Notebook

Moscow historical buildings up for grabs

The Moscow City Duma has approved a plan to sell 17 of Moscow’s historic buildings because it cannot afford their upkeep. The buildings are among the approximately 3,000 buildings within Moscow’s city limits that are designated sites of cultural or historical significance. The city currently rents 440 historic buildings to private citizens or organizations. Most of them are used as offices or private residences.

Tourist Invasion 

Some $5.5 million was spent in 1996 to “push” Moscow on the foreign tourist market.  Last year the influx of tourism increased three-fold, inspiring travel agencies in New Jersey and Dusseldorf, Germany to jointly create an exposition of Moscow for tourist exchanges and exhibitions in cities throughout the world.  Only about 12% of Moscow’s budget receipts are used for support of tourism.

Low Tanks

The city of Moscow will, in all likelihood, run low on water this year. The Russian Meteorological Center reports that the surrounding regions of Moscow had such a low level of precipitation this winter that they expect no flooding. The low river level this spring will worsen the water shortage problem that Moscow experienced last year. This prompted experts from Vodokanal (the city’s water authority) to come up with a Draft Resolution providing for an increase in water tarrifs from R571 to R800 per cubic meter. Vodokanal experts say Muscovites are not economical enough with water and use twice as much water per capita as citizens of Western capitals. City leaders plan to install water meters in all new apartment buildings. 

Stalin’s

War

Coming this summer to US Public Television: an unprecedented, 10-hour documentary history of Russia from 1924 to 1953. The program is unique in presenting a history of WWII as viewed from Russia. It draws on once-secret Soviet archives, documents and recent scholarship to provide a video chronicle of the Stalin era, of the tyrant’s war on Russia after Lenin’s death, of his leadership before, during and after WWII, and his death in 1953. The series, titled “Russia’s War,” is to run in five two-hour segments, on Fridays from July 11 to August 8. Check local listings for times and dates.

Russians pessimistic

Just six percent of Russians are content. This according to an opinion poll from the Russian Independent Institute for Social and National Problems. Seventy-two percent said they felt economic reform had lowered their standard of living, and 17 percent said their lives had changed little over the past five years. Forty-six percent said they would be content if their monthly income was R1 mn ($175), while 62 percent thought their lives will not get any better. 

Ups and Downs

The Russian government has announced that the monthly inflation rate for March was 1.4%, down from the previous month’s 1.5%. Despite a 2.3% increase in prices shown for January, the State Statistics Committee attributed this inflation decrease to lower food prices. The Russian government reduced inflation to 22% for all of 1996, the lowest figure since the beginning of free market reforms in 1992. President Boris Yeltsin’s administration has pledged to continue to reduce inflation even further this year, aiming for a 10% annual rate. 

 Show Trial in the Offing? 

Polish police in Warsaw, acting on an international wanted notice issued by Russia, have arrested former Duma Deputy Sergei Stankevich, a fugitive from Russian law for the last two years. Stankevich was a prominent figure in Russia’s democratic movement who later became political adviser to President Yeltsin. Stankevich was hiding in Poland and had changed his haircut and grown a beard. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office has an investigation open on allegations Stankevich took a $10,000 bribe for organizing an international opera and festival on Red Square. 

Stankevich, 43, is an historian by profession. He made a splashing political debut in 1989 when he was elected to the First USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. He was also a member of a group of reformers that flocked to Yeltsin in the early 1990s. He served as deputy mayor of Moscow from 1990-1992. In September 1992, he became a political adviser to President Yeltsin.  

From 1993 to 1995, Stankevich was a Duma deputy and therefore enjoyed immunity from prosecution for criminal activities. In 1995 the Duma turned down a request from Russia’s Prosecutor General Office to lift his immunity in connection with the bribery scandal. After his immunity expired, Stankevich rumored to be at large in the USA — a rumor, some sources say, inspired by Russian law enforcement bodies, who had actually knew Stankevich was in Poland, where he had moved with his wife and his daughter. While a presidential adviser, Stankevich had visited Poland and received the red carpet treatment from then President Walesa’s administration. The latter apparently saw Stankevich to be a potential future Russian ambassador to Poland and took some pains to ferret out Stankevich’s Polish roots, allegedly giving him a book about his ancestors in the Polish nobility.

Legal experts in Russia see Stankevich’s eventual trial as a test the anticorruption drive President Yeltsin announced in a recent radio address. Yet Polish prosecutors said that extraditing Stankevich back to Russia could take months. 

Moscow cops 

to get Chevys

The Moscow Police department plans to add 250 new Chevrolet Cavaliers to its eclectic fleet of foreign and domestic-made cars this year, thanks to a loan of at least $5 mn from the US Export-Import Bank.  The cars will bear the city’s white and blue colors and come with the “police package,” which includes a light bar, a siren and public address system. Although the majority of the police force’s fleet is made up of aging Zhigulis, the Cavaliers will add a further mix to the force’s 300 Fords and approximately 30 Volvo’s, Mercedes and BMWs.  

Russia Facts*

Total IMF loans to Russia since 1992: $14,000,000,000

Foreign investment in Russia in 1996: $4,500,000,000

Amount of hard currency imported into Russia since 1993: $84,000,000,000

Amount of dollars bought by Russians in 1996: $51,000,000,000

Amount of “capital flight” from Russia since 1992: $60,000,000,000

Estimated volume of annual “shuttle trade” in Russia, per year: $15,400,000,000

Russian population at end of 1996: 147,500,000

Russian population at the beginning of 1996: 147,975,000

Number of persons with tuberculosis in Russia: 1 in 1538 

Number of Russians in prison: 1 in 144

Number of Russians estimated as chronic alcoholics by Russian Duma: 1 in 34

Number of Russians applying for US visas who are turned down: 1 in 4

Number of US companies who said in recent poll they were approached by “mafia”: 1 in 18

...Number who paid “mafia” for “protection”: 1 in 350

Amount of gold reserves at Russian Central Bank, in metric tons: 390

Amount the government owes goldminers in back salaries, in dollars: $280,000,000

Metric tons of chemical weapons in Russia: 40,000

Average monthly wage in Russia, in rubles; in dollars: 885,000R, $155

...increase over 1996: 10%

Minimum subsistence wage in Russia, in rubles: 404,000R

...Number of persons living below this subsistence level: 31,500,000

Estimated percent of Russian population that is unemployed: 9.5%

Estimated bribe illegal immigrants in Moscow must pay to elude deportation, in dollars: $8

Monthly pension in Russia, in dollars: $14

Amount Anatoly Chubais, deputy prime minister, earned on the lecture circuit in 1996: $278,000

Number of privately-registered security firms in Russia: 9800

...Number estimated to have criminal connections: 1 in 10

Number of Russian tax collectors killed in the line of duty in 1996: 26

Amount of all crime in Moscow region that is committed by teenagers: 68%

Percent of Russian satellites that have been in orbit too long: 60%

Russian Duma deputies that voted to denounce idea of moving Lenin from mausoleum: 241

...Number that voted against: 11