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The BIRCH BARK BBS / 414-242-5070
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THE NEW AMERICAN -- September 18, 1995
Copyright 1995 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated P.O.
Box 8040, Appleton, WI  54913

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ARTICLE: The "Former" Soviet Bloc
AUTHOR: Robert W. Lee

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Communism, we were told, collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and
the old Soviet Union beginning in 1989. "Democracy," we were told,
was in the wind and "reform" was everywhere. Consider the former
Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, where there have been two
presidential elections, a parliamentary election, a national
referendum, and where a former American Secretary of State now
advises President Saparmurad Niyazov, who led his country to
independence in 1991. Encouraging indeed -- until we learn the rest
of the story.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal for April 11, 1995, staff
reporter Claudia Rosett noted that President Niyazov has done away
with the cult of Lenin. That is the good news. The bad is that he
has replaced it with the cult of himself. Throughout the country
statues of Niyazov "bedeck the streets, districts and collective
farms now named after him. Mr. Niyazov's profile, in bronze, adorns
the central bank. His face appears on Turkmen bank notes, on
billboards and in the design of hand-knotted rugs." Further,
Niyazov "has built an $82 million marble-floored airport, named for
himself," which has "no toilet paper in the ... restrooms, no food
in the restaurant and not much traffic on the airfield."

President Niyazov orchestrated the creation of the Red-dominated
Democrat Party of Turkmenistan, the country's only legally
registered party. To enhance his credentials as a "reformer," he
has reportedly urged Communist Party veterans to re-create the
Turkmenistan Communist Party and a kindred Peasants' Party. That
way, he can boast of having a "multi-party" system and impress the
West.

Regarding those presidential and parliamentary elections, Rosett
recalls that in "October, 1990, he [Niyazov] ran unopposed to
become Turkmenistan's first president, winning 98.3% of the vote.
In 1992, running again as the sole candidate, he won with a
landslide 99.5%. In 1994, apparently tired of campaigning, Mr.
Niyazov held a referendum that extended his term until 2002. He got
99.9% of the vote. In elections last December for a new 50-seat
Parliament, 50 candidates approved by Mr. Niyazov all ran
unopposed, and all won." Isn't democracy wonderful?

Rosett further reveals that Niyazov has retained the consulting
services of former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr. (a
longtime member of the ubiquitous Council on Foreign Relations),
who for the past two years has come to Ashgabat (the capital) for
Niyazov's birthday (which is also national flag day). Haig has been
helping Niyazov plan a pipeline that, Rosett states, "would run
across Iran to Turkey and eventually on to Western Europe." The
U.S. government has objected to the scheme, because it "might leave
Europe depending on a pipeline that could be controlled by
Iran...."

Rosett writes that Niyazov "decides how land will be used and who
may study abroad. He personally controls the dollar reserves of
Turkmenistan's central bank. Recently, strapped to pay bills for
some of his large, unprofitable construction projects, he
confiscated 75% of the 1994 profits of Turkmenistan's commercial
banks."

It is all for the long-range good, however. "In his speeches,"
according to Rosett, "Mr. Niyazov has explained that his iron grip
is part of his 'gradual' plan 'to build a democratic state.'"

So it goes in the former republics of what Ronald Reagan termed the
"Evil Empire." Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this
"collapse" of Communism is the extent to which so many Americans
have been persuaded to believe that leopards who long served the
old Soviet and Iron Curtain regimes, and who continue to exercise
decisive power within their respective nations today, not only
changed their spots, but transformed into benign pussy cats. Let us
look at additional examples that confirm the old adage that the
more things change, the more they remain the same.

Albania

In June of last year, Gannett News Service reported, "Five years
after the Iron Curtain fell, ex-Communists are making a comeback in
Central and Eastern European states and former Soviet republics."
Of the 22 states involved, Albania was described as one of only
five to "have kept former ruling Communists from returning to power
or from exercising major political influence." To the contrary,
President Sali Berisha, now often described as a fervent anti-
Communist, belonged to the Communist Party prior to 1989. His
government is praised as "democratically elected," yet over 10
percent of the citizenry has fled the country since Communism
supposedly ended. The government continues to generate two-thirds
of the country's gross domestic product, and most prices remain
controlled by the state-owned sector of the economy.

