ЧУБАЙС, ИЛИ КАК ДА СЕ ОГРАБИ РУСИЯ С ПОМОЩТА НА АМЕРИКАНЦИТЕ
Фред УейрНевероятната история на Анатолий Чубайс и как в продължение на години наред най-ненавижданият от руснаците политик , успя да наложи на страната си катастрофални либеристки реформи, разработени от неговите покровители - като Американската агенция за помощи в чужбина USAID и Harvard Institute на Джефри Сакс, благодарение на които винаги се спасява, дори когато е заварен "да бърка в меда" за измами на стойност стотици хиляди долара. Но това е и история за невероятните щети, нанесени на руснаците от безотговорното съюзничество между местната олигархия и политическите и финансови центрове на властта на Запад. За делата на Harvard Institute и западните консултанти в Русия "Искри" помести, през 1997 г., два материала: "Скандалът около Harvard Institute на Джефри Сакс", на английски и "Западните консултанти и руският дълг", на български.
The myth of Russia's successful transition from communism to
free-market democracy is solid coin in most places that matter,
from annual summits of the Group of Seven leading industrial
nations and the editorial nerve-centers of top media
organizations, to the electronic hives where the world's key
financial decisions are made. And in all those places it is
firmly understood that the primary author of Russia's historic
shift has not been the ageing and frequently doddering symbol of
reform, President Boris Yeltsin, but an unelected and immensely
powerful bureaucrat named Anatoly Chubais.
Backed by millions of dollars in Western aid, this 42-year
old, English-speaking economist conceived and wrote the main --
and much celebrated -- chapters of Russia's great transformation.
Working closely with U.S. government-funded economists of the
Harvard Institute for International Development, Chubais
fashioned a neo-liberal economic program founded mainly on faith
in the spontaneous self-organizing power of the market. The key
policy elements were a swift transfer of state property to
private hands, dismantling the social safety net and withdrawal
of government from economic planning and regulation. In turbulent
post-Soviet conditions, especially after Yeltsin smashed the
Gorbachev-era parliament in 1993 and concentrated power in the
Kremlin, democratic process was sacrificed in favor of rapid
change decreed from above and a small clique of insiders, many of
them Chubais cronies, came to dominate the re-division of
Russia's national wealth.
In 1992-4, Chubais designed and supervised the mass
privatization drive that, on paper, passed 70 percent of the
country's industry into private hands and created 40 million
individual shareholders. In practice, a handful of new financiers
gained control of the best assets while millions of workers were
left holding title to bankrupt industrial dinosaurs. In 1995,
Chubais abandoned populist pretences and launched "loans for
shares", a series of rigged auctions that almost literally
endowed most remaining crown jewels of Soviet industry and
natural resources upon about a dozen top tycoons. This scheme
almost overnight consolidated a dominant, if bandit-like,
capitalist class in Russia. The next year, he mobilized the new
plutocrats and their vast resources to muscle out Gennady
Zyuganov, the Communist electoral challenger to Yeltsin's throne.
Handed near total control over economic policy by a grateful
Yeltsin last March, Chubais pledged to reverse the seemingly
endless post-Soviet slump, tame the excesses of what he himself
had begun to term "oligarchic capitalism," restore the bankrupt
Russian state to solvency and make good its obligations to a
shattered and impoverished society.
But within the space of a few weeks this autumn, Chubais'
momentum disintegrated. A sudden thunderstorm of scandal burst
around him, covering him in public disgrace and prompting Yeltsin
to demote him. Worse, as Russia's stock market collapses, the
rouble tumbles and tens of millions of workers in the provinces
clamour for months of unpaid wages, Chubais record is beginning
to look less like a catalogue of achievements and more like a
recipe for catastrophe.
Like his American mentors before him (see ITT, June 30-July
13, 1997) Chubais has been caught manipulating market reforms to
line his own pockets. Last Summer Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan
Hay, the two top HIID officials who helped Chubais draft most of
Russia's key economic reforms, were fired after investigation
showed they had engaged in insider trading and used HIID
resources to support the private investment activities of friends
and relatives.
In November one of Russia's leading investigative
journalists, Alexander Minkin, exposed a secret book deal in
which Chubais and four highly-placed co-authors received a
whopping $450,000 advance from a publishing house owned by
Uneximbank--a financial empire that has been one of the biggest
winners in the privatization selloffs run by Chubais--for an
as-yet unfinished 250-page book, The History of Privatization in
Russia. Minkin printed his findings in the crusading weekly,
Novaya Gazeta, one of the few Russian newspapers not yet
controlled by a major financier.
"A fee of half a million dollars for a book on a technical
subject, albeit such a curious one as privatization in Russia, is
unimaginable," Minkin said in a radio interview. "It is a veiled
bribe."
The Russian media gleefully dubbed it the "writers union
affair," the opposition-led parliament demanded a criminal
investigation and Yeltsin hastily fired three of the would-be
authors from their official posts. Chubais was stripped of his
job as Finance Minister, but kept on as First Deputy Prime
Minister in charge of economic policy. Firing Chubais altogether
might "destabilize the government and damage the economy" by
panicking foreign investors, Yeltsin said.
