the eXile - Press Review

Issue #13/94, July 6 - 20, 2000

THE FIED FIEFER’S WEDDING PRESENT

by Mark Ames

Gregory Fiefer is getting married soon. He is the Moscow Times’s number-two native-English business correspondent, nipping on the heels of renowned IKEA tool Andrew McCheesey. Before that, Fiefer worked for the CIA-funded newspaper The Russia Journal. And before that, he got a Master’s Degree at the CIA’s top spawning ground, Harvard University (Jonathan Hay, Andrei Schliefer, USAID), where he wrote a thesis blasting the CIA’s top local villain, Yuri Luzhkov. How Fiefer managed to infiltrate the Moscow Times is anybody’s guess, but I’d wager it has something to do with the recent restructuring of editor-in-chief Matt Bivens’s soul, who this year modernized his center-left image a la Gerhardt Schroeder, courting big business and toning down his once strident center-left rhetoric in favor of a more accommodating editorial stance. It’s not for nothing that people are beginning to refer to him as “eBivens.nl”.

Soon, I understand, Fiefer will be getting married. This press review is my small attempt to try to entice his wife-to-be to stand Fiefer up on wedding day, eloping instead with some greasy heavy metal dropout.

He came to my attention again recently because of a pair of Samara-related fluff pieces that had all the trappings of mid-1990s hackness. Good liberals, and bad Communists. Good entrepreneur-capitalists fighting heroic uphill battles. It’s all so... 1995.

Published about a week apart at the end of May, Fiefer gave the incredible impression that a). Governor Konstantin Titov is a “liberal” governor who has turned Samara into a corruption-free, clean, bustling paradise, and that b). Samarenergo chief Vladimir Avetisyan, a scary regional Berezovsky type, is a model capitalist-entrepreneur. It’s hard to imagine the Times allowing propaganda like this back into their newspaper after all we’ve been through, but then again, as they used to say in the mid-90s, “The Times they are a cha-angin’!”

In the May 23rd issue of the Moscow Times, Fiefer led off his article “Titov Still Has Edge in Samara”:

Sitting in his dilapidated downtown office, Vladimir Nenashev grudgingly admitted his region is less corrupt than others in the country.

The city of Samara - capital of the region that bears the same name - may be testament to that. Its streets are bustling and clean, and its residents seem to have a certain amount of savoir faire lacking in other provincial cities.

Nenashev, head of Samara’s Social-Political Center and the region’s self-described sole human rights advocate, attributes the difference to liberal Governor Konstantin Titov, echoing the opinion of a vast majority of the population.

Now if you thought you just read a marketing pamphlet put out by “The Committee To Re-Elect Titov”, you’re not too far off. The first thing that sticks out about this shamefully fawning lead is that nowhere do we actually see Nenashev quoted as saying that Samara is less corrupt than other regions in the country. Rather, it’s reported that he says soin fact, nowhere in the article is Nenashev quoted at all! Furthermore, Fiefer allows Nenashev’s claim to being Samara’s sole human rights activist—a claim that should make any journalist immediately dismiss anything he’d have to say as the rantings of a lunatic suffering from grandiose—to stand.

So I called Nenashev’s office (8642-33-76-93) and spoke to his deputy, Yuri Nikishin. What I found out is that the Social-Political Center is the local representative for Yegor Gaidar’s Russia’s Choice Party, which, as you may know, is one of the parties that makes up the Union of Right-Wing Forces party. The party which Konstantin Titov belongs to, and, along with Boris Nemtsov, Anatoly Chubais and others, leads. It’s kind of an important fact to leave out, but it certainly fits the Fiefer pattern. Furthermore, even Nikishin laughed when I quoted Fiefer’s account of how Nenashev claimed to be the only human rights advocate in Samara. As for being less corrupt than every other region of Russia, Nikishin said, “Come on, every place is corrupt.”

