Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev made his final televised address on Christmas Day of 1991, President George Bush spoke to the American nation. Bush’s Christmas message had none of the sadness and trepidation that permeated Gorbachev’s; instead, it had the elation of a baseball coach whose team has just won the World Series:
Good evening, and Merry Christmas1 to all Americans across our great country! During these last few months, we have witnessed one of the greatest dramas of the twentieth century – the historic transformation of a totalitarian dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and the liberation of its peoples … For over forty years, the United States has led the West in the struggle against Communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans … But the confrontation is now over! The nuclear threat is receding. Eastern Europe is free. The Soviet Union itself is no more. This is a victory for democracy and freedom! It is a victory for the moral force of our values! Every American can take pride in this victory, from the millions of men and women who have served our country in uniform to the millions of Americans who supported their country and a strong defence under nine presidents!
It was as if the United States had singlehandedly wiped out autocracy in Russia. The implication was that ‘American values’ had triumphed, and Russia would henceforth adopt them too. A blinkered confidence that its leaders could simply be instructed in the art of becoming good capitalists ‘like us’ would be a hallmark of how the West would treat Russia for the next ten years.
Many Russians had heard about the freedoms and prosperity of the West, and they not unnaturally wanted the same. There was a rush to slough off the remaining trappings of Communism to make way for the new capitalist society: a new national anthem was commissioned, a new flag, and old names became new again – Leningrad became St Petersburg, Gorky Street in Moscow reverted to its old name of Tverskaya, Marx Prospekt became Okhotny Ryad, and so on across the country. I attended a bizarre event in Gorky Park, where Moscow’s Communist-era statues – all the Lenins and Brezhnevs, and the towering Dzerzhinsky that the crowds had toppled in Lubyanka Square – were dumped unceremoniously on a plot of scrubby grass. The Moscow mayor, Gavriil Popov, declared that this would be an ‘open-air museum of social history’. ‘One era of history2 has ended,’ he told the crowds. ‘Now we must build the new one.’
But the exorcism of Communism from Russian society would not be so easy. The CPSU was far more than just a political party; over the course of 70 years it had virtually become the state. Gorbachev’s spokesman, Vitaly Ignatenko spoke of the ‘void’ its abolition left in the running of the country and in the minds of its citizens.
This was a society3 whose resources had been allocated and whose needs had been supplied for decades by the party. Everything was done by and through the party. I even remember a poem by a young girl in the Communist youth newspaper. It said, ‘Winter has gone; summer has come – thanks be to the party.’ It sounds naive and funny today. But in those days we had the party to thank for everything. And all of a sudden to realise that the party is no longer there to tell you how to live your life, how to build your future …
For every Russian who welcomed the prospect of a new society built on democracy and capitalism, there were others – mainly, but not entirely, of the older generation – who pined for the Communist past. Eduard Shevardnadze warned that the Communists would not go easily, that revanchist forces were still active. ‘In August 19914 we defeated fools,’ he said. ‘But now they are finding smarter leaders. The Communists are still strong, and we would be naive to think they have been swept from the historical arena. If we allow ourselves to be divided, they will be stronger than us.’
That lurking sense of the new regime’s fragility, of its vulnerability to powerful Communist forces that might at any moment stage a comeback underpinned Boris Yeltsin’s efforts to entrench himself in power and the values he represented in the fabric of Russian society. It meant he was happy to listen when Washington offered advice about how to lay the foundations of market democracy in the shortest possible time.
In the months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, much was made of the so-called Washington Consensus: that capitalist economic models had triumphed and were now the only way forward for the world’s emerging economies. Learned theoreticians were dispatched to Eastern Europe to preach the gospel of freed prices, reduced government deficits, deregulated trade, export-led growth and integration into the world economy. A team of Western economists led by Harvard University’s Jeffrey Sachs had already been at work in Poland with generally encouraging results. Now they came to Moscow, and under their influence Yeltsin committed himself to a programme of ‘economic shock therapy’.
