but were actually fakes. And so the consumer was cheated, although it should be admitted that he paid a lower price for a fake than he would have for a pair of real Levi's. The consumer associations filed a complaint to a recently created anti-monopoly organization. The case was

heard in the Arbitration Court of Russia and even reached the Supreme Arbitration Court of Russia. The goal was to force the company to admit that it had sold goods of inferior quality, to inform consumers through the mass media that they had been cheated and were entitled to compensation, and, ultimately, to make the company pay the money which it was obliged to pay for violating the Consumer Rights Protection Law. It should be noted that, out of 20,000 consumers who had been misled by the company, only 600 people pursued their interests all the way through the courts, working with the consumer associations. These 600 people received monetary compensation in 1993. But the significance of this first campaign went far beyond the experience of the 20,000 people who had purchased fake Levi's. What in fact occurred was what we called a "receipt revolution."

The basic concept that consumers should obtain a receipt while making a purchase in order to protect their rights and be eligible for compensation should the merchandise prove inferior was articulated thousands of times during the mass media's truth-in-advertising crusade against the "Luks" Company. From 1993 on, a significant number of consumers began demanding receipts when buying expensive merchandise. A certain formalization of transactions began developing.

A major information campaign waged later (1995-96) also influenced the development of another important aspect of contractual culture. In March 1995, the Confederation of Consumer Societies (KonfOP) filed lawsuits in court and launched an informational campaign against three major transnational electronics manufacturers--Sony, Samsung and Matsushita Electric (trademark, Panasonic)--for violating consumers' rights to guaranteed service. Contrary to the Consumer Rights Protection Law, these companies did not guarantee consumers the right to exchange a defective product or to receive a refund. Instead, their warranties required consumers to go to their service centers for any warranty repairs. It was a blatant violation of the law, but the companies did not consider themselves bound to conform their warranties to Russian law--they found it more convenient to apply the warranty language used in other countries. The companies chose to ignore certain specific requirements of the Russian law, although the Russian market was already becoming fairly important to them, and by the mid-1990s electronics sales in Russia were growing exponentially. The publicity campaign lasted several months. In the end, all three companies amended their warranty statements and agreed to fund compensation programs for consumers. By March 1996, as a result of the publicity and the sales losses they had sustained, nearly all the transnational companies operating in Russia had brought their warranties into conformity with legal requirements, offering consumers who purchased substandard merchandise the right to choose between repair, exchange or voiding the transaction and obtaining a refund.

The third campaign, conducted in 1995-96, concerned Russian financial institutions. Depositors had suffered enormous losses when non-banking financial entities began collapsing in 1994-95 and major banks, such as Chara and Natsional'nyi Kredit, followed suit. The general principle we tried to establish after the wreckage of the old financial institutions can be summed up in the saying that was very popular in our organization: "When reading any financial services contract, look at the fine print as well as the numbers."

By the second half of the 1990s, although many old problems remained and new ones affecting the quality of both goods and services as well as corporate ethics had arisen, the vast majority of Russians were already paying attention to how business is transacted.

The third area of change in the norms of consumer behavior and societal relationships which the consumer associations stimulated was, of course, consumer-government relations. In the early 1990s, filing lawsuits against the government would have been unthinkable. No one would have believed that the government would retreat or even less likely, that it would make concessions in defending itself against lawsuits and campaigns. The Confederation of Consumer Societies brought its first suit against the government in 1993, challenging a federal statute that prohibited the use of right-hand drive cars within Russia. These inexpensive foreign cars, purchased mainly in the Far East, were used all over the country; they made it possible to begin to "automobilize" areas east of the Urals in the post-Soviet period. The Russian government was stunned by that lawsuit. When government lawyers concluded that the state was bound to lose

the case in court, the President of the Russian Federation revoked the statute or, more precisely, postponed its coming into effect for ten years. I doubt that the Russian Government will remember in 2003 that this law ever existed. Even should it try to implement this law, the issue will once again have to be resolved in court, a head-on confrontation that was avoided in 1993.

A confrontation with the government did take place in 1996-97, although not with the federal authorities but with the Moscow city authorities--who were no less influential, especially in Moscow, than the national government itself. In 1995 the city of Moscow introduced the practice of towing cars parked illegally, but its system differed radically from the methods used in developed countries. In the first place, towing rights were awarded to private companies that had been established with the assistance of the Moscow city government itself. Secondly, drivers were not notified that their vehicles had been towed; when they did manage to locate their vehicles at one of the impoundment lots, they were faced with exorbitant bills. In fact, the system devised by the municipal government was a way of granting private firms a license to provide unsolicited "services" at unregulated prices. It was a consumer-fleecing venture operated jointly by municipal authorities and a few private firms backed by the Moscow city government. Attempts to convince city officials to revoke this decree and switch to a normal towing procedure proved unsuccessful. Other large cities in Russia, moreover, began imitating Moscow's procedure.

Given this situation, consumer associations decided to risk taking the Moscow city government to court. The lawsuit eventually reached the Supreme Court of Russia. The mayor tried to defend his position at every stage. He even sent a letter to the members of the Russian Supreme Court requesting that they reject the case. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1997 the Supreme Court decided the case in favor of the consumer associations. Soon thereafter the State Duma amended the Administrative Code to prohibit the introduction of similar practices throughout the territory of Russia. The case was a major victory for public consciousness and societal standards over the arbitrary exercise of political power and attempts to create an illegal but profitable system of replenishing off-line municipal budget funds while feeding the appetites of city-hall cronies.

Now, at the end of the 1990s, Russian citizens do not find it unusual to act against federal or municipal governments using legal and informational weapons in order to gain concessions. Nowadays one will hardly hear words such as: "The issue is beyond discussion. This decree has been signed by the Prime Minister, and it will go into effect," words which we heard from the supporters of such illegal government decisions in the mid-1990s. At that point, we stood our ground and firmly insisted that the Prime Minister repeal the decree.

These days many people know that such actions are possible. What they do not yet know is what mechanisms they can use to influence illegal government measures. In order for such mechanisms to function, there must be individuals in society capable of exerting pressure through the judicial system and ready to provide information to the media. It is vital that such individuals enjoy the trust of the population. In connection with this, I'd like to say a few words about consumer associations and how they are organized in Russia.

Consumer associations sprang up in the late 1980s in major Russian cities as a result of the joint efforts of intellectuals (economists, lawyers, journalists) who had recognized the need for such organizations in the early 1980s, joined by activists of the so-called "black waiting lists." (During the times of the deficit economy, to acquire an item in short supply one had to register, spend years on waiting lists, and show up at certain intervals to ensure one's place in the line as it moved forward. Those involved in organizing "black" waiting lists, which for a fee assured one his place in line, took an active part in creating consumer associations. Neither the intellectuals nor the activists had business or government support, and thus they were forced to combine forces. In 1989 they founded their own single, unified organization, which now functions in seven countries of the former Soviet Union, and since 1992 has been known by the name the International Confederation of Consumer Associations (KonfOP). The organization's mission is to provide professional help to consumers. Our premise: the consumer is always a non-professional who, as a rule, must confront official or commercial agencies which have all the requisite professional staff and experience. Accordingly, our objective is to provide the

consumer with the lawyers, economists, financial specialists and journalists who can support him with their professional and intellectual resources. Consumer associations have their own publications, TV and radio programs and (since 1997) websites. Using these assets, they have been able to take the lead in the campaigns and lawsuits that have produced changes in the standards and relationships affecting the consumer market.

KonfOP has helped solve problems of national importance. The financial crisis of August 1998 was not merely financial in nature. For us, the most frightening consequence of the August events was the government's default on its debts. This was a terrible blow to the legal system which had been functioning in the country for several years. The refusal of the government to fulfill its obligations and negotiate with its creditors was dangerous, chiefly because it destroyed legal relationships which had already existed for a number of years. And the decision to default was taken by the government of the Russian Federation, the primary function of which should have been to maintain such relationships under the judicial system.

The financial dimension of the default drama, of course, should not be underestimated: it had a direct effect on consumers. A relatively small number of people who held the government obligations which the government refused to honor suffered, but losses on a far greater scale were born by those covered under mandatory health insurance funds and non-governmental pension funds, which held government securities as the law required them to do. Downpayments made to construction companies and prepaid subscription fees were often invested in these securities.

The August crisis disclosed another area of conflict associated with the collapse of the banking system, and these two areas overlapped to a greater degree than is usually recognized. In our view, the default was an attempt to cover up the bank crisis and help out some oligarchic banks. Naturally, the banks denied this, contending that the crisis was a result of the government's refusal to meet its obligations. As early as August 17, KonfOP announced that it did not recognize the actions of the Russian Government as legal and would contest them in court. In early September, the Confederation filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Russia declaring the government default illegal and demanding that it meet its responsibility to pay its debts.

We realized, of course, that the Government would not be able to pay all its debts, but we felt certain that the issue should be resolved through negotiations with the creditors instead of through the executive branch's unilateral illegal actions. KonfOP contacted like-minded business associations such as the All-Russian Union of Insurers, the Non-Governmental League of Pension Funds, two associations of money market participants and the Board of Directors of Share Investment Funds. In early November these six organizations announced the creation of the Moscow Creditors' Club (MCC). Our immediate and primary goal was to negotiate a structure for the repayment of defaulted government obligations that took into account the interests of both sides. To our surprise, the Government of the Russian Federation recognized MCC as a party to the negotiations on November 9.

The negotiations began on November 11. On November 24, after two weeks of exhausting negotiations, we reached an agreement that, in my view, essentially determined the resolution of the default. First, the default would henceforth be governed by legal procedures. On December 12 the Prime Minister signed an order based on the agreement with the MCC that required the Ministry of Finance to make new proposals to creditors, who would then be entitled either to accept or reject them. Second, the government made financial concessions, including reimbursement in full for losses incurred by the mandatory health insurance funds, by non-governmental organizations' funds, and by subscribers to publications. Although only 30 percent of non-governmental pension funds money was returned, which we considered insufficient, the concessions meant that some real debt restructuring was accomplished.

At the same time, KonfOP had to negotiate with the major banks. To this day we are still engaged in this task. I fear that in some cases, especially where refunds will necessitate bankruptcy procedures, the process may take one or two years. In August and September of 1998, with mediation from the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, KonfOP conducted virtually non-stop negotiations with five of the largest banks in Russia. Because of the general

panic at that time, the first round of negotiations dealt with normalizing relations between the banks and the investors. We fought for the acceptance and registration of investors' claims. We demanded that "hotlines" be set up and money be paid to those in extreme need--for example, in cases of illness, death, and urgent need to pay for surgery or education. KonfOP managed to reach certain agreements with four major banks. Nevertheless, we started a legal war at the end of September with all the banks over the deposits that they refused to return. The banks tried to interfere with the process of filing claims with the courts, as well as with the trials themselves. Ultimately, the banks refused to accept the legal rulings made in favor of investors.

The front line then shifted. More and more governmental bodies became involved in the struggle. In late December 1998, for example, the major banks persuaded the Central Bank to adopt an illegal measure that virtually halted implementation of court rulings made in favor of the investors. With the help of the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor General's Office, we had to fight the Central Bank to rescind this measure and reinstate the implementation of the court rulings. Generally speaking, the description of our war with the banks deserves a separate book. The foregoing description of the conflicts in the consumer rights field makes it possible to single out the obstacles to the development of normal civil institutions in Russian society.

There are three major obstacles: the state of the legal system, the social passivity of business, and the virtual absence of self-governing organizations at the municipal level. Let us begin with the legal system. It played a very positive role in the establishment of legal customs in society during the first half of the 1990s. Thereafter, however, the legal system suffered a severe crisis. If we cite the available statistical data, there were thousands of consumer protection lawsuits in 1992 and millions in 1995: the country's legal system virtually drowned under the pressure of these lawsuits. The legal system inherited from Soviet times dealt with only two kinds of civil cases: divorces and accompanying division of property, as well as inheritance. When contractual disputes between vendors and consumers and, especially, between banks and investors flooded the courts, the legal system ground to a halt. Against this backdrop, judges at all levels have changed their positions with respect to contractual disputes in the consumer market. The State Duma has been very slow in passing legal reform bills; the legal system has not expanded or gained in effectiveness; and the Supreme Court has begun devising legal and illegal constraints on litigation over consumer protection issues, aiming to limit extensive resort to the courts.

In my view, this is a dangerous tendency. Some changes, such as charging fees for lawsuits involving expensive consumer goods and financial services, are probably worthwhile. However, reducing awards for aggravated pain and suffering and penalties for breach of contract is absolutely out of the question. This is exactly what the Supreme Court is doing, however, and judges in the courts of original jurisdiction are eagerly following suit.

The second obstacle is the social passivity of business. Some would view this as an advantage to consumer organizations in that they are dealing with a disjointed enemy. In reality, the opposite has proved true: under existing circumstances we cannot solve our problems through direct dialogue with the business community either in specific areas or at the general level, where multiple spheres intersect. Nor have we been able to solve many problems through the introduction of ethical standards. Frankly, I hope that the events of August 1998 that brought entrepreneurs to the brink of disaster have affected the social activism of business. Actually, in the autumn of 1998 many new business associations began to form and the process of unification has begun. I hope that this trend will develop to the point where we will have partners for a dialogue fostering ethical self-regulation and advocating mediation procedures conducive to out-of-court settlements of contractual disputes.

The third and perhaps the most dangerous obstacle is the absence of local self-government. I should note here that the legal documents adopted by the Russian Federation mislead the people in this country and foreign observers alike in making frequent mention of a system of self-government. Laws on local self-government create the impression that such a system actually exists. In actual fact, what is referred to in Russia as self-government is nothing other than the nearly unlimited power of mayors. Almost entirely lacking are arrangements at the community level that could tackle such problems as negotiating and signing leases and

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service contracts and protecting the rights of tenants and landlords. Such bodies do not exist in Russia. Instead, municipalities are ruled by selected bosses who are restricted in the exercise of authoritarian powers far less than are representatives of federal agencies.

What factors work in favor of a new civil society? First, the high learning ability of the population in general, and consumers in particular, as well as the trust that consumers have developed in public organizations. Second, the cooperation which has developed between the media and public organizations. Third, the non-institutionalized but strong co-operation among professionals representing public organizations, government agencies and certain commercial enterprises.

I would say that a high learning capacity is one of the characteristic traits of Russians. They have always had to solve problems of survival independently, adapt both to changing power configurations and to utterly new and often unpredictable political twists and turns. On occasions I have been surprised by the speed with which people mastered certain elements of financial analysis or mastered the legal and analytical tools of the money market, banking and insurance--fields which were entirely new to them. When I was dealing with groups of defrauded investors and saw how easily they figured out how to influence elected officials, how to manage assets wisely, or how to launch arbitration proceedings, I marveled.

Making businessmen more socially responsible and municipal self-government more effective are in my view the most important issues for the next decade.

Large-scale changes during the new stage of civil society development in Russia require the following plan of action. First, a number of large and influential citizens' organizations which mainly defend civil rights have formed in Russia. Although these organizations are in contact with one another and share many views on current events, they do not combine their forces for the specific purpose of influencing the political authorities and public opinion. These citizens' associations must develop closer ties with one another. Because the most powerful and influential citizens' organizations do not aspire to political power and do not convert the people's trust into deputies' mandates and ministerial seats, they could constitute a center capable of influencing the ethics of government officials as well as that of the political opposition. If we succeed in creating permanent contacts and sustaining a large citizen's center of influence, we would have gone a long way toward creating citizens' institutions in Russian society and governance.

The second feature of such an action plan relates to the social organization of business and envisages the creation of business social centers. Business associations today are either intra-business structures engaged in political lobbying or extra-business associations of the "Round Table of Russian Business" type which hibernate between elections and only wake up during election campaigns to select pro-business candidates. But I see a different and more promising future for such business associations: a connection with the organizations of business self-management which have formed in the last five years. These organizations direct their activities toward representing and advocating business interests, particularly toward creating their own business standards, managing their relationships with clients, and introducing corporate insurance, ethical norms, and operating standards. Such management organizations operate in the money market, the real estate market, and the tourist industry, as well as among electrotechnical companies. If the efforts of the existing self-management organizations were united, the programs of business self-management expanded, and the links among business social influence centers, citizens' organizations, and the media strengthened, this would exert a salutary effect on municipal organization, legal reform, and protection of shareholders' rights.

In 1998 the Social Contract Foundation was established expressly to support such trends. The board of trustees includes such renowned figures as TV anchor Vladimir Pozner, economist Vitaly Naishul, Natal'ia Fonareva, Deputy Minister for Anti-Monopoly Policy, and Anton Danilov-Danilyan, Head of the Economic Department of the President's Administration. I am also a member of the board of trustees of this foundation. Other participants include business leaders who support business management. I hope this is the first step on the road toward realizing this plan.

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I do not wish to speak much about Russia's need for foreign aid because I don't think it is an issue of primary importance in the development of Russian society. Foreign aid, that is, aid to various nonprofit citizen initiatives, played a great role in the early and mid-1990s. But perhaps precisely because these programs were so successful, the question of foreign aid from Western countries should be formulated in an entirely different way.

In the first place, it seems to me important to understand why a civil society exists in Russia. It did not exist in the early 1990s but we do have such a society at the end of the nineties; that is why this aid should be managed entirely differently. Russian citizens' organizations should be authorized to handle this aid--not in the sense of using it for their own programs, but because these new institutions of Russian society are better suited than Western philanthropic foundations to decide for what purposes and through which mechanisms aid should be channeled and used in Russia.

Secondly, it seems to me that those who intend to start or to continue developing new aid projects for Russian society are not always aware that, at the moment, Russia does not need help, say, in creating a new legislature (which has been to a large degree, already created). Instead, we need help in mastering those customs and setting up institutions that are necessary if a modern legislature, which many Western countries have and Russia lacks, is to do its job. Inertia forces one to talk unthinkingly about legislative guarantees and legal conditions over and over again. But they are not the main problem. The main problem is knowing which informal rules are in effect and which voluntary institutions, agreements, and associations can activate and maintain existing legal norms.

As for the crisis in the legal system, Western experience in the use of out-of-court settlements and various forms of mediation, ombudsmanship, and the organized management of business may be as important as the reforms themselves. Ethical behavior towards business competitors, clients and the government, informational and ethical standards that should serve as media guidelines--these are fields that have not yet been seeded in Russia. Self-regulation in advertising and television would also be very interesting subjects for Russia to master.

In my view, the lack of ethical standards (and they are practically absent) in business and government creates a sense of impending disaster as a permanent condition of public consciousness, a catastrophic perception of the present; and a pessimistic expectation of looming threats from reckless leaders involved in risky projects. And so I believe that honest borrowing practices, high standards of ethical self-control, and the dissemination of information about them through the media, politics, business, and individual actions will create a solid barrier to such explosive scenarios.

With respect to Russia's prospects for economic growth, I would like to describe a point of view that some might consider surprising. Russia's possibilities for economic growth are usually examined from the standpoint of the traditional approach to economics, determining what resources, foreign as well as domestic, a country can attract and how it can best utilize them. Economic growth in Russia is not hindered by a lack of technical potential or technology. Russia has had its own experience with major technological achievements and it is capable of mastering the new Western technologies. If the volume of capital belonging to Russian companies and kept abroad is taken into account, the monetary resources of the Russian economy are much greater than the West believes. The problem lies in the system of operative rules. As long as the public considers that thievery is admissible at different levels of society and does not regard the very act of theft as sufficient grounds for a politician or a businessman to be excluded from certain kinds of activity; as long as public mores allow virulent envy of a neighbor and intolerance towards his acquisition of wealth; and as long as people assume that the government should take care of the individual and in exchange should receive *carte blanche* to do with that individual whatever it wants (and such attitudes are still widespread in Russia)--no market-based growth in the Russian economy, in my opinion, is possible.

I am fully aware that a change in these mores is a long and slow process. Again, one has to differentiate between the ability of the Russian population to master new tools quickly, as demonstrated by the experience of the 1990s, and the transformation of certain deep-seated views and habits that were formed over the centuries and passed on from generation to generation. I

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believe that the road to economic growth is one of long-term gradual changes in rules and mores not at the national level, but in the daily lives of people and social groups. We are talking about the creation of a new social contract in Russia, a new type of agreement between societal groups and the state. In the next decade the best type of economic development for Russia, among those which are realistically possible, would be a process of slow incremental growth accompanied by gradual changes both in mores and in production results. In ten or fifteen years, I should like to see a country that has acquired new rings of mores, standards, institutions, and organizations, like those on a growing tree--the kind of growth that will facilitate the falling away of traditional standards, notions about life, and attitudes towards one's kin, neighbors and the government. It is these which are dangerous to the Russian population itself.

As to my own role in the future process of change, by no means do I see myself involved in national politics. I do not think participation in politics is effective. Generally speaking, politics has a very low efficiency coefficient. Many capable and talented people in Russia have been involved in politics during the 1990s, or to be more exact, starting in the mid-1980s. Politics is, in a sense, overly saturated with people. I fear that Russia has lost more than it gained from this mass involvement in politics. Many persons that might have done much good in economics, business, social or civic life wound up in the maelstrom of political passions and now are practically useless to society. I deliberately avoid this kind of activity and have declined to take part in Russian governments several times.

