CHAPTER 1
Putin’s Economic Inheritance

President Boris Yeltsin was on vacation when the crisis smashed into Russia in mid-August 1998. Storm clouds had been gathering for months. Russia’s government was debt-ridden and nearly bankrupt, reliant on short-term loans to pay pensions and fund basic public services. The Kremlin spent too much and raised too little in taxes, filling the difference by borrowing at extortionate interest rates or by printing money, which fueled inflation. By the summer of 1998, as Russia’s borrowing rates spiked ever higher, everyone knew that a painful adjustment was inevitable. The only question was when it would come—and how traumatic it would be.

On July 13, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) led a coalition of international lenders in announcing $22.6 billion of financial support for Russia.¹ In exchange, Russia’s government promised sharp tax hikes and spending cuts, a package that was political suicide. But Russia’s leaders had no choice but to agree. Yeltsin cut short his summer vacation to assemble parliamentary support for the necessary legislative changes. By early August, however, the political process in Russia had ground to a halt. The government and the Duma disagreed over how to resolve the country’s budgetary imbalance. Everyone in Yeltsin’s government and in the Duma believed that Russia had time to debate, to discuss, and to play political games. They underestimated the speed with which debt investors were losing faith in Russia’s ability to repay—and losing interest in repeatedly rolling over Russia’s short-term debt. Yeltsin himself was disengaged. After failing to broker a solution to the political impasse, the president returned to his summer vacation just as the situation was beginning to spin out of control.²

Speculative attacks on emerging market currencies had sparked chaos in Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea earlier that year, and many investors—including those whose loans funded Yeltsin’s government—were nervously asking whether Russia would be next. The victims of crisis in Southeast Asia had all been forced to devalue their currencies, a move that amounted to a tax on consumers. When the Indonesian rupiah and Thai baht crashed in 1997 and 1998, those countries’ citizens were made poorer in dollar terms, and in response they drastically cut back on purchases of imports, bought with dollars. This restored these countries’ financial balance at the cost of impoverishing consumers.

Russia appeared on the brink of a similar fate. The currency was overvalued, and the central bank was spending huge sums to prop it up, keeping it pegged at a set rate against the dollar. The overvalued ruble not only made Russian exports less competitive but also created a dilemma for the central bank, which had a limited quantity of dollars with which to buy rubles.³ Yet Russians and foreigners alike were looking to sell rubles and get their hands on a more stable currency. Unless the situation turned, the central bank would run out of dollars and be forced to abandon the ruble’s peg. Economists refer to such a move as floating the currency. This was the wrong metaphor: if the central bank stopped supporting the ruble, it would sink like a rock.

Yeltsin “loudly and clearly” declared that Russia would not devalue the ruble. Prime Minister Sergey Kiriyenko promised that “there will be no changes in the monetary policy of the central bank.”⁴ But talk is cheap, and the Kremlin did not back it up with actions. The more the government insisted that it would stand by the currency and repay its debts, the more investors concluded that it was time to sell. On August 13, markets began to panic as investors raced for the exit. Foreigners and Russians alike dumped rubles and bought dollars, forcing the Russian central bank to spend down its dollar reserves to dangerously low levels. New lending to the Russian government all but stopped, as interest rates on one-month government bonds reached 160 percent. The Moscow stock exchange plummeted so rapidly that trading was repeatedly suspended.⁵

Something had to give. Prime Minister Kiriyenko appealed for more foreign aid but was turned down. He was left with no choice but to surrender. The central bank let the ruble fall against the dollar. Starting at six rubles per dollar, the ruble fell to twenty-five. Consumer prices more than doubled.⁶ Russians paid the cost of adjustment as they discovered that their wages suddenly bought only half as many goods as before.

