by Riazanovsky
*Boris Yeltsin, Ispoved na zadannuiu temu, Sverdlovsk, 1990, pp. 226-27. The passage refers to Yeltsin's first visit to the United States, 1989.
of the Soviet Union and a major reform of Russia. Even more a Soviet and a Party product than Gorbachev, for he came from a still poorer, indeed semi-starving, background, and had no cultural baggage except that provided by the Soviet system, Yeltsin broke with that system more sharply and decisively. No adjusted Leninism or nostalgia for him. Whether the two men represent progressive stages of the transition from Communism to a new Russia, or whether their differences were merely idiosyncratic and personal, is for future historians to decide. Needless to say, Yeltsin's ideological reorientation did not change his career-long political manner of an authoritarian Communist boss. Notably, as one studies his battle with his legislatures, one has to recognize that time and again both sides acted illegally.
All in all, one should probably grant sincerity to Yeltsin in his desire to transform Russia into a capitalist, or at least market-oriented, and democratic state. The first probably means to him above all a great abundance of material goods, as in an American supermarket. The second signifies especially an abolition of Communist control and restrictions with real popular participation in political life, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Yeltsin is something of a populist, and he owes his initial rise to the very top to popular appeal and popular election. Not an economist himself, he repeatedly put his confidence in such economic reformers as Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, or Sergei Kiriyenko. Only this confidence did not last long. The enormous difficulties of the reform process and the opposition of the increasingly powerful interests that did not want economic reform, or at least that particular kind of economic reform, made the President retreat repeatedly and try something else. In this tortuous process Yeltsin, like Gorbachev before him, was vilified from all sides, and time and again buried politically if not physically by foe and even friend. Once the most acclaimed politician in Russia, Yeltsin's support in opinion polls would drop to as low as 2 or even 1 per cent. Yet Yeltsin has refused to die either physically, in spite of a very dangerous bypass operation and constant illness, or even politically, but would actively reemerge, greatly assisted by the extremely strong position of the President in the Russian constitution, often to fire leading figures in the government and change its course somewhat. George Breslauer and other specialists have commented trenchantly on this idiosyncratic ruling style. The Russian President's ability to survive and even to remain, at least in a sense, on top of Russian politics, has continuously baffled many observers, and it even led some of them to despair. Survivability, however, exacted a heavy price. Most commentators came to interpret Yeltsin's behavior simply in terms of his determination to hold on to his position rather than as a pursuit of any economic or political principles.
It was in November, 1991, that Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais joined Yeltsin's government. Gaidar was appointed deputy prime minister for economic reform on November 7, 1991, first deputy prime minister on March 2, 1992, and acting prime minister on June 15, 1992, to be replaced by prime minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin on December 14, 1992. Gaidar returned to the government as first deputy prime minister in charge of the economy in September 1993 only to be dismissed again in January 1994. Chubais became minister for privatization and chairman of the State Committee for the Management of State Property (G.K.I.). He was to serve in several important capacities later and, like other of Yeltsin's assistants, would fall in and out of the President's favor. But privatization remains his main contribution to the transformation of Russia. As one specialist put it, Chubais "had the organizational talent to create the G.K.I. from scratch; he skillfully navigated through the rifts of conflicting political and economic interests. He demonstrated rare determination and staying power to see this grandiose project through to its conclusion," Yet, perhaps inevitably, the reform attracted as much blame as praise. In part because the legislature modified Chubais's original scheme, its result was a sweeping appropriation of state possessions, sometimes on an enormous scale, by a relatively small group of people already in charge of them or connected to those in charge - a major contribution to the ongoing differentiation between the poor and the very rich.
Economic reform in general had similar and still other problems to confront. There was much effort and considerable accomplishment. Even if Russia was slow to move in new economic directions, it was not as slow as, for example, Ukraine. And all the economies switching from Communism to the market have experienced major difficulties, including that of East Germany, in spite of its great special advantages. Together with the privatization of state property, private enterprise rapidly spread in Russia, ranging from the activities of leading international companies to those of the uncounted and often miserably poor local entrepreneurs. Moscow and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg and other cities acquired a great variety of consumer goods of every kind, impossible even to imagine in Soviet times. In fact, luxury items, such as Mercedes cars, became particularly prominent. Concurrently Russians obtained the unrestricted right to travel abroad, and colonies of rich Russians appeared in the French and the Italian Rivieras, in Switzerland, and on Greek islands. The ruble, first subject to inflation, which cost many people their entire savings, seemed to stabilize in 1996 and 1997. 1997 was a good year on the Russian stock exchange, and foreign investment in the country picked up pace.
