Russian Roulette Part 9

Often bamboozled by other businessmen and fleeced by a rapacious bureaucracy, they are paranoid. Tax evasion is still rampant, though abating. They trust in equity and avoid debt. Some of them have criminal roots or a criminal mindset - or are former members of Russia's shady security services.

Three fifths, according to the Expert-Komkon survey, find it "hard to survive" when "observing all laws". "Strong leaders are better than all sorts of laws" is their motto, quoted by Izvestia. Generally, they are closer to being robbers than barons.

Early capitalism is always unruly. It is transformed into a highly structured edifice by the ownership of land and realty (the prime collateral), the protection of private property, a functioning financial system comprised of both banks and capital markets and the just and expedient application of the rule of law.

Russia has none of these. According to Business Week, bank deposits amount to 4 percent of the country's mid-size GDP - compared to half of GDP in other industrialized countries. Mortgages are unheard of, deposits are not insured and land ownership is a novel proposition. The judiciary is venal and incompetent. Might is still right in vast swathes of the land.

The state and the oligarchs continue to represent a rent-seeking opportunity. Businessmen spend time seeking concessions, permits, exemptions and licenses rather than conducting business. The "civic inst.i.tutions" they form - chambers of commerce, clubs - are often mere glorified lobbying outfits of special and vested interests. Informal networks of contacts count more than any statute or regulation. In such a mock "modern state" no wonder Russia ended up with a Potemkin "middle cla.s.s".

Russia in 2003

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

Contrary to recent impressions, Russia's Western (American-German) orientation is at least as old as Gorbachev's reign. It was vigorously pursued by Yeltsin. Still, 2002 marks the year in which Russia became merely another satellite of the United States - though one armed with an ageing nuclear a.r.s.enal.

Russia's economy has revived remarkably after the 1998 crisis, but it is still addicted to Western investments, aid and credits. Encircled by NATO to its West and US troops stationed in its central Asian hinterland, Russia's capitulation is complete. In the aftermath of conflicts to be engineered by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria and, potentially, Cuba - Russia may feel threatened geopolitically as well as economically. Both Iran and Iraq, for instance, are large trading partners and leading export destinations of the Russian Federation.

If anything can undo the hitherto impressive personality cult of Russia's new "strong man", Vladimir Putin, it is this injured pride among the more penumbral ranks of the country's security services.

Russia's history is littered with the bloodied remains of upheavals wrought by violent ideological minorities and by a.s.sorted conspirators.

Hence Putin's tentative - and reluctant - attempts to team up with China and India to establish a multi-polar world and his closer military cooperation with Kyrgyzstan and Armenia - both intended to counter nationalistic opposition at home.

Luckily, the sense of decline is by no means prevalent.

Russians polled by the American Pew Research Center admitted that they feel much better in a world dominated by the United States as a single superpower. The KGB and its successors - Putin's former long-term employers - actually engineered Russia's opening to the West and the president's meteoric ascendancy. And no one in the army seriously disputes the need for reform, professionalization and merciless tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of the bloated corps.

Reforms - of the military, Russia's decrepit utilities, dilapidated infrastructure and housing, inflated and venal bureaucracy, corrupt judiciary and civil service, choking monopolies and pernicious banking sector - depend on the price of oil. Russia benefited mightily from the surge in the value of the "black gold". But the windfall has helped mask pressing problems and allowed timid legislators and officials to postpone much needed - and fiercely resisted - changes.

Russia's "economic miracle" - oft-touted by the "experts" that brought you "shock therapy" and by egregiously self-interested, Moscow-based, investment bankers - is mostly prestidigitation. As the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) correctly noted in November, Russia's 20 percent growth in the last three years merely reflects enhanced usage of capacity idled by the ruination of 1998.

Neutering the positive externality of rising oil prices, one is left with no increase in productivity since 1999. Industrial production - outside the oil sector - actually slumped. As metropolitan incomes rise, Russians revert to imports rather than consume shoddy and shabby local products.

This, in turn, adversely affects the current account balance and the viability of local enterprises, some of which are sincerely attempting to restructure. According to Trud, a Russian business publication, two fifths of the country's businesses are in the red. Russia's number of small and medium enterprises peaked at 1 million in 1995-6. They employ less than one fifth of the workforce (compared to two thirds in the European Union and in many other countries in transition).

Thus, falling oil prices - though detrimental to Russia's ability to repay its external debt and balance its budget - are a blessing in disguise. Such declines will force the hand of the Putin administration to engage in some serious structural reform - even in the face of parliamentary elections in 2003 and presidential ones the year after.

Russians - wrongly - feel that their standard of living has stagnated.

Gazeta.ru claims that 39 million people are below the poverty line.

Many pensioners survive on $1 a day. In truth, real income per capita is actually up by more than 8 percent this year alone. Income inequality, though, has, indeed, gaped.

Responding to these concerns, though, in a "coattails" effect, the president is expected to carry pro-Kremlin parties back into power in 2003 - a modic.u.m of elections-inspired bribing is inevitable. State wages and pensions will outpace inflation. The energy behemoths - major sources of campaign financing - will be rewarded with rises in tariffs to match cost of living increases.