The centrality of Chubais as both symbol and guarantor of
continuing market reforms was a universal theme in reporting on
the scandal in the U.S. media. Chubais is considered the West's
point man in a Kremlin often seen as unpredictable and lacking in
ideological stamina. His U.S.supporters professed shock that the
chief guru of Russian market reforms could turn out to be just
another dirty politician.
"Anatoly Chubais is both the agent and enemy of Russian
reform," editorialized the New York Times, one of his biggest
longtime fans. "Without Mr. Chubais's wily advice and
determination to shed Communist economics, Boris Yeltsin might
not have brought Russia so far along the road to democracy and
free markets. But Mr. Chubais, Mr. Yeltsin's top economic and
political adviser, has also condoned unseemly dealings between
the Kremlin and Russian businessmen. Even by the raw standards of
Russian politics, he has now disgraced himself and ought to
vacate his post as First Deputy Prime Minister."
That judgement sounds righteous -- and the Times was almost
alone among Western media in demanding Chubais' scalp -- but it
actually evades the hardest truths. The current scandal should
have come as no surprise given that Chubais has been linked to
several corrupt and criminal conspiracies in the past.
For example, during the 1996 presidential elections two
close aides of Chubais were caught leaving a government building
with $500,000 in cash. Chubais was later caught on a taped
transcript, published in the combative independent daily
Moskovsky Komsomolets, ordering a criminal investigation
into the matter halted. The money, it later transpired, was part
of a vast illicit slush fund which Chubais supervised as head of
Yeltsin's re-election campaign. (See ITT, July 8, 1996). Boris
Berezovsky, head of one of Russia's biggest financial-industrial
empires, told the Financial Times recently that in early 1996 he
and six other top tycoons met with Chubais in Davos, Switzerland,
and agreed to back Yeltsin's re-election with all the means and
resources at their disposal. Yelena Dikkun, a Russian
investigative journalist, has estimated that the Yeltsin team
doled out over $100-million to get their man re-elected, though
the legal spending limit for a presidential candidate was $3-
million.
Last summer, the daily Izvestia published documents showing
that in early 1996 Chubais received a $3-million interest-free
loan from a leading Moscow investment house -- and big winner in
the privatization lottery -- Stolichny Bank. The money was paid
to the Center for the Defense of Private Property, a nonprofit
organization founded by Anatoly Chubais. The Center invested
the cash in Russian state treasury bills, and deposited the
roughly $300,000 profits straight into Chubais' personal bank
account (see ITT, August 11, 1997). Later that year, as head of
Yeltsin's administration, Chubais was instrumental in handing
over a huge state-owned financial institution, Agroprombank, to
Stolichny Bank at far below market prices.
After the November revelations about his giant book advance,
Chubais told journalists that he and his co-authors planned to
give 95 per cent of the proceeds to "charity". Pressed on the
point, he named the beneficiary agency as The Center for the
Defense of Private Property. No one has yet been able to find a
telephone listing or an officer of the Center to give comment.
Revelations of corruption, while important, are only part of
the crisis. Russia's economy has taken a turn for the dire in
recent months and President Yeltsin, who possesses few known
principles beyond the exigencies of power, has sharply distanced
himself from Chubais and clearly set him up for sacrifice. In
part this is Yeltsin's standard reaction to trouble: he lines up
his ministers, judges them harshly, and metes out punishment. In
Russia's increasingly autocratic politics the president is above
the fray and must never be personally blamed.
"Russian politicians are all venal, and Chubais as much as
the others, but Yeltsin has moved against him now because his
program just isn't working," says Igor Bunin, an analyst with the
Center for Political Trends, a liberal think tank. "Society is
near the breaking point and can't stomach it anymore."
After six years of wrenching change, Chubais' much-vaunted
achievements appear -- like his literary endeavours -- to have
been little more than a high-priced scam.
"There is a Potemkin Village aspect to Russia's market
economy, as authored by Chubais," says Robert McIntyre, a
Fulbright economist who has lectured and researched in Russia for
the past year. "There has been great emphasis on doing the things
international financial institutions call for, such as getting
privatization done, setting up securities markets, stabilizing
the currency, slashing the state budget. These things appear to
have been done by Chubais, but on closer examination they have no
depth. The economic and social disaster underneath has been
studiously ignored."
Russia's economy has been in freefall for years and is now
roughly half its 1991 size. Mass privatization engineered by
Chubais may have changed the nameplate on many bankrupt
industries, but only worsened their economic plight. Though
Communist planners created the mess, Yeltsin's government
completed the ruin by handing whole economic sectors over to new
private owners without any obligation to invest, modernize or
even maintain existing infrastructure.
Boris Berezovsky bragged to the Financial Times that just
seven tycoons now control half of Russia's gross domestic
product. But in practice, Russia's new capitalists have chosen to
milk their inheritance rather than rebuild it. Russia's
government currency commission estimates, conservatively, that
$150-billion has left the country over the past six years --
roughly $2-billion per month -- or three times the total of
incoming foreign loans, aid and investment.
