#18 | September 25 - October 8, 1997  

by Abram Kalashnikov

When I was studying in America I learned an old adage: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." I thought before that the expression was meaningless now because people drive cars instead of riding horses. It turns out the expression is meaningless because it simply isn't true.

It turns out that you can lead foreign correspondents to water AND make them drink. All you have to do is organize a trip for a public official, and before you know it, you've got a line of hacks slurping it up at pondside.

Boris Yeltsin visited Oryol last week. No, Oryol is not a new toothpaste. It is an anonymous provincial town some 400 km from Moscow. That is, it would be anonynmous, except for one thing: its governor, Yegor Stroyev, is a convert from the Communist Party to the party of power, Our Home is Russia. A flip like that is all a governor needs these days to guarantee a visit from our sober and caring President.

President Yeltsin has, and understandably so, a mild political problem in the provinces. This may be- and I'm going out on a limb here- because the vast majority of state employees outside Moscow haven't received their salaries for months and in some cases years.

Those Mercedes you see being driven in Moscow were more often than not bought with the sweat of unpaid labor, mainly from provincial enterprises which process and/or mine natural resources. This is why significant portions of the provincial population were willing to vote for crude facsimiles of human beings, like Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, rather than place a vote of confidence in Yeltsin.

The political situation in the provinces are a sticky subject for the cheerleading Western press corps, which is one reason they never go there, except to do the occasional crowd-pleasing "Magnitogorsk: Rectum of the Universe" story.

That's why a gig like the Yeltsin trip is ideal for reporters: it gives them a chance to demonstrate, misleadingly, of course, that political volatilty in the provinces is an overblown thing. The end result is like an account of a picnic thrown for Marie Antoinette by a corrupt old Vicomte on the outskirts of Versailles in 1789: obscene flattery and good cheer all around, masking the fact that just a few miles away, peasants were sitting bunched around the emaciated corpses of their children, munching ergot and sharpening their pitchforks for the Big Show.

Timothy Heritage of Reuters pulls off the Marie Anoinette routine with flair:
"Yeltsin's visit to Oryol...was intended partly to show that he can go to opposition-held territory and show that reforms are bearing fruit even there."

Needless to say, Heritage fails to elaborate on how reforms are working in Oryol. In fact, his only reference to the Oryol economy is a disclaimer: "Just how good a model Oryol is is questionable. Although...it has honored all its debts to public sector workers and pensioners, Oryol is far less developed than Moscow and receives far less investment."

The time Heritage doesn't spend on the Oryol economy is spent instead on a prolonged rhetorical demonstration of the futility and undesirability of rebellion:
"The key task of the governors...is to improve the daily lives of their voters. Unrest and bad relations with the Kremlin are unhelpful for that."

Right on, Timster. I suppose good relations with the Kremlin, which has been responsible for the rigged auctions of many provincial enterprises, would help a lot. Especially when the government has been lending money to banks to buy up state industries and simultaneously stopping payment on pensions and salaries.

No, you're right, I don't see any cause for conflict there.

Heritage beefs up his rhetoric with the obligatory talking head, this one from Fond Politika:
"The governor's dormant desire is for the status quo. I don't think any are interested in unrest," said Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the independent Politika Fund think-tank in Moscow. "Every governor wants goods in his shops and wants to look responsible. Each has an interest in keeping things quiet."

Translation: hey, you've got Skippy Peanut Butter in your kiosks- shut up, already! And don't complain to me that you don't have any money to buy it! This is capitalism, and everybody is, after all, fending for himself.

The Western press, not only in Russia but all over the world, tends to have a very urban outlook on life. Countries are run from palaces in the sky, and the job of those on the ground is to keep your eyes on the thresher (or whatever that wheat thing is called) and leave the thinking to the college grads upstairs. That's why the American press loves stories about militias. They demonstrate plainly how dumb rural people look when they try to think for themselves.

Russia is no different. The Western press cares little that provincial Russians have been forced to accept an extremely humiliating drop in their standard of living. They're sympathetic in a way, and do often write stories about how terrible life is outside the capital (note the abundance of stories from hell-holes like Vorkuta), but there is never any implication that fixing these problems should be left to anyone but the big guys in Moscow. Reporters from the West- a culture that has been very positively affected by the legacy of revolution- always tab rebellion as not "responsible," as Nikonov put it.

The responsible thing, apparently, is to quietly starve and let Borya handle things.

That may not help the provinces prosper, but it will keep the Russian stock market soaring, and that, more than anything else is what guides Western reporting these days. That's why you read sentences like the following:
"Despite its efforts at peaceful cohabitation," Heritage concludes, "the Kremlin still has no guarantee that local governors can control local passions."

Human beings cogitate and strive for peace: its animals who don't think, and have passions that need to be controlled. Marie Antoinette divided the world up similarly. Maybe someday Oryolians will find a Bastille suitable for Mr. Heritage. Now that really would be a far, far better thing...