Russia’s New ‘Old Guard’ Premier

If Viktor S. Chernomyrdin’s rise to become prime minister of Russia were to become a movie, it might be titled, “The Old Guard Rides Again.”

The 54-year-old former Soviet minister of the gas industry looked distressingly familiar as he made his brief, gruff acceptance speech at the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies on Monday. The ugly brown flowered tie with the steely blue suit; the combed-back white hair and the official, formal style. . . .

The apparatchik is back.

Actually, it is unfair to lump Chernomyrdin (pronounced Chair-no-MIR-din) in with the hard-liners of the old Communist nomenklatura, or elite. Although his biography follows the classic pattern of any middle-aged careerist Communist, he sees himself--and others see him--as much more of an industrial technocrat than an ideologue of the old days.

As deputy prime minister in charge of energy over recent months, he has given strong verbal support to outgoing Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar’s team of radical reformers. When he differed with them, it was over such tactical points as when to release state control of oil prices, not whether to release it at all.

Still, his accession to the pinnacle of the Russian government somehow had a retro feeling: gone are the bold print ties of the young Gaidar team; the browns are back in.

Chernomyrdin is a man known for his ability to oversee one particular industry well, a former oil refinery worker whose main asset is considered his skill as a manager.

“He’s a fantastic gas professional,” said Mikhail Leontiev, a columnist for the weekly Moscow News. “But he’s also a person who’s classically incapable of being a prime minister. He doesn’t think in economic terms.”

Gazprom, the giant state gas concern that Chernomyrdin headed, “is an enormous concern and it works successfully, but it works like an empire. It’s run purely administratively,” Leontiev said.

In other words, Chernomyrdin is a product of the old Communist system of state planning and centralized distribution. After working his way up in the oil industry and then the gas industry, he served in the Communist Party apparatus from 1978 to 1982, helping run the energy industry by administrative fiat, rather than by market forces.

Now, deputy Victor Veremchuk of Vladivostok said, you have to wonder: “Can a person with such baggage accept a market economy?” Veremchuk had his doubts. “This is a heavy day for Russia,” he said. “We’ll have to start all over again from the beginning.”

That was going a little far. Along with praising Chernomyrdin’s hands-on experience, deputies generally called him a centrist, a middle-of-the-roader who might consolidate political forces as the radical Gaidar could not.