The technological level and physical condition of the majority of main and branch enterprises in the fuel and energy sector not only failed to meet contemporary standards but in many cases also failed to meet safety and environmental protection standards. More than half the equipment in the coal industry had exceeded its designed working life as had 30 percent of gas pumping units. There was more than 50 percent amortization in over half of oilfield equipment and more than a third in the gas industry. In oil refining the amortization on assets exceeded 80 percent, and it was projected that in the near future half of the capacity of all the electric power stations in the country would have to go off-line. By this time more than half the main oil pipelines had been in service for more than twenty-five years. As many as half the atomic power stations needed refurbishing.
Russia’s transport system was also antiquated. The rate of replacing rolling stock was reduced, leading to a sharp growth in the average age of the equipment, which was increasingly in poor condition. A large fraction had been in use beyond its designed service life, resulting in a drastic decline in safety and an increase in transportation costs. Losses in the merchant marine fleet and the destruction of the Arctic transportation system were a very real possibility.
The economic crisis caused serious social problems. People’s disposable real income was 40 percent lower than before the reforms of 1991. The gap between rich and poor increased dramatically, exacerbating social tensions.
Meanwhile, there was also an ecological crisis. Serious and even very serious ecological problems existed on almost a fifth of Russian territory. More than 60 percent of the urban population breathed unhealthy air containing various toxic substances in concentrations far exceeding maximum permissible levels. Approximately 40 million Russians breathed air with more than ten times the maximum permissible concentration of toxic substances. The regions of Moscow, Samar, Sverdlovsk, Irkutsk, and Kemerovo and the Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk territories were the worst offenders in this regard.
The Don, Terek, and Ural Rivers were dead. The waters in the Volga, Oka, Kama, Don, Ural, Tom, Irtysh, and Moscow Rivers were no longer potable. About half of the water draining into these rivers was polluted. Water purification systems could not cope with the toxic substances. Almost 70 percent of the Russian population consumed polluted drinking water.
Virtually no enterprises in Russia employed nonpolluting technology. An insignificant portion, less than one-fifth, of waste products was utilized and rendered harmless; the remainder piled up. Almost 1.5 billion tons of toxic and dangerous tailings, including mercury, chrome, and organic chlorides, poisoned the soil, causing irreversible degradation of the natural environment in an area of more than 2.47 million acres. Technological waste from urban industries was spread over distances of hundreds of miles (for example, 125 miles in the Moscow region). In the greater part of Russia’s European territory, soil pollution as the result of leaching of lead meant that people in numerous cities were exposed to lead pollution at more than ten times permissible levels. Across the length and breadth of Russia the soil was polluted with other heavy metals and arsenic.
Russia represented a flagrant example of just how dangerous progress is in the hands of irresponsible politicians. If nuclear blackmail was no longer a reality internationally, then inside Russia the nuclear factor operated powerfully and continuously without any deterrents. Even leaving aside the nuclear power plant meltdown at Chernobyl in April 1986, when radioactive contamination affected a wide area with a population of some 4 million people, the situation regarding nuclear power plants was intolerable. As a result of radioactive pollution from catastrophes and accidents between 1956 and 1967 and irresponsible attitudes toward nuclear waste, Russia was unquestionably the worst offender in the world. Most of the spent nuclear fuel was stored in on-site storage tanks, posing a threat to the safety of persons living in the vicinity of the nuclear power plants. Almost all nuclear power plants were located in densely populated European Russia, and about a million persons were exposed to dangers from them. It will take a century and a half to reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. This fact didn’t bother the authorities who, going back to the Soviet era, welcomed spent nuclear fuel and nuclear materials from other countries for reprocessing.
