#32 | March 12 - 19, 1998  

By Matt Taibbi
Abram Kalashnikov is on vacation.

Actually Abram Kalashnikov is not on vacation. We don't pay him enough to afford one. I just decided to take over his column this week. It'll give him time to spend at home with that ugly wife of his, and those two kids-I don't think even he knows their names.

The real reason I sent Abram packing is that he's not up for the job this week. That's because there have been two articles published in the Western press lately that were so atrociously dishonest that they fall outside the range of Kalashnikov-style snide bearded commentary. These two pieces have raised, for the first time in my experience here, the possibility that Western reporters are being paid off to write flattering pieces. Which is a new thing. I mean, even Carol J. Williams never sank that low.

The last time the Reuters news agency ran stone-cold obvious blowjob coverage in favor of Anatoly Chubais, I called local chief correspondent Martin Nesirky and asked for an explanation. That was last fall, when Reuters carefully avoided including any mention of Oneximbank-and therefore the crucial implication of bribery-after Chubais and three aides were disciplined for receiving an inflated book advance from Segodnya publishers.

That interview served its purpose in exposing Nesirky as a pro-Chubais lummox; at one point he even blundered and blurted out that whether I "like it or not, Chubais is a well-known figure in the West who [sic] Russia needs to maintain a relationship with the IMF." But though we ran that interview in a cover story, seeing Nesirky make a fool of himself wasn't quite emotionally satisfying enough, given the play the initial Reuters stories got around the world.

So this time, after Nesirky and Co. made exactly the same outrageous oversight in a March 6 article entitled "Chubais Wages War on 'Crony Capitalism,'" I decided to bypass Nesirky (who didn't return my calls anyway) and call his boss in London, Reuters International news chief Graham Stewart. I figured that if just writing about the guy doesn't make me feel better, I might at least get him in trouble with his superiors-maybe ruin his career a little bit and see if that does the trick.

Stewart said that he was "not aware" of the "specific background" that had been overlooked in the Chubais case. In this case, Nesirky had again sent through a piece which cast Chubais as a fighter for the people against "oligarchs" and entrenched money interests. Although the title of the piece was preposterous in itself, there was one sentence in particular which was positively criminal:
"Chubais, a brilliant administrator and much respected in the West, lost some of his prominence last year after a scandal, initiated by the media controlled by his opponents, over high fees he and his allies accepted for a still unpublished book."

Dissecting that paragraph line by line, it's hard not to notice an extraordinary effort to save Chubais's reputation by turning a bribery story into a story of an unsubstantiated attack on an honest official by unscrupulous enemies. First you get the dual compliment-qualifiers in the parenthetical phrase "brilliant administrator and much respected in the West," which are not only superfluous to the sentence but of questionable veracity. After all, on what basis could anyone possibly call Chubais a brilliant administrator? Does Nesirky have any idea? I doubt it. The Russian government under Chubais's watch has been the most poorly administrated country outside of Africa. It can't collect taxes, control the regions, fight crime, even regulate a crude facsimile of a capitalist economy. What Chubais is is a brilliant self-publicist and intriguer, which is different from being an administrator, who does boring things like collect taxes-something Chubais has failed spectacularly at.

In any case, the sentence doesn't get any better from there. The phrase "initiated by the media controlled by his opponents," ignores the fact that Chubais himself admitted to accepting the book advance! He was guilty, which means he himself initiated the scandal, not the opportunistic reporters who took advantage of the story. But Reuters insists on keeping Chubais isolated from the bribery story. In the next phrase, they write that the scandal revolved around "high fees he and his allies accepted for a still unpublished book." This implies that the wrongdoing here was for simply accepting an inflated book advance.

In fact, Chubais was accused of taking money from a publishing house controlled by a bank (Onexim) that won the Svyazinvest tender, which Chubais oversaw. Probably no better example of "crony capitalism" at its worst came out in the Russian press last year, yet Reuters carefully omitted it. Last fall, I was ready to believe that Nesirky was just stupid when he sent that stuff through. But now, to leave that out in an article entitled "Chubais Wages War on Crony Capitalism," I have to assume that something else is at work. Stewart, his boss, said he would speak to his Moscow bureau about it; at press time, I didn't know the result of that conversation.

