In the past couple of weeks, nearly every one of my peers in the community of analysts – Russia watchers has weighed in on Russia’s possible plans to invade Ukraine.  We have been given detailed breakdowns of the forces and equipment which Russia has moved into the border region with Ukraine, and we have heard every imaginable scenario for the use of these forces when the weather turns colder, as in February, for example.

 Others of my peers have reckoned in great detail the political and economic price which Russia would be compelled to pay if it were reckless enough to invade and seek to neuter Ukraine in one way or another. One analyst has described Russia’s possibly dividing Ukraine in two at the Dnieper River and forming a Russia-friendly state to the east of that divide, while allowing the rump state of rabid Ukrainian nationalists to go to hell on its own.

For its part, the Kremlin has vehemently denied having any designs on Ukraine and claims that Washington is behind this fake news which is intended to encourage the Zelensky government to do something quite stupid such as stage an all-out attack on the Donbas, using the latest weapons which it has received from Washington and its allies, in the mistaken belief that it will be backed up by Washington if things go awry. In short, this would be a replay of the scenario in Georgia in 2008 when the very same Biden who is now US President was feeding false hopes of support to the then Georgian President Saakashvili .

In my own unpublished ruminations about what is or is not going on at the Russian-Ukrainian border and what it means for peace or war in the coming months, I directed my attention to the issue of ‘red lines’ that Vladimir Vladimirovich has called out in various forums over recent weeks, though these red lines were never spelled out. Both in what he said and in remarks by unofficial spokesmen for the Kremlin like television news director Dmitry Kiselyev, I assumed that the Russian build-up of forces at the border was meant as a signal to the United States to desist from its stationing weapons and troops on Ukrainian territory in an attempt to achieve by stealth what it could not achieve by formally bringing Ukraine into NATO: to use the territory as an advance platform against Russia within the overall policy of “containment.”

Now, in the latest remarks to come from the Kremlin, it would appear that we all, my peers among Western commentators and I, have been wrong-footed.  Putin has said as clearly as conceivable within the traditional language of international diplomacy that if the USA puts offensive missile systems onto Ukrainian soil, thereby cutting the warning time of attack on Moscow to 5-7 minutes, then the Russians will station their hypersonic attack missiles on surface and submarine vessels within 5-7 minutes striking distance of Washington, D.C.

In short, what we potentially now have before us is the Cuban Missile Crisis Redux.  Only this time the gamblers with the fate of the world are playing with the cards face up.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

P,S. – One reader of this essay on my LinkedIn account asked me to document the new position statement by Putin regarding what it will do if its red lines in Ukraine are crossed by US and NATO. Good question! Putin made this explicit warning on November 30 during the online forum for the international business community, Russia Calling. It was partly reported by Reuters, I stress PARTLY: https://www.reuters.com/markets/stocks/putin-warns-russia-will-act-if-nato-crosses-its-red-lines-ukraine-2021-11-30/ Moreover, as a splendid example of how mainstream media use weasel language to conceal from their readers what our ‘adversaries’ are saying, the article on this subject in the December 1st edition of the “Financial Times” also tells us everything but the main point about Russia’s planned response to the new potential threat, namely positioning its hypersonic missiles to give equally short warning time to those who threaten Russia via Ukraine, meaning Washington, D.C. Other, less prestigious news outlets were more forthcoming. I think in particular of The Daily Mail.. It bears mention as well that such positioning of Russian hypersonic missiles just off the shores of the United States, in international waters 200 miles out, was outlined by Putin as Russia’s new capability arising from the various state of the art weapons systems he announced to the world in his State of the Nation address a couple of years ago. Since then Russia has gone on from prototypes and tests to full serial production and deployment of these missiles which may be carried on board surface vessels in shipping containers or on attack submarines.

Bringing Belarus Closer: Interview aired on Belarus Radio-Television

As I remarked last week with regard to TRT World, it is a pleasure to see the emergence of high quality English language global broadcasting from countries which never enjoyed a place on the dais hogged by CNN and the BBC.

Today I share with you the link to a 15-minute interview on the Belarus confrontation with Europe hosted by Belarus Radio & Television.  In an unhurried manner, I was allowed to cover the waterfront of issues behind the news of the Belarus – Polish showdown over migrants, and to put in context the geopolitical situation of Minsk that underlies US and EU efforts to make of the country a second front in their efforts to “contain” Russia by whatever means at their disposal, even at the risk of all-out war.

In particular I was able to call attention to the time dimensions that are missing from all mainstream media coverage. Our journalists tend to stay within the living memory of their profession, meaning, generally, what happened yesterday. Opinion page political scientists bring in their own more retrospective views going back perhaps ten years. And then there is the historical perspective, which I am adding, showing that, in the given case today’s disputes have a time line that goes back four hundred years or more.

I note that no cuts whatsoever to the taped interview were made by the studio’s editors during production. This amounts to an exceptional level of respect for the interviewee. I assure you that anyone given the microphone by CNN will be lucky to see 5 minutes out of 60 actually aired following cuts to find just the remarks that match the corporate political line.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ01yMkjtXI

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

As I have pointed out in the past with respect to the indigenous, home-grown Neo-Liberalism that swept through Continental politics over the past two decades in parallel to and not as derivation from the same development in the Anglo-Saxon world,  I point now to the latest manifestations of an indigenous “wokeness” in Europe that is following a parallel track of righteous intolerance that we see in the United States as promoted by Black Lives Matter and the anti-Culture bandwagon.. In both parts of the world the result is stifling political correctness that threatens anything resembling humanism, sophistication and breadth of thinking.

The latest outbreak of this insanity in Europe is in the ballet world.

In Berlin, we read the following in the online website “Slipped Disc” datelined November 26:

“The Staatsballet Berlin has quietly removed Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker from its year-end programme. Director

Christiane Theobald says it contains a Chinese dance and an oriental dance that amount to ‘a clear case of racism’ – even more so since the Berlin production follows Tchaikovsky’s 1892 original”

A fuller explanation of this cancellation may be found on thegoaspotlight.com, which quotes from the Russian business information website RBK.  As becomes clear in this article, the Russians are very interested party in the production and take the cancellation personally. Here we read:

“The directors did not like the appearance of children, whose faces are painted with dark paint, as well as the ‘stereotypical’ images of China and India in the ballet. The production will be presented to the audience, but later and in a revised version.

“The state Ballet of Berlin has refused to stage the Nutcracker by two Russian choreographers due to racial stereotypes, the acting head of the troupe Christian Theobald told Bild..

“She recalled that the play is a reconstruct of the original production of 1892 However, some elements that were acceptable at the time raise many questions in the modern world and need to be revisited, Theobald noted.

“For example,the directors were embarrassed in the appearance in the second act of children with faces painted with dark paint…

“Also criticized were the Chinese dance, where the dancers move with very small steps, and the oriental dance, in which the girls from the harem and the soloist with dark makeup participants.”