The rationale behind the policy was to shift Russia from the stagnation of Communist central planning to an economy where competition and private enterprise would breathe new vigour into the state. The Harvard economists, with the backing of economic liberals in the Russian government, notably the prime minister Yegor Gaidar and the economic guru Anatoly Chubais, convinced Yeltsin that delay would increase the scale of the task, and that the transformation had to be completed before the Communists could regroup and turn back the clock. Only by creating a new business elite and a middle class with a stake in the system could they be sure the Communists would never regain power. The reformers acknowledged that the speed of the change – the biggest and fastest privatisation exercise ever undertaken – would cause short-term pain, but argued that the long-term gain would make it worthwhile.
The pain was not long in coming. In January 1992, the Kremlin announced that prices for all but the most essential goods and services were being freed. After decades of strict state controls backed by billions of roubles of subsidies, the abrupt lifting of the lid sent prices rocketing. In the first month, inflation5 hit 400 per cent; some people’s savings were spent on the purchase of just a few days’ worth of food. It was not long before the sight of beggars on the street became commonplace and people were forced to sell possessions to feed their families. In an attempt to balance the national budget, state spending was slashed and taxes raised. When entitlement to free health care was reduced, few could afford the paid services that replaced it. Illnesses and infant mortality increased, along with alcoholism and suicide; by the mid 1990s, male life expectancy had fallen to 57 years.
Yeltsin’s popularity, which had been high after his heroism of August 1991, began to slide. The effects of the ‘shock therapy’ were widely resented and the government did a poor job of explaining why it was needed – that in the last days of Communism the country had been close to bankruptcy; that Russia’s national debt was so big that the world was no longer prepared to lend to it; that bitter medicine had to be taken. Much of the opprobrium was directed at Gaidar, Chubais and their team of young economists. Yeltsin’s vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi, who had shown6 such bravery during the siege of the Russian White House, joined the critics, describing the reformers as ‘young boys in pink shorts and yellow boots’. Yeltsin viewed the privatisation of state property as a priority, the key to unleashing enterprise and energy, and embedding the values of market democracy. He was determined that state assets should not be sold to foreign buyers; but home-grown investors with enough capital to purchase the colossal state industries he was selling off were rare. So the first attempt at privatisation in late 1992, masterminded by Gaidar and Chubais, was a voucher scheme that aimed to ‘give away’ Russia’s state industries to the people. Every citizen was given a voucher worth 10,000 roubles (approximately $60), each one representing a very small stake in the country’s economy. It was a quixotic attempt to create a shareholding middle class overnight. But it failed, because the people who did have money, and who had the inside knowledge that the vouchers were the key to untold future wealth – entrepreneurs such as Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Khodorkovsky – bought up the vouchers by the hundreds of thousands. Every street corner had hawkers with billboards advertising ‘Vouchers bought – good prices paid’; the idealism of the operation had evaporated. Even the mathematics seemed perversely illogical. The population of Russia was nearly 150 million, so 150 million vouchers were issued… meaning that the greater part of the Russian economy was apparently being valued at a mere $9 billion. No wonder the future oligarchs were determined to buy it up.
Privatisation left most worse off; a handful became wealthy beyond imagination. Berezovsky would later7 brazenly boast that Russia’s top seven businessmen controlled 50 per cent of Russia’s economy. The oligarchs were widely despised by ordinary Russians, who accused them of ‘robbing the state of its assets’; and the fact that most of them were Jewish added to the popular anger.
The Yeltsin era, begun with such high hopes, was turning sour. Food production in8 1992 dropped by 9 per cent; industrial production was down by 18 per cent. The majority of Russians were experiencing their worst living conditions since the Second World War. Wages went unpaid and inflation ran out of control; homelessness and poverty rose to unprecedented levels. Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi, who had become the leading voice of opposition to Yeltsin, described his policies as ‘economic genocide’. But a small minority were accumulating fabulous levels of wealth. The novye Russkie – ‘new Russians’ – in their Gucci and Prada, with their bodyguards, blacked-out Mercedes and Rolls-Royces, stood out on the poverty-stricken streets of Moscow, a tacit indictment of the new liberalism. With vast wealth up for grabs, gangsterism, corruption and violence flourished.
