American Enterprise Institute

May 8, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

1:45 p.m.	Registration
2:00	Panelists:	Anders Åslund, Institute for International Economics
		Andrei Kortunov, New Eurasia Foundation
		Andrew Kuchins, Center for Strategic International Studies
	Moderator:	Leon Aron, AEI
4:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

[Tape 1 of 2; Side A Begins. NOTE:  Russian names were spelled phonetically.]

Leon Aron:  Welcome to all.  The panelists here indeed do not require an introduction, but you will find their short bios in your folders.  By agreement, we will go in alphabetical order, starting with Anders Åslund, who is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute and who will concentrate on the economic side of the Yeltsin years.  Andrei Kortunov will speak about Yeltsin’s security and foreign policy and Andrew Kuchins, of course, is the President of the New Eurasia Foundation in Moscow. 

Andrew Kuchins, who is the Director of New Eurasian Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, will take up politics and the Yeltsin period in transition through a good portion through which he usually lived and worked in Moscow as the Director of the Carnegie Center there.  My hope, though, is that these are just guidelines: That we will have a substantive, in depth, unhurried discussion that is a luxury in this town, as I’m sure you know.  Especially during the question and answer period, I would encourage the speakers to add to each other’s answers and, of course, engage with the audience, so please feel free to talk with us.  It has been planned as a conversation. 

Now Yeltsin’s death suddenly brought back passions and controversies of recent Russian history and revived the debates that seem to be a thing of the past, which means that his role and his legacy is still very much relevant today and very much worthy of lectures and volumes that should be and could be delivered and written.

Having paid my dues, which reminds me of something, along with other publications by the participants, you will find a shorter version of an essay of mine in your folder.  It’s adapted from a chapter in a newly published book by AI Press, Russia’s Revolution, here it is and our publications department is telling me that it would make a wonderful Mother’s Day gift.  The publications department also wanted me to tell you that the launch of the book will take place on the 14th that is next Monday.  There are even forms here for you to register or you could register online. 

Well, with these duties discharged, let me go back and say that having thought and written quite a bit about Yeltsin, I reserve the right to intervene, but I would only make by way of introduction a mention of a few facts that I think could sort of frame our discussion to a certain extent. 

First, Yeltsin as a leader was both the product of not one, or two, but three revolutions that occurred simultaneously and then he proceeded to profoundly shape all three of them – political, economic and the one in Russia’s very concept of itself as a state, both internally and in its relations with the near and far abroad. 

Secondly, contrary to the stereotype, in his speeches and interviews and later on in his memoirs, Yeltsin has left quite a long record of what he thought of each of these revolutions, and also explained why he did what he did. 

Third, Russia under Yeltsin was both the freest it has ever been, save for the nine months between February and November of 1917, but also most benign in its relationship with the world -- again, the world both close to it and the world at large. 

And finally, in a country with a very strong authoritarian political tradition and the social psychology that this tradition had bred, both in the rulers and the rule, much of this unprecedented freedom that I just mentioned seemed to be due to self-restraint of one man, the revolutionary leader.  That it was so became quite clear when the successor to his office did not exercise that self-restraint and turned the country into quite a different direction. 

And so with all of this in mind, I’m going to our distinguished panel and I will start with Anders Åslund, and thank you very much.

 Anders Åslund:  Thank you very much, Leon, and you shouldn’t be so humble about your book.  I’ve read it, and I think it is excellent and well worth buying.  I don’t think that I’ve met ever any person who was as great as Boris Yeltsin.  I remember particularly once it was in December, 11th of December 1991 where it was seven foreign economies who had a meeting with Yeltsin there.  Boris Yeltsin storms into the room.  I never saw a bull of a man like Yeltsin.  Manic you can say, sure.  Strong, extraordinarily so and he entered and he filled the room.  Just filled it. 

And a big question, of course, was what does he know about economic reforms that he wanted to discuss.  And to answer the question, Yeltsin gave us a lecture for 40 minutes without any notes and told us exactly what we wanted to tell him about how to undertake a radical economic reform.  So Yeltsin knew it all and after this, from our side, [indiscernible], naturally asked for [indiscernible] and told Yeltsin what he thought should be done.  Here is Nikolai [indiscernible] and here is two pencils, one red and one green. 

He listens first and then he takes notes with either the red or the green pen and I never understood what it meant, but [indiscernible] might know this technique.  So this was a man that was on top of it -- a man with an enormous force.  A problem with [indiscernible] but, of course, this was a sign of mania.  A person who is so manic is also depressed sometimes.  And if you are depressed sometimes, you drink sometimes.  It’s a very good cure against depression, as is well known.  And what did Yeltsin accomplish? 

I think that Yeltsin’s accomplishments are extraordinary and I would particularly emphasize three [indiscernible].  The first is that he secured the borders of Russia by dissolving the Soviet Union.  Second, he transformed Russia into a market economy, and thirdly, he secured a democratic breakthrough, democracy for the long haul in Russia. 

So let me deal briefly with the non-economic points.  On the dissolution of the Soviet Union – I asked Gennady Burbulis who was then First Deputy Prime Minister what was the matter with Yeltsin, why he was so manic that day.  And Burbulis told me that they came from a meeting with the general’s staff, the Minister of Defense and Yeltsin had just convinced the general staff of the Soviet Union to go for Russia rather than the Soviet Union.  The day before Mikhail Gorbachev had faced the same audience and they had refused to provide Gorbachev with their support. 

So this was the very day after the [indiscernible] agreement on the dissolution of the Soviet Union that Yeltsin had secured the agreement with the Soviet military so that there would be no military conflict.  We can compare that with the situation in Yugoslavia.  No empire has gone away so peacefully as the Soviet empire as Dominic Lieven emphasizes so well in his book, Empire.  That was only one man who secured it, Boris Yeltsin.  So few people have saved so many lives as Yeltsin did those very days. 

You can also say that he chose exactly the right day to dissolve the Soviet Union.  If he had done it before the Ukraine referendum on independence on the 1st of December, it would have been an outrageous reaction in Russia.  If he had done it even one week later, the reaction in Russia would have been much greater. So he chose the optimal time to dissolve the Soviet Union and without having dissolved the Soviet Union, I don’t think that neither Russia nor the others could have developed as well as they did. 

On the economic reform, I think that the outstanding achievement of Yeltsin with regard was that he did make sure that a market economy was built.  Admittedly the very work was done by [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] and others, but they were all appointed by Yeltsin.  Yeltsin had, which Leon has very well emphasized, this extraordinary ability to reach out to people who he didn’t know, but he understood that these are the kind of people I need.  At a time when Russia was extremely [indiscernible] and even Gorbachev hardly hired any person in the senior position who was not at least his age, Yeltsin could reach out to anybody who [indiscernible] was needed for it, because he was strong and confident enough so that he didn’t feel threatened by them and immensely tolerant as very few people actually are. 

I would say within the market building, there were five big things that were done in the first year.  First of all, the price liberalization -- prices have basically been free in Russia since that time.  Secondly, import liberalization -- all tariffs were abolished for the first time since 1992.  The third was that the exchange rate was unified which is, of course, vital.  A fourth, the mass privatization that [indiscernible] undertook, which is the difference while Russia is not Belarus, because Belarus never undertook a full-fledged privatization.  If you were to do it, you had to do it in some kind of mass privatization.  Very importantly, a fifth point, Gaidar, military expenditure, particularly the procurement by 85 percent became 70 percent.  But this meant that the military industrial complex, that heretofore had ruled the Soviet Union, all of a sudden turned out to be defeated. 

These were quite extraordinary achievements.  And, of course, thanks to Yeltsin standing in one election after the other, the Soviet parliamentary election in ’89, the Russian parliamentarian election in 1990 and the Russian presidential election in June of ’91 and winning everything, he made through his example, Russia undertaking its democratic breakthrough.  Then you, of course, think that I should discuss problems.  Naturally there were problems with Yeltsin also. 

If I start with the economic side, the macroeconomic stabilization did not take place.  The reasons were many.  I would emphasize that there was no Western support at all for economic reform in Russia in 1992.  The central bank was under the control of the parliament and that was inflationary, open inflationary in its policy. 

Where we come to Yeltsin, he had a very unfortunate love of the old state enterprise managers, which especially in his memoirs emphasizes for the spring of ’92 when it was its most critical.  So he personally came out very strongly against liberalization of energy prices, for example, and thereby also for export.  But macroeconomic stabilization is difficult to understand and I don’t think that we should have expected Yeltsin to be fully up on it.  But what we could have hoped for was that he would have been more interested in it. 

It is very clear, notably from his memoirs, that after having appointed the reform team in the fall of ’91, he interacted with them in November and December, and then he was very distant from them and then of course when they failed politically.  Perhaps the tallest concern is that Russia’s democracy now has failed.  Of course, this depended on what happened under Yeltsin here. 

And I think now with the record at hand, it is obvious that Yeltsin should have dissolved the parliament in the fall of ’91 when he had the political force to do so, organized new elections, new founding elections and get a new constitutional order accepted in some way or the other.  He didn’t do it, but if you look up on his situation, the dominant school of political science, all of these fancy etiologies, Philip Schmidt and Guillermo Udon [indiscernible] and Terry Carl, etc., etc., they were all against it.  They said that you should have a slow transition, political transition.  You should have a negotiated and impacted transition nor were any political scientists there and provided good and relevant advice. 

Afterwards, we can see a few political scientists that were sensible, but they were not there at the time.  Yeltsin didn’t have any input, so then it’s very difficult to blame him, even if he understood how to dissolve the [indiscernible] without anybody informing him.  And something that is more objectionable is, of course, the war in Chechnya in the December of ’94 where the best you can say is Yeltsin was not much at it at the time but, of course, he was still responsible. 