We may possibly explain these decisions in Berlin as anticipatory and precautionary measures of the management to cover its ass ahead of the installation in office of the new federal cabinet where the position of ‘commissar of culture’ has been assigned to a leading figure from the Greens Party, who are in general at the forefront of the new bigotry and self-righteousness to which German politics is prone..

However, the same virus seems to have attacked brains in the French cultural world, and did so at the very start of this calendar year, as we read in the web pages of REMIX News, www.rmx.news datelined 4 January 2021

“The recently appointed director of the Paris Opera House, Alexander Neef, plans to remove three of the best-known ballet choreographies from the repertoire on account of those allegedly promoting White dominance, Neef told Le Monde . The three ballets in question are The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and Die Bajadere… all choreographed by the late Rudolf Nureyev, considered the best ballet dancer of his generation, according to Origo . The conflict goes back to September, incidentally, the month when Neef was appointed director. Then the artists of the Paris Opera House issued a manifesto entitled “On racial issues at the Paris Opera”, in which they said, among other things, that performers of colored skin will refuse to be masked as white when, for instance, dancing the role of a white swan.

“ While the management of the Paris Opera House denied the information in a somewhat lukewarm manner, French-Canadian academic and political commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté, in a commentary in Le Figaro, attributed the issue to the Black Lives Matter movement.

According to Le Monde, the three ballets in question have been targeted for the following reasons. In Swan Lake, the white swan is a symbol of good while the black swan that of evil. In The Nutcracker, critics found issues with the Arabic-themed dance Coffee…”

The spineless behavior of the directors in Berlin and Paris will lead to the utter gutting of repertoire if pursued without  resistance from art lovers.

Yes, indeed all of these classical gems from the 19^th and early 20^th century repertoire imbedded in their choreography features from the mental outlook of high society of their age. The remarks about national, ethnic, racial stereotypes in Tchaikowski’s works are accurate, but attempts at cleaning up the act, if the political will is there at the top of the troupes to do just that will run straight into the stereotyped musical composition which dealt in the popular melodies of flamenco, 1001 Nights Arabia, the Chinese Empire, Polish petty nobility, Russian folk ensembles and the like.  If the steps taken over from the Mariinsky choreographer of 1892, the brilliant French-Russian Petipas are found to be offensive to today’s thinking, what would one say of his follower, Fokin, who was the Russian impresario Diaghilev’s first choreographer for the Ballets Russes that brought these and contemporary masterpieces to Europe.  Yes, Fokin, had very cute tribal dances of blacks and other stereotypes in his pieces.  And so what?

The argument of the Paris Opera for delisting Swan Lake is even more strained, or shall we say, absurd.  Black Swan versus White Swan!  

This very same censorious behavior can sweep away most of Western classical literature.  I am now re-reading for the n’th time Dostoevsky’s incredibly rich Brothers Karamazov, which has vastly more to it than the dialogues from the Grand Inquisitor by which it is best known in Comp Lit 101 courses of American colleges.  It also speaks of patriarch Fedor Pavlovich Karamazov’s dealings in Odessa with Zhids and his even befriending Jews. It paints Poles in the most unflattering light as born card cheats, utterly dishonest people.  Yes, indeed, Dostoevsky had his own little prejudices.  And so what.  Only a certified idiot would tamper with his works, which are among the most brilliant contributions to world literature of all time not only in terms of the religious, ethical discourses of his protagonists but in the remarkable diversity of speech ranging from Old Church Slavonic to standard Russian of the street at the time to Frenchified Russian of the noble class, including the reprobate Fedor Karamazov.

As for the Russians’ view of the ongoing self-destruction of Western Civilization by their neighbors to the West, they have absolutely no problem with blackface, with Black Swans, and with stereotyped Chinese.  As they say, they never had black slaves, as did the Anglo-Saxon nations and the French, by the way. Instead they had and have today a ‘person of color,’ an offspring of Black Africa, Alexander Pushkin, as their national poet and universally recognized cultural hero.  Full stop.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

Translation into English of my book presentation speech to the Golitsyn Library, St Petersburg,16 November 2021

Shortly after I delivered a Zoom presentation of my book Russia in the Turbulent 1990s: Diaries, Memoirs, Documents  (Россия в бурные 1990-е: Дневники, Воспоминания, Документы) to the Golitsyn Library in St Petersburg, I posted on my website the Russian text of my speech. This was further carried on my Linked-In account, where it attracted a number of visitors.  How many of those visitors were Russian-speakers I cannot say, but I assume many visitors were not and so could not appreciate what is a very important statement on the state of play in historiography of Russia’s “second revolution” in the 20^th century, its years of painful transition from Communism to a market economy and democratic institutions in the 1990s.

For me, the appearance of this book in its Russian edition several weeks ago was a landmark on my life’s journey, as I explain in the speech.  Therefore, I now offer to English speakers a translation of the speech so that they may follow my reasoning.

I crafted the speech itself directly in Russian and did so in a literary style which, typically in the Russian language, meant paragraph long sentences and complicated grammar with often barely pronounceable participial phrases. The painful effort of oral delivery was clearly evident in the video recording of my speech that was posted by the Library and which I have put up on my website. However, that literary style enabled me to share with lapidary quality some complex observations on the creation and translation of my new book that I wanted to share with prospective readers and with the profession generally. I do that now in English below. May this message spur other participants in the expatriate world of Russia in the 1990s to come forward and add to the literature about those extraordinary times.

QUOTE

Good evening to you all and thanks for deciding to participate in this presentation of my book “Russia in the Turbulent 1990s.”

Firstly, I want to express my gratitude to my Russian publisher, Liki Rossii, St Petersburg for our fruitful collaboration in creating on the basis of my original two-volume, 1200 page English edition a book in Russian coming to 780 pages which I present to you today.

For you, book lovers, it is important to know that my partnership with Liki Rossii showed how useful it is to work together with professional editors when such possibility exists.  Unfortunately, I had no such possibility in the USA or in Western Europe when I was preparing the original edition in English. In the States many authors do as I did – they publish their books according to the formula “self-publishing,” a new and very widespread form of samizdat, which in fact is a return to the system of book publishing in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. To be author and consultant on the organization of your book as well as proofreader is a difficult burden.

Elizaveta Petrovna and Yuri Borisovich Shelaevy and their team gave me professional advice on shortening the text and optimizing the interest for prospective readers in this country, for example, by adding photographs which illustrate important moments in the narrative, and by adding a detailed Index of Names.  They of course, checked all the facts set out in the text. But surely their most important contribution was in editing the text with a view to eliminating inaccurate or simply erroneous selection of words and figures of speech in the translation from English.

On the cover of the book you will not find the word “translation.” Nor will you find the name of a translator.  In a certain sense the translator was me, but only in a certain sense.

