KNIFING EACH OTHER IN PRIVATE

of last week's feel-good' summit between Russia and America

Moscow

THE MAN they call 'the Saxophone Presi- dent' Russians has come and gone like so many foreigners before him, leaving us with a harmonious recital of platitudes about the need to go forwards not back- wards, greatness entailing goodness, and democracy not being perfect but the best thing we have, plus several similar encores.

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middle-class, middle- ability humanities stu- dents. For Russians struggling to compre- hend the fraught com- plexities of domestic Politics, the significance of the anti-liberal vote in December and the widening gap between word and deed from their leaders on the sub- ject of reform, it was a giant irrelevance.

The culture gap between Russia and the West gapes as wide as ever, however warmly the Coca-Cola and ,n ,n wieDonald's signs may twinkle in the soupy gloom of Moscow's wintry streets.

The White House entourage remained cocooned in the comforting misapprehen- sion that Russian viewers had huddled round their antiquated sets from Vladivos- teck to St Petersburg, listening intently to another nation's leader telling them to respect their own 'because at least he gets uP in the morning and tries to change se. mething'. This sounded a bit silly in Rus- sian, a language which draws a clearer line between the conversational and the formal register than is the fashion in America these days, but not half as daft as 'I expect You're wondering what this guy is doing sr,nding here telling you these things. Right?' Too right they were.

Don't tell this to the President, but very few of the ordinary Russians he so desper- ately wanted to reach watched the speech at all. It was broadcast in the doldrums of daytime television at 3.30 p.m. and barely mentioned on the evening news, which ungallantly ignored most of what Mr Clin- ton had to say and concentrated on fulfill- ing its nightly quota of Yeltsin-boosting.

Anyway, the days are over when Rus- sians were open to being lectured on the joys of democracy by a foreigner. 'He seems a very nice young man — so healthy- looking compared to our lot,' was all one housewife found to say, after unexpectedly encountering the leader of the only remaining superpower as he plunged unan- nounced into the queue in a butcher's shop. 'What's he doing here?' she enquired idly. 'Is something going on in the Krem- lin?' Told that there was a summit under way, she said she didn't think they had those any more.

This singular lack of interest was hardly Mr Clinton's fault. He came to Russia at a time when foreigners' stock is low. We are regarded as a huge disappointment: all talk, no action and culpably dim when it comes to penetrating the complexities of life in the East. My Russian girlfriends tell me that a westerner is no longer regarded as a particularly good catch: the twin curses of dollar and rouble inflation, a state of affairs which should not have happened but did, due to the failure to demonopolise the market in key areas as prices rose, has made Moscow one of the world's most expensive cities for incomers.

'Russian men are more generous with their money, and once they have made it big they tend to have more of it than a pros- perous westerner,' says Masha, a blindingly beautiful ballet dancer plagued by phone-calls from hopeful British and American lawyers. Muscovites have inordi- nate pride in their city, and find it deeply annoying that we expect it or its inhabitants to come cheap. 'I went out with one man from New York and he brought me three chrysanthemums be- cause he said that roses were too expensive in the market. I dropped him and took up with a currency speculator from Novosibirsk and he sent me twelve red roses. Which would you prefer?'

If Mr Clinton sensed the overwhelming indifference to his presence, he did not let it show, and mustered prodigious enthusi- asm for a 'feel-good' summit held at a time when Russia's embattled reformers and exhausted leader have precious little to feel good about. Shortly after his arrival, he quipped to his host, 'It's nice to be in a place where the President is having prob- lems with his parliament instead of me' - a remark so singularly inapt that it made his crack about Chancellor Kohl looking like a Sumo wrestler seem delicate. Later he wished the portly economics chief Yegor Gaidar 'the best of luck', and Mr Gaidar smiled back unhappily, as well he might, having already written his resigna- tion letter. Moscow during the summit resembled one of those dinner parties where the host family has had an almighty row before the guests arrive, and just about manages to stop shouting at each other and stage a show of goodwill until they are on their own again. No sooner had Airforce One departed than Mr Gaidar, the archi- tect of Mr Yeltsin's radical reform pro- gramme, went public with the news that he was quitting the new cabinet before he had formally been asked to join it, saying that the levers of real power had been removed from his hands and that 'dangerous deci- sions' were being made without his knowl- edge.

A fellow key liberal, finance minister Boris Fyodorov, followed suit, accusing the government of thwarting the very fiscal restraint policies it claimed to represent, while Ella Pamfilova, responsible for social security and the sole woman in the cabinet, threw a regular tantrum in her resignation speech, claiming she was 'reduced to scrap- ing for crumbs' for her budget while the government 'ordered parquet floors from Switzerland for the new parliamentary building'. All the disaffected democrats implicitly blamed Viktor Chernomyrdin, the conser- vative Prime Minister, for wresting govern- ment decisions out of their control, but Mr Yeltsin, by keeping silence on the strife and immediately accepting Mr Gaidar's resig- nation, has effectively backed this stolid former industrialist against the liberals as his last best hope for salvaging co-opera- tion with a freshly elected legislature bristling with nationalist and communist foes.