And then finally, I would say that Yeltsin’s ultimate failure was that he appointed [indiscernible].  Thank you.  And I should say that always, of course, amounts to an extraordinary hero, a great hero at the level of Winston Churchill and Charles DeGaulle and, of course, we shouldn’t expect such a person to be an even level headed person who manages all of the time.  Yeltsin was a man who could manage crisis, but find ordinary government extremely difficult.  Thank you.

 Leon Aron:  Thank you so much.  We now go to Andre Kortunov.

 Andrei Kortunov:  Thank you.  It is very difficult to take the floor after Anders Åslund.  I cannot claim that I can compete with him in terms of arguments.  But let me try just to focus my presentation on a couple of issues without an attempt to cover all foreign policy issues.  In my opinion, the first question that one might ask himself, analyzing Yeltsin’s foreign policy is whether there really was any foreign policy during his period in power. 

And, of course, many critics of Yeltsin even now would say that not only it was a defeatist foreign policy, not only Yeltsin was making one concession after another, unilateral concessions that the West was not willing to match in any reasonable way.  But there was no foreign policy concept as such.  Critics would argue that under Mr. Yeltsin, the Russian foreign policy was totally opportunistic – there was no strategy, there was no vision, there was no concept of the foreign policy.  They would argue also that this foreign policy was driven by institutional interests, rather than by any perception of national interest.  And indeed, they would probably say, I use an example, [there are] conflicts between say [indiscernible] on the one hand and the foreign minister on the other. 

They would argue that Gasprom as successfully developed and implemented its own foreign policy.  They would give a number of arguments that confirm this perception that, in fact, there was no such thing as a consultative national foreign policy.  They would also say that there was a major, major gap between the clarity level of the Russian foreign policy and the operational level.  That there were many statements, quite nice statements probably, but it was very difficult if possible at all to operationalize these statements.  That in reality, at lower levels, there were quite different approaches and different outcomes. 

And, of course, they would also argue that Yeltsin’s foreign policy was highly inconsistent.  That it fluctuated from one extreme to another, that he made some flamboyant statements, that you could actually never figure out what he is up to. So is it really right, is it fair to claim that the Russian foreign policy was defeated, that it was opportunistic?  I think that right now, a couple of years later, we can argue that probably these accusations are not totally fair given the specific situation in which Boris Yeltsin had to operate. 

I think that there are a couple of very profound, very fundamental dilemmas that Yeltsin had to face.  Of course, the foreign policy could not be consistent, it could not be strategic.  There were natural limitations that no leader could probably overcome.  One of the key dilemmas, which I would like to articulate, is the issue of identity. 

Again, it is now trivial to say that Russia has a problem of identity and when they talk about identity, what they usually mean is that Russia has to decide whether it is a European state or Eurasian state, blah, blah, blah after that.  But it’s not the challenge that Yeltsin had to face. 

First, he had a different identity problem, which was much more painful and for people around him as well.  The identity problem was that Yeltsin and people around him had to decide whether Russia was a successor to the Soviet Union, whether it logically inherited all the rights and all of the responsibilities of the former Soviet super power.  Or Russia was an entirely new state and Yeltsin had to design the Russian foreign policy literally from scratch. 

That was not an easy choice and clear enough, there was no ultimate solution to this identity problem, but I would venture to say that Yeltsin did try to break the continuity with all of the problems notwithstanding.  He did try to open an entirely new chapter in the Russian foreign policy.  He did try to dismantle the foreign policy legacy of the Soviet Union, despite the fact that he had to pay a pretty high price for doing that.  This is something that I will talk about a little bit later. 

Of course, it’s very difficult to speak about the Yeltsin’s foreign policy in general terms because we could see fluctuations, variations from one region to another and from one year to another.  We can talk about the cause of [indiscernible], for example, and it is really very different from the Primakov period.  So probably foreign policy was more volatile than any other field in which Yeltsin was personally engaged. 

But let me limit myself just to three major directions of Yeltsin’s foreign policy, and these are Russia’s relations with the West, Russian’s relations with the former Soviet Union republics and finally Russia’s relations with former Soviet clients and partners.  Now the basic question about the West is whether Yeltsin, at any point of his career, sincerely believed in a grand bargain.  Whether he really believed that there was a tacit understanding that Russia will renounce communism, will disband in its empire, will break the neck of the military industrial complex.  And in exchange, it will be accepted as a legitimate partner as a part of the community of civilized nations.  It would get a stature and prestige, it would get economic assistance at the level of the marshal fund, probably.  Whether the West is ready to make a commitment not to abuse the Russian weakness, whether the West was ready not to fuel the [indiscernible] left by Russia specifically in Central Europe, but also in the territory of the former Soviet Union – whether Yeltsin really believed in all that stuff. 

I can tell you my own experience because I had a chance to work with Yeltsin a little bit on a number of international issues.  We worked on his teaching on the United Nations in the early ‘90s and then at appeared at two or three G-8 meetings in the mid-‘90s when Russia became a member of the G-8 group.  And my impression is that, unlike Putin probably, Yeltsin believed in the benign West. 

He believed that if he played by the rules, he would get reciprocity, he would get recognition and he believed that international relations was not a zero sum game.  At least that’s the way how I interpret his comments to the papers that were presented to Yeltsin.  Yes, of course, he was suspicious of some western leaders.  Of course you know he felt uneasy about some of them.  For example, I remember quite an interesting discussion about Japan and about the territorial issue.  He was very forceful and the Japanese are trying to make use of our weakness and we will not allow them to do that.  So he was forceful. 

But in general, I think his position was that we can really cut a deal and that strategic partnerships with the United States is not just rhetoric.  That there is something more there, there is something more than meets the eye.  Now disillusionments, where things started to go sour.  I think the [indiscernible] of Natid [phonetic] was a serious blow to Yeltsin.  In my view, he didn’t expect Natid to enlarge and he believed that we could find an alternative to that.  Yugoslavia, in my opinion, was also very painful.  He realized that the world is probably much tougher, a much colder place than he expected it to be.  And, of course, the general disillusionment in liberal reforms added to this change in attitude. 

So when Primakov came to power and Primakov started to round the Russian foreign policy, one could argue that the pendulum started to go back and Yeltsin didn’t really oppose that.  Of course, Yeltsin was already sick and he wasn’t as active as before, but basically the foreign policy of Primakoff is much closer to Putin’s foreign policy than to the earlier period of Yeltsin. 

Now the former Soviet Union again, it was a very painful issue again, it was an uneasy dilemma.  Because on the one hand, I think that Yeltsin personally felt quite unhappy about the Soviet disintegration.  After all, Yeltsin has always been a Soviet man and I think in his ideal role, he simply would have replaced Gorbachev as the leader of the former Soviet territory. 

On the other hand, he was really responsive.  And again, I remember talking to people like Babulus and some others and Yeltsin was very receptive to the idea that we should really get rid of this [indiscernible], that it’s a liability.  That we would be better off if we disbanded the Soviet Union and he had some kind of – I don’t know that I would say resentment, but some kind of uneasy feeling about all of these Soviet made leaders in Central Asia.  He felt that he was of the different, belonged to a different league.  Though there were ideas about confederation, about some kind of a closer union with the former Soviet Republics. 

But I think that personally Yeltsin was not a great supporter of these ideas.  And there were a couple of turning points here as well.  I think one of the turning points was Chechnya when the territorial [indiscernible] Russia itself was under question.  And, of course, it shifted the pattern of relations between Russia and former Soviet republics. 

I think that his desperate attempts to build this notorious union with Belarus is also an indicator that he really wanted to do something to show that he wasn’t just a person who destroyed a great empire, but he was building something in place of this empire.  So I think that was quite an uneasy problem for Yeltsin and I think that we can also see a gradual evolution, first attempt to start from scratch, to dismantle the Soviet legacy.  An understanding that we are linked to each other and we have to do something, attempts to build closer relations with countries like Belarus and partially Ukraine. 

And, of course, even now many years later, people who used to work with Yeltsin have many second thoughts about how it was done and whether something could have been done in a different way, specifically Russian diasporas, migrations and things like that -- finally, clients.  The idea was, of course, was to change the basis of the Russian foreign policy and that is if you take countries like Cuba, like North Korea, Vietnam and China, the intention was to withdraw. 

Of course Yeltsin in his speeches of the early ‘90s was explicitly anti-communist and therefore he could not possibly cut a deal with these regimes.  We saw very rapid deterioration of the relations with these clients, not only in communist countries, but also let’s say radical Arab regimes and some other former partners of the former Soviet Union.  But again, here Yeltsin I think at some point realized limitations. 

It was especially spectacular in the case of North Korea when it turns out that if Russia didn’t have strong relations with North Korea, it became almost irrelevant on the issues of Korean settlement.  So essentially it was the West that demonstrated to Yeltsin that it would be nice to have your foot in the doorway if you really want to make a difference and you want to have some influence in places like the Korean Peninsula or Middle East or in some other places where the Soviet Union had a lot of influence.  So there were gradual attempts to regain some of the ground and with Primakov, these attempts turned out to be relatively successful; of course, not as successful as under Putin, but still the pendulum went back in this regard as well. 

And finally, the last but not the least, the legacy.  We know that a lot of what Yeltsin has done has later been dismantled.  However, I think that there are some critical elements for his legacy which are still there and which are likely to be there in the foreseeable future.  Let me single out three elements of this legacy and I think I will be rather trivial, but still I would like to emphasize these three elements. 