Azerbaijan

The Communists appeared to have suffered an authentic setback here
in 1992 when President Ayaz Mutalibov, a Red since 1963 who had
been elected in 1991 (he was the sole candidate), was forced out of
office by an angry citizenry. Abulfez Elchiby was elected to
replace him. A staunch nationalist, Elchiby had a long record of
opposition to the Communist Party and had been the nation's leading
dissident since the 1970s when he was imprisoned for two years at
hard labor in a rock quarry for his anti-Communist activities. But
in June 1993, Elchiby's government was toppled, and Azerbaijani
lawmakers promptly elected their old Communist leader Geidar Aliyev
as parliamentary chairman and designated him Acting President. In
a presidential election held on October 3, 1993, Aliyev received
more than 98 percent of the vote. He is a former KGB General, was
First Secretary of the Azeri Communist Party, and was a member of
the Soviet Politburo during the Brezhnev era.

Belarus

The current Supreme Soviet (parliament), elected in 1989, is
dominated by "former" Communists who continue to control the
policy-making process. In June of last year, Aleksandr Lukashenko
became the republic's first elected president. While in high
school, he served as secretary of a Young Communist League chapter,
and in 1982 became deputy director of a collective farm. Three
years later, he became secretary of that farm's Communist Party
committee.

Bulgaria

The Union of Democratic Forces, which helped oust the old Communist
government and won the 1991 parliamentary elections, held power for
only 11 months, after which the country was run by (in the words of
a December 18, 1994, New York Times dispatch) "former communists
who provided the guiding hand in the government of the 'non-party'
technocrats who ruled from December 1992 until September of this
year." In last December's general election, the Socialist (former
Communist) Party was returned to power, capturing an absolute
majority in the 240-seat parliament. Socialist Party leader Zhan
Videnov, whom Associated Press described the next day as "the new
face of the Communists who used to rule this Balkan country,"
became Premier. He had assumed leadership of the "former"
Communists in December 1991, and prior to that worked for the Young
Communist League.

Czech Republic

In January 1968, a so-called "liberal" faction within
Czechoslovakia's Communist Party, led by Alexander Dubcek,
temporarily took control of the country. In his 1984 book New Lies
for Old, former KGB agent Anatoliy Golitsyn claimed that it was a
carefully-plotted trial run aimed at determining if the West would
actually fall for the fantasy that a totalitarian Communist country
could spontaneously switch to "democracy" under the leadership of
supposed "reformed" Communists and their collaborators. According
to Golitsyn, the ploy had been planned in the late 1950s, prior to
his defection to the West, and was brought to an end without
exposing the supposed "democratization" when, after seven months,
Warsaw Pact troops invaded, ousted Dubcek, and installed a
Stalinist regime. Indications that something was fishy included the
nonviolent nature of the invasion (Dubcek and his colleagues did
not resist) and the fact that neither Dubcek nor his key advisers
were executed nor given lengthy jail terms. To the contrary, Dubcek
was given a plush job as a forestry manager in Bratislava.

Golitsyn predicted in 1984 that the time would come when, as part
of a new phase of Communist strategy, "liberalization in Eastern
Europe would probably involve the return to power in Czechoslovakia
of Dubcek and his associates." On December 10, 1989, hard-line
Communist President Gustav Husek resigned, and that same day Dubcek
and playwright Vaclav Havel (leader of the left wing of the Civic
Forum political movement) announced that they would both run to
replace Husek. Havel had earlier said of Dubcek: "I will not permit
any dark forces to drive a wedge between him and me.... He must be
at my side, in whatever function." Referring to Havel, Dubcek
asserted: "We've been together from the very start."

Within less than a week, Dubcek dropped out of the race and threw
his support to Havel. That same day, during a nationally televised
address, Havel declared: "For 20 years, it was official propaganda
that I was an enemy of socialism, that I wanted to bring back
capitalism, that I was in the service of imperialism.... All those
were lies." One week later the Communist Party endorsed Havel as
interim president and Dubcek as parliamentary chairman. The Federal
Assembly (parliament) unanimously elected Dubcek as speaker on
December 28, 1989, and the next day elected Havel president. The
fulfillment of Golitsyn's prediction was complete.

On February 21, 1990 Havel addressed a joint session of the U.S.
Congress, during which he urged our government to tangibly support
political and economic "liberalization" in the Soviet Union and
asserted that most important of all was the prospect that the world
would enter "an era in which all of us ... will be able to create
what your great President [Abraham] Lincoln called the 'family of
man'" (i.e., convergence). The day before, President Bush had
hailed Havel as a man of "tremendous moral courage" and had moved
to clear the way for Czechoslovakia to receive lucrative most
favored nation trade status. Mr. Bush also pledged U.S. support for
other Czechoslovakian access to aid from international financial
organizations, and the Export-Import Bank subsequently announced
that it would begin subsidizing U.S. exports to Czechoslovakia for
the first time since 1946. In September 1990, Czechoslovakia was
admitted to both the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund.

