David Satter: Darkness at Dawn

The third of my series of post-Communist Russian books is David Satter's Darkness at Noon: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003, Yale University Press). Satter wrote a previous book on Russia during the late-Communist period, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (1996; paperback, 2001, Yale University Press), which I haven't read but have seen highly recommended. Darkness at Noon finally quenched my thirst for a history of how Russia sunk so hard and fast following the fall of the Soviet Union. This is really a harrowing book. Reading it now it's impossible not to think of Iraq, one of the few comparable instances of a relatively advanced country sufferng a national catastrophe. Of course the two are not the same: Iraq was crushed under war and foreign occupation, but both involve major breakdowns in law, order, and basic civility, and both are conditioned by an American ideology -- capitalism in its rawest form, as the war of all against all -- given uncritical, unrestrained reign.

In Russia's case, you can chalk a lot of that up to ignorance. The Soviet regime had lost its legitimacy so completely that folks were prepared to believe anything about capitalism. I doubt that many Iraqis had any such illusions, but they were confronted with the most delusionary and coercive of American regimes. As Michael Schwartz has argued, Iraq's economy collapsed in a fit of Bremer privatization before the insurgency kicked into gear. Which makes me wonder whether Russia's fate isn't in the cards for the US, at least if you give Bush and his crowd enough time. It's often been commented that Washington's neoliberal economic dogmas have never actually been tried in the US or any other successfully developed nation. The fact that we haven't fallen apart like Russia or Iraq is testimony that we don't really believe all the crap that we routinely inflict on others. But we are starting to tatter around the edges, so much so that almost everything that is endemic in Russia is symptomatic and increasingly chronic in the US. Among the worst things is the Bush regime's contempt for law and their ability to rouse thuggish support for their cause. That they haven't started to whack their domestic enemies is a tribute to the enduring civility of American society, but if you spend much time with their dogs like Bill O'Reilly you'll start to appreciate how thin that veneer of civility has become.

The book starts with two chapters on specific events in 2000: the sinking of the submarine Kursk and a bomb scare in Ryazan. Exactly why isn't all that clear, but both represent failures of government and growing distrust of government. The books gets down to business in the third chapter, "The Young Reformers" (pp. 37-38):

The reformers' social darwinism was, in many ways, a reaction against Soviet society's professed concern for the needy and helpless. It was expressed in a refusal to consider the effects of their policies on the Russian population. When, in one of the new government's first acts, price controls were lifted on almost all products, wiping out the savings of 99 percent of the population, [Yegor] Gaidar answered objections by saying that the money in people's savings accounts was not real because it did not reflect the quantity of available goods.

The reformers' social darwinism was complemented by their economic determinism. It is an irony of the transition period that the reformers, intending to destroy socialism, preserved its most basic philosophical assumption, the belief that morality and law have no independent validity but are a function of underlying economic relations.

The reformers showed little interest in the sources of the legal framework that regulated the way in which the market economy in the West operated. In fact, conditioned by years of Marxist training, they dismissed moral idealism as "bourgeois thought," which was not based on anything real.

The consequences of social darwinism and economic determinism were greatly magnified by the most important practical effect of the worldview that the reformers brought to Russia's transformation. This was the reformers' indulgent attitude toward crime. Influenced by decades of mendacious Soviet propaganda, they assumed that the initial accumulation of capital in a market economy is almost always criminal, and, as they were resolutely procapitalist, they found it difficult to be strongly anticrime.

Because the bandits and black-market operators also wanted a free-market economy, the reformers began to see them as "socially friendly" and reacted to the criminals' growing wealth and property with equanimity and even approval, assuming that the gangsters would be able to hold on to their capital only as long as they were able to make it work "for the benefit of society."

The combination of social darwinism, economic determinism, and a tolerant attitude toward crime prepared the young reformers to carry out a frontal attack on the structures of the Soviet system without public support or a framework of law. The result was a catastrophe for Russian society.

(pp. 38-39):

The temptations that the new system introduced were overwhelming. The salaries of officials were low, and a single official decision could make a businessman rich overnight. As a result, decisions began to be sold. A businessman seeking an export quota, the right to hold government funds in his bank, or a favorable privatization decision was told, "It would help your application if you could make a loan to the following offshore company." Sometimes, particularly in the case of the city of Moscow, the transfer data for the offshore company were printed on cards for distribution. It was understood in such cases that the "loan" would not be repaid.

Bribery quickly became an integral part of the Russian way of doing business, and the expense of buying a government official was considered the most important part of a new enterprise's starting capital.

(pp. 46-47):

The creation of an oligarchic system began during the perestroika period, but its untrammeled development started in January 1992 with the beginning of the post-Soviet reforms. The reforms were dominated by three processes: hyperinflation, privatization, and criminalization. Their intersection led to economic collapse, mass poverty, and the effective privatization of the Russian state.

The hyperinflation began on January 2, 1992, after the abrupt freeing of prices, and it quickly divided the population into a minority of the very rich and a majority of the hopelessly poor. Yegor Gaidar, the deputy prime minister, predicted that prices would increase three to five times and then begin to fall. In ten months, however, prices rose twenty-five- to thirtyfold, driving millions into destitution. Soon hawkers and peddlers were everywhere as the members of the World War II generation took to the streets to sell their personal belongings. Within three months, 99 percent of the money held by Russian citizens in savings accounts had disappeared. Money that had been saved for decades to buy an apartment or a car or to pay for a wedding or a decent funeral was lost, causing psychological crises for millions of people.

The wiping out of citizens' savings was followed by the appearance of numerous commercial banks and investment funds, which were totally unregulated. At a time when spiraling inflation pushed ordinary citizens to seek ways to conserve their incomes, these investment funds and many commercial banks, a large number of which had ties to high-ranking officials, launched massive advertising campaigns, promising rates of return on investment of up to 1,200 percent. Most of these funds were pyramid schemes, and when they collapsed, more than 40 million people lost their savings a second time.

