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

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  After Gorbachev came to power and preparations for democratic reforms began, it seemed to the within-system dissidents that overcoming the inertia of evil and, transforming the USSR into a normal democratic system, was within reach. Instead, the attempt to liquidate evil in the USSR during perestroika wound up destroying the country.

  During President Yeltsin’s administration (1991–99), Russian authorities already began to adopt thinly disguised revanchist positions, first with respect to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; then toward the war in former Yugoslavia; and later with respect to other issues. The changes brought about by Gorbachev’s “Democratic Reformation”—to use leading reformer Alexander Yakovlev’s term—including withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, ending the Cold War, slowing the arms race, terminating support of terrorism and other “anti-imperialist” (that is, anti-Western) forces were now judged to be evidence of failures. Moreover, according to a twisted sort of logic, the source of all of Russia’s real and imaginary disasters was said to be democracy, which had never actually existed in Russia. What began was not simply a retreat but rather a headlong flight away from the shoots of democracy and a return to the Cold War and the attempts to impose one’s will on others without considering their interests or the interests of other countries. No later than the year 2000, a consistent assault began at home against human rights and democratic freedoms along with a restoration of the dictatorship that the outward show of free elections and democratic institutions could not conceal. The revival of Soviet-style Russian imperialism proceeded full steam ahead, including the proliferation of images of the enemy and the psychology of defending a besieged fortress. To a lesser degree, attempts were also undertaken to remilitarize the country.

  There is no shortage of explanations for why Russia has again chosen a road to nowhere. Many writers have sought to explicate why there has been an unprecedented backlash in Russian politics after the year 2000 and why there has been an explosion of political murders, persecutions, and punishments of nonconformists under the present system of Putinocracy. What follows is one such explanation.

  There is probably nothing more painful than breaking long-standing habits and stereotypes, whether it is the consumption of narcotics or the habits of thought and action. In the past thirty years the people of Russia have experienced at least two such traumatic breaks. The first was a rejection of the Marxist-Leninist dogmas on which the generation of the Soviet “builders of communism” was raised; they witnessed the dethroning of the gods, goddesses, icons, and other “sacred objects” during the Gorbachev Reformation. Many Russians viewed support for the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe in 1989, to say nothing of the reunification of Germany the following year, as a “surrender of the fruits of victory” in the Second World War. Likewise, they perceived the USSR’s real steps toward disarmament and its support of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm as tantamount to abandoning one’s foreign policy positions and “capitulating to imperialism.”

  This break, however, primarily affected the elite. The second break, the dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, was very difficult to bear for the majority of the population who was simultaneously impoverished by the depreciation of the currency. After the start of Yeltsin’s economic reforms in the early 1990s, those persons who considered themselves members of the elite felt disoriented. To be sure, it was the very same Moscow, the very same Kremlin. But objectively the country and the population had shrunk, and Russia’s economic, foreign policy, and military potential had changed as had the entire system of international relations. The Soviet imperial monster had fragmented into fifteen states, and the Third World countries with a “socialist orientation” and other “progressive forces” were left without a guide and fell into the abyss. Russians, who had been accustomed to superpower status, found all of this very hard to swallow.

  Objectively speaking, Russia was given a unique opportunity to become a normal country. The short-term democratic gains of perestroika could have developed into a new qualitative breakthrough not only on a national but also on a civilizational level. This, however, did not happen. The people who came to power in Russia were incapable of positive thinking, of discarding stereotypes, of reconsidering reality. Yeltsin’s team, which took over in 1992, was a strange mixture of theoreticians of democracy and mid-ranking Soviet functionaries who had ascended not only the many steps in their official careers but also the levels of their own incompetence. In addition, frequently a significant number of them were disguised siloviki.

  With its ambiguity, untranslatability, and widespread diffusion, the concept of siloviki, which came into general usage during the Yeltsin period, requires some explanation. In part the concept derives from the Soviet expression “power ministries and departments,” which traditionally meant the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as the Committee for State Security (KGB). In addition, on account of its influence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was included, although its power consisted only in the importance of the questions with which it dealt, its knowledge, and its ability to conduct negotiations and, if desired, to find mutually beneficial compromises.

  In the post-Soviet period, the number of power ministries and departments significantly increased. To the traditional siloviki—that is, the Ministries of Defense, Internal Affairs, Justice, and Foreign Affairs and the Federal Security Service (FSB, as the direct heir of the KGB)—was added the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which had its own troops; the Foreign Intelligence Service (previously the First Division of the KGB); the Investigations Committee; the Federal Guards Service (formerly the Ninth Division of the KGB); the Federal Courier Service; the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring; the Chief Directorate for Special Programs of the Russian President; the Administrative Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation; and the Federal Narcotics Control Service which, however, was dissolved in April 2016, and whose duties were transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some also include the General Procuratorate among the siloviki. Because siloviki are defined not only by power (for example, their possession of troops or repressive function) but also by their direct subordination to the head of state, it would be no exaggeration to say that one of the main siloviki is the Presidential Administration (especially if following the Constitution), an institution that also supports the staff of the Security Council. Apart from tradition, it is precisely according to this logic that the Ministry of Internal Affairs belongs among the siloviki.