In July 1990, the Federal Assembly re-elected Havel to a two-year
term, whereupon he selected a cabinet that included "former"
Communists as premier, foreign minister, economic planning
minister, and defense minister.

Havel resigned in July 1992, once it became clear that the country
would not continue as a federal state. In February 1993, parliament
re-elected him as the first president of the new Czech Republic
(which had separated from Slovakia on January 1st). According to
the July 1994 issue of Background Notes, published by the U.S.
State Department, "Full membership in the European Union, which the
government hopes to achieve by the year 2000, is probably the
country's highest foreign policy goal."

Georgia

In 1991, Zviad Gamsakhurdia received nearly 87 percent of the vote
to become the first directly elected leader of a Soviet republic.
Eduard Shevardnadze, who would later become Soviet foreign minister
under Mikhail Gorbachev, was the republic's Communist Party boss at
the time. Shevardnadze had earned a reputation for ruthless
brutality and had personally authorized the torture of prisoners in
Georgian jails. The Washington Post for September 6, 1992 recalled,
"In his 13 years as Communist Party chief [Shevardnadze] was
regarded as an aggressive persecutor of nationalists and
dissidents, including Gamsakhurdia." Writing in the Washington
Times for August 8, 1985, Michael Bonafield cited underground
documents that reached the West as early as 1975, indicating that
Shevardnadze "personally authorized the torture of prisoners of
Georgian jails." Bonafield described how Shevardnadze "set up the
special No. 2 block of the prison, a slaughterhouse for 'target'
prisoners and a place for the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs]
hangman's orgies, where the most horrible tortures were used:
beatings with iron bars, prodding with steel needles and rods,
hanging up prisoners by the feet ... and so on."

Shevardnadze joined the Communist Party in 1948, graduated from the
Party School of the Central Committee in 1951, and in 1956-57
became Second, then First, Secretary of the Communist Youth League.
He was named a full member of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of Georgia in 1958. From 1965 to 1972 he served as
Georgia's interior minister, and in 1972 became the republic's
Communist Party leader. He was appointed a nonvoting member of the
national Politburo in 1978, became a full voting member in 1985,
and was then selected by Gorbachev to succeed Andrei Gromyko as
foreign minister.

On December 20, 1990, Shevardnadze suddenly resigned as foreign
minister, raising the specter of an "impending dictatorship" due to
the increasing influence of "reactionary" forces opposed to
perestroika.

Following the failed anti-Gorbachev "coup" in August 1991,
President Gamsakhurdia was the only leader of a Soviet republic to
openly voice the widely held suspicion that Gorbachev had himself
faked the "coup" as part of long-range Marxist strategy. When the
new Commonwealth of Independent States was formally launched in
December, Georgia was the only republic that refused to join.

Soon, a clamor led by leftist intellectuals began demanding that he
resign. When he refused, heavily-armed opposition forces moved
against him in December 1991, and in early January he was forced to
flee the capital of Tbilisi. During an interview with Associated
Press on the day of Gamsakhurdia's departure, Eduard Shevardnadze
hailed the military coup as a "democratic revolution," assailed
Gamsakhurdia as a "dictator," and expressed "a great desire to
participate in the creation of a democratic Georgia."

In October 1992, Shevardnadze was elected to the new post of
parliament chairman, the equivalent of President. The election was
carefully structured to assure his victory and create the semblance
that it was a landslide. He ran unopposed and elections were not
allowed in at least six districts considered strongholds of former
President Gamsakhurdia. Shevardnadze received 90 percent of the
vote, after which he told reporters: "Our people have finally
chosen the democratic path." What he meant by "democracy" became
clear on August 6, 1993, when he told Parliament: "My word should
be law for everybody." According to the Autumn 1994 issue of
International Currency Review, he has "ruled Georgia with terror
and brutality ever since ... with the help of special troops or
'bodyguards' trained in secret by U.S. special forces seconded to
Georgia for the purpose."

Hungary

According to the State Department publication Background Notes for
December 1994, "Hungary's transition to a Western-style
parliamentary democracy was the first and the smoothest among the
former Soviet bloc...." The country's hard-line Communists were
supposedly voted into near oblivion in 1990 when the Socialist
Party (formerly the Communist Party) finished a dismal third in
parliamentary elections, capturing only 33 seats in the 386-seat
national assembly. The victor on that occasion was the Hungarian
Democratic Forum (HDF), which had been the first opposition party
to emerge during Hungary's supposed "liberalization." Yet, as
United Press International reported on December 13, 1989, the HDF
itself was receiving "support from the highest levels" of the
Communist Party Politburo.

