[PEN-L:292] Russia

["Frank Durgin" <fdurgin1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

      Michael;

          This is in response to your reqest for some discussion on Russian
and other affairs. Before laying out some
 thoughts on Russia I'd like to pose a question. I could swear that I read
a message from you saying that Fred Weir was going
to join us and answer questions for us. Did I get something mixed up?


       Michael, for some eight years  (yes eight years) I have been
watching
 the progressive disintegration of the Russian economy. I have been
watching
 in horror as the economic and social indicators (declining industrial and
 agricultural output, rising unemployment, unpaid wages, poverty,
 homelessness, hunger, disease and disappear) creep to well above ignition
 levels - and wondering when are they going trigger a gargantuan
explosion,
 the pieces of  which, as Lebed has  pointed out, will come raining down
on   the West.

 The depth of Russia's problems for the West do not seem to be recognized.
 Financial problems are so to speak, only skin deep. With eight years of
ever
 mounting social misery and still no light at the end of the tunnel.
Russia is virtual powder keg,  and on top of that powder keg sits  a highly
 unstable alcoholic (has anyone forgotten the his shelling of the
parliament building and the mass destruction and slaughter wrought in
Chechnya.).
The thought of civl war and armed combat swirling in and around
Russias civil and military nuclear facilites is a frightning one

      I do not have time to lay out the case I would like to make
regarding dangers to the West of the current situation. But, I wonder if it
might
 helpful to post an article of mine which appeared in the( Maine Sunday
Times
of  March, 17, 1996. The political landscape has changed only slightly
these past two
years, but the economic situation has deepened and the danger of a civil
eruption
and a nuclear winter far more acute