The basic translation from English was done by a “machine.” I used the online program on the website www.linguee.ru.  I uploaded English files half a typed page at a time and a second later received back the Russian text.  Thus, I got the entire translation of 780 pages in the course of one month. Entirely for free. If I had assigned this task to a normal translator, the work would have lasted a year and the cost would have been prohibitively high.

I want to note that I myself managed to catch and correct many of the peculiar words and expressions that a machine translation gives you even today, after all the remarkable progress that translation software has made in the past few years.  Moreover, as I said at the outset, my colleagues at Liki Rossii further cleaned up the text to reach a satisfactory end result.

Bearing in mind that the Foreign Literature Department of the Mayakovsky Municipal Library of St Petersburg is one of the “sponsors” of today’s event, I think that this entire production process of my book can give my “host” some useful tips.

Thus, I have a book, and this publication is a landmark on my life’s journey. I am proud that right after its release in its English original edition, my work was purchased by the New York Public Library and by a group of other libraries in the USA. However, to be frank, the material in this book will surely be better appreciated here in Russia, where every educated person older than 50 knows the personalities in business, political and cultural life with whom I became acquainted, collaborated and wrote about in my diary notes written long before the appearance of this book.  In the USA or in Europe only a narrow circle of specialists knows about them.  This book is more about your history than about ours.

 Now I will explain to you why my book is a pioneer in its genre of diaries and memoirs about Russia written by foreigners who worked in Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1990s.

And in conclusion I will share with you several of the conclusions I have drawn from reading my diary entries published in this book as regards democracy in Russia during the Yeltsin years, as regards the challenges which both domestic Russian and foreign businesses faced at the time, and as regards cultural life in Russia during those years.  I emphasize that the diaries are in and of themselves raw material for your personal evaluation and each reader will find his or her own discoveries.

       * * * *

The foreign community in the Russian capital during the 1990s reached 50,000 English-speaking families at the peak, in 1995-1996. They held all the key jobs in the newly opened representative offices and production subsidiaries of Western companies and international organizations. As I explain in the chapter entitled “Who were we?” there were among us people of my own age, in their 50s and older, having experience of working in Russia during the Soviet period.  But there were also many youths, 15 – 20 years younger than me, who were recruited by Western companies for their knowledge of the language and ambition to earn salaries that were not available to them back home, to become managers right after completing their degree programs.

For our benefit, an English language periodical press was created. It was partly mainstream in terms of political orientation, partly “underground,” but always interesting. In my book, I quote from articles appearing there to add a measure of salt and pepper to the narrative.

After the default and financial crisis of August 1998, Western companies halted plans for expanding their activities in Russia and sharply cut their staff.  Within a year, half of all expatriates already had gone home and they were replaced by Russian managers.  This signified not so much the promotion of Russian employees up the business ladder as it did the scaling down of Russia in the global plans of international business.

Why is it that almost none of the participants of the community of expatriates have written about what they saw and did in Russia during those years? One reason is that in general and most everywhere it is not in the nature of your average businessman to keep diaries and to prepare books of memoirs. Their aim in life was succinctly and colorfully expressed by my boss in the company Diageo, Andrew, when he spoke to us, his team, at one of the corporate gatherings: “You should become filthy rich!” Period.

Furthermore, there is the contractual clause on confidentiality imposed on all managers at the higher levels of corporate life. And even putting aside the contracts of the 1990s, many of those individuals either are still working in companies or are paid consultants to companies and cannot allow themselves the freedom to speak out publicly about their past.

In these matters, I occupy a special position. First, I received an education as an historian and knew very well from the time of my doctoral research how important diaries can be: they can add color to an age and add the human dimension to otherwise dry facts in archival dossiers. Moreover, during the years of my stay in Russia as a general director of the representative offices of a number of the world’s leading companies in the field of elite alcoholic beverages, I knew that I occupied a unique perch from which to observe the life of the upper and middle strata of Russia society and their interaction with us, foreigners, during an historically rare moment of hectic change.  I felt obliged to set all this down on paper.

When five years ago I finally thought about writing a book about Russia in the 1990s, I had a rich store of diary notes written week after week during the entire period.  In addition, I had cuttings from newspapers of this period which provide a general background for my observations.

All of this was arranged in files sitting on the floor of my office in Brussels, files which I did not look at until the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. During lockdown it became clear that it was high time to write and publish this rich material. It was now or never.

Secondly, since the time that I left corporate business 18 years ago and became an analyst of international relations, a blogger, the author of books of essays and a participant in political talk-shows on television, I faced no obstacles preventing my sharing information about my past as expatriate manager in Russia which is not a commercial secret. I merely observed several precautionary measures: I deleted the last names of my immediate bosses, who might take offense at any infringement of their privacy, and I excluded mention of those personal quarrels which always arise in human relations and are not interesting for the reader. I followed the old and wise folk saying that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

The proof that my approach was correct came in the remarks of one of my colleagues from United Parcel Service, a man who made a brilliant career in the company and was for more than ten years the president of their subsidiary in Germany. He wrote to me after reading the chapter on my four years working in the company, from 1989 to 1993: “Gil, I did not know that you had such positive feelings about UPS when we worked together.”  And he then recommended my book to his colleagues and bosses in the company’s Atlanta headquarters.

* * * *

If you open the web page for the English edition of Russia in the Roaring 1990s on www.amazon.com, you will find the evaluation of the book written by the editor of the best known daily digest on news about Russia read in American university circles, David Johnson. I quote:

“Fascinating firsthand account of work, politics and life in Russia in the 1990s. You should read it! Very relevant to today.”

I put the accent on his last words – about the relevance of this book.  I have no doubt that he was talking about the idealized view of Yeltsin’s Russia as the golden standard for democracy, in contrast to today’s Russia of Vladimir Putin, who supposedly liquidated this democracy and replaced it with his “vertical of power” – in other words, with an authoritarian regime.

You should bear in mind that 75% of my book consists of diaries which were written long ago and not of memoirs written in 2021. This means that the content does not reflect the thinking of today but instead consists of observations made in that period as regards the arbitrary exercise of power, the constant war carried on by the Executive Branch against the elected deputies of the people, that is to say, the State Duma, under Yeltsin.

These diary entries show how governance was carried out via decrees and ministerial circulars supposedly interpreting the laws, and not in accordance with the letter of the laws passed by parliament.  The decrees contradicted one another because of the constantly changing balance of forces within the Government between reformers and others. It is clear from my diaries that there was no Rule of Law, and this situation was recognized by the Western lawyers who were consultants to my employers. These lawyers told me that they were hardly doing any normal work to defend us in the courts; instead they mostly were busy with what we might call lobbying the senior bureaucracy on behalf of their clients.  At the same time, our auditors from the leading companies of the world in this specialty quietly and behind closed doors admitted that the application of prohibitions in laws and decrees issued in Russia ex post facto made it impossible to be law-abiding always and in all places.

