How 'The Oligarchs' Came to Dominate Russia

The Oligarchs Or How the Virgin Became a Whore
==============================================

By URI AVNERY
August 3, 2004
Counter Punch

This is a TV series about Russia. But it could have
been about Israel. Or about the United States. It is
entitled "The Oligarchs" and is now being screened on
Israeli television.

Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable--or would
have been, if they had not come straight from the
horses' mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully
boast about their despicable exploits. The series was
produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.

The "oligarchs" are a tiny group of entrepreneurs who
exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to
loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder
amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order
to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they
took control of the state. Six out of the seven are
Jews.

In popular parlance they are called "oligarchs"--from
the Greek word meaning "rule of the few".

In the first years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism
they were the bold and nimble ones who knew how to
exploit the economic anarchy in order to acquire
enormous possessions for a hundredth or a thousandth of
their value: oil, natural gas, nickel and other
minerals. They used every possible trick, including
cheating, bribery and murder. Every one of them had a
small private army. In the course of the series they
are proud to tell in great detail how they did it.

But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the
way they took control of the political apparatus. After
a period of fighting each other, they decided that it
would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order
to take over the state.

At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was in a steep
decline. On the eve of the new elections for the
presidency, his rating in public opinion polls stood at
4%. He was an alcoholic with a severe heart disease,
working about two hours a day. The state was, in
practice, ruled by his bodyguard and his daughter;
corruption was the order of the day.

The oligarchs decided to take power through him. They
had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels
and most of the other media. They put all these at the
disposal of Yeltsin's reelection campaign, denying
opponents even one minute of TV time and pouring huge
sums of money into the effort. (The series omits an
interesting detail: they secretly brought over the most
outstanding American election experts and copywriters,
who applied methods previously unknown in Russia.)

The campaign bore fruit: Yeltsin was indeed reelected.
On the very same day he had another heart attack and
spent the rest of his term in hospital. In practice,
the oligarchs ruled Russia. One of them, Boris
Berezovsky, appointed himself Prime Minister. There was
a minor scandal when it became known that he (like most
of the oligarchs) had acquired Israeli citizenship, but
he gave up his Israeli passport and everything was in
order again.

By the way, Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in
Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed
and a whole country devastated. He was interested in
the mineral resources and a prospective pipeline there.
In order to achieve this he put an end to the peace
agreement that gave the country some kind of
independence. The oligarchs dismissed and destroyed
Alexander Lebed, the popular general who engineered the
agreement, and the war has been going on since then.

In the end, there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the
taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power,
took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs
(Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to
flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in
Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be
hiding here.)

Since all the exploits of the oligarchs occurred in
public, there is a danger that the affair might cause
an increase in anti-Semitism in Russia. Indeed, the
anti-Semites argue that these doings confirm the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a document
fabricated by the Russian secret police a century ago,
purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to control the
world.

Moving from Russia to America--the same thing happened,
of course, in the US, but more than a hundred years
ago. At the time, the great "robber barons", Morgan,
Rockefeller at al., all of them good Christians, used
very similar methods to acquire capital and power on a
massive scale. Today, it works in far more refined
ways.

In the present election campaign, the candidates
collect hundreds of millions of dollars. George W. Bush
and John Kerry both brag about their talent for raising
enormous sums of money. From whom? From pensioners? >
 >From the mythical "old lady in tennis shoes"? Of course
not, but from the cabals of billionaires, the giant
corporations and powerful lobbies (arms dealers, Jewish
organiztions, doctors, lawyers and such). Many of them
give money to both candidates--just to be on the safe
side.

All of these expect, of course, to receive a generous
bonus when their candidate is elected. "There is no
such thing as a free lunch", as the right-wing
economist Milton Friedman wrote. As in Russia, every
dollar (or ruble) invested wisely in an election will
yield a ten- or hundred-fold return.

The problem is rooted in the fact that presidential
candidates (and all other candidates for political
office) need ever increasing amounts of money.
Elections are mainly fought out on TV and cost huge
sums. It is not a coincidence that all the present
candidates in the US are multi-millionaires. The Bush
family has amassed a fortune from the oil business
(helped by its political connections, of course.) Kerry
is married to one of the richest women in America, who
was once the wife of the ketchup king, Henry John
Heinz. Dick Cheney was the chief of a huge corporation
that has garnered contracts worth billions in Iraq.
John Edwards, candidate for Vice President, has made a
fortune as a trial lawyer.

 >From time to time there is talk in America about
reforming election finances, but nothing worthwhile
ever comes of it. None of the oligarchs has any
interest in changing a system that enables them to buy
the government of the United States.

In Israel, too, talk about "Money and Power" is now in
vogue. Ariel Sharon and one of his two sons have been
suspected of accepting bribes from a real estate
magnate. An indictment was blocked by the new Attorney
General who happened to be appointed by the Sharon
government at the height of the affair. Another
investigation into Sharon and his sons is still
pending. It concerns millions of dollars that reached
his election coffers by roundabout routes, crossing
three continents.

Shimon Peres' connections with multi-millionaires are
well-known, as are the huge sums poured out by American
Jewish multi-millionaires for extreme right-wing causes
in Israel. One of the Russian oligarchs is the part-
owner of the second biggest Israeli newspaper.

A political scandal concerning the Israeli Minister for
Infrastructure has mushroomed into an affair involving
giant multi-national corporations competing for
contracts for supplying natural gas to the Israeli
Electricity Company, an affair of billions in which
underworld figures, politicians and private
investigators play their parts. This disclosure has
made it clear to Israelis that here, too, politicians
of the highest rank have long ago been acting as
mercenaries for powerful financial interests.

These facts must alarm everybody who cares about
democracy--in Israel, Russia, the United States and
elsewhere. Oligarchy and democracy are incompatible. As
a Russian commentator in the TV series said about the
new Russian democracy: "They have turned a virgin into
a whore."

-----------

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with
Gush Shalom. He can be reached at: [email protected].

http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery08032004.html
-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
		--Brecht.

_______________________________________________
Rad-Green mailing list
[email protected]
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green