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The First National Yabloko Party Congress, which took place
in St. Petersburg last weekend, may have come as a big surprise
for many who believed that the only thing that party and its leaders
do is criticize the present administration.
Grigory Yavlinsky has often been criticized by his opponents
for being all talk and no action. They say that he has not proposed
anything substantial to, for instance, improve the country's economy.
"He had the chance to influence government policy, but refused
to take a position in the government." "He doesn't want
to cooperate with authorities." "He likes to be in opposition
to the power, and he does not need anything else." These
are the kinds of things you hear about Yavlinsky all the time.
But last weekend's congress demonstrated that these statements
aren't fair.
It turns out that Yabloko's critics have only noticed the tip
of the iceberg - Yavlinsky himself. They have failed to acknowledge
all those Yabloko people who are doing real work in regions across
Russia - many of which make corrupt local authorities decidedly
unhappy.
The main goal of the congress was to exchange experience among
Yabloko's regional representatives to make their work more effective,
especially regarding regional economics. And there was indeed
a lot of experience to share.
Our local Yabloko people discussed their experiences dealing
with municipal finance. Igor Artemyev, the former chairman of
the Municipal Finance Committee, presented the results of his
work with Governor Vladimir Yakov lev's administration, especially
on a Yabloko effort to set up a truly transparent financial-management
system.
During the two years that Artemyev was in power, he succeeded
in making the city budget more transparent and set up a new, open
system to attract bank loans to finance city projects. The system,
though, was not long-lived. Shortly after Artemyev left City Hall
in 1998, it collapsed.
"You know how it was before with loans," Artemyev told
the congress. "The authorities would make a call to a bank
and negotiate a loan at 30 percent interest, when the market rate
at the time was 25 percent. It isn't hard to figure out that the
difference ended up in somebody's pocket."
Artemyev's new system was really just a computer that gathered
data on the terms of various bank loans on a particular day when
the city needed a loan. Three officials - one from the Financial
Committee, one from the city treasury and one from the FSB - would
use this information to see if the city could have gotten a better
deal. Naturally, the authorities didn't like this system much,
but it worked well for several months anyway.
"Shortly after I left office," Artemyev said, "I
was told that the [computer running this] system had accidentally
burned up."
But one thing did remain, which is still considered a big Yabloko
achievement for city's economy: a more or less transparent budget.
Before Artemyev took office, the municipal budget was about eight
pages long. When he left, it was 600 pages.
"There are still many regions where authorities are happy
with three-page budgets, and this is intolerable," Artemyev
declared and he urged his colleagues to work on this matter when
they returned home.
"It's very easy for officials to hide wrongful spending
under vague budget articles... This our taxpayers' money, so we
must do something about it," he said.
The congress, then, was something of a public-relations action
to show the country that Yabloko is really involved in some important,
practical activity in the regions. Such an event should have taken
place a long, long time ago, but better late than never.
And it looks like it worked to some extent. There were about
300 Yabloko members from 45 regions at the congress - a number
that surprised some journalists, including one from the pro-government
news agency Itar-Tass.
"Why have you hidden the fact that there are so many members
of Yabloko working in legislative and executive branches all across
Russia?" she asked. That made Yavlinsky smile.
See the original at
http://www.sptimesrussia.com/secur/678/opinion/o_3690.htm
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