In the wake of one of Russia’s most turbulent upheavals, the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, the poet Fedor Tyutchev wrote:
… Bless’d is he who visited this world1
In its moments of unruly destiny!
For he was summoned by the gods
To partake in their revels;
A witness to their mighty deeds,
Admitted to their inmost thoughts,
He drinks immortal life
From heaven’s very chalice!
On the morning of Monday 19 August 1991 I felt I knew what he meant.
As BBC Television’s Moscow Correspondent for the preceding three years, I had sensed something was in the offing, but the news that woke me that morning took my breath away. State radio and television were broadcasting Neanderthal Communist propaganda that hadn’t been heard in Moscow for several years, accusing Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist regime of undermining the Soviet Union and exercising power in the service of ‘interests hostile to the Soviet people2’. It was time, said the announcer, ‘to restore the pride and might of the USSR’. The broadcast concluded: ‘For reasons of ill health, Mikhail Gorbachev is unable to continue his duties … a State Emergency committee has taken over.’
A hardline coup against the reforming Soviet president Gorbachev was under way. I remember speeding through the streets and seeing columns of tanks descending the broad avenues towards the Kremlin. They had been sent by the men who had put Gorbachev under arrest and were now running the country. It was an unsettling scene.
But in the days that followed ordinary Russians stood in the way of the tanks; some of them were shot or crushed to death for their determination to defend democracy. I was there when the Russian president Boris Yeltsin, liberalism’s last champion now Gorbachev was in captivity, climbed on the back of a tank to dramatise his defiance of the coup. For two days and nights, Yeltsin waited in the Russian White House for the attack to begin. The dramatic events of those August days resolved the confrontation between the forces of reform and hardline autocracy in the Soviet Union. In the face of vociferous public opposition, the hardliners lost their nerve, the coup collapsed and its leaders were arrested.
I was convinced – and said in my reports – that the downfall of the Communist dinosaurs who had mounted the coup, together with the dissolution of the Communist Party after 70 years in power, meant that autocracy was dead in Russia, that centuries of repression would be thrown off and replaced with freedom and democracy. But I was wrong. For the next decade, Russia tried to turn itself into a Western-style market democracy but slid instead into runaway inflation, ethnic violence and chaos. The following years, from 2000 onwards, saw that process largely reversed. The country became stable and relatively prosperous, but democracy and freedom again took second place to the demands of the state. The spectre of autocracy was again haunting Russia.
Back in 1991, I should probably have known better. In the grip of Moscow’s euphoria, I’d forgotten the lesson of history that in Russia attempts at reform are followed by a return to autocracy – unchecked power concentrated in the hands of a single unaccountable authority. It had happened so often in the past that it was improbable things would be different this time.
It was one thing for me to be wrong, but much more serious was the fact that the leaders of Europe and America were wrong too. They sent clever economists from Harvard to oversee Russia’s transition to the market, rejoiced at the defeat of Communism and assumed the problem was solved: from now on, they triumphantly declared, Russia would be like us. If only the West had learned the lessons of history, it might have avoided some of the terrible mistakes it was about to make, mistakes that would darken East–West relations, squander billions of dollars and contribute indirectly to the failure of Russia’s liberal experiment.
If we want to understand the processes at work in the last two decades, we need a proper awareness of Russia’s thousand-year history. Russia has never really been ‘like us’, if by that we mean a liberal, market-oriented democracy where the wielders of power are there at the sufferance of the people and can be replaced through a law-governed process.fn1 The Russian model, with the exception of brief, recurrent periods of radical experimentation, has always been the opposite: autocracy places the wielders of power above the law; they rule by divine right, or ‘by the dictatorship of the people’, but almost always by brute force.
Those who regard Russia as a proto-European nation miss the point. Russia looks both ways: to the democratic, law-governed traditions of the West, but at the same time – and with more of this inherited DNA in her make-up – to the Asiatic forms of governance she imbibed in the early years of her history, what Russians refer to as the silnaya ruka, the iron fist of centralised power.fn2
There is a school of Russian history, labelled path determinism, which says Russia is forever bound to be ruled by the fist of autocracy; that it’s in her nature, and Western-style democracy will never work for her. It was a view commonly held by British and American conservatives during the Cold War years and has recently enjoyed a resurgence. That diagnosis is perhaps too categorical, too redolent of the discredited ‘historical inevitability’ of Hegel and Marx. But I can’t help noticing how often it has been articulated over the course of Russian history. From the earliest rulers, Rurik and Oleg, to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the argument was advanced that Russia was too big and too disorderly ever to be suited to devolved power; only the silnaya ruka of centralised autocracy could hold together her centripetal empire and maintain order among her disparate people. The same rationale would be used by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tsars, by the Communist regime in the twentieth century and – mutatis mutandis – by Vladimir Putin in the twenty-first.
Winston Churchill’s exasperated quip about ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ set the tone for a lazy Western assumption that Russians are too complex even to try to understand. But if we can grasp Russia’s history, we can uncover the roots of her sometimes puzzling behaviour. She is a jarring combination of East and West that would trouble her artists, writers, politicians and thinkers for many centuries.
The poet Alexander Blok’s agonised questions ‘Are we Scythians? – are we Asiatics?’ speak of a Russia striving to protect Western cultural values, but rejected by Europe because of her barbarian Eastern nature:
Oh, yes – we are Scythians4! Yes – we are Asiatics,
With slanting, rapacious eyes!
… Like obedient slaves,
We held up a shield between two enemy races –
The Mongols and Europe!
Rejoicing, grieving, and drenched in blood,
Russia is a sphinx that gazes at you
With hatred and with love.
We can recall the streets of Paris
And shady Venice,
The aroma of lemon groves
And the hazy monuments of Cologne.
… But now through the woods and thickets
We’ll stand aside
Before the comeliness of Europe –
And turn on you with our Asiatic faces …
The historical intermingling of East and West is made flesh in the Eurasian faces of many Russians. (Look at photographs of Vladimir Lenin, for example, and you can see something of the East in his narrow eyes.) The question of whether Russia should be ‘European’, or whether she should embrace her ‘Asiatic’ heritage, including the autocratic system of governance acquired from the Mongols, is deeply felt. And the sense that Russia is in Europe but not of it endures today. The Kremlin wavers between authoritarian repression of political opposition and a lingering desire to convince the West that it respects human rights.
My aim in this book has been to put the events I witnessed in 1991 into their historical context, to highlight the previous turning points in Russia’s history, those ‘moments of unruly destiny’ when she could have gone either way – down the path of reform that might have made her a liberal democracy, or down the continuing path of autocracy, at times totalitarian, repressive and dictatorial.
I have not sought to make value judgements. I did not automatically assume that one path was better or more suited to the Russian condition. But I wanted to know why one path was taken and the other not, to weigh up what would have been needed to send this mighty nation down a totally different route, and to judge how close she came to doing so. Instead of today’s renascent authoritarianism, could Russia have become a Western market democracy like ours?
fn1 I take as given, of course, that democracy as defined here could scarcely be said to exist anywhere in the world between the decline of Athens after 146BC and its shaky re-emergence in seventeenth century Europe.
fn2 If proof were needed3 of Russians’ ingrained identification with the autocratic model, the Levada Public Opinion Research Center in Moscow has for the past 20 years carried out an annual poll. To the question ‘Does Russia need to be ruled by a silnaya ruka?’ the average of positive responses has been between 40 and 45 per cent, with an additional 20–30 per cent agreeing that ‘there are times at which Russia needs all power concentrated in a single set of hands’.