There was even more to the man-made hell in Russia. More than thirty-five hundred chemical works processed an incalculable amount of dangerous substances such as chlorine, ammonia, hydrochloric acid, and others. They often utilized antiquated and outmoded equipment, posing a threat of poisoning some 116,000 square miles with a population of about 54 million people. More than half the population of Russia was exposed to an elevated risk of technological and natural catastrophes due to poor management in combination with natural conditions. Almost 70 percent of accidents were caused by fires, explosions, and open gas and oil gushers, creating dire environmental consequences. Every year more than five hundred large-scale oil and gas pipeline ruptures occurred. As a result of the leakage of petroleum products, almost all the rivers in northwest Siberia, many other rivers, and the southern part of the Barents Sea were polluted with oil. Yet Russian authorities steadily reduced aggregate expenditures on environmental protection. In 1997 they were 60 percent less than in 1992 and constituted just 0.04 percent of total budgetary expenditures.
Economic and financial ruin combined with the horrendous state of the environment produced catastrophic consequences for the nation’s health. Over a six-year period (1990–96), the incidence of diseases such as tuberculosis increased 1.9 times, syphilis 49 times, drug addiction 6.5 times, and alcoholic psychosis 4.2 times. Deterioration in the health of pregnant women (for example, over six years the rate of anemia among them almost doubled) led to an increase of illness among newborns (1990, 14.8 percent; 1996, 31.3 percent among the total number) as well as to premature births. Twenty percent of preschool children suffered from chronic illnesses. By the time they graduated from high school only 15 percent of children could be considered healthy.
In several industrially developed districts, up to 40 percent of illnesses were caused by the harmful effects of air, water, and soil pollution; poor-quality foodstuffs and raw materials; production processes; and general conditions of life. The high levels of bacteria and viruses in drinking water caused acute intestinal infections and viral hepatitis A. The constant consumption of drinking water containing high levels of natural and man-made chemical pollutants contributed to the elevated incidence of illnesses.
Genetic damage is one of the dangerous consequences of environmental pollution. Studies of the frequency of genetic defects among urban residents exposed to varying levels of air, drinking water, and food pollution demonstrated that the degree of damage was linked to the overall level of environmental pollution by mutagenic and carcinogenic substances.
In Russia, 60,000 out of 1.2 million–1.3 million children born annually suffered from developmental birth defects and congenital illnesses. One of every four of these babies was seriously ill. Some died soon after birth; many others were invalids from childhood. About 15 percent of the population suffered from congenitally predisposed diseases such as diabetes, bronchial asthma, hypertension, psoriasis, and other illnesses. In 1999, deaths exceeded births by almost 1.7 times. Premature mortality also remained high. In the 1990s the working life for men decreased by five years and for women by one year.
In the face of this situation the authorities simply ignored the breakdown of public health and deteriorating conditions in society. They also did virtually nothing about chronic late payment of wages.
In October 1999 50 million persons, or more than 33 percent of the population, had incomes below the minimum living wage, as compared to 35 million people, or less than 25 percent, just one year earlier. In 1999 the wealthiest 10 percent of the population enjoyed incomes more than fourteen times greater than the poorest 10 percent. The difference in rates of savings was even greater: the wealthiest 20 percent of the population (by income) had 80 percent of all savin
gs, while the poorest 20 percent had only about 1 percent. Minimum income guarantees were woefully inadequate, or less than 10 percent of what constituted a subsistence wage for the working population. The paltry measures taken to alleviate the financial crisis of 1998 were mostly cosmetic and manifestly insufficient.
Objective as well as subjective factors were responsible for this state of affairs. In a step for which no preparations had been made, the union republics with a high degree of specialization departed from what had formerly been an economically integrated USSR, inevitably destroying the economic ties among them and leading to the breakdown of industry in the territory of the former USSR. Subjectively, massive privatization, also implemented without preparation, frequently led to the irrational utilization of Russia’s economic potential.
The failure of the Belovezhe Accords (1991) to regulate even a single real issue in relations among the post-Soviet states predetermined that the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) would be stillborn. The most contentious problems were the status of Crimea, which Khrushchev had given to Ukraine in 1954; the ownership of the Black Sea fleet; and the status of the Russian-speaking people in the post-Soviet states. Putin would subsequently tackle all these issues unilaterally.