If economic liberalisation was failing to deliver, the other promise of the new era – democratisation – was also in trouble. The naked exploitation of Yeltsin’s privatisation scheme had placed vast financial power in the hands of the oligarchs, and it was not long before they began to aspire to political power too. Several of them demanded and were given government posts. Boris Berezovsky became an intimate of the Kremlin, directing policy decisions from the shadows, reputedly the power behind Yeltsin’s throne. A plutocratic new order was emerging in which business and political elites were closely intertwined. It would mutate into a Faustian bargain, with each side believing it had a hold over the other.
The years from 1991 were one of Russia’s ‘moments of destiny’, when she threw off the shackles of autocracy and experimented with the values of liberal democracy. But after their initial enthusiasm, people were becoming disenchanted. The economy was crumbling, Russia had lost its superpower status and ethnic violence was brewing in the national enclaves within the Russian Federation. Yeltsin seemed to have no answer. When opposition to his policies reached boiling point in late 1992, he demanded to extend his right to issue presidential decrees, bypassing the scrutiny of parliament and allowing him to rule as a virtual dictator. The prophet of democracy was reaching for the methods of the autocratic system he had fought to overthrow. The irony did not pass unremarked; the ingrained tradition of autocratic rule was not an easy one to throw off.
But the Russian parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, and its standing legislature, the Supreme Soviet, refused to extend Yeltsin’s powers and refused to reappoint Yegor Gaidar as prime minister. Both refusals were a protest against the economic policies that had brought the country so much suffering with little sign of long-term reward. Yeltsin called a national referendum, asking the Russian people to choose between him and the parliament, between further economic liberalisation and a return to the old ways of doing things. When the referendum was held in April 1993, its questions were phrased in such a way that the alternative to Yeltsin’s policies seemed to entail certain disaster. He won the backing of most voters; but the parliamentarians, under the leadership of Rutskoi and the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, continued to block his reforms. Yeltsin threatened to disband the parliament. The stand-off between president and legislature was paralysing the workings of government. The newspaper Izvestiya commented acidly, ‘The president issues decrees9 as if there were no Supreme Soviet, while the Supreme Soviet suspends decrees as if there were no president.’ In late September, Yeltsin announced he was suspending negotiations on a new constitution, calling another referendum and dissolving the Supreme Soviet. Parliament responded by impeaching him and declaring that Alexander Rutskoi was now the president. Dual power was back, and Russia’s future hung in the balance.
By early October, demonstrators were marching in support of the parliamentarians, wooed by their promises to halt the economic reforms, restore state controls and stabilise prices. Armed clashes broke out on the streets of Moscow; the police and army split between those loyal to the president and those supporting the rebels. A vicious battle was fought for control of the Russian Television headquarters at Ostankino, in which 62 people were killed.fn1
By now the parliamentarians had fortified the parliament building, the same Russian White House that Yeltsin had successfully defended against the hardline Communists in August 1991, and were appealing for Muscovites to come to their aid. In 1991, Yeltsin had been protected by 50,000 civilians, but significantly fewer turned out to help Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. In 1991, the hardliners had hesitated to attack the White House, but Yeltsin had no such scruples. In the early hours of 4 October 1993, tanks of the Russian army launched a sustained bombardment of the building and by mid morning the upper storeys were on fire. At midday, elite soldiers of the Vympel and Alpha Spetsnaz units entered the parliament and began to clear it floor by floor. Hundreds of heavily armed rebels were inside, but they were no match for the troops. Within hours, the dead were laid out in the corridors and the besieged parliamentarians were debating their next move with increasing desperation inside the barricaded assembly chamber. When they emerged in late afternoon waving white flags, over 200 people were dead and many more wounded. It had been the worst violence on the streets of Moscow since 1917.
Boris Yeltsin denounced10 the rebellion of the parliamentarians as a plot ‘hatched by Communist revanchists, fascists and former deputies acting in the name of the Soviets’. ‘The organisers are criminals and bandits,’ he announced, ‘a petty band of politicians recruiting mercenaries who are used to violence and murder, attempting by armed force to impose their will on the whole country … The men who wave red flags have once again stained Russia with blood.’ But the rebel parliamentarians were neither revanchists nor fascists. They were not the Communist dinosaurs who led the August 1991 coup. These were politicians who opposed the liberal reforms Yeltsin was introducing in Russia, and whose views, expressed in a democratic parliamentary forum, had been ignored. Boris Yeltsin may have championed freedom and democracy, but he had stooped to coercion to impose them; he may have fought against the old autocracy, but he was now using its methods. The Russian White House, the building that in 1991 had been the symbol of Russian democracy – Yevtushenko’s ‘white swan’ – had been blown to pieces.
