Word: russian
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Swiss and Russian officials are investigating two other cases with far smaller dollar values but with huge political stakes. In one instance Swiss authorities raided two companies, named Andava and Forus. They were allegedly used by Boris Berezovsky--one of Russia's richest titans and an intimate of Yeltsin who helped bankroll his 1996 re-election, and reputedly handles the Yeltsin family finances--to misappropriate hard-currency receipts diverted from the Russian airline Aeroflot. In the other instance a Swiss-based construction company called Mabetex allegedly paid bribes to government officials, notably Pavel Borodin, another Yeltsin intimate and manager...
...effort to stage-manage Russia's successful transformation might have failed. The expectation of quick and miraculous success was naive when applied to a country with a scant history of capitalism, no experience with democracy, and no tradition of the rule of law. Whatever Washington did was a crapshoot. Russians have always cheated the system to survive or thrive, first the Czars, then the Party, now the elected government. Men who were once at home in the old regime hold power in the new, leaving little ground for reform to take root. Since the whole economy collapsed in August...
...West candidates in the running to replace Yeltsin when a new President is elected in what everyone hopes will be the first-ever peaceful transfer of power next June. The scandals are potent political fodder not only because they discredit Yeltsin but also because they fit into a popular Russian myth that the U.S. somehow engineered the country's woes. As eager as Russians are to blame their own tainted leaders, they also point an accusatory finger at Washington for their failures...
...scandals are only tangentially about what Russia might have stolen from the West. Most of the billions looted or laundered belonged to Russia. The real victims have been the millions of Russian workers and pensioners who are often paid late by a government without the cash to function. The most chilling consequence of that for Americans is not financial but psychological. When Russia repudiated communism in 1991, Western values enjoyed immense admiration and influence. That has vanished as millions of Russians have learned to equate reform with corruption and free markets with theft and misery. The hostility...
...steadfastly overlooking Russia's failures. Officials complained privately to Moscow from time to time about rampant corruption, but to listen to them now you'd think it had been at the top of their list for years. Suddenly they are trumpeting Clinton's stern warning recently to the latest Russian Prime Minister that corruption "could eat the heart out of Russian society." Last week Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged that the "Herculean task" of transforming Russia has not been "fully achieved...