The situation was exacerbated by the growth of anti-Russian sentiment in the CIS that was provoked in large measure by Boris Yeltsin himself and his team. This sentiment initially arose during the struggle for sovereignty of the Soviet republics, during which an aggressive form of nationalism was ignited. It later grew due to gross errors committed in Russia’s relations with the newly independent states. Among them were Moscow’s anti-Georgian policy, largely the result of Yeltsin’s personal antipathy toward Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze; Moscow’s support of the Abkhazian separatists; its meddling in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh; and its position regarding the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova.
There were no agreed-upon borders with other states of the CIS; thus, their external boundaries with Russia simultaneously became Russia’s borders. The problem was compounded by Russia’s dependence upon events within the CIS. The lack of reliable state borders made it difficult for Russia to deal with cross-border crime and turned Russia into a convenient staging ground for contraband, including narcotics, and facilitated illegal migration into Russia and, through transiting its territory, to third countries.
Moscow was troubled by the massive and largely uncontrolled migration of Chinese into the depopulated Far East and several districts of Siberia as Chinese citizens began to dominate several spheres of economic activity in the Far East. Moscow seriously feared changes in the demographic composition of the population in several border regions. According to various statistics, between 400,000 to 2 million Chinese were living illegally in the Far East region of the Russian Federation. Officials in Moscow were deeply concerned that the number of Chinese in the Far East would come to exceed that of the Russian population. Their concern stemmed from the fact that about 9 million people lived along Russia’s Siberian and Far Eastern border with China, while more than 100 million Chinese lived in the adjacent regions of China. Given China’s overwhelming population and the Russian authorities’ inability either to stop the massive migration of Chinese or to guide it into a positive channel, Moscow saw this influx as a serious threat to national security that might lead to Chinese military aggression against Russia under the pretext of defending the Chinese population.
The disintegration of all aspects of the nation’s military establishment, however, is what struck terror into the hearts of the masters of the Kremlin. It never occurred to them that the military in its previous form was quite unnecessary. But the significant diminution of defense potential, the sharp curtailment of the armed forces, and the loss of some of the most important elements of defense industry and of defense-related science, along with the reduction of the state’s overall operational readiness and its decreased capacity for military mobilization, were viewed as nothing short of a catastrophe. Objectively speaking, there really were several grounds for worry. Among them were an unsecured border, air and missile defense systems riddled with holes, and diminished air force and naval efficiency. They are just several general instances, but things were bad throughout the military establishment. No one had even thought of undertaking a fundamental reassessment of military-political doctrine.
Russian political and military leaders reacted very badly to the changes in Russia’s military capabilities compared to those of Soviet times. Moscow ascribed its own mistakes and miscalculations, to say nothing of the objective tendencies of the evolving world situation, to the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the loss of its influence in Eastern Europe that had already occurred in Soviet times.11 Complaints about the sharp shift in the balance of forces in Europe accompanied assertions that changes had occurred in the substance and trends of the disarmament process, resulting in the need to review relevant treaties and agreements. Moscow was particularly troubled by the strengthening and expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the eastward advancement of its infrastructure.
The expansion of NATO is a special page in the history of Russian politics. As the Cold War ended during perestroika, the USSR and NATO were on the threshold of establishing a relationship of partnership and cooperation. The breakthrough was supposed to occur at the Rome meeting of the NATO Council on November 7, 1991, that Soviet minister of foreign affairs Eduard Shevardnadze was going to attend.12 He was unable to do so, however, because of the domestic political situation.13
The West’s negative reaction to Russian president Yeltsin’s statement in December 1991 that Russia desired to become a member of NATO offended the Kremlin.14 However, cooperation continued, if only formally, until the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov as minister of foreign affairs in 1996. He poisoned the attitude of the Kremlin, parliament, and the previously neutral public toward NATO. From then on, the position Russia adopted toward NATO’s enlargement was irrational and illogical.15
Overall a paradoxical situation developed regarding national security. While remaining a mighty nuclear power, Russia virtually lost its nonnuclear defensive capability. With good reason both the Russian military leadership and the Kremlin concluded that the effectiveness of the army and its ability to guarantee the security of the borders were practically nil. From the start Russia’s military reform was doomed to failure, primarily because of the yawning gap between the military-political ambitions of the country’s leadership and part of the Russian population, on the one hand, and Russia’s economic resources, on the other.
