For thirty-eight years Soviet leaders sought to come to grips with Stalin’s legacy, by no means a simple matter for adherents of Marxism-Leninism. There could be no doubt that Stalin had achieved many of the goals set by the Bolsheviks in 1917: he had imposed a form of socialism on Russia by completing the transfer of ownership in the means of production to the state, and he had modernized the country, transforming it into a predominantly industrial and literate society. Moreover, in leading the country during the Second World War and the successful testing of an atomic bomb in 1949, he had achieved something well beyond Lenin’s dreams in 1917. He had guided the Soviet Union into the ranks of the great world powers, turning it into a rival of the United States in military strength and influence around the world.
But these achievements came at a heavy price. The government devoted vast financial and human resources to the military services to the neglect of the civilian sector, which remained underfunded, poorly administered, and shot through with corruption. As a consequence, the standard of living of the vast majority of people, very low to begin with, lagged far behind that of other industrialized countries. Furthermore, in the immediate postwar period, the heavy hand of the dictatorship was not relaxed and the fear that the security forces might at any moment unleash a new wave of terror produced a mood of apathy among the people, many of whom lost confidence in their government and the ideology that supposedly guided it. In the summer of 1953, there were signs that this mood was turning into outright hostility towards the authorities in Russia itself and in some of the satellite countries. Revolts broke out in several slave labor camps (probably the bloodiest one in Vorkuta), and there was serious unrest in the Czech city of Pilsen and, on an even larger scale, in East Germany. Overwhelmed by the problems they faced, Stalin’s successors floundered, alternating between reform and liberalization, on the one hand, and a tightening of controls over society, on the other. Neither approach succeeded. Within twenty-five years of Stalin’s death, it was becoming increasingly evident that the socialist experiment was not fulfilling its promises of material progress and social harmony. In the end, in 1991, it collapsed even faster and with less bloodshed than had tsarism in 1917.
The leaders who succeeded Stalin quickly settled on a course of extensive reform, but because of their ideological commitments and their fear of losing power altogether they proceeded cautiously. They avoided any initiatives that might undermine economic and political institutions. In any case, before they could tackle basic problems the leaders had to decide on Stalin’s successor as head of the party and therefore of the country. As had been true after Lenin’s death in 1924, there were no rules for deciding the succession. The leaders announced that political power was to be in the hands of a ‘collective leadership’ of five men (G. M. Malenkov, L. D. Beria, V. M. Molotov, K. E. Voroshilov, and N. S. Khrushchev) and the new rulers went to absurd lengths to demonstrate that they were equals. When they left their various cars on returning to their offices at the Kremlin from an official function they would make sure that all the doors opened simultaneously. But this was merely an outward show of comity designed to persuade the public that all was well in the highest circles of government. For several years the leaders were in fact engaged in a fierce struggle for power. At first, Beria seemed to have outwitted his rivals, but even though he vowed to press for extensive reforms he had been too closely associated with the worst excesses of the Stalin era to be acceptable to senior officials. At the end of 1953, Beria disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It is still not clear whether he was killed in a shootout in the Kremlin or secretly executed in the cellar of the police headquarters. He was the last Soviet leader who physically disappeared immediately upon losing his political post. That, alone, was significant progress.
Although nominally a collective leadership now governed the country, two men, Malenkov, the prime minister, and Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were the dominant figures, but soon they fell out. Before they quarreled, however, the leaders had agreed that relaxation of the police regime was essential not only to calm the nation but also to provide themselves with protection against the security forces. Within weeks of Stalin’s death they announced a limited amnesty for prisoners in labor camps, declared that the Doctors’ Plot had been based on false information extracted from suspects who had been tortured, and promised to replace Stalinist arbitrariness with a system that came to be known as ‘socialist legality’. In 1955, Khrushchev emerged as victor from endless intrigues at the highest levels of authority, but it took him another couple of years to remove his chief rivals from the center of power in Moscow. In another demonstration of the new political culture, the losers were not liquidated or sent to jail. Malenkov was appointed director of a hydroelectric power station in Kazakhstan, and several other high officials were given similar demotions.
Khrushchev was the first post-Stalin leader to rule the country for an extended period (about eight years) and to leave a lasting and significant mark on Soviet history. Born in 1894 into a peasant family, Khrushchev joined the Communist Party in 1918 and advanced steadily through the ranks; by the late 1930s he occupied the position of first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. Intelligent and sharp-witted, he was also a gruff and boisterous man given to expressing himself in earthy language. A firm believer in communism, and highly ambitious, he had faithfully carried out Stalin’s orders. There is evidence that he had qualms about some of them, but at the time he never voiced any reservations. His explanation for his silence is revealing. At a meeting chaired by Khrushchev when he was head of the government, someone raised the question of why no one had opposed the crimes of Stalin. ‘Who said that?’ Khrushchev asked sharply. No one spoke up. ‘There’s your answer; then, too, we were all scared.’
But once he became the ‘First’ in the Presidium, to use the Russian designation, he launched a policy of de-Stalinization, one of the most momentous and dramatic turns in Soviet history. Khrushchev did not, it must be emphasized, wish to dismantle the dictatorial system of rule or to abandon the goals of Marxism-Leninism, and there is still some question about his motives in undertaking the campaign against Stalinism. It may be that he did not know the full extent of the terror until 1954 and that he was genuinely shocked when he learned the details of Stalin’s crimes. It also seems likely that he realized that the mass terror had adversely affected the economic and social life of the country, because it had inhibited people from assuming responsible positions or from taking initiatives in their work. At the same time, Khrushchev probably sensed that his unmasking of Stalinist crimes would be political dynamite and would greatly add to his stature. Whatever the reason, at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 he delivered a four-hour, strictly secret speech in which he spelled out in amazing detail the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s, for which he blamed Stalin, accusing him of what now became a cardinal sin, ‘the cult of personality’. Despite his candor, Khrushchev went out of his way to stress that the evils of the 1930s were an aberration that did not affect the essential correctness of Marxism-Leninism, the viability of the Soviet system of rule, or its superiority to every other form of government. The congress, he declared towards the end of his speech, ‘has manifested with a new strength the unshakable unity of our party, the cohesiveness around the Central Committee, its resolute will to accomplish the great task of building communism’. The delegates all rose and greeted these comments with ‘tumultuous, prolonged applause’.
Nonetheless, the delegates to the congress were taken aback by Khrushchev’s speech, not only because they apparently had not known the magnitude of the terror but also because they feared that the revelations would destabilize the country. In short, the speech was a bombshell; what made it especially gripping and frightening was the description of the terror that Stalin inspired even in his closest associates. Khrushchev told the congress that N. A. Bulganin, a member of the Politburo, the highest political body in the country, had once confided to him that no one felt secure in visiting Stalin: ‘It has happened sometimes,’ Bulganin revealed, ‘that a man goes to Stalin on his invitation as a friend. And, when he sits with Stalin, he does not know where he will be sent next – home or to jail.’ The Soviet leadership took all sorts of precautions to prevent the publication of Khrushchev’s speech, but within days a translated version of it appeared in the New York Times, and copies of it also circulated among party activists and the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union. There is reason to believe that Khrushchev was not displeased by the publicity, even though it provoked a considerable amount of soul-searching among communists within the country and, perhaps even more so, abroad.
The policy of de-Stalinization took various forms. Within a few years, most of the inmates of the Gulag (some four and a half million) were released, many citizens – according to some estimates between eight and nine million – who had been falsely accused of crimes were rehabilitated, and the security police became considerably less visible, though it did not by any means close down its operations. In various ways the government relaxed its controls, which amounted to what came to be known as a ‘thaw’. Writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Dudintsev, and some others were able to publish their works even though they exposed unseemly aspects of Soviet reality. In the graphic arts and in cinema, the government was also more tolerant of newer forms of expression, and there was a flowering in both these fields. But the authorities limited the scope of the thaw. Thus, Boris Pasternak could not publish his novel Doctor Zhivago, which was critical of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the Soviet Union and sent it abroad for publication, for which he was punished by not being allowed to accept the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958. Periodically, Khrushchev would rave and rant against writers who seemed to him to be insufficiently supportive of Soviet institutions and values. At times he could be scathing in denouncing art he did not like, especially works by modernist and abstract painters.
For the Russian people, the end of the worst features of the Stalinist terror was welcome, as it was for foreign communists. According to Moscow wags, when Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito visited the mausoleum that contained the mummified figures of both Lenin and Stalin, he saluted the structure with a hand over one eye so that he could see Lenin but not Stalin. The campaign against Stalin’s cult of the individual reached its highest and most bizarre point at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961. On that occasion, D. A. Lazurkina, a longtime party member who had spent many years in a forced labor camp, strode to the platform and, after announcing her great reverence for Lenin, whom she always ‘carr[ied] in [her] heart’, announced that she had consulted with Ilych (Lenin) and he had said to her, ‘It is unpleasant for me to be side by side with Stalin, who brought so many troubles upon the party.’ The congress promptly passed a resolution acknowledging that it was ‘inappropriate to retain the sarcophagus containing the coffin of J. V. Stalin in the Mausoleum’, citing his ‘serious violation of the behests of Lenin, his abuse of power, his mass repressions against honest Soviet people, and other actions in the period of the cult of personality’. The next day, Stalin’s body was removed and reburied in a place behind the mausoleum near the Kremlin wall.
In economic affairs, too, Khrushchev was a reformer. Since 1953, Soviet leaders had sparred with each other over how to stimulate the national economy. Several critical questions were at issue: Should the government continue to emphasize the development of heavy industry or should it put greater stress on agricultural products and consumer goods, still in very short supply? How much of the national budget should be devoted to the military build-up, considered necessary in light of the tensions associated with the Cold War? These issues were debated against a backdrop of a sluggish economy, the consequence of Stalin’s misguided economic policies, the devastation caused by the Second World War, and a terrible famine in 1946–7 caused by an especially harsh drought. The income of farmers in 1949, for example, amounted to about fifty percent of the 1928 level, and by 1953 it had gone up to only sixty percent of that level. In industry, the recovery in the immediate postwar period proceeded more rapidly, but there were still serious shortages. In 1951, the shoe industry still produced less than one pair of shoes per person and the quality was very low indeed. Knitted garments also remained in short supply, and refrigerators and television sets were considered a luxury that the vast majority of citizens could not afford until the late 1950s. Careful studies have revealed that, in 1953, most people in the Soviet Union probably lived in poverty or on the edge of poverty.
Khrushchev proposed several policies to improve the economy. From mid 1953 he advocated an increase in the production of wheat in south-east Russia, west Siberia, and Kazakhstan, and early in 1954 he advanced the so-called virgin and idle land program, which called for the cultivation of tracts of land hitherto idle and land that had not been tilled for five years or longer. It was to be a mammoth undertaking that would lead to the cultivation of some thirty-two million acres of land in such widely different regions as the north Caucasus, the Volga, west Siberia, north Kazakhstan, east Siberia, and the Far East. Faced with considerable resistance to his plan, Khrushchev launched an intensive campaign in newspapers, party journals, and public meetings to promote the scheme. He finally got his way and the government organized the move of over 300,000 young men and women to the new farms, but the problems the pioneers encountered were daunting. For one thing, as scientists had warned Khrushchev, the warm winds from Central Asia tended to erode the soil in the steppe, making it risky to count on a steady run of good harvests in Kazakhstan, where much of the virgin program was being implemented. Moreover, in many places the authorities had failed to make adequate preparations for the newcomers, some of whom, forced to live in tents, gave up and moved to more hospitable regions of the country. All in all, Khrushchev’s agrarian policy had mixed results. There was an increase in the grain supply but not enough to solve the perennial shortages. A solution of the basic problems in Soviet agriculture would have required abandonment of the collectives and the innumerable regulations imposed on peasants. For example, a peasant who wished to slaughter a cow needed the written permission of no less than seven people. Abandonment of state control, a basic principle of Stalin’s agricultural program, was unthinkable for Khrushchev.