At the same time, the government announced it would default on its debts, forcing bond holders to bear some pain, too. Russian banks that held government bonds teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, a trend that was exacerbated by depositors rushing to withdraw their money and stuff it under the mattress. As the ruble plummeted, demand for dollars was so high that currency exchange booths ran out of cash.⁷ “Russia,” grumbled one disillusioned investor, “now ranks somewhere between Nigeria and Kenya.”⁸

The Roots of the Crisis

The financial crash of 1998 was widely interpreted as the first crisis of Russian capitalism. In fact it was the last gasp of Soviet socialism. The disagreements about economic policy that divided Russia during the 1990s—conflicts so sharp that they led Yeltsin to shell parliament in 1993, as the country teetered on the brink of civil war—gave way to a new and unexpected elite consensus. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, political disputes over taxes and spending caused the government to run massive budget deficits. By 1999, political conflict had been replaced by a surprising new consensus in favor of cautious fiscal and monetary policy. The new consensus solidified the role of market mechanisms in most sectors of the economy but recognized the need to strengthen the state, especially in the resource-rich energy sector.

The rise of an elite consensus in favor of balanced budgets and low inflation was unexpected, particularly after a decade of economic disbalances driven by political clashes. Beginning in the late 1980s, USSR general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of perestroika sought to create markets to replace Soviet-style command methods of organizing industry and agriculture. Gorbachev soon discovered that a shift toward market economics brought short-run pain before any long-run gain. The Soviet system had long coupled command methods with a system of exorbitant subsidies for politically favored groups. These subsidies had to be unwound if the Soviet economy was to be modernized. But doing so required a complicated and dangerous negotiation with the powerful groups that benefited from them.

The USSR’s vast military-industrial complex, for example, faced few constraints on its demands for funds. By the late 1980s, the Red Army and the industries that supplied it consumed around a fifth of Soviet output.⁹ The USSR’s system of collective and state farms wasted tractors and fertilizer on a vast scale, yet farmers’ incomes were propped up by the largest farm subsidy program in human history.¹⁰ Many other industries received similar handouts. If market economics meant subsidy cuts that reduced their well-being, why should industries, farmers, or the military support market reform?¹¹

As Gorbachev began pushing the Soviet economy toward a market system, powerful interest groups demanded compensation. Gorbachev would have preferred to force change. But though the Soviet Union was an authoritarian state, the general secretary was far from an absolute dictator. Many groups had the clout to obstruct Gorbachev’s efforts, so Gorbachev had to “buy off” those who were made worse off by change, providing reparations for the cost of reform. Because the Kremlin had to cut deals in exchange for reforms, it faced a growing mismatch between its ever-growing spending promises and the painful reality of declining revenues.

The problem of higher budget deficits was easy to diagnose, but it proved impossible to control. In exchange for legislation that unwound collective farms and privatized agriculture, for example, the farm lobby extracted debt write-offs and financial help. The military budget—little of which improved citizens’ well-being—escaped cuts throughout the late 1980s. Capital investment in industry spiked upward in the first years of perestroika, despite evidence that such funds were spent as inefficiently as ever, with little return on the billions of rubles “invested.” Capital investment was in large part a means for distributing funds to powerful industrial groups, which demanded support in exchange for tolerating Gorbachev’s move toward a market economy. The result was a paradox: even as Soviet legislation demanded that the economy be organized along market lines, Soviet enterprises and consumers faced incentives that—thanks to subsidies—had nothing to do with markets at all.

The expansion of subsidies stressed the Soviet budget, but they might have been survivable were it not for a sharp decline in revenue. An ill-conceived war on alcohol consumption slashed the tax take from drink sales just as sliding world oil prices squeezed profits on oil exports. The combination of rising spending and declining revenue pushed the Soviet Union toward fiscal crisis. The Kremlin tried borrowing to bridge its deficit, but no one was willing to lend the Soviet government the vast sums it needed. Gorbachev could not hike taxes or cut spending without threatening his hold on power. The only option was to print money.