A common idiocy among Western journalists in the former Soviet Union is to associate a local boss’s liberal rhetoric with things-clean and glorious. They always manage to find lots of happy faces and clean, pothole-free streets if the boss espouses “free-market reform” rhetoric, and gray, dour people and potholed streets if the boss’s rhetoric is “stuck in the Soviet times”. A perfect example of this was former Nizhny Oblast governor Boris Nemtsov’s image conjured up by the west. They’d often cite clean streets, happy faces, bustling activity, and foreign investors, leaving out the most damning statistic of all: Nemtsov’s region ranked somewhere in the gray middle of Russia’s 89 regions economically. Oddly, ever since a less West-friendly governor replaced him, Nizhny’s economy has limped upwards in the rankings.

I was just in Titov’s capital last week, and one of the first things I did was to check the potholes-in-the-street factor, because Fiefer is hardly the first in a string of journalists to positively comment on Titov’s streets, a practice made popular by legendary Los Angeles Times hack Carol “Ironhead” Williams.

In the very center of town, on Ulitsa Kuibishyova (Samara was for a time renamed “Kuibishyev” in honor of the Bolshevik hero) just where it dips closest to the Volga River beneath the Drama Theater, the street looks like it had been attacked by a wing of cluster-bomb-packed British Harriers. I actually started to count the number of potholes on that one section of street last Saturday, but I got annoyed and gave up at around forty or so.

Or take Ulitsa Frunze, another central street on which the main tram line runs. It looks like one of those post-8.5 earthquake photos of twisted streets on some Pacific Island nation, except that the dilapidated buildings are still standing. The same goes with Prospekt Gagarina, one of the main highways in town, but since it’s an artery that wouldn’t likely be on most journalists’ and foreigners’ itineraries, it’s got enough potholes to fill an Ironhead Williams opus magni, with a sequel to spare. Bustling? Not sure what’s bustling. There’s a miserable bazaar in Leninsky Street in the center of town. No traffic unless you get towards the projects-pocked outskirts, and even there the traffic is artificially produced by ill-coordinated traffic lights, whose engineers have yet to master the rudiments of smooth traffic flow.

Corruption? As Lyudmila Nikolaeva, editor of Samara Today, Samara’s internet news magazine, said, “It’s just the same as in Soviet days. You need a stamp from the Presidential Administration for everything here. Even the sun doesn’t shine without one of their stamps.” Titov’s quasi-Soviet shadow over local business was most evident by the fact that nearly every small shop in Samara, from apteki to beauty salons to produkty stores, had “Titov For Governor” posters prominently (and fearfully) taped to their windows, the way Jews once splashed lamb’s blood above their doors, to keep Titov’s stamp-men happy. And even though he only received 53% percent of the vote in an election that allowed almost no time (or media) for his opponents to muster a proper campaign, 100% of the stores that I saw proclaimed their support.

According to Fiefer, though, the region’s success is all due to his McFaulian politics:

But Titov’s active encouragement of investment and entrepreneurship may also have helped. Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle have invested in local factories, enticed by generous tax breaks.

Fiefer conveniently ignores the fact that Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle have invested in factories in regions across Russia, whether the local bosses speak the language of liberalism or authoritarianism. Even Fiefer’s nemesis Yuri Luzhkov has attracted those companies, to the hundredth power. And since when is giving tax breaks to multinationals (and not to your own citizens) a liberal idea? By that standard, China and Mexico would be the most liberal nations on earth.

But it is the sum of the article that is most offensive: Fiefer tries to make the point that Titov’s liberalism has made him wildly popular, and that the reason he called snap elections after his miserable showing in the presidential elections was a consequence of his astounding ethics:

Only once does he allow an analyst to voice what every single journalist I spoke to in Samara explain as the obvious truth:

“...[I]t was important for him to have time on his side,” said Yury Korgunyuk of the Indem research group. “Now he has an even better chance against his opponents, who don’t have enough time to prepare.”

“It was a purely political decision to protect himself from the powers above,” agreed Nikishin.

This contrasts with Fiefer’s reading:

So it came as a bit of a surprise when Titov resigned from his post last month.