In the aftermath of the October events, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were sent to jail. Yeltsin pushed through his plans for a new constitution and instituted a bicameral legislature to be known as the State Duma and the Federation Council. Its powers were significantly weaker than those of the old parliament: the president retained the right to rule by decree, to appoint the prime minister and to dissolve the Duma; he could no longer be impeached and he had the right to veto the parliament’s legislation by a simple majority in the lower house. Concentrating so much power in the hands of the president, and the neutering of parliament, left Russia with only a truncated version of the democracy Boris Yeltsin had once advocated. Like Catherine the Great, he had found that democratic ideals are all very well, until they necessitate the sharing of power. The experiment with Western-style liberal values was being watered down, and worse was to follow.
Elections to the new Duma in December 1993 saw Yeltsin and Gaidar’s party beaten into third place by the ultra-nationalist, anti-Western ‘Liberal Democratic’ Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a populist rabble-rouser who pledged to send the Russian army marching through Afghanistan and Persia until its men could ‘wash their boots11 in the Indian Ocean’. Two years later, in the 1995 Duma elections, the big winner was the reconstituted and resurgent Communist Party, in a landslide that said much about the people’s disenchantment with the government and the president. The combination of the irresponsible, Western-sponsored ‘shock therapy’ and Boris Yeltsin’s disastrous management of the economy had resulted in an onerous budget deficit. The state was collecting only a fraction of the taxes it needed to remain solvent; schoolteachers, civil servants and police were going unpaid; pensioners were not getting their pensions; industry was grinding to a halt. At a nuclear submarine base in the northwestern port of Murmansk, the navy found its electricity cut off after failing to pay six months’ fuel bills, leaving the vessels’ reactors in imminent danger of meltdown. Russia was in chaos. To make things worse, presidential elections were due the following year, and the Communists, under their new leader Gennady Zyuganov, were threatening to make a sensational return to power – this time via the ballot box.
Yeltsin and his allies panicked. They needed a massive injection of cash to keep the economy going if their election campaign were to have any chance of success; and they needed the oligarchs, who by now controlled much of the country’s media, to come to their aid in beating off the Communist challenge. For the oligarchs, too, the prospect of a Communist victory, with the promised horrors of re-nationalisation, corruption trials and political revenge, was not a happy one. Two leading oligarchs12, Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, proposed that Russia’s tycoons would lend the president the equivalent of $1.8 billion. It would allow the Kremlin to reduce the backlog of salaries and pensions and to offer a few economic sweeteners to the electorate. The oligarchs would also undertake to swing the media behind the Yeltsin campaign. But Potanin and Khodorkovsky wanted much in return. As surety for their money, they would require the government to put up the deeds to Russia’s remaining state industries, including the key sectors of iron, steel, gas and oil. The scheme would become known as ‘loans for shares’, and since there was very little chance of the bankrupt government ever repaying the loans, it was always clear that the oligarchs would get their hands on the key prizes of the Russian economy. But first they would have to use their money and influence to get Yeltsin re-elected: if the Communists came back, so would the old order. There would be no more private property, no more oligarchs and no more Yeltsin.
The infusion of cash and the blanket support of the media helped Yeltsin surge from disastrous poll numbers to beat the Communist Zyuganov in the second round of elections in July 1996. The oligarchs then claimed their prize. In September, the state organised a series of very unusual auctions for the nationalised firms that had been offered to the oligarchs as collateral for their loans. In each case, the only bidder for the assets in question was the oligarch who had made the loan to Yeltsin before the election. Potanin picked up the country’s leading nickel and aluminium company13 for kopecks; Berezovsky, with his partner and protégé Roman Abramovich, got the Sibneft oil company; and Khodorkovsky got a majority stake in the massive Yukos oil conglomerate, then Russia’s second largest producer, for the knockdown price of $309 million.