I see my own future prospects specifically in helping form a civil society center that could impose certain ethical constraints on business, government, the political opposition and introduce some behavioral vectors there as well as to the broader public. Here is how I see the problem. If the ideas I consider essential can be realized only through the acquisition of political power, it would basically mean that we are incapable of persuading the majority of people in our society that these ideas are valid. It would mean that these ideas can be implemented with only the help of an "Uncle Policeman" who has been ordered by those smart lads in the government to force people to behave in this way or that. Coercive activity of this kind is unacceptable to me. It seems to me that the trust which certain people or ideas can evoke in Russia's population, its citizens, can be manifested through the power of authority rather than the authority of power. That is exactly how I envision the meaning of the citizens' center of influence I intend to help build.

Translated by Anna Kucharev.

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# A Rule-of-Law State in Post-totalitarian Russia?
## Problems and Prospects

Vladimir Chetvernin*

*Russia and the Totalitarian Legacy*

"The Russian Federation (Russia) is a democratic, federative, rule-of-law state with a republican form of governance," declares Article 1 of the 1993 Russian Constitution. Any constitution, of course, defines the level of a society's state and legal development, anticipating its goals and formulating its highest ideals. And the constitution of a country such as Russia that lays claim to a notable role in a civilization where respect for human rights prevails, cannot ignore the values of *freedom* and *democracy*.

Russian reality, however, is still remote from these constitutional values. A corrupt, authoritarian, and bureaucratic system of governance has taken shape in post-totalitarian Russia.

Not that the 1993 Constitution is bad. In any case, nothing better than this Constitution is envisaged for the foreseeable future; its provisions need correction, completion, and protection. The contradiction between our constitutional ideals and our reality, however, is so profound that eliminating it will entail a lengthy process of Russia growing into its constitution and creating a civil society that would need it.

For the time being, we cannot say that Russia is moving irrevocably toward the constitutional ideals it was "granted" and not toward a new variation of its anti-liberal system. Russia is demonstrating the kind of post-totalitarian development that is ambivalent with respect to shaping statehood under the rule of law or under authoritarianism.

The state described in the Constitution has yet to take shape. The totalitarian regime has receded into the past, but the old bureaucracy remains at the feeding trough of power. A civil society and a market economy capable of self-regulation have yet to emerge. Domestic and foreign policies are decided by authoritarian means unaccompanied by the necessary competence. The political elites executing the reforms, moreover, are guided in no small measure by the bureaucracy's corporate interests. Modern Russia is witnessing the same sociopolitical process that led to the destruction of the Soviet regime: *the merging of political power and property*. Under such conditions, the law is often undermined by authoritarian, tyrannical regulation by directive and the distribution of privileges. Thus, there are no grounds whatever for concluding that Russia is moving in the direction of the rule of law.

Nonetheless, private property has been legalized. Formally, the Constitution and federal legislation guarantee individual freedoms and private property. A system for

* Vladimir Aleksandrovich Chetvernin - Born in 1954, Chetvernin graduated from the Moscow State University law school and earned his doctorate at the Institute of State and Law, where he is currently head of section. In the early 1990s he was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. Since his return to Russia, Chetvernin has been teaching law in various Moscow universities, including the Russian Legal Academy affiliated with the Ministry of Justice. He has published several books on constitutional law and legal theory.

separating executive and legislative powers both horizontally and vertically has been put
in place. The legal situation is fundamentally different from the Soviet regime.

Under the Soviet system of strict totalitarianism neither

Under the Soviet system of strict totalitarianism neither individual freedom nor
private property were tolerated: everyone together and no one in particular was the
"property owner." Laws guaranteeing citizens equal freedom, safety, and property were
replaced by arbitrary legislation enacted by authoritative command. Criminal legislation
meant protection of the state monopoly on violence. The state did not guarantee a
person's safety from arbitrary encroachments by the state itself; instead, it could
arbitrarily deprive one of his life and property and subject him to other deprivations and
violence. Criminal legislation stipulated that anyone violating the state's monopoly on
power be punished. One could not move freely around the country, to say nothing of
going abroad. Soviet criminal legislation regarded someone who fled abroad or refused
to return as a fugitive and threatened him with the death penalty.
Procedural legislation established an inequality of

to return as a fugitive and threatened him with the death penalty.
Procedural legislation established an inequality of the parties in a criminal process
in favor of the prosecution. Although the law proclaimed the principle of presumption of
innocence, it was not honored in practice. If an indictment failed to prove the defendant's
guilt, the court would send the case back to the prosecutor's office for further
investigation. This practice continues today.
The bureaucracy's desire for personal enrichment further

inquiry. This practice continues today.
The bureaucracy's desire for personal enrichment further corrupted public
administration. Although the nomenklatura had enormous power, it had no legal avenue
for enrichment: private property was formally prohibited, and the punitive and
investigative organs strictly controlled the acquisition of consumer goods. With the
easing of state controls, though, a bureaucracy ready to use its authority found many
opportunities for enrichment. Because the concurrent process of economic development
was artificially constrained by the ban maintained on property and on all free social
activity in general, a shadow economy and even a shadow social structure emerged in
which social status was determined by one's role and place in that economy. A new,
mafia-like social authority arose within the framework of the shadow social structure and
gradually engrafted itself onto corrupt elements of the bureaucratic apparatus. The
bureaucracy provided official cover for illegal business and in return received its share of
the action--income that substantially exceeded its legal earnings. This is how organized
crime is abetted by the bureaucracy; this is how gangs and oligarchic mafia-type clans
come into existence.
In such a society, the bureaucracy is concerned primarily with its own personal

come into existence.
In such a society, the bureaucracy is concerned primarily with its own personal
interests, but the ban on private property was a major obstacle. When a generation of the
corrupt totalitarian bureaucracy came to power in the former Soviet Union, private
property was permitted during Gorbachev's perestroika. At first property was sanctioned
only as a privilege, reserved for the bureaucracy (and for those connected with it in
transacting shadow business). Thus began the "nomenklatura privatization" of what had
been considered the "national legacy"--legally combining political power and ownership
of the means of production. A person without links to oligarchic-mafia structures had no
chance whatever of opening his own business legally.
The political elites in the center and the regions first won the right to decide the
fate of the national legacy and then organized the privatization process in their favor. In
the name of the state, which was acting simultaneously as the state and the super-property

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holder, they transferred state property to private individuals under conditions that were
least advantageous for the federal treasury but most advantageous for the officials
administering privatization and the oligarchic groups that stood behind them.

The bureaucracy "reassigned to itself" great chunks of state property through the
issuance of closed stock offerings for smaller enterprises as well as grandiose monopolies
such as Gazprom and the sale of particularly profitable firms at reduced prices to owners
who were proxies for the officials operating the privatization program. Secret
metamorphoses occurred: billions suddenly appeared where nothing had been before and
part of the national legacy, for example, the Communist Party funds, simply vanished.

Thus, the Russian post-totalitarian state not only organizes power but exercises
the rights of a supreme property owner--a characteristic of a pre-industrial or feudal
society. This indivisibility of power and property means that Russia has still not
achieved a division between civil society and state. This condition has led to the almost
total corruption of the government: occupying an official position is profitable if the job
provides access to the administration of state property or allows control over private
property.

In guaranteeing freedom of economic activity and supporting free competition, the Constitution appears to state that economic policy aims to introduce a market economy. Freedom of economic activity is defined as the right of each person to the free exercise of his capabilities and property for entrepreneurial or other economic activity not prohibited by law. Economic activity aimed at monopolization or unfair competition is not allowed.

In reality, the chief monopolist is the state (the executive branch, the
bureaucracy), and it creates other monopolists one rung down. By granting privileges
(licenses, quotas) to industrial and financial groups, the state transforms them into
monopolists functioning in different economic branches and sectors but still dependent on
the center. These groups in turn dictate the conditions of the economic game to smaller
property owners. Monopoly practices and unfair competition are the inevitable and logical
result--the main characteristics of Russia's economy.

The constitutional commitment to support competition is left hanging. Economy
actors do not operate independently but rely on the support or connections with specific
bureaucratic or mafia structures; fair competition (especially in the process of
privatization), to say nothing of state support for small business, the foundation of an
effective market is impossible. Economic freedom in Russia will remain a fiction for
some time to come.

Human Rights in Russia: Theory vs. Practice

The 1993 Russian Constitution in general corresponds formally to the requirements of a
law-based state and recognizes human rights as inalienable and belonging to everyone
from birth, i.e., they are *natural*.

The Constitution guarantees a system of rights and freedoms for the individual
citizen in accordance with modern standards of international law and recognizes human
rights as the highest value for the state. The Constitution subordinates the legislative,
executive, and judicial activities to the observance of human rights mandating rightful

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laws and prohibiting anti-legal (infringing) laws. The system of justice assumes the right of every person to protect his rights and freedoms by appealing to the competent court, in particular, the Russian Constitutional Court, regardless of whether the relevant rights and freedoms are guaranteed by law. For example, the right of citizens to substitute alternative civil service for military service fixed in the Constitution includes the right to refuse to perform military service. The fact that Russia still does not have a law on alternative military service cannot restrict the right to refuse to perform military service.

The Constitution obliges the competent courts to protect human rights regardless of what legislative protection they enjoy: in a rule-of-law state the individual has the right to enter into a judicial dispute over his rights with the legislator itself. The courts, which are subject first to the Constitution and only then to federal law (Article 120, Section 1), are required to apply no law that violates human rights, or to interpret such a law in a way that avoids violating human rights (according to Article 18 of the Constitution, human rights determine the application of laws). Finally, each person has the right, in accordance with international treaties of the Russian Federation, to appeal to the international organs charged with the defense of human rights and freedoms if all existing domestic means of legal defense have been exhausted (Article 46, Section 3).

The constitutional priority of human rights means that they can be restricted by law exclusively according to the following principle: The realization of human rights must not violate the rights of other individuals (Article 17, Section 3). However, Article 55, Section 3 of the Constitution obviously contradicts the priority of human rights in stating that the rights and freedoms of a person and citizen may be restricted by federal law insofar as this is essential not only in order to protect the rights of other individuals but also, in particular, for the following purposes:

* to protect morality; in this connection, the question arises: Who in a post-totalitarian, pluralist society, where there is no consensus on basic values and guidelines for development, is going to decide at the level of law what is moral and what is immoral--the supporters of liberal or Communist thinking?

* to protect the foundations of the constitutional order; including, for example, "national sovereignty"; however, human rights principles assert that (1) the source of state power is not the people but the individual, who alienates a portion of his natural freedom in favor of the state and (2) rights and freedoms protect the individual not only from government tyranny but also from "national sovereignty," as from any absolutism;

* to guarantee the country's defense and the security of the state; human rights principles argue, however, that (1) because the state by its very nature combines the principles of authority and law, it will always tend to limit the freedom of its citizens for the purpose of state security; and (2) such restrictions have a limit--human rights are an *inalienable* freedom.

Every person has the right to legal protection against arbitrary restrictions on his freedom, safety, and property. This right corresponds to the unconditional obligation of the state to establish precautionary judicial oversight over the legality and justification of

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police actions affecting the freedom and inviolability of the person and his property.
Where precautionary oversight is impossible, subsequent judicial oversight is mandatory.
A rule-of-law state does not have the right to encumber this oversight with any conditions
whatsoever. In England, for example, the Habeas Corpus Act was passed in 1679. The
Russian Constitution also establishes the rule of *habeas corpus*. Under Article 22 the
police must immediately bring an arrested person suspected of committing a crime before
a judge, who must honor the individual's right to a decision on the legality of his arrest.
At the same time, concluding and transitional clauses of the Constitution state that until
the passage of criminal procedural legislation that conforms with the clauses of the 1993
Constitution, the "old procedure" for the arrest, custody, and detainment of individuals
suspected of committing crimes shall remain in effect. And the "old procedure" is a
police procedure that excludes judicial oversight. Moreover, the Constitution sets no
deadline for bringing criminal procedural legislation into alignment with Article 22. The
rule of *habeas corpus* may not go into effect for a very long time.

In reality, constitutional declarations notwithstanding, the individual's rights and
freedoms are not the supreme value in modern Russia. Indeed, their value for the post-
totalitarian Russian state is highly dubious. Consider the massive human rights violations
in illegal--essentially criminal--police activity as well as in perfectly legal governmental
and administrative activity.

According to the Constitution, no one should be subject to torture. Meanwhile, the
Russian state compels a person to be in conditions in which there is a real danger of
torture, violence, and cruel or humiliating treatment. I am talking about being drafted for
and performing military service and about those people who have been detained and
arrested and are serving their sentences in isolation blocks, prisons, and work colonies.
The practice of torture and cruel and humiliating treatment has traditionally been the
norm for Russia.

One variety of torture is the overlong or illegal incarceration of prisoners. In
Russia, a catastrophic situation has come about. Convicted criminals are held in isolation
blocks overcrowded by several degrees of magnitude. Prolonged detention of suspects
(officially, up to half a year) while a crime is being investigated is a unique torture in and
of itself. In fact, many individuals who are only suspected of committing a crime (who
have not yet been convicted) wait two, three, and four years for a trial under conditions
injurious to their life and health. Incarceration practices crudely trample upon human
dignity.

Assigning a suspect to an investigation isolation block in Russia is a practice
enabling the organs of criminal prosecution to use torture as one of their main ways of
obtaining proof of guilt. The detention of those suspected and accused in cruel and
humiliating conditions is torture deliberately applied in order to break their will and
obtain confessions and information about third parties.

Approximately the same observations apply to the conditions for being drafted
and serving in the military. The current uncivilized practice violates clauses of the
Constitution in that state coercion to perform this service subjects the citizen to the risk of
cruel and humiliating treatment.

The Constitution unambiguously guarantees freedom of movement and settlement
inside the country. More than once, the Constitutional Court has invalidated regulatory

acts upholding the residence permit (a permissions procedure for registering citizens in points of settlement). However, in many municipalities, especially Moscow, registration is mandatory and administrative organs can deny registration. Unregistered residents are subject to administrative sanctions.

Consider, also, the issue of property guarantees in Russia. The Constitution establishes the principle of equal protection of private and state property. Hence, in the event of a conflict of interests (a rights dispute) between owners of private property and state organs defending the interests of state property, the dispute must be treated as one between formally equal sides and as such subject to resolution through judicial procedure.

Moreover, Article 35, Section 3 of the Constitution stipulates that no one may be deprived of his property except by decision of the courts. If you consider that, for instance, within the framework of tax relations (public law relations), the tax police have the indisputable right to deduct tax arrears from the bank accounts of taxpayers (legal persons), then this contradicts Article 35 of the Constitution and represents priority protection for state property. (Obviously, private individuals cannot deduct the state's debts from state bank accounts.)

Appropriate property guarantees exclude any curtailment of the individual's right to property belonging to him as a result of the confiscation of this property in a compulsory administrative procedure. This means that should a private person (physical or legal) refuse to transfer to the state within the time established by law the portion of his property (in the form of a specific monetary sum) that is subject to payment into the treasury, this sum is subject to confiscation, but only by judicial procedure. Legislators have the right to establish fines to be applied upon decision by the court so as to make refusing to pay one's taxes in a timely fashion maximally disadvantageous. However, it is improper to exact tax arrears in a compulsory administrative procedure, for example, by deducting the relevant sums from the accounts of legal persons.

However, existing legislation (Article 11, Section 1 of the Russian law "On the Federal Tax Police") gives the tax police the authority to exact tax arrears, as well as fines, from legal persons in a compulsory procedure (the compulsory procedure does not apply to physical persons) in the event of a delay in a tax payment. This statute obviously contradicts the Constitution.

The Constitutional Court, however, has taken a different position, ruling that the compulsory exacting of tax arrears by the federal tax police is not alienation of property in the sense of Article 35, Section 3. In its resolution of 17 December 1996, the Constitutional Court stated: "Exaction of a tax cannot be considered an arbitrary alienation of an owner's property. It is a legal confiscation of a portion of property stemming from a constitutional public legal obligation." However, Article 35, Section 3 of the Constitution refrs not to arbitrary or legal confiscation of property but to the inadmissibility of the (legal) alienation of property except by decision of the courts.

The Constitutional Court's basic argument is that sums of money subject to payment in the form of taxes are a portion of the legal person's property that the state has the right to dispose of, evidently, as the owner ("The taxpayer does not have the right to dispose of... that portion of his property which in the form of a specific monetary sum is subject to payment to the treasury"), and therefore one cannot equate exacting of tax arrears with the alienation of property in the sense of Article 35, Section 3.

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The Constitutional Court's desire to act in accordance with the state's fiscal interest is perfectly understandable, especially given the budgetary crisis provoked, in particular, by the widespread refusal of legal persons to pay taxes. From the moment the Constitutional Court's resolution of 17 December 1996, went into effect, Article 35, Section 3 of the Constitution has allowed the compulsory, extrajudicial procedure of curtailing the property rights of taxpayers (legal persons). To be sure, the decision to carry out compulsory exaction of tax arrears can be appealed in court: first the tax police determine the amount of the arrears (in which they can conscientiously make a mistake) and exact those arrears, and then the legal person has the right to seek the return of the improperly exacted money.

Nonetheless, the question remains: How can we reconcile the compulsory procedure for exacting arrears within the framework of public legal relations and the principle of equal protection for private and state property?

Similar examples can be cited for every article of the Constitution guaranteeing basic rights and freedoms. In the final analysis, doubts arise as to whether modern Russian society has achieved a level of development where human rights truly exist.

## Democracy, Political Pluralism: Dangers from the Left and Right

Democracy in Russia is a work in progress. Especially since antidemocratic (Fascist and Communist) political movements that reject the liberal foundations of the constitutional order and are intent on using democratic procedures to destroy them can function legally.

The Russian Constitution guarantees diversity of ideas, political diversity, and a multi-party system. At the same time, tolerance makes sense only until it clashes with a force intent on destroying the bearer of this tolerance. The freest democracy must defend itself from the spread of antidemocratic ideologies and organizations. A democratic constitutional state must prohibit the activities of politicized institutions of society that are striving to change the foundations of the constitutional order by unconstitutional, violent means. A rule-of-law state is incompatible with the spread in society of National Socialist (fascist), Communist (of the Leninist, Bolshevik type), or any other ideology founded on social, racial, ethnic, or religious hatred.

Therefore, the Constitution sets limits on ideological and political pluralism. It prohibits the use of constitutional rights and freedoms (especially the right of association, freedom to express opinions, freedom to assemble and demonstrate, freedom of religion, freedom of information, privacy of communications, and the sanctity of the home) to bring about a forcible change in the foundations of the constitutional order, to violate the integrity of the Russian Federation, to undermine the security of the state, to create armed formations, or to incite social, racial, ethnic, or religious strife. In particular, it prohibits the establishment and activity of public organizations whose goals or actions violate the foregoing provisions. The founding and operations of a public organization must be prohibited if the court establishes the anti-constitutional nature of the organization.

The threat to the democratic rule-of-law constitutional order in Russia stems primarily from organizations (associations) whose goal is to establish a terroristic dictatorship of a National Socialist or Bolshevik Communist type ("dictatorship of the proletariat"). These organizations typically organize armed formations and aim at the

seizure of state power; they therefore threaten the security of the state. Both are misanthropic ideologies; the attainment of their goals would require the destruction of some portion of society. These are totalitarian ideologies incompatible with freedom and human rights.

The constitutional ban on such public organizations, however, can be implemented only if there is a political will supported by the law enforcement organs. Because democratic transformations "from above" are carried through by a bureaucratic apparatus wholly inherited from the Soviet regime and because decommunization was never carried out in Russia, the prohibition of Communist and National Socialist organizations cannot be translated into legislative and executive action.

## Legislative-Executive Relationships: An Unbalanced Separation of Powers

The Constitution provides that governance in the Russian Federation is based on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers as independent branches. The president, the Federal Assembly, the government, and the courts execute governmental functions in the Russian Federation.

The Federal Assembly is a two-chamber parliament. The lower house, the State Duma, is the actual legislator. The upper house, the Federation Council, has the right either to approve or vote down a law passed by the Duma. The government exercises the executive power. Judicial power is implemented only by federal courts. (Below we describe only the relationship between the legislative and executive branches. Unfortunately, the judiciary in Russia has yet to play an independent role--or at least the kind of role the other two branches play. The political elites have no need of an independent judiciary. A simple example: The courts in Russia today are financed at such a low level that sometimes the electricity, water, and telephones are cut off in the courthouses for failure to pay their bills. The fate of the judiciary in Russia merits separate consideration and cannot be illuminated sufficiently within the framework of this essay.)

The Constitution does not place the president in any one of the branches of power. However, the scope of his executive authority allows us to conclude that the president is for all intents and purposes the chief of state. He appoints the chairman of the government; upon presentation by the government chairman, the president appoints the remaining members of the government and the directors of the most important ministries (foreign affairs, defense, internal affairs, and so on) independently; he has the right to chair sessions of the government; he decides whether to ask for the government's resignation; and he has the right to revoke resolutions passed by the government. The president determines the basic lines of domestic and foreign policy for the state in accordance with the Constitution and federal laws. In other words, his executive power is legally binding.

At the same time, the president has the right of legislative initiative. Moreover, the president has the right to issue decrees or edicts, which must not contradict the Constitution or federal laws. In particular, he issues decrees on those issues not regulated by federal law. These nonlegal presidential decrees function as law until a relevant federal law is passed. When a federal law is passed after a presidential decree has been

issued on that question, the clauses of the decree lose force the moment the federal law goes into effect.

For example, the president has the right to issue a decree instead of a specific law. He can also veto laws passed by the Federal Assembly. Moreover, if the Duma rejects the president's legislative proposal, he may issue it as a decree nevertheless.

