RUSSIA - Political Instability

The nightmare of a Russia split into nuclear-armed entities was evoked as Alexander Lebed, the maverick general who is a leading contender to succeed Yeltsin as president in 2000, offered to take over a Siberian missile unit if the Kremlin did not begin paying the troops. In a letter to Premier Kiriyenko made public on July 24 and timed to coincide with the visit of US Vice- President Al Gore to Moscow, Lebed said: "The officers are hungry, the officers are very angry... We, the people of Krasnoyarsk (a Siberian province

four times the size of France, of which Lebed is the elected governor), are not yet a rich people. But in exchange of the status of a nuclear territory, we will, if you like, feed the unit, becoming, with India and Pakistan, a headache for the world community".

Lebed added: "All the facts taken together lead to the sad conclusion that for the Russian government there is no land beyond the Urals... I am not an extremist. Compared to the thoughts of the officers at the Uzhursk missile unit, my thoughts are as pure as a baby's teardrop".

Gore played down Lebed's threat, saying the ex-paratrooper was probably just try-ing to attract federal attention to the problem of unpaid salaries in the military. But the Moscow government was not as sanguine about Lebed's emergence as a champion of the army and of the often ignored Russian hinterland. It is said that almost 650 Russian soldiers committed suicide in 1997, compared to 500 in 1996. In mid-1997 the chief financial officer at the prestigious Moscow Military District HQ with a rank of colonel committed suicide and his friends said this was prompted "by the grave financial position" of his family.

Coal miners, still unpaid, have recently stepped up pressure on the government by threatening to block every branch of the Trans-Siberian railway and to sever the European part of Russia from the far east until Moscow. On July 27, about 400 miners began a blockade of the southern Urals section of the railway and local officials said later the protests were spreading along the railway route. The protests jeopardised the local Mayak nuclear plant, the largest of its kind in Russia, which depends on coal-fired electricity for its cooling systems. Coal miners from the Arctic town of Vorkuta on June 11 began picketing the government HQ in the White House in Moscow. Unpaid employees in the oil, gas, coal and defence industries have all threatened a "hot summer" of action.