First of all, even now, with all of the setbacks that we have witnessed over the last couple of years – Russia is an open country.  Russia is a country with relatively forest borders.  We see a lot of international movement.  It is much more open to the West than ever before in its history.  I think this is a major accomplishment of the Yeltsin period and this more or less irreversible.  People who continue to travel, businessmen will continue to invest, internet will continue to develop and it is extremely important to keep Russia open, even if the political elite is trying to close the country down.  And, of course, we should be grateful to Yeltsin – not only Yeltsin, Gorbachev also played a role here, but definitely Yeltsin was instrumental in opening the country. 

Second, it is very interesting that despite all of these cancellations with former Soviet republics, despite all of the problems that we have in Ukraine or in Georgia or with Estonia right now, there are no “irredentist” claims.  Yeltsin was the person to nail down the territorial arrangement and he, of course, had many temptations.  He had [indiscernible] behind him and other people who claimed that we should take Crimea back from the Ukrainians, we should raise territorial claims to other republics, part of Kazakhstan belongs to Russia and things like that.  But he was very consistent in preserving the territorial integrity, not just of Russia, but of countries around Russia and this is something which is still with us. 

There are some people in this state [indiscernible] that we should absorb [indiscernible] for example, or [indiscernible] that we should raise territorial claims to Ukraine.  But basically, if you take the political mainstream, no one raises the issues of “redoran” [phonetic] borders.  Again, I think this is something that we owe to Yeltsin and to his period.  And finally, the last but not the least and I realize that here my conclusions can be questioned, but I think that what Yeltsin did, or at least what happened under Yeltsin, we saw a new generation emerging, a generation which has, if I put it in such a way, profoundly pro-western attitudes. 

Despite a rise in nationalism, despite being [indiscernible], despite many negative things that we now face in Russia, I will still believe that Russia is a profoundly pro-Western country.  That Russians perceive themselves as Europeans.  They may dislike U.S. foreign policy, they may dislike the way how the European Union treats them, they might dislike many things about the West, but it doesn’t change this fundamental sense of identity and the sense of belonging.  This is not a small thing, and I think these attitudes, these identities were tested during Putin’s years and they survived.  And since they survived, there are reasons to believe that this is something that we already have in our genetic code, and that is not a small thing.  Thank you.

 Leon Aron:  Thank you very much. 

 Andrew Kuchins:  Thanks very much and just to follow to that last point, Andrei, Russians are just like Europeans; Europeans don’t like American foreign policy and Europeans don’t like the European Union either.  I have generally considered myself a fairly lucky person.  Despite the fact that I was born on a Friday the 13th in February of an indeterminate year, I’ve always felt fairly lucky.  And as a sign of that luck, by the way, like Anders Åslund and Boris Yeltsin, we are all Aquarians. 

As a sign of that luck, the day after Boris Yeltsin died, well, guess who was on my schedule for a lunch date – none other than Leon Aaron, one of the world’s premier biographers of Boris Yeltsin.  I thought – man, am I a lucky guy, I’m having lunch with Leon Aaron the day after Boris Yeltsin died, we had a lovely lunch and a fascinating discussion.  In the case where great minds think alike, we both came to the lunch with the idea that we were going to hold this session on remembering Boris Yeltsin.  And to prove once again how lucky I am, Leon planned his first. 

So I’m very lucky to be here today, Leon, with you and Anders and Andrei, although I’m not so lucky in that I am the third speaker and have to follow the acts of Anders and Andrei. Let me do my best.  The week that Boris Yeltsin died –

 Leon Aron:  It just occurred to me that I am sitting here with three Anders, which brings [indiscernible] to mind with his St. Andrew fund.  I don’t know if there is a phenomenon or please, you started it, you opened the door with omens and birthdays and whatnot.

 Andrew Kuchins:  Well, and you go to the CIS website and see the discussion that we had about Mr. Yakunin last Thursday, which was quite interesting.  Thanks for that plug, Leon.  The week that Boris Yeltsin died, we also lost another titanic figure of Russian culture and world culture in Mr. Rostropovich. 

In listening to NPR that morning, and I apologize for those of you who heard me say this anecdote at the Dixon Center a couple of weeks ago, but the violinist of the National Symphony Orchestra, who played under Rostropovich for years, he was asked by the interviewer what did he remember about Rostropovich.  And he said that with a lot of people, you describe them and they are a little of everything.  Well, Rostropovich, he was a lot of everything. 

When I think of Boris Yeltsin, I think of Boris Yeltsin as the same way, which was what Anders was getting to in his introductory remarks.  And his legacy his huge, it is complex, like the man himself and the country that he led.  My task today is to think about his legacy in light of his successor, Vladimir Putin, and his political legacy.  Certainly that choice was his most consequential and certain his most controversial. 

Anders has already expressed his view that he think it is his worst.  There are many that will agree with that.  But I think this discussion will highlight Boris Yeltsin’s very, very mixed at best democratic scorecard, as well as some ironies of his leadership, and let me start with some of the ironies, I think.  The first irony is that Boris Yeltsin he set the precedent for the transfer of power to a handpicked successor rather than on schedule, democratic competitive elections.  This is very ironic, because as Anders has already pointed out or Leon perhaps initially, it was Yeltsin himself who had exposed himself to the electorate in contrast with Mikhail Gorbachev and was democratically elected. 

I’m afraid that his handoff of power to Vladimir Putin symbolized just how far Russian democracy had lapsed in the nine years since he had taken over as president of the Russian Federation.  It set the precedent for future handoffs to handpick successors rather than competitive elections, some variant of this kind of scenario we’re going to see in the next ten months or less in 2008. 

And it was with this decision that really the system of managed democracy and all of the terms of qualified types of democracies really came into being and has now been overtaken by the notion of sovereign democracy, but of course the seeds were set for that earlier on.  I think that a big turning point, a big signpost as we look back, of course, was back in October of 1993 with the decision to disband the parliament at that time and then the nature of the constitution, which established the super presidential system in Russia, which Boris Yeltsin himself didn’t take much advantage of, but certainly his successor has. 

The second irony I would point to is that Putin’s rise to power in the fall of 1999, it also put the spotlight on one of Yeltsin’s greatest errors, if not his greatest, and that was the decision to attack Chechnya in December of 1994.  Ironically, whereas in the first Chechen war that marked another major blow to Yeltsin’s popularity, the initial successes of the Russian armed forces in retaliating against the incursion of Dagestan in August, September of 1999.  That served as Putin’s fast track to popularity and what happened afterwards. 

And I guess that points to the larger irony when I look at these two figures.  The essence is that Vladimir Putin has been so popular because he symbolizes almost everything that Yeltsin was not.  And that Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, in effect, was the anti-Yeltsin.  Or, as our friend and colleague, Lilia Shevtsova, described as the terminator – the terminator of the Yeltsin type system.  Or, if you are looking at this in comparative revolutionary perspective, Yeltsin is the revolutionary, Putin is the Thermidor. 

And whereas in the 1990s efforts were made to destroy the past and create anew the mightiness of Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction, the past eight years have been all about restoring order, stability, return to Russian traditions, contrast of collapsed revolution with restoration.  Yeltsin’s 1990s are marked by economic decline; Putin’s years of power are marked by economic growth.  Yeltsin’s 1990s are marked by the devolution of power from the center to the regions. 

You recall his famous phrase, “Take as much sovereignty as you want.”  Whereas today, we see the re-centralization of power back in to the hands of Moscow and into the hands of the Kremlin, at least on paper.  Whereas in the 1990s there was a relatively free media, today we see the return of a far less free media, self-censorship. And yes, I know that people will say that not everything was great in the 1990s, but there was competition on national TV and there was criticism of the government in the 1990s and there is not today. 

I think that economically, Boris Yeltsin’s 1990s reflected a much more laissez-faire approach whereas today, we see more of a state directed capitalism in Russia.  In the 1990s, Russia was weak, humiliated, an international supplicant whereas today’s Russia looks to be a strong and intimidating, self-appointed energy super power.  And then on a more personal level, Mr. Yeltsin – sick, often drunk in public, an embarrassing leader at times for Russia versus the image of Mr. Putin, a young sportsman with a sharp mind. 

But I think that the supreme irony is that Yeltsin set this tradition of handpicked successors who could presumably protect the legacy of the predecessor and those kingmakers around him.  While I think that Boris Yeltsin and his family were pretty well protected, many aspects of Mr. Yeltsin’s legacy have not been and nor have been a number of the kingmakers around him, notably, of course, Boris Berezovsky.  And these have huge implications now as we are in the precipice of another succession. 

If history is any guide, we can expect Putin and his family to be protected, probably fairly wealthy, but there is little assurance for the kingmakers or the former king to have any significant influence over policy once he leaves assuming he does, in fact, leave the Kremlin.  I mean, the sort of Chinese Deng Xiaoping scenario where Vladimir Vladimirovich may serve as sort of a shadow power protect, eminence degrees, in my views absolutely has no precedent in Russian history, in Russian political culture. 

If you leave the Kremlin alive, and you look at examples of Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as the most recent cases, none of them had any significant influence whatsoever.  In thinking about Boris Yeltsin’s legacy in the context of what came after, I find myself puzzling over the eternal question of how much of history is contingent upon personality, the Chilenvesky [phonetic] factor, as Mikhail [indiscernible] said, and how much is contingent upon much broader structural factors?  And certainly Putin and Yeltsin are from different generations, and I think that is significant.  Yeltsin is from a somewhat more romantic idealistic [indiscernible] generation and Putin a more pragmatic, baby-boomer in the Russian context.