The president has the right to delay his veto on laws passed by the Federal Assembly. The Constitution gives the two chambers of the Federal Assembly the right to override the president's veto by means of a second consideration of a vetoed federal law. This procedure requires that at least two-thirds of the votes of the total number of members of the Federal Assembly and of the total number of deputies in the State Duma favor the federal law.

Finally, the president can schedule a referendum for passage of a law, thereby removing the Federal Assembly from the lawmaking process altogether. The decision taken in the referendum can be repealed or amended only by a new referendum.

Thus, the president possesses a standard-setting competence that makes him not only an organ of executive power but also an actual legislator, creating a conflict with the standard-setting competencies of the Federal Assembly. Presidential decrees that do not contradict the Constitution have the force of law until federal law establishes otherwise. The government, which is in fact accountable only to the president, will implement the president's decrees on issues not regulated by law until these decrees are repealed by the president himself--even after a law establishing differing regulation is passed.

## Impeachment: A Labyrinthine Process

The sole legislative counterweight to presidential authority is the constitutional possibility of impeaching the president.

According to the Constitution, the Federal Council can remove the president from office only on the basis of charges of treason or the commission of a serious crime, charges as voted by a majority of the State Duma, confirmed by a decision of the Supreme Court that the president's actions have the attributes of a crime, and further confirmed by a decision of the Russian Constitutional Court that the proper procedure was followed in bringing the charges.

The constitutional procedure for removing the president from office consists of the following successive actions:

First, the State Duma brings charges against the president. This requires the initiative of at least one third of the deputies, the conclusion of a special commission, and a decision passed by a two-thirds majority.

Second, the charges are sent to the Supreme Court, which must issue a decision.

Third, if the Supreme Court's conclusion confirms the charges, then the Constitutional Court must decide whether the Duma has followed the proper procedure for bringing charges.

Fourth, the Constitutional Court confirms that the Duma has observed the proper procedure for bringing charges, then the issue of removing the Russian president from office must be raised in the Federation Council.

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The Federation Council has three months to decide whether to remove the president from office. If a decision is not made within three months, then the charges are considered dropped. However, the impeachment process may end at the second stage if the Supreme Court's conclusion is negative (the same would happen if the Constitutional Court established that the Duma had violated procedures for bringing charges as established by the Constitution).

The constitutional procedure for impeaching the president should not be considered an effective element in a system of checks and balances. On the contrary, it underscores the imbalance in the authority of the legislative and executive branches. A complex process that requires decisions to be made on four different levels in three months' time guarantees that the president will not be removed from office.

The 1993 Russian Constitution was drafted "to fit" a specific president, with the calculation that the parliament could not remove President Yeltsin from office. In May 1999, the Duma's last attempt to bring charges against President Yeltsin failed shamefully. Duma leaders opposed to Yeltsin had been certain that by framing the articles of impeachment on several counts they would garner the necessary two-thirds of the votes. However, some of the deputies they controlled did not vote for impeachment, although they knew beforehand that the Supreme Court would take a negative position on all the impeachment counts. Once the Supreme Court had declined to confirm the validity of the charges, opposition deputies could have avoided serious conflict with the president, thereby saving political face. But much as they despised President Yeltsin, these deputies did not even have the nerve to start an impeachment procedure. As noted below, the president has the constitutional opportunity to dissolve the Duma whenever he feels like it--and it was the prospect of being dissolved and sent home that many deputies feared most of all in May 1999.

The relationship defined by the Constitution between the president, the government, and the State Duma is such that the deciding role in determining domestic and foreign policy always belongs to the president. In instances of conflict between the president and the Duma relating to actions of the government, the president has the last word. The government is responsible only to the president. If the Duma insists on a change of governmental course, rejects the candidate for chairman of the government nominated by the president, or votes its lack of confidence in the government, then the Duma, if the president wishes, can be disbanded. In the extreme case, the president can, without disbanding the Duma, implement a policy he has decided on independently, despite the Duma's stance.

And so, although the government bears no responsibility to the Duma, the Constitution forces the Duma to assume some responsibility for the future activities of the government: Either the Duma agrees to the candidate for chairman of the government or else it is disbanded, with the following exceptions: (1) during the six months before the end of the president's term of office, (2) in time of war or emergency, and (3) as of the moment the Duma brings impeachment charges against the president (Article 109); that time the president does not have the right to disband the Duma for any reason. However, the president can disband the Duma after the end of the impeachment process (the resignation of a president during the impeachment process would be unrealistic) or in a state of emergency or war. Therefore, only the first contingency offers the Duma a

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realistic option--the last six months of A presidential term (the president is elected for four years and cannot be re-elected for more than two terms in a row). However, if in this instance the Duma rejects the candidacy of the chairman of the government three times, then the president will simply appoint the chairman of the government and not disband the Duma. Consequently, in this instance, too, the Duma cannot do anything to influence the fate of the government.

Moreover, the president can use the procedure of Article 111 to disband the Duma at his own initiative or to fully discredit it in the eyes of the voters. At any moment he can make a decision to dismiss the government and propose a candidate for chairman of the government whom he knows will be unacceptable to a majority of the Duma. If the Duma rejects this candidate three times, it will be disbanded, and the president can once again appoint the dismissed chairman of the government. For the Constitution does not prevent the president from appointing the same candidate the Duma has rejected three times.

Imagine a situation in which the president has disbanded the State Duma on the basis of Article 111 of the Constitution. One might think that in this situation the president has brought his dispute with the Duma over the government he controls in to the court of public opinion. However, even if the people were to elect a new Duma with a majority even more opposed to the president, the result of the elections would not necessarily determine the government's fate. Although a newly elected Duma cannot be disbanded on the bases of Article 117 for one year after its election, it can be disbanded on the basis of Article 111. Assume that in the course of three months the newly elected Duma expresses its lack of confidence in the government twice and that the president is forced to make a decision about the government's resignation. After doing so, however, the president is not required to form a new government, and under the procedure envisaged in Article 111, he can reappoint the government in its former composition and disband the Duma. Theoretically, the president can get along without the State Duma's support for his entire term of office.

In this way, the president's authority to disband the Duma is essentially illegal, for it allows the president to be the judge in his own case. Secondly, it is absurd, for it forces the lower house of parliament to take formal responsibility for the activities of a government that, in turn, is responsible only to the president. If the president, who is independent of the parliament, determines the country's foreign and domestic policies and simultaneously has the right to disband the lower house of parliament in defense of his own policies, then this is political nonsense.

Which of the existing models for the separation of powers fits the Russian Federation? Clearly, Russia is not a parliamentary republic, since parliamentary systems have no president as head of the executive branch. If Russia were a presidential republic, in which the legislative and executive powers are strictly separate, as in the United States, then the Russian president would not have the right to disband the lower house of parliament, the Duma, ahead of schedule. Thus, Russia is not a presidential republic. Nor is Russia a mixed republic in which the government is responsible not to the president but to the lower house of parliament.

Consequently, this is a special, "Russian" model of the separation of powers--an unbalanced separation of powers.

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As we know, the separation of powers doctrine is a means for averting political radicalism and an authoritarian restructuring of society. Under a system of separation of powers, one cannot speedily bring about modernization, but one cannot destroy everything positive in society, either. If we were to ignore the separation of powers doctrine out of considerations of expediency and create a constitution drafted "to fit" the "reformist president" and designed to avert the threat of the Communist opposition, then this would mean subjecting the country to the risk of authoritarian counter-reforms after a new political leader came to power.

Taking into account the authority of the president as head of the executive branch, his opportunities for influencing the Duma, his lawmaking authority, and the low likelihood of successful impeachment, one can say that in Russia the Constitution has established a crude violation of the separation of powers doctrine in favor of presidential executive authority. The 1993 Constitution established a correlation between the legislative and executive branches that cannot be judged an appropriate institutional guarantee of freedom, security, and property or a guarantee against the monopolization of power and the resurgence of authoritarianism.

The main question for Russia today hinges on the winner of the presidential elections of March 2000. If a liberal democratic politician wins, Russia may move in the direction of a market economy and the rule of law. If a supporter of the authoritarian-bureaucratic system prevails--a new dictatorship will emerge, albeit on a constitutional basis. For the Constitution does allow the president to become a dictator. Russian politicians, especially in the Duma, have spoken a great deal about this danger, but when it gets to the point of trying to restrict the president's constitutional authority and balancing the constitutional relationship between the legislative and executive branches, then proposed amendments to the Constitution do not secure the necessary majority of votes (two-thirds) in the Duma. For each of the president's actual or potential rivals, whatever the outcome of the March 2000 elections, would have little or no desire to share power with his prospective competitors in the legislative branch.

Translated by Marian Schwartz.

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Reviving the Russian Orthodox Church:
A Task Both Theological and Secular

Hilarion Alfeev*

Interview

June 4, 1999

Danilovskii Monastery

Personal History

I was born in 1966, when Russia was an atheistic country, and I was educated in a Soviet atheist school. One by one my relatives came to God and religion, although their conversion started with the younger generation and progressed to the older generations. For instance, one of my grandmothers was an avid Communist Party activist. My father was a scientist and an agnostic. My mother became religious in the late 1970s. In their own ways, all my cousins found the path to faith. By the early 1980s, only my grandmother remained an atheist. Family history totally contradicted the myth that the Church was just a refuge for *babushki*. The return to the Church by the youth and the intelligentsia started much earlier than the 1990s. Even in the 1970s and 1980s young people manifested growing interest toward the Church.

I studied music (violin, piano and composition) in school and later in the Moscow Conservatory. For several years I was faced with a choice: music or Church service? When I decided to pick the Church over music and told my conservatory's dean, he said that he could not "allow such a musical talent to go to waste." He tried to convince me that he could explain the deceitful nature of the Church. He thought I was seduced by the Church. But he did not manage to convince me.

I became a priest at 20 years of age--but without any theological education. In Soviet days there were only three seminaries in the whole country (now there are more than fifty), so sometimes the Church was forced to ordain priests before they had any formal theological training or had educated themselves. I decided to complete my education by correspondence after I was ordained priest.

For several years I served in Lithuania, including two years as the dean of the Kaunas Cathedral. In January 1991 the Soviet army intervened in Lithuania and occupied the TV station in Vilnius. For several days the country was split between the Soviet-controlled part and the free, anti-Soviet part that was centered around the free Kaunas TV station. Most of my parishioners were ethnic Russians and I also frequently visited the local military garrison, talking to Russian soldiers and baptizing some of them. I personally knew all the military personnel of the garrison. When the Soviet forces invaded, I went on Kaunas TV and addressed the soldiers, asking them not to shoot at civilians even if ordered to do so by their superiors. This was a risky step, but I felt it was my duty to steer our Russian boys away from this action. The Kaunas TV broadcast my speech every hour for the next several days. There were instances when Russian

* Hieromonk Hilarion (Alfeev) - Born in 1966, Father Hilarion studied violin, piano, and composition in puruit of a career in music, but decided to become a priest in 1987. Educated in the Moscow Theological Academy and holding a doctorate in divinity from Oxford University, Father Hilarion has taught many courses in seminaries and written extensively for Russian and foreign publications. He is presently Executive Director of the Secretariat for Inter-Christian Affairs, Department for External Church Relations, the Moscow Patriarchate, in which capacity he travels widely and works with a wide range of inter-denominational organizations.

soldiers refused to take up arms. In the end, nobody from the Kaunas garrison took part in the
operation, and the Kaunas TV station was never taken over.

After that I became something of a hero to the Lithuanian people, although some of my
Russian parishioners thought that I had betrayed them. I always felt, though, that this was not a
Russian-Lithuanian conflict but a military intervention of the Soviet forces against native people,
Russians as well as Lithuanians. Soon I began receiving threatening phone calls and had to go
into hiding. My life in Lithuania became very turbulent.

By that time I had completed by correspondence my degree in the Moscow Theological
Academy and they offered me a teaching position. I taught there from 1991 to 1993, including
courses in theology, the New Testament, Byzantine Greek and homiletics (the art of preaching).
In 1993 I went to Oxford University and wrote my doctoral thesis on "St. Simeon the New
Theologian and the Orthodox Tradition" (St. Simeon was an 11th century Byzantine mystical
writer). After I graduated from Oxford in 1995, I wanted to return to teaching in the Moscow
Theological Academy. However, I was told that because my education in Oxford was not an
Orthodox one, the Academy's leadership was not sure if I would be fit to teach in an Orthodox
institution.

At that time I found myself under the wing of Metropolitan Kirill, the head of the
Church's external relations department. In my view, Kirill is one of the most prominent leaders
of our Church. Since then I have been working with him and since 1997 I have been directing
the secretariat that handles relations with other Christian confessions.

*The Church's Role as an Element of Civil Society in Russia*

In Soviet days the Russian Orthodox Church experienced repression in one form or another. The repression was most brutal in the 1920s and 1930s, when many priests were killed or imprisoned, monasteries and seminaries were closed, and many churches were destroyed. The situation improved a little during Stalin's late years, but once again deteriorated under Khrushchev. During Brezhnev's rule, while the country underwent a period of stagnation, the Church was less affected, in part because it had managed to lead an autonomous existence and even experienced an influx of young people. Overall, however, until 1988 the Church existed outside of society, in a kind of ghetto, and the separation between the church and society was strictly enforced. For instance, nobody in a prominent position could openly belong to the Church. If a schoolteacher publicly attended church, he or she would have been expelled.

In 1988, when we planned to celebrate the millennium of Christianity's introduction into
Russia, the situation changed drastically. The Church sought government approval for
organizing a nation-wide commemoration of the event, but officials declared that under no
circumstances could this celebration take place outside of church walls. This was the peak time
of *perestroika*, however, when everything was changing, former dissidents were openly speaking
out against the regime, and books and publications from the West were penetrating the Iron
Curtain. Interest in the Church was growing and many more people turned out at the various
celebrations held that year than the government could have ever imagined. In one small town of
60,000 inhabitants about 40,000 people took part in the festivities, whereas the local authorities
had predicted a turnout of no more than 1,000. It was during that time that priests first began
appearing on television, and after 1988 people started joining the Church en masse. Many of
them had always been believers, but had to hide their faith. Many others, including former Party

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members and militant atheists, realized that their historic and national roots lay with the Orthodox Church. Many young people joined the Church in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Then, in the mid-1990s we saw something of a decline in people's religious interest. Although at first masses of people were publicly baptized, many of them did not remain active members of the Church. Some were baptised out of a herd mentality and never returned to the Church to take part in its everyday life. Today, if you stop someone at random on the streets of Moscow and ask them if they consider themselves believers, perhaps half or even more would identify themselves as Orthodox. In most cases, however, they would not be regular churchgoers: they simply identify themselves with the Orthodox tradition and have only a limited relationship with the Church.

Thus the Church found itself in a dramatically new situation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For over seventy years the Church had been completely separated from society, unable to influence life in the country, because any kind of "religious propaganda" in the media was prohibited. We were allowed to publish a limited edition of Bibles and other books for church service, but we could publish no liturgical materials for wider circulation. After 1988 we suddenly found ourselves confronted with new possibilities and opportunities. Frankly, not everybody in the Church knew what to do with this new-found freedom. This was especially true of the older generation of priests, those who had to operate all their lives in constrained conditions. Some of them had no skills of working with people outside of the Church "ghetto." Thus not everybody could make the transition and pass through the now broken wall between the Church and society. Many priests and bishops had to learn things they never dreamed of before then. In the early 1990s many Church leaders were asked to speak to TV audiences, but television is a special medium, which requires a certain charisma and an ability to "break through" the two-dimensional screen. Very few priests managed to do that.

We also had the opportunity to begin teaching religion, as many parish schools began to open again. I remember when I was serving in Kaunas in the early 1990s, I volunteered to teach religion in one of the three Russian schools in the city. Although at first the school administration reacted with suspicion, eventually I was teaching first, second and third graders. Then it became clear that at all levels students wanted to study religion. I had to spend ten hours a week in school teaching religion to all grades. Then, the other two schools in Kaunas asked me to teach religion. Eventually I had time only for church service in the morning and teaching the rest of the day. Finally I recruited some of my parishioners, gave them some basic training, and sent them off as teachers of religion. Many priests at that time faced similar challenges, when there is so much freedom but one has neither the manpower, the resources, the time, or the skills to address them.

The Church is not even close to taking advantage of all the opportunities it now has. In coming decades the Church's main task, barring a sharp political turnabout in the country, is to meet the challenges of this new-found freedom.

## On Church-State Relations

In Soviet times the Church was formally separated from the state, but this separation worked only in one direction. The Church had no support from the state, but for its part the state actively intruded in Church life and collected huge taxes. Priests and bishops had to be approved by the authorities. The number of monks in monasteries was limited and regulated as well.

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But even before the 1917 Revolution, the Church was not free. For a long time it was part of the state apparatus. In the beginning of eighteenth century Peter the Great initiated reforms and eliminated the institution of the Patriarchate, installing in its place the Holy Synod, a collegium of Church leaders presided over by an official appointed by the state. During the two hundred years before the Patriarchate was restored in 1918, the Russian Church was stripped of its canonical authority. One can therefore say that the Church has not been free for some 300 years.

This is the first time in many centuries that we exist completely independently of the state. Today the Church is finally separated from the state, which for once does not meddle in internal church matters. I think it is important for the Church to preserve this kind of relationship. After the collapse of Communism, it became very tempting for people to fill the new ideological vacuum with the Orthodox faith. For Western people it might be normal to live their lives without some kind of unifying state ideology. But for our people it was out of character, and many in politics and in the Church alike were seriously looking for some kind of unifying ideology. They turned to Orthodoxy as a candidate for such a role. So far the Church has not become a part of the state and our official position is that we do not want to become part of the state again and lose our new-found freedom. We must work out some sort of *modus vivendi* and *modus operandi* that would enable the state and the church to live side by side independently of each other, but at the same time would enable the church to influence public policy in the areas of morality and spiritual revival. Ideally, the church would like be a source of a moral authority for the people, while preserving its independence from the state.

## Russia's Future and its Place in the Larger World

I should like to share my vision about what kind of society Russia should be. The spread of American "standards of civilization" is becoming the number one problem in the world. As Samuel Huntington argues, the modern world is divided among several "civilizational poles." One such pole is Western civilization and it lives according to a liberal standard that holds the human being as "the measure of all things." This civilization is focused on the human being, on the improvement of his condition and the protection of his rights. This humanistic civilization is successful in those parts of the world where it has developed for centuries, since the Renaissance. The countries that have accepted these humanistic standards provide high standards of living and welfare support for the population. Religion is a matter of free choice; nobody is forced into any faith, and no religion is prohibited. The humanistic civilization of the West keeps religion in the private sphere.

However, there are other civilizations. Moslem civilization is not humanistic; it places religion rather than the individual at the center of community life. Many moral values of the West and the Moslem world overlap, of course, many do not. Today the West takes a very tolerant approach to sexual minorities, so long as they do not break any rules. Such tolerance is unthinkable in the Moslem world. And there are many such points of divergence.

Apart from the Moslem world, there are countries belonging to what one might call the Orthodox civilization. They are not necessarily Orthodox countries; indeed, I would not describe today's Russia as an Orthodox country. But these are countries where Orthodoxy has played a key role in their cultural development, has laid the foundation of their moral and spiritual values, their worldview. Among these countries you will find such states as Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria,

Georgia, and Greece, to mention only a few. Greece, of course, stands at a crossroads between its Orthodox heritage and its current Western political orientation.

What do we see happening today? After the fall of the Iron Curtain many people thought that it would be very easy to unify the countries of the West and the countries of the Orthodox heritage that had remained until then in the Communist camp. But this was not so easy as people might suppose. In a way, we are watching a new Iron Curtain emerge across Europe, one that does not match the former frontier between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Instead, it separates the countries of Western civilization from those of the Orthodox heritage. Note that all the Eastern European countries which have successfully integrated with the West (like Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states) are either Catholic or Protestant in their persuasion, while the left-outs are traditionally Orthodox (like Serbia).

Russia today is one of those countries which cannot live according to Western standards of civilization. This is partially the reason why the liberal democratic reformers in Russia, who came to power in the wake of Gorbachev's reforms, very quickly fell out of public favor. They were pro-Western but they did not take into account Russian specifics, including Russia's spirituality, psychology, and national traditions. As a result, they suffered a fiasco. At this point it is not clear who will lead Russia in the next century, but I do not think that it will be the Western-oriented democrats.

The challenge for the West is to understand that it is impossible to have the whole world run by the same standard of civilization. This is one lesson of the Yugoslav conflict. Since the times of the tower of Babel, when God made humans speak multitude of languages, any kind of unity of humankind is impossible by any means but the divine. Humanity is a diverse mixture of peoples, countries, cultures, languages, traditions and laws. It is not humanly possible to have these diverse peoples accept a common standard.

The real danger is when particular standards of civilization are imposed on (or imported into) countries which are not ready to adopt them. Russia differs from the Western world in that it never had the Reformation, the Renaissance, or the revolutions of the nineteenth century that shook Europe and laid the foundations of today's liberal societies. Russia's standards of civilization can be different from those of the West. The greatest challenge for the West is to understand that and let Russia develop along its own unique path, not taking advantage of its current economic weakness and its dependency on the West.

## Russia's Own Challenge and the "National Idea"

The great challenge before us now is to chart our country's path into the next century. During the seventy years of the Soviet era, we were told what to believe and which road our country should take. Although this doctrine was both false and imposed on us, at least it gave some guidance to our people. Today nobody knows today what the country's national idea is. I believe the Church can play a crucial rule in helping to form this idea.