In a market economy, expanding the money supply causes prices to increase. But in the Soviet Union, prices in state-run stores were set by the government, though on the black market prices floated freely. As the money supply expanded, workers and businesses found that producing and selling goods at officially decreed prices was increasingly less lucrative. Many enterprises moved their production into the black market; many others stopped producing entirely. As production and distribution of goods froze, shortages spread across the country. Even staple goods were in short supply. Consumers stood in line for hours waiting for bread or milk as supply lines froze and distribution networks dissolved. By 1991, officials in local governments across the Soviet Union had no choice but to introduce food rationing. In Moscow, officials feared that food supplies might run out.¹²

The economic crisis degraded Soviet power. Combined with nationalist agitation and a loss of faith in communism, the failing economy sapped Gorbachev’s control over the apparatus of government. Over the course of 1990 and 1991, local leaders began to usurp power, at first in the Baltics and the Caucasus and eventually in Russia itself. Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian republic, soon realized he had few reasons to support the continuation of Soviet rule over Russia. In late 1991, Yeltsin met secretly with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus in a forest lodge, where they declared the end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, powerless, had no choice but to resign.

The emergence of fifteen independent states in the place of the Soviet Union was a political revolution, as new forces jockeyed for power and as countries forged new governments. Yet the economic realities of the Soviet system did not change overnight. How could they have? Factories and farms, stores and supply chains, payouts to pensioners—this economic infrastructure persisted, though everything was jolted by the collapse of the political system. The most painful reality that newly independent Russia faced at the end of 1991 was the budget deficit that the USSR bequeathed it. The chasm between the government’s revenue and expenditure was not reduced by the collapse of the USSR. It was probably made worse, as tax collection all but ceased even as demands on the government budget grew. The IMF estimated that the USSR’s deficit reached an astonishing 30 percent of GDP in 1991.¹³ Without painful changes, independent Russia’s deficit in 1992 would probably have been larger.

Upon taking charge of independent Russia, new president Boris Yeltsin’s sought to eliminate the shortages that paralyzed the Russian economy and threatened food supplies. Yeltsin and his economic team, led by Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, chose to attack shortages by freeing prices on nearly all goods, including food, on January 2, 1991. Yeltsin knew that “shock therapy”—the policy of rapidly shifting toward market prices—would cause pain as prices skyrocketed. But he also knew that there was no other path to eliminate shortages. The choice was between low prices on nonexistent goods and high prices on plentiful goods. Yeltsin concluded that the second option was best. He removed controls, prices skyrocketed, and shortages evaporated. The wave of inflation forced upon Russians the realization that the money in their bank accounts was worth far less than they had hoped. The real value of Russia’s savings had collapsed because of the late 1980s financial crisis—but by letting prices rise, Yeltsin made this visible. Many Russians blamed him, rather than the Soviet leadership, for their losses. Lacking money, and politically unable to tax business, Yeltsin’s government did little to cushion the blow of higher prices on Russia’s vulnerable households.

The main driver of inflation was the ever-expanding supply of money. There were two reasons that the money supply kept expanding: the decision by Russia to share its currency with other post-Soviet countries, and the central bank’s policy of loose credit. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Soviet ruble—which connected the post-Soviet economies—persisted. Central banks of several countries jointly controlled the post-Soviet ruble. Lacking enforceable rules about money creation, this structure allowed smaller countries to print post-Soviet rubles while forcing other countries to bear part of the burden of inflation. Take Turkmenistan as an example. Its central bank could print rubles and lend them to Turkmenistani firms, which could in turn use them to buy goods in Russia. The benefits of this ruble creation accrued to Turkmenian firms, which received Russian goods. The costs of ruble creation—in terms of higher inflation, which reduced the value of all rubles—were felt not only by Turkmenistan but by anyone who held rubles. Because Russia was the biggest country in the post-Soviet ruble zone, it suffered disproportionately from the higher inflation.¹⁴

The design of the post-Soviet ruble zone incentivized inflation, punishing Russians above all, because Russians held the most rubles. Yet it took Yeltsin’s government several years to dismantle the ruble zone and to establish its own currency. The Kremlin hesitated because it feared that abolishing the ruble zone would disrupt trade among post-Soviet countries. International experts such as the IMF also cautioned that rapid reforms might destabilize the economy yet further.¹⁵ But so long as the ruble zone existed, the zone’s multiple central banks kept printing money, and inflation galloped higher.