As I remarked in my diary entries, these leading firms in the fields of accountancy and audit, leading law firms reported to the corporate headquarters of their clients in London, in New York, that Russia was on its way to reforms and that you could work calmly there.  By their own hands, these highly paid experts created in the 1990s out of Yeltsin’s Russia some Potemkin Village for the broad public in the West.

In Western media of that period we heard only about two negative factors in the New Russia: corruption and the threat to the rule of pro-Western Liberals coming from the Communists and the ultra-nationalists like Zhirinovsky and his LDPR.  Such views took hold among educated American society.

I remarked in my diary how the topic of corruption dominated conversations at a breakfast gathering organized by the Harvard Club of Moscow in 1998 on the occasion of the arrival from Beijing via the Trans-Siberian Railway of a group of Harvard alumni, top administrators and their guide, professor of economics and deputy director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, Marshall Goldman. These gentlemen did not want to hear about anything else.

I do not deny that corruption was everywhere in Russia at that time, beginning with the bribes taken by petty law enforcement officers and reaching up to the powerful friends of the President. But we in business faced more serious problems every day about which I wrote a great deal in my diaries – namely, the massive anti-business legislation that was promulgated over 70 years of Communism and remained in force.

To be sure, in certain fields Russia did not have appropriate new laws to regulate new institutions and fields of activity, like the stock market and retail banking, to protect consumers. But in the current affairs of general business the problem was entirely different – the huge number of laws which treated all commercial operations of private business as criminal in fact or by intent.  The Government under Yeltsin used the banks as policemen, requiring justification to the bank officers for every kopek of income or expense. And no one – neither the Russian Government nor the Western media – paid any attention to this.

The only objects of their interest were the falling levels of tax collection, the national import-export account, state debt and, mainly, the privatization of state companies.  These questions are all set out in detail in my diary notes.

Finally, I direct attention to the significant part of my book devoted to High Culture in Russia during the 1990s amidst the general poverty and misery of the population. One may say that this phenomenon is rather topical today, considering how in our time of the Covid-19 pandemic the cultural life of Russia – symphonic orchestra concerts, ballet and opera performances, drama theater shows and exhibitions in art museums – are both much greater in number and far richer than in any other country in Europe or in America, where many cultural institutions still remain shut.  My book confirms the generalization that the performing and fine arts and other forms of Culture were and are a defining element of Russia among the world’s nations.

Whence the frequent entries in my diaries about cultural events and about leading artists? I had the privilege to work for producers of luxury goods, among whom it is customary that the budget for brand promotion includes not only advertising but also sponsorship of elite events. As the general director, I had a free hand to decide where to spend considerable sums of money, especially in Petersburg, where the expectations of cultural institutions from sponsors were more modest than in Moscow.

I established good business relations with the Philharmonic and with the Mariinsky Theater in the musical world. And business relations over sponsorship often became those of close acquaintances and friends. So it was with the director of the Philharmonic Society, Anton Getman and with the chief conductor Temirkanov.  So it was also with Sergei Kalagin, conductor of the Mariinsky Theater and assistant to Valery Gergiev. Kalagin presented me to the leading singers, baritone Vasily Gerello, bass baritone Viktor Chernomyrdin and tenor Sergei Naida. They all were world class talents who also performed abroad in the Met or in major theaters in Germany.

With time, my sponsorship on behalf of my employers moved from music to drama theaters and literature. Thus, together with my wife, culture journalist Larisa Zalesova, I established close friendly relations with the founder the director of the Theater on the Taganka in Moscow, Yuri Lyubimov and his wife Katalin. In the entr’actes Yuri Lyubimov invited us into his office for drinks with other sponsors, among whom at times were Boris Berezovsky, governors of Russian provinces and leading personalities in the arts. We were at the theater during the evening devoted to the 80^th birthday of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an unforgettable evening partly due to the unexpected speech by Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov.  We met with Lyubimov abroad as well, in France, Belgium and elsewhere.

Thanks to my position in the company United Distillers – Diageo, in 1998 I was appointed chairman of the Russian Booker, which was at the time the most prestigious literary competition in the country. I remained there until 2002, that is, two years after my divorce from Diageo. During those years, I became acquainted with the country’s literary intelligentsia, along with leaders among Russia’s publishers, the book trade and the directors of libraries in the provinces.

All of this is described in detail in the diary notes of my book. I hope that you will find these entries both interesting and instructive.

Today I do not have time to talk about an entirely different dimension of the book – my thoughts at the time about domestic politics of Russia and their influence on the country’s international relations, especially with the USA and the West. I have in mind the reaction of the West to the election of the State Duma in December 1995. The massive vote given to the Communists and ultra-nationalists appeared to support the arguments of those circles in the West who feared a coming change of course of Russia, its striving to reassume the status of a Great Power and to defend its national interests. In fact, that is exactly what was already under way: the Minister of Foreign Affairs known as “Mister Yes” because of his going along with all the impositions put up by the West, Andrei Kozyrev had been replaced months earlier by Yevgeni Primakov, a man of a completely different disposition and world view. Now the West no long felt restrained and shifted course to expansion of NATO in the East. This entire process of alienation of Russia from the West and vice versa is continuing right up to the present day. I hope that there will be among my readers some who are interested in these issues.

With this I close my address. Thank you for your attention. I am ready to answer your questions.

Unquote

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

TRT World:  “The Newsmakers” 22 November 2021

Yesterday I had the privilege to participate in a TRT-hosted panel discussion devoted to the virtual conference on coordination of EU sanctions against President Lukashenko convened in Vienna by Chancellor Schallenberg.

Global political, economic and military power have all undergone de-concentration and moved away from U.S. hegemony in the past few years.  Quality news channels in English serving global audiences have also developed apace in a number of countries which in the past never sought audiences outside their borders. TRT World, based in Istanbul, is a case in point as the program link below illustrates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PbohRGAWYxY.

Link to the Golitsyn Library’s video recording of the book presentation Россия в бурные 1990е, 16 November 2021

For Russian speakers, the video recording may present some interest, in particular the introductory words from publisher Liki Rossii and the Q&A which followed my talk.

   https://cloud.mail.ru/public/k1Vw/9rHf47QGH

On 15 November, the Harvard Alumni Association organized a Zoom event open to members around the world entitled “A Conversation with President Bacow.”  I take my hat off to Philip Lovejoy, head of the HAA, for this outreach to the global community.

I comment below on the main points in the President’s message which raise serious questions about the aspirations as well as the foibles, illusions and misdeeds of America’s Liberal elites.

Mr. President,

Many thanks for your warm and informative talk on Zoom.  You are very much the leader I wish we had back in 1963-67 when I came through Harvard College.