I do not believe that Russia needs a unifying ideology, nor do I think that Orthodoxy should try to assume such a role. But I do believe that Russia needs a clear vision of its path and its role in the world. It would be unfair to think of Russia as a country completely unlike any other, although there are many people in our church who believe that Russia is a messianic country with a specially ordained role. But one has to admit that Russia has its own history, civilization and culture. After seventy years of a Communist regime it must find its own face. Here Russian Orthodoxy could play a pivotal role. It is not an ideology and you can call it the

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"Russian national idea," if you want, but whatever it is, it should guide Russia's overall development, as well as its foreign and domestic policy. This vision, this national idea, must emerge from the people, although I am not sure what individual or organization could articulate it now. The national idea must be rooted in Russia's development before the revolution, during the Soviet period, and in the last 10 years. I do not think we need to wait centuries for the national idea to emerge, but at least some years.

Many people today use the biblical metaphor of Moses taking his people to wander in the desert for forty years in order for the older "generation of slaves" to die out and for the new free generation to emerge. They imply that we need to wait until the current generation disappears before a workable new national idea emerges. I do not think this metaphor is applicable to us. Every generation must take part in building the new Russia. Moreover, we cannot simply discard our Soviet past, however horrible it may have been. No foreign interventionist army forced Communism down our throats: it emerged from Russia's own history and development. What we need to do is learn valuable lessons from the horrible and excruciating period of Communism. This applies to the Church as well.

You hear many voices in the Church today calling for it to return to the nineteenth century, viewed as the golden age of Church-state relations, when the two institutions worked in tandem and were very close. In fact at that time Orthodoxy was a state religion, closely supervised by the Tsarist regime. And we saw how it all ended in the early twentieth century, when the people turned away from the Church. The same persons who attended obligatory religious instruction in schools in the 1910s persecuted the church in the 1930s and 1940s, burning icons and killing priests. The church must learn a valuable lesson from what happened in 1917 and thereafter, in order to find its appropriate place with respect to the state and make sure that it does not repeat its past mistakes.

## Russia and the West

In the political sphere, the West should not use Russia's current economic dependency on the West in order to impose its values on us. We felt this kind of blackmail when some in the West said that Russia would be denied loans and credits if the Duma approved legislation in 1998 regulating the practice of religion (the "law on freedom of conscience"). This tactic might have worked in the colonial regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth century, but it will be counterproductive in today's Russia.

As to religion, Western Christians should not view Russia as a wide-open field for proselytizing. Russia is a country with a millennium-old Christian tradition, and the Church is trying hard to help the Russian people reconnect with this tradition. In the last few years foreign missionaries have virtually invaded Russia. They come, often not even speaking the language, and start proselytizing as if this were a land of pagans, as if the country had never known Christianity. Any kind of Western mission in Russia should strive to work with the local Orthodox Church; otherwise the mission will become a proselytizing one. When missionaries use the lack of religious education among our people and recruit them into their sects en masse, it is unfair and has nothing to do with freedom of conscience. Freedom of conscience presupposes the possibility of choosing between different religions or ideologies. But one cannot be free to choose if one does not know much about his own tradition.

## The Potential for Church Reform

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The term "reform" does not apply well to the Orthodox Church, which is very traditional by nature. At its core the church is based on tradition, the unbroken chain that starts with Jesus Christ and the Apostles and continues down to our day. However, in every century the Church has had to adapt its tradition to the specific era in which it lived. On the one hand, the Church must use the modern ways of approaching people, but on the other hand it must remain traditional in terms of doctrine, spirituality, and morality. We cannot sacrifice Biblical values in favor of liberal ideals. Western colleagues tell us that men and women are equal and therefore women must be ordained as priests. We do not disagree about gender equality, but we cannot contravene centuries of church tradition that prohibit women from performing church services. Similarly, with the advance of the rights of sexual minorities, many in the West now talk about church-approved marriages between homosexuals and lesbians. In Russia this will never work.

Nonetheless, along with what must not be changed Orthodox ritual, some aspects of the Church's work are subject to revision, for example, how we present our teaching, organize our system of theological education and operate the system of church governance.

We should examine the problem of Old Church Slavonic used in the services. Some suggest that we should conduct services in modern Russian language in order to make them more accessible. If we were to switch our services to Russian, however, we would have to drop many of our liturgical texts, which were written by ninth or tenth century Byzantine poets and cannot be fully translated outside of their original context. We cannot drop Old Church Slavonic without reforming the whole process of the church service; this is not an option for the Russian Orthodox Church. One can see how little the Catholic Church accomplished when it dropped Latin as the mandatory language of service: although services are now easily understood, this has not brought many more believers into the church. Parts of the holy texts, like the Gospel and the Epistles, could indeed be read in Russian, but most of the liturgical texts should remain in Old Church Slavonic.

Today we urgently need a radical reform of the system of Orthodox theological education. The system that is now in place is a relic of the nineteenth century. It is characterized by a narrow approach, the rejection of foreign influences and ideas, compulsory rituals, and occasionally a distrust of learning, all of which stifle creativity and independent thinking. This system is a legacy of the Soviet period, when priests were constrained by the state and could not develop new elements outside the approved curriculum.

First of all, we must encourage creativity and originality of thought, instead of forcing students to mimic mindlessly the manners and thoughts of their teachers. A priest who can improvise a lively, engaging sermon will be more effective with the parish than somebody who simply recites memorized texts in the nineteenth century style of homily. Instead of being passive listeners, students should become active learners and be given the conditions to do their own research outside the curriculum. Some of the students today are systematically persecuted for the sole reason that they overstep the bounds of the curricula in their studies; that they stand out from the rest of the students by refusing to be content with memorizing the material given to them and by trying to go farther and work on their own; that they learn foreign languages more intensively then their teacher requires them to do. Such students are sometimes accused of unorthodoxy and pride. As a result, the graduates of theological seminaries more often than not are narrow-minded, inhibited, dispirited people.

It is true that the Russian Church has a horror of all things Western, non-Orthodox and foreign. But today's students in theological schools should be educated in a spirit of tolerance

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and openness towards other confessions, in part by studying comparative theology and world religions. Let us not fear that such "foreign influences" will steer students away from Orthodoxy. On the contrary, they will make our priests only stronger in theological disputes with representatives of other confessions. To this end we should also encourage educational exchanges with universities abroad. Learning ancient and modern foreign languages is exceedingly important for the priests of the twenty-first century: nobody should be allowed to graduate from the academy without speaking one of the three major European languages (English, French or German).

Some new disciplines should be introduced to the curriculum. We must study the accomplishments of Western theologians and Orthodox theologians who developed Orthodox thinking abroad during the Soviet era. We must shift the focus from empty-minded memorization of dates and names to the thoughtful study of topics and personalities in Church history. We must give our students an extensive course in classical philosophy; today they either do not study it at all or have a superficial introductory course. Another important subject is pastoral psychology; many of our clergymen know absolutely nothing about mental health issues and in their work with the parishioners cannot distinguish between spiritual phenomena and diseases of the mind. Sometimes what is assumed to be the sin of despondency requires medical treatment rather than chastening and penance. Priests must be trained to recognize this.

Furthermore, the relationship between teachers and students today are unequal and often lead to the spread of cynicism and loss of faith among some disciples. It is no surprise that the percentage of the graduates of theological seminaries and academies who actually go on to take holy orders keeps falling year after year. We must find a fresh approach to students, one that is more sober-minded, more respectful, more humane and more Christian. The situation when the seminary inspector and his aides exercise absolute power over students and their daily lives must be abolished. It is also important to diminish the influence of monks over our educational institutions. Distrust of learning is widespread in the monastic milieu. Some monks believe it to be their duty to inculcate in the students of theological schools a negative view of learning as something that is almost antithetical to faith. Very often they also cajole some students into taking monastic vows instead of starting a family, thus recruiting to their ranks people whose hearts do not desire a monastic life, but who are forced to suffer for the rest of their days.

## *The Church in the Social Sphere*

The Church has always taken an active social position. We are involved in active philanthropy, sponsoring numerous orphanages, homes for the elderly, hospices and hospitals. However, the Church cannot possibly perform the social duties of the state--it simply does not have adequate resources. Thus, the main role of the Church is to help people survive and find their way in the current crisis. We should also try to make the state take better care of the people. Whatever philanthropic work we can do is but a drop in the ocean compared to the needs of the country and the capacity of the state to meet those needs.

We are developing new organizational structures so that we can work with others in positions of responsibility such as the non-governmental organizations, the armed forces, the president's administration, and the educational system. Although we are only at the very beginning of this process, we have faith that our efforts, in this sphere as in others I have mentioned, will contribute to Russia's spiritual and material rebirth.

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And, of course, the rebirth of the Church itself is inextricably bound up with that of the nation. As I sought to summarize this profound challenge in a recent article published in *Nezavisimaya Gazeta*, looking ahead to the future, the rebirth will be possible:

* When we have theologians of a higher level, educated in ways that our present schools cannot give them. They will include experts in the areas of Bible studies, Apostolic studies, Church history, and ancient and modern languages. However, these experts will not just appear unless we systematically train them and unless we reform the Church's entire personnel policy to accommodate this goal.

* When we reflect on and internalize the Church's entire twentieth century experience, of survival under persecution.

* When we begin the process of renewal of the Church life on all levels.

* When the Holy Scripture assumes an appropriate role in the life of the Orthodox Church.

* When we begin systematic work to translate and publish the works of the Church Fathers.

* When church service becomes accessible to common people.

* When the heritage of the Russian theological school and the experience of the "Paris Period" of Orthodox theologians in exile are incorporated and implemented by modern day Russian theologians.

* When Russian theology frees itself from the "Western prison" and returns to its Byzantine and ancient Christian roots. To insure this return we will need fresh theological forces and new creative approaches toward fundamental theological disciplines.

* When the new school of Orthodox theologians emerges, ready to take over the heritage from the Paris school and thus create a new theological vision for the twenty-first century. Although this school could emerge either in Russia or outside, I hope that it does emerge here, where we have all the conditions for its appearance.

* When we reform schools and seminaries of the Russian Orthodox Church, when their curricula undergo reforms to foster the students' creative potential.

* When we can create in the Church an atmosphere supportive of healthy academic theological discourse on the most vital themes of modern Church life.

The Russian Orthodox Church has enormous human resources, unmatched by any other Christian church in the world. Western seminaries are closing one by one, whereas here we are experiencing a rapid growth in the number of new schools. In the West they complain about the deficit of "calling" and lack of interest among people to dedicate their lives to Church, whereas here in many of our schools five candidates apply for every student slot. However, we need to learn how to use this potential most efficiently, through careful selection of personnel, by attracting young creative forces, by chandelling them in the right direction, and by encouraging our people to study abroad.

Russia on the verge of the twenty-first century is ripe for a theological rebirth. The Church still commands considerable trust from the people and the secular authorities. To lose this historic chance would be a crime. This is why we need to engage in renewal--not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively, not only in terms of new cathedrals, but also in terms of theology, education and mission. We have no other way.

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# Caring for the Homeless in St. Petersburg

Valerii Sokolov*

## Interview

Friday, May 28, 1999

St. Petersburg

I have been working with the homeless since 1990 and came to this work through a chain of fortunate coincidences. At the time I myself was homeless, living without an internal passport. I have lived in such cities as Pskov, Volgograd and St. Petersburg. At the time, I refused to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. I especially resented performing any kind of work that the state imposed on citizens. In 1989 I returned to St. Petersburg because it was strange for me to live through all the changes going on throughout the country and only hear from others about the changes happening in the major cities. I remember telephoning a friend in St. Petersburg who told me that at the May Day demonstration that year some marchers were carrying Imperial Russian tricolor flags-- and the police did not stop them. That's when I knew it was time to go back. I got my internal passport in 1995 and legal residence permit for St. Petersburg in 1994.

The years immediately following 1989 were the greatest time for our country. Anybody could do whatever he or she wanted. Some used the situation to steal state property and secure their own position in the new Russia as the "political elite." Others, who wanted to do something useful, had the opportunity to do so, because the oppressive Soviet machine of coercion was collapsing. Whoever wanted to steal, stole. Whoever wanted to work, worked. And we were among the latter.

Our initiative was quite simple. At the time the lack of a legal residency certificate (*propiska*) was a criminal offense clearly defined as such in the Criminal Code. I disagreed with this policy. We used the more open atmosphere of that period to work with the Leningrad City Council (Lensovet) to address this issue. But we did not lobby Council members, instead we worked with the homeless. We proposed that the City Council grant the homeless food coupons. In the wake of the general reform and the democratization impulse all over the country, the Council agreed. Easier said than done, however. Who would be distributing these food coupons? There was no mechanism in place. So the city authorities told me that since we had come up with this idea, we should become this mechanism. Thereupon Nochlezhka (translated as the "overnight hostel") was formed as the agency designed to register the homeless.

The homeless in St. Petersburg are quite fortunate. In contrast to Moscow, St. Petersburg today functions without the *propiska* system. Moscow is an example of the "crisis of authority." The authorities there have not been able to figure out the appropriate control mechanism, since they cannot use Soviet-era oppressive methods, but neither have they learned modern, more subtle, non-authoritarian methods of control.

Take one example. Today we publish the newspaper *Na Dne* ("At the Bottom"), which the homeless distribute to earn money. Our colleagues from Odessa, Ukraine and Minsk, Belarus have borrowed our experience and started similar projects, with some

* Valerii Sokolov is the leader of a charity group for the homeless Nochlezhka, and the publisher of the newspaper *Na Dne*, distributed by the homeless in St. Petersburg.

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success. However, in Russia itself this initiative is having a very tough time. We tried to launch a publication like this in Novosibirsk, but we encountered great opposition from the regional authorities. Ironically, the St. Petersburg city administration has done very little for the homeless, whereas in Novosibirsk the oblast has sponsored a homeless shelter. Naively, we assumed that the authorities in Novosibirsk would welcome our initiative, but they dislike giving their homeless the kind of independence that our project gives them in St. Petersburg. They want to give their homeless access to the shelter only in exchange for performing some form of public service. The shelter administrators suggested that we let the homeless spend the night in the shelter in exchange for selling the newspapers. But we did not want to sacrifice our principles in this way. I believe that a state agency charged with sheltering the homeless should provide free access to everybody who needs it, without imposing any kind of economic conditions, as long as this practice is consistent with broad social policy goals.

We are still trying to expand our initiative to Russia's regions, hoping that people will start publishing similar newspapers locally. Usually we advertise the project in the local press, but those who respond want to know first of all how much we will pay. They assume they would be working for a local branch of our agency, not starting their own indigenous group. This is a very serious problem, typical of the kind we started having after 1991. From 1988 to 1991 enthusiastic activists, who believed in their cause and wanted to make a difference, started many civic initiatives, but today people expect to be paid for their services. Some even tell us: "We no longer believe in anything. We are prepared to work with you, but at least you should pay us something."

Another of our major accomplishments was registering the homeless to vote in two national elections (1993 and 1996). St. Petersburg is perhaps the only city in the world where this ever happened. It was extremely hard work, but it was worth it. We made certain that there were no violations of rules at the polling stations, so nobody could doubt the validity of our work, and the Central Electoral Commission accepted it. In 1996 we helped over 2,000 homeless register to vote in the presidential election, and television gave heavy coverage to the long lines before our polling stations. During this time we increased our registration database by over 1,000 people, for the most part those who were living in St. Petersburg without residence permits. These people had good jobs and incomes, had simply never bothered to obtain permits; our polling station was the only place where they were eligible to vote.

Since 1992 we have been providing the homeless with legal counsel, most recently with the help of the Soros Foundation. We have two lawyers and two social workers on the staff. Usually we help our clients draft proper legal documents, citing the relevant provisions of the law. The most common problem our clients encounter is real estate fraud. Every week we air a local television program, called an informal talk with the "hero of the day." One program exposed a swindle involving privatization of a large communal apartment. At first the police investigators assigned to the case refused to cooperate with us, but our program changed their attitude and made a difference.

Our greatest success is our newspaper, *Na Dne*, which began publishing five years ago, in 1994. Originally, we had no foundation support and started with our own money, using our own Russian methods. As a matter of fact, the first Russian newspaper called *Na Dne* came out in Moscow in 1912. Named after the famous play by Maksim Gorkii, it made a huge splash in Russian society by exposing the horrors of life at the very

bottom of the community. So, in 1994 we actually revived this newspaper. Today we
can do little to emulate the kind of shock that Gorkii's play made in Russian society at the
turn of the century. Right now we are running a project, "Tell Your Story," designed to
give the homeless an opportunity to share what it feels like to be homeless. We hope this
project will give the public a new perspective on the homeless problem. At first our
circulation was 30,000 copies, but now it is only 10,000, although the paper has grown
from four pages to sixteen. *Na Dne* comes out every two weeks. Recently, in May 1999,
we started a new newspaper project, called *Senatskaia Ploshchad* ("The Senate Square")-
-my own crazy idea to raise money and help finance *Na Dne*. If we could make
*Senatskaia Ploshchad* profitable, we could perhaps make enough money to foot the bill
for the rest of our operations. We distribute this paper free of charge in hopes of
attracting advertisers in large numbers.

attracting advertisers in large numbers.
Another accomplishment: last year was we successfully lobbied the city
administration to launch a program of preventive action against homelessness. As a
result, the city established a center to keep track of the homeless who used to have the St.
Petersburg *propiska*. The center issues them special residence permits that legalize their
status and the police cannot abuse them as they would if the homeless had no documents
at all. Our own workload has been reduced by this agency, which now registers all who
used to be legal St. Petersburg residents, while we still keep track of all the other
homeless. And because this registration agency is now part of the bureaucratic machine,
it is impossible to stop it, so it will work in perpetuity. Since the time when we helped
create this agency, we have had a falling out with the administration of St. Petersburg
Governor Vladimir Yakovlev: they tried to deport the homeless in large numbers outside
the city limits during the election campaign in 1998, when I was running for the city
Legislative Assembly. Two years before the state had pledged to open several shelters a
year, but the authorities failed to do so. They decided to solve the problem by physically
removing the homeless.
the administration and the Legislative Assembly. Usually we pick

We lobby both the administration and the Legislative Assembly. Usually we pick
a group of assembly members whom we deem to be closest to us politically and start
talking with them, planting seeds of ideas in their heads. Eventually they begin thinking
that the ideas are theirs and then are more likely to work hard to push them through.
Word of mouth is the best advertising

that the ideas are theirs. And then are more likely to work hard to push them through.
We do not advertise our activities. Word of mouth is the best advertising
campaign. For instance, we regularly receive letters from over 40 prison facilities,
requesting us to send newspapers, cigarettes or clothing. We did try to help, but right
now we have no resources.
we have about 30 people working in our various projects and agencies. Some

now we have no resources.
We have about 30 people working in our various projects and agencies. Some
income comes from the export of craftsmen-made birch-bark boxes to Great Britain. We
are also discussing a joint venture to export cedar oil to Great Britain. We get some help
from the Russian émigré community, mostly private benefactors. I do not like to engage
in fundraising: my philosophy is that people who want to help the homeless will find us.
If I have to go to somebody and explain to them the need to help the homeless, that's a
different story. I also like joint ventures where there is mutual benefit and profit. We can
form a business partnership, make money together, and then each side can use the funds
for whatever they want.
We do not depend for our existence on

Our total budget is $200,000 a year. We do not depend for our existence on
Western foundations, although we rely on their support. We have financing from the

(L)

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British Know-How Fund, which sponsors a project on "social advertising," which aims to influence the public creatively through the use of images. Many social problems are so localized that society as a whole is unaware of them: for example the spread of AIDS, diabetes, cancer, and homelessness. Creative advertising technologies can help the public develop subconscious awareness of social problems and find within itself a desire to help. Our partner is one of the largest British advertising agencies. We have had talks with the Mott Foundation about financing our regional chapters, but they were not enthusiastic about our work--it was not global enough, they said. Homelessness is a truly global problem, however: it touches on all aspects of life and affects a remarkable cross-section of society.

Aside from my work with the homeless, I take an active part in local politics. However, I keep my personal political ambitions separate from Nochlezhka. I first ran in 1995 for the State Duma, using my own money. For the duration of the campaign, I resigned from my regular duties in Nochlezhka in order to make sure that nobody could accuse us of being politically partial. I do not belong to any existing parties and believe that average people who are disappointed in the current regime should organize and create their own party.

Western donors have much to learn about Russia. One of the problems is excessive reliance on governmental structures. Take one example: in 1995 I submitted to TACIS a proposal for a grant of 200,000 ECUs to implement a project that would have turned around the situation in St. Petersburg dramatically. Although the initial response was favorable, we were ultimately turned down. When I telephoned to find out why, they told me that TACIS had consulted with Russian government officials, who said that if TACIS funded a non-governmental initiative that might become more effective than the government, this would undermine Russian statehood.

Often we face a lack of understanding about our work. Some people are offended: Why should we help the homeless when there are other social groups that need urgent care, including the sick, the elderly, the handicapped? Why should we spend our energy helping people who are already "wasted" and empty. My response: they are still human beings and citizens, they simply lack *propiska*. The main problem with Western aid agencies is that they try too hard to have a cooperative relationship with the authorities. In fact, if they are working with the authorities currently in power, that means they do not believe that a truly democratic alternative can emerge in the future. But I can tell you that people who vote at the polls can overthrow the powers that be, as happened in St. Petersburg in 1996 when, in part as a result of our efforts, Yakovlev defeated incumbent Mayor Anatolii Sobchak.