The second cause of inflation was the Russian central bank. The bank’s chief from 1992 to 1994, Viktor Gerashchenko, kept credit loose, hoping to stimulate production and investment. But the central bank’s credit issuance expanded the supply of money, creating further inflation. Gerashchenko eventually came to see the necessity of tightening credit conditions. But industries that benefited from cheap loans—many of which were prominently represented in the Duma—continued to lobby for loose monetary policy.

Through the early 1990s, President Yeltsin and the Communist-dominated Duma clashed repeatedly over industrial subsidies, with Yeltsin arguing that subsidies caused inflation, and the Communists insisting that cutting subsidies would destroy the country’s industrial base. Both arguments were right. In 1993, the dispute turned violent and Moscow teetered on the edge of civil war, as Yeltsin’s army shelled the Duma to force out opposition lawmakers. The conflict was defused by a referendum and fresh parliamentary elections, in which voters both expressed confidence in Yeltsin and simultaneously returned an anti-Yeltsin parliament to the Duma. Faced with painful economic choices, Russian voters were themselves unsure what to do. Riven by conflicts and divergent interests, Russia’s political class could not forge a consensus on how to stabilize the economy.

FIGURE 1 Russian government budget balance as percentage of GDP, 1992–2000. Rosstat.

St. Petersburg’s First Capitalist Government

In St. Petersburg no less than in Moscow, chaos followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Just as Yeltsin struggled to bring order to Russia—or even to control his own government—so too newly elected mayor Anatoly Sobchak found postcommunist St. Petersburg all but ungovernable. Like Moscow, St. Petersburg suffered painful shortages of many foods during the winter of 1991; like Moscow, the dissolution of Communist rule opened space for mafias and criminal gangs to seize profitable businesses. Hyperinflation wiped out family savings. Military factories, which employed thousands of St. Petersburg’s workers, were closing their doors, starved of funds.¹⁶ The entire city seemed on the brink of social collapse.

St. Petersburg’s mayor quickly concluded that his allies from the liberal intelligentsia were of little use in his effort to restore order. He needed aides who knew how to get things done, and who had the backbone and the connections to enforce his rules. Sobchak did not abandon the city’s democratic institutions, but after his election, the former law professor focused his efforts on strengthening law enforcement and tax collection. He turned to his former student in the law faculty at Leningrad State University, Vladimir Putin, for help.¹⁷ Sobchak knew that Putin had just returned from a five-year stint working for the KGB in Dresden, East Germany. After the Communist government of East Germany collapsed, Putin returned home to St. Petersburg and sought work in the new Russia.¹⁸ Sobchak found Putin useful both because of his connections in the security services and for his understanding of foreign economies—a mix of old skills and new.

In August 1991, Sobchak appointed Putin head of the St. Petersburg Committee for External Relations, tasked with managing ties with foreign business.¹⁹ Putin says that his job was to work with firms looking to invest in St. Petersburg, including Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble.²⁰ Yet his responsibilities were far broader. St. Petersburg was a commercial hub. Around 20 percent of Russia’s trade flowed through the city’s ports and pipelines.²¹ Putin’s position astride this vast flow of money and goods gave him serious clout. One important lever for managing trade—and exerting power—was the regulation of foreign exchange, which was closely controlled during the hyperinflation of the early 1990s. Without Putin’s approval, St. Petersburg businesses faced difficulties moving funds abroad.²²

Putin’s influence in St. Petersburg, however, did not stem solely from his regulatory authority. These powers were amplified, allege investigative journalists who have researched the subject, by Putin’s ability to maneuver between the city government, the security services, and the mafias that controlled many of the country’s leading export industries. From metals to minerals, alcohol to automobiles, the mafias’ export businesses gave them ready access to hard currency at a time when the country was all but bankrupt.²³ If public order was to be reestablished, in St. Petersburg or in any other city, government had to find a way to “tax” businesses in the shadow economy, whether by formal or informal means.

