Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  From his job in the Security Council (1997–2001), Kovalev observed some revealing aspects of Yeltsin’s dysfunctional administration. He depicts the council mostly through his sketches of five of the six heads of this body for whom he worked. (He was ill during most of Putin’s brief tenure.) His first boss was the former speaker of the Duma Ivan Rybkin. Rybkin apparently liked the work of Kovalev’s group in fending off the hawks in government who wanted to relaunch the war in Chechnya and their work in carefully planning the delivery of humanitarian aid to a region ravaged by two years of a destructive Russo-Chechen war.

  Kovalev made a trip to Grozny to ensure that the convoy of trucks would receive safe passage. However, when all was set to go, some unknown intervention occurred, and Rybkin refused to sanction the operation. He gave no explanation. Evidently the business or other interests of some powerful individual or group would have been harmed if the aid, which represented a small token of Russia’s atonement for the war, had been delivered.

  Andrei Kokoshin came next, a rude and arrogant egocentric, according to Kovalev, who thought he didn’t need help from his staff. He soon left but only after writing bad reports on the members of the staff—namely, individuals whom he had not used. Most of the president’s orders to him had just piled up on his desk untouched. Kokoshin was interested only in issues of nuclear nonproliferation and export controls, the field for which Kovalev was the responsible official. But he did not consult with Kovalev, who, it happened, had uncovered a dangerous situation in which poverty had driven Russian scientists to sell classified information.

  At this time also the scandalous case of Yevgeny Adamov, a senior Yeltsin official, came to light. He was widely suspected of commercially motivated crimes in the field of arms exports. Kovalev says that the evidence he found on this subject pointed to criminal activity. In 1998 he was appointed as Security Council representative on Prime Minister Primakov’s commission of inquiry into the Adamov case and related issues. Kovalev writes that Adamov apparently had active links with well-known figures in the world of organized crime and that he had set up companies in the United States with a Russian émigré partner. Also, the impression grew in informed circles that the secret proliferation of nuclear materials might actually, de facto, be part of Kremlin policy. The commission’s report, signed by Primakov, recommended that Adamov be fired. However, all this work came to nothing, because Adamov’s partners included Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Diachenko and other members of the president’s political “family.” Apparently these people barred any action.

  In 2005, however, the Americans, who had long been on Adamov’s trail, had the Swiss police arrest him. After a period in jail, he was turned over to the Russians rather than the Americans. He was tried and sentenced but, thanks to his high-level associates, was soon released.

  The next head of the Security Council, a former KGB general called Nikolai Bordiuzha, was the only one of the six to leave with a positive reputation. Apparently honest, he also showed himself to be both focused and hardworking. His successor was Putin, who, on becoming prime minister four months later, passed the torch to his close associate Sergei Ivanov, who served from 1999 to 2001. Kovalev found Ivanov to be a remarkably superficial and hypocritical person, with deep prejudices and the cunning of a fox. He was also a narcissist who wore bright pink and blue shirts and ties to the office.

  However, the most incompetent of the six was the last, a former police chief called Vladimir Rushailo. He knew nothing about international affairs and wasn’t interested in them. At his first meeting with foreigners, he read out loud every word of his briefing paper, including the reference section at the end. He didn’t realize that this section included some classified information. The unsuspecting Rushailo was happy with his performance—and the foreigners were even happier.

  In 1999 Russia’s mounting political chaos and bureaucratic paralysis, both aggravated by Yeltsin’s deepening problems with alcohol, produced a situation that played into the hands of the already-prospering reactionaries. Hence occurred Yeltsin’s calculated early resignation and the orchestrated election of Putin. This was followed by Putin’s cleverly judged measures to “restore order” and by a gradual, mostly disguised trend toward reactionary policies over the next few years. From 2003, Kovalev argues, the reaction steadily discarded its disguise as being unnecessary, given that the Russian people actually supported or tolerated this reverse course.

  Here Kovalev displays the insights of a social psychologist. It is difficult, he argues, for human beings to accept and adapt to large-scale change. In the late 1980s communist dogmas and idols were destroyed wholesale. For a time the people rejoiced that they could now express their resentments and hatreds of the communist regime, could exercise some choice, and could enjoy some personal freedoms.

  But then Russia’s status as a superpower vanished. And the economic disasters of the early 1990s struck most of the population. They had to struggle just to survive. They could do nothing to right the wrongs of communism. As time went by, they began to want relief from their sense of guilt and helplessness. They craved a freedom from responsibility, conscience, and choice and a protection from knowledge about the past. They consciously or unconsciously desired strong leadership and censorship of the media.