With leftists posing as free market "reformers" in control, the
economy deteriorated, which paved the way for the return of overt
Communists who hammer-and-sickled the theme that "democratic
reform" had failed. On May 29th of last year, the Communists were
returned to power when the Socialist Party secured an absolute
parliamentary majority. The Party then selected its leader, Gyula
Horn, as premier. Horn, who was the last Communist foreign minister
before the "collapse of Communism," had been described in a May 7,
1994 New York Times pre-election dispatch as "one of Hungary's most
unpopular politicians...." The electorate's distaste for Horn was
understandable. As the Times reported two days later, Horn "did not
run as the prime ministerial candidate of the Socialists,
apparently because his background as a member of a Communist Party
militia that helped suppress the 1956 uprising provided too much of
a campaign target for his opponents." The Times nevertheless
claimed that Horn "is considered to come from the reform wing of
the party."

Kazakhstan

Here, too, it is essentially business as usual, with "former"
Communists firmly in control. President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev,
the country's top Communist official prior to independence, was a
Gorbachev ally (and Politburo member) who joined the Communist
Party in 1962 and only resigned from its Central Committee in the
wake of the contrived 1991 anti-Gorbachev "coup." He was elected to
the presidency after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He was the
only candidate for a term set to expire in December 1996, but on
March 11th of this year he dissolved parliament and asserted that
he would rule by decree until new elections were held. On April
30th, he received more than 95 percent support in a referendum to
extend his term until the year 2000.

Some critics claimed that the extension amounted to a return to
dictatorship, but Nazarbayev insisted that it was needed to provide
stability. The West, including the U.S., reacted with typical limp-
wristed indignation. As reported by Facts on File for May 4, 1995,
"Representatives of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations
boycotted the announcement of the results of the vote." Anything
harsher was out of the question. After all, as the March 30th Facts
on File had reported, Nazarbayev "supported aggressive economic
reform...."

Kyrgyzstan

When President Askar Akayev was elected in 1991, he was lauded as
the "first freely elected" president of the republic. In fact, he
was the only candidate and received some 95 percent of the vote.
Coincidentally, 95 was also the percentage of deputies elected to
parliament who were members of the Kyrgyz Communist Party, which
Akayev himself had joined in 1981.

In 1986, President Akayev was beckoned to Moscow to serve in the
Soviet Communist Party Central Committee (CPSUCC) Department on
Science and Education. In 1987, he was elected vice president of
the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences, and later became its president. In
1989, he was elected to the newly created Soviet Congress of
People's Deputies and was subsequently selected to serve in the
Supreme Soviet. In 1990, he became a full member of the CPSUCC.

In the wake of increasing opposition to his policies, Akayev
scheduled a referendum for January of last year on whether he
should complete his term. More than 96 percent of the voters opted
to keep him in office so that he could continue his "reform"
efforts. In July, he proposed that press freedom be limited in
order to halt the "impunity and immorality" of "anti-democratic"
newspapers that were criticizing him. In testimony in October 1993
and May 1994, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott
declared that due to "the political enlightenment of its president
and also the boldness of their economic reforms, we're going to do
what we can ... [to] elevate the political profile of our
relationship." He described Akayev as "a true Jeffersonian
democrat."

Latvia

Latvia is one of the former Soviet republics which Gannett News
Service claimed in June of last year had "kept former ruling
Communists from returning to power or from exercising major
political influence." Yet Anatolijs Gorbunovs, chairman of the
Supreme Council (parliament), is a former member of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was
Latvian Communist Party secretary for ideology.

Lithuania

In March 1990, Vytautas Landsbergis, who had an impressive career-
long record of opposition to Communism, became the first non-
Communist to head one of the Soviet republics when he was elected
President by Lithuania's national parliament. He defeated Communist
Party chief Algirdas Brazauskas by a margin of more than two-to-
one. President Brazauskas had been trained as an engineer and
worked in construction before becoming a state economic planner in
1966. In 1977 he was appointed secretary of the Lithuanian
Communist Party in charge of economic affairs, and in 1988 became
Party boss. In 1990, he and a group of fellow Communists supposedly
broke with the Soviets and formed the Democrat Labor Party (DLP) to
succeed the Communist Party.

In 1992, Lithuania became the first of a growing list of former
Soviet republics or satellites to formally return reins of power to
the old-timers when the DLP captured a solid majority of seats in
parliament. The new parliament elected Brazauskas its chairman and
acting head of state and, the following February, Brazauskas
received 60 percent of the vote to become the country's first
directly elected President.