KGB connections were crucial in extracting tax revenue from these black-market businesses. For one thing, the KGB had tracked mafias and corruption schemes throughout the Soviet period, so some of Putin’s former colleagues had personal knowledge of how corruption rackets worked.²⁴ At the same time, Putin’s background in the security services facilitated his use of the law-enforcement apparatus. In his autobiography, Putin emphasized the unity of St. Petersburg’s law-enforcement agencies during the early 1990s, a unity that he had helped to forge.²⁵

The third use of a KGB background was as a source of ideas for “encouraging” businesses to pay taxes. In one incident that sparked a minor scandal, Putin demanded that St. Petersburg companies register with the Committee for External Relations to turn over data on their finances. Working with the tax inspectorate, Putin’s analysts examined firms’ tax payment records. This went far beyond the formal authority of Putin’s committee, but it appears to have produced substantial tax revenue.²⁶ One St. Petersburg city council member fumed that the scheme utilized “secret service methods” to extract payments.²⁷ True: that was the point.

Yet even a KGB background was no guarantee of political success. The heirs of the Soviet secret services were powerful, but they were not the only force in the new Russia. On Sobchak’s instruction, Putin joined the political party called Our Home Is Russia in 1995, and was named the party’s regional head for St. Petersburg. But despite Putin’s efforts, the party performed poorly in the 1995 Duma elections, finishing third behind two liberal parties.²⁸ The following year, Sobchak stood for reelection as mayor, naming Putin his campaign manager. Based on the Duma election results, Putin assumed Sobchak’s main challenge would come from the reformist liberals. He underestimated the support obtained by Vladimir Yakovlev, a former Sobchak staffer. Despite the benefits of incumbency, Sobchak and Putin were outmaneuvered by their former ally. Influential Moscow powerbrokers were bent on toppling Sobchak, and they funneled money to the opposition. Putin discovered that his sources of financing had dried up, even as St. Petersburg’s mafia bosses collected pots of money for Sobchak’s opponents.²⁹

When the votes were counted, Sobchak lost the mayoralty, and Putin lost his job. The consequences were worse for Sobchak, who faced not only the end of his political career but also an array of corruption investigations. As prosecutors questioned the former mayor about real estate deals on St. Petersburg’s Vasilevsky Island, Sobchak’s enemies circled. His chief of staff and several former aides in the city’s planning department were arrested.³⁰ Putin watched nervously. On October 3, 1997, Sobchak complained of heart problems during a police interrogation and was sent to the hospital. He was then transferred to a different hospital, this one managed by a friend of Putin’s. Four days later, Sobchak was whisked out of his hospital room onto a private jet, which flew him to Paris. Putin is said to have organized the escape to ensure that his “friend and mentor” was safe from punishment.³¹ Putin had dodged a bullet, too.

The Rise of the Oligarchs

Sobchak’s escape from his St. Petersburg hospital bed might seem like a scene from a Cold War spy novel. Political intrigues, assassinations, and the black arts of the secret services continued to plague Russian politics. In other spheres, however, Russia was moving beyond the Soviet period. By the mid-1990s, new businesses were beginning to emerge. Analyst Igor Bunin published an influential book in 1994 that profiled forty entrepreneurs working in spheres from insurance to ports to juice sales. Bunin’s point was that Russia was slowly casting off the legacies of central planning and developing entrepreneurs. “It happened,” Bunin began his book. “In post-communist Russia there are normal capitalists living and working. Ours. Russians.”³²

As this new entrepreneurial class emerged during the 1990s, many consumers were made better off. If you look at headline GDP figures, which show a production decline far steeper than America’s during the Great Depression, you might suspect that household incomes fell by a similar amount. But the GDP data obscure a complicated reality. In fact, much of the sharp fall in industrial output resulted from factories cutting production of goods that consumers had never wanted. As a result, the fall in living standards was significantly less than the collapse that GDP figures suggest.

