Assassination Puts Democracy in Peril

BRUSSELS — I know that dark doorway into the gloomy dom in St. Petersburg, with its smells of urine and cabbage, the wet filth sloshing underfoot at this time of year. “Hitchcock would have loved our sinister Russian doorways,” Galina V. Starovoitova said with a grin, the last time I saw her in London.

That was where they shot her. Two shadowy figures lurking on the stairs, waiting for her to return the Friday before last. One was a woman, say Russian detectives, from the fingerprints on the abandoned Beretta handgun. The other was a man with an unusual gun, an Argan-2000 machine pistol, once popular with U.S. Special Forces and now manufactured under license in Serbia.

A burst of gunfire in the winter night, echoing in that gloomy hall, the stench of cordite and then fresh blood drenching out the usual smells. Starovoitova dead and her aide grievously wounded. Then the sound of the assassins running, the clatter as their guns were tossed aside in the Russian darkness.

In the ensuing silence, the only sound to be heard was a clock somewhere, ticking out the countdown of the Yeltsin era and of Russian democracy.

“I used to think Russia was going through her Weimar phase,” Starovoitova once told me, referring to that ill-fated German democracy of the 1920s, which collapsed with the Great Depression and the coming of Adolf Hitler. “But Weimar had cabaret, it had creativity, it had Bauhaus and Thomas Mann. We have a disco Weimar: disco and the war in Chechnya.”

Disco and death. Four years ago, the first journalist was assassinated, almost certainly by military men fearing Dmitri Kholodov’s further exposures of illegal sales of military equipment. A suitcase bomb blew his legs off and he bled to death. Vladislav N. Listyev was far better known, the popular head of the ORT television network. His 1995 murder was said to be “related to his business activities.”

In some ways, the most fearsome killing this year was the murder of the head of privatization in St. Petersburg, Mikhail Manevitch. He was shot, almost certainly by a trained military sniper, with a single bullet to the head, through the back window of his car. St. Petersburg is getting a reputation. Last week, Izvestia called it “the center of political terror in Russia.” Dmitri Filippov, a powerful local businessman and banker, was gunned down, apparently for reluctance to make political contributions. Then came the shooting of one of the main collectors of such contributions, Mikhail Osherov, an aide to the speaker of the Duma, whom Starovoitova condemned as an unreformed communist crook.

When I first met Starovoitova, in those heady, hopeful days of perestroika, when Russia’s democrats began to emerge, blinking cautiously in the light, she hardly spoke English. She taught herself, convinced that Russian democracy would need constant interaction with the West, and fearing the gigantic task of transforming the sclerotic Soviet system might never be achieved by Russians alone.

In at least one depressing way, Russia is back where it started, being feebly ruled from a Kremlin hospital ward. But a terrifying proportion of other things have changed for the worse. There is hunger now, and homelessness. The collapse of the state finances in August, with the stunning default on the debt, has torpedoed the one sign of hope: that the privatized economy was starting to work.

The state is bankrupt, and First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri D. Maslyukov said last week that after 10 years of declining production, Russia would probably soon become an oil importer. Nothing could be more serious. Russia lives by exporting energy, mainly to Western Europe. The energy sector accounts for more than half the value of the Moscow stock exchange and almost a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product. The decline in the oil price, from $24 a barrel in January 1997, to $12 in July this year, triggered the debt default.

Above all, there is crime, extortion and contract killing. It began with extortion, preying on Russia’s fledgling businessmen. Then it became contract murders and car bombs, first against rival Mafia gangs, then against bankers. Now the killings are political. Starovoitova was the sixth member of the Duma, the Russian Parliament, to be assassinated.

The political rhetoric of Russian democracy has always been ugly, thanks to rabid populists like Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, leader of the ridiculously named Liberal Democratic Party. This fall, it became worse, with naked anti-Semitism being advocated in the Duma. Accusations of fraud and corruption fly back and forth between Boris N. Yeltsin’s supporters and the big businessmen and media magnates whose relentless propaganda in the last presidential election ensured his return to power.

Starovoitova stood valiantly against all this, just as she lost her place at Yeltsin’s side as his advisor on ethnic policies by opposing the war in Chechnya. Her last campaign in St. Petersburg was to try and rally the city’s liberals and democrats into a single voting slate dedicated to cleaning up corruption. Her prime target was Gennady N. Seleznyov, Communist and speaker of the Duma, whom she accused of extorting funds from businesses to finance his presidential campaign.

If there is any hope to be found in this political landscape of desperate gloom, it is the way Russia’s battered and dispirited democrats and reformers gathered at Starovoitova’s funeral to say her memorial should be a new political coalition to fight next year’s parliamentary elections on a reform ticket.

Three former prime ministers came to her burial Tuesday at the Alexander Nevsky cathedral. With them came Anatoly B. Chubais, the reformer who ran the privatization program and then master-minded Yeltsin’s reelection.

“They are killing our friends. They are killing our comrades,” Chubais said over her grave. “They want to frighten us, but they won’t succeed.”

He went on to promise an announcement of a new center-right coalition dedicated to free markets and democracy. At the same time, the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov, announced the formation of a moderate center-left coalition called “Fatherland,” which looks to be his vehicle for the presidential elections.

If these political plans work, and it remains a big if, we could at last see Russia move toward a stable two-party political system. So far, Russia has known the politics of the vozhd (the boss) whether it was tsar or commissar, Leonid I. Brezhnev or Yeltsin.

That may be the key to Russia’s future: whether it can advance to the kind of pluralism and party system that Starovoitova embraced or remain locked in the politics of the vozhd.

The omens are not good. In these twilight days of the Yeltsin era, the jockeying for position has seen three dominant candidates emerge. The first is the tough former general, Alexander I. Lebed, now installed as a Siberian provincial governor, who is a nationalist, though the rest of his politics seem worryingly vague.

Then there is Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, a former Pravda journalist (where he was a Middle East expert and befriended Iraq’s Saddam Hussein) who then headed the KGB’s successor before serving as foreign minister. He has done a decent job of stabilizing the political situation since being appointed prime minister, over his own strenuous objections, after the debt default.

The man to watch is Luzhkov, not only the most powerful mayor on Earth, but the only one with his own defense budget. He “adopted” a Russian battle cruiser that the navy could no longer afford. He has a proven track record of running Moscow with efficiency: metro trains run and buildings get finished on time. He has his own TV network and national newspaper, Rossiya, and plenty of money from his astute way of insisting that Moscow’s big companies, from auto plants to fast food, give the city a shareholding in return for property.

His criticism of the debt default has won him some friends among Western bankers, and his vocal admiration of Tony Blair’s “third way” has almost convinced the British prime minister that Luzhkov could become a sort of social democrat. Luzhkov also has bankrolled political allies in provincial elections around the country, including the new mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev.

“Never trust a vozhd,” was one of Starovoitova’s slogans. “They represent the kind of politics we have to grow beyond.” The problem for a demoralized country that still commands tens of thousands of nuclear warheads is that another vozhd may be all the system can produce.