I particularly welcomed your remarks on freedom of speech on campus, and on how Veritas is arrived at precisely by the clash of divergent opinions in a mutually respectful setting.  Regrettably my own experience of Harvard in the past several years in the area of my expertise, international relations with an accent on Russia, does not indicate that  your tolerance for those with different points of view is shared by colleagues in the professorial ranks.  They stand shoulder to shoulder over their reading of the “Putin regime” and in support of the hard line, aggressive and ultimately very risky stance that the United States has as promoter of a New Cold War to defend democratic values and the maintenance of its global hegemony. 

Efforts by my fellow “dissidents,” in particular the late Professor Stephen Cohen, to arrange round table discussions at the Kennedy School and elsewhere on campus (we dared not mention the word “debates”) on the Russia policy came to nought. We were snubbed. Thus, on the Harvard campus, just as in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country’s foreign policy establishment there is no open questioning of official policy on an existential question before the nation.

You spoke of Climate Change as the issue facing our civilization.  I beg to differ. If we keep on track with the demonization of our nuclear peer, Russia, and of the up and coming nuclear power China, if we bait them daily as our armed forces are now doing at their borders, we will be damned lucky to make it to 2030 not to mention 2050 and the carbon neutral world.

I also bring to your attention another take on the rising presence of foreign students in Harvard College and graduate schools about which your administration is clearly proud.  Do they make the campus more cosmopolitan and questioning of U.S. conventional wisdom about the world? or are they just another form of Davos Culture, meaning representative of the tiny minority across the 200 nations worldwide who are drawn to American life style and values but are distant from their compatriots.  Doesn’t such recruitment amount to the latest form of  cooptation, which had in the past brought in Jews and people of color from the domestic population and then Chinese and other Asians from abroad?  Are these students challenging Harvard and shaking it from its conceits?  or are they just trying hard to fit in and move along?  Wouldn’t more be achieved by sending Harvard students abroad on study programs? My own experience of the latter type was life changing: I have in mind the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship which the College conferred on me at graduation, enabling me to spend an academic year living in a dozen countries across Europe from France and the UK in the West to Russia in the East with the sole obligation to send back reports of my progress regularly.

Finally, I come to your remarks about the value of a liberal education in today’s technocratic and Covid-changed world.  I share your enthusiasm entirely. And your mentioning the views of the CEOs of major corporations who value candidates with top writing, reasoning and speaking skills versus the views of their own entry level recruitment officers fishing for narrow technical skills are surely relevant to the debate.  However, I ask how many Harvard College graduates will be entering large corporations after graduation.  I hazard the guess:  very few. Four years ago when I went to my 50th College Reunion I heard Joe Biden say in his talk to the senior class that less than 5% of graduates were going into government, which is just another large hierarchy, That confirmed what I had observed over decades of reading class books issued every five years by alumni:  almost none of my peers went into large corporations or other big entities.  They entered law firms or started their own businesses.  They were never “team players.” Tney were always too smart for that.  And I have to be persuaded that I am wrong about present day College students, who are chosen first and foremost for their IQ.

Notwithstanding these reservations, I greatly appreciated your outreach and your sincerity and  your thoughts about the real issues facing higher education today.

with best wishes

Gilbert Doctorow, College ’67

Tonight’s Zoom presentation of the Russian edition of my book on Russia in the 1990s was a celebration of the right product to the right audience. Wonderful audience of book lovers and those interested in the recent history of their city/country as recorded by an informed foreigner deemed to be reasonably objective.

The book:  Россия в бурные 1990е:  Дневники, воспоминания и документы (Russia in the turbulent 1990s: Diaries, memoirs and documents)

For those Russian speakers among you, my talk, in Russian, is set out below.  The entire event was recorded and will be posted on the website of the Golitsyn Library in the next few days.

Добрый вечер всем и спасибо Вам, что решили участвовать в этой презентации моей книги « Россия в бурные 90-е»

Первое дело я хочу выразить свою признательность моему российскому издателю, Лики России, Санкт-Петербург за плодотворное сотрудничество в создании на основании оригинального английского двухтомного издания в 1200 страниц книгу в 780 страниц на русском языке, которую я Вам презентую сегодня.

Для Вас, любителей книг, это важно знать, что мое партнерство с Лики России доказало, насколько полезно работать совместно с профессиональными редакторами, когда есть такая возможность. К сожалению, у меня не было такой возможности в США или в Европе когда я готовил первоначальное издание на английском языке . Там в Штатах многие авторы делают как я – выпускают свои книги по формуле «self-publishing», новый очень распространенный вид самиздата, который на самом деле есть возврат к системе издания книг в 18-ом и 19-ом веках.  Быть автором и консультантом по организации своей книги и еще корректором –  тяжелое бремя.

Елизавета Петровна Шелаева и ее команда дали мне профессиональный совет по сокращению текста и оптимизации интереса для перспективного читателя в этой стране, например, по добавлению фотографий, которые иллюстрируют важные моменты повествования, и  по добавлению детального Указателя имен. Они конечно проверили все факты,  изложенные в  тексте. Но, наверное, самым важным стал их вклад  в области редактирования текста с целью удаления неудачного или просто ошибочного выбора слов и выражений в переводе с английского.

На обложке книги Вы не найдете слово «перевод», тем более, не найдете имени переводчика. Условно им был я, но только условно.

Базовый перевод с английского  сделала «машина». Я использовал онлайн программу на сайте www.linguee.ru. Я загрузил английские файлы объемом до полстранницы один за другим и через секунду получил обратно русский текст. Таким образом, я получил полный перевод 780 страниц за один месяц. Совсем бесплатно. Если бы я отдал эту задачу нормальному переводчику, работа длилась бы год, и стоимость  была бы непомерно  высокой.

Хочу отметить, что я сам сумел уловить и исправить многие из странностей, которые дает машинный перевод даже сегодня, после всех замечательных достижений программного обеспечения последних лет.  И, как я сказал вначале, коллеги из Лики России произвели очистку текста до удовлетворительной степени.

Учитывая, что  Отделение иностранной литературы библиотеки имени Маяковского является одним из “спонсоров” сегодняшнего мероприятия , я думаю, что весь этот производственный процесс моей книги даст «хозяину» полезные подсказки.

Итак, я имею книгу, и эта публикация является ориентиром на моем жизненном пути. Горжусь, что сразу после выхода книги английский оригинал был куплен Нью Йоркской Публичной Библиотекой и группой других библиотек в США. Однако, честно говоря, материал в этой книге должен быть лучше оценен здесь в России, где

каждый образованный человек старше 50 лет знает про персонажей деловой, политической и культурной жизни, с которыми я познакомился, сотрудничал и которых описал в дневниковых записях, предшествующих появлению  этой книги.  В Штатах или в Европе только узкий круг специалистов их знает. Эта книга больше говорит о Вашей истории, чем о нашей.