The military-industrial complex, for example, made up 10–20 percent of the Soviet economy. When defense spending was cut to just several percent of GDP—the normal amount for European countries—this pushed GDP down sharply. Yet cutting wasteful production of unnecessary rockets and tanks made Russians no worse off. Survey data show that, despite the collapse of many Soviet-era industries, Russians on average ended the 1990s with far more material goods than they started with. The average household living space increased by around 20 percent during the 1990s. More Russians acquired more consumer electronics—from radios to refridgerators, TVs to tape recorders—than ever before. Car ownership doubled.³³ The complicated reality of the 1990s was industrial collapse and social instability coupled with nascent consumer affluence.

The fruits of a consumer society, however, were obscured by the chaos unleashed by Russia’s lack of a functioning government. In the Soviet period, political power rested not with the state but with the Communist Party. When the Communist Party collapsed in 1991, state institutions lacked the capacity for effective governance. Mafias had grown in influence throughout the final years of Soviet power, expanding to meet rising demand for black market goods as state-run firms stopped functioning. In independent Russia, mafia groups consolidated their influence, supplanting many local police forces. They collected “taxes” in exchange for guaranteeing businesses’ security, and operated according to their own laws.

The security services also expanded their influence in the early years of independent Russia. In theory, their powers were restricted by the formal dismantling of the KGB and legislation providing for greater oversight. In reality, current and former agents retained enormous clout. With powerful friends and knowledge of underhanded methods, former spooks were a step ahead in the struggle for property amid the wreckage of the Soviet state. Some provided security for leading businessmen. Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general, was hired by banker-turned-oilman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Others, such as Alexander Lebedev, built business empires spanning from telecoms to textiles. A third group, which included Vladimir Putin, worked directly in the government.³⁴

The greatest beneficiaries of the chaos of the Soviet collapse, however, were those who acquired state property. Many people participated in looting the state, and a handful managed to parlay these talents into billion-dollar fortunes. There were two main methods of theft that provided such enormous riches. The first was to seize control of factories, businesses, mines, and oil wells. In theory, the Soviet Union began turning over control of its enterprises to cooperatives in the late 1980s, and—also in theory—independent Russia began privatizing business in the early 1990s. The reality was quite different. Some firms were indeed privatized by law. But the most valuable assets were seized using illegal or underhanded methods.

Rem Vyakhirev served as deputy minister of gas in the Soviet Union. Even his first name—an acronym for Revolution, Engels, and Marx—demonstrated his parents’ devotion to the communist cause. After being appointed chief of Gazprom, the firm that inherited the Soviet gas industry, Vyakhirev continued to advocate a muscular state role in the economy, including government ownership of his firm. But state ownership was a fig leaf. Regardless of who “owned” Gazprom, Vyakhirev controlled it. In the absence of effective law enforcement and with powerful allies in the Kremlin, Vyakhirev and other Gazprom executives bought shares in the company through rigged auctions. They exported gas through intermediaries owned by their relatives, selling gas to shell companies at below-market prices and allowing the company to resell gas at the full price, pocketing the difference. In theory, the company was partially private and partially state-controlled. But the legal structure barely mattered as executives stuffed the company’s profits into their own pockets. Vyakhirev accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $1.5 billion.³⁵

Vyakhirev was not the only owner of an ostensibly state-owned firm to accumulate great wealth. Managers of many other state-owned firms grabbed state property on the cheap. Some of this happened legally. The government’s initial privatization plans were criticized for proposing to sell assets to foreigners, even though foreigners were most likely to pay a high price. Under pressure from the Duma, privatization laws were rewritten to give employees and managers the right to buy shares in their own firm at a discount. This cut the revenue the government received from privatization, taking funds that could have been used to bolster social welfare programs and distributing it instead to selected factory managers.³⁶ Such stipulations rigged the privatization auctions in a legal manner. Other schemes rigged privatization illegally. Oligarchs bribed and blackmailed officials and judges to ensure that auctions were decided in their favor. In one particularly scandalous auction known as the “loans-for-shares” scheme, a $355 million bid for Russia’s largest nickel miner was rejected on a technicality, leaving a $170.1 million bid the winner. The legal minimum bid price for the auction was $170 million.³⁷ By rigging the auction, the winner—Vladimir Potanin’s Oneksim Bank—siphoned millions of dollars from the state.