(pp. 47-48):

There were several ways of quickly accumulating vast, unearned wealth. One was to appropriate government credits.In 1992 inflation created a shortage of turnover capital, which paralyzed production and prompted the issuance of credits to Russian factories, whose value reached nearly 30 percent of the gross domestic product. With the inflation rate at 2,500 percent, these credits were offered at rates of from 10 to 25 percent. Instead of being used to pay salaries and purchase supplies, however, they were deposited in commercial banks at market rates, with the difference split between bank officials and the factory director.

A second way to acquire great wealth was to obtain permission to export raw materials. Although most prices in Russia had been freed from controls, energy prices, which at the beginning of the reform period were less than 1 percent of world market prices, continued to be regulated. Having abandoned the Soviet-era monopoly on foreign trade, the government began to allow anyone to export who could get a license; and since Russian raw materials were bought at the internal price for rubles and sold abroad at the world price for dollars, export licenses were akin to permission to print money. In Moscow they were frequently issued by the Ministry of Foreign Economic Ties, which functioned like a market, granting licenses in return for bribes, with the fee for the license insignificant in comparison to the size of the bribe.

A third source of wealth was subsidized imports. Out of fear that there would be famine in the country in the winter of 1991, the government sold dollars for the importation of food products at 1 percent of their real value, with the difference subsidized with the help of Western commodity credits. The products were sold, however, at normal market prices, with the result that the attempt to relieve the country's anticipated food crisis led to the enrichment of a small circle of Moscow traders. The value of import subsidies in 1992 came to 15 percent of the gross domestic product.

(pp. 51-53):

In theory, the "loans for shares" program provided for competition for the blocks of shares, with the winner determined by who could offer the largest credit to the government. In practice, however, the winner was the bank with the closest "informal" ties to the government, and the scheme, although it facilitated the handover of the most profitable Russian enterprises to the country's oligarchs, provided very little in badly needed revenue to the government. In 1995, for example, the total revenue from the mortgage auctions of twenty-one of Russia's most profitable enterprises was $691.4 million and 400 billion rubles.

Once an enterprise had been "mortgaged," the proprietary bank was free to exploit it; and when the government failed to repay the bank loans -- which, given the state's revenue shortage, was always the case -- it was up to the bank that held the mortgage to organize the final sale of the enterprise. Unsurprisingly, the enterprises became the property of the banks that had provided the original loans.

In 1995, Oneximbank won control of 38 percent of Norilsk Nickel, the giant nonferrous-metals producer, in exchange for a $170 million loan to the government. Two years later, in August 1997, it paid $250 million to retain the stake. After its repayment of the loan was deducted, the government had gained a mere $80 million for a major share in the plant that produces 90 percent of Russia's nickel, 90 percent of its cobalt, and 100 percent of its platinum.

In the meantime Oneximbank was free to expoit the giant combine as it saw fit. Norilsk Nickel was one of Russia's leading earners of hard currency, but by the spring of 1997 it owed its workers 1.2 trillion rubles in back wages. It was common for workers to faint from hunger, and that year, for the first time in decades, the children of Norilsk were not sent out of the polar city for the summer. The failure of Norilsk Nickel to meet its obligations raised the question of what Oneximbank was doing with the money that it earned from the combine. According to Obshchaya Gazeta, the bank was involved in highly profitable projects that required enormous amounts of cash. One such project was paying early on promissory notes from the federal government to the regional administrations in return for 20 to 30 percent of the note's face value. Inasmuch as the government had a budgetary debt of more than 50 trillion rubles to exployees, it was often unable to pay on these notes itself, and commercial banks used the income generated by their enterprises to buy these notes, leaving enterprises they controlled without enough money to pay salaries.

In fact the empowered banks, which soon controlled roughly 50 percent of the conomy of the country, began to feed continually off the state budget. They collected interest on budgetary funds, used the money to acquire the most valuable Russian enterprises, and then used the revenue from the enterprises to make huge profits by, in effect, leanding money back to the government.

The loan-for-shares scheme changed the relationship between major financial institutions and the government. The banks had long enjoyed the protection of patrons in government, but now, for the first time, the banks were in a position to put pressure on the government. Officials had to go to the banks to discuss such issues as changes in interest rates and the size of the government's indebtedness. Having created powerful banks by entrusting them with the government's money, the government fell into dependence on them.

With the approach of the 1996 presidential elections, it became clear that the government not only would not be able to repay the loans it had taken but, on the contrary, would need new loans. This state of affairs led to plans to put some of the country's most valuable properties, such as the Perm Motor Factory, which produces aircraft engines, Aeroflot, and Svyazinvest, the telecommunications holding company, up for auction, with the banks that had received shares in the enterprises dictating the conditions.

(pp. 53-54):

As was the case with privatization, the modern stage of criminalization in Russia began during perestroika. The Gorbachev-era reforms started with the legalization of "cooperatives," which became the only privately run businesses in the Soviet Union. The cooperatives quickly prospered, but, viewed as ideologically illegitimate,they were left without police protection at a time when it was illegal to hire private guards. They therefore became tempting targets for coercion, and gangs began to be formed all over the country to extort money from them.

By 1992 nearly every small business or street kiosk in Russia was paying protection money to gangsters. As a source of wealth, however, shops and kiosks could not compare with the state budget, and when, after the beginning of the Gaidar reforms, criminal gangs saw that former Soviet officials were using their connections to acquire vast, unearned wealth,they began to use terror ot take over the enterprises that the former officials had established. One sign of the gangsters' activities was the growing number of bankers and busienssmen who fell victim to contract murders.

The criminal terror against well-connected Russian businessmen, however, was short-lived. Soon the gangsters, businessmen, and corrupt officials began to work together. The gangsters needed the businessmen because they required places to invest their capital but, in most cases, lacked the skills to run large enterprises. For their part, businessmen needed the gangsters to force clients to honor their obligations. Before long, nearly every significant bank and commercial organization in Russia was using gangsters for debt collection.

