WOLVES ON THE PROWL

Wolves are coming back into the Moscow region,” a friend remarked last week as we sat in a village just outside the city, watching one of the heavier snowfalls of the winter. “The local administration just west of here is sending out hunters to cull them.”

“Four-legged ones, you mean,” I said. “Yes,” he replied, “the Moscow wolves aren’t in any danger.”

In fact the two-legged city wolves are on the prowl. What diplomats and journalists routinely call economic reform in Russia is now more reminiscent of wolves tearing at the carcass of a giant beast. The new banking magnates–oligarchs as they are often known–are fighting over the remains of the Soviet Union. There are very rich pickings: oil fields, natural gas, precious minerals and strategic metals. The people who end up with the largest hunks of the carcass will be powerful figures indeed, both here and abroad.

While some close observers like George Soros say the predatory period of Russian capitalism is almost over, the campaign to destroy Anatoli Chubais shows it is still going strong. First Deputy Prime Minister and the dominant voice in economic policy, Chubais is under relentless attack by two of the biggest magnates, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. The classic weapons of Russian politics are being used: compromising documents known as kompromat, the media, envoys shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic to persuade the Clinton Administration that Chubais is soiled goods. They have already crippled him; two weeks ago, Boris Yeltsin removed him from the key position of Finance Minister. But Chubais’ enemies will not rest until they have finished him off completely.

Briefing a small group of Western journalists last week, Chubais remarked almost casually that his whole government team, his family and his friends are under constant surveillance. Some are being offered “any money they like” to provide compromising material against him, he said. He refused to say on the record who was doing this, but a government official pointed to the MOST Group, Gusinsky’s media and banking empire, headquartered just across the road from the government building where Chubais has his office. MOST’s security organization, 600 strong and equipped with sophisticated technology, is headed by a former deputy chairman of the KGB.

Chubais’ claim sounded plausible. Natural resources are not the only things that are being privatized. Corporate security organizations bug phones and provide their bosses with dirt on their enemies, just like the old KGB. Newspapers owned or funded by the new magnates then print the material, just as the Communist Party press did in the past to a disgraced leader, a dissident or an irritating foreigner. Until recently Chubais had seemed an exception to the regime of moral relativity that reigns in Moscow. He could come across as arrogant, aloof and driven. But most people believed he was honest. This perception has been vaporized by a campaign launched last month, immediately after Chubais and his fellow Deputy Prime Minister, Boris Nemtsov, engineered Berezovsky’s dismissal from his government position.

The campaign centers on a $450,000 advance that Chubais and four colleagues split between them for a book on privatization. The book payment, Chubais’ enemies allege, is a disguised bribe. Chubais’ defense has been slow and largely unconvincing. His share, $90,000, is chump change in a country in which a few years ago the new Prime Minister found that Russia’s entire foreign-currency reserve was missing, and in which the oligarchs have become overnight billionaires in shadowy privatization deals. But it was enough to shatter Chubais’ image of probity. His enemies are putting out the word that they have much more on him and are moving in for what they hope will be the kill. Right now they are seeking help from across the Atlantic. A couple of weeks ago, Igor Malashenko, the president of NTV, Gusinsky’s television network, went to Washington. U.S. diplomats say he talked to senior figures in the Administration and argued that it was time for Chubais to go. Bright, articulate and abrasive (rather like Chubais, to whom he was once close), Malashenko was probably quite convincing. But Chubais’ enemies are leaving nothing to chance. Last week Berezovsky went on a similar mission to America. Diplomats say he took time out to practice his line on the U.S. ambassador here.

For the moment, Chubais is holding on. Whether or not he is finally forced out of government, the message is already clear: carving up the country is a serious business. In the place of fully functioning political institutions, the competition is not of ideas but of personalities. People can be as dangerous as wolves, and even more cunning.