In Russia, the village folk say that even a blind horse can pull a cart, if he is led.

In the case of Russia’s state insurer Rosgosstrakh, it is easy to see that the horse is being led in a circle; more difficult is to identify who has his hands on the bridle.

After selling a 49 percent stake in Rosgosstrakh to a still-secret consortium of foreign and Russian insurance interests, led by the Moscow investment bank Troika Dialog, the government is quietly considering a plan to release a controlling interest soon, according to a government source. (more…)

by John Helmer - Friday, August 2nd, 2002
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There is no better test of the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely than Russia’s Finance Ministry. Take the silver tax of May 1999, for example, and its predecessor in absolute folly, the silver edict of France’s King Louis XIV of May 1709.

At that time, Louis’ treasury was empty and his armies and administration impoverished. The desperation was finding expression each night in Paris, where statues of the king were defiled and lampooned. The Duchesse de Gramont conceived the idea of ingratiating herself in court by making a public offer of donating her silver dinner service to be melted down for the treasury, and used to fund the army’s expenses. The controller-general understood the folly of the idea. But the number of courtiers seeking the king’s favor was so great, the Mint was struck by an avalanche of table silver -too much, in fact, for Louis to have time to read and remember all of the names on the lists of the ambitious donors. (more…)

by John Helmer - Saturday, July 27th, 2002
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When it comes to evasion, Alexei Kudrin, deputy prime minister in charge of the diamond sector, could take a lesson from the French bard, Jean Racine.

According to the tale told by Madame de Sieving, Louis XIV once appointed Racine as his royal historian, only to rebuke him for failing to do enough to learn more about warfare. Once, when the king told Racine he should go a little out of his way to watch a battle from the front line, Racine replied that was exactly what he had intended to do, only his new uniform hadn’t been delivered from the tailor’s in time.

That’s the point about evasiveness. If you don’t keep your wits about you, you tend to look guilty. (more…)

by John Helmer - Friday, July 26th, 2002
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There are 72 regional electricity-producing utility companies – energos, for short – in the state-controlled holding known as Unified Energy Systems (UES), run by Anatoly Chubais.

None in Russia can be confident in predicting the outcome of the so-called reform of the power sector, except that Chubais and the government say they are committed to reducing the number of energos from 72 to 10; subtracting transmission business from each remaining energo, or gencos; creating new companies to buy, sell, and transmit power along the nation’s grids; and zeroing out the tariff-fixing electricity commissions of Russia’s regions, by centralizing that power in one federal body. (more…)

by John Helmer - Sunday, July 7th, 2002
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In nautical circles it has always been said that rats leave a sinking ship. On pirate vessels, however, the custom was to make the better type of crewman walk the plank.

At the Ministry of Finance under Alexei Kudrin, there is no sign whatsoever of a sinking feeling. The ministry’s man now runs the Central Bank in a maneuver that reduces the longstanding rivalry between the two in the Finance Ministry’s favor. Reducing the friction also reduces an important check on the potential for misbehavior. The ministry also appears to have prevented the accounting chamber chief Sergei Stepashin from making good on his undertaking to scrub the vessel from top to bottom.

The State Duma is no closer now than it has ever been to exercising effective oversight of Finance Ministry operations, or subjecting ministry officials to civil and criminal accountability for their actions. The state prosecutors and courts have so far ignored the hearsay and brought no senior ministry official to book for malfeasance. (more…)

by John Helmer - Saturday, July 6th, 2002
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The World Bank in Russia is a long-running soap opera full of starlets demanding astronomical fees for playing scenes charged with intimate advice and suspenseful mistakes that keep the plot alive, episode after episode.

When we last tuned in, a year ago in May, the Bank had just engaged Anders Aslund, the paid Romeo of Russian privatization, to analyze the effectiveness of the World Bank’s program in Russia. Julian Schweitzer, then freshly appointed chief representative of the bank in Moscow, conceded that Aslund was being paid anew to assess things in which he’d had a past, and possibly a current, personal stake. “We don’t necessarily take his advice,” Schweitzer said, as he nodded in the direction of the American doctrine on conflict of interest.
(more…)

by John Helmer - Monday, July 1st, 2002
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MOSCOW – “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

After Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to make the most of two summit meetings in a week with European leaders, it’s time to remember the dictum coined by Frenchman Alphonse Karr more than a century ago. Karr was a writer whose reputation fell into oblivion once he retired from Paris to Nice. There he cultivated, among other things, a species of bamboo to which his name has been attached in botanical encyclopedias.

Karr’s wit deserves to be better remembered than that. There was the time, for example, when a barbed publication he had aimed at Louise Colet, the occasional lover of writer Gustave Flaubert, led the lady to attack Karr with a knife. Karr had the weapon mounted in a case and displayed with the label, “Given to me by Madame Colet in the back.” (more…)

by John Helmer - Tuesday, June 4th, 2002
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Over growing protests from Iran, Russia has decided to draw a fine line in the Caspian Sea to enable oil companies to drill, but avoid the legal problems of setting up national sectors in the sea. The Russian strategy is also to settle the status of the northern Caspian oilfields without antagonizing Iran, by pressuring for a similar deal in the southern sector of the sea.

President Vladimir Putin and Kazak President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed an agreement that “solves the problem of the seabed oil deposits that were subject to disputes,” according to Andrei Urnov.

Urnov, who heads the Caspian Working Group at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Moscow, said the newly signed protocol divides not the Caspian sea, but the natural resources of the seabed. “By signing the bilateral protocol, we try to solve the dispute, unfreeze the development of the deposits in the Northern Caspian and calm down and reassure investors. Before the protocol was signed, the deposits located in the north of the Caspian Sea were not properly assigned to either Russia and Kazakstan,” he explained. (more…)

by John Helmer - Friday, May 24th, 2002
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The haste with which President George Bush announced this week’s arms control treaty with Russia -minutes after negotiators for the two sides claimed to have been working on the text, and days before they had finished work on the side document on missile defense – must have been embarrassing for President Vladimir Putin,

The disclosure allows almost two weeks to examine what has been drafted before Bush and Putin will sign the documents. Already, it is plain that the only concession Washington has made to Russian concerns is to call the warhead limits document a treaty, even though it isn’t binding in any of the specific ways nuclear arms control has been mandated between Washington and Moscow for a generation. (more…)

by John Helmer - Friday, May 17th, 2002
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MOSCOW – Had Adolf Hitler won his war against Russia, he had a market and land reform plan that should ring a bell.

That’s because the policies that have come closest to the targets Hitler envisaged have been implemented by well-known officials of the Boris Yeltsin administration, many of whom still occupy high posts in the Russian government.

As Moscow police deployed this week to prevent young skinheads from rampaging violently against the foreigners they accuse of stripping Russia of its identity and prosperity, the heads who really skinned Russia continue in power to promote reforms that are closer to Hitler’s schemes than the fantasies of today’s lumpen proletariat. (more…)

by John Helmer - Saturday, April 20th, 2002
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