The bandits' methods were simple. The debtor was contacted and informed that the gang knew his address and all his movements and that if he did not pay his debt by a certain date, he and his family would be killed. Usually this was enough to induce payment, in which case 50 percent of the money went to the gang. In cases in which the debtor was unable to make good the debt, he was usually murdered.

The partnership between business and crime did not stop with debt collection. In rapidly became clear that gangsters could be used for many purposes, from eliminating unwanted competitors to "persuading" potential business partners to soften their terms in contract negotiations. The most successful bankers and entrepreneurs became those with the closest criminal structures.

(pp. 53-54):

The ascendancy in Russia, however, of people who made their fortunes not through legitimate conomic activity but through stealing led to economic collapse. In the period 1992-1999 Russia's gross domestic product fell by half. Such a drop had not occurred even under German occupation. Russia became a classic third-world country, selling its raw materials -- oil, gas, and precious metals -- in order to import consumer goods. The value of investmen tin Russia fell every year for eight years, until in 1999 it was roughly 20 percent of its level in 1991. Having acquired their money, for the most part illegally, Russia's newly rich declined to invest in Russia lest a future government confiscate their wealth. Money was moved out of the country in enormous quantities; estimates of the amount that left Russia illegally during the Yeltsin era range from $220 billion to $450 billion.

The economic disaster was accompanied by a demographic catastrophe. In the years 1990-1994 male life expectancy fell by more than six years. In 1998 it was fifty-seven years, the lowest in the industrial world. IN the late 1990s the Russian population overall fell by 750,000 a year, and the country faced epidemics of drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

I included a number of quotes on the Second Chechnya War and Vladimir Putin's accession to power in a separate post (pp. 64-71). Satter argues that the apartment bombings that led up to the war were the work of the Russian FSB, led by Vladimir Putin, intended to start a war which would serve first as a distraction from efforts to reform Yeltsin's oligarchy and second as a vehicle to promote Putin's succession of Yeltsin. The Ryazan event in the second chapter is key to these charges: in it the FSB was caught red-handed, then claimed that they put the bombs there as part of a training exercise.

(pp. 74-75):

In late 1991 the Russian Exchange Bank began to pay 20 percent on deposits. This rate was several times higher than the interest paid by other commercial banks, and the offer was publicized with the help of professional advertising. Almost immediately deposits began to pour in. For the first time, the market saw that it was possible to attract huge amounts of money with high interest rates. This lesson was learned best of all, however, by unscrupulous operators who found that the possibilities for using high interest rates to attract money from a population with no experience of prudent investment were practically unlimited, particularly if there was no intention to pay.

From 1992 through 1994, 800 dummy firms defrauded nearly 30 million Russians of 140 trillion rubles in what became known as the "theft of the century."

(pp. 95-97):

The condition of the seamstresses at the Golubaya Oka Textile Factory was typical of the situation of workers in Russia. Privatization, which put 80 percent of Russian industrial enterprises in private hands by 1996, was supposed to make workers "co-owners" of their factories, but instead it made it possible to exploit workers in a manner that, in some respects, was worse than the expoitation that had existed under the Soviet Union.

The liquidation of state property removed Russia's factories from the control of the government but did not alter the working relationships inside the factories, leaving the directors, who were the last representatives of the Soviet regime following the dispersal of the Communist party committees, in complete administrative control.

In formal terms, ultimate authority was vested in the shareholders, but in reality the shareholders were not in a position to impose their will on the director. Because the director decided on hiring, firing, and promotions and controlled all information, he could dominate the shareholders' meetings even if he owned only a small number of shares. It was he who decided what information to make available to the shareholders,a nd with the shareholders' names printed on the ballots, the consequences of voting against him ranged from demotion to dismissal.

In a few short years there was a change in the character of Soviet-era factory directors. Men who had been dedicated to meeting the targets of the economic plan and often knew little else began to strip the assets of their factories.

One technique used was to withhold necessary payments, including salaries, and deposit the funds at interest. The director typically established close personal connections witha local bank, making it dependent on the factory, and thus on him. The factory's income was then deposited in the bank at high interest or invested, with the director and bank officials splitting the income.

Another technique for stripping assets was to create "daughter firms" that functioned as middlemen, charging exorbitant prices for inconsequential services. Finally, as a result of their access to shops and warehouses and control over transport and security guards, the directors were able to organize the theft of equipment, raw materials, and products, which, following privatization, began to disappear in large quantities from Russian factories. In the first years of the reform period, huge lines formed at Russian border crossings as trucks headed for foreign ports with materials stolen from factories at the behest of their directors.

Faced with the rapacity of the directors and their own vulnerability as a result of the collapse of industrial production, the workers often sank into a helpless passivity, which was reflected in letters to Russian newspapers.[ . . . ]

In fact, it was the defenseless of Russian workers that, amid the rise of a class of criminalized factory directors and the impotence of the official trade unions, gave rise to the first workers' protests. These protests were crushed ruthlessly, but they demonstrated by their futility the real condition of workers in the post-Soviet era.

Most of the stories involve companies not paying workers, as well as crushing unions and protests (pp. 98-102):

The delays in paying salaries soon reached two months, and the factory began to give workers part of their pay in the form of meals in the factory buffet. The food was of prison quality, but the workers accepted it eagerly, often bringing it home for their children without eating anything themselves.

After the factory was privatized, conditions became worse. Part of the production as well as truckloads of spare parts disappeared. Metal cutting machines were removed and sold on the side. Materials were taken from the construction site of a future sports complex and used to build three- and four-story dachas for the factory management.