  All this was highly convenient for Putin, who declared off the record in December 1999: “Order number one has been carried out. The FSB has successfully embedded itself in the government.” Kovalev argues convincingly that this was probably the first real chance for the secret police to take power themselves. He dismisses, as do I, the theory that Yury Andropov had a chance to do so in 1982. He points out that in 1956 Andropov had his eyes opened by the Hungarian revolution, when he was Soviet ambassador to Budapest. Also, in 1975 he had supported Soviet acceptance of the human rights provisions of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. And he had backed the promotion of “within-system dissidents” like Fyodor Burlatsky and Georgy Arbatov. None of this indicated a man who favored a dictatorship run by the secret police.

  Much of part 2 of Kovalev’s book consists of his long cry of lamentation for the fate of his country under Putin. It is a terrifying and all-too-justified indictment. He goes to the heart of the matter by quoting Nikolai Nekrasov. In 1875 the poet said that Russia had endured harder times in the past but not times that were morally more despicable (podlei). This judgment, which Kovalev finds even more applicable to the present than to 1875, evokes another example of Putin’s astounding good luck. His rule coincided with an unprecedented rise in the world prices for oil and gas. The resulting financial windfalls enabled the government to pay off its debts, fill the coffers of the treasury, and start spending serious money on remilitarization (much of it fortunately embezzled). Remilitarization was considered essential to the overarching project of “restoring Russia’s greatness (velichie).”

  Kovalev’s succession of laments is a long one. The regime took control of the national TV channels and imposed upon them an effective censorship. Dissenters and members of the opposition were isolated in a small “information ghetto,” where they could do little harm. The Kremlin dubbed Putin “the national leader” and photographed him in a wide variety of heroic roles and meetings with bikers, submariners, sportsmen, and entertainers. It promoted the Stalinist practice of having citizens voluntarily inform the authorities about suspicious or undesirable activities (stukachestvo). It organized and indoctrinated groups of young storm troopers, sometimes called Putinjugend, who have flexed their muscles on demonstrating dissidents and wayward foreign ambassadors. The Kremlin also sponsored the development of a “national ideology” (previously attempted in vain by Yeltsin), partly to make it easier to identify and target “enemies” among the population. Candidates for this status have included Caucasians, Central Asians, Islamists, and “political extremists” of various stripes, especially radical liberals and radical Russian nationalists. And it stepped up the amount of secret police eaves
dropping on citizens’ phone conversations and on various means of electronic communication.

  The regime also set up a commission under President Medvedev to counter attempts to “falsify” history that put Russia in a bad light. And it tried to prevent the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from passing a resolution condemning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The Kremlin also promoted the Russian Orthodox Church as being, in all but name, the country’s established national church and plied it with both material and nonmaterial privileges. As a result, the church’s leaders routinely bless the government in public and vote for its nominees in elections.

  On the political side, Putin’s regime eroded democratic institutions by abolishing the popular election of governors, banning the formation of blocs of parties, removing the line “against all” on election ballots, forbidding candidates to attack each other on television, narrowing the possibility of calling a referendum, reducing the minimum turnout needed for elections to be valid, and reintroducing the Soviet practices of falsifying election results and of requiring state employees to vote for the main government party. It also expanded the use of violence and murder against political opponents (Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko) and “inconvenient people” (Ivan Kiveledi, Roman Tsepov), and it waged massive violence and state terrorism in the North Caucasus, especially Chechnya, and in emergency situations like the Moscow theater and Beslan school tragedies.

  In the field of illegal arms sales, the Kremlin protected practitioners of sales from exposure. When Kovalev worked in the Security Council, he saw documents that provoked his grave doubts as to whether the government was covertly proliferating nuclear materials.

  Putin and his associates, by their example, caused corruption to become rampant in almost all spheres of life, and they encouraged xenophobia. They failed to discourage the highly dangerous practice of dedovshchina, or “systematic bullying” in the military. They pumped streams of money into an irretrievably demoralized army and a grossly inefficient weapons industry, with negligible results. They neglected the renewal of Russia’s infrastructure and the building of badly needed new roads. Further, they allowed the education and health care sectors to provide declining levels of service to those people who could not afford to pay for privatized services.

  The most serious broad problems, in Kovalev’s view, are twofold: First, the authorities act as they wish, with no sense of being accountable to the law. Second, the population has been demoralized and rendered passive and manipulable by its political emasculation and its sense of helplessness in the face of police power and all-pervasive corruption.

  In foreign policy, Kovalev sees the picture as equally gloomy. Through the regime’s unearned sense of entitlement, Russia became “a danger to itself and those around it.” Toward the West, Putin’s administration was markedly more hostile than Yeltsin’s was, but it still contrived on most occasions to mask the extent of this hostility. It also offered the West cooperation in certain limited spheres. Putin was astute to seize the opportunity presented by Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States in September 2001. He promoted the convenient Russian line that extremist Muslim terrorism is a single, interconnected, worldwide phenomenon and that therefore the West should cooperate with the Kremlin in combating such terrorism inside Russia.