For the industrial sector, Khrushchev proposed reforms that were almost as bold as his agrarian program. In February 1957, he recommended the dissolution of the ministries in Moscow that supervised industry and their replacement by about one hundred councils operating in local regions of the country. He argued that administrators and managers would be in a better position to make decisions on industrial priorities if they were in closer touch with the enterprises. It seemed to be a sound idea, but by itself it did nothing to increase productivity or to rationalize the pricing system, which was chaotic and generally impeded productivity (see below). But Khrushchev believed that socialism as he knew it was the best economic order ever devised by humankind and that it greatly surpassed capitalism, for which he had nothing but contempt. This explains his frequent boasts that the Soviet Union would in the not too distant future have a much more productive economy than the West – at one time he stated that this would happen no later than 1981. It also explains his boast, addressed to the West in 1957, that ‘We will bury you.’ Widely interpreted at the time as a threat to physically destroy the West, it actually was meant to convey his certainty that socialism would outlive capitalism.
To a growing number within the political elite, Khrushchev appeared to be a man who flitted from one reform to another – only a few of the more prominent ones have been mentioned here – without a clear and sound vision for the country. He alienated many party activists by frequently shifting around or dismissing administrators he believed were not energetic enough in implementing his policies. Only a year and a half after he had reached the highest position in the party, in June 1957, several members of the Presidium, soon to be known as the ‘anti-party group’, conspired to oust him from office. The ensuing intrigues are among the more bizarre political events in recent Soviet history. It was clear that the conspirators had the votes in the Presidium to sack Khrushchev, but the first secretary would not give up. He told the Presidium that, since he had been elected by the Central Committee, it alone had the authority to dismiss him. In the meantime, Khrushchev’s supporters had begun to alert Central Committee members throughout the country of the impending coup and urged them to rush to Moscow. In an inspired move, Marshal G. K. Zhukov sent planes to bring them to the capital. Some members had already forced themselves into the meeting room by banging on the door to gain admission, to be joined soon by another three hundred brought in on military planes. The Central Committee then voted to retain Khrushchev in office, motivated apparently by a desire to continue his policies (which gave individual Central Committee members more influence than ever before) and by a fear that his defeat might restore the authority of the dreaded security police.
FOREIGN POLICY UNDER KHRUSHCHEV
Khrushchev was a dynamic leader, but he was also erratic, bombastic, crude, even boorish, and he was willing to take drastic steps to get his way. These traits frequently manifested themselves in his foreign policy, in the formulation and execution of which he played a very active role. At a meeting in 1960 at the United Nations, for example, he removed one of his shoes and banged the table to show disapproval of comments by the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan. Khrushchev was also blunt as well as unyielding in refusing to relax controls over the satellite states in Eastern Europe, all of whom deeply resented domination by the Soviet Union. In 1956, when the Hungarians sought to assert their independence, he sent troops and tanks to crush the rebels. But it would be a mistake to depict Khrushchev as an unrelenting hard-liner in foreign affairs. In 1955, he evacuated a naval base in Finland, and, more important, he agreed to a peace treaty with Austria that provided for ending the occupation by the Soviet Union and the three Western powers and the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the country. In return, Austria vowed to remain neutral and to compensate the Soviet Union with goods for Austrian properties that the Russians abandoned.
For the rest, Khrushchev’s foreign policy during the heyday of his period in power can be described as consisting of two different, even contradictory, tendencies. On the one hand, he pursued a forward policy in Berlin, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America with the aim of sharply reducing the West’s influence; on the other, he repeatedly sought to improve relations with the United States. Since in his mind capitalism was doomed and its replacement by communism was merely a matter of time, it seemed to him unnecessary to risk a military confrontation with the United States. So long as he pursued such a moderate policy, the Cold War remained a serious but bearable irritation for both sides. In the summer of 1962, however, for reasons that are still not clear, he embarked on what can only be characterized as a reckless and adventurous course that brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of nuclear war.
In mid October an American reconnaissance plane discovered that the Soviets were installing launching pads in Cuba for medium range and intermediate range missiles, which meant that the United States would soon be susceptible to an atomic attack from these sites. The most plausible explanation for this daring Soviet move is that Khrushchev planned to use the missiles as a bargaining chip in upcoming negotiations over a peace treaty for Germany. The Soviet Union would offer to withdraw the newly installed weapons in Cuba in return for an American commitment not to place nuclear weapons in Germany. Apparently, Khrushchev also hoped to secure a promise from President John F. Kennedy that the United States would agree to a nuclear-free zone in the Pacific. To Khrushchev, the shipment of missiles to Cuba, which had embraced communism in 1959, did not seem to be unreasonably provocative. After all, the United States had placed nuclear weapons in Turkey, which was closer to Russia than Cuba was to the United States. Khrushchev had also persuaded himself that Kennedy was too weak a person to take resolute action, and that he would be especially cautious because congressional elections were to take place early in November.
The Soviet leader miscalculated badly. Kennedy took several measures to make clear that he would not accept Soviet missiles in Cuba: he asked Congress for authorization to call up military reservists and then, on 16 October, he put Cuba under a ‘quarantine’, which was in effect a blockade. Kennedy made it clear that American warships would search Soviet vessels bound for Cuba and would not permit any that carried offensive weapons to dock in Cuban ports. He also indicated that if the nuclear weapons already on Cuban soil were not removed quickly the United States would take military action against them. The initial reaction of the Soviet leadership to Kennedy’s threats was alarming: they put their country on military alert and for a couple of days a nuclear war seemed to be a real possibility. On 25 October, Khrushchev retreated, telling Kennedy that he would withdraw the missiles in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba, which, the Soviet leader now said, was what he had wanted to achieve all along.
War had been averted, but politically the entire escapade was a disaster for Khrushchev. To his critics at home, who had for some time bemoaned his erratic behavior, the Cuban adventure was yet another example of his ‘harebrained schemes’. Over the previous four years he had come up with one reform after another and the results were mixed at best. Although he had been instrumental in dismantling much of the Gulag and in restraining the security forces, the police still maintained close surveillance over the population and at times arbitrarily arrested citizens guilty of no more than expressing dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. Khrushchev’s economic reforms had also not yielded the results that people had expected. True, the population was better fed and such consumer goods as television sets and refrigerators were now more widely available. It has been estimated that during Khrushchev’s years in power the production of consumer goods rose by some sixty percent. Moreover, the launching of the satellite Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, the first manned orbit of the globe, enhanced the prestige of Russia. But there was still much grumbling about shortages of consumer goods, about their poor quality, and generally about the standard of living, which remained low. In 1963, an unexpectedly poor harvest caused considerable hardship for many citizens. And there was another reason for growing disillusionment with Khrushchev: his tendency, despite his criticisms of Stalin, to create a new cult of personality centered on himself. His photographs appeared endlessly in the press, and with increasing frequency books would include a preface lauding his achievements as the country’s great leader. It is said that he was thoroughly pleased when his grandson asked him, ‘Who are you? The Tsar?’
His colleagues in the Presidium and the Central Committee, however, were not pleased and early in 1964 they hatched another conspiracy to oust him. The prime movers were a former and a present head of the KGB (security police), A. Shelepin and V. Semichastny. Though many details are still unclear, we know that on 13 October 1964 officials in Moscow sent a message to Khrushchev, who was vacationing in the Crimea, asking him to return immediately to the capital to attend a meeting of the Presidium. On his arrival, he immediately realized that several people who owed their high positions to his benevolence had turned against him and that he would be sacked. As he had done seven years earlier, he insisted that only the Central Committee had the authority to dismiss him, but this time the plotters had anticipated his demand. The entire Central Committee had been summoned and at its meeting on 14 October M. A. Suslov, the party ideologist and one of the more senior members of the Presidium, formally charged Khrushchev with fifteen errors, among them recklessness in foreign affairs, mistreatment of colleagues, failures in economic policy, and dictatorial conduct. The committee voted unanimously to strip him of all his offices. Khrushchev tried to fight back, but, sensing the hopelessness of his position, he gave up, declaiming abjectly that ‘I’ve got what I deserved.’ He was allowed to retire on a pension that permitted him to live comfortably.
The dignitaries selected as Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev, a man no one had believed destined to assume the highest political position in the Soviet Union. The conspirators settled on Brezhnev only because they thought that choosing him would avoid controversy by concealing the fact that Shelepin, generally presumed to have the inside track to succeed Khrushchev, had been a central figure in the conspiracy. To everyone’s surprise, Brezhnev quickly demonstrated the political skills necessary not only to outwit his rivals but to hold on to the highest post for eighteen years.
Brezhnev’s career had not been distinguished. He was a typical apparatchik (party functionary) with a gift for remaining in the good graces of his superiors. He joined the Communist Party in 1932 at the age of twenty-six and steadily moved up the ranks. Khrushchev, then party leader in the Ukraine, especially appreciated Brezhnev’s loyalty and secured rapid promotions for him. During the Second World War he served ably as a commissar on the southern and Ukrainian fronts, and in 1950 he became first secretary of the party in Moldavia, where he distinguished himself by ruthlessly suppressing the ‘bourgeois nationalism’ of the local population. In 1952, Stalin appointed him to the Presidium, and as an ardent champion of the virgin lands campaign Brezhnev achieved prominence in the early 1960s. Neither particularly intelligent nor effective as a public speaker, Brezhnev was a cheerful and charming man who acquired a special skill for planning agendas for meetings and ensuring that proposals would be accepted with a minimum of controversy. But he was also a vain man who would punish subordinates who did not praise him adequately by dispatching them to obscure and undesirable posts. Convinced, as he put it, that ‘nobody lives just on his wages’, he was unashamedly corrupt. He enjoyed high living and had a special weakness for big foreign limousines, which he collected assiduously. Foreign dignitaries who visited him frequently gave him one as a gift, and he derived childlike pleasure from sitting at the wheel of one of his cars at his various government retreats. A joke circulating in the 1970s nicely captures the public attitude towards the country’s leader. Brezhnev took his aging mother on a tour of the lavish country homes where he kept his cars and lived luxuriously. She remained silent until the frustrated Brezhnev finally asked her point blank what she thought of all his comforts. ‘It’s very nice,’ she responded, ‘but what will happen when the communists come back to power?’
Soon after Brezhnev died in 1982, his eighteen-year rule came to be known very aptly as the ‘era of stagnation’. Still trying to overcome the painful legacy of Stalinist repression and to achieve a decent standard of living for the people, the country could hardly afford a prolonged period with no marked economic and political progress. Brezhnev did not reintroduce mass terror, but after a few months in office he stopped criticizing the cult of personality, urged a more favorable assessment of Stalin’s ‘achievements’, and adopted a hard line towards all dissent, which nevertheless continued to increase. When the government refused to sanction the publication of controversial works of literature, dissident authors, who during previous periods of severe repression kept their work secret by writing ‘for the drawer’, turned to samizdat (self-publishing). They would reproduce their writings by making carbon copies of them or by using mimeograph machines and then distribute them by hand. In a celebrated trial in the fall of 1965, the authors A. D. Siniavsky and Yu. Daniel were sentenced to, respectively, seven and five years in prison for having secretly circulated works that disparaged the official rules on how literature should portray Soviet life and for having satirized Stalin’s terror. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, already famous for his depiction of the labor camps, protested the censorship and increasing repression, but to no avail. Eventually, Siniavsky and Daniel were allowed to emigrate, and in 1974 Solzhenitsyn was unceremoniously expelled from the Soviet Union.
