A history of Russia

by Riazanovsky

  One great fear of Yeltsin and his government, associated with the Chechen war, has not so far materialized: The inability to suppress the Chechens did not lead, in a domino effect, to other nationalities or parts of the country separating themselves from Moscow. But in other major respects the war was indeed a disaster. The utterly miserable performance of the Russian army was a shame and a scandal for patriotic Russians, and even Russians in general, and it was blamed directly on Yeltsin, Grachev, and their assistants. Perhaps an even more signifi-

  cant divide came to separate the President from the liberals who could not pardon him the stubborn pursuit of the Chechen war and its cruelty. The much respected Sergei Kovalev's resignation from his position as head of the President's human rights commission was more than an individual gesture. Yeltsin's humanitarian and progressive mystique was no more. Abroad, too, the Chechen war produced a most painful impression, even if no state rushed to recognize the new Chechen government.

  Yeltsin's bloody victory over the parliament in October 1993 did not establish either cooperation or a stable balance between the executive and the legislative branches of the Russian government. To be sure, the successful referendum on the new constitution of December 12, 1993, further strengthened the President's powerful position. In full charge of the executive, he could appoint and dismiss ministers and even pass measures by executive decree, when legislative approval was not available. Yet ultimately he needed the agreement of the two-house legislature - the Upper House, the Federation Council, representing the federal units of the state, and the Lower House, the Duma, representing the people at large - to enact a budget and a full legislative program. The parliament could also reject the proposed prime minister, although a third rejection would lead to the dissolution of the legislature and new elections, a threat that was to be effective in obtaining approval. Thus obviously important, although not dominant, the legislature, and in particular the Duma, remained on the whole hostile to Yeltsin throughout his tenure of office. There were several reasons for that unfortunate situation. As has been repeatedly noted, neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin made a determined effort to establish and lead a strong political party. They had little appreciation of party politics and preferred to think of themselves as national leaders on a presumably higher plane. Moreover, through the years Russian liberals and moderates could not create an effective united party, but stayed divided into quarreling factions. The most prominent liberal politician, the able economist Grigory Yavlinsky, has been frequently criticized for his vanity and exclu-siveness, but it may be unfair to single him out in that connection. By contrast, the only major party available and ready to operate, given an opportunity, was the communist party, and it was, of course, in the opposition. Besides, very hard times gave rise to all kinds of opposition, including the fantastic Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his so-called Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

  Zhirinovsky became politically prominent rather suddenly in 1991, when he came in third in the first Russian presidential election won by Yeltsin. Even more striking, indeed stunning for many Russians and foreigners alike, were the results of the Duma election of December 14, 1993, when Zhirinovsky's party, the L.D.P.R., took 23 per cent of the total vote. Of course, much of Zhirinovsky's support was a protest vote for a man who challenged the government, the establishment, and even the world in a most extreme and vulgar manner, including physical assault on his opponents in the Duma, who promised everything to all, and who never hesitated to lie or to deny well-known facts. Yet beyond that

  amazing behavior - similar in some important ways to that of Zhirinovsky's friend, the French Right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen - many observers seemed to detect a fundamental fanaticism even as Zhirinovsky proposed such solutions for establishing peace in the world as another major war, which would destroy Turkey and the Turks and ensure the legitimate Russian expansion to the south. Zhirinovsky certainly made his contribution to the frequently drawn analogy between Yeltsin's Russia and the Weimar Republic in Germany. But the December 17, 1995, Duma election reduced the vote for the L.D.RR. from 23 to 11 per cent, and even Zhirinovsky's own antics appeared gradually to lose, in spite of his inventiveness, much of their impact and news value.

  Yeltsin had much more reason to worry about the communist, or neo-communist, revival and the coming presidential election in June 1996. In fact, his chances of political survival looked minimal. After five years of his rule most of the Russian people were in dire and still worsening economic straits, with no end to their tribulations in sight. As already stated, agriculture was in shambles, the industrial output kept declining, the government went on borrowing money, but did not even provide wages or social security payments to its millions of employees and retirees who had to survive somehow for weeks, months, and sometimes years on their own. The war in Chechnia continued. Enormous corruption and organized crime held sway in the country. The polls indicated that the popular approval and support of Yeltsin had fallen to several percentage points. Yeltsin's main challenger, the communist leader Genady Zyuganov, while deficient in charisma and even in simple personal appeal, had a huge nationwide party behind him and aimed to mobilize all discontent, including the nationalist variety.

  The issue in government circles came to be whether to allow the election to take place or whether to scrap it by declaring a national emergency, ostensibly because of the Chechen war or for other reasons. Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin's personal guard, friend, and closest collaborator, devoted to his master but also a schemer in his own right, joined other generally conservative assistants who believed that an election was bound to be a catastrophe. Yet they lost out to the pressure exercised by Chubais and other reformers, by the billionaires, the so-called "oligarchs," such as Boris Berezovsky and Aleksandr Gusinsky, and by foreign countries, not to mention Yeltsin's own irrepressible optimism. So the President held the election and, indeed, won it, in spite of bad health, which was again causing problems. The first round of voting, on June 16, gave Yeltsin 35 per cent of the vote, Zyuganov 32 per cent, Aleksandr Lebed 15 per cent, and so on down the line, with Gorbachev getting one-half of one per cent. Because no one obtained a majority of votes, the two leading candidates had to compete in a second round. Further strengthened by Lebed's support, on the third of July Yeltsin gained 53.8 per cent of the vote to win the election and remain the one and only President of the Russian Federation.

