A rchive Date
[ 29-01-2001 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Russia ]

Untouchable in Moscow, jailed in America

- Sun Columnist at Large

January 29, 2001

MOSCOW - Outrage is the official Russian reaction to the detention of Kremlin insider Pavel Borodin in New York City. Reaction on the streets of Moscow ranged from astonishment to hilarity. There were suggestions aplenty that Borodin's real crimes were stupidity and vanity.

What on earth was this supposedly clever man doing flying to the U.S. for a candlelight dinner party when the Swiss had an international warrant out for his arrest because of his alleged involvement in a US$24-million kickback and money-laundering scheme involving members of

Boris Yeltsin

's family?

The only possible explanation was that Borodin, like so many other New Russians, was so used to doing as he pleased at home that he believed he was untouchable anywhere.

Borodin's feeble explanation was that his invitation to one of the many inauguration balls for President

George W. Bush

, from a small time Florida businessman hoping to make money in Russia, constituted an "official" invitation from the government of the United States and therefore conferred upon him diplomatic immunity.

Pasha, as his friends call him, was travelling on a tourist visa because he had ignored a broad hint from the U.S embassy in Moscow. Consular officials there had told him it would take some time to consider his request for a diplomatic visa. Another factor, of course, was that Borodin sought a diplomatic visa after the embassy had closed for the day about 17 hours before his flight to the U.S.

Used to their own Byzantine intrigues, and perhaps awed by Borodin's self-importance, some of his supporters here have suggested the detention of one of Russia's finest sons had to be part of an ongoing plot to humiliate the country. Others have said it was President

Vladimir Putin

's sly way of further diminishing the influence of Yeltsin's murky inner circle.

This may be true, but the Russian ambassador did show up in New York last Thursday to plead that Borodin should be allowed to await trail in a Russian diplomatic residence because he was indispensable to the Russian state. The request was denied.

That Borodin would think he deserved global immunity from prosecution is hard to fathom.

The ambassador described him as a deputy prime minister but he is now, officially, at least, only a very minor cog in the Russian government. Having finished a long, immensely controversial term as Yeltsin's keeper of the Kremlin's multi-billion dollar assets, Putin had shuffled Borodin off to run an impotent body encouraging the politically dead notion of a union between Russia and Belarus. (A job Putin took away from him four days ago.)

However meaningless Borodin's job may have been, it probably came with the range of perquisites that thousands of senior Russian bureaucrats have come to expect since Russia embraced crony capitalism - a dacha, an apartment, a driver, a fancy western car.

Top communists tried to hide their lives of immense privilege from the threadbare masses by dressing in ill-fitting cheap polyester suits and driving Soviet cars. When they suddenly re-invented themselves as believers in a market economy, they stopped hiding the fact they had access to private food shops and oversized flats and had been able to make shopping trips to the West while the masses queued for hours for plastic shoes and bad cuts of meat.

While they officially still earn peanuts, gangs of senior and even mid-level functionaries who had once claimed to be loyal Marxist-Leninists are shameless about showing off their new perks. They revel in demonstrating that they can afford designer clothes, enrol their children in the best European and American schools and jet off to luxury holidays.

Ostentation and swagger take many outrageous forms in Russia. The elite here compete with each other to see who can build the most hideous and hideously expensive dachas. They hang out in large numbers at ridiculously expensive night clubs, casinos and restaurants, where much of Russia's business, such as it is, apparently gets done.

This is the life Pavel Borodin left to go to a party in Washington.

Whatever Borodin may think of himself, someone with good American contacts says he has already become a bit of a nuisance for the incoming Bush administration. He predicted that sooner or later the U.S. government would send the Swiss police their apologies and let Borodin go home to a country where he clearly has mastered the rules.

Until then, Boris Yeltsin's bagman is sitting in an American slammer.

Matthew can be e-mailed at

74511.357@CompuServe.com

or visit his

home page

World Fact Book

(CIA

)

]

Cross-Indexed:

The Russian Military

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