Both the budget itself and Yabloko's stance with regard to it and to the government in general will bear watching in 1999.
Meanwhile, this year is starting off with the same policy proposal as last year: bank restructuring and centralization. This time the pretext isn't political scandal or incestuous relationships with media blocs and government officials; it's bank solvency in the wake of the financial crisis.
An organization, the Agency for Restructuring Lending Organizations (ARCO), has been set up for just that. Meetings between ARCO and the Central Bank have resulted in announcements that about 680 out of around 1,500 Russian banks will be insolvent; the announcement included a plea for six months' grace to see which banks would emerge truly insolvent. (Read: "even after we get our personnel in them...or in their competitors".)
ARCO is being allocated funds to rescue favoured - I mean, distressed - banks. Premier Yevgeny Primakov has approved a plan to sell bonds to pay for the (presumably off-budget) appropriations. Off-budget appropriations for a selective rescue plan for an always politically and economically hot sector. Of course, no hint of politics or possibility of corruption whatsoever. Our civil servants in Moscow are too fine and upstanding, and bear the weight of too fine a reputation, for that. And the politicians would never stoop to bending policy to help their friends fill their war chests - let alone within a year of Duma elections and 18 months of the presidential election. Just ask the auditors.
Meanwhile, Primakov is taking up Yeltsin's purge tune, promising a governmental housecleaning at an undetermined but presumably approaching date. He wants to strengthen discipline in his government. This was in the context of discussing measures to strengthen enforcement of the government alcohol monopoly, which was declared last fall.
Given both the long Russian experience (as in since America was a thinly populated set of colonies and Europe was ruled by monarchs) with trying to control drunkenness, plus the fun we in America had with Prohibition (of alcohol) in the 1920s and have had with prohibition (of some other drugs) since the 1980s, this purge might extend well beyond the Kremlin before it's over. Especially since tobacco seems to be next on Moscow's list of money-makers. (Who says the Russians disdain America's example to the world?)