By mid-1994, malnutrition and financial uncertainty had led to a deep social crisis. Families broke up as men found it impossible to support their children. Workers who became ill could not afford medical care and died prematurely. There were the first suicides. One day in the factory, a woman stopped Dorofeev and said to him, "Do you know what I'm forced to feed my daughters? Animal feed. I take cow feed, mix it with pearl barley, cook it, and serve it." Dorofeev recalled that the last time people had been forced to eat animal feed was during the siege of Leningrad. [ . . . ]

As a trade union leader, Dorofeev had the right to review the factory's financial records, and he soon made several discoveries. One of them was that although the factory was not giving workers their salaries, [company director] Pirozhkov had been paid 48.5 million rubles between December 1995 and June 1996. He also discovered that the factory had paid 391 percent intereston credits of 3.5 billion rubles from Credprombank, although the highest interest rate being charged for such credits during that period was 200 to 240 percent. At the same time, the factory's taxes were not paid directly to the government but to Credprombank so that the bank could first collect interest on the money. Payments had been delayed by two weeks for at least a year and a half. Dorofeev took this information to the prosecutor, and the police arrested the Credprombank executives responsible for the Leninsky raion.

By June the lag in paying salaries had reached eight months, and the workers survived only because they raised potatoes and other vegetables on their dacha plots. Every Monday they arrived at the factory exhausted after a weekend of hard work. [ . . . ]

One night, shortly before May Day 1997, Dorofeev was at home watching television when he heard the sound of bottles in another room. He got up and found his wife lying across their bed in an unnatural pose. He called an ambulance, and she was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors pumped her stomach and saved her life. She had taken sleeping pills. Vladimir found a suicide note, which summed up the impotent anguish of the entire workforce of the Heating Equipment Plant. It read: "Damn you, Pirozhkov."

On the police (p. 113):

There are several reasons why the police often do not make a serious effort to defend ordinary citizens. In the first place, the Russian police, as in the past, are organized to support the political authorities against society. They do not have a psychological predisposition to defend individuals. In this respect, the situation is little different from what it was in the nineteenth century, when the marquis de Coustine noted that police in Russia harass the innocent but, in a crisis, do not rush to offer aid.

Alao as in the past, the Russian police are judged according to a quota system that rewards a low crime rate and a large number of "solved crimes." This system induces the police to avoid anything that will ruin their statistics. As a result, they avoid accepting complaints from citizens who have been the victims of difficult-to-solve crimes. If a citizen's apartment is robbed, they may try to persuade the victim not to report it by saying, "Nonetheless, we won't find them." They also may avoid classifying a person who has disappeared as missign or an unidentified corpse as the victim of foul play because, in both cases, they may become involved in efforts that threaten their record for solving crimes.

Perhaps most important, the police in postcommunist Russia do not want to defend ordinary citizens because they regard it as an unproductive use of their time. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many of the best law-enforcement professionals left the intelligence services, the Interior Ministry, and the Office of the Prosecutor General to work for private security bureaus at fifteen times the pay. Many of thsoe who were left were incapable of getting a job elsewhere. These officers saw that government officials all around them were using their positions to obtain illegal wealth and, following their example, began to use every opportunity to solicit bribes.

In time, the police began to resemble just one more criminal gang, and their obsession with making money left them with neither the time nor the energy to enforce the law.

The book has many examples. One of the most striking is of Tatyana Zelinskaya and her estranged husband Vladislav Bezzubov. She divorced him in 1997. He was deep in debt, and starting making threats against her (p. 124):

In November 1998 Buzzubov moved out of the apartment but made harassing phone calls, sometimes simply breathing into the phone and at other times making threats. "For $200 or $300," he told her, "I can arrange to have you killed. No one will look for you,a nd no one will care." Despite the pressure, Tanya refused to sign over her share of the property. Instead, she tried to expedite court hearings, which, at Bezzubov's insistence, were continually postponed.

A series of criminal attacks ensue, both on Tanya and on her sister Nina. In each case Buzzubov calls afterwards and threatens again to have her killed. In each case Tanya goes to the police, who do nothing. Finally, Tanya is shot in the back, which she survives (p. 126):

In June someone set fire to the car belonging to a friend who had agreed to live with Tanya and Nina in order to provide protection. Thoroughly frightened, Tanya went again to the police. A duty officer took her in to see Chernikh, who told her that the police were fed up with this "domestic scandal." When Tanya told him that she had already been shot and now was afraid of being killed, Chernikh offered a suggestion. "Why don't you use the same methods against him that Bezzubov is using againt you?"

After that, Tanya moved to the Ukraine, and that's the end of the story, at least in the book.

On organized crime (pp. 131-132):

The situation in the Avtovaz factory reflects a central fact of Russian life, the power and savagery of organized crime. Gangsters in Russia are not a marginal phenomenon confined to such areas as the illegal economy as narcotics, prostitution, and gun running. They control large parts of the legitimate economy, and neither a powerless public nor the organs of law enforcement have the means to bring them under control.

In 1997, 9,000 criminal groups in Russia with nearly 600,000 members controlled an estimated 40 percent of the Russian economy. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimated that more than half of Russia's twenty-five largest banks were either directly tied to organized crime or engaged in other illegal activity. Criminals dominated the market in oil products, aluminum, real estate, restaurants, hotels, and alcohol, and they controlled the wholesale and collective farmers' markets. In large parts of the country, they subordinated the local government and, through it, received support for their businesses and direct access to government funds.

The influence of gangsters is so powerful that they dominate the culture. Their language -- "fenya," a form of labor camp slang -- is used by government officials, entertainers, and media personalities. Their songs are sung at social gatherings, and they are the heroes of novels, films, and television series.

Organized crime created a world of limited freedom in which millions of Russians live under constant threat of violence to replace the total lack of freedom that existed under communism. The success of the gangs in establishing their domination was in turn a result of police corruption, ties with political leaders, and a total disregard for human life. These factors made the gangs ruthless machines of coercion, ideally suited to the conditions of a society without law.

Satter devotes a whole chapter to Vladivostok and its governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko, who already played a key role in Meier's Black Earth (pp. 171-172):

By late 1994 the bleeding of the krai budget had produced a severe financial crisis. Teachers, doctors, and other state employees were going for months without pay, necessary maintenance and renewal of infrastructure were ignored, and hospitals, schools, and orphanages no longer received essential supplies.