While Titov is almost certain to win in a landslide when he runs again for his old position in early elections on July 2, his resignation came after a pitiful showing in presidential elections in March, during which he collected only 1.5 percent of the national vote, and 20.5 percent in his own region, coming second to the victor, Vladimir Putin.

First of all, there’s a glaring error here: Titov actually came in third, after Putin and Zyuganov. Secondly, his resignation and call to snap elections was a sign of desperation, for if he had to wait until December, it’s quite likely that an opposition candidate would have been able to mount a more serious campaign. Even so, Titov barely escaped having to go to a second round. So much for the “landslide” and the “overwhelming majority” who attribute their happy lives to the liberal governor. By the way, the local Duma, in its last day of existence, voted to extend the governor’s term to five years, which was a true surprise, although the reasoning is obvious: maybe Titov could outlast Putin’s four year term, and stay in power for life. Or at least another five years beyond.

More insidious than that, however, was Fiefer’s blowjob piece on scary local oligarch Vladimir Avetisyan, chief of Samarenergo.

When I arrived in Samara last Friday, masked Tax Policemen had just raided Avetisyan’s offices, apartment, and dacha. The official reason was that he is suspected of having avoided paying taxes. The real reason, however, is that Avetisyan is widely considered to have ordered the murder a tax inspector Sergei Grigoriev earlier this year who was snooping into his business. His body was riddled with bullets as he was entering his podyezd; investigators found a TT and PM pistol ditched near his body. Avetisyan’s problem: Grigoriev’s father, Evgeny Grigoriev, is a former FSB bigwig who now heads Samara’s branch of the Federal Tax Police. Uh-oh.

Despite the fact that Moskovsky Komsomelets published a huge piece on this just days before Fiefer’s May 23rd article, “Samaraenergo: Playing by Free Market Rules”, Avetisyan comes off as a regular Wharton grad guy.

Sitting in his super high-tech, tightly guarded chrome-and-leather Volgapromgaz office, Avetisyan speaks in a way that is more reminiscent of that liberal “bible,” The Economist, than of a classic company director from the nation’s rusty and often red heartland. Lauding President Vladimir Putin’s decision to appoint reputedly radically liberal Andrei Illarianov as an economics adviser, Avetisyan has little but scorn for the old-guard bureaucrats who want to continue the energy sector’s politically expedient policy of subsidies and absurdly low, profit-crippling power rates.

“The market is the only way out,” Avetisyan said of Samara’s economic problems.

Wait, didn’t Fiefer say that Samara didn’t really have any problems, because it had already embraced the market? Well, whatever. Among Fiefer’s grave omissions: Avetisyan, with Titov’s patronage, founded Volgopromgaz in 1993, and eventually expanded to control some 70 shady companies. One of which is “OOO Agentsvo Vooruzhenoi Okhrany”, a private army of some 1050 soldiers, 382 of which are licensed to use flamethrowers. A federal raid on Avetisyan’s private army last December 28th found that besides a cache of weapons and high-tech intelligence gathering equipment, they found in their offices copies of official criminal investigations into various murders associated with his security firm, copies of transcripts and documents of inter-dealings between the Tax Police and the Samara Prosecutor’s office, videotapes and recordings of conversations.

Not a word of that in Fiefer’s piece. Instead, Avetisyan sits in his super high-tech office reading the Economist.

Even Avetisyan’s decision to give Siberian Aluminium a massive discount earlier this year during Chubais’s failed bid to take it over, and Avetisyan’s subsequent raising of tariffs after Berezovsky won the battle, was described by Fiefer in this way:

[It] not only shows that the company [Samarenergo] is serious about playing by market rules, but attests to the ability of regional industrial groups — such as the one of which Samaraenergo is a part — to form their own power bases; ones that owe little to the Moscow infighting that dominates most observers’ view of the nation.

So, Mrs. Fiefer-to-be, when you hear your husband give his wedding vows, you may want to make a few phone calls too to check his veracity. As his reporting in Samara shows, Fiefer’s word leaves a little to be desired.

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