The second means of building a fortune through theft was to take advantage of sky-high inflation rates. Politically connected banks competed to attract government deposits in the early 1990s. For example, a bank might accept a billion-ruble deposit from the government that it knew the government would not withdraw for six months. With the inflation rate running at double and triple digits, the value of the rubles the bank was obligated to return to the government decreased substantially every month. Borrowing rubles, converting them into dollars, and paying back depreciated rubles several months later provided banks with substantial profits. The model was simple, but the returns were enormous, allowing oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Potanin to accumulate vast fortunes. By using their political clout to pay interest rates far below inflation, these banks’ early “profits” derived from money skimmed from the state budget.³⁸

How did the oligarchs get away with it? The state was too weak to hold the oligarchs to account. Yeltsin’s government was divided, as factions representing various oligarchic groups vied for the president’s ear. Banker Boris Berezovsky was thought to be close to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana, while the gas sector was represented by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, formerly Soviet minister of gas. At times, some oligarchs even served as officials in Yeltsin’s government. While he struggled to corral the diverse interests represented in his government, Yeltsin was fighting a decade-long struggle with the Communists in parliament. This meant that both the president and the Duma were looking for allies against the other. The oligarchs purchased support from Duma members to ensure that legislation favored to their interests. Yeltsin, meanwhile, relied on the oligarchs to bankroll his political campaigns.

Most famously, Yeltsin made a pact with the oligarchs before the 1996 presidential election. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who looked likely to defeat Yeltsin, threatened to reverse privatizations that constituted the basis of the oligarchs’ fortunes. “If Zyuganov wins the Russian presidency . . . he will undo several years of privatization and this will lead to bloodshed and all-out civil war,” thundered longtime Yeltsin aide Anatoly Chubais in 1996.³⁹ Chubais convinced the oligarchs to set aside their disputes and mobilize against the Communists. They poured millions into Yeltsin’s campaign and—to everyone’s surprise—Yeltsin won a second term. In return, the oligarchs were assured that the legality of their dealings in the early 1990s would not be questioned.

It is easy to overestimate the oligarchs’ power in Yeltsin’s Russia. True, the oligarchs’ privatization schemes, and especially the “loans for shares” deal, eroded the rule of law, scared away foreign investors, and sapped Russians’ confidence in free markets. In a macroeconomic sense, however, inflation—caused by the government’s inability to raise revenue and control spending—was far more damaging to Russians’ incomes than privatization. Yet despite some bankers’ financial interest in keeping inflation levels high, for example, the government managed to reduce money supply growth in 1994 and 1995, and price increases slowed.⁴⁰ The oligarchs stole vast sums, but their influence was not absolute, as their power was checked at times by government and by public opinion. The oligarchs were also divided among themselves. Gas mogul Rem Vyakhirev, for example, had very different interests from media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky.

Even so, combined with Yeltsin’s weakness vis-à-vis a fractious Duma and the country’s far-flung regional governments, the oligarchs’ power grated on Russian public opinion. Berezovsky boasted that a group of seven oligarchs controlled half of Russia’s economy. “Russia is undergoing a redistribution of property unprecedented in history,” Berezovsky crowed. “No one is satisfied.”⁴¹ In the early seventeenth century, a group of seven boyars—Russian aristocrats—deposed Tsar Vasily and invited Polish armies into Moscow, a dark period known as the “Rule of the Seven Boyars,” or semiboyarschina. One journalist described Yeltsin’s Russia as the “Rule of the Seven Bankers,” or semibankirshchina. The power of the bankers, most of whom were Jewish, was seen as no less humiliating as when the traitorous boyars had turned the country over to Polish armies. Most Russians wanted nothing more than to see Berezovsky and his fellow banker-oligarchs cut down to size. This feeling was widespread not only among average Russians, who felt like they had lost out from the collapse of the USSR. Russia’s political elite was also concluding that Russia’s government budget could only be balanced if the country’s oligarchs began to pay more tax.