Сейчас я собираюсь Вам обьяснить, почему моя книга является пионером в своем жанре дневников-воспоминаний о России иностранцев, работающих в Москве и в Петербурге в 90-е годы.

И в заключении я поделюсь  с вами некоторыми выводами, которые я сделал из своих дневниковых записей, опубликованных в этой книге касательно  демократии в России в ельцинские годы, вызовам перед бизнесом – и отечественном и иностранном – в то время и по поводу культурной жизни России в те годы.  Одновременно подчеркиваю, что дневники сами по себе есть материал для Вашей личной оценки и что каждый найдет свою добычу.

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Численность иностранного сообщества в российской столице в 90-е годы достигла 50.000 англо-говорящих семей в период пика 1995-1996 год. Они занимали все ключевые должности в новых открывающихся представительствах и производственных подразделениях западных фирм и международных организаций. Как я объясняю в главе «Кем мы были», среди нас были  мои сверстники в возрасте 50 лет и больше, с опытом работы в России в советское время. Но было много молодежи, на 15 – 20 лет моложе меня, которую западные фирмы набрали за знание языка и желание заработать деньги, им недоступные у себя дома, и стать менеджерами сразу после учебы.

Для нас открылась англоязычная ежедневная пресса, частично мейнстрим по политической линии, частично андеграунд, но всегда интересная, и в своей книге я  часто цитирую статьи из нее для  дополнительной меры соли и перца.

После дефолта и финансового кризиса в августе 1998, западные компании приостановили свои планы по расширению деятельности в России и резко сократили кадры. Через год половина экспатриантов уже уехала домой и их заменили русские менеджеры. Это значило не столько продвижение русских сотрудников по деловой лестнице сколько уменьшение России в глобальных расчетах международного бизнеса.

Почему почти никто из участников сообщества экспатриантов не написал о том, что они видели и делали в России в те годы?  Одной причиной является то, что  вообще и везде не в характере рядового бизнесмена вести дневники и готовить книги воспоминаний. Их цель в жизни была красиво и сочно выражена моим боссом в компании Diageо, Эндрю, когда он выступил с речью перед нами, его командой, на одном из корпоративных собраний: «Вы  должны стать очень  богатыми!» Точка.

 Кроме того, есть вопрос о конфиденциальности в договорах всех управляющих высших уровней корпоративной жизни. И даже минуя договоры  1990х, многие из этих лиц или еще работают в фирмах или являются консультантами и не могут позволить себе выступить публично как свободные личности и говорить о прошлом.

В этих вопросах я занимаю особое положение.  Во-первых, я получил образование как историк и хорошо понял со времен моей  работы над диссертацией, как важно иметь дневники, которые могут дать колорит эпохе и человеческое измерение сухим фактам в архивных папках. Кроме того, в годы моего пребывания в России в качестве генерального директора представительств ряда ведущих мировых компаний в сфереэлитных спиртных напитков, я знал, что занимаю уникальное место для наблюдения наджизнью высшего и среднего слоев русского общества и их взаимодействия с нами иностранцами в исторически редкий момент изменений.  Я  чувствовал обязательство все это зафиксировать на бумаге. Когда я наконец 5 лет назад думал написать книгу о России в 1990е годы, у меня был богатый запас дневниковых записей, написанных  понедельно за весь период. И к тому же еще, у меня были вырезки из газет того периода, которые дают общий фон для моих заметок.

Все это стояло в папках на полу в моем кабинете в Брюсселе без движения до начала пандемии Ковид-19. При локдауне  стало ясно – пора написать и опубликовать это богатство. Или сейчас или никогда.

Во-вторых,  с тех пор, как я оставил корпоративный бизнес 18 лет назад и стал аналитиком международных отношений, блогером, автором сборников эссе и участником политических ток-шоу на телевидении,  у меня нет никаких  препятствий, чтобы  делиться информацией из моего прошлого как экспатриант-управляющий в России, которая не является коммерческой тайной. Я только принял некоторые меры предосторожности: я удалил фамилии моих непосредственных боссов, которые могли бы обидеться за вторжение в их частную жизнь,  и я исключил упоминания о тех личных ссорах, которые всегда возникают в человеческих отношениях и не представляют интерес для читателя. Я следовал старому, мудрому совету, что ловишь больше мух медом, чем уксусом.

Доказательством  того, что мой подход был удачным, стал тот факт, что один из моих коллег в компании United Parcel Service, человек, который сделал блестящую карьеру в компании и более 10 лет был президентом их дочерней компании в Германии, написал мне после прочтения моей главы о своих четырех годах в компании с 1989 до 1993: «Гил,я не знал, что у тебя были такие положительные впечатления от ЮПС, когда мы работали вместе.» И он потом рекомендовал мою книгу своим коллегам и боссам в штаб- квартире фирмы в Атланте.

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Если откроете  вэб-страницу amazon.com английского издания «Россия в бурные 90-е» (Russia in the Roaring 1990s), вы найдете оценку книги, данную  редактором самого известного в Американских университетских кругах ежедневного дайджеста новостей о России Дэвида Джонсона.  Цитирую:

 « Увлекательный рассказ из первых рук о работе, политике и жизни в России в 1990-е годы. Обязательно прочтите! Очень актуально для сегодняшнего дня.» 

Я делаю акцент на его последние слова – об актуальности этой книги.  Я не сомневаюсь, что речь идет об идеализированном понятии ельцинской России как эталоне демократии по сравнению с сегодняшней России Владимира Путина, который якобы ликвидировал эту демократию и ее заменил вертикалью власти – иначе говоря, авторитарным режимом.

Имейте в виду, что 75% моей книги – дневники, которые написаны давно,  и не воспоминания, написанные  в 2021. Значит, ее содержание не отражает сегодняшнее мышление,  а наблюдения того периода о произволе, о постоянной войне исполнительного органа с избранными депутатами народа – т.е. с Государственной Думой при Ельцине.

Эти записи показывают, как правление осуществлялось  по указам и по циркулярам – письмам министерств, интерпретируя закон не по тексту законов, одобренных парламентом. Указы противоречили друг другу из-за постоянно изменяющегося равновесия сил внутри правительства между реформаторами и другими. Ясно из моих дневников, что не было никакого верховенства закона, и эта ситуация признавалась западными юристами, с которыми мои работодатели консультировались. Эти юристы сказали мне, что почти никакой нормальной работы  по защите нас в судах они не делали – они больше занимались тем, что мы называем лоббированием высшей бюрократии в пользу своих клиентов.  Одновременно, наши аудиторы от ведущих компаний мира по специальности тихо и за закрытыми дверьми признавали, что применение запретов законов или указов ex post facto в России сделало невозможно быть всегда и везде законопослушными.

