Yoshie wrote:
>
> The CPRF's program, such as it is, can never be achieved by the
> CPRF's means.
This means that it's a normal party no? Operating according to the normal rules of
hypocrisy, double-dealing, sanctimoniousness etc of bourgeois parties everywhere.
Until just a few years ago, the British Labour Party's programme for more than 70
years had contained the famous Clause 4, which obliged the party when in govt to
take the means of production (!) into national ownership and to secure the full
fruits of those who labour by hand and brain, in a just and equitable system of
distribution. Nobody called all Labour MPs, ministers etc, systematic thieves,
crooks and liars when they did the exact opposite, because no-one ever expected them
to carry out any part of their programme. Why is not the same decency, the same
right to a fig-leaf, permitted to the KPRF?
Actually, hypocrisy is all right in its way. The 'Red Directors' who now squat like
tribal hetmen over the plunder of state and party, or the famous oligarchs, are not
hypocrites: they honestly behave like feudal barbarians. Which is better? Let's face
it, the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois is the only public morality we've
got. Better that than the alternative. This from JRL:
Foreign Policy
January-February 2001
In Other Words
True Crime, Russian-Style
By Chrystia Freeland
Okhota na izyubrya (Stag Hunting)
By Julia Latynina
527 pages, Moscow: Olma-Press and St. Petersburg: Neva, 1999 (in Russian)
Pity the would-be Russian thriller writer. A big part of the pleasure we take
in the latest blockbuster mob movie or bestselling crime novel is the sheer,
children's-bedtime-story catharsis of entering an imaginary world whose
dangers are vivid, yet safely removed from the struggles of our ordinary
existence. But in postcommunist Russia, "real life" is as lurid and scary as
any John Grisham pot-boiler. This is a country where a small-business owner,
engaged in a trade as mundane as selling shoes, must pay local gangsters more
often than the electric company. Here, tax officials sometimes wear
bulletproof vests, conceal their faces in black balaclavas, and carry machine
guns; the best restaurants have metal detectors in the foyer; and the
country's leading tycoons routinely must evade car bombs and flee the country
under threat of arrest. And as for luridb well, one of Moscow's most popular
news programs features an anchorwoman who strips while she recites the day's
top stories.
Against the backdrop of this surreal reality, Russian journalist Julia
Latynina's attempt to write an "economic thriller" is a heroic undertaking.
She tells the story of a Moscow banking oligarch's underhanded campaign to
seize control of a Siberian metallurgical factory from Vyacheslav Izvolsky,
the plant's tough, young local owner. The book's publishers have tried to set
the tone with a pulpish cover featuring a steely-eyed assassin cocking his
pistol at the reader.
Latynina gamely struggles to keep the book jacket's guns-and-molls promise.
She stages a gangland shootout, gives us a couple of scenes of creatively
gruesome torture, and, by the end of the book, manages to tote up three
corpses, a half-dozen assassination attempts, and several encounters with the
prostitutes of Moscow's casino land. It's a noble effort, but ultimately,
Latynina is outgunned by the sheer brutality of everyday Russian life. In a
country where a week of headlines produces more gore than all 527 pages of
Stag Hunting, Latynina's thriller never quite manages to thrill.
That may be why Stag Hunting hasn't quite achieved the runaway popular
success its publishersb who touted the novel as "a book with every chance of
becoming a national best-seller"b had hoped for. But Latynina's work has
become a must-read for the select group of mostly Moscow-based journalists,
pundits, politicians, and executives who unselfconsciously refer to
themselves as the Russian elita. Stag Hunting owes its influence among the
elita to the meticulously detailed economic story Latynina tells once she has
dispensed with her sex-and-guns subplots.
As one of Russia's leading business journalists, Latynina is an able guide to
the intricacies of post-Soviet economic life. She deftly combines a firm
grasp of the dizzying financial detail of Russian businessb an intentionally
confusing realm of barter, arrears, and offshore bank accountsb with a clear
understanding of the larger, systemic role these transactions serve. When it
comes to interpreting the Russian economy, Latynina is, to borrow Isaiah
Berlin's terms, both a fox and a hedgehog, and that is what makes Stag
Hunting such a fascinating book.