One of the more cruel punishments of dissidents meted out with some frequency during Brezhnev’s regime was their enforced placement in psychiatric wards. This practice had apparently been used at times by Stalin, and after the Gulag had been almost completely dismantled it again appealed to the authorities as an effective way of dealing with alleged troublemakers. A few men with medical degrees could be found to examine dissidents and diagnose them as suffering from such ailments as ‘psychomotor excitement’, ‘sluggish schizophrenia’, or even ‘reformist delusions’. During a twenty-year period from 1962 to 1983, some five hundred citizens, many of them human rights activists, were detained in psychiatric hospitals. That the security police remained a force to be reckoned with is also demonstrated by the statistics that in 1973 the KGB employed 500,000 people and by 1986 the number had risen to 700,000.
In foreign policy, Brezhnev used a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. He was not as bombastic and provocative as Khrushchev and he sought to maintain formally good relations – détente – with the United States. But he did not hesitate to use force to defend what he considered to be the vital interests of the Soviet Union. In 1968, when communist reformers took over the government of Czechoslovakia and proceeded to establish ‘socialism with a human face’, Brezhnev vacillated for a few months and then sent powerful forces to crush the liberal movement. Then he enunciated the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, notable not so much for what it said but for the boldness with which he formulated it. Brezhnev declared that whenever the Soviet Union believed developments in a socialist state threatened its interests it had the right to intervene militarily. The pronouncement of the doctrine inevitably chilled relations between the USSR and the West and put a damper on reformist tendencies in Eastern Europe as well as in the Soviet Union itself.
Eleven years later, in 1979, Brezhnev made his most aggressive move in foreign affairs. He ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, which was undergoing a civil war that Soviet leaders feared the socialist regime might lose to Muslim fundamentalists. In a sense, then, the invasion was an application of the Brezhnev doctrine, even though Afghanistan was not part of the Soviet bloc. But the intervention proved to be a major blunder. The Afghans put up fierce resistance, the terrain was treacherous, and many Soviet troops fought sluggishly because they could not understand why they were in the country in the first place. The invasion also cooled relations between the USSR and the West, and in particular with the United States. As a sign of disapproval of the invasion, President Jimmy Carter prohibited Americans from participating in the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980. In 1988, after a futile war of over eight years that had produced a stalemate, the Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan without having achieved their stated goals.
Long before that humiliating retreat, the Soviet Union was in the throes of a serious domestic crisis, the result of an economic slowdown and the incompetence of the political leadership. Ever since 1966, the government had exuberantly claimed that the country had entered the stage of ‘mature socialism’, but the data about economic developments indicated that the drive to improve the standard of living remained stalled. For one thing, the government maintained a huge military expenditure, some ten and a half to eleven and a half percent of the gross national product. Moreover, labor productivity, which had been low for many years, continued to lag behind that of other industrialized countries. In the period from 1951 to 1965, for example, the rate of increase in productivity amounted to between forty and fifty percent of that of American workers. In 1963, each miner in the United States produced fourteen tons of coal per day, whereas their Russian counterpart produced 2.1 tons per day, even though the level of mechanization was about the same.
There were several reasons for the poor showing of the Soviet economy. The central planners in Moscow determined the prices of all goods, but they made their decisions arbitrarily without taking into account the laws of supply and demand or the actual cost of producing goods. Some goods and services were absurdly cheap and therefore required heavy subsidies, which, in turn, prevented the planners from making the most rational allocation of resources. Also, the price of many items remained unchanged despite inflation, which the authorities for ideological reasons simply refused to acknowledge. Pay scales, also centrally determined, did not provide incentives for workers to exert themselves to maximize output. To understand the workers’ attitude, one need only consider the lot of an unskilled worker, who in 1964 earned sixty rubles a month, a sum that could buy two pairs of shoes and nothing else. A witticism attributed to Eastern European workers also accurately describes the attitude of Soviet laborers: ‘You [the government] pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.’
The agricultural sector was similarly stagnant in the 1970s. Investments in capital stock increased by no less than 160 percent in the years from 1965 to 1980, whereas total output went up by only about twenty percent. One reason for this disappointing development was the poor quality of agricultural machines. In western Siberia, for instance, only fifteen percent of milking machines were in working order. In other parts of the country, machines were obsolete and often broke down. Even when they did work properly they were inefficient. Throughout the USSR there was such a shortage of trucks and trains with refrigerators that a substantial amount of the agricultural yield perished before reaching the markets. In 1981, a Soviet newspaper reported that each year about 620,000 tons of fertilizer were lost in transit because of poor facilities or simple negligence.
Other features of Soviet society signaled stagnation. The rate of population growth slowed markedly. The annual rate of increase in the 1950s, 1.8 percent, had declined by more than half by the 1980s, to 0.8 percent. During the decade from 1969 to 1979, life expectancy fell from 69.3 years to 67.7 years. The health-care system was for most people woefully inadequate, but that was not the only reason for these declines. Alcoholism, a perennial problem in the Russian Empire, remained widespread in the Soviet Union. In Leningrad alone, in 1979, over eleven percent of the population was arrested for being inebriated in public. It has been estimated that in 1980 some fifty thousand people died from alcoholism and that eight to nine percent of the country’s national income was lost because of alcohol abuse. The rate of absenteeism at factories and offices on Mondays of workers recovering from a weekend of excessive drinking was alarmingly high.
In a centralized political structure, reform measures to address these problems could come only from the top, but by the mid 1970s the Soviet leadership was incapable of taking any initiatives. Brezhnev had visibly deteriorated physically and, as is now known, suffered from some debilitating nervous ailments. Several strokes had impaired his gait as well as his diction; quite often he was incoherent. Instead of heeding the advice of respectable doctors, he turned to a quack who plied him with medicines that only worsened his condition. But he gave no thought to retiring. On the contrary, he encouraged a new cult of personality, which lauded him as the vozhd, a title previously accorded to Stalin. He collected one medal after another and was even awarded the Lenin Prize for Literature for his memoirs, which had been written by a hired hand. In 1977, he also took the initiative in drafting a new constitution, which would give him the honor of having replaced the outworn Stalin constitution of 1936. The new document proclaimed the attainment of a ‘mature socialist society’, but did not introduce any significant changes in the country’s political system. It was clearly designed to massage Brezhnev’s ego.
For about twelve months, beginning late in 1981, Brezhnev’s condition was so precarious that he rarely appeared in public and yet no action was taken to remove him from office. The members of the Politburo, who knew of Brezhnev’s infirmity, could have voted to oust him, but they were too timid. The most plausible explanation for their irresponsible behavior – Brezhnev, after all, had his hand on the nuclear button – is that they deeply distrusted each other and feared loss of power and privileges if any other person became first secretary. So it was not until Brezhnev’s death on 10 November that the Politburo chose a new leader, Iu. V. Andropov, for many years the head of the KGB.
In some respects the choice seemed to be a good one. Andropov was a highly intelligent person with extensive experience in public affairs. Although quite cynical and determined to maintain the Soviet system of rule, he understood that the country had taken several wrong turns and that major reforms were essential. He vowed to end corruption and to reestablish discipline in society, and made extensive personnel changes to bring into the top echelons of government people who were honest and energetic. But he was too old (sixty-nine) and too ill to lead a campaign for reform. He suffered from a serious kidney ailment and barely six months after taking office he often had to miss important meetings. He died in February 1984, having served as general secretary for less than sixteen months. Now the Politburo returned to form and chose the seventy-two-year-old K. U. Chernenko as their leader. Chernenko was in every respect a mediocrity and he was ill with emphysema. He died in March 1985 without any memorable achievement during his brief tenure in the highest office in the land.
For about a decade the USSR had essentially been rudderless, and for many people within the country and abroad the government had become an object of derision. No doubt for that reason, but also because it had become evident that dynamic leadership was needed to deal with the nation’s economic decline and political disarray, the Politburo now selected as general secretary M. S. Gorbachev, who was relatively young (fifty-four), intelligent, very engaging, experienced in public affairs, and ambitious and energetic. Equally important, he seemed to be far more open-minded than most Soviet officials and understood, as did few others in the upper reaches of the government, that the country was in trouble and needed to be revitalized.
Although Gorbachev had belonged to the top echelon of the Communist Party for some eighteen years, not many people suspected that he was the kind of person who would lead the Soviet Union in a fundamentally new direction. He was, as the historian Robert Service put it, a ‘brilliant dissimulator’; in public he toed the party line but in private conversations with his family and closest friends he had, ever since his days as a student at Moscow State University from 1950 to 1955, expressed dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in his country, though he had only the vaguest notion of how to improve conditions. Given his personal experiences, his caution was not surprising. Born in 1931 in southern Russia into a family whose roots as peasants stretched back for many decades, he was well aware of the horrors of Stalinism. One of his godfathers had been arrested during the collectivization drive of the early 1930s, several members of his own family were victims of repression, and about a third of the inhabitants of Privolne, the village in which he was born, died in the early 1930s directly as a result of Stalin’s policies. As a youngster, Gorbachev worked diligently in the fields, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1949. But he was also an excellent student and was admitted into the prestigious Faculty of Jurisprudence at Moscow State University, from which he graduated with very high grades. Legal work, however, did not interest him and after a few days in the office of the Stavropol procurator’s office he embarked on a career in politics. An indefatigable and efficient worker, his promotions came rapidly. By 1970, he was the leader of the Stavropol region party organization, and in 1978 he moved to Moscow to become first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party with the specific charge of heading the Agricultural Department and the various ministries dealing with agricultural affairs. In this position he attended the sessions of the Politburo though he could not vote. At forty-seven, he was the youngest man in the top leadership of the country.
Immediately after Chernenko’s death, the members of the Politburo unanimously voted for Gorbachev as general secretary of the party and therefore the nation’s leader. But there is little doubt that had the Politburo members suspected that Gorbachev had a strong, pragmatic bent and that he was determined to improve conditions even if it meant adopting ever more far-reaching reforms, they would never have voted for him to lead the Communist Party. By 1985, he was known to be relatively open-minded, but his colleagues took him at his word when he proclaimed that he was committed to Marxism-Leninism. To be fair to Gorbachev, he was sincere in his expressions of loyalty to party dogmas. In 1985, he had no idea how difficult it would be to introduce reform. Nor did he himself know at the time how far he would be willing to go to achieve his goals.
The six years of Gorbachev’s rule were an extraordinarily confusing period during which the public mood in the Soviet Union alternated between optimism, anxiety, and frustration. Well-wishers and critics of communism throughout the world waited with bated breath for the latest pronouncements from the Kremlin. For both sides, one issue, posed in two forms, was paramount. Could communism reform itself, in the process becoming democratic, without abandoning socialism? Or was the rot in the communist regime so deep rooted that the entire system had to be abandoned before a more efficient and decent order could be created? These are questions that will preoccupy scholars for many years to come and it is not likely that they will reach a consensus, because the issues Gorbachev confronted were so complex. At critical points during his period in power Gorbachev himself was at a loss on where he wished to lead his country, as is clear from his response late in 1990 to a reporter’s question of whether he was moving to the right. ‘Actually,’ he responded, ‘I’m going around in circles.’ Part of the problem was that every time he took an initiative to spur the economy, conditions deteriorated further. The advice he received from politicians and experts was contradictory, adding to the pervasive confusion: people on the right warned him that he was going too far and that his reformist policies were bound to produce chaos; people on the left berated him for not going far enough and warned him that if he did not introduce radical changes quickly he would lose the goodwill and support of the people, most of whom allegedly yearned for bold initiatives.
