Issue #01/56, January 14 - 27, 1999  

by Bill Powell and Yevgenia Albats
Newsweek

Near dusk on August 16, a young boy--the son of a shepherd--spotted an angry wolf making his way toward his flock. The boy was sitting high in a tree branch, not far from where he had been sitting when he had originally called the villagers for help after sighting the wolf several days before. As he bounded to the ground, the wolf spied him and made chase, forcing the boy to send another impassioned cry out for help-beginning what would be the most difficult night of his young career. If the boy's alarmist reaction a few days before had signaled the beginning of a less lonely existence in the fields, his cries tonight would mark the beginning of a long twilight that would ultimately result in his untimely death and ingestion at the jaws of the hungry predator. The fallout, for the boy and for the village, was immediate and deeply painful. The boy's father's experiment with keeping him in the fields was a disaster, and the future of his flock--and his family--uncertain. Within a week, his reformist son had been interred, his position taken by a left-leaning ex-communist ten year-old with ties to the village's hardline parliament. The incident also rocked markets around the world, as investors struggled to convince the hardline village leadership to intervene the next time help was called for.

How the boy came to be eaten is the subject of the story that follows--a story based on meticulous interviews with almost all of the particulars.

The disastrous summer represented the collapse of what villager Pyotr Avin called the "village support system"--a fragile response unit designed to avoid catastrophes just like the one involving the shepherd's son. The lesson, Avin said, was this: "The wolf was there all three times the boy called for help. The failure to respond was a stupid--and stupidly tragic--mistake."

EDUCATING THE BOY
When a nine year-old, bespectacled, relatively anonymous shepherd's son was put in charge of the flock last summer, he self-effacingly told a bemused village press corps, "I'm as surprised as you guys are."

By early May, after the village's hardline nationalist elders finally confirmed him, the boy was still trying to grasp what he was up against. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't keep his father's sheep from shitting on their neighbors' lawn. In hindsight, he later said, his family was incredibly naive-- they should have erected fences, or used dogs, to control the flock. "But at the time, we had so many optimistic notions," he later told reporters. "We thought we could just talk the sheep out of it. But they went on shitting all over the place. We just didn't know enough about sheep."

In early June, he spotted the wolf for the first time. "It came over the hill and just walked away with a sheep. Then it came back for me. That's when I cried for help."

The first cry, on June 16, provoked a reluctant--and somewhat tardy--rescue effort by the village's hardliner coalition parliament. Says village banker Avin: "The nationalists didn't believe there was a wolf. We had to fight them tooth and nail just to get them to make a rescue effort. It was hell."

Anatoly Chubais, one of the two main strategists behind the village rescue effort, said his group was so startled by the village government's reluctance to respond that it was forced to take the dramatic step of appealing to other villages.

Former U.S. Ambassador Strobe Talbott later said that his President "firmly backed" the rescue effort for the boy, despite the fact that his own government had practically no resources available for the mission. It was help the boy desperately needed. "We dialed 911," said Chubais. "And help came."

ENTER THE CAVALRY
After interviewing the boy at length, the IMF calculated that the wolf was at least twelve feet long and had huge fangs that, as a result of its insatiable hunger, were continually dripping saliva. Director Michel Camedessus, when told about the wolf, was reportedly "exasperated" that more had not been done by the village to prevent its arrival.

"Michel was pissed," said John Smolding Eee, the Fund's point man in the village. "He came up to me in the hallway and said, 'What the fuck is the deal with this wolf thing?'"

The Fund promised more help, but only on the condition that the village leadership "begin taking the wolf threat more seriously", as Smolding Eee put it, beginning with draconian measures to reduce the sheep supply.

Chubais and behind-the-scenes village whiz kid Yegor Gaidar convinced the government to go along. Reformers celebrated the rescue and apparent righting of the situation with an impromptu birthday party for Chubais, who had just turned 43. Villagers and sheep alike sang "Happy Birthday" in English, merrily drinking the blood of Christians and burning crosses in front of the houses of neighboring black sharecroppers. It would be the last time the village would feel truly happy. "We thought the bad times were over," said Aven. "But we were wrong."

THE WOLF RETURNS
The next day, the boy spotted the wolf again, and again called for help.

Resentment against foreign involvement and rising nationalist sentiment fueled an even later rescue response. "To this day, not many people know how close the boy came to being eaten that second time," says Gaidar. "We had to think fast."

But by then, domestic opinion had turned against the boy, despite a host of international monitor organizations which had reviewed the case and judged his wolf sighting legitimate. In fact, even as Euromoney magazine was naming the boy "Wolf-Spotter of the Year", polls showed hardline villagers who favored his ouster gaining support.

"We reached a stage," says Avin, "when people simply didn't believe that the wolf existed anymore. Even the support of the IMF couldn't convince them otherwise."

"They thought our rescue package was a magic bullet," says Smolding Eee. "But the truth, sad as it is, is that these villagers were simply too unsophisticated to really see the wolf for what it was. They just didn't believe in it enough."

THE END
On August 16, when the boy cried for help a third time, the reformers were left "politically toothless", as Chubais now calls it. Hardliner elders voted unanimously to ignore the call for help. The rest, as they say, is history. The reformers were deposed and sent to the grueling exile of their private estates in Switzerland, with only the company of Western reporters to help soothe their consciences. "We had a chance to make a difference," said village banker Mikhail Freedman. "But in the end, we just couldn't save the boy. And nobody believes us anymore."

THE MORAL
Nationalist villager Aesop was unimpressed with the laments of the ousted rescue team. "As far as I'm concerned, the moral to this story is this," he said. "Liars will never be believed, even when they're quoted in Newsweek."