Worse even than the Reuters piece was a column by Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post entitled "Keep On Helping Post-Communist Russia Get Ahead." The article was ostensibly about Russian foreign policy and about the gradual phasing out of Soviet-era leaders, but transformed midway into a bizarre and seemingly irrelevant homage to Vladimir Potanin of Oneximbank:
"...But for every Russian who still dreams of dominating Latvia or Ukraine, plenty more still just want to do business there.

"One such person is baby billionaire Vladimir Potanin, who in the space of a decade has metamorphosed from low-ranking Soviet bureaucrat into one of the world's most influential businessmen, with interests in banking, oil, mining, newspapers and more.

"Like many of his generation, Mr. Potanin, 37, is just now coming up for air from the post-Soviet maelstrom and checking out the world. He is forming international alliances, including with British Petroleum and the financier George Soros, and recently came to Washington, seeking to show that not all 'robber barons,' as they are commonly known in America, are the same.

"A new Duma will be elected next year. Mr. Potanin hopes that it will have a better 'understanding of the modern world, of getting Russia integrated into the world.' Businessmen like himself will be working toward that goal, he said."

First of all, Potanin is an ex-Komsomol official who is absolutely from the Soviet school of leadership, and doesn't fit, rhetorically, as an example of the new non-Soviet generation. Secondly, Potanin made his money in a completely Soviet way-through the old method of tribute. He won a bid for Norilsk Nickel when Chubais put Oneximbank in control of the tender, bidding $171 million for a company worth billions, using government funds Onexim held as an authorized bank to make the purchase. He won the Svyazinvest bid under mysterious circumstances; Chubais and four of his aides (including then-State Property Chief Alfred Kokh) were all disciplined for accepting money from Onexim-controlled organizations. Potanin has also been a key figure in the dismantling of the free press in Russia; he was the main impetus behind the firing of Igor Golombiyevsky, an incident most people see as the Alamo for the free press in Russia. Yet this guy, the prototypical "robber baron," a guy who made his entire fortune through government favors, is the guy Hiatt is hyping as the "baby billionaire" who is "just coming up for air" and different from other "robber barons." He makes Potanin, one of the most ruthless operators in Russia, out to be some kind of eagle scout just getting ready to join a management training program at AT&T. This is something I've never seen before-a column in theWashington Post, reading like an advertorial in Euromoney.

Just imagine how absurd that passage would look if it were about any Russian businessman other than the one most closely connected to U.S. ally Anatoly Chubais. If it had been Yevgeny Dovgan, or Sergei Mavrodi, or Vladimir Bryntsalov, no Western reader would have been able to get through that piece without concluding that Hiatt had either gone insane or been paid off. Yet the only difference between those guys and Potanin is that they're smaller-time. And another thing: Potanin isn't even quoted directly in the piece. If Hiatt had been given an interview, you'd almost understand the article in the context of a journalist blowing someone who gave him a scoop. But here it just appears out of the blue, a weird little p.r. pitch in the middle of what is otherwise a serious policy editorial.

So what's up? I called up Hiatt and asked him what prompted him to put all of this stuff in his piece.

"I'm going to let my writing speak for itself," he said.
"But do you know anything about Vladimir Potanin? Do you anything about loans-for-shares?"
"Of course I do," he said. "I've written a lot about it."
"Then how could you write that Potanin 'just wants to do business'? The guy walked away with Norilsk Nickel for nothing..."
"Again," he said, "I'm going to let the writing speak for itself."
"Okay, well then can I just ask you flat-out: Were you paid to write this piece?"
Long pause. "Oh, please," he said.
"Why?" I said. "He pays off dozens of Russian journalists. Why not the Washington Post?"
Another long pause. "I was not paid to write this piece," he said.

Whatever. As Johnny Cochran said, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." The Hiatt-Reuters pieces don't fit, not logically, not even in the context of sheer laziness or natural bias. If I'd read either piece in a Russian paper, I'd assume they were "zakazniye" articles, and would have a 99% chance of being right. Does it really make any sense to conclude the opposite just because the writers were Westerners? You be the judge. Personally, I've still got a reasonable doubt.