Russia faces more than merely a skewed wealth distribution or dependence on mineral wealth. Its difficulties are myriad. On cue from Washington, it is again being hyped in the Western press as a sure-fire investment destination and a pair of safe geostrategic hands. But the dismal truth is that it is a third world country with first world pretensions (and nuclear weapons). It exhibits all the risks attendant to other medium-sized developing countries and emerging economies.

External debt repayments next year will exceed $15 billion. It can easily afford them with oil prices anywhere above $20 and foreign exchange reserves the highest since 1991. Russia even prepaid some of its debt mountain this year. But if its export proceeds were to decline by 40 percent in the forthcoming 3-4 years, Russia will, yet again, be forced to reschedule or default. Every $1 dollar decline in Ural crude prices translates to more than $1 billion lost income to the government.

Russia's population is both contracting and ageing. A ruinous pension crisis is in the cards unless both the run-down health system and the abysmally low birthrate recover. Immigration of ethnic Russians from the former republics of the USSR to the Russian Federation has largely run its course. According to Pravda.ru, more than 7 million people emigrated from the Federation in the last decade.

Russia's informal sector is a vital, though crime-tainted, engine of growth. Laundered money coupled with reinvested profits - from both legitimate and illicit businesses - drive a lot of the private sector and underlie the emergence of an affluent elite, especially in Moscow and other urban centers. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Goskomstat - the State Statistics Committee - regularly adjusts the formal figures up by 25 percent to incorporate estimates of the black economy.

Russia faces a dilemma: to quash the economic underground and thus enhance both tax receipts and Russia's image as an orderly polity - or to let the pent-up entrepreneurial forces of the "gray sectors" work their magic?

Russia is slated to join the World Trade Organization in 2004. This happy occasion would mean deregulation, liberalization and opening up to compet.i.tion - all agonizing moves. Russian industry and agriculture are not up to the task. It took a ma.s.sive devaluation and a debilitating financial crisis in 1998 to resurrect consumer appet.i.te for indigenous goods.

Farming is mostly state-owned, or state-sponsored. Monopolies, duopolies and cartels make up the bulk of the manufacturing and mining sectors - especially in the wake of the recent tsunami of mergers and acquisitions. The Economist Intelligence Unit quotes estimates that 20 conglomerates account for up to 70 percent of the country's $330 billion GDP. The oligarchs are still there, lurking. The banks are still paralyzed and compromised, though their retail sector is reviving.

Russians are still ambivalent about foreigners. Paranoid xenophobia was replaced by guarded wariness. Recently, Russia revoked the fast track work permit applications. .h.i.therto put to good use by managers, scholars and experts from the West. Foreign minority shareholders still complain of being ripped-off by powerful, well-connected - and minacious - business interests.

With the b.l.o.o.d.y exception of Chechnya, Putin's compelling personality has helped subdue the cla.s.sic tensions between center and regions. But, as Putin himself admitted in a radio Q-and-A session on December 19, this peaceful co-existence is fraying at the edges.

The president will try to reach a top-down political settlement in the renegade province prior to the 2004 elections, but will fail. Reform is anathema to many suborned governors of the periphery and the Kremlin's miserly handouts are insufficient to grant it a decisive voice in matters provincial. Devolution - a pet Putin project - is more about accepting an unsavory reality than about re-defining the Russian state.

The economic disparity between rural and urban is striking. The Economist Intelligence Unit describes this chasm thus:

"The processing industry is concentrated in the cities of Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. These larger cities have managed the transition relatively well, as size has tended to bring with it industrial diversity; smaller industrial centers have fared far worse. The Soviet regime created new industrial centers such as Tomsk and Novosibirsk, but Siberia and the Russian Far Eastern regions remain largely unindustrialised, having traditionally served as a raw materials and energy base. Owing to the boundless faith of Soviet planners in the benefits of scale, one ma.s.sive enterprise, or a small group of related enterprises, often formed the basis for the entire local economy of a substantial city or region. This factor, compounded by the absence of unemployment benefits, makes the closure of bankrupt enterprises a politically difficult decision."

The politically incorrect truth is that Russia's old power-structure is largely intact, having altered only its ideological label. It is as avaricious, nefarious and obstructive as ever. Nor does the Russian state sport any checks and balances. Its inst.i.tutions are suspect, its executive untouchable, its law enforcement agencies delinquent.

Russians still hanker after "men of iron" and seek tradition rather than innovation, prefer unity to pluralism, and appreciate authority more than individualism. Russia - a ramshackle amalgamation of competing turfs - is still ill-suited for capitalism or for liberal democracy, though far less than it was only ten years ago.

Conspicuous consumption of imported products by vulgar parvenus is no subst.i.tute to true modernity and a functioning economy. Russia is frequently praised by expats with vested interests and by international financial inst.i.tutions, the long arms of its newfound ally, the United States.

But, in truth, "modern", "stable", Russia is merely a glittering veneer beneath which lurk, festering, the old ills of authoritarianism, lawlessness, oligarchy, aggression, ignorance, superst.i.tion, and repression mingled with extremes of poverty and disease. Here is one safe prediction: none of these will diminish next year.

Russia Straddles the Euro-Atlantic Divide

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

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The Chechen Theatre Ticket

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Russia's Idled Spies