Our greatest disappointment in the last nine years was when certain Western partners, whom we had trusted in good faith, used us for their own needs and never gave anything back. For example, we worked with one German organization which used us as a way to fundraise and make a lot of money in Germany. They would encourage German "good Samaritans" to make tax-deductible contributions to help the Russian homeless, whose photographs they obtained from us. They even gave people receipts for their donations. What the individual donors did not know was that we saw none of that money. In this way the group stole about DM 1.5 million from us. I really do not like it when people use the tragedy of the homeless to make money.

In contrast, our partners in Scotland are very professional and honest. Everything in our dealings with them is out in the open. If we agree to go into a joint venture together to make money, we clearly set out the division of labor and the profits. If they want to give us financial support, we also clearly outline the terms of agreement. When there is an equal partnership, the work thrives. But when one partner is trying to deceive the other, it is not acceptable. There are six billion people in the world, and ultimately through trial and error, we will find the partners we want.

Of course, I have my own vision of how the problem of homelessness should be addressed. We live in a real world, however, where both the state and the non-governmental organizations lack the resources, so we have to make do with what we have. I have a vision for a system of social infrastructure that would enable any person to lift himself up from being homeless and take his own, dignified place as a member of society. This system would address the many problems faced by the homeless, including dependency on drugs and alcohol and lack of faith in one's own self. We need a structured network of psychological counseling and emotional support, to help these people believe in themselves. Under such a system they can eventually move up higher and higher until attaining complete reintegration into society.

The situation is different in the West. These nations have long-established economic and social systems. In the course of my work I often travel to Scotland. I notice that the homeless there occupy a certain niche, which leaves very little room for upward mobility. This means that potentially he can move up in the world: get a decent job, and even have a house with a garden, and deal with all problems of "normal" life, like car payments, parking fees, and mortgage payments. Maybe it works there. On the other hand, what is happening in Russia today might be useful for the West to learn. Our homeless live on the edge and have learned to survive in hostile environments. This might be a crazy idea, but I think that if you could give them a business to run (of course, under certain conditions), they would be incredibly successful: because they are used to fighting against the odds, they have become naturally entrepreneurial. As human beings and as survivors they are incredibly flexible and have great potential. Of course, you cannot just give them money and tell them to run a business: it is crucial first to provide them with a framework of psychological support and give them the confidence they need.

(cc)

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# What Future Awaits the Russian Press? A Prognosis

Iosif Dzialoshinskii*

Today it is impossible to find one person in Russia who is satisfied with the condition and performance of the press in general, and the regional press in particular. Everyone criticizes the press, radio, and television quite vehemently. I won't repeat or rebut the charges; I will say that most of them are just. But listening once again to the invectives against the press, I recall the years of my youth, spent at the regional newspaper *Leninskoe znamia* [Lenin Banner] and at the republic-wide Communist Party newspaper *Sovetskaia Moldaviia* [Soviet Moldavia], and I realize what a gigantic leap forward the former Soviet press has made. At least, a significant portion of the press has moved forward.

Understandably, such a swift transformation could not avoid various deformations, sometimes quite morbid and unpleasant. But in any case I have a much more positive reaction to an unkempt, sweaty running man than to a well-touched-up, flawlessly dressed, and respectable corpse. Nevertheless, the tendencies of development in the Russian press are such that we need to consider where it is going and what kind of a future awaits it.

## *The Past*

In the years 1991-1995, Russia made the third attempt in its history to get out of the trap of totalitarianism. The first two attempts (1825 and 1917) ended with an even greater clampdown on the individual. The necessary, but extremely painful, transition from Soviet totalitarianism touched the foundations of state and society. So abrupt and simultaneous were these transformations that the crisis phenomena took the form of disjunctive and leapfrogging changes, violating the usual cause-and-effect paradigm.

The real (and some would say only) result of the reforms was glasnost. The press, the mass media, turned into an important, and perhaps the most authoritative, social institution of those years. And yet, while promoting the values of democracy and market relations in society, Russian journalists did not apply those principles to themselves. It was a golden age for freedom of speech; the press could fight against Communism as well as the current regime, while being paid quite well by that regime. You could say whatever you wanted, without thinking about any economic consequences. With the lifting of censorship, the press nevertheless retained state subsidies; prices were laughably low, and circulation rose sharply. While fighting for the switch to a market economy for the country, only a few editors tried to imagine what that market economy would mean for them personally and for the publications they headed. Few tried to change their own economic base or the management of their publications.

New publications kept being created with no reason for their existence except the desire of their ambitious founders or journalists. For instance, in the period 1993-1997, the number of registered periodicals in Russia rose by 45 percent. At the same time the subscription circulation

* Iosif Mikhailovich Dzialoshinskii - Born in 1945 in Azerbaijan, Dzialoshinskii grew up in the Far East but moved to Moldavia to begin his journalistic career. He worked in several newspapers there, then earned his Ph.D. in philology at the journalism school of Moscow State University and afterward held research and teaching positions in Moscow. In 1993, together with his partners, he founded the Institute for Humanitarian Communications, which he still heads. A civil rights activist, he has published numerous books and articles and often appears on TV to discuss media issues.

throughout the country fell by about 32 percent. Even if we add retail sales and take alternative subscriptions into account, the trend was still negative.

In Moscow alone there are still 15 daily newspapers of quality. In the city of Yekaterinburg, with a population of one and half million, and an average annual income in 1998 of just over $1,600 per capita and a monthly advertising market of $2,000,000 (before the August crisis of 1998), there were 170 periodical publications, a dozen radio stations, and twelve television channels. Television's share of the advertising market in Ekaterinburg was approximately one third, between $500,000 and $700,000 a month. Those twelve channels existed on $700,000 a month, but 80 percent of the advertising revenue went to only three channels. The question arises: "What were the other nine channels living on?"

This press system is needed only by those who work in it and those who give money to it. Even the so-called Russian media empires were behaving like socialist states rather than capitalist enterprises. They were not counting their money.

However, the euphoria of the early perestroika years quickly ended. Glasnost itself needed certain guarantees, the most important of which were a developed civil society, coordinated market transformations, and the development of democratic institutions based on establishing a truly effective judicial and law enforcement system.

Absent such guarantees, freedom of the press quickly dried up, and journalists felt deceived. It turned out that changing the name of the publication and its founders was not enough to solve all the problems. After the economic and political cataclysms, came a wholly predictable drop in the population's interest in mass media. The circulation of newspapers and magazines fell several times and is unlikely ever to return to those previous levels. Some newspapers have ceased to exist.

Having felt the cruel hand of the market, many journalists started asking for a return to socialism. In fact, in January 1994, the editors of several large newspapers threatened a strike, demanding financial subsidies from the government. The Union of Journalists of Russia, the Committee on Information Policy and Communications of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, the Russian Federation Committee on the Press all played at the same game, if not in total harmony, trying to bring the mass media out of the market--and they almost succeeded.

However, the social system, having moved from one condition to another, sharply changed the nature of the demands made upon information subsystems in general and journalism in particular. Russian journalism responded to these demands by broadening the repertoire of the mass media, changing the priorities of its activities, revising criteria for personnel evaluation, introducing new technologies, and reorienting the professional mindset.

Another problem that arose in those years for Russian journalists grew out of the need to find a new professional, spiritual, social and political identity. Tens of thousands of workers in newspapers and magazines, radio and television now had to determine for themselves how they would behave. Many had to overcome decades-long professional principles and goals and develop altogether new criteria for self-appraisal. The rapid changes in those early transition years actually led many Russian journalists to a kind of mental breakdown. Formerly immovable perceptions began to fluctuate, crumbled, and were then replaced. Much of what journalists had taken as incontestable truths turned out to be errors, lies, or illusions; and what used to be considered erroneous, suddenly turned out to be the truth.

It was particularly difficult to define one's political stand. The thinking of most Russian journalists in that period was a rather bizarre mix: ideas of openness to the West, recognition of the market, and adherence to democratic values jostled with populism, concepts of social justice

under a powerful state, elements of paternalism, and faith in Russia's great historic mission. This uneasy amalgam of limited economic liberalism with moderate cultural nationalism and notions of sovereignty formed the basic sociopolitical position of many Russian journalists. (In fact, many still hold these views today.)

The search for a new professional identity was complicated by the need to choose among
several concurrent ideologies that Russian journalists used to explain and justify their activity.

One of these ideologies orients the journalist toward messianic, enlightening, and propagandistic action. Under this philosophy, journalists contend that they express the highest interests of the state and society; therefore they have the right to manage (and sometimes even to manipulate) the minds and actions of the broad public. For such a journalist, the audience is an object of action, an object to be mastered.

Another ideology, one imported from the West, allowed journalists to regard themselves as unprejudiced purveyors of the news, getting information and passing it on to society without bearing any responsibility for how it would be used, or by whom.

A third professional ideology, derived from the best examples of Russian editorial writing, required the journalist to work toward solving specific social and human problems.

Naturally, there was (and is) a fourth ideology--to earn as much money as possible by offering the audience those news items, impressions and images for which it is willing to pay a lot of money. In this case, a journalist regards himself as an instrument for satisfying the clients' desires. The audience is not a partner in communication, but a consumer of services: "The client is always right."

These approaches to the meaning and organization of journalism differ from one another in every essential criterion of professional self-appraisal: the basic goals of the journalist as set by himself (or someone else); the intended audience; the means by which the writer plans to reach his goals; and the methods and technology he uses.

It is a difficult professional choice, and it has yet to be made.

New kinds of knowledge were now required. Thousands of seminars and training sessions were held in editorial offices and schools to help journalists understand how to manage and market newspapers, determine editorial policy, and design advertising policy. American journalists were of great help; they visited even the most remote newspapers and patiently explained to their Russian colleagues how to publish newspapers and magazines, or run television and radio programs, under market conditions.

However, the American experience did not translate very easily into Russian reality.

## The Present

The functioning of journalism in Russia today is determined by a set of four institutions that consume its product.

First, the government. Not only does it determine the rules of the game but it generates, commissions, and consumes media products. The government can buy journalists or force them to comply with its demands. Coercion can take many forms, exploiting for example, the need to request office space from local bureaucrats or the fear that the authorities might turn off the electricity or raise the rent. But the problem is not only that the state is actively interested in journalism: many journalists themselves see the government as the most important, if not the only, source of public vitality. Over 70 percent of journalists use government agencies as topics for reporting and sources of information.

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Second, big business. Russia's criminalized business is very interested in having the media operate in a certain way. Because very few authentic businessmen seriously believe that media investments can be profitable, organized crime controls journalism and the entire system, both directly and indirectly. Bribery, pressure of various kinds, and invitations to join various prestigious associations are among the weapons used.

Third, the intelligentsia. At the dawn of perestroika and glasnost, the only groups controlling the media were the government representatives and the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia was the principal supplier of media content. And then, as circumstances changed, the intelligentsia was shunted aside. Nevertheless, it still continues to influence the media, particularly through the use of information associations and inducements to attract journalists to them.

Finally, civil society. Journalists take an active part in public organizations and many become leaders of civil society groups.

The government wants journalists to give it a pleasant face, to polish its image; it pays or gives subsidies for that. So journalists fulfill official commissions. The business community wants journalists to push their interests. Journalists (for appropriate compensation) prepare and publish commissioned articles in great quantities, with enthusiasm. The intelligentsia wants journalists to bring to the public certain theories, myths, and values they have created. And since the intelligentsia can pay nothing, it writes its own articles and pressures the media to publish them--whether or not those ideas and theories meet the profound needs of the population. The components of civil society also want the press to help them solve their problems.

Surrounding these four structures, on the periphery of the system, are the average readers, viewers, and listeners, who, truth to tell, are of no great interest to many practitioners in the media because they bring little profit and cause much trouble.

And what do the journalists want? In Russia today, according to the Union of Journalists of Russia, there are over a hundred thousand professional journalists, that is, people who consider themselves to be professional journalists. These are people who are accustomed to a certain life style, a certain social position, and a certain professional behavior.

Analyzing the relationship among these four elements of Russian media (and leaving aside the daily kaleidoscope of flickering news items on the TV screen) we find that all of us are in the dramatic situation of losing our illusions. In many respects Russia has retreated from the ideas that gripped people's minds during the first period of political and economic transformations.

In journalism, one consequence of that crash is the desire of the Russian nomenklatura to remind journalists who is boss. Regional leaders are especially active in trying to housebreak journalists, although the federal authorities, beginning with Yevgenii Primakov's government, also began severely limiting access to information. In the second half of 1999, with the approach of elections to Duma and the presidency, pressure on the independent press intensified.

## The Future

Even in these complex conditions, however, Russian journalists are energetically defending their right to professional independence. They are fighting for the enactment of federal laws that would put an end to any possibility of governmental interference with the press. They are actively lobbying for the passage of draft legislation "On the Right to Access to Information." They are demanding legal regulation of the electronic mass media; in the absence of a law

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regulating television, broadcasters end up so slavishly dependent on the executive authorities that one cannot speak of them as independent media.

Information legislation in the regions is beset with particularly acute problems. During our research on the legal framework for mass media in the regions of Russia we found that most often the regional lawmaker sees the media as an instrument of government influence on the political and economic development.

Moreover, freedom of speech and other human rights in the different regions are so sharply differentiated that Russia in effect has 89 different political systems. Compare, for instance, freedom of speech guarantees in Sverdlovsk Oblast with those in autocratically governed Kalmykiya.

The next focus of the journalists' fight for their future is the creation of a functioning market for mass media.

In the Soviet years, a system was created, perfect in its own way, for organizing press activity, complete with pre-determined circulation figures, planned subscriptions, fixed prices, and so on. That system guaranteed journalists a rather comfortable environment. After representatives of the mass media obtained their freedom, though, they discovered that freedom had its down side. The market in which they found themselves was not at all the way it was described in textbooks. Trying to adjust to this strange market, only a few publications followed a market path by improving the quality of their product, modifying it to meet consumer demand, or attracting advertisers. Most editors resorted to very different methods: publication of commissioned materials under the guise of journalistic exposes, renting out their premises, not paying taxes, using undeclared cash, and so on. During this period, some regional newspapers fawned on government agencies. The editors asked the regional authorities for financial and other kinds of support; in exchange, they had to provide informational and political services. All this led to a corrupt press.

Those interested in the healthy development of the Russian press want to increase the transparency of the advertising and information markets, audit circulation figures of print media and issue reliable ratings of television programs. To the extent that such efforts bear fruit, advertisers who today doubt their ability to evaluate the effectiveness of their media advertising will gain confidence.

Russian journalists are also grappling with the issue of ethical self-regulation. In England, for example, no one would think of rushing to the courts if a newspaper should print inaccurate (as distinct from libelous) information. There, if a journalist violates one of the unwritten but well understood rules of journalism, he can lose his job and even be drummed out of the profession. In Russia, unfortunately, a professional community has not yet formed. Many journalists feel no responsibility before their colleagues (much less their readers or viewers), and this had led to many violations of professional ethics. Taking advantage of such breaches, several conservative legislators are calling for harsh laws that would protect society and the state from irresponsible journalists. In order to avoid such measures, many Russian journalists feel that the time has come to create their own institutions for regulating media operations and managing relations with the public and the state.

Russian journalists are once again keenly interested in professional development and have evinced great interest in *The Charlotte Project*, a book that recounts an experiment by an American journalist who was dissatisfied with her professional development and sought remedies. The book was not translated into Russian until 1998, even though it came out in the United States in 1994 and described an experiment conducted in 1988.

The ideas the book propounds were discussed intensively in training sessions for Russian journalists run by the Institute for Humanitarian Communications in 1999. The participants severely criticized the Russian media community for a widespread assumption that the function of journalism was purely information gathering and dissemination. This shift to a philosophy of "pure information" accompanied the shift in the public attitude toward journalists as hired hands who could be used to transmit all sorts of information, as long as it had some semblance of veracity. This attitude, in turn, has led to an increasing alienation between journalism and its audience, on the one hand, and frustration among journalists, on the other.

Russian journalists were very interested in how the idea of "civil journalism" could be integrated into a conceptual and technological system enabling Russian journalism to attain a new level of professionalism.

They particularly liked the idea that the means of mass communication had first of all to help the public influence politicians to understand the true interests of citizens. Many journalists from the regional media have gone much farther. They want to give journalism a human face, make it belong to the people, linking journalism with the profound need of Russians to express themselves and understand their place in life. An interesting example of this kind of journalism is the magazine *Severiane* [The Northerners]; the story of its founding can be read in the essay to this volume contributed by one of its founders, Olga Lobyzova. Such projects are happening in other regions of Russia, too.

An important result of these seminars was the formation of an "invisible college" composed of participants who advocate the idea of civil and socially responsible journalism. The Center for Civil Communications has as its basic goal to stimulate activities of the mass media directed at bringing citizens into a dialogue that could lead to the solution of social problems and the formation of civil society.

These training seminars, together with the publications of the Center for Civil Communications, have served as catalysts for a powerful transformation process in Russian journalism, which is coming to realize the vulnerability of a purely informational approach, and is trying to find an effective and comprehensible philosophy of professional activity.

Obviously, future changes will depend on the path of development the Russian state and society will take. The most pessimistic scenario assumes that the resistance of certain elements of society will ruin the plans for the country's transition to a market economy and democracy. The chances for this are very low, but not zero. If this should be the path our development takes, Russia would face the danger not only of internal catastrophe, but of external catastrophe as well. As for the press, it is clear that such a scenario would lead to the restoration of a totalitarian system of handling the mass media.

Another scenario, which many experts consider more likely, assumes that in the near future, Russia will become a moderately authoritarian state with a mixed economy of a state-capitalistic type. Should this scenario come to pass, the government would in the first instance try to control the mass media through economic and legal means.

In the final analysis, Russia's transition from an industrial society to an informational one will lead to the establishment and development of information and communication consortia, which will publish newspapers and magazines as well as print and audio-visual products. Such integrated information enterprises will make full use of new technological capabilities. Since these consortia will be steadily moving away from government influence, the authorities will try to hinder their development. In particular, they will use the pretext of combating media monopolies.

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As the country moves along the path of market reforms, many print media will go under. The periodicals that do survive will become more businesslike, contemporary, and responsive to the changing demands of the public. A determining factor in the increasing competition of newspapers with other media will be the quality of their product. Naturally, all this will require that journalists adjust to the accelerating pace of change.

Gradually, journalists will come to realize that the reader, the viewer, and the listener must be treated not as a mere recipient of information or an object to be manipulated or educated, but as a living, doubting, real person seeking an effective way of organizing his life. Such an approach will bring us closer to conducting a true dialogue directed toward providing an answer to the perennial question: "How should we live?"

In summing up, I can say that journalism in Russia today is undergoing a period of unique transformation. Like our society in general, it has emerged from the totalitarian shell and is trying to change into a normal structure of civil society. Some things work, and some don't. But unless the Russian press turns into an authoritative, independent institution of civil society, no other transformations in Russia will be possible.

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# My Life, My Fate--The Magazine *Severiane* and Russia's North

Ol'ga Lobyzova*

## Fate Foreshadowed

After starting to work at the city newspaper at age fifteen, I shifted to the drama theater. No, I don't want to describe the colorful opening nights, the life of an ordinary actor, or even the innovations of directors. The wardrobe master and light technician, the cloakroom attendant and stagehand, the ticket collector and hairdresser--they, too, deserve at least a share of the applause when the play ends and the curtain falls. The particular smell of the theater, its indescribable magnetism; perhaps you will sense them better when you meet--not the celebrated prima ballerinas and stars who are brilliant even in the provinces--but people of the modest theatrical professions, those who most often are unbelievably devoted once and for all to their chosen work, their theater.

In those distant "stagnant" 1970s, very diverse people chose such a path: those of a philosophical bent or the opposite; outright failures ("I don't give a damn") or those living difficult lives suffering some kind of breakdown; or those for whom the theater was a transitional stage before their final descent to the social nadir.

But I was taking my first timid steps in journalism and, naturally, couldn't express my thoughts about all this in a clear and striking manner. It was more like a premonition of a life theme, my first encounter with the breathtaking iceberg of life's diversity, that underwater part which a "bookish" schoolgirl could only dream about.

Then there was a passion for Pushkin and Dostoevsky, the question of psychologism in contemporary Soviet literature, the subject of my senior thesis. Along with my studies and a turbulent student life, library vigils and merry little feasts, scholarly conferences and tours along small Russian rivers, talks "about life" and cracking the "granite of science," I continued to work with the mass media in Nizhnii Novgorod. I remember to this day how I wound up in a boarding school for mentally retarded children, where I was confronted with tragedy, pain, devotion...

Before I defended my thesis, I began working in radio broadcasting at the manufacturing association "Kaprolaktam," one of the oldest and largest enterprises in Dzerzhinsk, the nation's leading city in the chemical industry, which employed over 30,000 workers.

At that time, in addition to newspapers with large circulation, radio editorial boards were established at municipal enterprises and research institutes. We worked with the municipal and provincial radio, met one another at seminars or elsewhere simply to discuss problems of life and work. Nearly all of us were very young; there was a spirit of competition and camaraderie between us. We valued the intonation and emotion in radio which gave us an advantage over the print media; after all, the papers, especially the official press, were blinkered and dried out as could be.

These lines may seem an odd assembly of reminiscences and unrelated thoughts. Actually, they aren't. Somehow they deftly and logically fall into place, row after row, within the conception I constructed during my professional. The embodiment of this concept of life was the appearance, survival and development of the people's magazine *Severiane* [The Northerners].