In a massive study of the post-Soviet economy last Spring,
the Russian Academy of Sciences estimated that capital investment
by 1995 was down to just 25% of the 1989 level. Lev Mironov,
chairman of Russia's Oil and Gas Workers Union, says depreciation
of fixed assets in that industry -- one of the most favored
sectors in the Russian economy -- is running at a rate three
times greater than new investment.
"This is all very much the consequence of the Chubais model
of reform," says McIntyre. "His approach was to put all the
property into the hands of capitalists as quickly as possible and
make the government stand back and let them do their job. Well,
he did, and they did. The tragedy is that there are plenty of
perfectly respectable economic alternatives to neo-liberal slash
and burn reforms, but none were ever considered here."
The oft-repeated goal of creating Western-style mass middle
class prosperity has evaporated, almost in proportion with the
growth of oligarchic economic control. According to Harvard
University's Davis Center for Russian Studies, the number of
small businesses in Russia plunged by 50,000, or about 7 percent,
between 1995 and 1997.
"Big Russian financial empires, with strong political
connections, mostly don't pay taxes," says Tatiana Maleva, an
analyst with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "Bankrupt
factories can't pay. The government's tax revenues keep falling,
and so the squeeze on small businesses gets tighter and tighter
every day. No wonder they're disappearing."
The oligarchs fathered by Chubais-style reform showed their
gratitude by backing President Yeltsin's re-election campaign in
1996, but have since fallen out in squabbling over division of
the few remaining juicy state assets. Chubais owes much of his
current political discomfort to the mud-slinging war --
revelations of conspiracy, corruption and dirty deeds -- waged by
the rival tycoons through their private media megaphones in
recent months.
Moscow sources whisper that it was professional spies hired
by one of the disgruntled financiers, Berezovsky, who provided
Minkin with documents and details of Chubais' lucrative book
deal. Minkin refuses to say, but insists that "if a fact
convinces me of its truth, I'll print it".
For the vast majority of Russians, all these Kremlin
shenanigans pale beside the daily struggle to survive. The
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions estimates that
40 percent of Russian workers did not receive their salaries in
October, and only one quarter are paid regularly and in full.
The ICFTU charges Chubais' financial management is at the
heart of the crisis. The Russian government has systematically
cut-off assistance to struggling industries, condemning them to
sink or swim in almost impossible conditions, while borrowing
heavily from the International Monetary Fund and the domestic
bond market. While tax revenues have fallen to barely 50 per cent
of projections, debt servicing devoured over 6 per cent of
Russia's GDP last year.
As the Russian government scrambles to maintain payments to
creditors at home and abroad -- often by recycling IMF loans --
it chronically defaults on wages for millions of public sector
workers, pensioners and the military.
"Russian leaders are quick to do the bidding of
international finance. When will they start to do the bidding of
the people who elected them?" ICFTU chairman Bill Jordan told a
November conference on the spiralling wage crisis.
This autumn's global financial turmoil deeply aggravated
Russia's woes. Dubbed "the world's best performing stock market"
before October's crash, Russia's bourse has halved in size.
Foreign capital has stampeded out of the country, forcing the
government to almost double the cost of its own borrowing and
pushing the battered rouble toward almost inevitable collapse.
Even the IMF is furious and threatening to withhold
scheduled support due to the Russian government's chronic
inability to collect taxes. Ironically, that failure has its
roots in IMF-recommended policies as implemented by Chubais:
abandoning Russia's industrial heartland to collapse while
refusing to burden the big business oligarchs with serious tax
obligations.
But a delicious whiff of scandal has been added, thanks to
yet another Potemkin Village-like scheme devised by Chubais and
exposed by Minkin. According to government and banking documents
Minkin published in Novaya Gazeta, Chubais sent 45-trillion
roubles (about $7-billion) of the state's money on a long and
seemingly futile odyssey through the Russian banking system.
First the cash was placed on the accounts of local authorities,
then transferred to accounts set up for major industrial tax
defaulters, then returned--labelled as tax receipts--to the
federal treasury.
The point? "The reason for this massive movement of money
was to convince IMF inspectors that Chubais is getting Russia's
revenue problems in hand, that tax collection is starting to pick
up, and that he should be rewarded with more IMF money," says
Minkin. "As you may know, the Russian government survives mainly
on IMF money".
Given all this, it may seem wondrous that Chubais still has
a desk in the Kremlin. But, as the Times editorial quoted above
shows, the brand of market reforms for which he remains the prime
symbol and key enforcer still has a powerful constituency in the
West. For Yeltsin, the calculation may be somewhat simpler:
"Yeltsin is saving him for the dead of winter, when things are
really bad, and firing Chubais will bring maximum political
returns," says Bunin.
Whatever his fate, Russia will be wrestling with his legacy
for a long time to come. "Chubais has created an economic and
social ruin and called it reform," says McIntyre. "It's worse
than failure. He's created a warped and dysfunctional economy
that rewards all the wrong people and brings down cruel
punishment on the vast majority."
( "In These Times", февруари 1998 г.)
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