Word: chernomyrdin
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...your leader. That's the worst possible thing President Clinton could ask when he arrives in Moscow Tuesday, because Russia's political leadership is no closer to filling its power vacuum than it is to resolving the country's economic crisis. The Duma on Monday rejected Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister, while Boris Yeltsin has already accepted a lame-duck presidency by agreeing to relinquish many of his executive powers. That leaves the tycoon kingmaker Boris Berezovsky as the most powerful man in Moscow, but the latter-day Rasputin is not on Clinton's itinerary...
...Chernomyrdin is trying to cobble together a coalition involving Communists and other opposition parties, but Monday's rejection was a bid by the opposition-controlled Duma to secure further concessions before confirming him in a later ballot. Western lenders are alarmed at the concessions Chernomyrdin has already offered, such as reintroducing Soviet-era price and exchange controls. Any further horse-trading will simply confirm doubts about a Chernomyrdin government's ability to stop the economic hemorrhaging...
...Yeltsin era is over and Russia's future is uncertain. Prospects for economic reform are bleak. Whether or not Yeltsin remains in office, power will be in the hands of Viktor Chernomyrdin's unlikely coalition of technocrats, Communists and tycoons. That new administration plans to revive price controls and other Soviet-era economic mechanisms that may well smother what's left of the county's infant entrepreneurship...
...only certainty under Chernomyrdin's coalition is that things will get worse before they get better. But after surviving seven grueling decades of communism and a Nazi invasion that killed 20 million people in only four years, it's not surprising that Russians greet news of financial collapse in Moscow not with panic, but with a resigned shrug...
...shelters. "Traders look at Russia, and they see Indonesia with nukes," says Baumohl. "The same failing economy, the same social unrest. But with Russia, there's that spectre that if the wrong people come to power, we've got the Cold War all over again." Baumohl looks at Viktor Chernomyrdin's return to the Kremlin as a "soft coup" -- but what comes next could be very, very hard...