For five years thereafter I worked as editor at the radio station of the manufacturing association "Plastik." For the first time, I was responsible for virtually everything, including technical, ideological, and, of course, diplomatic issues. Soon, however, this favorite brainchild, the contracts I made, my thorough knowledge of the problems of management and workers,

* Ol'ga Grigor'evna Lobyzova - Born in 1955 in a provincial industrial town near Gorkii (present day Nizhni Novgorod), Lobyzova wrote articles for a local newspaper when she was only 15, and continued her journalistic career in Gorkii State University, where she studied history and philology. After graduation she pursued a career in radio journalism, while publishing articles in various newspapers. After moving to the Far North in 1986, Lobyzova continued her award-winning work in radio and the press. She is an active member of several journalistic professional associations.

suddenly began to burden me as being petty, demanding, and predicable. The limits of my activities seemed narrow and the paths well-worn. "Somehow I need more air here..."

But I didn't feel like wasting away in some fatal rapture: If I didn't try to go beyond the limits of this compulsion now, as soon as I could, while I still felt excited about my work and had the desire to change something in my life, make a foray into the unknown, I thought it would turn out to be impossible later. Life would move along under its own momentum and I would be left to regret unclaimed and, therefore, missed opportunities.

I sent job inquiries to the radio and television committees of Russia's five northern regions. Why particularly there? It seemed to me that the epicenter of major events was there, life was in full swing there, far away from everyday routine, out there in the harsh conditions of the Far North. At the peak of global aims and accomplishments, characters were forged that were different from one another; original people lived there, in a word--Northerners. The first to answer me was the committee at Salekhard, in the Yamal-Nenets region (itself a part of Tyumen Oblast). They suggested that I send several of my radio broadcasts as a business card. It was still that euphoric time, when everyone was talking about the Tyumen' North. It didn't require very much work to find an enterprise in my own city which made special equipment for the natural gas industries of Yamal and to interview people directly involved.

The broadcasts turned out to be of a high quality. The enterprise was refining a very powerful technological process to a high degree of precision and the workers talked about it simply, graphically, and professionally. I sent a small packet of text with my "creations" to my northern colleagues and awaited their reply. They responded dryly, even crudely, writing that they had received my packet, the broadcast had been aired, but it could have been even better. They didn't bother to introduce themselves and scrawled some kind of unintelligible hook instead of a signature. How was I supposed to address the "hook?" I answered the arrogant northerners in about the same spirit but sent them another couple of broadcast texts.

Soon after dispatching my harsh epistle, I received a phone call. It was Anatolii Konstantinovich Onel'chuk, the chairman of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District TV and Radio Committee. At that point, my sense of impasse intensified, grew solid enough to be palpable. His energetic voice sounded clear and enticing, like the voice of hope:

"Ol'ga Grigor'evna, were you offended by me?"

"And were you by me?"

And we both laughed at the same time. He suggested that I work with them a while to prove myself and take a look at them. My vacation time was approaching and I agreed without hesitating. I agreed without asking who was taking on what obligations, including the material ones; after all, even then the North was a distant and expensive "pleasure" for those of us who earned very average wages. But I was accustomed to being responsible for myself, always and in everything, especially since initiative, as we say, is punishable.

The last days of July 1985 in Moscow, as I was departing, were really scorching: on arrival in Salekhard I noticed that the vegetation was tender and somewhat sickly, as if it hadn't gathered up enough strength; there were little islands of popular fluff, like snow that hadn't melted and big-eyed daisies with green, still immature centers, not bright yellow ones. Instead of the usual concrete beneath the airplane's wheels we saw bumpy, camouflage-colored metal plates--it was the airstrip of a military airfield, which was supposed to have served as such for a very limited time. It's true what they say, nothing is more permanent than the temporary. From my first steps on the Salekhard said I discovered that everything here was on a temporary basis, as if they were just about to beat a retreat and everyone who could, would abandon these deserted, cold, God-forsaken, sparsely settled parts. And then everything would remain as it had been hundreds of years ago.

Salekhard stretches along the bright-blue Ob' River, immense in its lower reaches. The TV and Radio Committee was --and still is--located in one of the city's squat, listing little houses, in the former house of a merchant, without plumbing and basic amenities. But, thank God, such quarters are slowly becoming exotic: perhaps even before these lines appear in print, my colleagues will celebrate a housewarming in a modern building, specially equipped and designated for TV and radio journalists.

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When they do, I hope they will carry with them from their old "Radio House" above all what I felt during the first hours and days of my contact with them--a very kind, creative atmosphere and a passionate involvement with their work. They knew how to work and how to rest: winding up the day at a "kapustnik" [an evening of amateur stand-up comedy] in the radio committee for Salekhardians in those years was very lucky and very desirable.

A journey on an old all-terrain vehicle with constantly slipping track belts took me through the mountains of the Polar Ural region into Europe--along the routes of the summer nomads--and back into Asia, to their quarters, people who had never been seen before--reindeer breeders--and to their remarkable way of life, which flowed in closest harmony with nature, the vast distances and the peaks covered with snow that hadn't even melted by August, all worthy of Nicholas Roerich's brush... It was precisely after I came into contact with this multi-dimensional world of the tundra, so open and yet so secret--was it from the past? the future?--that my heart was taken once and for all by Yamal, a spacious land with a short and heavy name.

Once the North enters a person, it never releases him; it will return him to it even after years of separation, and in spite of the circumstances. The magazine *Severiane* features a column called "The Attraction of the North," in which people describe how they wound up in the North, how it received them, how it displayed both unexpected tenderness and stunning capriciousness. The North --is it salvation? Oblivion? Escape? Despair? Hope? Impasse? The subject is endless and unique. The leitmotif in each person's life are three dates, the day, month, and year when he arrived in the North.

April 9, 1986 is marked in my work record as my first working day in the North. Having worked for a little more than a year at the radio, I transferred to the regional newspaper *Krasnyi Sever*' [The Red North]. Thus, without suspecting it, I took several more steps toward founding *Severiane*: innumerable assignments, primarily into the Yamal interior and the launching of *Polyarnaya Zvezda* [The Northern Star], as a weekly, the first among the regional northern newspapers. Everyone created, searched for, and tested their own conceptions, styles, approaches. The search for form and content went on concurrently, this semi-official organ did not put pressure on other newspapers, and journalists had splendid opportunities for self-expression. Evolution, ethnography, culture, economics, society...

I wrote about old women from the tiny half-deserted village of Nori, about the Kuton'uransk bakers, who baked the most delicious bread under ghastly circumstances, about the search for wives for the reindeer breeders, about the boy with heart trouble abandoned at the Radio House, who suddenly acquired both a family and his health... At any rate, in the end, there was always room for hope in the conclusions of my copy. I didn't come across any absolutely hopeless situations or insurmountable circumstances. After all even death, no matter what anyone says, is the apotheosis of life. Its conclusion and quintessence. Besides, the weekly was no longer that boring little four-column number, whose style and size were determined from the outset and unchangeable. The weekly was already a symbiosis of a newspaper and a magazine, from which both entities gained. We worked with inspiration; we thought more about the newspaper, new heroes and publication topics, and less about ourselves. During perestroika the circulation of the regional newspaper reached its peak--twenty thousand copies for the nearly five hundred thousand inhabitants of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region. Ordinary people with their opinions, dreams, and problems, occupied the pages of the newspaper, at first timidly and then more and more confidently.

## Severiane --The New Color in the Palette of the Yamal Mass Media

Right up to the beginning of the "parade of sovereignties" the concept of a Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region was formal, not geographical. The address was written clearly and definitely--Tyumen Oblast, city of Salekhard. The majority of newcomers sought a quick ruble without even suspecting that they were in Yamal. The Tyumen regional administration dictated everything, even the smallest rules of the game. Our editorial staff had to request permission from the Regional Printers and Publishers agency for even the pettiest editorial expenses.

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But in the early 1990s, the Moscow center let go of the reins, lacking the power to hold them so tightly any longer. Yamal was one of the first in the country to begin the battle for its sovereignty and was finally recognized as a full-fledged subject of the Federation. In retaliation, Tyumen Oblast immediately expelled our newspaper. Yes, yes, imagine that the *Krasnyi Sever* [The Red North], after having become a weekly and switching from outdated type to modern offset methods, had to be printed in the city of Tyumen, two thousand kilometers from the Yamal's capital city. We had to send film with airplane crews and we picked up the printed copies in the same way.

It is only now that one of the best printing complexes in the Urals is located in Salekhard; all that remains is to master it the technology and train the specialists.

I was dispatched to Moscow to bring home the truth to Mikhail Poltoranin, then the Minister of the Press. The editor, however, didn't assign me any supergoals. "You probably won't get to see the Minister. So at least get through to one of his deputies. Explain that our situation is critical: the population and regional authorities cannot remain indefinitely without a publication of their own."

I nodded my head in agreement, but in my heart I swore to be loyal to my own newspaper: I would meet with Poltoranin himself no matter what and would try to convince him that we urgently needed help. Armed with the support of Vladimir Arteev, the region's representative in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, an energetic man of authority and a good friend of our newspaper, and after waiting in the Minister's reception room for over three hours, I bolted forward. My turn had come, but no such luck... Tyumen Oblast officials had beaten me to it through a direct telephone connection (their intelligence had worked efficiently); Ivan Kiapik, the head of the Oblast Graphic Publishers, had already telephoned Poltoranin. When I finally walked into Poltoranin's large, long office, he was standing beside his desk, gesticulating menacingly and inquiring loudly:

"Ah, you're the one who wants to appropriate the Salekhard printers and our equipment? You're the one separating yourself from everyone and hoping to survive independently?"

Nothing doing. Having been stuck in the reception room, I wasn't overcome by these overbearing cries, but charged into battle straightaway:

"What equipment, Mikhail Nikiforovich? Dating from the times of Ochakov and the conquest of the Crimea? Leave it for yourself, maybe it will be good for a museum exhibit. But first, you should also hear from the other side dragged into the conflict. And you ought to have a look at our newspaper. How do you like it?"

And I shoved a few copies of the *Krasnyi Sever* under his nose. Somehow he became kinder instantly. He even said that, if we were to continue on this way in the future, we would be fully capable of claiming a decent place in the nationwide championship of regional newspapers.

This was how we won the internecine war. Right up until the establishment of our own graphic base, we successfully published the paper, doing all our pre-publication work at the editorial-publishing complex of the *Krasnyi Sever*.

The Yamal region was visibly divided into rural, agrarian, industrial, and urbanized sections. For a long time the contrasts between life in one or another area were simply scandalous. The asphalted demonstration model town of Nadym was planted with parks and gardens, had straight rows of upright five-story buildings, was well supplied with food produce and manufactured goods, and offered its citizens suitable salaries. Virtually next door, right there, the villages and settlements of the Nadymskii district drowned in mud and decrepitude, offering neither normal life, work, nor prospects of any kind.

Settlers from other parts of Russia, many of whom were security guards or janitors, valued only money in all that northern life. They were frank to the point of shamelessness: "We'll be honest: we came here to take. To take everything if possible." These people regarded with condescension the stable, permanent population of the rural areas and Salekhard itself, which shared the fate of those regional territories which were not favored by the oil and gas generals. They felt they were the true masters of life. He who pays the piper calls the tune. And that is why the question arose of transferring the regional capital from the not prestigious, pitiful Salekhard,

4

continually financed from whatever was left over in the budget, to the multi-storied, brick and concrete city of Novyi Urengoi.

If you saw Yamal as only the richest storehouse of natural resources, then you had to grab everything valuable from there quickly and with a minimum of effort; you couldn't care less whether the grass grew or not. However, not everything is as simple as it may seem to worshippers of the Golden Calf. Yamal is an ancient land. It contains not only oil and gas, but archeological monuments and caveman settlements as well. It is the homeland of representatives of a unique Arctic civilization--the few remaining indigenous peoples of the Far North.

Our newspaper began talking about this emphatically and from a lofty civic perspective. The editorial staff then initiated two expeditions: along the "501st construction" route (everything connected with this project until then had been forbidden), and along the Ob River, from its source to its estuary in order to attract attention to the environmental problems of the greatest Siberian river. But judging from the circulation figures and subscription rate of the paper within the region, the population of the industrial part of Yamal was not very excited by these topics. We have not yet succeeded in changing this tendency.

Much has changed, nonetheless. Common sense and decency have prevailed. A Salekhardian, Yurii Vasil'yevich Neelov, a true native son, a man who thinks in a long-term perspective and judges matters sensitively, has become the governor of Yamal. Plans which had previously seemed strange and short-sighted have become achievable. The naked rationalism of the newcomers, who had often spent most of their northern biographies living out of suitcases and who never became intimates of this land, was replaced by filial concern for it and for those populating it. Land of my father, my birthplace--for Russians, these ideas belong to the category of eternal values.

Nor did what was happening elsewhere in Russia pass Yamal by. Builders, transport and road workers, oil and gas workers all experienced the effects of the general Russian crisis in full measure; employees of financial institutions and pensioners also began feel the pinch.

The social programs that Governor Neelov began implementing at the time were unprecedented. A bare listing of these innovations would take up extensive space. I will merely emphasize that, as a result of these programs, the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region in recent years is becoming a relatively successful Siberian area, even within Russia as a whole. Both the young and old are coming here, some to begin their northern biographies, some to end their working years, counting on a more or less secure old age. Who knows: perhaps with chronic Russian instability, this dashing from one extreme to another, and the intensification of destructive tendencies, it may turn out that the regional authority took on more than it could handle.

As is now absolutely clear, Yamal is an extremely rich source of raw mineral wealth, a tasty morsel for those who play the big business card. Time will tell whether the power structures of the region will serve only as a buffer softening the contradictions between the oligarchs and the population, or whether they remain an urbanizing force striving to achieve an equilibrium of interests. For the time being, Yamal is an outpost of stability, encompassing migratory streams of various forces and directions. These forces may exceed even assimilating and conquering boom of the 1960s and 1970s. All the more so do they recall the tragic times of the 1940s and 1950s, when Yamal was part of Stalin's enormous Gulag Archipelago; through it passed the track of the tragically notorious railroad then being constructed, the so-called "Stalinka" or "501st construction."

Comparable to those migratory waves, not in size but in influence and missionary zeal, was the migratory stream which arose in the 1930s, comprising educators, scholars, and zealots whose educational center was Leningrad. All these migratory streams left their mark on Yamal's history as well as the lives of the Yamal inhabitants. Because of the very heat of these passions, and accompanying conflicts, Yamal could never be considered as some sort of abandoned, God-forsaken corner of Russia, far removed from the storms and anxieties of the center. I don't know whether such places do exist in our country, but it is obvious that Yamal, always colorful in nationality mix, social makeup and the scales of events it witnessed, is not one of them.

5

Yamal is an area of priority interest to Gazprom, which extracts more than 90 percent of Russian natural gas here. Yamal is also the only place in Russia where so many reindeer graze (more than 500 thousand head, according to statistics), where the aborigines keep faith with the traditional way of life inherited from their grandfathers and fathers--raising reindeer, fishing, hunting. The industrial development of Yamal is proceeding, one way or another, with unavoidable consequences: the withdrawal of more land from circulation and, along with that, the growing slaughter of reindeer as the tundra population gets younger and more children appear. Able-bodied young native men and women of the tundra now often have a secondary and secondary-technical education. The radio, tape recorder, TV and snowmobile are no longer exotic objects in their everyday lives.

At the same time, there is a host of other problems. As for supplies of bread and essential goods in some variety, the situation is better in some places, worse in others, but the problems are being solved. As for the second kind of bread--information--things are not going well. What about the native people of the tundra? They are virtually deprived of any printed publications. Those northerners who at one time subscribed to many newspapers and magazines, readers of books and philosophers, are now on starvation rations: their living standard is steadily declining, in spite of the measures undertaken by the regional authorities, while the prices for periodicals and their delivery are sharply increasing. Moreover, most of what was once our "central" mass media are completely uninterested in life in the Russian boondocks. As a matter of fact, they don't know this either: business trips are now expensive and most journalists have no desire to leave the confines of the Moscow Ring Road. The electronic mass media are, to be sure, more mobile and ubiquitous, but their cavalry raids into the provinces are, more often than not, superficial; capital city snobbishness doesn't allow them to see a great deal or to penetrate the essential nature of things.

And how many once authoritative publications have turned into yellow tabloids or have changed their editorial policy! The market dictates its rules. Without a moment's hesitation, those who determine the development of the mass media offer readers and viewers a menu of dishes with different sauces (titles, covers), all composed of the same components--politics, crime, sex, entertainment. The people, fed to the point of satiety, are now forced to choke on this diet, which is served up along with the hot spice of the "Elections." Whether this diet is to people's taste or affects their health is of no interest.

The time when everyone heedlessly believed everything that the mass media said, however, has passed into oblivion. Russians, exhausted from constant stress, who grew up in authentically humanistic traditions notwithstanding Marxists utopianism, now "vote with their feet." The mass media are not simply losing their authority, they are being rejected. The collapse in newspaper circulation on a scale, never seen until now is related to this mood and does not stem from social and economic conditions only.

Ordinary, simple folk are more interested in the life which is being lived nearby. They want to know more about their own land, about the customs and traditions of the peoples that have inhabited it from ancient times, about famous individuals, and to learn from people, whether they are household names or ordinary ones, who are the same as they are.

I reached these conclusions after attending many journalists' seminars and meetings in Moscow, after listening to the advice, recommendations, and desires of venerable analysts of the central and regional mass media, and after reflecting upon these things myself. It may be banal to say it, but saving the drowning is the work of the drowning themselves. Bringing back the newspaper reader is possible only after the newspapers return to him and place him at the center of their work.

People of the older generation are experiencing with difficulty the destruction of basic moral values, the receding into the past of that which only recently was proudly called the Soviet way of life. The baby is being thrown out with the bath water; for many of them, the meaning of what they had lived for, experienced and worked for is lost. In spite of the fact that society is forever indebted to them, it does not attempt, either materially or morally, to save this life experience, these unrepeatable grains of history contained in the lives of these people, from devaluation and oblivion.

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(c1)

These destructive processes, fortunately, are not so absolute in the provinces. The very existence of the magazine *Seberiane*, I hope, will become a small offering to the veterans of the North. From the very first issues, they considered the magazine theirs. They write to us, suggesting topics, issues and heroes. These letters, I hope, will in time become the core of the magazine and make it truly an authors' and readers' publication. Without fake, ingratiating, composed letters. Life devises plots in the face of which any compositions pale. Sincere, optimism, and naivete, always the strong and weak points of the provincial press, will always find a response in the readers' hearts, helping them withstand deepening depression, dejection, apathy and despair.

On April 2, 1999, the first issue of *Seberiane* saw the light. One might get the impression that *Seberiane* is victoriously marching around Yamal, sweeping all obstacles from its path. Actually, this isn't the case. For almost everyone involved, the magazine is a rather optional field of activity. Harassing authors, working out a distribution plan with an eye to the remote corners of the region and its difficult transportation system, meeting with functionaries, determining strategy and tactics, organizing each issue and tracking the process of its creation from A to Z, and then doing everything so that it reaches the reader as soon as possible--all this has been my work and no one else's. It is probably absurd and not modern and, from the point of view of business people, naive and ridiculous. But I do this without any pay, without any financial or technical support, even--imagine this--without an office and facilities where our creative activists might meet. So all this is not as simple as it may have seemed in the beginning.

Perhaps I'm impatient and the genesis of any undertaking is exactly like this and is not dropped down "from above." Especially since the magazine-infant--how to say this more gently?--the child is still illegitimate, having no official birth certificate. But, like every alive, helpless being, it is wailing, calling for attention, begging to eat and drink; it can't survive at all without diapers, its own cradle and other small items essential to life. The question of the anxious offspring has not yet been decided. Nonetheless persons who have never had any relationship to it at all, but who have sensed its value, have decided to "adopt" it brazenly and high-handedly.

In our country every thing occurring in other areas are occurring in the mass media, where the initial accumulation of capital is actively proceeding. Banal envy, fierce competition, under-the-table games, excessive ambitions, elementary lying, phenomena always brilliantly expressed in journalism (as in any other creative profession), are now more thickly entangled with commercialism and careerism. The basic principles of professional corporatism in the media are being trampled upon. Worst of all is when bureaucratic psychology prevails over the psychology of creativity and the basic principles of Russian journalism. It would be all right if this process took place only within the communities of regional mass media, but it is especially tragic when it eats at the souls of specific individuals and becomes a conflict within a person.

But the brighter the light, the darker and more intense the shadow. One is unthinkable without the other. The question is, is it worth paying particular attention to the shadow? After all, it exists in order to set off and emphasize the all-penetrating, victorious power of the light. This is especially noticeable in the North.

## Prognosis and Fears

The third issue of *Seberiane* is now in progress. If everything goes as planned, we will be able to put out a fourth issue in 1999, and will gladden readers with the first issue of the year 2000.

To some this may seem very little. Four 48-page issues of a magazine in A4 format for the year. Oh, but that's a lot! Its publication was not subsidized by the 1999 regional budget. Besides which, expenditures for the already existing mass media were drastically cut.

No matter what I am involved with, no matter where I am, no matter what sort of work I'm doing, one way or another my thoughts return to *Seberiane*. I'd like to avoid mistakes, choose a true intonation, not moralize tiresomely, not lecture but create the kinds of conditions, an atmosphere of sincerity, that would lead people to seek us out and open the storerooms of their personal life experience.

