Moscow Times - May 13, 1999
EDITORIAL: Is Stepashin A Russian Pinochet?
History will look kindly enough on Yevgeny Primakov. He had enough horse sense to print some money to pay wage arrears, and to ignore the textbooks and let the Central Bank restrict trade in the ruble. And he was enough of a negotiator that his government managed to wring a parsimonious deal out of the IMF - which was all any Russian government was going to get anyway these days.
All the same it's good to see him gone. His government's longer-term plans were at best irrelevant, at worst alarming. And Primakov is not a man one would like to see in the Kremlin - not with his dubious KGB roots and his lack of enthusiasm for democracy (he advocated letting the Kremlin, not the people, choose regional governors).
In other words, the Primakov era could have been worse. That's the good news. The bad news is, it may be about to get worse.
Yeltsin's television address Wednesday inspires little confidence. It seems we need Stepashin, a police officer, to bring in "unpopular" and "harsh" economic measures. These, Yeltsin stressed, will be free market policies. As Yeltsin explained, no one wants to take harsh free market steps on the eve of parliamentary elections. Yeltsin also added that the Primakov government seemed unaware that the provinces are restless.
Taken together, this all sounds alarmingly like the preamble to a Pinochet-style defense of authoritarian capitalism.
Yeltsin ditched Primakov because he feared him as a rival for power, and this sends the strongest signal yet that Yeltsin is wrestling with the question of whether to step down himself in 13 months. Yeltsin faced this same question in 1996, when friends like Boris Berezovsky and Alexander Korzhakov urged him to scuttle the presidential elections. Yeltsin, explaining that he expected to win, went forward.
We can only hope that history will not note Primakov's departure - serendipitously, on the first anniversary of demonstrations that brought down a decades-old Indonesian dictatorship - as the start of the Suharto-ization of Russia.
The Western governments must think clearly about their priorities in Russia as never before. It is imperative that they recognize that democracy and free markets - at least as defined by the Western governments - are not necessarily the same thing. Indonesia and Chile at their dictatorial worst were also purportedly free markets.
Whatever happens, the Western governments should stand up for democracy first. The West must not be lulled into complacences when the Russian bureaucracy - which is twice as bloated as the Soviet command apparatus - promises "economic reform." Be suspicious of the trade-off.