Rumblings in Russia.

• Author: KAGARLITSKY, BORIS
• Position: Russian government

`The time of Yeltsin and his cronies is coming to an end'

The war in the Balkans has succeeded in one respect: It has revealed the scale of anti-American feeling in Russian society, especially among younger people. The reason does not lie in solidarity with "brother Slavs" and still less in the Orthodox faith--most young people in Russia do not even know how to cross themselves properly. The war in Yugoslavia simply gave them the chance to express what they had already been thinking for a long time.

For young people, the free market reforms dictated by Washington have meant a shortage of good jobs, expensive but nevertheless third-rate education, and the lack of career prospects. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Russia has been making one-sided concessions to Washington in exchange for promises that we would be accepted into the "civilized world" (as though we had previously been savages and barbarians). But instead we received only poverty, humiliation, and economic collapse.

After NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia began, Russians splattered the American consulate in Moscow with rotten eggs and paint bombs. A turning point had been reached. People had grown tired of feeling helpless, of being humiliated, of being ashamed of themselves. They wanted to act.

The failure of the Americans in the Balkans became the subject of jokes, and Russian computer hackers began assaults on official sites in the United States to the accompaniment of sympathetic reports in the press. One tabloid devoted a front page to portraits of Clinton and Milosevic, with the caption A PRISON CELL IS HUNGRY FOR THEM. Another published a puzzle in which readers were required to determine, on the basis of egg stains, which of the windows of the U.S. Embassy were in the cross-hairs of a gun-sight. A correspondent in the Balkans for the liberal Novaya Gazeta admitted that he dreamed of the Russian Black Sea Fleet sailing to the Adriatic, even though he acknowledged that this would mean war.

Yevgeny Primakov, Russia's prime minister for eight months until Boris Yeltsin dismissed him on May 12, caught the change of mood expertly. He won massive support for his decision to turn his aircraft around over the Atlantic and return to Moscow rather than meet with the Clinton Administration as it began its war against Yugoslavia.

He also departed from the absolute devotion to the free market, which has so marked the Yeltsin period. His power rested on the managers of military-industrial enterprises that had remained within the state sector, and which therefore had not collapsed like privatized industry. In conducting negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on writing off part of Russia's debt, the Primakov government created an important precedent for debtor countries.

Yeltsin appointed Primakov under duress as a crisis gripped the country last August when the economy crashed. The political problem was not simply that no free market politician had sufficient...