Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [209]
20. The results of the December 12, 1993, elections were:
Liberal Democratic (ultranationalist) 22.79% (59 seats)
Russia’s Choice (Reformist) i5.38% (40 seats)
Communist Party i2.35% (32 seats)
Women of Russia (Centrist) 8.i0% (2i seats)
Agrarian (Communist farmer) 7.90% (2i seats)
Yavlinsky-Boldyrev-Lukin Reform 7.83% (20 seats)
Russian Party of Unity and Accord (reform) 6.76% (i8 seats)
Democratic Party (Centrist) 5.5% (i4 seats)
21. Only Albania, Armenia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Latvia have kept their Communists completely out of their governing circles.
22. “Every Man a Tsar,” The New Yorker, Vol. 69, December 27, 1993, p. 8.
23. For the environmental costs of the transition see Murral Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992), pp. 565-566. The problem is less ongoing despoilation than the economic inability to clean up the mess left by the Soviet regime. Chernobyl, still operating, and Lake Baikal, among the world’s largest freshwater bodies (still dead for all practical purposes), are perhaps the best known examples of the economic disincentives to ecologically sound policy produced by the new market economy.
24. Michael Specter, “Climb in Russia’s Death Rate,” The New York Times, March 6, 1994, p. A i. Falling life expectancy reflects the reemergence of diseases like cholera and tuberculosis as well as the swath being cut by crime and alcoholism through the Russian male population. Vodka, a Russian sop under commissars and tsars alike, is the one consumer item available at a realistic price (about a dollar a bottle).
25. For a check on these generalizations, readers may wish to consult the United Nations Children’s Fund’s Crisis in Mortality, Health and Nutrition, a survey of health conditions from 1989 to 1994 in Russia, Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine. UNICEF director James P. Grant states: “This health crisis is unprecedented in the peacetime history of Europe in this century,” and is “obviously … eroding political support for the reforms that are under way.” Barbara Crossette, “U.N. Study Finds a Free Eastern Europe Less Healthy,” The New York Times, October 7, 1994, p. A 13.
26. Claire Sterling, “Redfellas,” The New Republic, April 11, 1994, pp. 19-20. Also see her new book Thieves’ World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
27. Celestine Bohlen, “Russian Mobsters Grow More Violent and Pervasive,” The New York Times, August 16, 1993, p. A 1.
28. Serge Schmemann, “Russia Lurches into Reform,” The New York Times, February 20, 1994, p. A 1.
29. In recent times, even foreign businesses have become targets and prudent investors have had to hire their own heavily armed security forces. Only McWorld’s symbolic masters like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have been spared, not perhaps because they are totems but because the publicity would be bad (because they are totems!). See Michael Specter, “US Business and the Russian Mob,” The New York Times, July 8, 1994, p. D 1.
30. About measures that only Zhirinovsky’s party supported in parliament, the newspaper Isvestia commented: “Every time Russia has tried to do something for the greater good of the state, it has ended in political terror and dictatorship and extraordinary powers in the hands of extraordinary bodies.” David Gurevich is moved to ask, “Is there no third way between Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Michael Corleone?” in “The MOB—Today’s K.G.B.,” The New York Times, February 19, 1994, p. A 19. There is not yet a clear answer to his question.
31. Andrew Solomon, “Young Russia’s Defiant