[Side A Ends]

[Side B Begins]

 A very warm man of almost volcanic emotions and Putin is a study of outward cool.  While I never had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Yeltsin, I did have an opportunity to meet a couple of times with Mr. Putin.  In one of those cases recently, and this is a meeting we had in September where we had a three and a half, four hour lunch in a very overheated dining room at [indiscernible], Mr. Putin’s home, all of the guests in the dining room were either taking off their coats or mopping their brow because it was very hot and they were sweating. 

I chose to mop the brow rather than take off the jacket.  Mr. Putin was not uncomfortable.  Mr. Putin did not sweat.  He was cool as a cucumber.  I don’t know what to conclude from that, either he has a naturally lower body temperature, or this is part of some martial arts KGB training in exquisite body control or perhaps there is a medication that can control that, I don’t know. 

Anyway, very, very different personalities.  And certainly history gives rise to certain people with certain gifts at certain times.  Yeltsin was the man who made the revolution.  Neither Gorbachev before him nor Putin after him would have done that.  Gorbachev had the chance, didn’t do it.  Putin, not the guy to make the revolution.  I mean, they just aren’t built for it. 

But let’s run a little counter factual exercise for a moment in thinking about this sort of personality versus structural factors.  Let’s say that oil prices remained in the $25 to $30 range from 2003 to today.  Might things have turned out differently?  Likely there would have been more impetus for Mr. Putin to continue on a liberal economic reform program and try to promote the diversification of the economy.  Natural monopolies, like GAZPROM, they might have actually been broken up. 

I remember in the spring of 2003 in Moscow, that was a serious discussion.  Of course, Andrei Illarionov can tell just how serious it was and whether there was a prospect for that.  But people were talking about it, whereas nobody talks about it today.  Maybe Mr. Khodorkovsky would have never been arrested, maybe liberal parties would have remained in the Dumas. 

Maybe Mr. Putin would have been reelected, but under a more competitive election and more competitive conditions than he was.  Instead of a macroeconomic revolution driven by energy exports, to a considerable extent, we might have something that looks more like Dan Yergin and Thane Gustafson were predicting as a possibility in their book Russia 2010, the chuda [phonetic], the chuda scenario for Russia.  In which robust economic growth would be caused by not high-energy prices and commodity prices, but by real diversification of the economy.

Or let’s say that instead of Vladimir Vladmirovich Putin, Yeltsin’s successor was – well, this might be kind of like science fiction – what if Boris Nemtsov or Sergey Kiriyenko or Andrei Illarionov, someone who was of a more liberal bend of mind than Mr. Putin.  To what extent if, in the context of high energy prices from the last four years would we still have seen a certain diminishing of structural economic reforms, somewhat of a throwback to a pre-revolutionary state directed capitalism. 

Would we have seen any crisis over the Orange Revolution?  Would we have seen this obsession with enemies within, enemies without?  Would we have seen a second Chechen war?  I don’t know.  And we do know from Mr. Putin’s dissertation and first person that he came into power with certain inclinations, certain views about the 1990s and certain predilections towards a greater state control over the commanding heights of the economy, but things might have been different.  I mean one thing that seems much clearer today than two years ago even is the correlation between high energy prices and revenue coming into the Soviet and Russian economy for the last 35 years with a certain type of political economy and foreign policy. 

And to put it in a nutshell, in the period of high-energy prices under Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Putin, we see a more assertive, a more nationalist, a more aggressive, a more competitive Russian foreign policy, a less plural, less open policy and less structural economic reform.  In the environment of lower prices with Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin, we see the opposite of those phenomena very broadly speaking. 

So just to conclude our exercise on these counterfactuals, if Boris Yeltsin had stayed on another eight years, I suspect that to some extent, Russia would have moved in a thermadorian like direction, a bit more authoritarian type of polity with the effect of oil and gas revenue driving some of this. 

Or, if in 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev was general secretary, if oil had been at $65 a barrel, I think you would have seen a lot less radical reform likely a continuation of the USSR.  If you look at the conventional wisdom of the [indiscernible] community at that time, that was the prediction.  But the point is, we can’t rerun history, so we will never know what would have happened under different conditions. 

We do know that the character of leadership matters, but so do a lot of other things that are not so easy to predict.  And if someone had told you or me in 1987 that within four years – 1987, right after Mr. Yeltsin was booted out of the politburo [phonetic] that he would be the president of an independent Russian federation, I think you would have bet to the contrary.  Likely if someone had told you or me in 1997 that Vladimir Putin would be president of the Russian Federation of 2000, I think you would have bet against that outcome also.  First of all, you have to look at it and find out who that guy was. 

So in conclusion, I just would say that the next leader of Russia may be just as unpredictable, and maybe that is a fitting or appropriate legacy for Yeltsin.  Thanks.

 Leon Aron:  Thank you very much for the presentations, and exactly what I expect them to be, which is superb.  I am looking forward to essentially conversation with all of you here.  If you could introduce yourself as you –

 Male Speaker:  Particularly about the price, letting the prices go when Yeltsin came on board, liberalization of prices.  There are some people who say that this is the worst thing that could have been done, that the economy just went to hell in a hand basket after doing this and that he should not have done that.  Other people point out that if the official price mechanism control prices in the Soviet Union had already, was already non-functioning and besides, Yeltsin inherited a state which was greatly under foreign debt.  The economy was run to the ground and the energy thing, a lot of pollution and so forth.  But what is your view of the introduction of price liberalization?  Was that a good thing to do, and what was the effect of that if something had been done differently?

 Anders Åslund:  Yes, you could have continued the mess that was in ’91 and the country would have run aground totally.  The DDP in ’91 in the Soviet Union fell by 16 percent, which is quite a big decline.  Even so, the Russian inflation in ’91 was 144 percent and even so, there was no goods available.  This was complete madness.  There was no other way out than to liberalize the prices.  And then we look up on what were the biggest problems that were caused above it. 

The common view at the time was that everybody will take to the street and exactly nobody took to the street.  There was no labor unrest whatsoever.  These were at least perceived conceptions.  The main problem instead was these massive energy rants.  In ’91, the price of one ton of oil in Russia was 50 cents.  You could sell the same ton after time for $100, at 200 times higher price abroad.  These are the people who really got rich in Russia. 

Now this was the energy lobby headed at the time by Viktor Chernomyrdin who were dead against energy price increases.  Not because it would hurt the population, but that it would hurt their extraordinary personal profits.  So I think that the message is totally clear and the seminal article in this regard, I would say is Joel Hellman’s article in World Politics in ’98 saying the winners take all. 

It was not the population or their suffering that was the problem; it was the winners who wanted to make massive gains on keeping as many distortions as possible.  And, of course, we had Viktor Gerashenko, the head of the Central Bank at the time, who wanted to take care of his people, so he gave them more money than anybody else and therefore is still a very popular man in Russia because nobody in the world has given us large gifts to his friends as Gerashenko.  This was of no benefit to the population.  So liberalization was a fundamental for any stabilization of the economy and recovery of growth.  Not the only one, but one of them.

 Male Speaker:  Just to clarify for the audience, [indiscernible] gave, among other things, gave out loans that were below the inflation rate, which were gifts – that is what you were referring to right, in a way?

 Male Speaker:  He gave out loans in ’92 at 10 or 25 percent interest rate when inflation was 2500 percent.  So a loan from the Central Bank of Russia was a gift.  This amounted to between 30 and 40 percent of DDP in ’92 that Grashenko gave to his very many good friends.

 Male Speaker:  Yes?

 Male Speaker:  A question for [indiscernible].  You said that perhaps one of the greatest mistakes of Mr. Yeltsin was his chosen successor.  I think if we go back to ’99, at the time the choice was made, we need to remember several things.  Number one, by that time, the lower standards of living was very firmly linked with the weakness of central government at the time of the population. 

Number two, there was a very palpable feeling in Russia at the time that the country was about to fall apart.  But number three, we need to remember that it was a post-9/11 like environment in September of 1999 with apartments and buildings being blown up.  I think in this situation, wasn’t it almost a foregone conclusion that the successor should be a candidate, should be a law and order candidate rather than liberalization candidate which means that either Mr. Putin or somebody like Mr. Putin.  So in those kinds of circumstances, should applaud Mr. Yeltsin for his choice of successors.

 Male Speaker:  Well, we don’t know why the apartment house exploded.  Until we know that, we should be very careful.  David Sater has a very strong statement that it was organized by the KGB.  I find it plausible, but not obvious.  In that case, it would pretty much look like the plot - similarly the Chechnya invasion of Dagestan looks very strange. 

The question is if this was provoked by some parts of the Kremlin.  So both of these two elements might have been provoked by the Kremlin – we don’t know, but that was part of it. 

And it was a general amazement that Putin was [indiscernible] somebody else could have come in under, and it was really a very open political situation.  The critical thing was that when that five people selected Putin, Abramovich, Berezovsky, [indiscernible] and Alexander Voloshin, the names from Yeltsin’s last memoirs -- so this was nothing inevitable in these two regards that Putin was chosen and that the situation would be like this.  Russia was already well on its way back in 1999 with six and a half percent growth that year.  The idea that Russia was falling apart I think basically was over. 

At that time, it was only Chechnya which was an open sore.  What would have been preferable is, of course, an open election.  And given what happened in any case in the parliamentary elections, we could say that Russia was turning in a better direction.  I would argue that there were three groups that were punished by the public after the August ’98 financial crash, the oligarchs, the regional governors and indeed the communists because they had pushed for policies that turned out to be disastrous for the country.  Thank you. 

 Male Speaker:  If you have something to add as well?

 Male Speaker:  Well, it’s a great question.  My wishy-washy answer is yes and no.  I mean no in that I don’t believe that anything is inevitable and that so much is historically contingent.  I think what Anders has said is right in that Mr. Putin was very much manufactured as a candidate out of virtually nothing and so I think that part is true. 

