Reformers in Russia Cash In and Move On

When the next page in the Second Russian Revolution is written, Sergei B. Stankevich, onetime advisor to President Boris N. Yeltsin, former deputy Moscow mayor and pioneering reformer, will not be around to contribute.

No one, in fact, seems to know where the kid-faced Moscow politician is these days.

Police would love to find out--Stankevich, once a champion of democracy and civil liberties, has been charged with graft and could wind up spending 15 years in prison.

No life track, perhaps, better explains Russia’s ongoing political drama and looming chance of a Communist restoration.

Stankevich once observed that “a young democracy’s worst enemy is itself.” And some “democrats” as well, many Russians would now add.

In the late 1980s, in the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, Stankevich, an eloquent, clean-cut alumnus of the Lenin State Teacher Training College, thrilled Moscow crowds weary of Soviet orthodoxy and repression by shouting, “Russia, forgive us!”

Today, with his country in turmoil, the 42-year-old politician is on the lam. Moscow acquaintances believe that he may be in Hollywood, where, they report, the daughter of a girlfriend had dreams of making it in films.

His exit may have been hasty and inglorious, but Stankevich is hardly alone.

Other radicals, democrats and reformers whose names became household words in Russia over the past decade have dropped out of public life, moved abroad, cashed in on their fame or functions, or experienced a seismic shift in convictions or loyalties.

Meanwhile, Russian Communists have been reorganizing, and their candidate, Gennady A. Zyuganov, is now favored to beat Yeltsin in the June 16 presidential election.

Future historians will fix the blame for Russia’s ongoing mess, and for the ultimate success or failure of free enterprise and parliamentary pluralism here after almost three-quarters of a century of single-party rule and state ownership.

But with fewer than 75 days left until voters must decide whether or not to put a Communist back in command of the Kremlin, some Russians already hold the radicals and reformers of yore responsible for not having made more of the chance, perhaps fleeting, to refashion their country.

Alexander V. Minkin, a muckraking correspondent, used a profanity when discussing onetime reformers like Stankevich, who has been the subject of a series of exposes in Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.

“I am angry . . . not because of what they stole,” Minkin said. “There is plenty to steal in Russia, after all! But because of the way they handled things, they have brought us to the brink we are at today.”

Six winters ago, at a private dinner held on a glacial January night in Moscow, a pensive Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Siberian-born poet who made a career out of skirting the bounds of orthodoxy, jotted down and read aloud a poem that warned that “saving our fatherland halfway would fail.”

Al Gore, now U.S. vice president, was at the table, along with four prominent intellectuals closely linked to the struggle against the old Soviet ways. Of that foursome, only one man, Lev Gushchin, now editor of Ogonyok magazine, still plays an active role in Russian public life.

Of the other three, Vitaly A. Korotich, Ogonyok’s former editor, is now a college professor in Massachusetts. Reform economist Gavriil K. Popov, swept into Moscow City Hall as mayor, quit in 1992 with few Muscovites believing that he was leaving office a poor man.

As for Yevtushenko, he has been more visible of late in the United States than in Russia. He gave a reading of poems in February to a well-heeled audience at a Boston Philharmonic concert, looking, one reviewer said, “like a prosperous capitalist banker.”

“They’ve all kind of prospered; they’ve made money out of the deal,” Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, said of the reformers and anti-establishment heroes of yesteryear. “Still others have just turned their backs on things.”

Abel G. Aganbegyan--former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s first economic advisor--now runs a Moscow institute with multiple and lucrative business ventures, including a $130-million international business center now under construction.

The longtime face and voice of the Kremlin’s “new thinking,” former Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov, is teaching at a college in Pennsylvania.

Leonid A. Radzhikovsky, a Moscow political journalist and former deputy in the Duma, the lower house of parliament, said it was inescapable that personalities would rocket to prominence in turbulent times and fade just as fast.

“It’s like when you have a fire in the house,” he said. “The people who get to the window first are the ones you see first. The people didn’t change, the times did.”

By his tally, in the 450-seat Duma fewer than 15 lawmakers remain who also served in the republic’s first reform-era legislature, which braved the Kremlin’s displeasure to proclaim Russia’s “sovereignty” June 11, 1990.