>

    RUSSIA MARCHES DANGEROUSLY TOWARD CIVIL   WAR
>     ( Maine Sunday Times
of  March, 17, 1996)
>
>  	The probability of civil war is a subject which is on every Russian's
>  mind, and one which  Yeltsin has adopted as a key theme of his
>  presidential campaign . In a TV interview on Feb 14, the eve of
>  announcing his candidacy, he  warned  that efforts to "return the
>  country to the past...would be a tragic mistake...and would not be
>  the light at the end of the tunnel, but the outbreak of new, ever
>  more terrible fires of civil war."  In his announcement speech at
>  Yakaterinburg, he claimed that a communist victory could spark a
>  civil war, and the next day in Chelyabinsk he warned that only he was
>  capable of keeping the nation from civil war. In his state of the
>  Union address of 23 Feb 1996 he said  "We have come to the edge of
>  that dangerous line beyond which fatigue and mistrust may outbalance
>  people's fortitude and hope."
>
>    Other "reformists are voicing the same theme. Anthony Chubais, the
>    recently disposed head of Russia's privatization commission, said
>    that Zyuganov's calls for a revision of the privatization program,
>    would lead to a "bloodbath." Gaidar, in an interview after the
>    recent Duma elections, said that the "elections were merely a
>    prelude to new and deep shocks in Russia" and went on to state that
>    if the left gains power it will give rise to a "new anti-communist
>    wave which - shorter and more brutal then that of August of 1991 -
>    will sweep them away." When asked by the reporter if he considered
>    such an outcome inevitable and without hope of any way of
>    preventing it, he responded, "No hope, honestly speaking,
>    absolutely no hope.".
>
>    It is not the possibility  of civil war which should surprise, but
>    rather the fact that it has not already broken out. In a New York
>    Times piece six years ago, A.M. Rosenthal wrote  that the Soviet
>    Union was becoming "hungrier, shabbier and colder week by
>    week...(It)is as near collapse as a country can be without
>    exploding into total revolution."  Since those words were written
>    the situation has drastically deteriorated.
>
>  Russian GDP has declined by some 50%, and industrial production over
>  50%, The production of goods that affect everyday lives has
>  plummeted. Output of footwear in 1995, for example, has fallen by 85%
>  as has that of TV's and washing machines. Production of refrigerators
>  has fallen by some 52%  Gross agricultural output is down by some
>  40%, and grain output has progressively declined from a pre-reform
>  average of 100 million tons per year to 66 million tons in 1995.
>  Whole milk production in 1995 was down by over two thirds from pre
>  reform level and that of meat and meat production down by slightly
>  less than 50%. Investment in plant and equipment is down  by 75%,
>  with the result that Russia is now consuming it machinery and
>  equipment at a faster rate then it is being replaced. In the words of
>  Russia's leading publication on financial matters, "The time when
>  Russia could live off of the material, cultural and political
>  resources created by the two or three preceding generations has come
>  to an end.
>
>
>  Unemployment has long been in the double digits and in some areas
>  runs over 30%, while large numbers of those who are working are owed
>  many months of back wages. Lifetime savings have been wiped out by a
>  more than 4,800 fold inflation, and real incomes and consumption are
>  down by some 50% from their pre-reform levels. In the words of the
>  president of one of Russia's largest construction companies,"All of
>  the material well-being that people had, they lost in one hour. There
>  is practically no more free medical care, assessable higher
>  education, no right to a job or rest. The houses of culture,
>  libraries, stadiums, kindergartens and nurseries, pioneer camps,
>  schools, hospitals and stores are closing. The cost of housing,
>  communal services and transport are no longer affordable for the
>  majority of families."
>
>
>     The scale of human suffering (poverty, hopelessness, hunger,
>     rampant disease and  soaring death rate) brought on by the
>     economic collapse has been enormous and in fact rivals that war
>     years. 39 million people lack the resources to obtain a
>     physiological minimally necessary level of consumption. And while
>     the Western press has succeeded in missing it, the Russian press
>     abounds with reports of hunger. As early as Sept 1992, reports of
>     hungry and underweight children began to appear and have been
>     occurring with ever more rapid frequency, Per capita intake of
>     food in Russia has fallen in the past few years almost by one
>     third  As reported in  the Russian government's official
>     newspaper, Rossiiskaya gazeta, one third of the Russian population
>     is undernourished. In March of 1995 the  press has carried
>     pictures of people scavenging for food in the 100 or so dumps
>     ringing Moscow. And in an article this past June on world hunger,
>     Vyacheslav Yevolinskii, Chairman of the Council of the
>     Federation's (the upper house of parliament) Committee on Agrarian
>     Policy wrote ."The outlook for Russia is especially pessimistic.
>     Here one third of the population today is  undernourished."And he
>     predicted that the number would soon grow to fifty  percent.    In
>     October a national newspaper carried a front page picture of a
>     child approximately 5 years old sitting on a sidewalk begging for
>     money, holding a sign which states  "I want to eat. Help me."  The
>     same paper in a front page editorial on Feb 10 said that its
>     letters editor had been receiving so many reports of hunger among
>     rural children that it had opened a hot line to enable people to
>     call and report. emergency cases.
>
>   The number of homeless persons (a phenomena unknown in the
>   pre-reform era) has increased dramatically. Estimates of their
>   number in Moscow alone run between 300,000 and 400,000 of which some
>   30,000 are children.  The largest portion of them, according to
>   Izvestiya, are people who have lost their housing as a result of
>   fraud and physical force.  So far this winter, in Moscow alone, 250
>   persons have been found frozen to death.  "The attitude of the
>   militia toward the homeless" in the words of the Christian Science
>   Monitor, "was best illustrated last December when Mayor Yuri Luzkhov
> ordered a pre-election cleanup of the streets. Homeless people were
>   gathered at stations, hosed with cold water, herded onto trains, and
>   deposited 40 miles outside Moscow in snowy fields"
>
>  The bi-product of hopelessness and hunger is disease. A UNICEF study
>  concluded that deficient diets and stress from unemployment, social