  In the face of all this, Kovalev retains his hope that there are in fact some limits to the Putin regime’s anti-Western policies. He argues, plausibly, that the Russian ruling class has deposited its capital in the West for safekeeping; therefore, it cannot afford to allow Putin to go too far.

  As for Russia’s neighbors in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Kovalev recounts the manifold ways in which the Kremlin has alienated them through its bullying, its political interference, and its use of such tools as gas supply blackmail, trade embargoes, encouragement of regional secession (contrary to Russia’s traditional position), and, in the case of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, outright military force. As mentioned earlier, Kovalev rebukes the West for not opposing seriously enough the unrealistic but dangerous grandiosity of the Putin regime’s foreign policy that obtains in regard both to the CIS and to the world at large. In some cases like that of Georgia, Kovalev sees the West’s lack of concern as “amoral.” More broadly, however, the West is indulging in a morally dubious Realpolitik that is likely to contain the seeds of danger for the West itself. It does not understand that, as Kovalev perceptively writes, Russia is currently led by individuals whose personalities display “a childish willfulness” (infantilizm). This willfulness comprises egocentricity, cruelty, hysteria, theatricality, irresponsibility, emotional immaturity, an imperviousness to reason, an inability to take account of the views and interests of others and to separate fantasy from reality, and a lack of concern for other people’s suffering.

  Kovalev sees Russia—with such an albatross of leadership around its neck—as having entered a second period of stagnation (zastoi). The first was under Brezhnev and his successors in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. Today the country’s leaders are even more incompetent than were the Brezhnevite gerontocrats. They can tighten the screws, but they will continue to use terror only against individuals and small groups. They “simply won’t be capable of engaging in mass repressions.” These people have taken Russia into a dead end, and so far there is no sign of a new group of Gorbachevites waiting in the wings, preparing to extract it. Moreover, Russia is like “a disintegrating, delayed-action bomb.” Thus, internal upheavals and/or territorial fragmentation are conceivable and even likely in due course. Eventual hope lies in an arduous and protracted rebuilding of its society and state from below.

  Kovalev ends with some words from Chaadaev. His choice of quotation, like the theme of his eloquent book, shows how closely, across nearly two centuries, he and Chaadaev are in tune with each other. “It is permissible, I think,” writes Chaadaev, “in the face of our tribulations, not to share the aspirations of the unbridled patriots who have brought our country to the edge of the abyss, and who believe they can muddle through by persisting in their illusions and not caring to notice the desperate situation that they themselves have created.”

  It would have been pleasant if Kovalev could have reached a less harsh conclusion. But, like Chaadaev, he believes that a cure can proceed only from a diagnosis that discerns correctly the core of the disease. In this book he offers an unflinching, perceptive, and compellingly written diagnosis.

  Preface

  In the twilight years of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its then leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues made substantial contributions toward establishing democracy in their country. The infrastructure of Soviet totalitarianism was dismantled. The outlines of parliamentarianism, a multiparty system, the entire spectrum of civil and political rights, and authentic nongovernmental organizations appeared, and civil society began to take shape. But later it seemed, and soon became obvious, that things were regressing. In the Putin era one could only feel nostalgia for what, to borrow the words of Ivan Bunin, was the free atmosphere of the last two to three years of the USSR.1 How had Russia’s dismemberment of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea, its aggression against Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s deliberate destruction of the entire system of international security become possible? In essence, this is the key question for the future not only of Russia but of the West and all humankind as well. After all, even a weakened Russia plays an extremely important role in the contemporary world.

  It seems that some sort of evil fate is haunting Russia. Whatever happens, this evil fate turns against it and others. Russia’s efforts to enhance national and international security lead to increased threat. Both the paternalism directed toward its own people as well as the neglect of their interests lead toward extinction. The state becomes degraded by force either of circumstances or of its own accord. Democracy fails to take root in Russia, for not only are reforms always implanted “from above,” but with some sort of fat
al inevitability, they also lead to disasters. In 1881 at the height of his liberal reforms Alexander II, the tsar who abolished serfdom, was assassinated by those who supposedly cared for the welfare of the people. This resulted in the counterreforms of Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, whose feckless policies led to the Bolshevik coup d’état. The brief interregnum between the fall of the monarchy and the Bolshevik putsch was even more significant. The provisional government was so full of good intentions that it turned out to be nonviable. Decades later, after Gorbachev’s reforms began to be implemented, which did not happen until 1989, he formally retained power only until the end of 1991. Thereafter he became the most detested head of state in the history of Russia. The final collapse of the democratic transformation of Russia may definitively be dated to the autumn of 1993, when a constitutional crisis was resolved by force rather than through dialogue and compromise. Official and unofficial agents of the special services who came to power in 2000 under the collective pseudonym of Vladimir Putin exercised an inordinate influence over all aspects of Russian life.