Moreover, despite his intelligence and political savvy, Gorbachev seems not to have been familiar with a basic rule of politics, first formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform’. It did not occur to him that his reforms might unleash a chain reaction in Soviet society that he would not be able to control. Thus, he was surprised that his proposals, especially when they became more radical, triggered protest movements among the national minorities and in Eastern Europe, movements that played a major role in the break-up of the Soviet Union. Then there were unexpected disasters, such as the nuclear reactor meltdown in Chernobyl in April 1986 and the earthquakes in Armenia in 1988, both of which the government mishandled, further eroding confidence in its competence. Finally, Gorbachev had to contend with personal rivalries and betrayals, factors that are often overlooked by historians but that can have a powerful impact on the course of events. Given all these intractable problems, it seems as though Gorbachev was destined to fail and the Soviet Union was bound to collapse. But that would be too simplistic a reading of the country’s history from 1985 to 1991. A complicated interplay of factors accounts for the final outcome, which no one could have foreseen when Gorbachev began his period of rule.
Gorbachev’s first initiative was moderate but also ill-advised. Following in Andropov’s footsteps, he launched a campaign against alcoholism with a two-fold aim: to boost economic productivity and to overcome a social problem that had reached serious dimensions. The government sharply reduced the output of liquor, ordered the police to enforce the prohibition of the production of vodka at home (samogon), imposed restrictions on the sale of alcohol at restaurants, and generally waged a campaign to discourage the drinking of spirits. These measures did lead to a decline in the consumption of liquor and to an improvement in public health. But these positive achievements were outweighed by deleterious consequences. A great many people addicted to liquor resorted to such industrial products as methylated spirits and anti-freeze to produce liquor, which was of inferior quality and often harmful. The government did not understand that alcoholism is a symptom, not a cause, of personal malaise, and that it can be effectively combated only by a long and sophisticated program of therapy and counseling. It also turned out that by reducing the production of alcohol the government lost no less than 28 billion rubles in income within three years, which it could ill afford at a time of economic decline. And the campaign against alcoholism did not stimulate an increase in productivity. Within three years the campaign was quietly dropped.
Gorbachev’s initiatives in political and cultural affairs were more promising and certainly more enduring. In 1986, as he began his move towards the left, he adopted the policy of glasnost, a hazy term that literally means ‘publicity’ or ‘openness’ but that soon acquired a variety of meanings. Initially, Gorbachev seems to have had in mind little more than that the government would be more forthcoming and self-critical in issuing information. But it did not take long for that cautious approach to be abandoned in favor of official toleration of the dissemination of information and opinions on a wide range of issues. By 1988, newspapers, journals, and television were dealing with subjects that had been taboo for decades, such as the Stalinist terror, censorship, the degradation of the environment, corruption, crime, the failings of the health services, and the intrigues at the highest levels of authority. Works of fiction, including those of writers who had been forced to emigrate, were now freely published, and films could deal with the seamier aspects of Soviet life. Scholars who did not toe the party line could publish their works even if they went so far as to criticize Lenin, who was still revered by Gorbachev and his colleagues. In December 1986, Gorbachev personally invited Andrei Sakharov, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who had been exiled to Gorky for his human rights activities, to return to Moscow, where he soon became the leader of the democratic movement. As a result of glasnost, cultural and political life in the Soviet Union underwent a fundamental change, and the public’s enthusiasm for the change appeared to be boundless.
Glasnost was actually part of a larger reform enterprise that Gorbachev dubbed perestroika (reconstruction), which too was never clearly defined. When he first used the term, in May 1985, he merely said, ‘Obviously, we all of us must undergo reconstruction, all of us . . . Everyone must adopt new approaches and understand that no other path is available to us.’ Alexander Yakovlev, a loyal and highly intelligent supporter of Gorbachev, viewed perestroika in moral terms, as a movement to inspire citizens to become creative and responsible people. However, within short order, the term became a watchword, a catch-all for the transformation of Soviet society. Devoid of specific meaning, it could be used to justify a wide range of economic, social, and political changes. As Gorbachev moved from timid reforms to moderate and then to radical reforms, he defended all of them in the name of perestroika.
The most pressing problem for Gorbachev was the economy, which continued to deteriorate after he assumed leadership of the Soviet Union. In both industry and agriculture, output declined steadily. The farms did not produce enough food and about one-fifth of what is referred to as ‘caloric intake’ had to be imported, this at a time of growing budget deficits. Industry’s failure to keep up with the technological advances that were sharply increasing productivity in the West not only adversely affected the country’s standard of living but also raised fears in the government that their country was falling hopelessly behind the West in military strength.
In 1990, during Gorbachev’s fifth year in office, the economic crisis deepened dramatically. Within one year the net national product declined by nine percent. Prices rose precipitately, some staple products such as milk, tea, coffee, and soap were hard to find, and in numerous regions the authorities introduced a system of rationing. In a desperate attempt to stimulate productivity, Gorbachev adopted a measure to allow workers to elect their own managers, but this backfired because the new managers, beholden to their employees, raised wages sharply, and that, in turn, caused further inflation. The government also tried a variety of other economic reforms, such as permitting a private (capitalist) sector to develop in services and small-scale industry and relaxing central control over wages, but these strategies too did not work, in part because many officials who opposed Gorbachev’s program simply ignored them. Gorbachev then began to speak of establishing a ‘socialist market economy’, a self-contradictory notion whose meaning he failed to explain and which did not have any practical consequences.
Gorbachev sought the advice of highly competent economists, and almost invariably they recommended that the government abandon centralized control of the economy, as well as the restraints on ownership of private property and private initiative. In September 1990, a commission under the direction of the respected economist Stanislav Shatalin presented to the government a detailed list of economic reforms, known as the ‘500 Days Plan’, to turn the country away from socialism and establish a system of free enterprise. The project even included the wording of twenty-one legal acts that were to be passed by the legislature to provide the basic regulations for the new economy. No one can be sure that Shatalin’s plan would have worked, but it was widely regarded as the country’s best hope for overcoming the economic crisis that threatened to turn into a catastrophe. Gorbachev seemed to favor the plan and the chances of adoption were promising, but, as so often when he had to reach a major decision, he got cold feet. Probably, he was not prepared for so sharp a retreat from his ideological commitments; he still regarded himself as a Marxist-Leninist and expressed his support for ‘socialism with a human face’. It may also be that he feared that Shatalin’s measures were simply too radical and would encounter so much resistance that they would only make matters worse. He now turned sharply to the right and dismissed several of his most dedicated, reform-minded supporters. In his public pronouncements he reverted to stale communist phraseology.
Gorbachev’s inability to revive the economy undermined his other achievements, which were impressive. At no previous time in the history of the USSR did the people enjoy as much freedom as they did in the late 1980s. Equally important, a whole series of political institutions were established that appeared to be the bedrock of a genuine democratic order. Gorbachev had moved gradually, step by step, but in the political sphere he was bold and courageous. He created a new political structure that gave the people a greater voice in national affairs. A Congress of People’s Deputies consisting of 2,250 members was elected and was to meet annually, serving as a check on the authority of the executive part of the government. The congress would elect a Supreme Soviet of 542 representatives, which would meet twice a year and serve as a legislature operating more or less like a parliament in Western countries. But only two-thirds of the Congress of People’s Deputies were to be elected directly by the people. One-third of its members were to be chosen by ‘social organizations’ such as trade unions and the Communist Party. The Supreme Soviet would elect the chairman, who, it was assumed, would also be the general secretary of the Communist Party, the post that Gorbachev occupied. According to Article 6 of the constitution of 1976, the Communist Party was ‘the nucleus of the political system and of all state and public organizations’, and Gorbachev was not prepared to strip the party completely of that status. He remained committed to the Soviet Union as a workers’ state in which the communists would enjoy important political privileges.
Still, the meetings of the Congress of People’s Deputies over a two-week period in late May and early June 1989 were greeted with enormous excitement throughout the country. To be sure, the elections were not ‘democratic’ in the Western sense of the word. Not only were so many seats set aside for special organizations, but in over twenty percent of the constituencies only one name appeared on the ballot and in other areas there were irregularities that assured victory for Communist Party candidates. Not surprisingly, the conservatives – that is, party activists opposed to Gorbachev – won a solid majority of the seats. On the other hand, close to ninety percent of the eligible voters went to the polls, and more than a few Communist Party officials failed to be elected. A substantial number of the deputies were reformers, among them the now revered Andrei Sakharov, and, most important, the deliberations were broadcast on television. The people of the Soviet Union, and many outside the country, were riveted to their sets, amazed at the candor with which deputies questioned and criticized the leadership. There were extensive references to the brutal repressions during the Stalinist era, the activities of the security police, the ecological catastrophes, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, not to mention the questions about the luxurious lifestyle of Gorbachev and other senior officials. Sakharov called for a fundamental political change: the Communist Party should no longer enjoy a monopoly of power. Gorbachev was elected to a new post, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the leading position in the state; a title that was soon changed to ‘president’. Gorbachev retained the post of general secretary of the Communist Party.
But his hope that the political reforms he had instituted, far-reaching as they were, would give him a breathing spell during which he would be able to revitalize the economy and restore stability would soon be dashed. The pressures on him from the left continued, and in March 1990 he took a leap forward in implementing a change that did nothing less than undermine the authority of the Communist Party. For some seventy-three years it had exercised power in the Soviet Union on its own, unencumbered by any checks. Now Article 6 of the constitution, which guaranteed that power to the party, was amended and power was placed in the hands of the state. In many ways, this was Gorbachev’s crowning achievement, since it opened up the possibility of the Soviet Union evolving into a pluralistic democracy.
But by this time, Gorbachev was under siege, attacked savagely from the right and the left. The leader of the left was Boris Yeltsin, a flamboyant and impulsive politician who had made his mark as a hard-driving party official in Sverdlovsk (formerly and now again Ekaterinburg). In 1986, Gorbachev had brought Yeltsin to the capital where, as first secretary of the Moscow Party City Committee, he proceeded to make a mark by dismissing numerous functionaries for corruption. Yeltsin also played the role of a populist, often traveling around the city by bus, visiting factories, offices, restaurants; on his endless tours he would ask citizens how services might be improved. His popularity rose quickly, and as that happened he became more daring and tactless in pressuring Gorbachev to adopt more radical reforms. In October 1987, Gorbachev fired Yeltsin, who also resigned from his position as candidate member of the Politburo. He now assumed the relatively minor post of deputy chairman of the State Construction Committee, and it seemed that his career had come to an ignominious end.
But Yeltsin was bent on rehabilitation, driven not only by ambition but also by a determination to avenge his defeat by Gorbachev. The two men became bitter rivals, and for the next four years the conflict between them played a central role in the demise of the Soviet Union. In mid 1988, at the Nineteenth Party Conference, Yeltsin unexpectedly announced his support for almost all of Gorbachev’s program and humbly asked that he be reinstated as a party leader. After a sharp attack by the rightist Egor Ligachev, the conference delivered Yeltsin another humiliating defeat by voting not to restore him to his party post. Undaunted, Yeltsin decided to resurrect his political career by throwing in his lot with the democratic opposition to Gorbachev and by running (in the spring of 1990) for election to the People’s Congress of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest constituent republic of the Soviet Union, a move that signified a shift in his political allegiance from the Soviet Union to Russia. Within a few months Yeltsin was elected speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet and a year later, in June 1991, he won election as president of Russia. He now had his own power base and, according to reliable polls, was considerably more popular in the Soviet Union than Gorbachev.
