Yevgeny Primakov obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/28/yevgeny-primakov

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Yevgeny Primakov, who has died aged 85, was an outstanding foreign minister and prime minister of the Russian Federation in the 1990s. He was a bold critic of the oligarchs and their neoliberal capitalism, a staunch defender of Russian national interests after the pro-western foreign policy of the early post-Soviet years, and a man whom many Russians considered the best president their country never had.

His popularity peaked towards the end of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, when he supported inquiries into allegations of corrupt practice by Yeltsin and his entourage. They responded by unleashing a torrent of smears against him on state television and selecting Vladimir Putin, then head of the Federal Security Bureau, the KGB’s successor, to take over from Yeltsin.

Among national leaders Primakov was unusually well-educated and experienced on international issues. He spoke Arabic, had served as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and then headed his country’s top academic thinktanks, the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

He was first brought into active politics by Mikhail Gorbachev, who valued his diplomatic skills and careful analysis. In 1989 Primakov was elected chairman of one chamber of the Supreme Soviet and a year later Gorbachev appointed him to the Presidential Council, which was struggling to contain demands from republics in the Baltics and the Caucasus, as well as Ukraine, for autonomy within a reformed Soviet federation or outright independence. During the abortive counter-revolutionary coup by security chiefs and Communist party conservatives in August 1991, Primakov stayed loyal to Gorbachev. Under Yeltsin he served as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service until 1996.

In the early post-Soviet years the Russian elite was divided into liberal westernisers and pragmatic nationalists. Both camps hoped the US and other western countries would join in creating a new European security architecture for a reunited continent, but they differed on tactics. The nationalists claimed too soft a line from Moscow and too much eagerness for western loans would make the west see Russia as a weak, even defeated player. Primakov argued within the elite against the expansion of Nato into central Europe. Unwilling to accept Washington’s view of a globe characterised by a “single super-power”, he supported the neo-Gaullist idea of a multipolar world. He advocated a new strategic triangle between Russia, China and India, a concept that later led to the establishment of the Brics group – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Primakov also urged Yeltsin to spend more effort on building good relations with the former Soviet states, a policy that western hawks claimed was a return to Soviet expansionism, but which Primakov saw as the natural responsibility of a metropolitan power towards areas where large numbers of its former citizens still lived. It was no surprise when, in March 1996, Yeltsin appointed him foreign minister to replace Andrei Kozyrev, who was seen as excessively submissive to the west.

Primakov himself was an example of Soviet multiculturalism. Born to a Jewish mother and Russian father in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, he was brought up in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. After graduating from the Institute of Oriental Studies, in Moscow, in 1953, he worked for state radio and as Pravda’s Middle East correspondent until 1970, before taking up jobs in the thinktanks he was later to head.

After three years of service in domestic politics between 1989 and 1991, he returned to the field in 1998 after the bank defaults and rouble collapse in August. Parliamentary opposition to the neoliberal western-backed policies of the oligarchs and their friends – dubbed by some analysts as market Bolsheviks – had rumbled with greater or lesser intensity throughout the Yeltsin years. It reached a new peak after the default.

Moves were made to impeach Yeltsin, who tried to appease the opposition by reappointing a former prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, but the Duma rejected him. In desperation the president turned to Primakov. Here was a man of the centre-left, who, unlike the neoliberals, advocated a greater role for the state in regulating the economy and directing investment. He was also a natural conciliator. Chosen as prime minister, Primakov appointed communists as well as reformers to his cabinet and started a policy of quantitative easing, pumping money to enterprises to pay wages which had been stopped, hire more staff, and revive investment. The economy revived, helped by a surge in the price of Russia’s main export, oil.

He soon began to trouble Yeltsin by accusing Boris Berezovsky, a key oligarch and the main Kremlin fixer, of corruption and by backing an investigation by the prosecutor general into corruption allegations against Yeltsin and his family. This added to Primakov’s popularity, which was further enhanced during the crisis over Nato plans to attack Moscow’s ally, the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević, because of his ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo. Primakov tried to persuade the US not to use force.

Flying to Washington for talks on a new American loan, he was rung by the vice-president, Al Gore, and told that Nato bombing had begun. A furious Primakov ordered his plane to turn round halfway across the Atlantic. The decision was hailed in the Russian media as a dramatic sign that Russia had restored its independence and would not condone US violations of international law for the sake of cash.

Yeltsin was worried that Primakov was becoming the most popular politician in Russia, with a real chance of winning the presidential election the next year. In May 1999 Yeltsin sacked him as PM. Primakov responded by forming an electoral alliance with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, called Fatherland-All Russia, which swept into the lead in opinion polls before the Duma elections that December. This could have been a springboard for a successful campaign for the presidency a few months later.

Berezovsky’s TV station, ORT, launched a furious demonisation of Primakov, claiming he was a puppet of the communists and too old at 70 to be a proper president. At the same time the Kremlin launched a new war in Chechnya, allowing Putin, freshly installed as PM, to argue that the country needed someone young and strong to take charge. Primakov’s star faded and in February 2000 he withdrew from the presidential race, which Putin won easily.

In 2001 the new president gave Primakov a soft job as chairman of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a position he held until 2011. He was allowed one final political assignment of importance in March 2003, when Putin, using Primakov’s Arab experience, sent him to Baghdad to try to persuade Saddam Hussein to make enough concessions to stop the impending US invasion. Primakov had been entrusted by Gorbachev with a similar mission before the first Gulf war in 1991. Neither succeeded. They were rare failures for a man who managed to maintain a reputation for integrity, realism and consistency during some of Russia’s most turbulent and ideologically divisive years.

Primakov’s first wife, Laura, died in 1987. He is survived by their daughter, Nana, and by his second wife, Irina. His son Alexander died of a heart attack in 1981.

• Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov, politician, born 29 October 1929; died 26 June 2015