Gore Visits City on Volga to Promote U.S. Investment

Vice President Al Gore came to this city on the Volga River on Wednesday to promote American investment in Russia’s provinces and encourage its leaders to remove barriers to further economic development.

The vice president, concluding four days of meetings with Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, praised the progress Samara has made in luring foreign investors to rebuild its economy.

“The message of the growing prosperity in Samara is that other regions in Russia will also be able to attract growing investment and more good jobs by accelerating the reforms and not hanging on to the old bureaucratic ways that never did any good anyway,” Gore said after touring a Russian-American factory that produces fiber-optic cables.

The Samara region, 530 miles southeast of Moscow, has the highest standard of living of any region outside the capital and has attracted 22 U.S. companies to start operations here. Among them are General Motors, General Electric, Pepsico and Coca-Cola.

Gore and Chernomyrdin toured the Samara Optical Cable Co., a joint venture of Corning Inc. and the Samara Cable Co. The event took on the appearance of a political campaign as women in white lab coats and men in white shirts and business suits crowded around the two politicians.

The tour also allowed Gore to highlight one of his pet themes, computer technology, as he inspected the high-tech cables being manufactured for computer communications.

“You can see here in Samara and here in this factory the benefits of Russia being integrated into the world economy,” the vice president said. “In this plant, the information superhighway for Russia is being constructed as the Internet spreads throughout Russia, bringing Russia fully into the Information Age.”

With Chernomyrdin by his side, Gore urged Russia to make further improvements in its economic climate by passing laws to protect intellectual property rights and overhaul the punitive tax system.

One of the most frequent complaints from American businesses in Russia, he noted, is the system of taxing a company’s entire revenues--not just its profits. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has proposed legislation to reform the tax code and remove that provision, but the bill has languished in parliament for months.

Nevertheless, Gore lauded Russia’s efforts to become part of the international economy and predicted that it is “only a matter of time” before Russia joins the World Trade Organization. “After all, Russia has already undergone the most dramatic peaceful transition in history, and it has taken place in only a few short years,” he said.

Samara is the third region highlighted as an attractive place for investment by the so-called Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission but the first that Gore has visited. The others are Novgorod, northwest of Moscow, and the Russian Far East, including Khabarovsk and Sakhalin Island.

Before departing from Samara for Washington, Gore praised this week’s session of the commission as “productive.”