In the meantime, the Soviet empire had started to unravel, a process that tested to the utmost Gorbachev’s skills and his commitment to peaceful reform. Gorbachev was thoroughly dedicated to the preservation of both the Soviet Union and socialism and he made every effort on behalf of both causes. To his credit, however, it must be said that he refused to apply massive force to maintain the empire or to retain power for himself. He still had the necessary forces under his command and occasionally he came close to launching a crackdown but in the end he held back. His restraint will surely be recalled by historians as one of his most admirable traits as a leader.
Beginning in 1989, the countries in the Eastern Bloc – Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia – which were formally independent but in effect were vassal states of the Soviet Union, broke away, declared their independence, and discarded communism without encountering any forceful attempt by the Russians to restrain them. But that was not all. Since 1987, nationalist movements had become increasingly assertive within various republics of the USSR. At first, they demanded autonomy, but soon they escalated their demands and called for virtual independence. In November 1988, for example, the Estonian Supreme Soviet announced that it had the authority to veto laws enacted in Moscow. Two months later, Lithuania officially protested the presence of Soviet military forces on its territory. Both these states declared that Russian would no longer be the official state language. Within another year, nationalist movements demanding autonomy or more far-reaching self-government had spread to virtually every region of the country, including republics culturally and linguistically close to the Russians, such as Ukraine and Belorussia. To prevent the disintegration of the country, Gorbachev in April 1991 initiated a rapprochement with Yeltsin to secure his support for a new Union Treaty that would grant the constituent republics greater autonomy than heretofore in economic and political affairs but still retain the Soviet Union as a unified state. A formal treaty between the republics establishing the new arrangement was to be signed on 20 August.
Infuriated, hard-liners in the leadership of the Communist Party swung into action. First, they attacked Gorbachev so vehemently that he offered to resign as general secretary. Only the entreaties of his supporters led him to reconsider. But then the hard-liners made their most daring move: they initiated a coup to unseat Gorbachev. The events surrounding the plot would make a perfect storyline for a comic opera. Even the prologue to the coup is mind-boggling. In mid 1991, James Baker, the American secretary of state, warned Gorbachev that a coup was imminent, but he cavalierly ignored the information. He could not believe that the men he had outfoxed politically were capable of toppling him. In August he went for a rest to his dacha in the village of Foros on the Black Sea.
On 18 August, he unexpectedly received a visit from four senior officials, who had arranged to have all of Gorbachev’s telephone lines inactivated. Without wasting time on formalities, the four men asked Gorbachev to give up power to the vice president, G. Yanaev, who would immediately proclaim an emergency to allow the authorities to restore order and, it was assumed, cancel the Union Treaty. Then Gorbachev would resume his position as head of state. The president rejected the plan and his defiance paid off because the conspirators were incredibly incompetent and cowardly to boot. They had neglected to arrest any of the leaders likely to oppose their scheme and they made no attempt to take control of the television stations or to guard against street protests. The press conference they held to inform the nation of their action was a fiasco. Far from being presidential, Yanaev was a nervous wreck who could not stop fidgeting with his fingers. Another of the conspirators, Valentin Pavlov, was too drunk to show up at the press conference. The government’s first public appearance did not inspire confidence in the plotters’ ability to run the country, let alone restore order at a time of crisis.
For Yeltsin, the coup was a golden opportunity to demonstrate his courage as well as his commitment to fundamental reform. In an unforgettable gesture, he climbed atop a tank outside the White House, the building that housed the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and had become the headquarters of the resistance to the coup, and before a large crowd vowed to defeat the conspirators. Yeltsin immediately became a national hero. Then the army delivered a fatal blow to the conspirators by refusing to support them. By midday of 21 August, just three days after it had started, the coup had fizzled out.
On his return to Moscow, Gorbachev made several major mistakes that played into Yeltsin’s hands. He refused to criticize the Communist Party even though a number of its leaders had either joined the coup or had given their blessing to it. Many of them now resigned from their positions, but Gorbachev surprisingly replaced them with other people who were anathema to the people who had stood with Yeltsin at the White House. Inevitably, Yeltsin’s prestige soared and he knew how to make the most of his chances. He treated Gorbachev with contempt, vowed support for a market economy, declared the independence of Russia from the Soviet Union, and recognized the independence of the other republics. The Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen separate states, a development that two years earlier hardly any informed person anywhere would have believed possible.
To appreciate the historical significance of the Soviet Union’s collapse, it is worth considering the fate of other powerful empires. The Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire all disappeared, but all of them lasted much longer than the Soviet empire; they declined gradually over a period of decades if not centuries. And all of them left powerful imprints on the lands they had dominated. The Roman Empire, for example, lasted roughly from 27 BC until AD 476, some five hundred years, and its period of decline took about 140 years. In the east, ‘Roman’ rule survived until 1453. Its legacy in law, art, and literature is too well known to require further comment. The Spanish Empire existed roughly from the late fifteenth century until the seventeenth century, and its cultural and political impact on the Americas was very pronounced and is still highly visible. The British Empire lasted from the seventeenth until the twentieth century and disintegrated gradually over a period of many decades. Its cultural and political influence was, of course, enormous.
By contrast, the Soviet empire – so different politically, economically, socially, and culturally from imperial Russia as to constitute a new polity – lasted only seventy-four years and the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe a mere forty-five years. The Soviet legacy was deep discontent in the former communist states, passionate hatred among the subject peoples for the Russians, and violent ethnic conflict. And it is now clear that the successor states to the Soviet Union have retained few, if any, traces of the communist system in economics, politics, or culture. How can we account for this? How did it happen that a huge empire, one that appeared to be enormously powerful, dissolved within just six years after the government initiated reform, and left so few positive traces? Boris Yeltsin in 1992 made a statement that suggests an answer. ‘The world can sigh in relief. The idol of communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed.’ A historian might legitimately refine Yeltsin’s statement by suggesting that communism failed because it was from its inception a utopian and thus unattainable idea that was incompetently implemented by ruthless ideologues.
THE PRESIDENCY OF BORIS N. YELTSIN
As president of the newly independent Russian Federation, Yeltsin set himself a task so prodigious and complicated that in hindsight one can legitimately doubt whether he ever had a realistic chance of succeeding. He planned to transform Russia in short order from an authoritarian state, in which the economy was centrally owned and regulated, into a democracy, in which private enterprise predominated. This was to be achieved in a country without deeply rooted traditions of popular government, without the legal and economic institutions that are the backbone of capitalism, and without cadres of citizens familiar with the principles of democracy or the practices of capitalism. No country had ever undergone a transition within a brief period of time from authoritarian collectivism to free enterprise and popular rule, and although there were numerous plans on how to proceed no one could point to relevant precedents.
Even under the best of circumstances the chances of success would have been dubious, but conditions in Russia in 1991 were fraught with intractable problems. Probably the most serious were the failings of the political leadership. It was not simply that Yeltsin lacked experience in coping with the tasks at hand. He was an extremely erratic man apparently without firm convictions. At one time a loyal communist, he flitted from enthusiasm for reform to populism; then he repudiated communism entirely and proclaimed his support for democracy and a market economy. But once in power he convinced himself that the Russian people wanted a strong ruler. He now became increasingly authoritarian, going so far as to assume the role of ‘father of the nation’, and acting like ‘Tsar Boris’. To the surprise of even some of his closest associates, he would refer to himself in the third person as ‘the president’ and issue terse orders in the manner of a monarch or dictator. Yeltsin was also a troubled man who suffered from deep depressions, during which he would disappear from public view for weeks at a time. Addicted to alcohol, he would occasionally be seen in public unable to walk in a straight line. And there were protracted periods when Yeltsin was so seriously ill that he could not perform his official functions. Struck down by several heart attacks, he underwent a quintuple coronary bypass operation late in 1996. During these periods of indisposition no one was legally empowered to take his place, since the constitution contained no provision on who was to govern when the president was incapacitated. The warring factions in his entourage, eager to protect their privileged positions, would unite in clever but not altogether successful attempts to conceal the president’s infirmity.
Most of the time the factions were at loggerheads on how to deal with the rapidly declining economy, the creation of new political and social institutions, and the increasingly strident demands for independence of minority populations such as the Chechens. A brilliant political tactician, Yeltsin endlessly engaged in intrigues and sought to play off one group against another before reaching a decision, but this mode of governing proved to be ineffective because it often led to inaction by the government on critical economic and political issues.
Yeltsin’s most pressing challenge was the economy, which had been stagnating for many years and had been a major stumbling block for Gorbachev. Determined to avoid his predecessor’s indecisiveness, Yeltsin adopted the radical proposals – known as ‘shock therapy’ – of his newly appointed minister of economics and finance, Yegor Gaidar. The idea was to introduce quickly and suddenly a series of fundamental reforms that would in short order abolish the socialist economy and replace it with one operating on the basis of the market mechanism. Yeltsin was persuaded of the plan’s feasibility and likened Gaidar to a physician who treated a paralyzed patient by dragging him off the bed and forcing him to walk. On 1 January 1992, the government announced that, as of 2 January, price controls would be lifted, allowing the market to determine prices of goods. Gaidar warned that there would be some inflation; he estimated that prices might rise as much as one hundred percent. His analysis was deeply flawed: in two months prices went up at least ten-fold. But that was not all. Industrial production fell sharply, the value of the ruble declined dramatically, and unemployment rose at a rapid pace.
There were short periods of economic recovery since the Gaidar reform. For example, 1996 is considered a good year because the rate of inflation was only about twenty-two percent. But all in all, the lot of the Russian people since 1992 has been grim. A few statistics tell the tale. In late 1992, for example, one-third of the country’s 148 million citizens lived below the poverty line. Millions of working people – according to one reliable estimate, about three-quarters of them – did not receive their pay on time and sometimes the delay ran to months. Many residents in cities managed to feed themselves only because they had small plots of land on which they grew potatoes and vegetables. In large parts of the country, barter in goods was the normal mode of trading. Russia’s system of health care was in a shambles, its dysfunctionality causing widespread hardships among low-income citizens. In lifting price controls, Gaidar and Yeltsin undertook a necessary reform, but they did it without adequate preparation. A free market cannot operate without the prior existence of a legal order, an efficient banking system, a stock market, and a public that is accustomed to reasonably fair competition. None of these prerequisites prevailed in Russia, and this doomed the government’s initiative.
The second aspect of Gaidar’s economic program, privatization, did not fare any better. Again, his reasoning was sound, but the implementation of his reform was deeply flawed. From October 1992 the government, under the direction of Anatoly Chubais, a skilled and ruthless administrator, provided vouchers, each worth ten thousand rubles, to citizens for the acquisition of state enterprises. But at a time of high inflation, ten thousand rubles quickly became a paltry sum, and, in any case, the average citizen knew precious little about stocks or the running of a factory or business. Moreover, the entire process of privatization was shot through with corruption and as a consequence relatively small groups of former managers of Soviet enterprises became owners of huge enterprises and, occasionally, of enormous conglomerates. A nation that only a few years earlier had prided itself on not having a class of capitalist exploiters now had such a class, and many of the rich made a vulgar display of their wealth.