What is also true though is that – and it’s amazing that the Yeltsin administration was able to orchestrate that in those conditions where their own popularity could be counted in single digits.  When they had the helm of the country, when there was the impoverished of tens of millions of people and a palpable sense of some chaos and anarchy.  They took advantage of that with this incursion in Dagestan and how that was perpetrated I am agnostic about.  But I think in a larger perspective that somebody would emerge like Mr. Putin and undertake policies like Mr. Putin, to some extent is not surprising that after a revolutionary period you have a Thermidor. 

Now at a broad level, that is true.  But I mean, the devil is always in the details.  Here I think that Mr. Putin’s character, his bent of mind made essential differences, especially after 2003.  I think you can really distinguish between different characteristics of the Putin administration before and after 2003. 

I would evaluate in much more, considerably more positively before 2003 and things in the summer and fall of 2003 started to – to me, a great deal of the legacy, there was some erosion of the legacy already if you look at what happened with the decision of the governors, elections and federation council and the media and MTV and things like that.  But what happened after 2003, that was qualitatively, I think, of a different nature and change the nature of the regime.  I don’t think that was inevitable.

 Male Speaker:  Well, the point, if we look back at the late ‘90s, we can come to the conclusion that it was not a spontaneous decision by Mr. Yeltsin to select Putin.  Actually he was looking for candidates; he was desperately trying to identify Luzhkov after the default of ’98.  As you probably recall, there were ideas about Mr. Luzhkov and then Primakov started to gain power and then there were a couple of other candidates.  And even in the summer of ’99, many believed that Yeltsin seriously considered Mr. Stepashin. 

One of the reasons that Mr. Stepashin didn’t qualify because Stepashin was perceived as a softy.  Even before Dagestan, he was perceived as a softy, because allegedly, he was too “flexible” in dealing with big businesses, the oligarchs.  And then ultimately Yeltsin decided that he needed a stronger character.  And then another very important consideration, as far as I remember talking to people relatively close to Yeltsin at that point, they were paranoid about the issue of loyalty.

When they discussed Mr. Putin, the basic argument that was made by people like Hamarshaor [indiscernible] was look here he didn’t betray Sobchak, though for him, it would be logical to betray Sopchak and to find a new boss.  He didn’t betray Sopchak and that means that he will never betray us.  And this argument was a very powerful argument for the “family.” 

So it wasn’t a kind of improvisation, it was, I think, a decision which had to mature and I can’t image that Stepashin was a little bit more authoritative, it probably would have a different presence today. 

 Male Speaker:  Yes, my name is Frank Fletcher.  My question would be, and I don’t know who would want to answer this, Mr. Yeltsin’s relationship with the former organs of Soviet states security. I know that he reformed them and broke up the various directorates and made them into separate agencies, but did he understand or was he concerned about the growing role of former KGB or currently serving intelligence officers role in the society and politics and the economy?  Is there anything that you can say about that?

 Male Speaker:  You can start?

 Male Speaker:  I am happy to respond.  Think of Yeltsin’s situation.  First in August of ’91, it was vital to know what the security people were doing and he had a contact that provided him with important information.  Secondly, October of ’93, it was difficult for Yeltsin to get people to fight for him and he had – his bodyguard Korzhakov [phonetic] and Barzakov, who was later the head of the KGB were the two persons that write most about it, his memoirs in that connection. 

And then you have this Banya group of approximately eight people, including Barzakov and Korzhakov that played a bit role around Yeltsin in 199a to 1996.  Of course, they were very much behind the unfortunate war in Chechnya.  So Yeltsin had spent a lot of his time on security issues.  My guess is that he spent more of his time on security than on economic reform.  So this was very or far more – this was very high on his agenda because of these three events.  And of course therefore he was also very much engaged in it.  I think that this is very much the drawback. 

You can see that Yeltsin was this kind of [indiscernible] person.  That he had on the one hand all of these democratic and liberal attitudes and on the other hand, you had the Banya [phonetic] with these awful people who were both from the KGB and in most cases seriously criminal.  These were two different worlds in which Yeltsin was living.

 Male Speaker:  My take is that he might have some instinctive resentment against the security apparatus, especially after the August coup because, of course, Kruschkov [phonetic] and some other people who were actively involved in the coup were connected to the security mechanism and [indiscernible]. 

At the same time, my impression is that at some point, when [indiscernible] started looking for mechanisms that he could use in running the country, he realized that the choice was very limited.  If you take the army, the army on the [indiscernible] was really going down the drain.  [indiscernible].  So basically, he didn’t have many tools to choose from.  Therefore, after this first quite romantic moves to compartmentalize the KGB, to split it in a couple of agencies, I think maybe already in ’94 or ’95, we can see that the trend was reversed.  Again, it didn’t bring the result that we see right now, but still there was a reversal of the trend.

 Male Speaker:  [indiscernible].

 Male Speaker:  Of course you know, as a politician, he realized that he should keep a tension between that first department of KGB and [indiscernible].  All of them needed, and Yeltsin was not an exception.  But at some point, it seemed that DRU almost lost its own depth when it was stated that we don’t have any miss in the role.  We have strategic partnerships with the United States, we are friendly with everyone.  Then the question was raised by many, what is the purpose? 

If you remember, what Bakatin had to say and statements by Oleg Kalugin basically many people started to question the rationale for the REU.  And then I think especially with the enlargement of Natin with events like Yugoslavia, there were signals that probably we still need this institution and we should just assign different functions to the institutions.  I agree that the REU was also given some more prominence, especially under Primakov, because Primakov held all of the security establishment quite a lot. 

 Male Speaker:  Of course, what Yeltsin built between ’94 and ’96 was an elite presidential service under Korzhakov [phonetic].  In that area, that was the main force, so that was clearly his idea.  But since they had Korzhakov in June in ’96, this idea [indiscernible] didn’t really have a clear concept about what to do after that.

 Male Speaker: If I may add something.  This is – it has become a persistent criticism of the 1990s and Yeltsin that he did not dismantle the KGB.  I think it has been mentioned here why he didn’t or why he tried and failed.  What is often forgotten is because of the nascent institutions of civil society, especially one of the key aspects of the 1990s, key hopeful aspects, was the growing independence of courts, starting with the constitutional court. 

But then all the way down, especially with the decision to give local courts the power, including district courts, to interpret the constitution.  That a lot of that power of the secret agencies has been really quite eroded.  And of course, the epitome of the 1990s to me is the case of Alexander Nikitin [phonetic], the environmental former navy captain, environmental – the person who works for the Norwegian environmental agency, NGO.  It is a very interesting case – I have written a paper about it. 

First of all, it was an open court, it was an open hearing.  One after another, Nikitin’s team appealed to the constitution, to the Yeltsin constitution of ’93.  Which incidentally, for all of its problems, it was an astounding document.  And one after another, the constitutional court agreed with him.  One of the issues, for example, was the hearings themselves.  They insisted that they appoint the lawyers, the defense team for Nikitin because others they were not cleared for state secrets.  It was a very important constitutional precedent in which the constitutional court said no.  You have to brief to the extent that you can as far as it pertains to the case. 

The defense attorneys must know what the substance of the case is.  They appealed – there is an article in the constitution, a very interesting article which says that, which defines the state secrets and which says that you cannot retroactively declare certain things secret, which of course has been done under the Soviet regime all of the time. 

One of the key defenses was that what he provided the Norwegians with, which essentially is data about the contamination of the Baltic Sea due to the erosion of the submarine nuclear holding points, that at the time, it was not a secret.  You could not retroactively make it a secret now.  In other words, one after another in the Nikitin case, you saw an open Russian court dismantling precisely the kinds of defenses or I should say the points of attack that has been traditionally used even prior by the Secret Service, even prior to the Bolshevik revolution. 

When the judge essentially threw out the case, he got a full acquittal, with very interesting comments.  His lawyer said that this is the first time in Russian history where anybody was acquitted on a charge brought by the Secret Service.  And so we should always – so yes, so contrasted with the Nikitin case and the Sutyagin [phonetic] case.  And this is very important to keep in mind, in other words, that Janus that Anders referred to – I prefer a more earthy metaphor of a centaur – choose your part, but I think the head was definitely human. 

But the nether parts of Yeltsin and his regime were what the nether parts of the centaur were.  But the point is that the growth of other areas of Russian civil society, particularly independent courts, counter weigh very powerfully to whatever the resilient or resting power or residual power of the FSB by that time was. 

And incidentally, as correctly has been mentioned here, the dismissal of Korzhakov and Barzakov, particularly the manner in which they were dismissed, was a very serious institutional blow for those forces.  And so pretty much I would say between the summer of ’96 and the emergence of Putin in the fall of ’99, at best that you could say about those that they were the external, the SVR did its spying, as it was designed to do, while the domestic part of it was fairly demoralized. 

 Male Speaker:  Let me just add something to this conversation as it also relates to your question.  This is more of a personal anecdote in that I did live, was running an NGO at the Kennedy Moscow Center from August of 2003 until the end of 2005.  The biggest, most palpable difference that I felt about Russian life and living in Russia in 2003 made such a difference. 

In the 1990s when I came to visit and even up until 2003 when I was living there for the first four or five months, I never felt the fear or the vulnerability that I always felt when I came to visit or when I lived there as a student back in the 1980s and it really was with the Hoterkosky [phonetic] arrest.  Part of this has to do with the fact that my personal ties to this is because we were, at the time, a grantee of the Yukos [phonetic] Corporation and we were a foreign NGO in Moscow, etc.