The effects of corruption also spread to the coal-mining regions. As the krai administration took money from the federal government that was intended for Dalenergo, the state power company, and used it instead to plug holes in the krai budget caused by corruption, Dalenergo ceased paying the coal miners. The miners mounted strikes in late 1994 and hunger strikes in 1995. Finally they stopped supplying coal to the power stations. As a result there were cuts throughout Primoriye in electricity, heat, and water.

By early 1996, there were days when power in Vladivostok was off for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four.

On a typical day, most people returned home to find there was no heat or light. The first step was to light candles or a kerosene lamp. The next step was to heat up food in the dark on a butane gas stove. The food, as a rule, had been prepared the previous night. At some point, dots of light would appear in the buildings, and there would be shouts of "It's been turned on!" People then rushed to switch on everything that could be switched on -- cooking rings, stoves, teakettles, refrigerators, heaters, washing machines, and televisions -- in order to take a shower, do the dishes, wash clothes, and cook for the following day.

The disruption of daily life affected everyone. People were afraid to take an elevator lest they be trapped for hours inside a box suspended nine stories above the ground. It was difficult to wash or launder, carry out elementary business, or provide for oneself an done's family.

Another section is on the declining value of human life (p. 203):

In the first place, to facilitate the reforms, the government removed all restrictions on the sale of alcohol. The result was that Russia was flooded with cheap vodka, and while the purchasing power of the average Russian was cut in half, his salary in relation to the cost of vodka increased threefold. The period of unrestricted sale of alcohol coincided with the rapid privatization of state property. Tranquilizing the population with cheap vodka made it easier to carry out privatization, even at the cost of thousands of lives.

Another example of the new government's disregard for human life was the failure to finance the system of public health. For the first time, Russians found that they had to pay for many medical services, from necessary medicines to lifesaving operations, and inability to pay led many to give up on their own health. The failure to finance adequately even such hospitals of "last resort" as the Vishnevsky Surgical Institute in Moscow, which was underused despite a surge in the death rate, came at a time when well-connected insiders were acquiring giant Soviet enterprises for next to nothing.

The most important sign of the priority of political change over the need to protect lives, however, was the tolerance shown for corruption and organized crime. The absence of legal safeguards during the privatization process led to an increased level of conflict in Russia and destroyed the possibility of introducing elements of moral idealism in postcommunist society. For many people who had been raised under the Communist system, the resulting spiritual void was intolerable. It led to a sharply higher murder rate, a spiraling suicide rate, and an epidemic of heart attacks and strokes.

The "shock therapy" approach to reform resulted in a tidal wave of premature deaths. In the period 1992-1995, deaths exceeded births by 2 million, a demographic catastrophe not experienced in Russia in peacetime except during the famine of 1932-33 and the Stalinist terror of 1937-38.

This is a story about Galina Mkrtumyan, whose child Artyem fell into a sinkhole filled with boiling water, and whose husband Vladimir went into the pit to pull the child out. Both died days or weeks later as a result of their burns (pp. 209-210):

On March 21 there was a funeral and Vladimir was cremated. Galina hird a lawyer an dprepared to file suit against the city of Moscow. While doing so, she learned of the fate of Marina Yarova, a forty-three-year-old mother of two, who had been boiled alive after falling into a sinkhole in a field near her apartment whilewalking her dogs on March 11, seventeen days after the accident involving Galina's husband and son. With this news, she lost all hope for the future of her country. It seemed to her that there was no tragedy sufficiently horrible to shake the indifference of the authorities or their disregard for human life. She later told a reporter that her son had died a death that would not have been imposed on even the most hardened recidivist in the most barbaric and uncivilized country in the world. Becuase of the criminal carelessness of the city authorities, her life had been ruined. "What I feel now is terrible emptiness," she said, "and I am standing on the brink of an abyss."

Such crime was possible only due to a massive breakdown in the moral fabric of Russian society (pp. 224-225):

Against this background, three factors made it possible for gangsters to achieve legitimacy and even a form of respectability. The first was the gangsters' depiction of themselves as Robin Hoods who forced corrupt businessmen to "share" their wealth and, to a degree, redistributed it.

The second factor was the general belief that the gangsters, by using force to appropriate wealth, were not that much different from anyone else. Russians were raised on a depiction of capitalism as a jungle in which only the most ruthless survived, and they saw how, in Russia, huge enterprises were stolen and fortunes made on the basis of political connections. Accordingly, it often did not seem that the activities of the gangsters were particularly blameworthy.

Finally, Russians accorded gangsters legitimacy because, with the collapse of Communist ideology, which, to a degree, gave people a sense of meaning, the population was left without moral orientation.

The resulting moral vacuum often had murderous consequences. In the years 1992-1997 in Moscow alone, 20,000 people sold their housing and then disappeared. In the country as a whole, the number for the period was many times higher. A significant percentage, if not the vast majority, of these people were believed to have been murdered for their apartments.

Once housing was privatized in Russia, it became valuable, and apartment gangs formed in cities all over the country. They bribed building superintendents to give them the names of alcoholics or elderly persons living alone without close relatives. They then, under various guises, made contact with these persons, forced them to sign over their apartments, and then killed them. The "sale" was then registered with the help of cooperative notaries and officials of the passport department of the local police.

The success of the apartment gangs was, in part, a tribute to their ruthlessness. But it was possible because of the cooperation of ordinary citizens. The building superintendents, police officials, and notaries knew, or at least strongly suspected, that nothing good would come to the persons whom they identified or certified to have sold their apartments, but they did so anyway because the fate of these people was not their concern.

Similar moral indifference was demonstrated by high-ranking officials. In 1992 the Kremlin Palace of Congresses was rented out for an unusual spectacle. Members of Aum Shinri Kyo, the Japanese doomsday cult, dressed in tinsel-colored leotards danced around in clouds of dry ice in a musical written by the cult leader, Shoko Asahara, to markt he beginning of Aum's "Russian Salvation Tour." It was during this tour that cult members made the acquaintance of Oleg Lobov, the secretary of the Security Council and a close associate of Yeltsin, inaugurating an era of close cooperation between Aum and the Russian authorities.