There is no doubt, however, that privatization fundamentally and quickly changed the Russian economic system. Within four months approximately one-third of all commercial and service establishments were in private hands, and the total number of businesses that were privately owned came to almost a million. Two years later, in 1994, private enterprises in Russia employed close to forty percent of the workforce, an amazingly rapid change in the country’s economy. Stores were now stocked with quality goods as they had never been under communism. The main beneficiaries of the privatization of government enterprises came to be known as the ‘oligarchs’ because they exercised enormous influence over government policy. Some of them occupied senior positions in the Yeltsin government or his entourage.
Deputies in the two parliamentary chambers, the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies, vigorously criticized the government’s economic program. The speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, was initially a strong supporter of Yeltsin, but soon became estranged from him, partly because he did not like the president’s policies but also because he himself aspired to Russia’s presidency. Under the Soviet system such open rivalry between a legislative leader and the executive would have been unthinkable. But now that Russia had a parliamentary system of sorts, the challenge for political leaders was to establish an effective working relationship between the executive and legislative branches. That is never easy, but it was especially difficult in Russia, which had no tradition of a balance of power between the two branches of government. Nor was there a tradition of independent political parties with clear-cut programs that could impart a degree of coherence and discipline to the deliberations in the legislative body. Although the various groups in the parliament, none of which ever enjoyed a majority in the chamber, proclaimed adherence to specific programs and represented specific social or economic interests, they were for the most part loose associations that for all intents and purposes represented the views of their leaders. Moreover, individual members of the chamber switched loyalties quite easily, further complicating the legislative process.
A perennial problem for Yeltsin’s governments throughout the nine years of his presidency was to obtain a majority for their legislative proposals. By inclination, and because he faced so many crises, Yeltsin wished to govern by decree. In October 1991, the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia had in fact granted him emergency powers to enact his economic measures by decree, but once the impact of the reforms became evident the legislature had second thoughts. By mid 1992, it would no longer give the president carte blanche and turned down one after another of the government’s reform measures. The stage was set for a confrontation that ended in a terrible setback for the evolution of democratic institutions in Russia.
The conflict between the parliament and the president lasted for about a year. To end the gridlock, Yeltsin in September 1993 took the drastic step of ordering the dissolution of the legislature. He also indicated that in the meantime he would rule on his own and that an election of a new legislature would be held in December, at which time there would also be a referendum on a new constitution drafted by the authorities. Presidential Decree No. 1440, which proclaimed these measures, brought the conflict to a head. Only hours after the publication of the decree, the parliament in effect dismissed Yeltsin from his post by electing Aleksandr Rutskoi as president of the Russian Federation. Rutskoi was the vice president, but ever since early 1992 he had vigorously opposed Yeltsin’s policies, and because of his fame as a military hero, and his charisma, the opposition, composed of communists and ultra-nationalists, embraced him as a man who could lead the struggle against the president. To safeguard Rutskoi’s election, the parliamentary leaders convened an emergency session of the Tenth Congress of the People’s Deputies and directed their civilian supporters to take up arms in defense of the White House.
Yeltsin responded by declaring a state of emergency in Moscow and by ordering military forces, including tanks, to surround the building. Fighting began on 2 October, and two days later tanks fired into the building, causing extensive damage and numerous casualties. Within hours, the people holed up in the White House surrendered. Rutskoi and other political leaders were imprisoned. It was a momentous event that tarnished the reputation of both Yeltsin and the opposition, both of whom had displayed a recklessness that had seriously harmed the country. As a leading historian of the Yeltsin period, Lilia Shevtsova, noted, the clash ‘destroyed the long-standing taboo against the use of brute force in political struggles in Moscow’.1
The government now drafted a new constitution, which was adopted in a referendum in December. Although it provided for a bicameral legislature, the State Duma and the Federation Council, it clearly shifted the balance of power in favor of the president, who became what many called a ‘superpresident’ with an enhanced authority that in some ways resembled that of the tsars. According to the constitution, the president not only was to act as head of state and as the guarantor of the Fundamental Laws, but also was to appoint the prime minister and all other ministers. The prime minister had to be approved by the State Duma, but if it rejected the president’s choice three times and voted no confidence in the government twice within a three-month period, the president could dissolve the legislature. At the same time, it was exceedingly difficult to oust the president. That could be done only if the chief executive could be proven to have committed high treason or some other crime, and even then the charges against him required the affirmative vote of two-thirds of both legislative chambers, the Supreme Court, and the Constitutional Court. And all the steps for the president’s removal had to be completed within the short period of ninety days from the moment that the charges were first voted by the Duma.
Despite his victory in securing approval for the constitution, Yeltsin could not rest easy, for in the vote for deputies in the new legislature he suffered a bad defeat. Of the 450 seats in the State Duma, the bloc led by the communist Gennady Zyuganov commanded 103 and the ultra-nationalist and right-wing Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, under the erratic and eccentric Vladimir Zhirinovsky, had captured 64 seats. Yegor Gaidar’s party, Russia’s Choice, the movement most inclined to support Yeltsin, won only 66 seats. Of the remaining two hundred or so deputies, over 120 considered themselves independents and the rest were divided among four other parties. With such a complicated distribution of seats, it was not likely that the government would find the legislative support it needed for effective government.
Nor would the government readily find political support in dealing with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the northern Caucasus, the attempt by the autonomous republic of Chechnya, home to about 1.2 million people, to achieve independence. Deeply committed to the Sunni branch of Islam, the Chechens have a long history, dating back to the nineteenth century, of resistance to Russian domination. In 1991, Yeltsin’s government installed General Dzhokhar Dudayev, who had been an officer in the Soviet army, as leader of the Chechen republic on the assumption that he would remain loyal to the Russian Federation. But he quickly announced his support for independence, which he formally declared in November 1991. At first, Yeltsin did not react to Dudayev’s move, perhaps because he was preoccupied with other matters. But late in 1994, the president decided to stop Chechnya’s drift to independence. The Russian Federation was not a multinational state to the same extent as the Soviet Union, but eighteen percent of the population was non-Slavic. If the Chechens were permitted to establish a separate state, on what basis would the government be able to prevent other republics from following suit? In eight regions of the Russian Federation, movements for autonomy or independence were becoming increasingly vocal. But Chechnya was important to Russia for yet another reason. A pipeline was to be built through the region to carry large quantities of oil from the Caspian fields to the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, and Russia expected to earn millions of dollars from this arrangement. Already in desperate straits financially, the government was not prepared to jeopardize that income.
Late in November 1994, a small group of volunteers organized by the Russian security forces marched towards Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, expecting to oust Dudayev in a matter of days. It was only the first of many miscalculations of the Russian government and military commanders. The Chechens quickly routed the volunteers, a drubbing that Yeltsin took as a personal insult. On 2 December, the Russians began what would turn out to be a bloody six-year conflict (with some pauses) that caused horrendous suffering among the Chechens. On two occasions Grozny was subjected to long series of air attacks and to invasion by Russian troops. It is estimated that during the first two years alone sixty thousand Chechens lost their lives and much of the capital was reduced to rubble. But the Russians also endured many casualties – about 25,000 – and, to the shock of many citizens, the army was exposed as an undisciplined, ill-equipped force that could not defeat a small country that officials denigrated as a haven for bandits and terrorists.
A fair number of Chechens were in fact engaged in criminal activities of various kinds, and on several occasions Chechen guerillas committed atrocities that aroused passionate condemnation in Russia. For example, on 14 June 1995, some two hundred guerillas seized control of a hospital in southern Russia, over a hundred miles from Chechnya, and, after killing twenty police officers, held two thousand patients as hostages. When Russian soldiers tried to storm the hospital, the Chechens managed to repel the attacks, in part because they used patients, including pregnant women, as shields. Only after the prime minister, V. Chernomyrdin, appeared on the scene did the Russians and the guerillas reach an agreement for the hostages’ release. By that time the total number of deaths on both sides was 120. The war ended in August 1996, when General A. Lebed signed an agreement with the Chechens granting them ‘political autonomy’, a concept so vague that many commentators predicted, correctly, that the conflict would be resumed in one way or another. Outside Russia, but even more so within the country, the Chechen war provoked widespread condemnation of Yeltsin and his government. In a public opinion poll in January 1996, only eighteen percent of the respondents expressed willingness to vote for him even if the opponent was Zyuganov, leader of the unreconstructed communists, who was favored by thirty-three percent of potential voters. Yeltsin’s political career appeared to have come to an end.
But the man was more resilient than anyone thought. In mid 1996, he defeated Zyuganov in a second-round, run-off election despite unfavorable polls, a new bout with near-fatal illness, and an economy still in deep decline. During the first six months of that year the government had managed to collect only sixty percent of due taxes, inflation had escalated, government employees had endured long delays in receiving their salaries, and the gross national product had fallen by another four percent. It cannot be said that Yeltsin’s electoral comeback was an edifying event that reflected well on Russian democracy. He won because a small group of wealthy oligarchs spent huge amounts of money on his election campaign, the media controlled by the president’s supporters publicized vague charges that the communists planned to tamper with the election, and many people still recoiled at the idea of having a communist as leader. A commonly heard opinion was that ‘the president is a liar, but the communists are far worse.’ Zyuganov won 40.31 percent of the vote and Yeltsin held on to the presidency by a slight majority, 53.82 percent.
THE PRESIDENCY OF VLADIMIR PUTIN
For the next three years Russia continued to muddle through, but only barely. In August 1998, the country teetered on the brink of financial collapse after the government, violating its own promises, suddenly devalued the ruble by fifty percent and defaulted on its debts. Yeltsin’s health took another turn for the worse and for long stretches of time he could not carry out his presidential functions. Charges that people in his entourage and family were illegally enriching themselves further eroded public confidence in the government and the entire political system.
In August 1999, Yeltsin made yet another ministerial change that surprised everyone. He named Vladimir Putin, an unknown bureaucrat, as prime minister, the fifth person to occupy that post in seventeen months. Forty-seven years old, Putin had spent most of his adult life working for the security services and for several years he had served as a spy in East Germany. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he returned to his place of birth, St. Petersburg, where he held a senior administrative post in the local administration under the reformist Anatoly Sobchak, rising to the position of deputy mayor. He began to work for President Yeltsin in 1996 and quickly joined Yeltsin’s inner circle, known as the ‘family’. At the time he became prime minister, not much was known about his political views or his political skills. ‘Far from charismatic,’ one report noted, ‘he has an expressionless mask-like face, rarely smiles, and speaks softly.’ By all accounts, he made a conscious effort not to identify with any particular political group. He was on friendly terms with liberal reformers, but he was also a passionate patriot determined to restore Russia’s prestige, and one of his first public pronouncements stressed his intention to deal harshly with Chechnya, where fighting had resumed. On Russia’s future course, Putin was highly eclectic. He favored a market economy but at the same time insisted that the economy must be adapted to Russian conditions. ‘We can count on a worthy future,’ he declared, ‘only if we manage to naturally combine the principles of a market economy with Russia’s realities.’ Moreover, he said that the state would have to be ‘strong’ and ‘paternalistic’. The question of whether this would benefit the country seemed irrelevant to him. The traditions of Russia simply could not be cast aside. ‘[They] exist and remain dominant for now. This should be taken into account, especially in social policy.’ Russia, Putin also insisted, would not in the foreseeable future – or ever – resemble the United States or the United Kingdom. ‘Russian democracy’, he has said, ‘will never parrot the West’s liberal model,’ and he contended that in Russia ‘a strong state is a guarantee of freedom, not a threat to it.’