So that moment was especially palpable, but that is when the fear returned for me.  More and more often after that, in conversations, we weren’t naïve or extremely naïve.  We assumed before that people were reading mails, people were listening to phone conversations, but we never really talked about it.  We never felt vulnerable because of it.  After that, we did and I did for sure.  There is a really, really big difference. 

I know that some of the statements that some liberal politicians made at that time, I think Vladimir Ryzhkov and others, that this is like 1937.  Well, it might have sounded like an overstatement, but there as a real element of truth to that, I felt, and that was my personal experience. 

 Male Speaker:  Mr. Vartanov talked about Yeltsin in respect with the authority and integrity of the former Soviet republics.  How does the role of Russia in conflicts of [indiscernible]?

 Male Speaker:  Of course, Yeltsin was also somewhat schizophrenic about the Postevitz [phonetic] case.  He wanted to be paternalistic towards Soviet republics, and we saw it during the CAS summits.  I think that if you take Pravia and Transnistria and [indiscernible], these territories were used as a leverage that could make part of Soviet republics more, let’s say constructive on other issues. 

As we saw during the ‘90s in the Russian position towards issues like Pravia or Transnistria has always been a factor in their relations with Georgia or Maldova.  So I think that it was not about 100 percent support of separatism.  There was no intention, really, to break the territorial integrity of Georgia or Maldova, but the idea was that if you have these points of entry, you can exercise more influence on these countries. 

The position of Yeltsin has become much more complicated after 1994 because Russia itself demonstrated vulnerability and with separatism of Chechnya, it became increasingly more difficult to use similar problems in other Soviet republics.  Because if you take, for example, the first Chechen campaign, you can see that many people who are on this side of the Prazan [phonetic] Republic in the beginning of the ‘90s against Georgians later on for Chechnya against Russians.  So the situation became quite complicated for Mr. Yeltsin.  But I don’t think like he really wanted to dismantle Georgia or to help Trasnistria to break out from Maldova – I don’t think that was the intention. 

 Male Speaker:  My name is Arshur Mohammed, and I cover the State Department for Reuters.  I had two questions of a more contemporary nature, if I may.  One is the Bush Administration over the last several years has voiced its distress, sometimes more loudly and sometimes more softly, about the evolution of democracy, human rights and so on in Russia.  I am thinking of Powell’s article in Essia, but none of this seems to have had any effect on events. 

Is there anything that the Administration can do to try to influence Russia in this regard or is it just an illusion to think that it can do so and all it can do is make these public comments, but not really expect much from it.  My second question is whether you think that the more assertive rhetoric, at least from President Putin – thinking of the speech in Munich, of course, and the state of the nation speech a few weeks ago – suggests that Russia will be a more reluctant, difficult oppositional force in its dealing with the United States or not?  Whether it really depends on the issue at hand, whether it’s Kosovo –

 Male Speaker:  Thank you, a very lovely question and this is the kind of question that I would particularly ask you to pose and I am very happy to receive it.  On the first, the U.S. Administration doesn’t make any negative comments about Putin.  President Bush’s long substantial comment on Mr. Putin dates to the end of September 2003 where he said approximately, “I admire President Putin’s vision of building democracy, rule of law and freedom in Russia.”  After that he realized that he had better shut up, but he hasn’t revoked that statement, which he should do. 

It is a disgrace for a democratic country to have such a statement quite in the category of what [indiscernible] accurately write about Iraq today in The Washington Post.  If you take the last two critical U.S. comments, it is Condaleeza Rice’s comments about capping all of the gas from Russia to the Ukraine from January 2006.  It is Vice President Cheney’s speech in The Daily News last year which stands out in the category of its own with neither before work not any follow-up, so that was obviously an aberration. 

The U.S. policy on Russia is positive and then you have these low level statements in the State Department that complains about human rights.  The U.S. statements on Yeltsin were much more critical.  So then we come to your second question, the Russian conclusion from this is that when you talk to Americans, carry a big stick.  The more you beat them, the better they behave, so you had better beat them properly.  This is the fundamental truth as Russians see it that Putin has understood.  While Yeltsin thought that one could be kind to Americans, the point is that if you are kind to Americans, you don’t get anything.  Thank you.

 Male Speaker:  On the first question – in my view, and this is a controversial view, I think we lost a lot of credibility on the democracy question long before Vladimir Putin came to power.  I remember being in Moscow in the weekend of – the first weekend of October of 1993 and watching on CNN where my clear read was that President Clinton virtually gave Mr. Yeltsin a green light to resolve the dispute with parliament any way he saw fit.  I thought at the time that that was a grave mistake and that was a mistake for Mr. Yeltsin and it was a mistake for the U.S./Russian relationship. 

Secondly, I would point to the comment that President Clinton made about comparing Boris Yeltsin to Abraham Lincoln as a defender of the union after the initial attack in December of 1994 on Chechnya.  I think that was also a grave mistake.  So I think there were a number of things that we said early on where we lost credibility. 

I think that what we could do now best to restore credibility on this question, and I would agree with the view that we have close to none on this, is simply to get our own house in order and to not make us so easily attackable or on double standards and on human rights abuses and on democratic practices ourselves.  That would serve as a better example for the Russian Federation and for anybody else.  Right now, the Russians aren’t in the mood to listen to lectures from anybody, especially us. 

On the point about the speeches and a more assertive Russian foreign policy, you know, I don’t think it is so much of a difference between Mr. Putin and Mr. Yeltsin; I think it’s a difference in the balance of power and in the Russian sense of its own power.  The Russian power is on the rise right now, the U.S. is mired in a very difficult war in Iraq.  We have an unpopular president, both here in this country and abroad.  For a number of reasons, U.S. power is somewhat down and the Russians estimate their power is up.  I think they overestimate that, and in a not surprising way. 

But I think that has a lot more to do with the kind of rhetoric and the kinds of policy that we see coming out of Moscow today as opposed to the personalities actually at the helm.  So I would expect on issues where the Russians define their interests differently than us, to the extent that they view their position as relatively more powerful, they will be more assertive of their interests and less compliant with us. 

 Male Speaker:  I recall meeting a high level bureaucrat of this administration, Putin’s administration and I asked him why they are so tough and uncooperative with Americans.  And the answer as basically – look here, whatever we do, it is pointless; they simply hate us.  They hate us no matter what we do because they hate us because of what we are.  Look at the Freedom House report; they claim that Russia is no different than Turkmenistan. 

Look at the last report that the Department of State published and again, the assumption is already that Russia is not going to have fair and open elections.  And of course, that creates an uproar.  There was a motion in the state duma in the Federal Assembly and the decision was made to investigate all of the [indiscernible] that receive foreign funding.  So definitely those who are down there in the trenches feel some side effects.  Again, I don’t want to say that whatever Russia is doing or Putin is doing is great - we do have problems, human rights and political freedom. 

But I think that here in this city, there should be some kind of better understanding of the situation down there and also indeed there are double standards.  There are double standards because when, for example, Vice President Cheney makes a statement on Russia and then he praises someone like Mr. Lev and his success in building democracy - that looks a little bit odd. 

Of course, this is something that cannot go unnoticed – they say look here, they are hypocritical.  They have Mr. Bush is fine, but look at the people around him, look at public opinion polls, look at the D.C. establishment, look at comments in The Washington Post or other papers here – there is no positive information about Russia whatsoever.  So again, understand that it is impossible to regulate such things but my take is that there should be a balance and unfortunately, we don’t see it. 

 Male Speaker:  Just a brief comment.  I think that I differ here with Andy Kuchins a bit.  There were mental differences in the very concept, in the ideological direction of the foreign policy.  Yes, the country was weak but this weakness argument is – I always find it a bit suspicious, as if the accountants make security policy.  As if they sit down and calculate – okay, we have a GDP growth under 2 percent, let’s be pliant and like the United States. 

Now our GDP growth is now 6.6 percent – no, we are strong now.  And of course, Cuba and Castro and Iraq and Saddam Hussein and the correlation between aggressiveness and the state of the economy is not that straightforward.  So the argument that Russia in the ‘90s was weak therefore it aligned itself with the west and now it’s strong and therefore it aligns itself with nobody is at least somewhat suspect. 

We definitely know from a book I am writing now, I am very pleased to see to reread, not in a hurry, but sort of in a very pleasurable way, the documents of glasnost ’87 to ’91.  It’s very clear, the new political thinking that emerged under Gorbachev and [indiscernible] and the road to the European house–

[End Side B]

[Tape 2 of 2; Side A Begins]

 -- was the direction Russia, Russian foreign policy.  Whatever problems we have, our place is with the civilized world.  It may be politically incorrect, but that is what they called it, meaning Western Europe and the United States.  What we have today, I think, is a fundamental change.  Again, the country is still open and the country still considers itself European, but our place is with ourselves.  In other words, under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it was truly a matter of values.

     I mean, our values are – with some problems and whatnot, our values are their values.  On basic values, democracy, human rights, demilitarization, we are pretty much, or at least we are going in the same direction.  The ideology of the current Kremlin is different.  Our ways are our own way, their values are at best suspect and at worst unacceptable to us, hence we have sovereign democracy – we have all these modifiers before democracy. 

And so I think – this is not, and here I agree with Andy, it’s not a matter of personalities. I think it’s a matter of a basic change of how the elite perceived where the country should go and where its true greatness lies.  There are different criteria now for the state greatness than there were under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. 

 Male Speaker:  Actually, I have several comments.  Would it be possible?

 Male Speaker:  Yes, surely.

 Male Speaker:  Okay, first of all, I would think Leon Aron and the three panelists for the great panel, for the great discussion and for a great introduction.  Just would like to join – in the process of proffering new ideas.  Probably you would put your reports into something, maybe have a volume. I think just really these three presentations with your introductory remarks really works to be including something that would survive for longer than this wonderful two hours of the discussion. 