>  uncertainty and a sense of pointless had contributed to sharp
>  increases in heart and circulatory diseases, And as reported by The
>  New York Times, "Rates of cholera, dysentery, diphtheria,
>  tuberculosis and many sexually transmitted diseases have exploded.
>  The rise is due largely to the sharp reductions in funds for public
>  health, a flood of often sick refugees from former Soviet republics,
>  poor hygiene and severe shortages of antibiotics.  In 1992 Russia
>  recorded 3,900 cases of diphtheria, In 1993 the figure jumped to
>  15,210...(and) in the first six months of 1994 alone, the number
>  tripled again to almost 48,000 cases in the nation. By comparison, in
>  1993 the US did not register a single case. Cases of venereal disease
>  among girls aged 12-16 tripled in Russia in the fist six months of
>  1994 year compared with the same period 1993...".	.Twenty four out of
>  every 1000,000 Muscovites  currently have tuberculosis.
>
>
>
>
>  Social and economic stresses have produced one of world's highest
>  suicide and murder rates. The suicide rate now ranks third among 83
>  industrialized nations of the world. From a nation with one of the
>  lowest homicide rates in the industrialized world Russia's murder
>  has risen to surpass that of the US  and is 20.5 times the European
>  average for men and 12.2 times that rate for women. .   These high
>  rates, combined with the number of early deaths from disease,  have
>  pushed the Russian death rate to 15.7 per 1,000 which is higher than
>  that of India (10.5), Bangladesh (11.9) and  Ethiopia 14.3).  The
>  live expectancy of the Russian male has plummeted to 57 years (three
>  years less then the  Russia male retirement age). In the words of
>  Oxford U. Demographer, David Coleman  "A decline in life expectancy
>  this dramatic has never happened anywhere in the postwar world."
>
>  This high mortality, combining with widespread poverty, has produced
>  the macabre situation in which the morgues of Russia are overflowing
>  with corpses that family members fail to claim  because they are
>  unable to pay for a funeral. In St Petersburg last June, there were
>  27,000  such corpses unburied and laying in the cold chambers of the
>  morgues. By way of a benchmark, it might be noted that in 1994 85,000
>  people died in St Petersburg.
>
>
>  As the death rate has risen, the birth rate has fallen. The number of
>  births per 1,000 of population fell progressively from 12.1 in 1991
>  to 9.6 in 1994, As a result, during the first three years of reform
>  (1992 to 1994), the population shrank by some 1.8 million. and in the
>  first 9 months of 1995 shrank by another 2 million, And the end is
>  not in sight. According to a report prepared by Goskomstat and the
>  Center for Economic Conjuncture of the Russian Government, by 2005
>  the population of Russia will fall by another 5.1 million
>
>
>  These gruesome social indicators, sufficient by themselves to cause
>  political upheaval  are rendered much more highly inflammable by the
>  enormous differentials in income."reform" has produced. In the race
>  to grab up the national wealth a very small minority accumulated the
>  bulk of it. Contrast the plight of Russia's several million of
>  unemployed, homeless, hungry and sick with the situation of Russia's
>  few thousand "New Rich", who, like The New York Times, find that
>  "Russian stores are full of better cloths and groceries. Russians
>  fill nightclubs, restaurants and health clubs whose prices would made
>  a New Yorker blanch. Russians are lunching and brunching with
>  cellular phones, electronic dairies and Hugo Boss suits. Russians are
>  building huge, crenellated brick dachas, restoring Moscow's tattered
>  office buildings and hiring foreign accounts. Russians are pouring
>  into once forbidden European vacation spots like Cyprus and
>  Brumini, let alone Paris and London"  This year the highest 10% income
>  group in Russia has 27 times as much income as the lowest 10% . In
>  Moscow the richest 10% have 50 times the income of the lowest 10%. If
>  45% of the Russian population has incomes less than the physiological
>  necessary minimum ( $48 at the current rate of exchange), the upper
>  3% have a per capita income of about $800,000 dollars per month.
>
>    A tragedy in the original greek meaning of the word is rapidly
>    approaching its climax. The point beyond which it would have been
>    possible to avert civil conflict has long passed. As reported in
>    the Jamestown Foundation's Prism, an analysis prepared for Yeltsin
>    by the apparatus of his own National Security Aide Yuri Baturin
>    stated that "even if no cataclysms occur and if genuinely
>    well-considered and  effective reforms are implemented, it will not
>    be possible to restore the economic potential (in terms of GDP
>    volume) that the country had in 1985 by any earlier than
>    2003-2005."  It also concluded that  the badly needed sweeping
>    restructuring of the economy is only possible if the state
> retrieves its former role, i.e. the very thing that Yelstin and his
>    entourage stress will precipitate a conflagration.
>
>   Just what form the denouement will take, or what the  triggering
>   event will be can not be foreseen. Yeltsin's entry into the
>   presidential fray is a clear signal that he and his corporate allies
>   are determined to hold on to power. But they have only to June to
>   act. Irrespective of the rising volume of his promises, Yeltsin
>   simply can not win the June presidential election.  He is ill,
>   ageing, unstable and a chronic alcoholic. Five years of his promises
>   have brought incredible hardship and suffering to the majority of
>   Russia people and made him the most hated person in Russia today.
>   Talk  of retribution for those enormous sufferings is widespread.
>   As William Safire has pointed out, "Yeltsin and his Kremlin clique
>   fear personal punishment from left or right should they lose
>   power..." He quotes Chubais as saying that if the communists win
>   "Yavlinsky will be in prison with me"
>
>       Many are predicting, and Yeltsin vigorously denies, that some
>       national emergency will be contrived to justify canceling the
>       elections (bear in mind that these upcoming Presidential
>       election was originally  scheduled to be held in June of 1994,
>       but Yeltsin cancelled it). Yeltsin's response to the protests
>       that such an action would inexorably provoke, will be vigorous.
>       The precedents are there - the shelling of the parliament, the
>       imprisonment of the vice president and the speaker of the Duma,
>       the destruction of Grozny,  and the pulverization of
>       Pervomaiskya. The difference this time, however, is that there
>       are sharp  divisions among the generals and security force heads
>       as to where their allegiances lie.
>
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