Moldova

President Mircea Snegur was elected on December 8, 1991. The sole
candidate, he mustered 98 percent of the vote. As summarized in an
August 12, 1994 CRS Report for Congress, he "held various top
Communist Party and government positions before Moldovan
independence in 1991, including president of the Moldavian Supreme
Soviet, deputy chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet, and secretary
of the Moldavian Communist Party Central Committee."

Moldova's first parliamentary elections in February 1993 saw the
Agrarian Democratic Party (ADP), led by Snegur and other "former"
Communists, finish far ahead of their rivals. Petru Lucinschi of
the ADP was subsequently elected parliamentary speaker. He was once
a member of both the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist
Party and the Politburo, and was a first secretary of the Moldavian
Communist Party. Premier Andrei Sangheli also has a long record of
service to the Communist cause.

Poland

Poland was the first East European country to supposedly throw off
the yoke of Soviet domination. The Solidarity labor movement, which
thrust "anti-Communist dissident" and current President Lech Walesa
into the public spotlight, was launched in 1980 after months of
nationwide strikes. Founding members of the movement included
authentic anti-Communists, Communists, and collaborators with
Communism. According to then-Hungarian Communist Party First
Secretary Stanislaw Kania, there were about one million Communist
Party members in Solidarity, including 42 of the 200 members of the
Party's 1981 Central Committee.

In New Lies for Old, Anatoliy Golitsyn charged that Solidarity was
"suppressed" in 1981 (though not completely) as a maneuver to
convince the West that it was an authentic opponent of the hard-
line regime headed by Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski. Golitsyn
predicted (in 1984) that eventually "it may be expected that a
coalition government will be formed [it was], comprising
representatives of the communist party [there were many], of a
revived Solidarity movement [after it was re-legalized], and of the
church. A few so-called liberals might also be included [some
were]."

During a series of "round table" negotiations between Solidarity
and the ruling Communist government in March 1989, an agreement was
reached on major political reform. Early in the negotiations,
Walesa agreed to let the Communists have 65 percent of the Sejm
(lower house of parliament) seats in the new government. With
Walesa's blessing, Jaruzelski, his supposed tormenter of less than
a decade earlier, was elected president by parliament. Jaruzelski
bowed out after Walesa was elected to succeed him in December 1990.

While negotiations for the new system were progressing in 1989, the
March 2, 1989 issue of the Soviet current affairs weekly New Times
printed an interview with Walesa in which he acknowledged that he
was not seeking to take power away from the Communists. "Let power
remain in the hands of the Communists," he said, "but let it be
different. Let it serve the people better, respect the law and be
accountable to society. We are prepared to cooperate constructively
with such authorities."

In the country's first parliamentary elections under the new
system, more than 29 parties gained representation in the Sejm. The
"former" Communists of the Democratic Left Alliance, and their
Peasant Party allies, captured a mere 93 seats in the 460-seat
Sejm. But in September 1993, the Communists were voted back into
power when the two Red-dominated parties secured a two-thirds
majority in the Sejm, sufficient to override presidential vetoes
and perhaps draft a new constitution amenable to their own
interests.

Poland's current prime minister, Jozef Oleksy, was previously
speaker of the Red-controlled Sejm. He once belonged to the Central
Committee of the Polish Communist Party. He replaced Waldemar
Pawlak, who resigned as prime minister after losing a no-confidence
vote in parliament on March 1st of this year. Pawlak, too, was a
"former" Communist.

On August 12, 1994, Minister of Internal Affairs Adrzej
Milczanowski, who was brought into government service by Walesa,
appointed Marian Zacharski as chief of Poland's civil intelligence
agency. Zacharski was forced to step down only five days later in
the wake of a vigorous protest by the United States. Years earlier,
Zacharski had been sentenced to life in prison in the U.S. for
stealing military secrets for the Soviet Bloc. He was freed in 1985
as part of a Cold War spy swap. President Walesa praised
Zacharski's "professionalism and many years of experience," but
nevertheless called for his resignation because the nomination
would make "Poland's process of integration with the West more
difficult." The Washington Post reported on September 3, 1994 that
"Zacharski will remain in a prominent position in the intelligence
section of the Office of State Security, Poland's civilian secret
service."

The Post also reminded its readers that Walesa's regime had
"allowed and even encouraged Communists to remain in important
police and security posts." For instance, "the deputy minister in
charge of intelligence in the ministry and the director of the
Office of State Security are former Communist operatives.
Zacharski's appointment was just another move in that direction.
The man he was supposed to replace, Janusz Luks, himself a senior
intelligence officer during the Communist era, is reported to have
been assigned to the Polish Embassy in Washington."