I have several comments and clarifications if I may.  After that, I would like to pose a question I think of rather general importance for everybody, for all four of you, and maybe for [indiscernible] here in this audience.  Little clarifications, something of – Andrei, you mentioned this Freedom House report that has been purportedly presented in Russia by Russian official organizations, that Russia has been compared with Turkmenistan by political consumer freedom.  Freedom House never ever has done it, to put Russia on the par with Turkmenistan.

As you know, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, as well as Russian, the many members of the public chamber have announced that Russia has been put on the par with North Korea, Libya, Cuba – the Freedom House, never have done this.  It’s not a very big deal to check real data as almost everyone in Russia has done immediately, just to download in the website of Freedom House and check what the real data are. 

And immediately, all Russian [indiscernible] within a few hours have been informed everybody that this is a lie because Freedom House put Russia much higher.  It’s not too high, it’s not of the United States, it’s not to European countries, but they are not at the same level as Turkmenistan [phonetic], Cuba, North Korea and Libya. 

Nevertheless, now with already four months, Russian official mass media, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Russian members of public chambers and human rights, the person responsible for human rights like [indiscernible] and Mr. Lukin never, some kind of change and never corrected their false statements.  Just why we are dealing with new events that is a purported lie that has been done, has been distributed and still kept, and it is very clear for Russian consumption, for Russian domestic consumption, because everybody in the world can check this now. 

Second, there was a [indiscernible] from the person sitting at the first table about the reasons why Mr. Putin can be picked up by Yeltsin by these group of people.  It is probably important to remember sequence of the events.  All of the events that you have mentioned, including some kind of these very poor state of Russian economy, bombing of Moscow apartments and what else was there, the Chechen war, all of them happened not before, but after the decision has been made on selection of Mr. Putin as a successor.  But what is important that, first of all, Mr. Putin has been selected and after that, all of these two events have happened. 

And as for economic growth, Anders is absolutely right, I will just add that the growth of GDP that year was 6.4 percent, but industrial growth was 12 percent and machine building growth was 20 percent and growth in light industry was 50 percent.  Never before, never after Russian economy was experiencing such tremendous fast growth.  So that is why all of these arguments that we actually accustom to hear regularly here now especially from official propaganda is actually not correct, actually a complete lie. 

So that all of this happened to be after, not before.  And I think that just what I found in the comments of Andrew is really intriguing.  If you don’t mind, I will just try to, some kind of challenge of the statements.  Not because they – actually, they are very good, because they are provoking the thinking.  Because you put some kind of contradictions, something what has been done in the period, in the first eight years of Russian transformation and in the second eight years of the Russian transformation. 

So it is obviously, it will be associated with names of these two people, Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Putin.  It is not necessarily to say that – okay, Mr. Yeltsin is in charge of these events and Mr. Putin is in charge of those events, but it is understandably associated with the names of these two people.  And here I would like to say that just the real picture is probably not so simple as it could look like from the very first glance.  Certainly it would listen to propaganda machine, it would be said okay, Mr. Putin brought order and law and just your comment was exactly about that.  But if you look at the real state of law and order, it would be surprisingly enough that today it is much higher level of lawlessness, disorder than it was under Mr. Yeltsin. 

It is surprising to listen to, but if you would see how it was very [indiscernible] at that time, but it is certainly much far from law and order than it was under the Yeltsin time.  So that is interesting that the person who has been associated with law and order according to your statement and according to official propaganda, brought less order and less law and much more disorder and much more lawlessness.  It is an interesting to just to mention.

There are issues that have been mentioned about the devolution of power that has been given by Yeltsin and some kind of re-centralization of power in Russia.  On the surface, it looks like as it is these famous words that have been said by Yeltsin and it is repeated all of the time.  But it is interesting.  In reality, there was no some kind of really dissolution of Russia in the first eight years, between ’92 and ’99. 

No, there was only one piece of [indiscernible], which is not Russia, as everybody knew it long before, for all of these two centuries of [indiscernible] war.  So it has not been conceded as really something a part of integrated Russian territory for centuries.  And from that perspective, actually Russian regions actually kept together.  It is interesting that over the last seven or eight years, many Russian regions now much far from Moscow and from Russia, from federal authorities, from federal centers under Yeltsin. 

And suddenly there are concerns for Chechnya, which is now the fact an independent republic.  There is no Russian legal authorities, no Russian ministries, no Russian government have any power at all in Chechnya, much less than it was even under [indiscernible] regime, where some kind of Russian people could travel there without any kind of big fears and it is impossible right now.  It is also true for Ingushetia, for Dagestan, for Kabardina and for many other regions -- today, much less dependent on Moscow and much more independent from Moscow than it was under Yeltsin.  That is again, if we look at it deeper, it would be a different picture. 

The next issue would be economy.  It has been coined that okay, under Yeltsin it was a laissez faire versus some kind of centralist, some kind of government rule approach.  On one hand it is true and on the other hand, no. Because if we look under some kind of measurement of economic freedom, including rate of inflation, size of budget deficit, size of government as I suggested, government expenditure and government rating as a share of GDP, the burden of taxations, the burden of regulation, at least some kind of open regulations, some kind of nominal regulations – no doubt. 

Today, the level of economic freedom is higher than it was under Yeltsin.  And that is why it can be claimed that okay, to some extent, Putin happened to be, certainly for the first period of his term, some kind of [indiscernible] system that [indiscernible] of Russian economy than Mr. Yeltsin.  Certainly we understand, but to some extent, it’s not so kind of blame to Mr. Yeltsin or to Mr. Putin or to some kind of their personal efforts, but just some other issues, but the fact of life is such. 

Another point, I would say that the claim that high prices of energy of fluctuations in energy prices and political economy in Russia are very closely co-related.  Probably it is some sort of claim that has been also made by Yegor Gaidar in his book and in his many public appearances is purely incorrect.  It is incorrect.  Because the period of higher oil prices on the former Soviet Union was a period of very persistent liberalization, both political liberalization of the former Soviet Union, economic liberalization and some kind of civil liberties.  It was some kind of international policy that was an attack on Afghanistan, but domestically, it was a very strong way of liberalizing of Soviet society. 

So that is why it is just absolutely impossible to making such a claim that the higher prices, energy prices in Russia, the more assertive policy, both domestically and internationally, become or vice versa.  Certainly not.  We can mention many, many other claims, including – not only from the Russian experience, but from other experiences. 

Okay, but I would like to stop here with comments and would like to ask a question.  One of the really critical points that everybody has mentioned is the choice of successor in August 1999 or July 1999.  Here we can see, and it probably will – maybe is not very well understood by this big five who have been mentioned Anders, but it has been very well understood by Yeltsin.  He had a very serious choice, a really historical choice.  He was fighting for two main goals and the first goal is just creating Russia out of the former Soviet Union.  But after that, two main issues – one is freedom, regardless how vaguely it can be defined, and second democracy.  For textbooks, freedom and democracy would go hand by hand, they were coinciding.  In real life, they are not. 

In Russia, after these eight years of transition, it became absolutely clear for Yeltsin as a practicing politician, not like a theoretic theorist, that it is not the same.  If he were some kind of follow democracy and he actually did all of this time, he would have a communist parliament.  Not only impeach him, it’s a guarantee, but that would destroy whatever he has done.  Yeltsin and all of his reform and reformation, the revolution in Russia however previous [indiscernible].  And he had tried it several times and each time he has received the same response. 

The only one case was when he actually relied on parliament support, it was when he has offered Mr. Primakov as a prime minister and parliament eagerly supported Mr. Primakov just to know that in eight months, Mr. Primakov would be the very first contender for presidency.  It was a very clear agenda what he would do when he would be elected as a president. 

So for Yeltsin himself, just let’s try to imagine ourselves or each of you in some kind of – in the shoes of Mr. Yeltsin.  In July and August of 1999, you have some kind of accomplished some [indiscernible] revolution, you brought some freedom and after that, if you would follow strictly according to democratic rules with free election, you know for sure the next government, the next president will destroy everything what you have achieved, including yourself, family, whatever. 

Actually he was thinking not so much about himself, he was thinking much about the country.  What would be your choice, to follow democratic rules or to try to find different ways how to secure the most important heritage or some important elements, some important achievements of his presidential term.  As we know, he was trying to find some person who would be able to protect, whether it was Mr. Nikolai Yegorov [phonetic], Stepashin or Mr. Putin, finally.  So what would be your choice?

 Male Speaker:  I would like to make a comment. I think it’s a great question and it’s a question which suggests a value choice rather than a rational choice.  My position on that, and I made this very clear back in 1996 when I was invited to join the election campaign of Mr. Yeltsin, my position is that for the sake of the country, it would have been better if Mr. Zuganev had been elected as Russian president in 1996 and I will tell you why. 

Democracy is tested by the transition of power.  You need to go through two or three transitions of power before you can claim that you have reached the stage of mature democracy.  If we look at central European countries, all of them had gone through these transitions.  All of them experienced a shift of power from liberals, from [indiscernible] reform parties, to former communist to social democrats.  That happened in Poland, that happened in Hungary, that happened in Bulgaria.  That allowed them to consolidate, not just their democracy, but also the national consensus about the rules of the game and also transition to a market economy. 

Nothing dramatic happened.  If you believe that central Europe is different and their communists are really different from ours, Kwasniewski is not a match to Zyuganov - but even Yeltsin is not a match to.  But even if we assume that they are different, look at Ukraine.  Look at what happened in Ukraine in the mid-‘90s and we don’t really often refer to this experience. 

