Subject: [CivilSoc] In Forgotten Chukotka, the Charity of a Russian "Oligarch"
From: Center for Civil Society International (ccsi@u.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 07 2001 - 19:55:40 EST
From Johnson's Russia List #5011, 7 January 2001
<davidjohnson@erols.com>
#7
Financial Times (UK), January 6, 2001
A Miracle Worker, By JOHN LLOYD
Chukotka is afflicted with poverty, cold and a rapidly declining
population. Its newly elected governor has already spent part of his
personal fortune to help those who remain. John Lloyd visits bleak
far-east Russia.
In a school hall in the town of Pevek, as far north as you can fly,
an audience, mainly of women in their middle years, are only half
unbundled from the rigours of -30 C outside.
Before them, a young man with a stubbly beard, tallish but stooped,
in a sweater, jeans and fashionable square-toed shoes, is seeking
their votes in his bid to become governor of this region, Chukotka.
Yet he barely speaks, and hardly smiles. In a voice which rises only
a little above a mutter, he says: "Well, I won't say anything, and
would like to hear your questions."
He is speaking to Russians: so how the questions come! They are not
so much questions, though - for these are Russians having a very bad
time. They are a cascade of complaints, a litany of miseries. They
fall about the man who faces them - complaints about the lack of hot
water and heating, about the impossibility of getting medical care,
about the endless delays in applications to leave the region for
somewhere less inhuman and about prices, prices, prices.
Yet he says things such as "I don't know" or "I haven't looked into
that" or "maybe we can do something, maybe not".
Or, increasingly as the evening goes on, he says nothing and lets the
complaints multiply, sometimes causing quarrels among the audience as
they query the depth of each other's misery. As a campaigning style,
it is astounding in its charmless, charisma-free insouciance.
Yet they love him. Several women got up, their voices choking with
emotion, saying: "Roman Arkadievich, I want to thank you from my
heart, my soul, for what you have done for us."
One the headmistress of the school in which the meeting takes place,
stands up, blushing and breathless, and says: "Roman Arkadievich,
here we are demanding all of this of you, and you ask nothing of us.
Is there something we can do for you?"
He smiles faintly and says: "Nothing I can think of, but if there is,
I'll let you know." The polls, in that week before his election, said
he would get more than 80 per cent of Chukotka's votes.
Roman Arkadievich Abramovich wants to be governor. His posters,
showing his face smiling its sad smile, eyes downcast, with the
slogan, "New Time; New Governor; New Life", are everywhere.
They are in Pevek's half-ruined airport, to which no scheduled
flights come any more. They are on the walks of the town square,
where a concrete Lenin still scowls into the night. They are hung
about one of the few restaurants, whose owner attracts Abramovich's
admiration because he has created a grubby but warm oasis of
privately owned public service, with good borscht. But this
restaurateur is a rare figure. Most of Pevek's 7,000 people - once
numbering nearly 40,000, this is becoming a ghost town - have little
energy left to go beyond surviving in their dying, freezing
settlement.
That Abramovich should have been their candidate (and, from Christmas
eve, when he duly won the election with 90 per cent of the vote,
their governor) is one of these pieces of exotica of which
post-Soviet Russia is so full that it loses its power to surprise -
until you consider his career, and what brought him here.
Roman Abramovich: Jewish, an orphan before the age of four, brought
up by grandparents in the northern region of Komi. Higher education:
in an institute of forestry. Started a co-operative making plastic
toys as soon as the Gorbachev-era reforms let him. Moved into oil
trading; in the early 1990s, worked with the Omsk refinery and the
Noyabrsk Oil and Gas company to form what became, in 1995, Sibneft.
By 1997, under the "shares for loans" scheme which took the most
precious of the state-owned assets into private hands, he had,
through various companies, acquired the largest block of shares in
the company (it is now 40 per cent). Together with Evgeny Shvidler,
president/CEO of the company, he had restructured it into an
integrated producer pumping (at present) 330,000 barrels a day, with
a $1bn investment programme under way to raise output to 420,000 b/d
by 2004.
In the past year, Abramovich put together a giant holding company
named Russian Aluminium, which has 75 per cent of the country's
aluminium capacity and is second in the world in output (2.4m tonnes)
after Alcoa (3.8m) of the US.
He is not just a very wealthy industrialist and oilman--he also
became, in the second term of the Yeltsin presidency, the most
influential of the oligarchs, after his friend Boris Berezovsky.
(Berezovsky is now in voluntary exile in the US, a bitter opponent of
President Vladimir Putin for what he calls his dictatorial rule.)
"We were close friends. But Berezovsky didn't help me," he said, with
a little smile. "He helped himself." In any case, Abramovich had a
closer ally in Tatyana Dyachenko, daughter of Yeltsin and, especially
during Yeltsin's periods of sickness and recuperation, his closest
aide and conduit.
"She was influential. Not as much as has been said in the media, but
she could bring her father information which no one else could,"
Abramovich said.
He says of the first decade of Russian freedom and capitalism that it
was also a time in which the share-out of state property meant that
anyone who wanted to be something in business at least had to have
lines into the government.