Still, much of the Establishment media continues to portray Lech
Walesa as "a staunch anti-Communist," a description employed, for
example, by the Associated Press in a recent dispatch.

Romania

Despite early attempts to hide the fact, the Communists have ruled
Romania without interruption since December 1989, when Communist
dictator Nicolai Ceausescu was assassinated. The National Salvation
Front (NSF), led by former senior officials of the Ceausescu
regime, became the provisional government. Ion Iliescu, a "former"
Communist Party official, was named president, a post he still
holds today. Sham elections were held in May 1991 in which the NSF
attained two-thirds of the seats in both houses of parliament,
while Iliescu received 85 percent of the presidential vote. He was
re-elected in 1992.

Though Romania has not been free of the heavy hand of Communism,
and has never had a chance to try authentic free market economic
alternatives to socialism, some Western media have blamed its
present sorry plight on the failure of "democracy" and "the free
market" since the overthrow of Ceausescu. Consider, for instance,
a remarkable December 21, 1994 Associated Press dispatch which
claimed, "A hungry country sees little difference between democracy
and Communist dictatorship," and stated that Romania's
"traditionally backward economy has slipped further in the free
market." Truly, the mind boggles!

Russian Federation

Boris Yeltsin's authoritarian Red stripes have, in recent months,
become increasingly visible to all but the willfully blind. On
August 18, 1995, for instance, the AP noted the jitters being
generated by the Russian president's close and friendly ties to an
increasingly powerful secret police apparatus. According to the AP,
the Federal Security Service, as the former KGB is now known after
six name changes since 1991, "is alive, well and making a comeback
under the protection of none other than Boris Yeltsin. Last month,
Yeltsin promoted the chief of the Kremlin guards, a close friend,
to head the Federal Security Service, his latest move to tighten
his grip on the old KGB."

That "close friend," Colonel-General Mikhail Barsukov, was a KGB
agent during the Soviet era. The AP dispatch continued to note,
"Many Russians, including opposition politicians, businessmen,
bankers, former dissidents -- even some of Yeltsin's top advisers -
- are jittery about the president's growing ties to the secret
police."*

------------------------------------------------------------------
*NOTE: In December 1993, Yeltsin announced with great fanfare that
he was scrapping the hated KGB. "The Ministry of Security, the body
which conducted political surveillance of people for nearly 75
years, has been abolished as a whole," he declared. His decree was
widely publicized, and undoubtedly served to further convince many
Americans that he was truly committed to the sort of meaningful
reforms that could justify further infusions of U.S. foreign aid
and other assistance. Less publicized was his action one day
earlier in promoting 27 senior Security Ministry officers to the
rank of general.

------------------------------------------------------------------
The head of Yeltsin's personal security service, General Aleksandr
Korzhakov, is another longtime steward of the police state.
Korzhakov, who has been with Yeltsin since 1985, joined the KGB in
1970. His influence with Yeltsin is said to be enormous. "To this
day," Yeltsin wrote in his recently published autobiography The
Struggle for Russia, "he never leaves my side, and we even sit up
at night during trips together." He describes Korzhakov as his
closest companion of the last ten years.

On December 2nd of last year, Korzhakov had the presidential
security service launch a raid, which has yet to be explained, on
the offices of Vladimir Gusinsky, Russia's leading banker. Gusinsky
is allied with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a potential rival to
Yeltsin in next year's presidential elections. Soon after the raid,
Luzhkov denied he had any desire to run for president, and Gusinsky
has not surfaced in Russia since early January, when he moved his
family to London. Washington Post correspondent Margaret Shapiro
observes that such incidents, among others, "have sparked worries
here among pro-reform democrats that Russia could be heading back
toward a police state."

Korzhakov has participated in cabinet-level meetings between
Yeltsin and his ministers, was a member of the Russian delegation
to the December meeting of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, and is said to have been responsible for the
appointment last November of Vladimir Polevanov as the country's
new privatization chief. Polevanov has called for a larger
government role in industry and a reduction of private involvement.
He has suggested that companies sold by the state be re-
nationalized and favors policies that will limit the "damage" done
by privatization.