But it was a unique case when Mr. Kravchuk ran for reelection and he lost to Kuchma [phonetic] who, by the way, represented the old guard and communists who firmly supported him.  But that gave Ukraine a chance to introduce some kind of the political process which, in my opinion, is more promising than what we have in Russia, despite all of the turmoils that they have in Ukraine, despite all of the problems they experience right now. 

And when no democrats decided – I remember talking to some of my friends in the democratic camp during the 1990s and they were concerned primarily about the institutional interests.  You know these people, they say I’m not sure that I would be able to do my business to make my money under Zyuganov; therefore I will support Yeltsin. 

The first betrayal of democracy happened in 1991, in my opinion, when there was a chance to move to a much more democratic system.  The second betrayal happened in 1993 when they drafted and pushed through the constitution which, of course, created a super presidential republic.  And the third betrayal happened in 1996 when they said that –-

Okay, Russia is different.  We’re not in the business of power transition.  Our communists are so naughty, they are so bad that we should really defy all political rules of the game.  But it’s like in Turkey.  You know, if a radical or even moderate Islamic parties can come to power, let’s forget about democracy, but then you will never have democracy.  You know, my guestimation again – history doesn’t repeat itself, of course, so the only way is to be hypothetical about it. 

But my guess is if miraculously, in 1996 Mr. Zyuganov had come to power in Russia, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.  He would still go through some reforms.  He would definitely moderate his statements.  There would have been no re-nationalization because there were the same constraints that Primakoff faced two years later when he came to power. 

So again, this is my personal view, but I think that unfortunately we missed this chance.  Yeltsin, with all due respect, has to take responsibility for this missed opportunity as well.

 Male Speaker:  Wonderful comments Andrei on this point.  I’m not so sure about 1996 as Andrei as - I think this was a very difficult situation.  Of course, the parallel that was made at the time was Germany in 1933 and the parallels were far too many given that Russia and the communist party that is a special case.  And indeed, it was quite a free election.  It was rather a certain [indiscernible] control dominance factor was the issue.  On ’99, I think it was really a very different situation. 

First of all, the communist party was much weaker after the August crash.  Secondly, the lesson, approximately as Anders said, here about Andrei Kortunov, about Eastern Europe is that each government loses every election.  The reason why they do so is that because corruption is always the leading topic in each post-communist election.  Therefore, the incumbent complement is always guilty and is almost always loses.  I think there are four cases when an incumbent in government has actually won elections in Central Europe after communists.  So [indiscernible] is small and if Primakoff would have won, which is likely, he would have lost the next time around.

 Male Speaker:  I would have fired Primakoff, too, in ’99, in the answer to your last question.  But I agree with Andre in principle, that the fundamental character of Russian democracy was deformed before that.  I think what Anders said at the outset to Mr. Yeltsin, in the fall of 1991 or in the spring of 1992 and they called for new elections, that would have the time to right the slate clean.  But that wasn’t done and those were the decisions of ’93 and I also agree that the election – well, the election of 1996 was, in retrospect, far more competitive and democratic than elections that have come afterwards. 

It also helped to, I think, set the town in a negative way about the nature of Russian democracy.  The points that you’ve made, I always am kind of creativist man in some of these contrasts of Yeltsin and Putin and it’s important to disaggregate them, especially the point about security.  I mean, you can look at the data on the volume of terrorist attacks.  How you define lawlessness gets a little more complicated in what you define there, but terrorist attacks, etc. and personal safety, the situation is far worse under Putin than it was under Yeltsin.  That’s for sure true. 

The point about the last point, Andre, and we can talk about this at greater length over lunch sometime or something, it sounds like you are making the argument that Brezhnev’s Russia in the 1970s and early 1980s was more reformist than Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s – I misunderstood you.

 Male Speaker:  Let me make a clarification.  I was talking about the rule of law.  I am not specifying what kind of law, but the Brezhnev Soviet Union was much more rule-based society than today’s Russia.

 Male Speaker:  That’s different.

 Male Speaker:  That’s a point, and that is very important, because just never before in the last 30 or 40 years, at least in the memory of the current generation do we have such a destroyed rules in the country that we are enjoying today.  Just never – not only the ‘90s with Yeltsin, nor even more under the Brezhnev regime over 20 years in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.  And that is very important, because this is basic pillars of society that have been constantly and permanently destroyed. 

 Male Speaker:  Let me make just one other comment and then turn it over to Leon, because it’s kind of a response to your comment before in response to me.  Yes, for sure, whether the economic structural argument, the personality, the ideologies – it’s not an either/or situation.  It’s hard to define whether the chicken comes before the egg or vice versa.  But just kind of looking at, there is a correlation that I see over the past 35 years in that – when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, certainly he didn’t come to power with the views of radical reform, which he ended up undertaking. 

I think his viewpoint was quite different and it was radicalized while he was in power.  But I think that in retrospect, if the Soviet economy had not been in a bad position, I think there would have been far less impetus to tinker with the system – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  It wasn’t so obvious that it was broke until I think the oil prices crashed in ’86. 

 Male Speaker:  This is a fascinating debate and it’s actually a matter of history as well.  One of the things that became clear to me as I studied every public opinion poll in ’96 – and by the way, Russia, of all of the great revolutions, the most polled revolution.  I mean, when I hear – that’s why it’s difficult to – because it’s not, we speculate that when Robert Darton goes and he studies documents of the French Revolution or French Samizdat at the end of the 18th century, that is one thing. 

We have polls, we have polls by Russian pollsters, even more so we have polls by every respectable polling organization.  In ’96, yes we started with polls showing 10 percent Yeltsin popularity, Zyuganov ahead.  Yeltsin begins to travel, he shows that he is alive.  He takes Alexander Romanoff and a couple of others as his speechwriters, his speeches are becoming truly excellent and the normal rule of democratic politics works.  We have exit polls by including, among other places, one of the most respected public opinion firms, New York Metosky and Company, which were almost exactly corresponding to the results – 46 to 54 all along.  We could track that. 

So in other words, I am here with Anders and I don’t see – we can talk about the role of the media, but it always – I mean, the Russian people obviously can defend themselves on their own, but it always strikes me as terribly – not even negligent, but kind of dismissive of the Russian people’s common sense to say that because NTV or the oligarchs in some other places positively portrayed Yeltsin and negatively portrayed Zyganev, some Bashkiriya region voted for Yeltsin and not Zyganev. 

In fact, the opposite happened.  And we know, as I am a lapsed student of sociologist of public opinion, we know that as with the brands of cars and detergents, it is extremely difficult to change people’s opinions on the things that really matter to them, which brings me to the last point. 

I am not sure, Andre, that in 1999 the situation was dire.  What we’ve seen in 1991, the election of Yeltsin as president still of Russia still inside the Soviet Union, the referendum of ’93 and the election of ’96 is that the same 40 million Russian men and women, God bless them, supported – when push came to shove – supported the movement towards radical reform, towards revolution.  Then the coalitions fell apart, obviously they cursed Yeltsin, they hated inflation.  But isn’t it a tribute to the incredible wisdom and courage that in April of ’93, with inflation at 200 percent monthly, something like that? 

There you go – on the question, as you all remember, on the question do you support the social policies of the current administration?  Yes.  And nobody, as far as I know, nobody claims that anything was fudged or this was not a free expression of the people’s opinion. 

So I think in ’99, and incidentally Andre, the election, the Duma election showed a very important movement.  I mean, Yablika [phonetic] and SPS got a very strong foothold.  The communist party yes indeed was still the largest faction, but the leftist plurality was gone.  So I’m not convinced that in ’99 the situation was that dire from the point of view of Yeltsin’s legacy. 

Let me just, it was a reaction to my statement; let me limit myself to just one comment.  If it is true that common sense is the decisive factor and that media control doesn’t really matter –

 Male Speaker:  At certain issues, at certain times.

 Male Speaker:  The funding of the campaign doesn’t really matter.  The ability to mobilize the cultural elite and the political elite doesn’t matter, then you should have no problems with Putin and this transition, because this is exactly what we have right now.  We have a situation when the ruling party controls media, controls cultural elite, controls funding.  So if you assume that back in 1996 basically it was more or less fine.  There were some minor irregularities, then the logical conclusion is that it is also okay right now. 

 Male Speaker:  First of all, thank you very much for these answers, but just – if you will allow me to come back, not to ’96, not to ’93, not to ’92 and ’91 but to, again, to August of 1999.  Just if once again, we could just to say what would you choose if you were Boris Yeltsin in July or August of 1999.  So you have all options in front of you, so just – either you are picking a successor or you are just allowing a successor who would presumably would defend so-called achievements of freedom or whatever, as you thought, that it looks like today, to some extent.  Or he would just decide – let democracy decide. 

And that is why it’s a very high level of certainties, almost 100 percent, that Mr. Primakov will be the president of Russia.  The ruling party will be a different ruling party and all of these super residential responsibilities and rights will be in the hands of Mr. Primakov, who actually refused to cooperate with Mr. Yeltsin a few months before when the Russian parliament wanted to impeach Mr. Yeltsin. 

Just if you can say – okay, this will be [indiscernible] by Primakov or Putin.  Just it’s actually – in this case, so-called freedoms versus so-called democracy will be your choice, whether Putin or Primakov.  Your answers?

 Male Speaker:  Andrei, I don’t think this was the choice, though.  I think a pro-reform, pro-democracy candidate other than Putin –

 Male Speaker:  There was no such a person.  No, we are looking at reality, not as some kind of theoretical or desirable situation.  We are looking in July or August of 1999.  At that time, it was very clear, as you remember.  There was a massive powerful group of people headed by Mr. Lushkov and Primakov with Mr. Primakov really as the candidate for presidency and Mr. Lushkov as a candidate for prime minister.&nbs