ALL AWAIT THE ANTICRISIS PROGRAM.

First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov said that the government’s anticrisis program would be both finished by the end of the week and considered at a cabinet meeting on Saturday (October 31). Maslyukov had earlier promised to provide officials of the IMF with the program’s contents, but later said they would have to wait. “Kommersant daily,” which has been in a running battle with Maslyukov and other member’s of the Primakov cabinet, published Tuesday (October 27) what it said was a copy of the anticrisis program. According to its version of the document, money emission will not exceed 60 billion rubles–some US$3.7 billion at current exchange rates–by the end of this year. This is considerably higher than the estimate given earlier by Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov, who said that no more than 20 billion additional rubles would be printed. The document published in “Kommersant” also called for the cancellation of the decisions taken last August 17 by the government of then-Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko and then-Central Bank Chief Sergei Dubinin to freeze payment on treasury bills and devalue the ruble.

“Kommersant” said the government’s anticrisis plan represented an attempt to copy the “South Korean” growth model, based on large financial-industrial groups working in close “partnership” with the government. The newspaper predicted that this approach would yield results similar to those in South Korea, whose economy fell sharply last year and which, like Russia, had to request a multi-billion-dollar IMF loan (Kommersant daily, October 27). “Kommersant” and other media have reported that Sergei Glazev, a professional economist who heads the Federation Council’s analytical center, is one of the masterminds behind the government’s anticrisis plan. Glazev, who once served in the government of Yegor Gaidar, is a strong proponent of state regulation and Asian-style industrial policy.

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