  Sometimes the siloviki are automatically assumed to be “hawks.” Of course, this is not without foundation. For example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs—a department that is very hospitable to hawks—has always had an entire nesting site for hawks, but there are also “doves” in the Ministry of Defense and in other “military” departments.

  This is one of the reasons that the word siloviki is untranslatable. Another, no less important reason is that there is no analogous situation to that in which many siloviki are effectively outside the sphere of legislative action, to say nothing of any sort of control, and report only to the head of state. Even during Soviet times, the power ministries and departments were subordinate, at a minimum, to the Politburo. It seems that this is precisely why the concept of siloviki is impossible to translate.

  The unwillingness and inability of Russian authorities to understand and acknowledge the changes in Russia’s place and role in world affairs, and their lack of any vision of the new possibilities, inevitably led to serious consequences, including withdrawal symptoms from dictatorship at home and abroad. The Kremlin and the elite experienced a real break, like that of the most inveterate drug addict.

  A win turned into a loss. At a fork in the road, instead of choosing the uncertain but hopeful path toward a better and democratic future, Russia’s new leaders turned back and toward the phantom glory and repressive authoritarianism of the Soviet past with dire consequences for their country and the world.


  Working in the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the late 1980s on assignments that included the elimination of punitive psychiatry, I constantly ran across physicians’ diagnoses asserting that one or another patient “represented a danger to himself and those around him.” As a member of a working group drafting a law governing psychiatry, I always posed the question, just what sort of danger is indicated? Then I thought to apply this term to my own country. Could anyone really doubt that the USSR, which had destroyed millions of its own people for the sake of some abstract “radiant future” and had been seriously preparing for nuclear suicide, really represented a danger to itself and the rest of the world? Under Gorbachev it seemed that this danger could be overcome. On the one hand, power had ceased to be a refuge for the superannuated; instead, the authorities were trying to heal the country. On the other hand, power had not yet entered into the stage of “fiddling while Rome burned.” Its collapse into the infantilism of the Putin-Medvedev era was entirely unforeseen.

  This infantilism was no less dangerous than the senility of Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko, who preceded Gorbachev in power. Why do I use the term infantilism? Egocentrism and an unwillingness and inability to consider others are characteristic of infantilism. So, too, is hysteria, one of whose distinctive features is a pronounced tendency to engage in theatrics and an urge to focus attention on oneself. Such demonstrations are very typical of the Kremlin under Putin. In particular, they manifest themselves in an ostentatious eagerness to confront the West and to engage in a new cold war. The thinking of hysterical persons is based on emotion; reasonable arguments and facts have little meaning for them. Their hysteria also affects those around them. This, in turn, plays into the hands of those in power, since hysterical people are very open to suggestion and easily manipulated. Given their inability to distinguish between reality and their own fantasies, infantile adults typically live in an imagined world. Infantile leaders such as Putin are always playing games—not with lead soldiers but with human lives. They care nothing about suffering inflicted on others.

  Psychiatrists are familiar with the peculiar psychological disorder of “shared psychotic disorder” (known as folie à deux [madness of two])—that is, when a healthy person develops the delusional symptoms of another individual, and the affected person can be more dangerous than the transmitter. Similarly, the Kremlin cynically infects those around it with the phantoms of benefits and power. Meanwhile, via a process of autosuggestion, it convinces itself this is how things really are. The Russian people are easily convinced that they have been constantly humiliated by quasi-democracy, by the decolonization of countries in Eastern and Central Europe that have been occupied as a result of the Second World War, and, finally, by the normalization of relations with the West.

  The Kremlin is quite effective in palming off these false notions on the people, who readily embrace them. One of the main goals in so doing is to divert the attention of those habitually deceived persons, humiliated by their impoverishment, toward problems other than their own. This tactic is a throwback to Soviet times, when a large part of the population subordinated its own real interests to the sham interests of the state. Following the collapse of the USSR, the Kremlin’s conceptual shell game succeeded quite well because it had been skillfully prepared and facilitated by the influx of petrodollars when prices were high, making it easier for many ordinary Russians to identify their own interests with the interests of those in power.

  For many Russians, carefully fabricated myths trumped their own well-being. The ephemeral and mindless dreams of “restoring the greatness of the USSR” pushed them to support such criminal adventures as those in Chechnya, in Georgia, and in Ukraine.

  Russian society, destroyed by the Bolsheviks, had been atomized into a mere collection of people lacking in social solidarity. In the post-Soviet period, through the efforts of its masters, it became an illusory electorate.