Yet, in truth, the economy had been running down. Gorbachev's indiciseveness and years lost for fundamental reform, much criticized by many, Yeltsin notably included, were repeating themselves under Yeltsin. The government kept borrowing money abroad to stay afloat. Agriculture was in shambles, with the old structure in disarray and no effective substitute available. Industry declined from year to year, with the entire huge military-industrial complex largely cost ineffective or simply useless. Short of funds, the government fell months behind in paying wages and salaries, and this lack of payments and lack of money spread throughout the economy. Pensioners were among the obvious sufferers. The situation was made worse by the fact that the Soviet Union had never had a strong social secu-
rity system, especially if we exclude the social services of the very enterprises that were collapsing. Because of a drastic shortage of funds, such state institutions as the prison system and the armed forces themselves reached a desparate state. Prisoners' conditions, political persecution and punishment aside, declined compared to the Soviet period. Soldiers and officers were "advised" by their superiors to fish, hunt, farm, and gather mushrooms in order to survive until the federal government accumulated enough cash to pay military wage arrears. At times uniformed servicemen begged in the streets. As usual, the situation was more complicated than a very brief summary can indicate. Thus the penury of the army resulted partly because the high command and certain other elements were blocking its effective reduction in size. Similarly other, and sometimes the same, interests kept hanging on to the heavy and largely obsolete defense industry. And it proved very difficult to close mines, even when they operated at a loss or became superfluous. Entrenched administrators on top had a common cause with workers who were losing their jobs, often with nothing to replace them. Yet with all the variations and qualifications, the financial catastrophe loomed ever larger.
The central Russian government found it very difficult or impossible to control and sometimes simply to influence the component parts of the huge Russian state even after the fourteen non-Russian republics had separated themselves. Eventually eighty-nine distinct autonomous units, these component parts claimed often far-reaching rights and privileges, stopping in the case of Tatarstan just short of full sovereignty, although so far only Chechnia has fought a major war for independence. As regional interests and electoral democracy gained ground, local officials had all the less reason to obey Moscow. Most of the directives from the center were simply ignored. Characteristically, the central government failed to collect the greater amount o
f the taxes due to it, one reason for its financial weakness. Corruption and crime grew rapidly, to the point that Russia was listed as the third most corrupt country on the face of the earth by an organization issuing such statistics. Exploiting privatization or exporting oil, gas, metals, and other valuable materials abroad, often with the aid of special permissions or even illegally, as well as profiting in other ways from the unhinged economy, some people quickly became enormously rich. Often compared to the robber barons of the early stage of capitalism in other countries, the Russian barons unfortunately proved to be different in that they took their enormous fortunes abroad rather than use them to develop the economy of their native land. In fact, in the post-Soviet years very much more capital left Russia than came in the form of loans, aid, and investments put together. Mafias, pornography, prostitution, and violent crime experienced an exponential growth as gangs fought for their turf. The victims of violence seemed to be especially bankers, but also people of many other occupations, including mere passers-by. The disastrous ecological condition of much of the country, brought strikingly to the attention of the world when glasnost replaced secrecy, only continued to deteriorate. Still more revealing of the ongoing disaster were the medical and mortality statistics,
with the life span, particularly for men, although already low, taking a precipitous plunge. Solzhenitsyn's jeremiads about the dying out of the Russians and Murray Feshbach's surprising statistical discoveries were gaining general acceptance.
Russian politics could not be separated from Russian economics, the two constantly interacting and usually damaging each other. Yeltsin's greatest collision with his legislature, at the time the Supreme Soviet, occurred in October, 1993. Several factors led to a catastrophe. There was a fundamental hostility between the President and many members of the legislature, who looked back to the Soviet world and opposed reform. Numerous nationalists were particularly incensed by the breakup of the Soviet Union. And in the novel political arrangement, where Yeltsin had great power and was intent on acquiring more of it, legislators were very conscious of their own governing role as well as of their perquisites. The ongoing transformation of the country increased tensions and deepened problems. The legislators, therefore, had some reason to believe that in a showdown with Yeltsin they would be supported by the army and the people. A very mixed group or, perhaps better, combination of groups, their leaders included the Vice President, Alexander Rutskoi, whom Yeltsin had hastily appointed to that position probably because of his military record and impressive appearance, and the leader of the legislature Ruslan Khasbulatov. By the end of 1992, under pressure, Yeltsin had to let Gaidar go, and the more generally acceptable Viktor Chernomyrdin became prime minister. The President survived efforts to impeach him or to limit drastically his powers by law, although on one occasion by a very narrow margin. In April 1993 he succeeded in obtaining from the legislature a popular referendum on several key issues (although not on that of private property). The results were gratifying for Yeltsin: 59 per cent supporting the President, 53 per cent supporting the social and political policies of the government, 49.5 per cent favoring an early election for President, but 67.2 per cent favoring an early election for parliament.