Как я заметил в своих дневниковых записях, эти ведущие фирмы по счетоводству и аудиту, ведущие фирмы адвокатов доложили в корпоративные штаб- квартиры в Лондоне, в Нью Йорке, что Россия идет к реформам, и там  можно спокойно работать. Своими руками эти высокооплачиваемые эксперты  в 1990е годы создали из России при Ельцине  Потемкинскую деревню для большой публики на Западе.

В западных СМИ того периода говорили только о двух отрицательных моментах в Новой России:  коррупции и угрозе правлению про-западных Либералов со стороны Коммунистов и ультра националистов, как Жириновский и ЛДПР. И такие убеждения сложились в образованном американском обществе.

Я отметил в дневнике,  как тема  коррупции доминировала в разговорах за столом на завтраке, организованном Гарвардским Клубом  в Москве в 1998  по случаю  приезда из Пекина после поездки по Транс-Сибирской железной дороги группы Гарвардских выпускников, администраторов и их гида, профессора экономики и заместителя директора Центра Российских Исследований в Гарварде Маршалла Голдмана. Ни о чем другом эти господа не хотели слышать.

Я не отрицаю, что коррупция была везде в России того времени,  начиная со взяток мелких блюстителей общественного порядка и до самых крупных друзей Президента. Но мы в бизнесе испытывали еще более серьезные проблемы каждый день, о которых я много писал в своих дневниках – а именно наследие законодательства анти-бизнес, оставшееся после  70 лет Коммунизма.

 Да, в известных сферах Россия не имела адекватных новых законов, чтобы контролировать новые учреждения и сферы деятельности, как например  фондовая биржа или ритейл-банкинг, чтобы защитить потребителя. Но в текущих делах общего бизнеса проблема была совсем другая – огромное количество законов, которые трактовали любые коммерческие операции частного бизнеса как преступные по факту или по намерению. Правительство при Ельцине использовало банки как полицейских, требуя  оправдания  перед банкирами за каждую копейку доходов и расходов. И никто, ни российское правительство, ни западные СМИ обращали на это внимания. Единственными предметами их интереса были падающие сборы налогов, национальный счет импорт-экспорт, государственные долги и, главным образом, приватизация государственных компаний. Эти вопросы детально изложены в моих дневниковых записях.

Наконец обращаю внимание на значительную часть моей книги, посвященную Высокой Культуре в России в 1990е, среди общей нищеты и горестей населения. Это явление,  можно сказать, довольно актуально сейчас, учитывая, как в наши дни пандемии Ковид-19 культурная жизнь России – симфонические концерты, балетные спектакли и оперные постановки, спектакли драматических театров и выставки в музеях намного больше и богаче, чем в любой другой стране Европы или Америки, где многие культурные учреждения просто остаются закрыты. Моя книга подтверждает обобщение, что исполнительская, изобразительная и другие формы Культуры были и есть определяющий момент России среди народов мира.

Откуда  частые записи в моей книге о культурных мероприятиях и ведущих артистах страны?  Я имел привилегию работать на производителей предметов роскоши, у  которых принято, что бюджет на продвижение включает в себе не только рекламу, но и спонсорство элитных мероприятий. Как генеральный директор я располагал свободой  решать, на что тратить значительные суммы денег,  особенно в Петербурге, где ожидания учреждений культуры от спонсоров были скромнее по сравнению с Москвой. Я успел наладить хорошие деловые отношения с Филармонией, с Мариинским театром  в музыкальном мире. И деловые отношения в спонсорстве часто стали и приятельскими или дружескими. Так это было с директором Филармонии Антоном Гетьманом и дирижером Темиркановым. Так было с Сергеем Калагиным, дирижером Мариинского оркестра. Калагин  мне представил ведущих певцов,  баритона Василия Герелло, баса- баритона Виктора Черноморцева и тенора Сергея Найду .  Они все были талантами мирового класса, которые тоже выступали за границей.

Со временем мое спонсорство от имени своих работодателей перешло от музыки к  драматической сцене и  литературе. Так мы с женой, журналистом Ларисой Залесовой наладили близкие дружеские отношения с основателем и режиссером Театра на Таганке в Москве Юрием Любимовым и его супругой Каталиной. В антрактах  Юрий Любимов нас приглашал в свой кабинет на встречи с другими спонсорами, среди них был  Борис Березовский, губернаторы и другие деятели искусства. Мы были в театре на вечере, посвященном  80- летию  Александра Солженицына, незабываемому вечеру и по неожиданному выступлению мэра Москвы Юрия Лужкова.  С Любимовым мы тоже встретились за границей во Франции, в Бельгии и  т.д. 

Благодаря моей должности в фирме Diageo меня назначили в 1998 председателем Русского Букера, в то время  самой престижной литературной премией в стране. Я им оставался до 2002 года, то есть 2 года после моего развода с Diageo. За это время я познакомился с творческой литературной интеллигенцией, с видными деятелями среди русских издателей, в книжной торговле и директоров библиотек в провинции. 

Все это подробно описано в дневниковых записях моей книги.  Надеюсь, что Вы найдете эти записи и интересными и поучительными.

Сегодня нет времени говорить о совсем другом измерении книги – мои тогдашние оценки внутренней политики России и ее влияние на международные отношения страны, особенно с США и Западом. Я имею в виду реакцию Запада на избрание нового созыва Государственной Думы в декабре1995 года. Массовое голосование за Коммунистов и ультра-националистов, казалось,  поддержали  аргументы тех кругов на Западе, которые опасались  изменения курса России и устремление на восстановление статуса великой державы и на защиту своих национальных интересов. Фактически это и случилось : Министр Иностранных Дел, Господин «да» на всякие  навязывания Запада Андрей Козырев был заменен Евгением Примаковым, человеком совсем другого склада.  И Запад больше не стеснялся  и взял курс на расширение НАТО.  Весь этот процесс отчуждения России от Запада и наоборот продолжается до сегодняшнего дня.  Надеюсь, что будут среди моих читателей те, которые интересуются этой проблематикой.

Этим я заканчиваю свое выступление. Спасибо за внимание.  

©Gilbert Doctorow 2021

It gives me great pleasure to invite the Russian-speakers among you to register for and participate in a Zoom presentation of my latest publication hosted by the Golitsyn Library in cooperation with its parent organization, the Mayakovsky Municipal Public Library of St Petersburg, Russia. The date is 17 November, the time 18.00 Moscow time, which is 16.00 Central European Time and noon Eastern Time in the USA. My talk on that date will be delivered in Russian.

You can read about this event and register by following either of the following links:

https://pl.spb.ru/events/index.php?ELEMENT_ID=45748

https://galitzinelibrary.timepad.ru/event/1828611/

A video recording of the event will later be posted by the Mayakovsky Library on its youtube channel.

About one week later, I will be delivering a second talk about this new book in English, this at the request of the Mayakovsky Library for the sake of its English speakers. The topics I discuss then will not be the same as the first speech, so there is no repetition.  When this English talk is announced for registration, I will alert you so that non-Russian speakers among you can also participate.