From the outset there was no way to achieve the postulated missions. The half-hearted character of the decisions that were adopted foreordained the growth of negative tendencies in the military establishment. It acquired greater airs than it had boasted in Soviet times and became an independent threat to the security of Russia as well as that of other states. In this context it suffices to recall the bombastic talk about the need to raise the army’s fighting spirit by achieving military victory in Chechnya. The situation in the army merited special attention. Russia’s disdain of the USSR’s former allies in Central and Eastern Europe caused Moscow to underestimate their interests and influence. Viewing these countries as unfriendly, Moscow itself largely provoked the consequences that were inimical to its own interests. It was absurd virtually to ignore the states that were candidates for entry into NATO while, at the same time, trying to prevent NATO’s expansion.
From within the Kremlin’s walls Russia’s overall situation appeared catastrophic. Japan had claims on the Kuril Islands. China was engaging in demographic and economic expansion in Russia. The Russo-Mongolian border was uneasy. Relations with neighboring Georgia were tense. As for Chechnya, although it was a part of Russia, since it was close to Turkey, the border there had particularly symbolic value. Kaliningrad, the former East Prussian Königsberg that was annexed to the USSR after World War II and is a Russian exclave wedg
ed between Poland and Lithuania, experienced significant difficulties, and doubts arose as to whether it would remain part of Russian territory. Despite many attempts to break the stalemate on resolving the extremely serious problems of the Kaliningrad region, the authorities firmly refused to do anything at all. Their arguments were more than slightly peculiar and contradictory. On the one hand, they said that “the European Union will give us everything themselves.” On the other hand, they asserted that the Kaliningrad region was an internal matter and that no Europeans had any business sticking their noses into it. Objectively speaking, however, Western help was badly needed to resolve such problems as organized crime, drug addiction, AIDS, and prostitution, the indicators of which were literally off the charts in this region.
In addition to these objective difficulties, for Russia, a no less important consequence of the Soviet Union’s collapse was the loss of its global influence. The traditional Soviet mentality was unable to cope with this. However paradoxical it might seem, surveys of public opinion showed that superpower status was more important to people than their own well-being.
Given both objective reasons and the mentality of Moscow politicians, between 1992 and 2000 Russian foreign and domestic policy became unpredictable. The Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were unable to come to terms with the loss of a superpower role, the enlargement of NATO in 1999, and the loss of Russia’s former sphere of influence. Missing from view were objective trends in international relations as well as the leaders’ own mistakes and miscalculations.
Russia’s real and imagined vulnerability, the generations-long psychology of a besieged fortress, the great power syndrome combined with the basically false thesis that the fall of the USSR and what followed were due to the nation’s defeat in the Cold War—all taken together led to the kindling of revanchist feelings. The democratic reforms that had recently been undertaken were blamed for all the ills that had befallen Russia. Of course, the attempts to observe democratic standards and human rights during perestroika were facilitated by revelations regarding the many contradictions and conflicts in the USSR, with interethnic ones in the first instance. What disappeared from the view of those bent on revenge was the inconvenient truth that all the nation’s disasters were due to domestic, not foreign, reasons. The pernicious consequences of self-destruction were basically ascribed to the external adversary. This position was extremely convenient and accorded with Russian traditions since it enabled the authorities to disclaim responsibility. Instead of rethinking the new realities, they rattled their sabers and shifted responsibility onto an external threat. The processes that led toward the disintegration of the country, however, deserve special consideration.
Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin Page 18