His pact with the oligarchs discredited Yeltsin. Corruption allegations surrounding his advisers and his family began to take their toll. He appeared as a politician who acted on impulse, whose behaviour – like that of Nikita Khrushchev – was unpredictable. The CIA’s assessment that he was ‘flaky’ seemed to be borne out: as with Lech Walesa in Poland, Yeltsin had been the man for the dramatic moment, but was decidedly unsuited to the long haul of day-to-day politics. A long history of heavy drinking had resulted in embarrassing moments, including an alcohol-fuelled attempt to conduct a military band on a visit to Germany, a tottering performance at a press conference with world leaders, and a speech in which he read the same passage three times before being halted by his aides. (When I spoke to him before the 1996 presidential election, his face was puffy, he slurred his words and seemed uncertain of what he had and had not promised the electorate; immediately afterwards he disappeared from public view.)
Rumours that Yeltsin was seriously ill were strenuously denied by the Kremlin, but for the first weeks of the 1996 presidential campaign the president was absent from the scene. Then suddenly he was back, appearing at an election concert in his native Sverdlovsk, where he jumped up on stage to dance the rumba with a manic energy and an impressive sense of rhythm. It was only years later that we discovered the truth: Yeltsin had suffered14 a serious heart attack, one of several that would strike him in the next four years, and had been advised by his doctors to take a lengthy break from politics; but at the insistence of his election team he had been given adrenalin injections that shot him back into action. The long-term effects of such treatment were potentially disastrous, and for the rest of his time in office it was never clear how much he was in charge of events and how much he was being manipulated by the powerful ‘advisers’ he had acquired from the ranks of the oligarchs.
Yeltsin’s commitment to liberal democracy had been undermined by the deterioration in the economic and political climate, and his previously stated support for the freedom of Russia’s national minorities was also coming under strain. His advice to the nationalities to ‘take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’ had come back to haunt him; ethnic unrest had been growing since 1991, as different national regions attempted to take him at his word. Chechnya had elected a new president, the former Soviet air force general Dzhokhar Dudayev, who declared independence from Moscow; subsequent discrimination against Russians living in the republic had led to violent clashes. For three years, Yeltsin avoided the use of force, engaging in proxy negotiations with the separatists, but in December 1994 Chechnya was close to civil war. The Kremlin announced that the Russian army was being deployed to ‘restore order’. The defence minister, Pavel Grachev, boasted that the fighting would be over in days, if not hours, but his ground forces suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks. As casualties mounted15 and Russian conscript prisoners were reportedly tortured and executed by their captors, Moscow retaliated with a campaign of carpet bombing, the heaviest of its kind since the allied destruction of Dresden in the Second World War. By the time Russian troops captured the Chechen capital a month later, little of the city was still standing; the presidential palace was in ruins and tens of thousands of civilians had been killed.
Russia had learned from centuries of experience that subduing the mountainous territories of the north Caucasus is not an easy task, and sporadic fighting continued for much of the next two years. The mullahs proclaimed Chechen resistance a jihad – a holy war with heavenly rewards for those who fell in it – and Islamic fighters from the Middle East flooded in. Guerrilla forces continued to harry Moscow’s army, inflicting heavy casualties. Atrocities were widespread on both sides; prisoners could expect little mercy, and civilians suffered almost as much as the troops. Chechen detachments would regularly take hostages, most spectacularly when they seized a hospital at Budyonnovsk in southern Russia in June 1995. Dudayev was assassinated by a Russian guided missile in April 1996, but fighting continued until August when a ceasefire was signed. The First Chechen War (1994–6) would result in the deaths of 100,000 Chechens, mostly civilians, and between 5,000 and 10,000 Russian soldiers. Yeltsin’s image as a democrat was in tatters; the viability of liberal government as a means of ruling Russia was looking distinctly questionable.
For most of the 1990s it seemed to be in the interest of the West to support Russia’s experiment with democracy. It had, after all, brought an end to the Cold War, halted the ruinously expensive arms race and transformed Moscow from a feared opponent to a willing ally. Decades of Western demands for an end to totalitarian rule and political repression had been answered; Yeltsin’s bold reforms had been praised by Washington and London, so now that he was in trouble there was an expectation that the West would help shore up his fortunes. But George Bush’s Christmas message of 1991, and similar declarations by other leaders, had promised an end to worry about Russia, not an expensive campaign to support its government, however pro-Western it might be.
