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| Igor Yurgens |
Igor Yurgens, executive secretary of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, is a little wistful. “We used to have regular meetings with president Putin, roundtable discussions, normally in the presence of the prime minister and chief of staff,” he says. “We delivered a message, and usually he listened attentively, then we prepared a draft law if required. Then we’d work through bilateral committees and commissions.”
But invitations from the Kremlin have got scarcer. “There has been a pause since the Khordorkovsky case,” Yurgens says. “We haven’t had any of these roundtable discussions since June last year. We had a chance to express some of our concerns to the president at our congress in October 2003, and that’s it. So now we’re waiting for a new meeting. It’s supposed to take place this month, and we’re hoping the dialogue will be resumed there. But at the moment, it’s pretty tense.”
The Union, perhaps Russia’s most powerful pressure group, has represented business interests since about 1989. However, it came to prominence in 2000, after president Vladimir Putin was elected.
Yurgens recalls: “Putin asked big business to come to one place [the Union] and work out a common strategy, and not come to the Kremlin one by one, as they had done in Yeltsin’s time.” Thus, in 2000, the oligarchs joined the 15,000-company-strong Union. “They managed to acquire the top position in the organization through their colossal financial power.” Almost all the positions on the Union’s 25-strong board are now held by representatives of the oligarch holding companies. Yurgens himself joined as vice-president and executive secretary in 2001.
However, the tentative balance between the state and big business was broken last July with the beginning of the attack on oil company Yukos’s shareholders. Perhaps because he didn’t hold any major assets, Yurgens was one of the few members of the business community unafraid to speak out against the attack on Yukos CEO Mikhail Khordorkovsky.
He says: “It’s way beyond the truth to say that Khordorkovsky was trying to privatize the political process. He was intelligent enough to realize that a balanced system with checks on executive power was a more healthy situation for his business. But he overestimated himself and Yukos. He was arrogant.”
What will happen to Khordorkovsky? “It’s hard to say. It depends how Putin wants to be perceived – as gracious and forgiving, or as tough. Everything depends not on the court but on the predisposition of one man. This is not helpful.”
And what will happen to the Yukos shares seized by the government? “It would be a disaster if they de-privatize it or violate the private ownership rules and give the company to someone else. But probably they will try and take it and give it to a state company, to Rosneft or someone else.”
It’s a measure of the sentiment among the business community in Moscow that, a few minutes after saying it would be a disaster if the Kremlin were to nationalize Yukos, Yurgens says: “I was in France in the 1980s, and Mitterrand nationalized some private banks. It was not a disaster. They just had to be re-privatized again. The nationalization of one or two key assets – I don’t see a catastrophe in that. Our worry is that they will not stop at one or two assets. They will try to grab it all back.”
A think-tank called Russian Axis recently suggested that Putin was about to embark on a “systemic solution” to the domination of the Russian economy by the oligarchs, by going after the remaining ones. Similar fears lay behind the steep drop in the share price of Norilsk Nickel last month, after it was rumoured that the state prosecutor was now targeting Norilsk owner Vladimir Potanin.
But Yurgens thinks Putin will halt the attacks on the oligarchs, mainly because he wants to be part of the normal international community. He says: “The real check on executive power is Putin’s desire to be a member of the G8.”
The Union is, or was, a pressure group with real influence, in a country without a very developed civil society. Yurgens says: “Civil society will grow as the middle class grows. We should be more active politically, but it will always be difficult because our population is spread so thinly across such a huge territory that sometimes we don’t have grass-roots civil society.”
Part of the problem with the growth of civil society is that government has always suspected that it is merely a front for oligarch interests, and so it sees no injustice in suppressing it. For example, the Moscow Helsinki human rights group, a leading advocacy organization, was recently attacked by government figures for being a front for exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, which it denied.
The challenge for liberal or business pressure groups now will be to detach themselves financially and ideologically from the oligarchs.
That applies as much to the Union as to any other group. Yurgens says: “The structure needs to be changed. We will change the composition of the board of directors. We will represent more of the regional organizations, and more of the SMEs and new groups.”
Yurgens still has some fight in him. “If we [the business community] deal with our own destinies, if we regroup, then we will be protected. But if big business is passive, slavish and servile, the anti-business, nationalist agenda will grow. Business should formulate its own agenda, not be a lapdog.” Julian Evans