No one seems to know where the kid-faced Moscow politician is these days. Police would love to find out -- Stankevich, once a champion of democracy and civil liberties, has been charged with graft and could wind up spending 15 years in prison.
No life story, perhaps, better explains Russia's ongoing political drama and looming chance of a Communist restoration. Stankevich once observed that a "young democracy's worst enemy is itself." And some "democrats" as well, many Russians would now add.
In the late 1980s, in the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, Stankevich, now 42, an eloquent, clean-cut alumnus of the Lenin State Teacher Training College, thrilled Moscow crowds weary of Soviet orthodoxy and repression by shouting, "Russia, forgive us!" Today the politician, is on the lam.
Stankevich is hardly alone. Other radicals, democrats and reformers whose names became household words in Russia over the past decade have dropped out of public life, moved abroad, cashed in on their fame or functions, or experienced a shift in convictions or loyalties.
If a common sentiment among Russians is that the demokraty have proved inept and corrupt in power, it is in part due to fallen idols like Stankevich. Among Russian reformers, no one knew U.S. politics more intimately, or spoke better English. His thesis, the fruit of 10 years of study, dealt with the U.S. Congress. He even spent a day on Capitol Hill with New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and his staff.
When, in 1989, the Soviet Union finally got a genuine parliament, Stankevich, then 35, was elected to it.
For many Russians used to Politburo gerontocrats, the freshly scrubbed history teacher personified their hopes.
"Now, all of a sudden, we were seeing normal people! Young, nice-looking chaps knowing how to put across what they thought; in short, people very much like Western politicians," Marina Shakina of the New Times magazine wrote. "If democracy amounts to procedure, then the top connoisseur and performer of democratic ceremonies was none other than Sergei Stankevich."
If Moscow prosecutors are correct, simple greed got the best of the reader of Thomas Jefferson or Alexis de Tocqueville. In 1992, while he was still counselor on political affairs to Yeltsin and Popov's right-hand man at Moscow City Hall, Stankevich squeezed $6 million from Russia's currency-strapped government to finance a gala Red Square concert. The event bombed; Jose Carreras, the Spanish tenor, was the only big name to come.
But the $6 million had been quickly shipped to a London bank. Soon a receipt surfaced carrying Stankevich's signature for $10,000. Stankevich said he had earned the money from lectures he gave in London, then claimed he took the cash on behalf of a sick Russian boy who needed medical treatment in Israel. He denied any wrongdoing and claimed he was the target of a "complicated, multi-step political scenario."
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