  Yeltsin had certain advantages in the election, and he utilized them to the full

  and even beyond the legally proper and permissible. Notably the government had a virtual monopoly on television and used this opportunity to display communists' oppression and atrocities during their seventy-five years of rule. The entire administrative and bureaucratic apparatus was urged to do everything possible to turn out the right vote. The press was also heavily in favor of the incumbent President. Yet in this case the situation was more complex: Russian press was generally pluralistic and free, as well as strongly critical of the government, but the fear of Zyuganov and the communists made it rally solidly behind Yeltsin, including some publications that switched from sharp criticism to support, only to return to criticism after the election. Moreover, the communists had their advantages, too. They represented the only huge, well-organized, and territorially comprehensive political party in Russia, while Yeltsin in effect had no party of his own. Candidates could have their representatives at the polling places, but only the communists provided them everywhere. The fact was that Russians rejected communism, which they knew only too well, and also did not believe that it could become something different and truly desirable. In particular, the communists had great difficulty expanding their electorate in the second round after they had gathered the faithful and the susceptible protesters in the first. Later analyses indicated that the party relied very heavily for support on the elderly and the retired, and had little acceptance among the young.

  Aleksandr Lebed, of course, also helped Yeltsin. A blunt and determined general, he attract
ed attention as commander of the Fourteenth Army by both protecting the interests of the Russian population and reestablishing peace in the newly independent republic of Moldova. Characteristically, in the process he went beyond his instructions. In the presidential election he stood out as a classic law and order candidate, uncontaminated by corruption and collapse around him and dedicated to setting matters straight. Lebed's main comparative weakness was that he had neither the government nor the communist party (or any party of any significance) behind him. His choice of Yeltsin over Zyuganov in the runoff probably made the outcome of the election inevitable. In fact, two days after the first round Lebed joined Yeltsin's government as the National Security Advisor. As already mentioned, it was Lebed who signed for Russia the treaty of peace with the Chechens. Not surpisingly, Lebed's government service did not last long, with Yeltsin accusing him of exceeding his authority and Lebed bitterly criticizing government policy. Striking out on his own, Lebed won in the runoff election of May 17, 1998, the governorship of the huge Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, in the process defeating the government candidate and boosting his presidential aspirations for the year 2000. Only Yeltsin himself, Yeltsin's closest collaborator and long-time prime minister Chernomyrdin, Primakov, Zyuganov, and perhaps the energetic and successful mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov seemed to rival Lebed in political prominence.

  Yeltsin's electoral victory in June and July 1996 was followed by other events propitious for the President and his government. Yate in August the Chechen war

  finally came to an end. On the fifth of November Yeltsin underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery. In spite of many fears, the surgery proved to be successful and eventually enabled the President to return to his work with a renewed vigor. The year 1997 witnessed a stabilization of the ruble in Russia, and a great increase in capitalist activity, international and national, in the country. Many participants and observers believed that the country had finally turned the corner. On September 19 it was even announced that because of a bumper crop Russia would be able for the first time in fifty years to export grain.

  Encouraged by these and certain other developments, but continuously beset by mounting indebtedness, the increasing poverty, even penury, of the people, the inability of the government to collect most of the taxes, and of industry to increase production Yeltsin turned to one more burst of economic reform. Characteristically, he dismissed his ministers, including this time even the prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had the remarkable distinction of having lasted in that position for several years. Chernomyrdin, an old-timer, and manager of the enormous natural gas monopoly in Soviet days, with a certain relaxed manner and numerous connections in important circles, was told by the President that younger and more energetic reformers were needed, while he, Chernomyrdin, should prepate for the presidential election in the year 2000. The new leader was a relatively little-known economist Sergei Kiriyenko, who after a long battle was finally endorsed by the Duma and became prime minister in March 1998. The plan was, at last, to cut government expenses and subsidies, to collect taxes, and to streamline and modernize the Russian economy. The results, unfortunately, were worse than ever. For one thing, Russia became embroiled in the world financial crisis, which began in Asia but was spreading to other continents. Another devastating factor outside Russian control was the continuing low price of natural gas and oil, which constituted over 50 per cent in value of Russian exports. But, probably more important, Russia was paying for a failure to restructure effectively its economy and operating a kind of a pyramid scheme where only ever-new international loans kept the economic machinery going. Several such loans were indeed obtained by Chubais and others in the new crisis, but they proved insufficient. Once the ruble was again destabilized and government financial obligations repudiated in part or at least put in question, the financial world collapsed in Yeltsin's Russia in August 1998 and the months following. This time not only the mass of the Russian people was affected, but even many of the financial and business groups that had prospered earlier. As to the foreigners who were operating in the country, most of them left much faster than they had come in. Even the International Monetary Fund refused further loans. Kiriyenko was dismissed. Yeltsin again proposed Chernomyrdin as prime minister, but this time he could not push him through the Duma, because of the obvious long-term connection between the candidate and the system that had failed so disastrously.