Background Information about the book to be presented

Earlier this year, in February when the second volume of my Memoirs of Russianist was published by Author House in Indiana, I mentioned that a Russian-language edition would soon be coming.  In fact, such an edition did appear a few weeks later, primarily as a low-price e-book and high price paperback.  However, I did little to promote it, since its appearance was a stopgap measure, to have something available to the reading public pending the preparation of a revised edition in a thoroughly corrected translation.  That has now taken place thanks to the release in St Petersburg of Russia in the Turbulent 1990s: Diaries, Memoirs and Documents (in Russian: Россия в бурные 1990-е: Дневники, Воспоминания и Документы).

A lot has changed in going from the first edition to this new one thanks to an important change in the production process.  Whereas the original English edition was the product of self-publishing, by which I was author, editorial consultant and ultimately ‘translator,’ in a qualified sense that I will now explain, this new Russian edition is the fruit of a traditional collaboration with a quality publishing house having considerable experience with books on modern Russian history, Liki Rossii, in St Petersburg. Regrettably, there was no such potential publisher available to me in the United States or Western Europe.

I did not address this question previously, but it is now high time to explain that I ‘translated’ the original English text into the Russian text of the Author House edition using a machine translation tool provided for free online by www.linguee.ru.  Thus, I fed into their website half or a third of a printed page at a time and received a Russian text back in several seconds  The entire translation of 800 pages took me a little over one month.  Had a human translator assumed this assignment, the translation work would have taken a year and would have been prohibitively expensive.

In anticipation of your likely raised eyebrows at the notion of putting a machine translation into print, I hasten to add that I have a good deal of professional experience as editor and translator in the Russian-English language pair, though admittedly that is running in the Russian to English direction based on my being a  native speaker of English. I was well prepared to catch and correct the nonsensical word choices and even nonsensical composition of whole sentences that a machine translation even today in its greatly improved capabilities compared to a very few years ago will inevitably render. However, inevitably, given the sheer volume of text to be edited and the blindness to errors that develops with fatigue, I freely admit that there were quite a few errors in the version of my Russian edition that went to press in the USA.  With the help of an editorial team at Liki Rossii, we have flushed out most of these errors and provide in the new Petersburg edition a text that will raise few objections over linguistic quality among Russian readers.

However, the publication of a Russian edition also entailed a good many other important changes to the content of this book. 

First of all, it puts in one 780 page volume what had been 1200 pages in two volumes in the English originals. The entire narrative section of the English Volume I, which took the reader from my childhood and early education up to my becoming an expatriate manager in Russia in 1994, has been included in the new single volume edition. I also included select diary entries from 1978 – 1980 that are particularly interesting for the general reader and relevant to understanding who I was, what was my intellectual and experiential baggage, when I moved to Russia in 1994.

Secondly, we changed the title of the book to make it more comprehensible to Russian readers, for whom the notion of a “Russianist” is as alien as the notion of an “expatriate.” But this was not all.  Indeed, the original English title “Memoirs” is misleading. On the better advice of my Russian editors, we changed the subtitle to reflect the actual content of the book, which is preponderantly diaries, a much rarer literary form and potentially more valuable to professional historians and social scientists.

Finally, under the guidance of my Russian editors we put into the new volume 8 pages of mostly color photos in montage illustrating key moments in the text, especially as regards my chairmanship of the Russian Booker Literary Prize. And we added a detailed Index of Names to facilitate the reader’s navigation through the book.

I am hopeful that many of you will sign up for the book presentation and I will welcome any comments from eventual readers of the book

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021

“No taxation without representation” was the rallying cry of the American colonists in the run-up to the War of Independence.  Taxation issues arising from decades-long overspending on the military in the national conflict with England are what brought down the French monarchy and cost Louis XVI his head.  Strangely, Emanuel Macron overlooked this history when he imposed new taxes on gasoline a couple of years ago in an attempt to both raise revenues for the state and implement a “green” agenda to appeal to the environmentalists. Thus, he spawned the ‘yellow vests’ movement that caused havoc across France and has not entirely gone away up to the present.

As a professionally trained intelligence analyst, Vladimir Putin has always understood the connection between taxation and revolutions better than other heads of state. As a result, when he came to power in 2000 one of the first major reforms he oversaw was the imposition of a very low flat rate income tax.  Once in place, this had the immediate effect that was widely foreseen by political analysts in Russia and abroad: it cut away nearly all of the possibilities of graft and corruption in administration of taxes on the general population. There was nothing ‘negotiable’ to encourage bribe giving or taking. 

What few commentators picked up at the time or since is what this approach would mean ultimately for the political pact between Citizens and Power.  All that we have heard is about a different pact:  Power ensures rising prosperity and Citizens keep their mouths shut and make no claims.

So where would the State get its income to meet budgetary obligations?  In the distant past, during tsarist times the Russian state took in 32% of overall revenue from the excise and other taxes on vodka, which was a state monopoly.  In the early years of the newly independent Russian Federation, this income collapsed when the government farmed out the income to a limited circle of favored charitable organizations and friends.  In 1995 that amounted to $200 million a month disappearing from the state coffers. What gradually came to replace excise tax and to rise to about 40% of total state budgetary income was tax on oil and gas, coal and other extractive industries. Western analysts direct attention to this number, which they explain as indicative of the overconcentration of the Russian economy on oil and gas and failure to diversify its economy. Yet, in the writings of the same analysts we find tucked away the fact that oil and gas account for just 15% of Russian GDP.  In fact, the Russian economy is becoming ever more diversified, not in small measure due to Western sanctions.

The 40% of all budgetary revenue flows number is the standard today and was cited just a couple of days ago in expert articles appearing in the daily news digest Johnson’s Russia List.  The number came up in the context of the meetings in Glasgow to deal with climate change and the concerted efforts of global leaders to sharply reduce reliance on fossil fuels.  Russia’s contradictions in planning for increased production of these fuels while striving to become carbon neutral by mid-century were what underlay the attention to the role of fossil fuels production in covering the Russian state’s financial needs.

What these and other Western experts do not talk much about is the peculiarity of Russian taxation on energy producers. Russia chiefly taxes their export earnings and does not impose more than nominal excise taxes on fuels consumed within Russia. By contrast, in Belgium and many other European Union countries the high price of fuel is due to very high taxation at the gas pump.  That is to say, the Russian consumer does not feel the weight of regressive taxes on consumption at home. Indeed, in terms of advanced industrial countries, of which Russia is one, the income and excise tax burdens on Russian citizens is minimal.

To my mind it is most striking that this arrangement is not called out by the myriad analysts who daily are looking for reasons to pillory the Russian ‘regime’ for depriving its citizens of political rights and enforcing autocracy.  The logic is clear:  the Russian citizen has little reason or justification for feeling aggrieved over his slight political weight because he pays next to nothing in taxes.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021