Earlier this year, Yeltsin signed into law legislation renaming,
reorganizing, and strengthening the intelligence services. As
summarized in an editor's note in Anatoliy Golitsyn's new book The
Perestroika Deception, "The Federal Security Service was
'empowered' to search homes without warrants, to run its own jails
and independent 'criminal' investigations, to operate under cover
of other official agencies, to bug telephones and intercept mail
(with 'court permission'), and to operate abroad." London's Sunday
Times for April 9th quoted Sergei Karaganov, deputy director of the
Institute of Europe of the Academy of Sciences and an adviser to
President Yeltsin, as stating that "Russia is moving toward a mixed
democratic, semi-authoritarian model, with the strengthening
elements of a police state."

In June 1994, under the guise of fighting organized crime, Yeltsin
signed a decree empowering the regular police to hold suspects for
up to 30 days without charge, permit police searches of property
and examination of financial records without a warrant or evidence
of a crime, and allow certain crime-ridden cities and districts to
be placed under "special control."

Even as American taxpayers are bilked to bankroll what is said to
be the Yeltsin regime's commitment to "reform," old-time Communists
are leading Russia's prosperity parade. For instance, all of the
plotters of the apparently contrived 1991 "coup" against then-
President Mikhail Gorbachev, and the similarly suspicious
parliamentary revolt against Yeltsin in 1993, have been freed. As
just one example of how they are doing, consider the plight of
former Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, who helped instigate the
1991 "coup." The Washington Post for September 22, 1994, reported
that Pavlov is now a prosperous banker living in a $500,000 home
and taking home about $60,000 after taxes (the average Russian's
annual wage is around $1,200). According to the Post, many others
"have made transitions similar to Pavlov's, including others
involved in the anti-Gorbachev coup. Indeed, among the leading
businessmen of Russia today are many top Soviet-era bureaucrats and
party members. One recent analysis found that nearly two-thirds of
Russia's new rich had converted prominent positions under the old
regime into their present lucrative niches."

In September of last year, researchers at the Russian Academy of
Sciences released a study that found that more than 60 percent of
the 580 richest persons in the country were former members of the
Soviet Union's Communist elite. In the area of banking, for
instance:

* Sergie Rodionov, chairman of one of Russia's largest commercial
banks, headed the banking department at the Soviet Finance
Ministry.

* Sergei Yegorov, chairman of the Commercial Banks Association, was
once chairman of the Soviet State Bank and head of the financial
department of the Communist Party Central Committee.

* Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the Tveruniversal Bank, was a former
Soviet prime minister in the 1980s.

Such are the folks with whom Western entrepreneurs are being
encouraged to do business. As Anatoliy Golitsyn advises in a
postscript to The Perestroika Deception: "Western industrialists
and financiers should reverse their mistaken involvement in joint
ventures with the Communists, thereby financing the revival of
their main political adversaries, supplying them ill-advisedly with
new technology, and wasting time and money on operations that will
ultimately be taxed to death, confiscated, or both."

And make no mistake about it, the possibility of expropriation
exists in virtually all of the "former" Communist countries,
including those deemed most "reformed," and crackdowns of a
Tiananmen Square type are not out of the question in some
instances. The New York Times for July 3, 1995 quoted an
unidentified Western ambassador as saying that there are already
"many cases of Russian joint venture partners turning on their
Western partners and trying to seize the businesses" and that
"these cases involve officials of the Government." And Peter
Charow, executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in
Moscow, told the Times, "A lot of Government agencies have been
taken off the state budget and must find ways to support
themselves. Foreign companies are often seen as ready prey."

As noted earlier, the law that established and empowered the
Federal Security Service authorized the FSS to run its own prisons.
The gulag mentality is not only surviving, but thriving. Last fall,
William Cohen of the Colorado-based Center for Human Rights
Advocacy led a group of U.S. and European legal experts who visited
Russia to examine the country's criminal justice system. A dispatch
filed in mid-October by Scripps Howard News Service reporter Holger
Jensen summarized their findings. Among other things, "the legal
system is still largely controlled by Communist-era bureaucrats,"
with the most serious human rights violations taking place in
Russian jails, where "suspects are held for months, sometimes
years, under barbaric conditions before they go to trial."

Russian procurators (as prosecutors are called) usually assume that
anyone arrested is guilty. Jensen reported that they "will go to
any lengths to obtain a confession. So conditions in the pretrial
detention centers are deliberately made worse than they are in the
prisons and labor camps where convicted felons are sent after their
trials." Suspects "are routinely starved, beaten and deprived of
contact with their families," and some "confess to crimes they
didn't commit just to get out of the awful detention centers."

