When a doctor's newest patient arrives nearly dead, what is to be done? That was the question in Moscow on December 31, 1999 when Boris Yeltsin resigned as President. To former KGB intelligence officer Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin handed over a barely twitching, thoroughly criminalized Russia.

Yeltsin, his economic planners, courtiers and assorted gangsters starred between 1991 and 1999 in a cosmic morality play. Paul Klebnikov describes them all in GODFATHER OF THE KREMLIN: BORIS BEREZOVSKY AND THE LOOTING OF  RUSSIA. Not since Hitler invaded in 1941 has one man brought such disaster to "all the Russias" as well-intentioned but bungling Boris Yeltsin (GODFATHER, p. 320).

Only 12 years ago the Soviet empire was still menacing. In 1989 the Warsaw Pact boasted a five-day strategy for smashing across West Germany and the Low Countries to the English Channel. That was seven years after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, who had relentlessly built up the Red Armed Forces. Since 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had preached peace and cooperation. Within the still intact USSR, Gorbachev, through "restructuring" and "openness,"
expected to stuff Russia and other republics into a new constitutional
framework enshrining both a freely chosen "federalism" and "socialism."

In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. By 1992 the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were history. There remained Boris Yeltsin's Russia. But by Americans Yeltsin was not feared. He was a democrat and a benevolent drunk. Well before Yeltsin was re-elected President in 1996, Bill Clinton made it easy for Americans to feel safely bored by everything Russian. Americans sounded no alarm when Clinton's inner circle, including Vice President Al Gore, brushed aside intelligence warnings that Yeltsin was proving disastrous for everything that had worked and for most things of value in the old Russia
(p. 325).

Into and throughout his grim story of 1990s Russia, historian Paul
Klebnikov weaves the rises and falls of one Boris Berezovsky, erstwhile intellectual and latterly robber baron. In 1946 Berezovksy was born "into a Jewish family that was part of Moscow's educated elite" (p. 52). He became a highly trained, modest-living egghead, a computer specialist who, only after Yeltsin gave him and other looters the opportunity, happily deserted science for private business and court intrigue. In four years he became a multi-millionaire, extending tentacles into used cars, civil aviation, communications, banking, foreign trade and on and on. Through the story of Berezovsky and other "oligarchs," GODFATHER OF THE KREMLIN demonstrates how American-style democracy proved ruinous to Russia's moral and economic health.

At some primitive level the old USSR and its satellites, like the earlier
Ottoman Empire, actually got  important things done. Not cost-effectively. But most Soviets felt they were treated, if not fairly, at least equally unfairly. There was a centralized plan for their empire. It distributed and enforced complementary economic roles and functions among countries and regions (p. 81.)

In 1989 Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan visited Moscow and studied the USSR's economic needs. To him Moscow's first priority had to be absorbing that half of the Soviet GNP represented by the roughly $800 billion worth of rubles held by private citizens. A gradual privatization of state-owned productive assets would first draw down the "ruble overhang." That successfully done, price controls should be cautiously lifted. The ruble could be devalued. Soviet economists in fact drafted (but Gorbachev did not implement) a series of emergency measures called The 500-day Plan. "The privatization program would start with such small assets as apartments, plots of land, shops, trucks and small workshops, and movegradually to large factories, mines and oil fields" (p. 51).

On January 2, 1992 Yeltsin, having pushed aside Gorbachev, did things exactly backwards. He began by lifting most domestic price controls. "The great mass of savings accumulated by Russians over a generation was wiped out" (p. 80). Russia's GNP plummeted year after year. Nor did Yeltsin protect the elderly, the sick and the poor, and they died in unprecedented numbers.

Only later came privatization. Within two years half of government-owned productive properties was to be in the hands of citizens, partially through distribution of 151 million vouchers (p. 126). By 1993-94 many of the country's most valuable assets were privatized, with irretrievable loss to government revenues.

It was like tossing bloody bait to sharks. Vladimir Gusinsky and other soon to be "oligarchs" gobbled down everything privatized they could sink their teeth into. They thereby won unprecedented influence over and within the increasingly impoverished government. The most blatant pirate was the drama's villain, Boris Berezovsky.

President Putin raced through 2000, his first year in office, with successes which included a 7% economic growth rate. Putin now appears poised to contain, perhaps even to crush, "the Godfather" and other robber barons. He has declared war on the oligarchs, some of whom actively helped him be elected only ten months ago. Vladimir Putin has promised Russia a "dictatorship of law."

We shall see.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GODFATHER OF THE KREMLIN: BORIS BEREZOVSKY AND THE LOOTING OF RUSSIA (New York, Harcourt, 2000, xiv, 400 pp., $28.00)

-OOO-
 

Sent from Canyon Lake, Texas 
to Asheville TRIBUNE