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(L)

I am absolutely certain that uninteresting people do not exist, that every life has something which merits attention, which conceals discoveries, illuminates the heights of man's spirit and the depths of his fall. Every life is grand, epic or tragic, at times melodramatic--depending on the viewpoint of the one evaluating it, the one who becomes its "chronicler." The tone of the story, and the degree of the journalist's invasion into the author's narrative--all of that is important. Remember Pushkin's words, "The darkness of lowly truths is dearer to us than the deception which ennobles us"? To exaggerate, to smooth over, to pass over in silence--or to tell the honest truth, no matter the consequences? So you are left face to face with your professionalism and your conscience.

At the same time, it's frightening to rely solely on veteran inhabitants of the North. What if it turns out that they too are going to pontificate to each other, repeat what has been told and heard a thousand times? Meanwhile, young people remain in the thicket of their own problems. Vladimir Pavlovich Polushkin, *Severiane's* artist, a like-minded person who is close to me and, I'm not afraid to say, a real friend and comrade-in-arms, understood my doubts and shared them right away:

"It's the start of the school year, we'll go to the grade schools and high-schools, we'll meet with the kids, talk to them, design an application. We'll get information--we'll decide how best to reflect youth subjects in the magazine."

And Valentina Nikolaevna Kiseleva, our third comrade, the managing secretary, the soberest head of all of us, although an eternally doubting and self-critical one, stands up for an impeccable style, a small number of materials, a harmonious combination of the present and the eternal.

We are very different, and this helps us avoid monotony, but we are somehow similar in some ways. For example, in our anxiety about *Severiane*. Our alliance forces us to recall the ironic couplet going back to childhood:

In a single tub did wisemen three
Sail in a storm across the sea,
If the old tub had been stronger--
Our tale would now be longer.

Life will show how wise we are, but it's a fact that there are plenty of storms and that the tub could stand to be stronger. Meanwhile--may it be smooth sailing for us. We'll wake up someday in the morning and, instead of an old tub, we'll pilot a modern, sturdy vessel with excellent seagoing properties--neither big nor small, but just right, so as to get to the most secret corners of the Yamal, along its vast expanses of water, and tell our reader about the people who live there, with their joys, and troubles, their problems and victories.

At a time when we see the erosion of the previous power structure, the obvious weakening of central authority and the increase of local administrative authority (and what would you have us do, if that is the center of gravity to which solving many key problems has been transferred?), old relationships vanish and new ones between regions appear. The division of the Russian land again, as once in the past, into appanage principalities, and the continuing predominance of centrifugal over centripetal forces means that for now there is still no reason to travel beyond the borders of one's region. Besides, the model of a regional magazine has not been worked out yet, and there is enough to do within these confines.

The emergence of the Arctic Agreement several years ago, which unites the polar countries and neighboring ones, that is, the countries of the Arctic circle; the consolidation of the northern regions of Russia (nearly 70 per cent of its area); and global international projects like the revival of the Northern Sea Route, all give us hope that the time is not too distant when the magazine *Severiane* will be in greater demand. Do you believe in the importance of the "human factor" in the implementation of such projects, in the fruitfulness of personal contacts, in the need for information about the people of the northern territories of the world, offered from this point of view?

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(c)

These thoughts may seem naive, but if a high threshold of demands is raised even higher, the action assumes that efforts at a qualitatively different level will ensue. No wonder they say that every good soldier carries a marshal's baton in his pack.

Making predictions is a highly infelicitous affair, the more so when it concerns a project whose idea and conception was yours. What if we call a prediction simply the vector of a movement's direction? Where will this arrow, which promises much, trembles with impatience, and pulsates with life, land?

If everything turns out the way it should, and if we are not mistaken in what is most important in our work, our magazine will be not just another medium of public information but a social, unifying, and constructive phenomenon. An embodiment of patriotism, humanism, kindness and understanding, in whose sphere of influence people will not only want to read the magazine but to write for it, suggest topics, and feel that it is their own, a part of their lives.

We must fight for this. It is worth working for.

Translated by Anya Kucharev.

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# The Rise and Fall of Environmental Protection as a National Security Issue

## Aleksandr Knorre*

The problems of environmental protection in Russia (rather, in the territory of the former Soviet Union) in the last few decades have become a topic of public attention both within the country and abroad. Chernobyl and the Aral Sea have become symbols of global environmental catastrophes. Campaigns to protect Lake Baikal, the Siberian taiga, and the Ussurian (Siberian) tiger still have major international public resonance. The world has shown unfeigned interest in Russia's natural habitats and concern for its fate. This is not surprising--Russia with her enormous territories is one of the main world "treasure houses" of natural resources, and their condition to a great degree determines the situation on our entire planet.

News media reporting about the environmental situation in Russia and statements by politicians have created the impression that the entire country has turned into an enormous zone of environmental calamity. But what is happening in fact?

According to the chairman of the State Committee on Ecology of Russia, Victor Danilov-Danil'ian, 55 percent of the country's territory is not touched at all by human activity and another 20 percent is affected only slightly. One may argue about the criteria for that evaluation, but it is clear that the greater part of Russia is not in a zone of environmental crisis. That is not the situation, however, for those parts of the country where most of the population lives.

Thus, it is estimated that at least 25 percent of the population drinks polluted water which is not up to sanitary codes. Almost three-quarters of the large cities have air pollution beyond the parameters judged acceptable by sanitary and environmental standards.

The situation may appear catastrophic in specific areas; as a rule, this definition is automatically extended to the environment in general. But that is not at all the case. All the indexes of pollution used by critics apply to relatively small sites in terms of area. A mere five to ten kilometers distance from most cities, pollution becomes relatively small or even simply unnoticeable.

A number of rivers are polluted by various kinds of industrial processes, but, for instance, in the delta of the Volga--a river that receives the greatest outflow of toxic wastes in the country--local residents have no fear in drinking water which is practically harmless straight from the river.

Yes, there are quite a few plants that pollute territory 30-50 kilometers and even 100 kilometers around them--for instance, the nickel complexes in Norilsk and the Kola Peninsula. However, in relation to the area of the entire country even those large sites are minuscule, covering only fractions of a percent of the entire territory.

* Aleksandr Georgievich Knorre - Born in 1956, Knorre studied geography at the Moscow State University and for many years worked as a soil survey engineer at a research institute. A Greenpeace member since 1989, Knorre became one of Russia's leading environmental campaigners, and in 1993 the executive director of Greenpeace Russia. In 1999 he became the head of the Moscow office of the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX).

And while there is a series of megalopolises in the land, it would be strange to talk about the **natural** environment in these cities. And it would be even stranger to talk about environmental destruction or catastrophes.

The horrifyingly vast eradication of forests that took place in recent decades has decreased by several times, and the country's forests as a whole are not in danger of falling to the axe. It is true that in six or seven regions located near countries that import timber, forests are being felled in great numbers. But even in these regions, with the exception of a few territories, the volume of annual cutting has dropped compared to Soviet times.

And even radioactive pollution is no greater than it was at the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe. It is true that the nuclear sites have become much more **dangerous**, but for now, thank God, they haven't started exploding.

When we speak of the greatest existing, rather than potential, dangers nationwide, we should focus on one thing - the destruction of biodiversity as a result of the destruction of natural forests in the border export-oriented regions.

Russia's "contribution" to global problems belongs in a separate category: destruction of the ozone layer, climatic changes, and pollution by stable chlorine organic compounds.

I will return to the existing danger sites that could be the source of a true catastrophe when I examine issues of environmental policy.

At the same time a true catastrophe for the country is the state of health of the population and (here the word is truly appropriate) the catastrophic effect of the environment on public health.

Thus, according to numerous public health officials, only ten percent of infants are born healthy. Official data from industrially developed regions show that 40 percent of illnesses are directly related to pollution, and physical aging is ten times earlier than in regions with better ecology. In my opinion, the scope of this problem is not fully appreciated. Most people living in extremely difficult economic circumstances believe that an improvement in the standard of living means material well-being. This position is characteristic of the government on all levels: "First feed the people, and then ..." But the problem is that for a great many people that "then..." may never come.

Even Viktor Danilov-Danil'ian, chairman of the State Committee on Ecology, admits that there is "a marked weakness in environmental policy." However, even here this official is not being forthright. There simply is no environmental policy in Russia--the existing policy could actually be called a policy for destroying environmental policy.

I probably should begin not with the year 1989, when cutbacks were made in all environmental protection agencies. I find the fact that the Russian Government under all its prime ministers (except for Primakov's Putin's, on which there is no data) intentionally violated applicable Russian environmental protection laws and did not back down from their decisions even when they became widely and publicly known. Was this not one of the reasons for the diminished interest in environmental problems among the population? Naturally, many (if not all) regional politicians maintained similar policies.

Here are some examples:

**Gaidar:** The construction of sites for atomic energy, which had been halted after the Chernobyl catastrophe, was "unfrozen," and a government program for the development of 26 new nuclear reactors was approved.

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**Chernomyrdin:** More than 20 government orders authorizing the "transfer of territories covered with forests of the first group into non-forested ones, for aims not tied to forestry management" (put more simply, permission to build roads, dachas, and enterprises in the forests) did not undergo mandatory environmental review. And a curious, but highly dangerous, decision of the Supreme Court of Russia is related to these orders. The Court rescinded the government decisions as being illegal. Appeals by the government, however, got the Court's decision changed, and the plaintiffs--the citizens of Russia--lost, since they had missed the three-month deadline for bringing their suits. The government's illegal decisions are still in force.

**Kirienko:** The government gave permission to build a highly dangerous plant for destroying chemical weapons without the mandatory state environmental review required by law.

**Stepashin:** Under pressure from Exxon, the government gave permission to discard drilling solutions from oil platforms directly into the ocean in the Far East, despite the fact that this practice is explicitly banned by the applicable law--the Water Code of Russia.

However, these examples merely illustrate the federal government's indifference to environmental issues and its often consumption-oriented approach. In examining the consistency of environmental policy, I must note that, surprisingly, the "strongest" decision in environmental protection was the 1988 joint decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR establishing a State Committee on Environmental Protection as an organ set above other institutions and ministries. Since then, however, the State Committee on Environmental Protection (or Ecology, as it is now known) has been losing ground. Over the years it has not only ceased being administratively senior to other ministries, but actually has lost its ministerial status. There have been nine reorganizations of the committee. It saw its policy control over water, forests, and radioactive objects withdrawn. It has suffered innumerable staff cutbacks, while the total number of state officials in other federal agencies of Russia has grown. The Ecology Committee has approximately six thousand state inspectors, while the number of people working for the Forestry Service approaches two hundred thousand.

The attack on environmental issues is evident in other areas. The Center for Sanitary and Epidemiological Control, which was relatively objective in its assessment of the environment in areas where it could affect the population, was stripped of its independence and made a branch of the Ministry of Health.

The State Atomic Agency has lost its control over military nuclear sites, which are now subordinate only to the Ministry of Defense. By the way, military nuclear sites are the most potentially dangerous sources of pollution.

Except for two procurator's offices mandated to protect the environment (and one of them, the Moscow office, exists only for political reasons - to give the city another level of control over the oblast), the entire system of these special jurisdiction procurator's offices has been subordinated to the territorial procurators. In practice, this means that there are practical legislative barriers which prevent the nature-protecting procurators from appealing decisions of regional authorities. And since the regional procurator's offices of general jurisdiction almost always depend on the local authorities, the special procurators have their hands tied.

At the same time the authorities have reduced the remaining rights of the environmental organs. Thus, the State Committee on Ecology is not able to stop or suspend the work of harmful or dangerous enterprises. The only way it can act is by turning to the courts. But more about the courts later.

It is interesting that despite the profound economic crisis and the acute need for money, the Russian government has not permitted the introduction of environmental taxes or fines. Without going into the details of legal finances, I can note that the system today contains a legal loophole that can reduce the payments enterprises must make for polluting the environment by hundreds, even thousands, of times. Therefore the enterprises are simply not interested in reducing pollution. To make the scale of this abuse clear, the Baikal Cellulose and Paper Plant is a good example. Its actual payments for pollution are 3,000 times lower than the "invoice" (i.e., the amount it is supposed to pay). Analogous coefficients apply to many other industrial enterprises.

It is also interesting to note that, for instance, the Space Agency and the Ministry of Defense do not pay at all for polluting the environment. The Space Agency doesn't even pay for the pollution created by commercial launches of space vehicles.

The judicial system is a special area. In the early 1990s environmental trials were relatively widespread. Several dozen lawsuits throughout the country contested various anti-environmental decisions of the authorities. For the most part, the state organs lost. Our greatest achievement was the repeal of the Presidential Decree that allowed radioactive waste to be brought into the country. However, the situation has changed substantially since then. Without casting aspersions on the objectivity of the Constitutional Court, I must mention its decision in the summer of 1998. The Court ruled that almost all cases dealing with complaints about decisions taken by government authorities at the federal and regional levels were henceforth to be solely within its competence. Non-governmental organizations can no longer bring suit on the level of municipal courts. Private citizens will have even more trouble trying to litigate. Bringing a case before the Constitutional Court is most difficult in any event, and even (quite a rare event!) if the case were placed on the docket, the trial itself might not take place for one, two, three, or more years. In the meantime, the disputed decision will remain in force.

The federal authorities' noncompliance with the law unties the hands of the regional authorities, too. I do not know of a **single** region where the local authorities have not violated environmental legislation. In some regions the authorities try to hide such violations, while in others they practically flaunt them. Thus, in Bashkiria, a dam was under construction in a national park that could never, under any circumstances, be legal. Yet the president of the Republic of Bashkortastan authorized that construction on the grounds that the project complied with Bashkir laws, which in his interpretation at least supersedes federal laws.

In summing up the sad situation, I must say that there is no environmental policy in Russia. Instead we have a collection of handsome, formal decisions with almost no meaningful content and the practice of ignoring environmental laws on the part of executive authorities on all levels. But why limit the problem to the executive branch? Lawmakers themselves have decided that any draft law affecting the environment must go through an environmental review in order to be considered by the Duma. However, these reviews are simply not conducted.

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Many environmental problems related to pollution could be resolved simply by using the pollution control equipment already on hand. Several scientists have shown, for example, that the normal use of that equipment would cut the volume of waste dumped into the water supply by one half. And this measure would not require additional expenditures.

On the whole, with a minimum of good will and adherence to a few basic rules, the situation could be radically changed, with no one complaining about the cost. The following measures are needed:

* Environmental legislation must be obeyed. First and foremost by organs of the executive branch. Regardless of what the organs of the executive branch may feel about the laws. Regardless of what "benefit" may accrue to the country if the laws are violated. This applies primarily to the mandatory environmental reviews.

* Payments of fines for pollution must be made in full. They must not depend on profit. They must depend only on the amount of pollution and be the same regardless of the form of ownership of the enterprise.

* Punishment for government officials who violate environmental (and any other) laws must be inexorable. This demand is in the Presidential Decree, but it is not applied universally.

* The actual function of protecting the environment must be concentrated in one institution/ministry, which must not itself be involved in exploiting resources and must have the levers to stop the violating enterprises.

* Judicial and law enforcement systems must work. Citizens must have the right to defend their environmental rights in court.

The public environmental movement became the first alternative philosophy to contest official Party and government policy in the Soviet Union. Starting in the second half of the 1960s and continuing for two decades, environmental issues were almost the only area in which views and opinions that digressed from the official line were allowed, albeit in a limited way. Debates over the fate of Lake Baikal and the project to reverse the flow of northern rivers involved scientists, writers, and politicians; and for all the limits on these debates, they went far beyond the framework of narrow technical and scientific discussions, turning into a phenomenon that influenced the formation of public opinion. For many people, it was an opportunity to "blow off steam," for others a life's work. It is no accident that many well-known politicians came up through the environmental movement, including Boris Nemtsov, Yegor Gaidar, and Aleksei Yablokov. For instance, Nemtsov was one of the leaders of the movement to stop the construction of the Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) atomic station. Now, the buildings that were to be part of the power station house a liquor factory instead.

Along with learning the truth about their past and what had happened in the nation for seventy years, Russians discovered the truth about the environment in which they live. And the interest in that issue kept growing. Public opinion polls in 1990-1991 showed that environment ranked in second or third place among the problems that concerned Russians. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was not a single politician who did not include protection of the environment in his platform. It was so easy then, criticizing the Soviet regime, blaming the Soviet system for all the environmental

problems, and promising, promising.... Naturally, it was that attention to environmental problems that helped many of today's politicians get ahead. However, few of them remember that now.

Ecology has stopped being a fashionable topic. According to sociologists, in 1998 the environment ranked only 9-12 on the list of major public concerns. Of course, one of the most important and obvious reasons for this drop in interest was the dramatic decline in the country's economic and social condition. As an ecologist put it in the mid-1990s, people were much more worried about getting bread than about the heavy metal particles that could be falling onto them from the sky.

But it would be a mistake to think that people stopped caring completely about the conditions in which they lived. There are numerous examples of that. It is enough to travel beyond the big cities, full of politics and big business, to see that people in their own place, in their own "small homeland," are still worried about forests and rivers, about the earth that feeds them and the air they breathe. The problem is that, as a rule, they simply don't know how to oppose the indifference--and often the destructive actions--of the authorities, local and federal, the brazen and unpunished embezzlement of resources for short-term gain, and the flagrant flouting of the law.

My work in the last few years has brought me into contact with dozens and hundreds of people from every walk of life to talk about the environment. I can testify that ordinary people have not grown any less concerned or interested over the years. For instance, a young police officer, as he arrested activists demonstrating against atomic energy, said, "You're absolutely right. If it were not for my uniform, I'd be with you." There are many instances like that. I believe that the lowered ratings in opinion polls is not a function of lowered interest in environmental protection so much as it is a loss of trust in the regime, a loss of hope that the government can solve any acute problems, including environmental ones.

Along with many other factors, this mood reflects the growing gap between society and government, between daily life and politics. Note that the greatest interest in environmental problems occurred in the early 1990s--the period of the highest social activism in Russian society and the period of greatest trust in the new Russian government. The credit of trust was very high then; however, in subsequent years it has been used up completely.

And what happened to the public movement itself? The boisterous development on the wave of enthusiasm of the late 1980s-early 1990s gave rise to many environmental organizations. A decade later most of them, with very few exceptions, have either turned into a trampoline to toss their activists into politics, have moved under the government's wing, or become mere shells of their former selves. Today there are over a thousand public environmental organizations in Russia, but less than five percent of them are capable of doing real work. The rest are very weak and have few members. The reasons for this vary, but I have mentioned the two most significant ones--the lack of a financial base and the low social activism among people who have little faith in the possibility of positive changes in the current situation. The state is in no shape to support public movements, and moreover, has little interest in encouraging them. Unlike political parties, environmental organizations are of no interest to Russian business. To be sure, there are rare exceptions, for example, when support of environmental programs or organizations helps create an attractive image for business.

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We must bear in mind, moreover, that the whole concept of independent public movements (not only environmental) has appeared quite recently in Russia, and the mechanisms for assuring their stable existence are simply not developed fully. Therefore, it is not surprising that almost all environmental organizations working in Russia today rely on support from abroad. This applies both to the branches of international organizations in Russia as well as those that were founded in Russia but existed from the start on grants from foreign organizations. Most environmental nongovernmental organizations active in Russia are also financed by Western foundations.

I must point out that the present flow of money being sent as environmental aid or loans on the state level is being used irrationally. Research done by the Federal Environmental Foundation shows that most of this money is expended on management projects, while allocations for practical solutions of environmental problems are much smaller (for instance, in the Urals regions they are 4.5 times less). Yet, given a non-existent environmental policy, chronic noncompliance with environmental (and other) laws, and the miserable salaries of government officials, it is useless to attempt management projects.

Foreign support of the public movement is not limited to finances. In the last ten years Russia has learned the methodology and strategy of NGOs, without which the development of a civil society is unthinkable. Much of what has come to Russia from abroad has been modified and adapted to Russian conditions, although with great and continuing difficulties. Russian society developed for many decades in isolation and suspicion, and at first it did not trust, and sometimes simply did not understand, innovations from the West. I remember the incomprehension with which Greenpeace's first steps were greeted in Russia and what fantastic motivations were attributed to its actions; it is only now, several years later, that its goals and aims are being assessed more or less objectively. Perhaps the greatest achievement in the last decade has been the creation of a special niche in the motley spectrum of Russian public life for these environmental organizations, which have brought new views and approaches to long-standing problems, adding their contribution to the development of pluralism and democracy in Russia.

It goes without saying that the help and support coming from abroad creates its own problems. No sooner does a public organization touch on the interests of the regime or big business than the old accusations about foreign interference come up. And there may be a total lack of consistency in these charges. For instance, Greenpeace, which speaks out against the use of atomic energy, is regularly accused of defending the interests of international oil companies. At the same time, when it acts against oil pollution, it is denounced as an ally of the international nuclear lobby.

The same inconsistent and unreasoned approach and the same accusations of hurting Russia are used not only against entire organizations but against individual activists. The names B. Mirzoyanov, L. Fedorov, A. Nikitin, and G. Pasko have become well known in Russia and abroad. Their main crime was trying to tell the truth about the environmental threats in Russian military chemical and nuclear areas. All four were charged with divulging state secrets, despite the fact that they were merely exercising their constitutional right, since article 42 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation states: "Everyone has the right to a healthy environment, accurate information about its condition, and compensation for damage to health or property as a result of violation of

environmental law." The Law on State Secrets explicitly prohibits classifying as secret any information on the state of the environment. We know that the official investigators in each of these cases were unable to build a case on divulging state secrets; in the end all the cases, which had great public resonance, were dropped in one way or another (although the "case" of Captain Nikitin formally continues, and Grigorii Pasko was given a suspended sentence on the absurd charge of "exceeding his official capacity").