  Next an effort was made to achieve a compromise and rally support of the Duma and the people behind a new government. Foreign minister Evgeny Primakov, who had connections and an important past in the communist party and the police establishment, switched his state functions to become prime minister, while newcomers to the governing group included a number of outsiders as well as some former officials brought back to high office. Yeltsin's prestige sank lower than ever, and it was expected that he would be promptly forced to resign or at least become unmistakably a mere figurehead. Yet, although again ailing, the President apparently thought differently, and he merely assured the Russians that he would not run for office in the year 2000. (Whether he could run was a matter of dispute, depending on whether his first election would count towards the constitutional limit enacted later - eventually the supreme court decided that it would count.). But neither Primakov nor anyone else seemed to dominate the scene. In fact, the government appeared to have no clear economic policy as it promised on the one hand to continue the free-market reforms and the modernization of Russia and on the other to pay quickly its huge debts to employees and retirees and to bring the population of the country out of its penury. Nor was it going to accomplish the latter by printing all the money needed and producing another great inflation, which, in any case, was rising rapidly.

  Foreign Policy

  It was Gorbachev and his associates, not Yeltsin and his government, who made the historic decision to let Eastern Europe go and who ended the cold war. They also made a major contribution to the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, although in that development Yeltsin too played a prominent part. The net result was a transformation of international relations and, indeed, of the political map. Most important, the dread of an impending mutual atomic annihilation disappeared. Much as one can rightly worry about the possibility of an atomic war, for example, between Pakistan and India, or about the use of atomic weapons by some rogue government or even a private group, these dangers do not begin to compare to the Armageddon threatened by the intense, decades-long confrontation of the two superpowers. International relations lost their apocalyptic character and became more a matter of common sense and adjustment. Yeltsin and Russian foreign ministers, in particular Aleksandr Kozyrev, continued the orientation and the work of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze.

  Taking into account the immensity of the change, the breakup of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the sudden appearance of fifteen independent states in Europe and Asia, where there had previously been one, occurred amazingly peacefully, in particular as far as Russia was concerned. To be sure, the bloody and tragic Chechen war must be kept in mind, although, strictly speaking, it represented a struggle within the Russian Federation itself rather than between that

  Federation and other newly created republics. Otherwise, the Russian army played a secondary role in the bitter fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which came to center on Nagorny Karabakh, in purportedly supporting or even promoting the rebellion of the Abkhazians against Georgia, in guarding the southern border of Tajikistan, and in still other instances of crisis and war. Characteristically, Russian interventions were marginal both geographically and in their importance for the evolution of Russia proper.

  More central were Russian relations with Ukraine and Belarus, connected with Russia by centuries of history and by very numerous cultural and personal ties, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Russian relations with the Baltic states to the west and northern Kazakhstan to the east, which, while not "Russian" in the same sense as Ukraine and Belarus, or even Slavic, contained a
very large percentage of Russians in their populations. In fact, some thirty million ethnic Russians found themselves outside the Russian Federation, perhaps twenty million in Ukraine and ten million in other new republics, where sometimes, as in such small countries as Estonia and Latvia, they formed a third or more of the population. Russian-Ukranian relations have been most significant and problematic. Whereas much of eastern Ukraine is ethnically Russian and Russians constitute the largest ethnicity also in the Crimea, transferred to Ukraine by Soviet authorities as recently as 1954, western Ukraine is not only solidly Ukrainian, but also, in part, ardently nationalist, and, again in part, even different in religion, professing Uniate Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy. Under the circumstances, and pressed hard by their respective nationalists, the two governments did well to settle their mutual affairs peacefully, as reflected in the treaty of friendship of May 30-31, 1997, signed by Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, confirming the boundary between the two countries and agreeing that Russia lease from Ukraine for twenty years the great Crimean naval base of Sevastopel (so prominent in the Crimean War of 1853-56). The Russian need for peace followed readily from everything discussed previously; as to Ukraine, it was probably worse off economically than Russia, on which it depended for fuel and other imports and to which it was heavily in debt.

  White Russia, or Belarus, has been very different from Ukraine. Behind Ukraine in developing a sense of identity or nationalism of any kind (the Lithuanian-Russian state is one of its main historical assets), Belarus has also exhibited little or no hostility towards Russia, a feeling that has been one of the inspirations of Ukranian nationalism. Poor, its economy unreformed, and dependent on Russia for fuel and other needs, Belarus seemed to be in many ways an ideal junior partner for its giant neighbor. And indeed Belarus and Russia signed on April 2, 1997, a Treaty of Union. Although Yeltsin presented that treaty as a major success, it was not clear what it meant or where it would lead. In fact, economists in particular asked, what could Russia gain from Belarus? In addition, the crude, dictatorial head of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, kept arousing opposition at home and even in the world (as when he was