Reports of the latest negotiations between a Russian government delegation and IMF representatives sometimes resembled a theater of military operations and sometimes the chronicle of a harvest campaign – brief, convincing, and all important.
Now a few words from the gifted general or combine shock-worker — Anatoly Borisovich, please. And now, the junior commander or Communist Youth League Brigade Leader – Sergei Vladlenovich, please.
And now to the God of Thunder or our collective farm chairman.
"Is there a crisis, Boris Nikolaevich?"
"No crisis."
"But we were worried here..."
At last the sweet foretaste of victory, the first glimmers of figures in the billions, like a taxi meter in inflationary times. Will it help? Well, sure.
Ask any Russian citizen what his country will avoid when it gets the Western money, and he simply will not know what to answer. The government's program to combat the crisis is actually not so much a manifesto of struggle as a collection of documents connected with common sense. Even before there was any crisis it was necessary to change the social payments nobody paid but still irritated people in real need, and to change the whole taxation system, and so on and so forth. And is this really the money the country needs to overcome its crisis? Why then not "dekulakize" those glorious Russian monopolies or even just threaten them with Premier Kirienko's little finger.
There is a crisis. We have yet to see it, but we soon will. The loan can help avert unforeseen social consequences — we hope — but it cannot change the very essence of the Russian economy, the rule of anointed oligarchs and powerful monopolies. It will not alter the relationship between the President and elite spawned by this economy. It is already apparent how Yeltsin bothers this elite, how it would like to take the crown from him, and how he over and over covers it in a white light. The crisis will not change the essence of Yeltsin himself: he will not give up power today or tomorrow. He might only name an heir apparent whom the elite would view only as the long shadow of the old tsar. That Yeltsin is not Gorbachev is already news to nobody, nor is the fact that up to now the Russian elite is somehow more worried about politics than economics because it was sired precisely by political rather than economic changes. This is already a tradition.
The worse thing about the crisis is the desire to use it.