I am not suggesting that there was a government policy behind these incidents, which took place in different years, designed to suppress the environmental movement. Rather, each of these cases involved the interests of specific groups which wanted to cover up their own mistakes and abuses or to "defend the honor of the uniform." But one can't help noticing how easily state organs (investigators, courts) are prepared to accept the charge of malice when actions of environmental activists are concerned.

Russian society is not departing easily from the habits of suspiciousness and mistrust that were bred into it over decades. In the minds of many, accusations of damaging the defense capabilities of the state still do not need thorough proof. But it is clear that with every year the situation is improving. The atmosphere in society is changing; there is a growing desire to know the truth about the conditions in which people live and to protect the environment without turning to the authorities for help. Therefore the role of environmental public organizations is not decreasing; in the future it will continue to grow. In light of this, it is hard to overestimate the value of the international support and help being given to Russian public organizations. Today, that support is an integral and indispensable condition for the development of civil society in Russia. Without that civil society, without dynamic international cooperation, it is impossible to imagine Russia in the 21st century.

# A Sad Tale About a Happy Fate

## Irina Prokhorova*

It has long been a commonplace that Russia is a literature-oriented country, where social and political processes are traditionally viewed through the prism of literary manifestos and the everyday strategies of invented characters. And since the young Russian culture stepped onto the European stage in the Romantic period, Romantic thinking to this day is the linchpin of our society's development and self-evaluation. It should come as no surprise that the role models for the young generation are still Chekhov's dreamy young ladies, mad, disheveled geniuses, perpetually suffering Hamlets, noble knights of the revolution, bold and dashing robbers, and so on. And if a young person endowed with a life-affirming personality, a thirst for activity, and a desire for success (both creative and material) should try to bring that Romantic dream to life, he will inevitably encounter hostile incomprehension and snobbish prejudice, lectures on the incompatibility of serving God and Mammon, and demonstrative scorn and indifference about the results of that cultural action.

What does come as a surprise is this: It turns out that great Russian literature has also predetermined the attitude of Western society toward Russia, despite the multivolume efforts of Sovietologists and historians, the revelations of spies, and plain common sense.

Moved by compassion for the mysterious and "eternally feminine" Russian soul that has been languishing under the yoke of totalitarianism, and captivated by the "universal sympathy" of Russian literary heroes, members of the economically developed international community leaped at the chance in the early days of perestroika to save the Sleeping Beauty. But when the Beauty woke up and bared her vampire teeth, when the money thrown at building a new life in Russia sank into the sand like golden rain, then disillusionment naturally followed; the Beauty was quickly renamed a monster that was to be avoided. As an angry representative of a Moscow branch of a Western foundation once told me, "There's no one to work with in Russia. There are no structures here, only personalities!"

You can imagine what it felt like to hear that after seven years of hard work creating a leading philological journal and a model publication in the humanities. I doubt that this bleak conclusion would encourage my numerous colleagues in the business of publishing books and intellectual periodicals. So then, who are these "personality structures" who not only think but also act, create, and achieve success--and yet, as far as their own countrymen and foreign well-wishers are concerned, appear not to exist?

*Once Upon a Time....*

...there lived in the Soviet Union at the end of the Brezhnev era of stagnation a young woman, who, like most of her professional colleagues, sat in the library, wrote her dissertation exposing and condemning a bourgeois approach toward art, read banned books, and along with everyone

*Irina Dmitrievna Prokhorova* - Born in 1956, Prokhorova earned her doctorate in English literature from the Moscow State University. After a career writing for TV and literary journals, she became the editor of the *Literary Review* magazine in 1986. In 1992 she founded the independent literary journal *Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie* [New Literary Review] and in 1995 an eponymous publishing house, which she owns and operates. Under its auspices, Prokhorova publishes two literary journals and several book series on literary criticism, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and fiction.

else gathered around tables in the famous Moscow kitchens roundly denounced the "damned Communists." And then, like a thunderbolt from the sky, came perestroika, and the astonished woman, like Dorothy from Kansas, found herself in a new, mysterious, and unknown land.

That amazing time in the early 1990s in Russia has not yet found its faithful chronicler. It was an astonishing era, both in its joyous perception of the world and in its wealth of opportunities. Intoxicated and emboldened by sudden freedom, the young woman decided to start her own "highbrow" literary studies journal bearing the long title *Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie* [New Literary Review]. Here she planned to publish the best of the best specialists in Russian literature from all over the world and (without the censor's heavy hand) to open up a heated debate over the path that the new Russian studies in the humanities should take.

Her friends, upon learning of her project, tapped fingers on their temples and brought forth a hundred incontrovertible arguments against the timeliness and potential of the idea. At first glance, the circumstaces were not very conducive to a cultural initiative. In the early 1990s publishing was an enormous lure for organized crime.

The printing presses, for all their technological backwardness, had not yet moved into market relations and were laughably cheap, as was paper, which was still allocated to printing houses at "state," i.e., subsidized prices. Added to this was the huge demand for entertaining literature...more precisely, the real hunger created by many years of a forced diet that called for militantly didactic and ideologically pure products. And finally, the Soviet centralized system of distribution had not yet been destroyed. As a result, one hastily translated and poorly published mystery novel could guarantee its publisher a mansion in Miami.

So there was nothing strange about the way the young woman, with her project, her endless refrain of "please" and "merci," and her request to print 5,000 copies of a fat scholarly journal, caused the fat printing house ladies, who looked more like brothel madams or gang leaders, to laugh at her. And why shouldn't they laugh, when at the same time the young woman was there with her journal, a no-neck dressed in a track suit with tattoos all over his body would arrive, pull from his pants pocket a crumpled wad of bills with many zeroes, and generously pay the ladies, who out of gratitude for his gentlemanly ways give him three days later 500,000 copies on gray paper of another hard-boiled novel like *Tough Tommy* or *The Ear Eater*.

But that was only one side of the coin. On the other, this was a precious and brief moment, when the old vertical axis of power was destroyed and the bewildered political elite dropped the levers of influence. It was only in that period that you could create an independent periodical which questioned the entire system of scholarly priorities and authorities and proclaimed its own cultural policy, without being squashed by an irate and infuriated establishment.

By the way, I was not alone in my search for new ways of self-realization. Cultural magazines of every stripe were springing up like mushrooms after rain, and some were astoundingly bold and original. Alas, not many managed to survive the unequal battle with hyperinflation, tax robbery, lack of minimal financial support, and economic chaos. However, some did survive and were even tempered in the struggle (for example, *Kinovedcheskie zapiski* [Film Critic's Notes], *Seans* [Séance], and *Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal* [The Art Journal]). And by 1995 the situation on the publishing market had changed radically. First of all, the initial wholesale demand for popular literature had been met, and the market began quickly differentiating itself, responding to the acute demand for new cultural publications, mainly in general education, economics, and the humanities. Crime publishing became a bit more civilized and centered in the monstrously large publishing houses, which before had exercised monopolies

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in official textbooks and political propaganda materials. The abandoned territory was filled by the cultural publishers and the flow of intellectual literature grew stronger. In just a few years several hundred publishing houses (private as well as privatized government published, primarily university presses) appeared, each publishing from one or two titles to 20-30 books a year in every branch of scholarship. As a group these publishers now have lion's share of high quality cultural production in Russia.

Nevertheless, they can't be considered fortune's favorites, since they existed and in large part continue to exist in an information vacuum; the new bosses of the expanding mass media with admirable stubbornness destroyed the culture sections of newspapers as well as the cultural review programs on television and radio, insisting that the mass audience didn't want it. The totally destroyed (and still not repaired) distribution system didn't bring any joy, either.

Publishing activity for obvious reasons was concentrated in the two major industrial and cultural centers: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Both cities were swamped by an abundance of intellectual publications, while the rest of the enormous country was still without books and periodicals. The impossibility of dealing with the monstrous monopolistic prices for postage has forced society to turn to the methods of our great-great-grandfathers--the country is filled with wandering book peddlers. Not a day passes by that some bearded young man who looks like a theoretical physicist (and most often is one) does not appear on the doorstep of *Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie* to buy up magazines and books, pack them in his backpack, and head off into the vast expanses of Russia, only to return in a few months like a wild comet.

Since the former government book stores until quite recently adhered to the sacred traditions of the Soviet land and did not want to burden themselves by carrying a large number of books they did not understand, small "intellectual literature stores" run by the owners of intellectual publications or by passionate book lovers began to open first in Moscow and then in other cities. Today the capital has at least a dozen such book stores (Ad Marginem, Geliia, Grafoman, Eilos, for instance), where you can buy or order almost any serious book published in post-perestroika Russia. In the last two years foreign literature bookstores (Shakespeare and Co., Pangloss) have opened, as well as many bookstores on the Internet.

All this apparently chaotic and antediluvian infrastructure, with its book peddlers, quasi-legal bookshops, fragile publishing houses, literary clubs, and small art galleries, has turned out to be astonishingly stable and vital; it even survived the monstrous financial crisis of 1998. Wouldn't it be nice if the government were to be pleased and would reward its modest heroes, who have worked so zealously for the renaissance of culture? Oh no, the government continues to shed tears over the loss of sacred sites and the destruction of cultural values; it tirelessly showers awards on well-worn and moth-eaten Soviet cultural figures, declaring them to be national treasures.

What is the root cause of this amazing myopia (if not night blindness) that prevents both domestic and foreign statesmen from seeing what is in front of their very noses--not just "personalities," but fully operating structures that deserve their attention and support?

*Parallel Worlds, or the Battle Between Light and Darkness*

As the perceptive reader may have guessed, it's all the fault of obsolete Romanticism. According to Romantic theory, a person must exist in an eternal duality: the earthly material world and the lofty sacred world. Usually human life exists in the earthly plane and only rarely, in an inspired moment, can an artist penetrate into the other world, and become an intermediary between the

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parallel forms of existence. Essentially the same thesis was formulated more prosaically by the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir I. Lenin, when he announced with characteristic decisiveness that the modern world had two cultures (he labeled them "bourgeois" and "proletarian," but let's not be sticklers here). Lenin and his followers turned this idea quite successfully into real life: in Soviet Russia, under the pressure of totalitarian censorship, two parallel cultural worlds were formed--the barren official Soviet one, and the creative, unprotected underground one.

The most amazing aspect of this is that in post-Soviet Russia--despite the development of glasnost, freedom of speech, and the independent mass media--this structure of cultural thinking has survived intact. During perestroika all new non-governmental cultural initiatives (unless they happened to have been created by major mafiosi like the sculptor Zurab Tseretelli, and supported by the powerful lobbying of local and even federal authorities) were automatically considered by bureaucrats (and even by the public) as being underground art, illegitimate amateurism. Meanwhile the former state institutions, however pathetic and weak they might be, were still considered full-fledged representatives of Russian culture. Moreover, this dualistic cultural world view was influenced by the new economic ideas and concepts. The strong entrepreneurial activity elicited stormy debates within the stunned cultural community--talk of the shadow economy, criminal business dealings and other lofty matters about which the intelligentsia had little comprehension.

Within public opinion there gradually emerged a bizarre amalgam of concepts of high and low culture, "transparent" and "shadow" activities, positive and negative poles. As a result, the old Soviet cultural institutions (which for the most part had not reformed--but had simply powdered their noses - all those ministries of culture and higher education, most of the schools and institutions of higher learning, the Book Chamber and the Lenin Library) not only preserved their official status but acquired high marks as legal, honest, and "transparent" structures. While the specialized lycees and gymnasiums, museums of contemporary art, art galleries, literary clubs and salons, cultural publishing houses and "highbrow" periodicals which enthusiasts had founded, were psychologically exiled to the underground. In addition they were "awarded" shadow status, and as we all know, where there is shadow, crime cannot be far behind.

That was the simple-minded logic. (When I began publishing, some of my colleagues, upset by the quick rise in the journal's popularity, which they had not expected, shamelessly said practically to my face that I was publishing the journal with "dirty criminal money.")

Let us linger a bit on the concepts of light and shadow, for their dialectic in Russia is particularly odd. First of all, the usual identification of shadowy activity with crime in Russia requires correction. For instance, under the Soviet regime the source of criminal, anti-legal thought was the state itself, whereas the foundations of civil society and democratic consciousness were formed in the subversive, illegal and "criminal" (from the point of view of the authorities) milieu of opposition-minded intellectuals. As for corruption and unwillingness to pay taxes, the dominance of these phenomena in Russia suggests that these are not regrettable deviations from the norm; they *are* the norm. They reflect the instinct for self-preservation, a natural reaction of the social organism to the archaic and inflexible Russian laws, which bear no relationship to the realities of contemporary life and thought. In the classic words of nineteenth-century Russian literary literature, bad laws can be corrected only through bad execution.

And now, the second point. In the late 1940s the brilliant Russian playwright Yevgeny Shvarts wrote a prophetic play called *The Shadow*. A shadow separates itself from its owner, proclaims itself a human being, and nearly acquires the throne as well as the hand of the

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princess. As is customary in a fairy tale, all ends well; the owner of the shadow, a young scholar, commands "Shadow, know your place!", and it obediently lies down at his feet. But that is a fairy tale. In real life, the "shadow" side of Russian culture is constantly usurping the right to sovereign rule. All the "official" institutions mentioned above, all the innumerable academic research institutes in humanities and the university humanities departments run by former teachers of Marxism who quickly entrenched with the aid of new tricks, are nothing more than shadows, phantoms, and soap bubbles. Nevertheless, they eagerly simulate activity; this boils down to emitting cries about saving culture (that is, themselves). They successfully continue their vampire existence thanks to the injections of new money.

In essence, contemporary Russia finds itself in a unique situation: the infamous "shadow" intellectual infrastructure has assumed the creative, educational and enlightening functions of the traditional official cultural institutions, now fallen into a state of profound stagnation. One can say without exaggeration that genuinely free scholarly and artistic thought today circulates only in that community. All those literary clubs, bookshops, salons, and literary prizes, when taken together, constitute a forum of intellectual ideas and a base for a new cultural strategy.

(In the first year of *Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie*, we initiated a scholarly conference under the journal's aegis, and it soon became the most prestigious and popular event for Slavicists. In 1998 I founded a second journal, *Neprikosnovenny zapas* [Private Stock], where Russian and Western intellectuals began exchanging ideas and thoughts about the world and their own existence.)

This "through the looking-glass" aspect of cultural life in Russia appears to be hardest to understand for people who have grown up under a the system of Western democratic institutions, where the administrative and social agencies, however imperfect, nonetheless reflect the structure of society. You cannot help sympathizing with the Western colleague who tries to set up a joint cultural program with Russian institutions which have names that seem to speak for themselves and suddenly discovers that in fact there are no structures at all.

However, please forgive me if in the heat of my polemic I have exaggerated a bit and portrayed things too darkly. Western and Russian foundations are not completely blind and helpless, of course; it is thanks to many of them that we function so well. I imagine that the grateful Russian community has long since raised a monument to George Soros, because his numerous and diverse programs of support have stimulated many intellectual initiatives. I simply want to stress that no foundation in Russia that I know has clearly defined and deliberately implemented priority support for *new* cultural initiatives.

But wait, someone will object, what about all the programs to develop new communications technologies? And in fact there are quite a few of them, but it seems to me that at some point the passion for developing mass media has overshadowed the essence of mass media: they are not a goal in themselves, but only and above all a means for circulating developed ideas and interpretations. If there is no support for the elements in society that give rise to such new thinking, then the new information technologies will be left with the sad fate of circulating old flawed myths and false fairy tales.

*Instead of an Epilogue*

If the reader should get the impression that I am complaining, then he would be mistaken. I was simply trying to describe as objectively as possible certain characteristics of cultural life in

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contemporary Russia. Personally, I am happy with my fate, which has allowed me to change my life abruptly and enrich it with new experiences.

Let me add that we have no intention of accepting a shadow existence. We are seriously discussing setting up an association of independent publishers, founding a specialized book fair for intellectual literature, and making a stubborn assault on the mass media. And so on. Of course, as I look at my friends and colleagues, who wrench funds from their meager family budget in order to print an arcane book, or who spend their evenings moonlighting and their days teaching Greek and Latin literature and medieval French poetry in the lycee they themselves founded, I sometimes catch myself thinking, "Perhaps all those ideas about the mysterious Russian soul and its universal sympathy aren't so wrong after all."

# It Is Not Easy To Be a Scholar in Modern Russia

Vadim Radaev*

The 1990s were not the easiest time for academic work in Russia. What difficulties and temptations did scholars and researchers encounter during those years? Who left and who remained? How were problems of financing resolved? Finally, what does the experience accumulated suggest about the future of scholarly research in Russia today?

After completing my graduate degree, I worked for more than twelve years in one of the major institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, doing research, teaching, and trying to organize collective projects in economics and sociology. I should like to talk about my personal experience. Naturally, this kind of experience is always limited. Nonetheless, I will not be backing up my opinions with all-too-familiar statistics on the brain drain or reduced financing for scientific research. I realize, too, that the view I am setting forth is largely subjective. I believe, however, that many of my Russian colleagues would agree that the situation I describe is fairly typical.

## *End of the Romantic Period*

I arrived at the Academy of Sciences as a young doctoral candidate in economics in early 1987, at the very height of perestroika. From the formal standpoint, very little had changed yet. Party and Komsomol organizations were still in full operation, department directors handed out assignments, ad hoc research collectives wrote memoranda to the Central Committee and Gosplan. But you could already feel a powerful ferment. A sense of impending freedom and new opportunities was gaining strength.

It all began when the older generation underwent a sharp rift in its ranks. Some scholars ("men of the sixties") began actively criticizing the existing order and fighting for increasingly radical reforms. Their popularity among young people was unquestioned. We listened to all their speeches and read everything they wrote. The other "old men" did not much care for this. They attempted to make restrained criticisms of the reformers' outbursts, but more often they kept silent and stepped back, yielding the field of battle.

At that time, capable young people were eager to join the Academy. The prestige of scholarly work was still relatively high. They began to take up new perestroika topics that seemed very bold at that time: civil society and social stratification, bureaucratism and alienation, chronic shortages and denationalization of property. Many of the "orthodox" snorted skeptically but were patient, afraid to be written off as "retrogrades." On the whole, attention to young people intensified, and thirty year olds quietly began moving up the ladder. Soon after,

* Vadim Valer'evich Radaev - Born in 1961, Radaev earned his doctorates in economics from the Moscow State University and in sociology from the Russian Academy of Sciences. He had an illustrious research career in various institutes, which culminated in four books and over 100 other publications in Russian and English on topics ranging from Russia's shadow economy to its new entrepreneurs. Radaev also has taught at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the European University in St. Petersburg, and the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences. He is currently chair of the economic sociology department at the Higher School of Economics and is director of the InterCenter, an independent research institute.

international borders opened, opportunities arose to make periodic trips abroad, and learning
English became a matter of some urgency.

This was a time of glorious plans. Unfortunately, it did not last very long. Along about
1990 there was an obvious break, and soon after that academic sciences ran into a whole gamut
of problems related to staff, finances, and organization.

## New Temptations

For all that has been said about the shortage of funds for academic research, the main problem
has always been the lack of qualified personnel. It's always harder to find capable people than it
is money. And the swift erosion of professional staffs in the early 1990s was the first grave blow.
It turned out that young people had more attractive prospects than the Academy of Sciences.
Those on whom hopes for the future had been pinned began to leave the Academy--and the
country. At the same time, it was getting harder and harder to lure graduates of the best
institutions of higher education into the Academy. Finally, within a few years, the flow of young
scholars began to dry up altogether.

It was in 1990 and 1991 that young people began to go abroad to study *en masse*. Since
the prospects for actually leaving were often terribly vague, they kept their plans to themselves
until the last moment. A person could look at you with clear eyes and talk enthusiastically about
his creative plans, projects, and new field research, but at that very same moment his visa
application was sitting at one of the foreign consulates.

The moment of departure came amid declarations of mutual devotion and promises of
support on all fronts. And our young colleagues disappeared. Since e-mail was still something
exotic, as a rule, working ties were broken. With the spread of the Internet, to be honest, not
much has changed. They left for another world, tried to become part of it, plunged into a round
of new concerns and worries. And "domestic" (Russian) problems faded into the background. Of
course, everyone swore they'd be back in a year, but then they stayed on another year or two, and
then more. By way of insurance, places nobody needed were held for them in an academic
institute, but everyone knew they would not be back.

These new quasi-emigrants showed up in their native country on infrequent trips during
vacations to do a little quick field research, for most of them had to specialize in Russia,
regardless of their personal professional preferences. They stopped by to talk about old
friendships and at the same time "to take down information." They vanished quickly: "You
know, I'm really short on time right now, but next time . . ."

In the process of this "creeping emigration" people got divorced and started new families.
Having become "citizens of the world," they indulged in feelings of nostalgia for Russia, that
primordial Russian sentiment which grows with distance from one's birth place.

Some began to return, but not to their old jobs, of course. Upon arrival they quickly
resigned from the institute because they were paid so little there and weren't being offered high-
level positions right away (the old fellows being in no hurry to part with their own jobs). Their
brand-new Western diplomas had still not been officially recognized, and it is extremely difficult
to create your own research organization if you spend six or more months a year abroad.
Therefore, they looked for jobs mainly in the offices of Western firms or foundations; more often
than not, they had to forget about their old scholarly passions. They would say: "What can you
do? Such is life."

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