Simpson on Sunday: Relief at a return to the old Soviet ways
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Chernomyrdin says 'no return to the past' [29 Aug '98] - CNN
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RUSSIA shows all the signs of setting its course straight back to the future.
Tough reforms, the determination to deal with the fundamental structural problems of the economy, even the basic principle that the market must be allowed to rule: all have been abandoned or are in serious question. And it has come as a genuine relief to almost everybody here.
It now seems obvious that Sergei Kiriyenko, he of the surprised gaze and the schoolboy eagerness, was crudely set up last March when Boris Yeltsin made him prime minister. His five-month government, which was summarily dismissed last week, merely served to discredit the entire reform process and to enable Viktor Chernomyrdin, the once and future premier, to escape the blame. Kiriyenko even realises it himself. "I was aware of this back in March," he said yesterday. "It was clear what was coming."
Whether Yeltsin stays as a kind of constitutional monarch until his term in office runs out in 2000, or whether he decides to resign directly President Clinton leaves Moscow on Thursday, is now a mere technicality.
Everything he was supposed to stand for - market-based reform, parliamentary democracy - is in the process of being abandoned. The future belongs to the corporate state mentality which Russia effectively assumed the day Stalin died in 1953.
Its nastier mind-controls and its KGB snoopers aside, the old Soviet system was the kind of corporatist entity which is now reappearing, where the political bosses and heads of the big national industries and utilities get together to sort things out, without the inconvenience of the market, the criticism of interfering politicians or the nuisance of occasional elections.
Directly poor Kiriyenko moved out of the prime ministerial office, Chernomyrdin and his advisers started the congenial business of preparing the way for price controls, the nationalisation of weaker banks and enterprises, and the printing of large amounts of paper money: if these things should prove necessary.
As the former boss of Gazprom, the old Soviet gas monopoly, Chernomyrdin was never an enthusiastic reformer: during his five years as prime minister, which ended last March, he reluctantly went along with the changes in Russia because there seemed to be no alternative. Now there is one.
If it is introduced wholeheartedly, it won't and can't work for long, of course. It was nationalisation, price control and the printing of money which brought the downfall of the Soviet Union. The IMF, the World Bank and the big Western nations would not dream of throwing more billions down the Russian black hole. Yet, as it slowly dawns on people here that a little of the old system may be on its way back, there is general relief and happiness.
Standing in a crowd of people besieging their bank, and watching the way sharp-suited characters continually elbowed their way to the front past the old ladies who simply wanted to get enough of their own money out in order to buy food, I could understand why most people here have come to loathe the free market. Controls are what they long for. Who is to blame, I asked one nicely dressed, gentle, elderly soul, who will think herself lucky if she gets a hot meal today. "Biznismen," she answered, almost spitting out the word. And yet when I spoke to just such a biznisman as he came out of the bank, he told me he was so desperate to find the cash to pay his workforce that all he did was to go the rounds of the banks now, making withdrawals. "I can't sleep at night," he said. His haggard face showed he was telling the truth. In a society like this, all the old instincts lie close to the surface.
At the Kievskaya railway station yesterday a standard figure from the old Soviet days was on duty in the ticket hall: the valyutchik or black-market currency dealer. With his leather jacket and his wad of currency as thick as a brick, one eye on the cops and the other on the punters, he was doing excellent business. But, whereas in Soviet days he would have sold illegally-obtained dollars in exchange for roubles, now he was selling roubles in exchange for dollars. Almost everyone has hard currency now: what they need is roubles to buy food in the shops.
His rates weren't even excessive given the collapse of the past few days: 13 to the dollar instead of 7.9, which was the official rate when the currency exchanges were frozen last Tuesday. Street-changing like this isn't illegal nowadays; the police just don't like to see crowds gathering.
So, the man in the black leather jacket was happy. So were the people hurrying away with their roubles; at least they and their families will be able to eat. Russia is once again starting to do what it does best: getting round the rules. After seven years without them, it looks as though the rules could soon be back with a vengeance.
John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs Editor
telegraph.co.uk |