On 31 December 1999, Yeltsin made another startling announcement. He resigned and appointed Putin acting president, giving him a clear advantage in the election scheduled for March 2000, three months before the end of Yeltsin’s term. The president’s health no doubt played a role in this sudden resignation, but there was also much speculation that Putin promised not to investigate Yeltsin’s family or entourage for corruption.
Putin was easily elected president and has since placed his stamp on Russian politics. Early in 2001, the outlook for Russia did not appear promising. The ghastly condition of the economy was highlighted in a series of articles in the New York Times on the state of the national health system. Every year, about twenty thousand cancer patients were dying because they could not afford to purchase the necessary medicines, and another 200,000 people suffering from diabetes could not afford insulin. Life expectancy, which is widely regarded as a ‘barometer of a society’s health’, declined every month during 1999 and the average for men and women was 65.9 years, ten years lower than in the United States. Over the previous decade, death rates had climbed about one-third and it was estimated that, if the trend continued, in fifty years the total population of Russia could decline from 145.6 million to 121 million. The economy had stabilized but at a very low level of productivity. Much of it was still in ruins, a large percentage of the population still lived in poverty, and there were no signs of a serious reform campaign to stimulate productivity.
The political outlook was equally bleak, and many experts in Russian affairs feared that the new president would not be a champion of reform. A product of the most sinister Soviet institution, the security police, Putin did not appear to have shed his distrust of liberal democracy and in some respects seemed to revert to Soviet-style conduct. For example, after an explosion on 12 August 2000 killed all 118 men on board the nuclear submarine Kursk, the Russian admiralty, unwilling to acknowledge mistakes by Russians, blamed the accident on a collision with a foreign vessel, even though two retired Russian commanders insisted that a collision could not have caused the damage. Putin’s government also tried in various ways to intimidate two national television channels that had the temerity to criticize the authorities. Perhaps most ominously, the government sought to increase its power by reducing that of regional leaders. Putin established seven new regional administrations, each one headed by a former general of the KGB or the army, to assume control over the outlying regions of the country.
Still, the fear, often voiced by liberals in Russia and by foreign commentators, that Putin planned to turn back the clock and reestablish a Soviet style of rule, has proven to be exaggerated. In fact, for several years it was hard to fathom Putin’s long-range goals; he seemed to exemplify Winston Churchill’s famous quip: ‘Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ However, after he had completed two four-year terms in office there was little reason to retain the hopes of the 1990s that Russia would be transformed into a liberal democracy in the near future. Certainly, the Russian people no longer believe that their country is moving towards that goal. In fact, there is deep-seated discouragement with national trends, as was demonstrated in a public opinion poll in 2006: seventy-one percent regretted the collapse of communism and only twenty-two percent expressed no nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Most people accepted with equanimity the autocratic political system established by Yeltsin in 1993, often described as a ‘superpresidency’, under which the president was about as powerful as the last monarch, who ruled from 1906 to 1917.
A major reason for the increasing acceptance by the Russian people of authoritarian rule was the violence that erupted between late August and early September 1999 in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk (in the Dagestan Republic). Chechen separatists bombed a series of apartment blocks in those cities and in the process killed hundreds of civilians. Putin now seized the opportunity to flaunt his toughness and determination to restore order; he endeared himself to ordinary citizens craving safety by vowing to ‘kick the shit’ out of Chechen terrorists. Within weeks, the Russian army reentered Chechnya en masse, and after a singularly bloody war that lasted eight months the region was pacified and the virtual independence that Chechnya had achieved in 1996 was rescinded. But the costs were high. For several weeks, Russian troops laid siege to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and when they finally entered the city, on 2 February 2000, they found a devastated area that a United Nations report described as ‘the most destroyed city on earth’. The Russians, too, suffered heavy losses, although reliable statistics are hard to come by.
Toughness became a constant theme of Putin’s rule, enabling him to assume the role of protector of the people, many of whom felt threatened by violence and a breakdown of public order. In September 2004, when terrorists seized a school in Beslan, a town of 35,000 people in the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, he ordered Russian security forces to attack the building even though 1,200 adults and children were held hostage. In the bloody melee, 334 civilians (among them 186 children) died, but Putin’s government could claim to have preserved the prestige of the state by crushing the forces of disorder. Citizens (including many intellectuals) who support the government invariably emphasize their yearning for order and stability.
Although liberal democrats found the events in Chechnya alarming, there was some reason to believe that these harsh actions did not fully reflect Putin’s conception of how Russia should be ruled or his vision of Russia’s future. Early in his presidency, he sought to portray himself in various ways as a modernizer, as a man devoted to reform. For example, he placed flowers on the grave of Andrei Sakharov during a ceremony honoring the distinguished physicist, who during the 1970s and 1980s had courageously taken up the cause of the dissidents and had become a champion of civil rights and democracy. Putin also advocated – or paid lip service to – certain progressive ideas: he suggested that the power of the oligarchs was excessive and harmful to society, he spoke of the need to deregulate the economy, he called for reform of the notoriously inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy, and, perhaps most significantly, he urged the elimination of corruption. Corruption, as has been acknowledged by many senior officials in Russia, is not the preserve of a small group of miscreants but is firmly embedded in the country as a way of life, and as such it constitutes a major deterrent to the development of an efficient economy. According to a study by independent researchers, reported in the newspaper Vedomosti (The Record) on 6 February 2008, corruption is most widespread in departments administering the collection of taxes, the enforcement of the law, the handling of public health services, the adjudication of property disputes, and in the judicial system in general. The amounts of money to be paid for favors are very high: to be nominated by a party for a seat in the State Duma costs between two and five million dollars, the introduction of a legislative proposal in the Duma requires payment of a fee of $250,000, and anyone interested in obtaining a purchase order from a state agency must agree to hand over twenty percent of the order’s total value. It has been estimated that the annual value of bribes runs to 240 billion dollars; about half the people in Russia consider corruption to be the single most important barrier to economic growth. In a speech to the State Council on 8 February 2008, Putin acknowledged that these statistics were accurate. ‘One cannot start one’s business,’ he said. ‘People have to give bribes in every controlling institution – fire prevention, environmental services, medical permissions – you need to go to all of them, and it’s just terrible.’ But his administration made no serious efforts to uproot corruption.
Especially appealing to Russian liberals and to Western specialists in Russian affairs was Putin’s avowed interest, also articulated early in his presidency, in improving relations with the West. From 2000 until 2003, he made numerous gestures towards the West, and some commentators became convinced that Russia was at last bringing to a close a trend begun by Tsar Peter the Great, a champion of Westernization. In 2000, Putin went so far as to suggest that Russia might even welcome integration into the structure of NATO. A year later, in October 2001, he gave a speech in fluent German in the Bundestag in which he urged an end to the distrust that still remained from the Cold War era and called for greater cooperation, economically and politically, between Russia and Europe. Finally, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, Putin expressed full sympathy for the victims of the assault and vowed to cooperate with the West in its war on terrorism.
But the embrace of the West was short-lived. Many among the elite in Russia were not prepared to accept the permanent relegation of their country to that of a minor power on the world stage. Still smarting from the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, a growing number of the political class yearned for the reestablishment of their country as a superpower. Their slogan, gaining steadily in popular approval, is that ‘Russia is a great power or it is nothing.’ In April 2005, Putin indicated that he shared this sentiment when he declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the twentieth century.
An unexpected development in 2004, the sudden and steep rise in the price of oil – within four years the price of a barrel of crude oil rose from $25.00 to $100.00 – greatly improved the country’s economy and immediately boosted the self-confidence and influence of the government in the international arena. In short order, Russia, the second largest exporter of oil, paid off all debts to foreign countries and amassed foreign currency reserves that were surpassed in volume by only two countries. So far, the government has done little to apply the vast oil profits to revitalizing and modernizing the overall economy, which remains in the doldrums despite the improvement of conditions for some citizens. But as a wealthy ‘petrostate’, Russia has been able to use its new-found wealth to flex its muscles and to intimidate such former Soviet republics as Ukraine and Georgia and even Western Europe by withholding oil deliveries or by sharply raising the price of oil. Inevitably, their more assertive foreign policy soured relations with the West.
By the same token, some policies of the United States have had the effect of antagonizing the Russian authorities and the political elite. Although President George W. Bush at one time praised Putin as a ‘straightforward and trustworthy’ man whose ‘soul’ he could accurately gauge, and although he generally refrained from criticizing the Russian government’s domestic policies, including the drift to authoritarianism, the warm relationship between the two leaders did not last very long. For one thing, during his early period in the White House Bush did not bother to pay much attention to Russia, a slight that rankled the men in the Kremlin. But, in addition, important policy differences between Russia and the United States emerged after 2001. To mention only some of the most serious ones, Russia’s leaders vigorously opposed as unnecessarily provocative the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe, resented Western support of democratic forces in Ukraine and Georgia, opposed the granting of independence to Kosovo, refused to support America’s invasion of Iraq, and, finally, they strongly protested the placing of US missiles, allegedly for purely defensive purposes, in Poland and the Czech Republic. The differences between Russia and the West are not by any means insignificant, but it should also be noted that, for the Putin government, conflicts with the United States and the European Union have served a useful domestic purpose: they have given credibility to the Kremlin’s warnings that the country faces determined enemies who can only be withstood if the people rally around the government. Still, it would be a mistake to speak of a full-scale return of the Cold War, if for no other reason than that Russia is still militarily weak and must therefore exercise a fair degree of caution in reasserting itself. At the same time, there can be no question that in the years from 2006 to 2009 Russia and the United States no longer viewed each other as friends committed to pursuing common interests in international affairs. This is not likely to change in the near future; their interests are now too divergent.
It is not only in foreign policy that the United States (as well as the West in general) and Russia increasingly drifted apart. The accelerating trend towards authoritarianism in Russia has alienated many citizens in democratic countries who at one time had welcomed the political and economic changes that occurred after the collapse of communism. The list of actions by the Putin government that undermined democratic principles in recent years is long and deeply troubling. A few examples will suffice to indicate the trend. In a move designed to weaken possible opposition to the existing order, the authorities in the fall of 2003 nationalized major parts of the huge oil company Yukos and arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the main shareholder of the company and an outspoken critic of the Putin regime. After a trial for fraud and tax evasion that was a travesty of justice, he was sentenced to nine years in prison, and in addition the government took various steps to bring about the collapse of Yukos. Soon thereafter, other oligarchs were deprived of their roles in the political process and the government expanded its control over the economy. Several oligarchs, fearful of persecution, now live permanently outside of Russia.
These individuals, however, cannot assume that they are beyond the reach of Russian security officials, as was demonstrated in November 2006 in the ghastly affair of Alexander Litvinenko. Formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Federal Security Bureau, Litvinenko had emigrated to the United Kingdom, where the authorities granted him British citizenship. It is widely assumed that in a throwback to the practices of officials at the time of the Soviet Union, Russian agents killed him by plying him with radioactive polonium-210. The Kremlin denied all charges of complicity in the murder, but the evidence against the Russian authorities is very persuasive.