But that's over now, he says. "It's over because the need for such a
system has gone. Everyone now does his own business and doesn't poke
his nose into others' business.
"And in any case, Putin now seems to be more decisive, sharper,
reacts very quickly to events, so there's no sense in advising him.
He does everything in his own way, as his own man."
He praises Putin and his prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov; but the
governing circle is very different: "I'm not in his circle. His
circle, as I understand it, is made up of those who are his work
colleagues, organised by responsibility and rank. Maybe he has some
friends who are not obvious, but I don't see that if they exist they
influence the decisions he takes. The people he has are all formal;
they are there because they fulfil a specific function."
The past, however, is not so easily shaken off. Which Abramovich was
in the last stages of his campaign in Chukotka, a hair-raising
lawsuit was issued in New York by three trading companies against
Russian Aluminium alleging money laundering, bribery, fraud and even
murder. Abramovich is not named in the suit but some of his
associates are.
It is precisely the kind of thing he most wants to avoid in his drive
to spearhead a cleaner, more transparent Russian capitalism, starting
with Chukotka.
His relationship with the place seems to have been something like
love--except, as he tells it, not love, but pity, at first sight. He
was elected parliamentary deputy for the region more than a year ago,
and when he first visited, he was shocked by its poverty and
desperation.
In spite of the cold, it once attracted workers because of its much
higher wages and guaranteed long breaks in the sunnier parts of the
Soviet Union. Now, it is shorn of all privileges, desperately poor,
with services crumbling and some settlements, according to
Abramovich, "on the verge of starvation."
"The poverty of the people was a big shock. The biggest challenge is
to get out the people who want to go, and attract new people in. If
you can get the working of the gold and other reserves increased, and
establish some industry, and work on infrastructure, then you can do
something."
On the morning after Abramovich's meeting at the school, I went back
to the same building--the day as dark at 10 in the morning as it had
been at 10 at night--to hear Alexander Nazarov, then still Chukotka's
governor, talk to a much smaller audience.
He was below average height, almost - it seemed - square, in suit and
tie, fluent and knowledgeable about the region in which he had spent
his life, rising up through the Communist party and the regional
parliament to take the governorship in Yeltsin's first year of
office.
For a man who is under investigation from the federal tax authorities
and who is scoring about 5 per cent in the opinion polls (which
Abramovich has had carried out), he is in good enough form.
But he faces an audience - again, largely of women - which is
bitterly hostile. "We don't believe you!" shouted a woman with the
overalls of a school-cleaner, after Nazarov had said he would do all
he could to increase spending on education. "Who'd believe you now,
after all this time when you' ve done nothing for us."
After a while, he stopped, his own will apparently sapped, and went
out with as much dignity as he could.
I talked to one woman in the audience, Ilira Victorovna, who said she
had come to Pevek 25 years ago and "thought it was paradise".
"We had been living in a communal apartment, the family all in one
room, and here we had four rooms and a kitchen and bathroom for
ourselves.
"Now my husband has no work and I get paid only sometimes. My mother
emigrated to Germany and she helps us. Imagine! A pensioner giving us
$1,000 every so often to keep us going. It should be the other way
round. But we don't want to leave. It's so beautiful here and
everyone is so friendly. Maybe Roman Arkadievich will help us.."
The reason these people put their trust in Abramovich is largely that
he has already helped them. He has spent tens of millions of dollars
of his own money. He has pumped money into the ailing medical
services, which do not cover the region any longer and where even the
hospitals in Anadyr, the capital, lack basic equipment.
He has taken critically ill people to have treatment in Moscow. He
has bought textbooks, and even computers, for the schools. Best of
all in the minds of the people of the region, he paid fo0r 3,700 of
their children to have extended holidays in the sun last year -
children who had rarely seen the sun, never seen the sea, who ate
everything in sight and then stuffed bread in their pockets to bring
back for their parents.
Ida Ruchina, who helps run Abramovich's foundation, Pole of Hope,
says: "They all wrote letters after they been on the break, and said
things like 'we thank you for the holiday, but I know it was a
miracle and will never happen again'."
Were he to die tomorrow, Abramovich would be a hero in Chukotka--an
exotic visitor, a kind of human cargo cult, dropped from the skies
with money and food and holidays.
The people in Chukotka have usually reacted to their deepening
poverty and isolation by becoming passive, losing touch with reality.
The people still expect miracles.
Yet in many ways, he is a miracle. For most of them, born and
reaching adulthood in Soviet times, the notion that a young
millionaire could come in an aircraft from Moscow to succour their
children, provide medicines and feed the remote settlements is beyond
the bounds of reasonable expectation.
Is he for real?
"It's the question that we all ask," says Vladimir Glebets, the only
journalist left in Pevek, who still attends the meetings, though he
rarely writes or broadcasts anything. "Is he here for the gold? For
the oil? To use it as an alibi to cover past sins? To hide here? Or
to do good for us?"
It would be cruel indeed to pull out now: Abramovich says he cannot
abandon the people he has come to live among and represent. It may be
that he really does wish to become the first New Russian
philanthropist. If so, he has come to the right place.
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