With Lobov's help, members of the sect, described as "Japanese businessmen," trained at the bases of the Taman and Kantemirov Divisions near Moscow in the use of machine guns, rifles, and tanks; shopped for advanced weapons, including MiG-29 fighter jets, Proton rocket launchers, and nuclear warheads; and attended lectures at the Laboratory of Thermodynamics of the Academy of Sciences, where they studied the circulation of gases.

In 1995 members of the sect launched a sarin nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo metro that killed 12 people and injured more than 5,000. At the trial of the leader of the sect, Aum's chief of intelligence testified that the production designs for the sarin had been delivered to Aum by Lobov in 1993 in return for $100,000 in cash. (Yeltsin's response was to promote Lobov to be his envoy to Chechnya.)

The situation demanded the ability to draw clear morald istinctions, but in a society that had lost one worldview without having gained another one, many Russians found those distinctions impossible to make.

I suppose you can argue that the fact that no Soviet nuclear bombs have been used by terrorists suggests that maybe there was a limit, but maybe it's just that the price wasn't right, or maybe it's just the timing. In one notable event after the book was written, two Russian airlines were blew up by Chechen suicide-bombers who had bribed their way onto the airplanes.

posted 2007-09-21

September Rollouts

When Osama Bin Laden unveiled his latest message to the masses, I was reminded of Andrew Card's 2003 quip about waiting until August was over before rolling out a new product. Bin Laden's appearance was mirrored in the Petraeus/Crocker dog and pony show of purported progress in Iraq -- towards what remains the unasked and unanswerable question. I've been reading books about Russia lately, and have run across another September Surprise: this one from 1999, the salesman Vladimir Putin, the product the Chechen War rematch.

The following are quotes from David Satter's Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003, Yale University Press). The first Chechen War followed in the heels of the breakup of the Soviet Union, which left the Russian Union (former RSFSR) in control of dozens of non-Russian "autonomous" regions threatening further fragmentation. The war reached a tentative end in 1996 with substantial autonomy for Chechnya, and bad feelings all around. The independence movement attracted support from mujahideen anxious to advance their jihad beyond Afghanistan, a dangerous minority not content with de facto independence. No doubt similar elements were at large in Russia's military, spoiling for a rematch. And Russia in general was in wretched shape after eight years of kleptocracy had reduced GDP by half while unleashing rampant criminalism. By 1999 Yeltsin's approval ratings were down in the single digits -- he avoided impeachment only through flagrant bribery, and would be eased out at the end of the year with Nixon-like immunity from future prosecution.

Satter's thesis is that scandal was finally catching up with the new Russian oligarchy, but they escaped through the power shift and the distraction of war and terrorism. This started with Chechen militants crossing the border into neighboring Dagestan, another muslim region with a troubled history of Russian occupation (pp. 63-64):

On August 5, 1999, a Muslim force led by Shamil Basayev, a Chechen guerrilla leader, and Khattab, a guerrilla leader believed to be a Saudi citizen, entered western Dagestan from Chechnya with the purpose of starting an anti-Russian uprising. On August 9 [acting premier Sergei] Stepashin was dismissed, and Vladimir Putin took his place. On August 22 the force withdrew into Chechnya without heavy losses.

The incursion provoked indignation in Russia, but there were also immediate suspicions that the invasion was a provocation intended to prepare the public for a new war in Chechnya. The internal forces assigned to guard the border had been withdrawn shortly before the Chechens invaded, so the force led by Basayev and Khattab entered Dagestan without resistance. For two weeks, while the invaders fought with the local police, the Russian army made no move to attack them. The invaders then withdrew from Dagestan in a convoy of 72 Kamaz trucks without interference. Commenting on the invasion, Vitaly Tretyakov, the editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which is owned by Berezovsky, wrote that the Chechens had been lured into Dagestan in an operation organized by the Russian intelligence services.

Alexander Zhilin, a prominent military journalist, wrote that he had spoken to high-ranking officers in the general staff, the Ministry of Defense, and the Interior Ministry and that all were in agreement that the invasion was a preparation for another preelection Chechen war. "In this connection," he wrote, "all my interlocutors without exception stressed a not unimportant point: the FSB and the Security Council were headed simultaneously by the present head of the government, Vladimir Putin."

Despite concern that it was a provocation, the invasion of Dagestan refocused the attention of the country on the northern Caucasus. In late August, the Russian armed forces began land and air attacks on villages in Dagestan controlled by Wahhabi Muslims in apparent retaliation for the earlier incursion. On August 31 a powerful explosion ripped through the underground Manezh shopping center next to the Kremlin, killing one person and injuring thirty. This event unsettled the political atmosphere, but the tension had to reach a qualitatively new level before the population was sufficiently galvanized to support a second Chechen war. This occurred as a result of developments over the next few days.

Then came the September product roll out (pp. 64-65):

The events unfolded as if according to plan.

At 9:40 PM on September 4, a car bomb exploded in Buinaksk, a city in Dagestan, demolishing a five-story apartment building housing Russian military families. The death toll from the explosion was 62, with nearly 100 people injured.

On September 9, shortly after midngiht, an explosion destroyed all nine stories of the center section of the building at 19 Guryanova Street in the Pechatnikisection of Moscow. Several bodies were hurled into the surrounding streets. Fires raged for hours under the smoldering rubble. By the end of the first day, the death toll had risen to ninety-eight.

Russian officials immediately blamed the Guryanova Street bombing and the bombing in Buinaksk on Chechen terrorists seeking revenge for their "defeat" in Dagestan. A spokesman for the FSB identified the explosive used in the bombing as a combination of hexogen, a military explosive, and dynamite. According to Yelstin, terrorists had "declared war on the Russian people."