Russia had been accepted as a member of the G7, now G8, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had granted it an economic stimulus package worth around $10 billion. But further aid was slow to come. As early as October 1992, Yeltsin had begun to express Moscow’s frustration at the lack of Western support. ‘Russia is not a country16 that can be kept waiting in the ante-room,’ he said, as the Kremlin expressed a desire for quick integration into the Western system. At various times, Yeltsin suggested that Russia could become a member of the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and even of NATO. But all his suggestions were rebuffed. NATO continued its expansion into the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, signing up Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic while leaving Russia with little more than a cooperation agreement. Moscow became alarmed at suggestions that former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states, might also be recruited.
By the end of the 1990s, relations were frosty. Yeltsin denounced NATO’s intervention in Serbia and Kosovo without a UN mandate; and Bill Clinton responded by attacking the Kremlin’s renewed military activity in Chechnya. At a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, President Clinton jabbed his finger at the Russian president and demanded he halt the bombing of Grozny; Yeltsin stormed out of the conference. Shortly afterwards he gave vent to his frustration. ‘Yesterday,’ he said17, ‘President Clinton sought to put pressure on Russia. He forgot for a moment, for a second, that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons. He has forgotten about that.’ It was an echo of the disquieting rhetoric of Khrushchev and Kennedy.
The world economic crisis of 1998 cast harsh light on Russia’s economic imbalance. The collapse in the price of oil, gas, metals and timber meant Moscow could no longer rely on the unbridled export of natural resources to finance its escalating budget deficit. In August, the Kremlin announced that it was devaluing the rouble and suspending the repayment of its foreign debts. The financial markets, panicked at the prospect of a Russian default, sent share prices tumbling. By the end of the year, thousands of people had lost their life savings as a series of banks collapsed; hundreds of firms and businesses went under; inflation hit 88 per cent18 and shops were again left with empty shelves. Demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow and other big cities, demanding an end to the liberal economic reforms. Yeltsin responded by firing his prime minister and the government. He announced that the reforms were being suspended, and Russia’s experiment with Western-style liberal democracy ground to a halt.
In August 1999, with no sign of the crisis abating, Yeltsin appointed yet another new prime minister. He was a little-known bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin, who had been installed the previous year as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Few expected him to last long in the job. But he brought a new ruthlessness to the Kremlin, a bullyboy swagger on the continuing unrest in Chechnya, and – behind his professions of support for Yeltsin’s reforms – a belief that Russia needed strength and stability more than it needed democracy.
For most of the 1990s the Kremlin had loosened the reins of autocratic power, allowing political participation and economic freedom. The Yeltsin years had raised the prospect that Russia might turn away from her ‘Asiatic’ past and join the camp of ‘European’ nations. But it had come to nothing. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Boris Yeltsin welcomed the new millennium with a dramatic speech on television. The old, sick president announced that he was stepping down six months early.
‘Dear friends, my dears19,’ he began. ‘Today I am offering you New Year greetings for the last time. Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am retiring.’ Yeltsin’s speech was emotional; at times he gasped to catch his breath. And though he spoke of hope for the future, his overriding message was one of failure – the failure of the experiment he had embarked upon in the heady days of August 1991, when it appeared that Russia was throwing off her thousand-year mantle of autocracy and embarking on a new course of freedom and democracy. ‘Today, on this incredibly important day for me,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you for forgiveness. I ask your forgiveness because many of the hopes we had have not come true; because what we thought would be easy turned out to be terribly difficult. I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling the hopes of those who believed we could jump from the grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilised future. I myself believed we could do this. But it could not be done as simply as that … and in my heart I have experienced the pain that each of you experienced … As I go into retirement, I have signed a decree entrusting the duties of President of Russia to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin …’
A bloated old man squinting at the autocue, his speech slurred and his eyelids drooping: it was a sorry epitaph for twentieth-century Russia’s last great ‘moment of destiny’. Reform was once more giving way to the resurgent tradition of autocracy.
fn1 The dead included the freelance television cameraman Rory Peck, who had previously been working for the BBC.