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Article: Boris Yeltsin's fatal folly
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- July 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Society for Advancement of Education Jul 1996. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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TWO GREAT FAILINGS stand behind Moscow's relentless I suppression of Chechnya: greed and folly. The former is endemic to a new system of quasi-criminal economics that has arisen from the post-Soviet shambles; the latter is a strange inability, author Barbara Tuchman once observed, "to perceive that a given policy is harming rather than serving self-interest."
Greed is harder to document, especially in the murky world of contemporary Russia where the LUKoil company has emerged as one of the largest oil companies in the world and an uncounted player in Russia's national politics. LUKoil is critical to Moscow, providing cheap fuel for the military in exchange for deferred taxes, and ample ...