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Putin doing his Russian roulette routine

A.H. Jaffor Ullah writes from New Orleans
VLADIMIR Vladimirovich Putin became a household name in his native land, Russia, in 1999 when President Boris Yeltsin appointed him as the prime minister of the country. Mr. Putin was only 47 years old when Yeltsin's advisor Anatoly Chubais had recommended Yeltsin to make him a Kremlin insider. In Russia, one has to be at least a sexagenarian to be considered for the high position of president of the country. However, Mr. Putin is an exception to that unwritten law. In the March 2000 elections Mr. Putin, the candidate for president and supported by Yeltsin, had received about 53 per cent vote. Mr. Putin became the next president and the rest is history.
Three years have gone by since Mr. Putin had assumed the control at the Kremlin and his sphere of influence had grown in the meantime. However, a mini-crisis is going on in Moscow centering on the arrest of a rich billionaire by the name Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Mr. Khodorkovsky is a no ordinary guy in Russia. He was the CEo of the giant oil company Yukus at the time of his arrest in late october 2003. The financial fallout resulting from the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky rocked the Russian stock market. Many Russia watchers in the West were concerned hearing the ordeal the Russian tycoon had gone through. The country had endured a currency market collapse not too long ago when Boris Yeltsin was at the helm as Russia was welcoming a market-oriented economy saying sayonara to centralised economy of the Brezhnev era.
Mr. Putin made a calculated decision to get even with some of the Russian oligarchs who were rich and powerful. These oligarchs are young who amassed wealth during Mr. Yeltsin's tenure as the President of Russia. As one may recall, Mr. Anatoly Chubais, a Leningrader, was the chief architect of the free-market economy. He had advised Yeltsin to sell many state-controlled factories and industries to usher in free-market economy in Russia. Mr. Khodorkovsky was in his late twenties when he started buying government properties at a bargain basement price. He was lucky enough to have bought an oil company. His estimated wealth is now
considered to be about $ 8 billion. However, that did not make him a Kremlin enemy. It was widely reported in the West in recent days that Mr. Putin had made a secret pact with the emerging oligarchs of Russia not too long ago by virtue of which they were told to stay far away from politics. Mr. Putin knew that the nouveau rich oligarchs had the financial muscle to create problem for him. That is precisely the reason Mr. Putin told the oligarchs to mind their business and not become involved in politics. Mr. Khodorkovsky disobeyed
this dictum of Mr. Putin as he gave money to an opposition politician. Consequently, Putin's ire was on him and in no time, he was arrested and thrown in a Moscow jail, which was teeming with ordinary criminals.
This action of Mr. Putin did not go unnoticed in the West. Most news organisations carried the news of Mr. Khodorkovsky's arrest. Mr. Putin's hard-nosed policy was criticised very severely. Some Russian observers are of the opinion that many ex-KGB men are manning the Kremlin these days and they are the one who are backing Mr. Putin to play hardball against the oligarchs who are defying the president. The oil company Yukus's financial statement is a public document and Mr. Khodorkovsky ran the company a la West very transparently. Nonetheless, Russian government had alleged that Mr. Khodorkovsky tried to evade paying taxes. He did not receive a bail; therefore, he relinquished his position as the CEo of Yukus. What Mr. Putin is doing to Mr. Khodorkovsky is nothing new. Russian government is notorious for playing hardball with the dissident. However, Mr. Putin is not realising the fact that his scorched earth policy with the Russian oligarchs may backfire and cause impediment to country's journey to free-market economy. Before analysing the unfolding drama of Yukus CEo's arrest in Moscow, which is receiving a lot of airtime in the media, one must look at the curriculum vitae of Mr. Putin to understand why the Russian President is acting this way to subdue one of his newly found foes.
Mr. Putin did spend 15 years as a foreign intelligence officer for the Committee for State Security (KGB), including six years in Dresden, East Germany (now Germany). He retired from active KGB service in 1990 with the rank of lieutenant colonel and
returned to Russia to become prorector of Leningrad State university with responsibility for the institution's external relations. Immediately, Putin became an adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, the first democratically elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Sobchak was an outstanding figure of the Soviet perestroika in the late 1980s and played an important role in the collapse of the communist power in the country during Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure as the president of the former uSSR.
Mr. Putin quickly won Sobchak's confidence and became known for his ability to get things done; by 1994, he had risen to the post of first deputy mayor of Leningrad. Mr. Putin moved to Moscow in 1996, where he joined the presidential staff as deputy to Pavel Borodin, the Kremlin's chief administrator. There he came in contact with the fellow Leningrader Anatoly Chubais the most powerful figure in the Boris Yeltsin Administration. In Kremlin, Putin moved up in administrative positions. Within two years, President Boris Yeltsin made him the director of the Federal Security Service (the KGB's domestic successor), and shortly thereafter, he became secretary of the influential Security Council.
In 1999, Yeltsin's health was deteri- orating and he was desperately searching for an heir to assume his mantle; he appointed Putin prime minister in 1999, which paved the way for his ascendancy to the coveted position of the president of Russia. Mr. Putin is a product of Brezhnev's era. He has seen how the Soviet government treated the political dissidents. Even though today's Russia is very different from Brezhnev's time, but Mr. Putin is certainly acting like his predecessors. This harsh action of Mr. Putin won't bode well for his country, which still needs western nations' financial input to make all the reforms Russia need to become a member of the free market communities. His hard-nosed policy to jail an enterprising CEo is not sitting well in the West. Foreign investment in Russia could very easily dry up resulting in a financial mess. We have seen only few years ago the meltdown of the stock market in Russia resulting from a currency crisis. Let us hope the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky, which points out to the blatant disregard for property rights by the Russian government, won't trigger another stock market meltdown in the country.
This kind of unilateral action to arrest a private citizen was not expected from a reform-minded Putin Administration. Russia has laws and courts whose help the Putin Administration should have sought to bring Mr. Khodorkovsky to justice. Instead, Mr. Putin had played a nasty game of coercion. They say old habits don't die so easily.
on November 4, 2003, Mr. George Melloan, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal wrote, "There is no reason to doubt that Mr. Putin is sincere in wanting to create a modern economy. Why would he not be? But with the Khodorkovsky prosecution, he has made a major error. He has confused a challenge to his own personal political power with a challenge to the state itself. By doing so, he has revealed to the world that Russia has made very little progress toward establishing a rule of law and that property rights don't really exist when high politics are in play."
Mr. Putin's heavy-handed treatment to bring his foes in line is all but a reminiscent of Communist era when dissensions were not tolerated. It is like deja vu all over again.