Early in September Yeltsin began to prepare his coup against the parliament. The plan was to disband the legislature on the grounds of its obstructionism and of the popular approval of the President and his policies in the April referendum, and to call for the election of a new legislature in December. The dissolution of the parliament was to come suddenly on the nineteenth of September, a Sunday, when its members would not be in their building, "the White House," and would thus lack the advantages of a central position, unity, and considerable armed security and protection. But, perhaps inevitably, the news leaked out and spread. Instead of abandoning the building, the legislators dug in. For ten days or so large supplies of armaments and a great variety of rebellious individuals and groups flocked into "the White House," where Rutskoi and others tried to organize them into an effective military force. Witnesses remember the standard of the Romanov family flying next to the red flag of communism; the cossacks and even the neo-Nazis were also prominent. Yeltsin's broadcast on the twenty-first
of September made the conflict and the deadlock explicit. Neither side was organized or prepared for what had happened. The inhabitants of "the White House" represented a fantastically mixed and undisciplined lot living from hour to hour on rumors of the impending government attack and wild stories of what else was happening in Moscow, the rest of the country, and the world. But the authorities also did not know what to do, as they disagreed, could not tell what military forces would effectively support them, and wished to avoid a massacre. Mediation under the auspices of the Patriarch failed, because the rebels were in an upbeat mood at that point in time and would not seriously consider a compromise settlement. To be sure, Yeltsin can be blamed for setting off the entire collision by his coup against the legislature and for acting, to put it mildly, in an unconstitutional manner. But it was the legislature that first brought violence into play. Already on the twenty-fourth of September a woman was killed when an extremist military leader in the parliament staged an attack on a military communications office. More important, on the third of October, having gained more followers and some crowd support, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov endorsed attacks on the Ostankino television center and the headquarters of the mayor of the city, i.e., tactics of a classical military rebellion and takeover. It was on the fourth that troops, with tanks, finally arrived to bombard "the White House" rebels into submission and to arrest them. More than a hundred people were killed, many of them bystanders; the building itself presented a picture of utter devastation. Although the capture of "the White House" did not prove to be a difficult military operation, Yeltsin and his assistants might have been lucky to survive as well as they did. Their fortunes depended on such factors as a general telling his friend, Rutskoi, that he was not going to obey his orders, and, of course, on the seriously delayed arrival of military support. On the twenty-ninth of February, 1994, the Duma declared an amnesty for the participants in the events of October, 1993, as well as for those who attempted the coup in August, 1991, and for other prisoners.
The parliamentary catastrophe of 1993 was followed in 1994 by a still greater disaster, the Chechen war. One of the 89 units of the new Russian Federation, the Chechens constituted less than 1 per cent of its population and were located on a far Caucasian periphery, important perhaps only for oil and gas transport. A warlike people, they had fought under Shamil until 1859, when they finally became reluctant subjects of the Russian empire. Stalin considered them disloyal in the Second World War and had them transported, under atrocious conditions, to Central Asia, from which they were allowed to return to their native land only after the supreme dictator's death. There was no love lost between them and the Russians as well as certain other Caucasian peoples. Still, Yeltsin would have been wise to have left them alone in their bitter internal struggle, or at least to have supported cautiously the less anti-Russian elements. Instead he chose a direct and major intervention. No doubt he grossly underestimated the military preparedness and the fighting quality of the Chechens, as did his Minister of
Defense, Pavel Grachev, who promised a very quick and easy victory. Also, the President did not want to antagonize Russian nationalists, and wished to assure himself and all others that a component unit could not simply leave the Russian Federation at will. Pride and stubbornness certainly entered the picture on both sides. When the initial laughable military effort failed, the Chechen capital city of Grozny and the land of Chechnia became a battlefield, now often compared to Vietnam, or, to keep the analogy closer, to Afghanistan.
Perhaps not so unexpectedly to those who followed the evolution of Russia in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, but to the great surprise of the world, the Russian army proved to be in an appaling condition and totally unprepared for a war with the Chechens. Tank assaults on Grozny witho
ut the necessary infantry support and even without maps of the city led to the isolation and annihilation of the attackers. Massive bombardment eventually reduced much of the city to rubble, but probably killed mostly its peaceful ethnic Russian inhabitants, for the Chechen urbanites were much quicker to take to the hills. As to the Chechen fighters, they proved remarkably elusive, usually escaping with ease and striking suddenly from all sides. Some 40,000 people perished in Grozny. To be sure, the Russian army did capture, or recapture, the city, but only to abandon it again. And the total Russian military casualties in Chechnia were estimated as exceeding those of the Soviet army in Afghanistan. The unavoidable death and destruction of war were underlined by particular acts of deliberate cruelty, such as the massacre of civilians in the village of Samashki by the special forces of the ministry of the interior on the sixth through the eighth of April 1995. In general, there was much cruelty on both sides, but it was the Russians who were the aggressors. About a year after the assassinations in Samashki they even succeeded in killing by a rocket from a Russian aircraft, which had homed in on a satellite telephone in Chechen headquarters, the President and largely self-appointed main leader of the Chechens Dzhokbar Dudayev, an able but disreputable character, formerly a general in the Soviet air force, but later the standard-bearer of Chechen nationalism and Islam, which he neither knew nor followed. Yet the bitter war, although deadlocked, continued. It was only several months later that Aleksandr Lebed, representing Russia, and Asian Maskhadov, a more moderate Chechen leader, signed a peace pact. Victorious, the Chechens had in effect gained their independence and retained all their land for themselves, although the formulation of their exact relationship to Russia was left for the future.