  In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, the condemned man must become friends with his own executioner. This is precisely what the communist regime—beloved by many of its slaves—succeeded in achieving. Putin’s regime has also managed this quite well. In Nabokov’s novel, the condemned man, understanding the savagery and unreality of the world around him, rebels against it, pulls it down, and thereby abrogates his own execution. In Russia, unfortunately, this has not happened. To be sure, a protest movement has begun, and people come out on the streets from time to time to defend their own dignity. But this movement, and every one of its participants, has been ill-served by the so-called democratic leaders. Many of the condemned Russian dissidents have become reconciled to their fates.

  The regime in Russia since the year 2000 is usually identified with Vladimir Putin. This is a mistake that has cost both Russia and its foreign partners dearly. When, after two consecutive terms in office, Putin entrusted Dmitry Medvedev with safeguarding his presidential chair between 2008 and 2012, many in Russia as well as abroad believed that changes for the better were imminent. In fact, Putin had merely carried out another successful special operation. Medvedev secured the support of Russian liberal idealists, and the West waited, in vain as it happened, for Medvedev to implement his wonderful promises. The main point was lost from view. It was not a question of personalities. No matter how painful it is to admit, albeit with several caveats, the special services had really come to power for the long term. And they will never share this power with anyone nor give it up voluntarily.

  Russia is sick. Its illness is complex and psychosomatic in character. This presents itself, among other ways, as manic-depressive psychosis accompanied by acute megalomania, persecution complex, and kleptomania, all compounded by dystrophy given the objectively declining economy. The latter is true despite what was an intermittently satisfactory financial situation, at least until the imposition of increasingly tough Western sanctions in 2014. An obvious manifestation of this diagnosis is that Russia’s military organization has been in a state of accelerating disintegration since the Yeltsin era. The inadequate remilitarization of the country or at least the appearance of this, beginning under Putin, does not contradict this reality.

  Social psychologists assert that persons who have spent considerable time in places where they were deprived of their freedom, such as prisons and mental institutions, are often drawn back to such places after they are liberated. There everything is clear: they are clothed, shod, fed, given drink, sent to sleep according to a strict regimen, and awakened in the morning. But in freedom everything is different. “Yesterday I was given freedom, what shall I do with it?” Vladimir Vysotsky, Russia’s great bard of the 1970s, declaimed this prophetic question.

  How many times has Russia willingly rushed into bondage, mistaking it for freedom and democracy, thinking that it would bring happiness to itself and to those near and far? It did so without realizing that such a condition was freedom from responsibility, freedom from conscience, freedom from choice, freedom from individuality, from one’s own opinions. For the Russian people, crippled by those in power and imbued with false values, this condition was their only choice. It is the choice of those for whom fear of the authorities is virtually embedded in their DNA, the choice of a generation educated in a single way of thinking, without alternatives, bled white by the aftereffects of “class struggle” and of the Leninist-Stalinist concentration camps. This is also the only possible choice for many of the younger successors of that generation.

  Russia was also affected by kleptomania, when one steals not only from others but also from oneself, from one’s own future. This phenomenon began in 1917, when the Bolsheviks, an unscrupulous gang of thieves and persons who were not only poverty-stricken materially but also spiritually destitute, came to power. Since that time the thieving has not stopped. It acquired a special, truly Bolshevik scope during the period of privatization in the 1990s when the entire country was pillaged. Since that time the thievery has changed; there is no less robbery, but it is of a different so
rt. Corruption reigns everywhere at a level, according to Transparency International, that puts Russia in the same category as Azerbaijan, Guyana, and Sierra Leone.2 Meanwhile, the number of billionaires is growing in this impoverished country.

  Russia is sick, a disgrace that was already nurtured by Josef Stalin and by Nazism. Of course, at present, entire nations are not seeing their people deported as the Chechens and others were in Stalin’s time. But it is a fact that the ultranationalist society Pamyat’ and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia were organized on the initiative and with the participation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB. To this day, Russian Nazism, initially encouraged by the Soviet authorities, is cared for and cultivated by the state.

  The communist regime brainwashed an inert people. It did so by means of mass executions, concentration camps of the GULAG, and mind-numbing and morally destitute propaganda. Sadomasochistic perversions became the norm of life in Russia, where the state mocked the people, and they in turn were delighted by their humiliation.

  This almost worst-case development of events in Russia was brought about by a series of maneuvers at various levels. Among them we must single out psychological factors, which, in Russia, play a disproportionately large role, especially because of the high degree of suggestibility and the ease with which the majority of the population can be manipulated. Russians lacked the opportunity to acquire an instinct for freedom and an immunity from attempts to oppress them. The ruling authorities make very effective use of this, especially with respect to compromising freedom and liberalism.