According to the constitution adopted under Yeltsin, a person may serve no more than two successive four-year terms as president, and as Putin approached the end of that period of service late in 2007 there was much speculation about his intentions. He was still relatively young (fifty-five) and it was clear that he savored his role as ‘superpresident’. He had become an adept leader and he was convinced that he had both stabilized the country and placed it on a path to regaining its position as a power to be reckoned with. For some time, ever since 2002 in fact, a ‘mini cult of personality’ had been promoted. Under Yeltsin, the walls in various government offices had been adorned with portraits of artists and some of the more prominent tsars, but now they were covered with photographs of Putin. Would a man of such prestige and stature, who was widely regarded as a ‘soft dictator’, willingly surrender his exalted office? Late in 2007, Putin gave his answer, and it was both clever and devious. He announced that he would step down as president and that in the upcoming election in March 2008 he would support the forty-two-year-old Dmitri Medvedev, a relatively unknown official who occupied the post of First Deputy Prime Minister and who was not known for his independence. Designated by Putin for the presidency, he was certain to win the election, and, most commentators assumed, he would do the bidding of his mentor and benefactor, who announced that he planned to remain in a leading position in the government, almost certainly as prime minister.
And in a four-hour news conference on 14 February 2008, weeks before leaving his presidential office, Putin left no doubt in anyone’s mind that as prime minister he expected to be the decisive leader of the nation. ‘The President is the guarantor of the Constitution,’ he said. ‘He sets the main directions for internal and external policies. But the highest executive power in the country is the Russian government, led by the premier,’ a post that he himself intended to occupy for at least four years. Mr Medvedev did not dispute Putin’s gloss on the constitution even though for eight years the leader and main spokesman of the government had been President Putin, not his prime ministers.
Putin also let it be known that the basic policies of the years from 2000 to 2008 would not be altered. There was no reason to change them since, as he put it, during his stewardship of the presidency ‘there have been no major failures.’ He indicated that he would not abandon his quest to restore Russia’s power and prestige, and repeated his intention to aim strategic missiles at the Czech Republic and Poland if those countries permitted the United States to install its missiles. It was also reasonable to assume that there would not be any significant change in the government’s domestic program, which had included a steady erosion of individual freedom and civil liberties. The seriousness of that erosion was dramatized one day before the president’s press conference. The Moscow Times of 13 February 2008 announced that the city authorities in St. Petersburg had shut down, allegedly for ‘fire safety violations’, the European University at Saint Petersburg, which is funded largely by Western foundations and is considered the leading independent institution of higher learning in the city. After declaring that politics had played no role in the authorities’ action, the president of the university, Nikolai Vakhtin, complied with the city ordinance and stopped all classes, but at the same time he quietly sought to persuade officials to rescind the order of closure. Liberal opponents of the government, however, insisted that the university was being punished for its research in Russian politics, and, more specifically, for its acceptance of a grant from the European Union to study Russian elections. Attempts to obtain clarification from offices that oversee fire-safety regulations regarding the order to shut down the university proved futile: no government official was willing to comment on the matter. But Putin had let the cat out of the bag some months before the closure when he accused the university of ‘being an agent of foreign meddling’. After worldwide protests against the government’s action, the authorities permitted the university to reopen on 21 March.
Two other aspects of Putin’s behavior at his last press conference as president deserve to be noted: his vulgarity and his disdain for the democratic process. When he was asked about reports in the West that he had amassed a huge fortune as president, he replied that journalists picked such ‘rumors . . . from a nose and smeared [them] onto their papers’. When a French journalist raised doubts about the credibility of recent results of the parliamentary election in Chechnya, in which ninety-nine percent of the population participated in the vote and ninety-nine percent of all ballots were cast for the president’s party, Putin turned to a state journalist from Chechnya to respond. The reporter did not hesitate to give the answer that Putin expected: ‘These are absolutely realistic figures. Personally, all my acquaintances, including myself, voted for United Russia,’ the party that scored the resounding victory.
The emergence in Russia of a political system that is now widely regarded as a ‘managed democracy’ can be traced back to certain statements and actions by Putin early in his presidency, whose significance was not fully understood at the time. Within weeks of his assumption of presidential power, Putin revealed that he regarded the state, by which he meant the executive branch, as the institution that can most effectively guarantee personal liberties and undertake initiatives to benefit society. ‘The stronger the government,’ he said, ‘the stronger personal freedom . . . Democracy is a dictatorship of the law.’ The meaning of this brief and somewhat opaque statement was suggested by Putin’s conduct during the Andrei Babitsky affair in January 2000. Babitsky was a reporter who sent dispatches from Chechnya revealing the brutality of Russian soldiers in putting down local insurgents. On 16 January, Babitsky was arrested by Russian officials and was immediately accused by the government of being a supporter of Chechen rebels. A month later, the Russian authorities exchanged him for two Russian soldiers held captive by the rebels, clearly a move designed to gain credibility for their charge that Babitsky had engaged in treasonous activities in Chechnya. Since then, official pressure on journalists to toe the government’s line has become more insidious. Within a few years no fewer than thirteen Russian reporters had been murdered, and in October 2006 an eminent and courageous critic of the government, Anna Politkovskaya, was found shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building. Although ten suspects have been arrested in connection with Politkovskaya’s murder, few people familiar with the case believe that the actual murderer was ever in custody.
In addition, the government has sought to avoid criticism of its policies by exerting various forms of pressure on television stations: local governors or mayors ‘advise’ business executives not to place any advertisements with stations that are considered hostile to the authorities; officials suddenly and unexpectedly discover irregularities in a lease of a TV station, or violations of fire or sanitation codes; and, finally, the police carry out raids on newspapers to confiscate ‘illegal software’ and thus intimidate reporters. These measures to stifle freedom of speech, important as they are, do not exhaust the endeavors by the authorities to sustain the ‘managed democracy’. At the same time, various steps have also been taken to centralize political power in the Kremlin and, what is more ominous, to prevent opponents from running for office. In 2004, Putin enhanced his power by abolishing the election of local governors and independent legislators; under the new procedures, governors were appointed by the central government, and in elections of legislators citizens could no longer vote for individual candidates but had to cast their ballots for a political party. Putin justified the changes as essential to promote ‘national cohesion’, which, he claimed, was necessary for the ongoing struggle against terrorism.
But democrats in Russia were not persuaded by the claim and denounced the new procedures as ‘the beginning of a constitutional coup d’état’ or a ‘step towards dictatorship’. Then, in the run-up to the presidential election in March 2008, Putin’s government invoked highly technical and specious reasons to prevent three men (among them the former world chess champion Garry Kasparov) from running for the office. This left only four very weak candidates in the race against the heavily favored Dmitri Medvedev. The final blow undermining confidence in the legitimacy of the electoral process in Russia was delivered by the international monitors who were to observe the vote and pass judgment on its fairness and honesty. They left the country after declaring that so many restrictions were imposed on their work that they could not possibly render an objective evaluation of the legitimacy of the election.
The results of the election confirmed Putin’s prediction that Medvedev would win by an overwhelming margin because, as the president put it, the vast majority of Russians approved of his policies and achievements. Medvedev received slightly over seventy percent of all the votes, and almost seventy percent of all eligible Russians cast ballots. These statistics, virtually unheard of in national elections in Western democracies, inevitably raise further doubt about the fairness of the electoral process in Russia.
What, then, can we say about Yeltsin’s legacy twenty-five years after he took the lead in destroying the Soviet Union and committed himself to establishing democracy and a free market in the newly independent Russian Federation? His actions were unquestionably revolutionary, as were his stated aims. But at this moment no simple answer to the question can be satisfactory for the simple reason that his policies were driven by contradictory impulses, and the same can be said of his successor. Yeltsin retained the democratic procedures that had been introduced during the last years of Gorbachev’s tenure as general secretary of the Communist Party, but he did virtually nothing to create institutions that would perpetuate those procedures and impress upon the people the desirability of maintaining them. He did not establish the rule of law, the constitution drafted under his direction granted more power to the president than is healthy in a democracy, and he did not lend his support to the formation of independent political parties, which are one of the lifelines of democracies. Moreover, his toleration of corrupt officials undermined confidence in democracy, as did his frequent hints that the president might dispense with elections. On the other hand, it has become the rule in Russia that political struggles are to be decided by elections, although their imperfections are understandably disturbing to committed democrats. Moreover, despite the growing arbitrariness in recent years of the security police there has not been a reversion to the practices of the Soviet era, when vast numbers of people suspected of opposition to the existing order were sent to the Gulag or otherwise persecuted. The press and other media have come under severe pressure, but there is still more freedom of expression now than there was during the period from 1917 to about 1986. Russia certainly cannot be said to be a ‘democracy’ in the sense the word is understood in the West, but neither can the country’s political system be characterized as totalitarian.
In foreign affairs, Yeltsin’s legacy has also been ambiguous. Neither he nor initially his chosen successor, Putin, made any extensive efforts to force the other former Soviet republics to reunite with Russia, even though relations with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova were at times contentious. In relations with the West, and particularly the United States, there were some tense moments that grew more strident during the years 2007–9, but there were no major clashes, certainly none that could have led to military conflict. This is not an insignificant matter because Russia, despite the decline in its armed forces, still has thousands of nuclear weapons and therefore cannot be discounted militarily.
The economy under Yeltsin underwent a radical change from a highly centralized structure, in which private property played a minimal role, to a decentralized one in which most enterprises are privately owned. But this transformation exacted a terrible price, steep economic decline. The output of goods plummeted, many people became impoverished, and in the late 1990s the morale of the nation reached a nadir. President Putin has not eliminated the free enterprise system but he has imposed more state control over the economy. The ultimate outcome of this process remains in doubt. In the meantime, the spectacular rise in the price of oil after 2004 produced a sharp and steady upward climb of the national economy, and the lot of sizable groups of Russians, especially those who live in the larger cities, has improved substantially. There is still much poverty in the country and some economists contend that on the whole the population of Russia is worse off now than it was in the early 1980s. Few of them dare to predict when the market economy will produce a standard of living in Russia comparable to that in the West.
In concluding this account of Russian history it seems appropriate to touch again on an issue that has frequently been a central concern of Russian political leaders and intellectuals and that was raised on the first page of chapter 1: is Russia part of the West or does it belong culturally to the East? Lilia Shevtsova, in my view the leading specialist on Yeltsin’s presidency and on recent Russian history in general, offered a nuanced answer to the question in a book she published in 1999, before Putin’s assumption of the presidential office. I believe that her answer accurately reflected the state of affairs at that time and remains valid today. The superpresidency created by Yeltsin, she argued
follows the country’s historic Byzantine model of governance, in which all power is concentrated in a leader – a czar, general secretary, president – who becomes the symbol of the nation and its arbiter as well as its main guarantor of stability. In contrast to the Western political tradition, in which power is based on rational ideas and institutions, the Byzantine tradition has always invested power with something sacred, irrational, and personal. The ruler was considered to be simultaneously the father of the nation, omnipresent, and not responsible to any other person or institution.
Stalin, Shevtsova continued, ‘was the full embodiment of the Byzantine tradition of irrationality, mystery, and contempt for society’. Although ‘the past still keeps Russia in its embrace’, and although it is too early to decide definitively whether the country will be able to shake off that embrace, the changes in the economic and political system of the country that followed the collapse of communism suggest that ‘Russia is gradually understanding the need to finally close the Byzantine chapter in its history.’ True, in the seventeen years since Shevtsova wrote these lines President Putin has steadily moved Russia back to the Byzantine tradition. But it is not yet clear how long-lasting his influence on Russian political culture will be. It will be some time – perhaps decades – before we know whether the Western traditions of freedom of the individual and private property, which animated the upheaval in 1991, have struck deep roots in Russia, providing the country with the preconditions for a stable democracy and flourishing economy.