Promises by the Russian leader to con- tinue radical restructuring of an economy still dominated by vast, unprofitable state enterprises are disingenuous, given his fail- ure to defend his original team. The Potemkin summit will very likely be fol- lowed by a period of Potemkin reforms, with a conservative-dominated government pledging further changes for appearance's sake while quietly printing money and stalling meaningful decisions back home.

As in the latter doomed days of Presi- dent Gorbachev, the rhetoric about reform is growing in inverse proportion to the amount of it about. Mr Clinton's relentless championing of his host conjured up mem- ories of poor old George Bush rallying around Gorby long after he had lost broad support at home. Like his predecessor, Mr Yeltsin, rattled by public disillusionment and a surge in confidence on the part of conservatives, now appears to believe that his salvation lies in cohabiting with his opponents rather than fighting them. Popu- lar enthusiasm, as the embittered Mr Gor- bachev learned, can turn more abruptly in Russia than elsewhere into public censure, and a climate of ill-focused dissatisfaction benefits an energetic challenger. For this reason Mr Zhirinovsky's advent has caused an outbreak of panic and self-doubt in the Kremlin so overwhelming that the Russian leader is prepared to sacrifice a figure of both strategic and symbolic importance in order to be seen to be responding to it.

Many ordinary Russians, even those sceptical of Mr Gaidar's academic approach to economic management, see his departure as a sign of a disquieting shift in an increasingly opaque political world, the more worrying for not being admitted openly by Mr Yeltsin. 'I can't say I liked this shock therapy or that I even knew what Gaidar was on about most of the time,' grumbled one workman, shovelling piles of dirty snow outside the new Duma. 'But he was Boris Nikoleyevich's representative on earth. Without him, I have no idea what the President stands for besides keeping himself in power.' His colleague thought the government was just like the politburo under Brezhnev: 'All the best of friends in front of visitors and then back to knifing each other in private.'

The local Beelzebub responsible for unleashing this particular round of strife was not invited to the summit reception, but his uneasy presence hovered over the whole affair. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, having brusquely enjoined Mr Clinton and his sax- ophone to stay at home, strutted his aggression on the floor of the freshly con- vened parliament while Bill and Boris wal- lowed in amity in the Kremlin. By the end of the week, Bad Vlad had threatened pri- vatisation minister Anatoly Chubais with prison, screamed that all candidates for the post of speaker should be sent for examina- tion in psychiatric units (with the excep- tion, of course, of his evidently sane self) and had a brawl with a democratic deputy over who should go first in the canteen queue.

The Sid Vicious of Russian politics, Mr Zhirinovsky has the punk-rocker's knack of capturing attention by behaving badly. There are moments when you feel it cannot be long before he takes to spitting at the audience. But his primitive tricks pay off. The morning after the signing of the nucle- ar arms accord under which Kiev would renounce its weapons and Washington and Moscow would stop targeting theirs at each other, not a Russian I met had the slightest interest in the good news. The chatter on the trolley-bus was all about Zhirinovsky's latest excesses.

The reasons for his popularity, besides his shock appeal and mastery of the caustic sound-bite, are sundry, but one of the most trenchant is his embodiment of wounded Russian pride and the dream of restoring self-reliance to a country traditionally wary of being told by outsiders how to run things.

Faced with this potent challenge, Mr Yeltsin's instinct is to counter his adver- sary's lies with some of his own half-truths. Barely a statement for domestic consump- tion emanates from the Kremlin nowadays that does not talk of defending Russia's strategic interests, dignity and greatness. Amidst the sweet nothings exchanged with Mr Clinton, the Russian leader slipped in a warning that the West should not resist Moscow taking on a more substantial 'peace-keeping' role in the former Soviet republics and pursuing a 'restoration of lost traditions'. Belarus, whose independence from Russia was always a half-hearted affair, has been quietly reintroduced to the rouble-zone.

All of this is harmless by comparison with Mr Zhirinovsky's declared aims of Russian dominance, but his very existence as a political force has introduced ideas which sounded like the growls of out- landish hardliners a few months ago into the discourse of mainstream Russian poli- tics. With Mr Clinton safely gone, we are likely to hear a lot more of Mr Zhirinovsky — and some of it will come from the lips of Boris Yeltsin.

Anne McElvoy is the Times bureau chief in Moscow.