The novel, which helpfully includes a three-page appendix listing all the
banks, offshore companies, and trading firms attached to the Siberian
metallurgical factory that is the main theater of action, is full of riveting
detail. Latynina explains precisely how factory directors use offshore firms
to evade taxes, illustrates the best way to bribe provincial governors,
traces the mutually beneficial accumulation of interenterprise arrears within
a particular region, and shows how a tax regime intended to encourage exports
can be manipulated to evade domestic taxes. Latynina is likewise enlightening
about the weapons of corporate warfare K la Russe: The heaviest guns are not
hired "killers"b though they do make an occasional appearanceb but the more
sophisticated arsenal of artificial bankruptcy, bent judges, manipulation of
shareholder registries, and the painstaking accumulation of dossiers of
compromising materials, known as kompromat, usually compiled by ex-KGB agents
and used to blackmail one's business opponents. If you care about the Russian
economy (or, braver still, invest in it) but cannot instantly define
financial instruments like veksels (promissory notes) or lzheeksport
(falsified export documents), you should read this book at once.
For all her foxy talents, Latynina reveals her inner hedgehog, and that is
another reason Stag Hunting has appealed to the Russian elita. Beneath the
gangster flourishes and financial minutiae, Latynina develops a robust theory
explaining how Russian capitalism really works. Her Stag Hunting school of
Russian capitalism boils down to three tough-minded precepts:
First, the Russian state has disintegrated. In Stag Hunting, "there is no
impersonal law," and "Moscow no longer exists." Instead, the country has been
carved into "feudal kingdoms," each controlled by the reigning local business
"khan" or "princeling." Second, business corruption is not only ubiquitous,
it is inevitable. Given the absence of an impartial legal system and the
perverse nature of Russian taxes, the only sensible way to run a business is
through an opaque web of offshore companies, mass tax evasion, liberal
bribing of government officials, and the occasional use of deadly force.
Latynina underscores the absurdity of obeying the law in today's Russia
through the example of the old-fashioned, by-the-book Stalinist who runs a
helicopter factory not far from the metallurgical plant owned and operated by
her fictional hero. The old-timer follows every government edict and
scrupulously pays himself a modest ruble salary. But before long, the factory
of the Volga-driving, virtuous Red director has run out of money, and he is
forced to throw himself and his enterprise at the mercy of his thieving,
Mercedes-riding neighbor. As the perplexed helicopter man tells his new khan,
"I don't know how this happened. I don't steal, and my factory has ground to
a standstill. You do steal and your factory is working."
Finally, Latynina's Russia is a pitiless, neofeudal world in which the strong
dominate by natural right, and the weak either blindly serve them, or perish.
Izvolsky views his workers with a lordly contempt: "I don't love them. It's
enough that I pay them." Their response verges on religious awe: "thanks to
the Russian people's sympathy for men like Ivan the Terrible . . . the
director was almost universally respected."
The Russia of Stag Hunting is an unpleasant place, but a convincing one.
Latynina's vision of a collapsed state has become a truism of contemporary
Kremlin watching. Her conviction that corruption is structurally inevitable
is equally uncontroversial within Russia itself, although Westerners often
have a fairy-tale preference for blaming the country's current woes less on
the system itself and more on individual, evil businessmen. And Latynina's
psychological insight into the relationship between Russia's self-appointed
supermen and its untermenschenb an Ayn Rand fantasy come to lifeb is
dead-on.
Reading about Stag Hunting's princely Izvolsky, I couldn't help thinking of
what one of the real-life Russian business oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
once told me: "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him.
It means for some reason he was unable to become an oligarch. Everyone had
the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it. If a man didn't do
it, it means there are some sorts of problems with him."
What is especially endearing about Stag Hunting's jaundiced world view is
that Latynina assesses the status of her own caste and gender with the same
cold eye she brings to unravelling interenterprise arrears. In her Russia,
journalists are all pawns in the corporate game, either owned by their
proprietors or on sale to the highest bidder. Women fare even worse. Sleeping
with the boss is as natural a part of a secretary's duties as taking
dictation; date rape is socially acceptable, particularly if it's a superman
doing the raping; and a woman's principal career choices appear to be either
prostitution or hand-and-foot domestic servitude to one's masculine
protector. Of course, as an ethical journalist and an independent working
woman, Latynina is a living exception to the bleak rules she sets out, but
that merely makes her unsentimental view of the degraded condition of her sex
and her profession more impressive.
Those Western politicians and analysts who still cherish the hope that a few
parliamentary votes can straighten out the post-Soviet economy and who see
President Vladimir Putin as the good czar intent on cleaning up Mother Russia
had best avoid Stag Hunting. They will be depressed by Latynina's portrait of
a country in which the government is at best irrelevant and at worst corrupt
and ruled by business-princes whose power is crude and violent, but
essentially stable. The Russian establishment, on the other hand, has
recognized itself in the portrait Latynina has painted. Russians can be
accused of many sins, but a failure to acknowledge their own shortcomings has
rarely been one of them.
Chrystia Freeland is the deputy editor of Canada's Globe and Mail and author
of Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (New
York: Crown Publishers, 2000).
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