The residents of Moscow now began to fear being blown up in their beds. Yeltsin ordered [Moscow mayor Yuri] Luzhkov to have all 30,000 residential buildings in the city searched for explosives, and residents organized round-the-clock patrols. The police received thousands of calls from city residents reporting suspicious activity, and a building near the scene of the explosion on Guryanova Street was evacuated in a false alarm.

On September 13 a massive explosion reduced a nine-story brick apartment building at 6 Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow to a smoldering pile of rubble. The bombing took place at 5:00 AM, and Muscovites awoke to graphic television footage showing emergency workers feverishly going through the debris. A rescue worker asked, "How can anyone tell how many people are dead if we find them in small pieces?" The death toll in the Kashirskoye Highway explosion soon reached 118.

On September 16, with funerals for the first bombing victims still going on, a truck bomb ripped off the facade of a nine-story apartment building in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk, killing at least seventeen and injuring sixty-nine. The psychological shock of the explosion, which, like the explosion on Kashirskoye Highway, took place at 5:00 AM, was so great that afterwards hundreds of people were unwilling to sleep in their homes and insisted on spending the night outdoors.

In the aftermath of the explosion, Putin appeared on television and said that it was necessary to "wipe [the terrorists] out in their toilets."

With the bombings, the psychological preconditions had been created for a second Chechen war.

The effect was much like the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US: while it may have been good news for the jihadists, it was even better news for politicians and a military desperate to prove their mettle in a context where both had fallen on hard times (pp. 65-66):

Almost from the beginning, however, there were doubts as to whether the bombings were really the work of Chechen terrorists. Both Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen leader, and Basayev denied that Chechens had anything to do with the bombings. More disturbing than such denials, however, were the circumstances of the bombings themselves, which made the claims that they were the work of Chechen terrorists increasingly implausible.

First, all four bombings had the same "signature," as attested by the nature of the destruction, the way the buildings' concrete panels had collapsed, and the volume of the blast. In each case the explosive was said to be hexogen, and all four bombs had been set to go off at night to inflict the maximum number of casualties.

Second, to do what they were accused of having done without expert assistance, Chechen terrorists would have needed to be able to organize nine explosions (the four that took place and the five that the Russian authorities claimed to have prevented) in widely distant cities in the space of two weeks. They would have had to be able to act with lightning speed. In the case of the bombing on Kashirskoye Highway, the police checked the basement where the bomb was placed three hours before the blast.

Third, the Chechens also would have needed to penetrate top-secret Russian military factories. Investigators said that each bomb contained 450 to 650 pounds of hexogen, which was produced in Russia in only one factory, a plant in the Perm oblast guarded by the central FSB. Its distribution was tightly controlled. Despite this, the presumed Chechen terrorists were supposedly able to obtain the hexogen and transport tons of it to locations all over Russia.

Finally, Chechen terrorists would have had to demonstrate technical virtuosity. In Moscow, the bomb on Guryanova Street caused an entire stairway to collapse. On Kashirskoye Highway, an eight-story brick building was reduced to rubble.In Volgodonsk, the truck bomb that killed seventeen people damaged thirty-seven buildings in the surrounding area. To achieve this kind of result, the explosives had to be carefully measured and prepared. In the case of the Moscow apartment buildings,t hey had to be placed to destroy the weakest, critical structural elements so that each of the buildings would collapse like a house of cards. Such careful calculations are the mark of skilled specialists, and the only sources of such specialist training in Russia were the spetsnaz (special assignment) forces, military intelligence (GRU), and the FSB.

Another troubling aspect of the apartment bombings was the timing. The bombings were explained as a response to the Chechen-led Muslim invasion of Dagestan earlier in the month (regarded by many as a Russian provocation). A careful study of the apartment bombings, however, showed that it would have taken from four to four-and-a-half months to organize them. In constructing a model of the events, all stages of the conspiracy were considered: developing a plan for the targets, visiting the targets, making corrections, determing the optimum mix of explosives, ordering their preparation, making final calculations based on the makeup of the explosives, renting space in the targeted buildings, and transporting the explosives to the targets.

I don't find much of this logic convincing -- I suspect that the explosive expertise, and maybe even the hexogen, is relatively easy to come by in Russia, especially given the rampant bankruptcy and corruption; arguments of the form "only X has the expertise and/or organization to do this" are often wrong. But if you agree that the whole series belongs to a single hand -- the alternative that both sides divvied up the atrocities is harder to believe just given the tightness of the timeline -- then the organizational capabilities of the FSB have an edge. (Another possibility is that the Dagestan operations were initiated by the Chechen jihadists in an effort to support allied forces in muslim Dagestan, but that the bombings in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia were not.) Hexogen, by the way, is better known as RDX, the base for many plastic explosives, including those used to compress subcritical plutonium cores in nuclear bombs. The story continues (p. 67):

At first these inconsistencies troubled only a small number of people familiar with terrorist operations and the capacities of the FSB. But on the night of September 22, six days after the bombing in Volgodonsk, the "training exercise" incident took place in Ryazan, and the "terrorists" captured there were found to be members of the central FSB. A short time later, after weeks of insisting that the xplosive used in the bombings in Buinaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk was hexogen, the FSB suddenly changed its explanation and announced that the explosive was a combination of aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate, which can be found on any collective farm.

Many Russians did not want even to consider that the FSB might have been behind the apartment-house bombings, but these two events increased suspicion. The notion that a fake bomb had been put in the basement of the apartment building in Ryazan as part of a training exercise was more than many people were ready to believe. At the same time, the change in the identity of the explosive appeared to be an attempt to negate the impact of the fact that a gas analyzer in Ryazan had detected hexogen and that the only factory in Russia that produced hexogen was guarded by the FSB. The police had already arrested one person whose hands showed traces of hexane, a chemical similar to hexogen.