In its annual assessment of human rights around the globe, released
in February, the State Department noted that thousands of Russians
have been illegally arrested, and that prisons often stop feeding
inmates for months at a time, relying instead on relatives to
provide food. Also, a jury system has yet to be introduced in 80
regions of the country. Confirming the findings of the Cohen team,
the State Department report found that suspects are routinely
denied access to attorneys, and are beaten into confessing by
procurators who win rewards for closing cases promptly.

Slovakia

Premier Vladimir Meciar is a "former" Communist whose party
finished first (garnering about one-third of the vote) in the 1992
elections. Writing in the November/December 1994 issue of Foreign
Affairs (flagship publication of the CFR), Anne Applebaum, deputy
editor of The Spectator, described Meciar as "a Moscow-trained
apparatchik." In March of last year, Meciar was removed from office
following a no-confidence vote in parliament, but was returned to
the post after his party won Slovakia's first national elections
later in the year. Facts on File for October 6, 1994 reported that
Meciar "was fiercely opposed to Western-style economic reform,
foreign investment and the privatization of state enterprises...."

In March 1992, the defense and security committee of what was then
Czechoslovakia's Slovak republic issued a report, which parliament
accepted, accusing Meciar of collaborating with the StB (the former
secret police) during the pre-independence era. According to Facts
on File for April 2, 1992, the "report contended that Meciar had
worked for the StB under the code name 'Doctor' and that he had
promoted former StB loyalists while interior minister [of the
Slovac republic], and that he had used information in the StB files
against his political enemies."

Tajikistan

From 1991 until he was forced from office in September 1992,
Tajikistan's president was Rakhman Nabiyev, a former Communist
Party first secretary. In November of that year, the current
president, Imamali Rakhmonov (a Nabiyev supporter), became acting
president. As noted by Facts on File for April 17, 1995, the
government continues to be "led by former communists."

Ukraine

From December 1991 until July of last year the second most populous
of the former Soviet republics was ruled by its first directly
elected President, Leonid M. Kravchuk. He was the country's former
Communist Party chief for ideology. Kravchuk kept the government,
industry, and agriculture in the hands of his fellow Communist
apparatchiks. In the July 1994 election he was defeated by current
President Leonid D. Kuchma, who was once director of the Soviet
Union's largest missile factory.

In October, Kuchma announced a program of economic reforms which,
mimicking Lenin, he called his "new economic policy." It was
publicized in the West as evidence that he was a true-blue reformer
deserving of massive infusions of Western aid and the support of
Western businessmen. Kuchma has claimed, "Without international
aid, we will fall like a house of cards." The aid was quick in
coming, and not merely from the international lending institutions
to which the U.S. contributes heavily. On November 22, 1994, the
Washington Times reported that "President Clinton today will make
Ukraine the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid when he
raises taxpayers' donations to $900 million, including a $30-
million-to-$50-million program to build free houses for former Red
Army soldiers." During a briefing for reporters on November 21st,
according to the Times, "a senior administration official explained
that the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship under Mr. Clinton was rocky at
first but has been bolstered by the July election of Mr. Kuchma, a
reformer."

The Ukrainian prime minister, Vitaly Masol, was the Soviet Union's
top economic manager.

Uzbekistan

President Islam A. Karimov was elected president in 1991, receiving
86 percent of the vote after severely curtailing the activities of
all opposition parties. He had opposed his country's break with the
Soviet Union, claiming that Uzbekistan was not ready for either
"democracy" or a market economy.

As in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, a referendum was arranged to
provide a lop-sided endorsement of an extension of Karimov's
presidential term. An April 29, 1995 Associated Press dispatch
noted that the "lop-sided figures in those referendums were
reminiscent of the turnouts reported in Soviet-era one-party
votes."

On December 25, 1994, in the country's first parliamentary
elections since the apparent demise of the Soviet Union, the
Democratic Party (former Communist Party) captured more than 70
percent of the seats. As noted by Facts on File for February 9,
1995: "Foreign observers said Karimov had allowed the election
because he wanted to at least claim that Uzbekistan had a
multiparty democracy."

            *    *    *

If the same standard by which "reformed" Communists and their
collaborators have been judged in recent years had been in effect
at the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki
Tojo, and their henchmen could have survived and prospered by
simply tearing insignia from their uniforms and pledging their
devotion to a new world order predicated on "reform," "democracy,"
and "convergence" with the Allied nations.

It would have been foolish to fall for such preposterous claims by
supposedly repentant "former" fascists. Why, then, believe such
bogus claims when they emanate from self-professed "former"
Communists?

END

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THE NEW AMERICAN -- September 18, 1995
Copyright 1995 -- American Opinion Publishing, Incorporated P.O.
Box 8040, Appleton, WI  54913

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