Of course not everybody has cashed in or dropped out, and Gorbachev himself is even attempting a comeback that could land him in the presidential sweepstakes against Yeltsin.

From a desk in a Moscow government office put at his disposal, Lev A. Ponamarev, co-chairman of Democratic Russia, the umbrella organization founded in October 1990 to fight the Communists at the polls, is trying to rally “democratic forces.”

“I am still a leader of the democratic movement. But the movement has shrunk,” he admitted.

The leader of Democratic Russia is toiling for Yeltsin’s reelection, but only because he believes that Zyuganov would be a far worse choice for Russia.

In a recent article, Ponamarev complained that “in the president’s entourage, not one former dissident remains,” though there are former Communist apparatchiks aplenty.

For one prominent reformer, it was inevitable in retrospect that he and his fellow thinkers would be elbowed aside by the forces unleashed by market economics.

In October 1988, Roald Z. Sagdeyev, head of the Soviet unmanned space program, scientific advisor to Gorbachev and admiring colleague of the late Andrei D. Sakharov, a fellow physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, became the first member of the Soviet parliament in memory to cast a “no” vote against a bill endorsed by the Communist leadership.

Today, Sagdeyev, 63, teaches physics at the University of Maryland and lives in West Virginia with his wife, Susan Eisenhower.

The 1990 marriage between the granddaughter of a U.S. president and an ethnic Tatar who belonged to the Soviet military-industrial complex was a unique event that said the Cold War was over.

In the years since, Sagdeyev has been cured of his illusions about the role he and other change-minded intellectuals could play in Russia’s rebirth.

“I think it was a kind of dream that we would be able to stay on top of the political processes, to be like a navigator or a guru,” Sagdeyev said in a telephone interview from his campus office in College Park, Md.

Instead, he said, Russian intellectuals were quickly supplanted by “pragmatists” and entrepreneurs hungry to take control of state assets.

Ironically, in many cases, the new bosses turned out to be the same as the old.

A recent survey by one Moscow newspaper found that 78% of the political leadership and 61% of the economic leadership of the new Russia emerged from the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura, or elite.

“For the public, since there has been such universal theft, this has created the impression that the whole [reform] business was, well, not a land grab but a property grab,” Goldman said.

If a common sentiment among Russians is that the demokraty have proved inept and corrupt in power, it is in part due to fallen idols such as Stankevich.

Among Russian reformers, no one knew U.S. politics more intimately or spoke better English.

His thesis, the fruit of 10 years of study, dealt with the U.S. Congress. He spent a day on Capitol Hill with Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and his staff.

When in 1989 the Soviet Union finally got a genuine parliament, Stankevich, then 35, was elected to it and helped form the Inter-regional Group of Deputies, the first organized opposition inside the Soviet system in nearly seven decades.

For many Russians used to Politburo gerontocrats, the freshly scrubbed history teacher personified their hopes for the future.

“Now, all of a sudden, we were seeing normal people! Young, nice-looking chaps knowing how to put across what they thought; in short, people very much like Western politicians,” Marina Shakina of the New Times magazine wrote.

“If democracy amounts to procedure, then the top connoisseur and performer of democratic ceremonies was none other than Sergei Stankevich.”

If Moscow prosecutors are correct, simple greed got the best of the reader of Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill.

In 1992, while he was still counselor on political affairs to Yeltsin and Popov’s right-hand man at Moscow City Hall, Stankevich managed to squeeze $6 million from Russia’s currency-strapped government to finance a gala concert at Red Square.

The event bombed; Jose Carreras, the Spanish tenor, was the only big name to come.

But the $6 million had been quickly shipped to a London bank. Soon a receipt surfaced carrying Stankevich’s signature for $10,000.

Stankevich said he had earned the money from lectures he gave in London, then claimed he took the cash on behalf of a sick Russian boy who needed treatment in Israel.

He denied any wrongdoing and claimed that he was the target of a “complicated, multi-step political scenario.”

He slipped from sight after failing to win reelection to the Duma in December, which meant he no longer had parliamentary immunity.

Last month, he was charged with violating Article 173 of the Russian Criminal Code.