Farewell to Primakov

The decision by Yevgeny Primakov to join forces with Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and his Fatherland-All Russia movement, a broad coalition of regional barons and apparatchiks-turned-tycoons, may mean different things to different people.

For Mr. Primakov, a former spy, scholar, bureaucrat, and prime minister, his alliance with Luzhkov may prove to be little more than a footnote in his curriculum vitae. For too many Russians who saw in him their only hope for a better future, it came as a rude awakening-for some of them, even as a personal tragedy.

Last September, after seven unbridled years of helter-skelter, often mismanaged but nonetheless desperately-needed reform, it was both sobering and depressing to see at the apex of Russian power Mr. Primakov, the ex-Soviet Union"s last intelligence chief, Mr. Gerashchenko, its last and hopelessly ineffectual central-bank boss and Mr. Maslyukov, its last, plodding head of Gosplan, the state planning agency that had become a byword for self-deluding statistics and all that made Communist economics ridiculous.

And it was a measure of failure of Russia"s rulers to see many people, both at home and abroad, feel nostalgic about Mr. Primakov"s abrupt departure in May.

True enough, avoiding a rapid descent into chaos was hardly reason for celebration. Perhaps, Mr. Primakov"s job, keeping Russia"s misery quietly contained, was task enough for him. It was certainly not good enough for Russia.

But Mr. Primakov, to be kind to him-neither drunk, nor diseased from one end of the year to the other, nor a political amateur and possessed with a modicum of administrative ability-was, for the moment, a presentable face for his country.

His popularity grew as he stayed aloof of all groupings and clans within the Yeltsin regime, which had become tied in the public mind with privatization, a massive and highly flawed sale of state assets, and the theft of public goods by government cronies.

He growled against post-communist corruption without being a Stalinist. He implied that changes had to be made in Russia, but did not issue a call to arms-at the time when an extra-parliamentary revolt, egged on by the country"s many angry nostalgists from the Soviet era and perhaps endorsed by surly generals, could not be ruled out.

Russia"s left saw Primakov as one of their own; the right could not find much fault with him. Until Primakov"s arrival to the center stage Russians had no idea of what a centrist political bloc might look like. Primakov put a face on it.

Mr. Primakov's fortunate attribute, that of resembling former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev both outwardly and in the essence of his policy-keeping Russia"s misery quietly contained-brings him a certain popularity within the tired and disoriented society.

Primakov's rating corresponds remarkably to the results of the poll that asked who was the most outstanding Russian politician of the 20th century. The winner of that poll, by an overwhelming majority, was not Stalin, Lenin, Stolypin or Gorbachev, but Leonid Brezhnev. In him, and his Primakov incarnation, the post-Soviet myth of a golden century is actualized.

The myth of Yevgeny Primakov was that of a Soviet grandee of the old school, an academic and a diplomat, who bravely challenged the well-connected and the sticky-fingered, personified by the ruling "family"-and suffered mightily for the Truth.

Yet who would argue that Luzhkov is anything but the flesh and blood of the existing system? And not only because he shouted at the top of his lungs "Yeltsin! Russia!" during electoral rallies in 1996. But above all, because the power structure he built in Moscow is based on the same incestuous collusion of power and money as the federal system, created by the joint efforts of the Communist nomenklatura and the young reformers.

The Primakov-Luzhkov duo will inevitably become an organic continuation of the epoch of nomenklatura Thermidor (the conversion of power into property) that has been continuing under various ideological labels for more than 10 years.

Luzhkov's movement, which has been gaining strength in recent months, includes politicians with drastically different outlooks-for example, on the issue of land reform, which has been stalled for years. But a central thread is that many represent what is called here "state capitalism." They are former Soviet officials who have come to accept that Russia should be a market economy, but who also want the state to control and regulate the market, and to choose winners and losers.

Their regime would also, in economic terms, be protectionist, corporatist and loth to privatise any more of Russia"s ailing industry. It would probably come to an arrangement with the mighty oligarchs, but their crony-capitalism would be tightly dependent on the whims of the political powers that be.

Russia"s tycoons would not want their banks reformed. All too many civil servants will go on living off what they can siphon from the state. And an onslaught on the corruption and bad government that lie at the heart of Russia"s ills will remain a gigantic, and some fear hopeless, task.

The armed forces and the successors to the KGB would be raised again to a position of special eminence within the state. The press and television would be corralled. Russia would become an angry place - neither democratic, nor prosperous, nor kind to its neighbours. Bednaya Rossiya - "poor Russia" - as they often say.

But there is, of course, a bright side to it. For now we know for sure that there is no real political opposition-or real democracy-in Russia. What we do have is the worst possible kind of pluralism-a clan warfare within a closed inner circle, a network of businessmen and cronies, who control much of the economy, suborn enough politicians, have enough strongmen at their disposal and corral most of the media outlets.

Those who believed in the Primakov alternative will never-or at least for a very long time-trust anyone or anything. But it yet may be all for the better. What happened to Primakov is a tragedy for many people, but not a catastrophe for Russia.

True, our last illusions about the Russian system of governing have been shattered. But this may yet be a guarantee that Russia will be rescued out of her current misery. For if a political system is corrupt to the core it means it is doomed and will-sooner or later-be replaced by a new one.

We do not know who will come to replace the current leaders. We have no idea to what extent-it is not a question of if, but of how much-the vote will be rigged.

But it seems the Russian electorate has learned the drill, and that it will be much more difficult to manipulate voters now than it was in 1996. Nor should we be forgetting that only too many promises have been made by politicians and then broken. Disillusionment will certainly translate into a very low voter turnout. And this may become the beginning of reform.

Primakov gave many Russians hope that change may come from within the system. His position is similar to that of the later-day Gorbachev, another transitional figure, entirely unable to staunch Russia"s slide into chaos, who also tried-quite as desperately, and ultimately unsuccessfully-to find a consensus of sorts. Like Gorbachev, also a good tactician but a poor strategist, he seems bent on managing Russia"s decline rather than trying to find ways to reverse the trend.

It was also Primakov who, through his own opportunism, showed that these hopes were ill-placed. That could be the role history has been sizing him up for-before consigning Mr. Primakov to its dustbin.