Such charges were impossible to prove, given that the FSB had control of the crime scenes, including the bombs seized in Ryazan. Besides, most Russians accepted their government's word, and felt the urge to war, which Putin pursued so vigorously that throughout Andrew Meier's Black Earth the Second Chechen War is almost always referred to as "Putin's War" (pp. 68-69:

In the aftermath of the bombings, Russia launched a new invasion of Chechnya, which now enjoyed overwhelming popular support. [This was just a few months after Yeltsin narrowly avoided impeachment on charges of having started the first Chechen War.] Putin was identified as Yeltsin's designated successor, and preelection propaganda on his behalf got under way at the same time as Russian troops moved across the northern Chechen plain toward the Terek River. In a country tired of criminality and chaos, the state-run television helped Putin project an image of competence, energy, and determination, and within weeks he went from having virtually no support in the country to being by far the leading candidate for president.

As both the Chechen war and the presidential campaign progressed, however, fears that the events leading to the war had been orchestrated became increasingly widespread. Some political observers in Moscow noted that events were unfolding in a manner that matched the conditions described by Harold Lasswell, a University of Chicago political scientist, as being optimal for successful propaganda. In a book describing Allied propaganda during World War I, Lasswell said that a propagandist's success is limited to the tension level of the subject population, which he described as "that condition of adaptation or mal-adaptation, which is variously described as public anxiety, nervousness, irritability, unrest, discontent, or strain." According to Lasswell, "the propagandist who deals with a community when its tension level is high, finds that a reservoir of explosive energy can be touched off by the same small match which would normally ignite [only] a bonfire."

There was no question that Putin's prosecution of the Chechen war was taking place in a society whose tension level after the September bombings had increased dramatically. When [Alexander] Voloshin began to investigate the Ryazan incident, he was advised to read Lasswell's book by friends who were aware of the popularity of American political science literature within the FSB. After doing so, Voloshin became convinced that events were being played out according to a scenario written by Lasswell.

At the same time, although the bombings were supposed to have a Chechen "trail," there was no proof of Chechen involvement, and for the Chechens the bombings made no sense. Having won conditional independence in the first Chechen war, the Chechens knew that they easily could lose it if Russia were sufficiently provoked. If it is assumed that the Chechens understood the danger of an invasion but -- out of sheer hatred -- bombed the apartment buildings anyway, it would have been logical for them to launch new acts of terror once the invasion took place. But none occurred. At the same time, by blowing up apartment buildings in impoverished, working-class neighborhoods while ignoring targets of strategic or symbolic significance, the Chechen terrorists appeared to be declaring war on the Russian people, a response that would have been completely illogical if their goal was to protest the actions of the Russian state.

There may never be conclusive proof of who organized the apartment-house bombings. Definitive evidence bearing on the Ryazan incident is in the hands of the FSB and presumably will never be made public. However, the political situation at the time the bombings took place, the level of preparation, organization, and expertise demonstrated in their execution, and the suspicious nature of the "training exercise" in Ryazan all suggest that the bombings were organized not by the Chechens, who had nothing to gain from them, but by those who needed another war capable of propelling Putin into the presidency in order to save their corruptly acquired wealth. These could only have been the leaders of the Yeltsin regime itself.

Andrew Meier describes the Second Chechen War at some length in Black Earth, focusing on a cleanup operation massacre in Aldy, a town just south of Grozny. The Russians launched a brutal assault on Chechnya, using massive air strikes and artillery bombardment to produce maximum damage while suffering minimal casualties. Russia was able to capture Grozny in February 2000, and Putin was elected president in a March 2000 triumph. The short-term effect of Putin's ascendency was to short-circuit reform of the criminal oligarchy that developed under Yeltsin (pp. 69-71):

The Chechen war continued to go well, and Putin's approval rating remained high, but there was no guarantee that this situation could be maintained until the scheduled election date in June 2000. If Yeltsin resigned immediately, however, Putin would become acting president, and elections could be held in three months, giving him an enormous advantage. Yeltsin's entourage persuaded him to agree, and on New Year's Eve, Yeltsin resigned, handing over the reins of power.

The elections were set for March 26, and Putin eschewed serious campaigning and avoided even explaining where he stood on the major issues facing the country. As a result, the Russian people elected someone about whom they knew nothing, which allowed them to invest him with hoped-for characteristics.

With the help of the September bombings, the anger of the population was redirected from the criminal oligarchy that had pillages the country to the Chechens. And since it appeared that the war was being prosecuted successfully, Putin was the recipient of the public support that would have otherwise gone to those trying to fight the death grip of criminals on Russian society. [ . . . ]

In nine months, the situation had changed to a degree that many would have not thought possible. With grants of immunity from prosecution for Yeltsin and his family, and a new government that looked very much like the old, the members of the ruling oligarchy no longer had to fear criminal prosecution, and all talk of a reexamination of the distribution of property during the privatization process -- the largest corrupt giveaway of state resources in history -- disappeared.

The long-term remains to be seen, but one side-effect of the war was that Chechens did eventually produce a number of significant terrorist actions in Russia. The idea that Putin and the FSB could be responsible for the September 2000 apartment bombings is monstrous, but wouldn't come close to a top-ten list of Russian (both Soviet and Tsarist, and arguably post-Soviet) state crimes against their people. In many ways the crimes of the Soviets were schooled under the Tsars, and Putin's apprenticeship in the KGB is hardly a break from that legacy. In any case, Putin's opportunistic use of Chechnya for his own political purposes is inarguable, and damning enough -- same for Bush's opportunistic use of 9/11. That they emerged after 2001 as kindred spirits, with Bush peering into Putin's soul and liking what he saw, seems fitting.

I don't find any 9/11 conspiracy theories other than al-Qaeda at all convincing, although it still seems probable to me that the post-9/11 anthrax attacks were some sort of operation within the greater US military-security complex, intended to ratchet up our fear of terrorism in order to gain support for military operations abroad. That remains a major unsolved crime, its critical import now forgotten but its immediate impact still reverberating.

Wikipedia mentions several Chechens arrested and convicted on charges related to the 2000 bombings after Satter's book appeared, but also notes that the evidence isn't public.

posted 2007-09-12