Putin Moves to Moscow

As Anatoly Sobchak was fleeing to Paris on a private jet, Vladimir Putin was planning his own escape. Making use of connections from St. Petersburg, Putin was appointed deputy chief of the Kremlin’s Property Management Department, beginning his rapid ascent in Moscow.⁴² Though Putin relished his proximity to power, he found that the problems the central government faced were similar to those he wrestled with in St. Petersburg. State authority had eroded. Mafias and oligarchs rewrote or ignored laws they did not like. Regional governments bucked the Kremlin’s demands, facing no punishment for doing so. The weakness of central authority was most painfully evident in Chechnya, where from 1994 to 1996 Russia had fought a painful and inconclusive war with separatists. The Kremlin’s failure to defeat ragtag militias in Chechnya underscored the widely held view that the government was inept.

Yet even more than the war, the government’s effectiveness was degraded by its persistent lack of money. The mismatch between revenue and expenditure that the Soviet Union bequeathed to independent Russia proved difficult to close. The government managed to cut the budget deficit from 20 percent of GDP in 1992 to 7.2 percent by 1996, when Putin first arrived in Moscow.

Fiscal stabilization was accomplished not by raising revenue but by cutting spending. In part, spending was reduced by cutting waste leftover from the Soviet period. Military procurement, for example, was slashed by 60 percent in 1992 alone. Yet many of the spending cuts inflicted serious pain. In inflation-adjusted terms, government health spending fell by a third between 1990 and 1995; education spending was cut by almost half, and pensions fell substantially during those five years. Clinics were closed and schools were shuttered, even as nominal prices skyrocketed.⁴³

Harsh spending cuts were the result of the central government’s chronic inability to collect taxes. The problem was partly administrative—Russian bureaucracy has never been known for its efficiency—but the root issue was politics. Regional governments and powerful oligarchs did not want to pay higher taxes, and together they were strong enough to thwart collection efforts. As in so many spheres, Russia’s tax dilemma had Soviet roots. In the early 1990s, many unprofitable but politically influential industries were kept alive by cheap loans from the central bank. But as Russia tightened monetary policy in 1994 and 1995, these firms and their influential backers in the Duma and the government had to find new sources of funds.

To do so, Russia’s massive gas and electricity monopolies were used to fund dying industries. In 1996, Yeltsin established a commission designed, its chairman explained, “to redistribute energy resources at the disposal of government bodies and of enterprises, regardless of their form of ownership.”⁴⁴ Translated from the Bureaucratese, this meant that the government would coerce energy firms, public or private, to provide gas and electricity to failing factories at below-market prices. At times energy was provided for free. In exchange for this generosity, the government quietly let energy companies avoid paying tax.

Energy made up a sizeable share of the economy, so exempting energy firms from taxation hobbled the government budget. But it served a crucial political purpose. By early 1996, the fuel and energy sector had provided net credit of 42 trillion rubles ($8.3 billion) to struggling industries. In exchange, the energy firms ran up “arrears”—unpaid taxes—of 13.7 trillion rubles, which partially compensated them for lost profits. As more firms, including railroads, were roped into similar schemes, industry began to breathe easier. Only 469 bankruptcies were declared in 1995, as loss-making firms obtained sufficient credit to continue operations.⁴⁵ That was good news for the government, which was desperate to stave off factory closings and layoffs that could devastate its political fortunes.

The scheme to keep bankrupt industries alive by tolerating an expansion of energy firms’ tax arrears had a big downside. Energy firms were among Russia’s largest companies. If they weren’t paying taxes, the Kremlin had no hope of plugging its budget deficit. The deficit increased sharply as this strategy was ramped up, reaching 7.6 percent of GDP in 1996.⁴⁶ With the Kremlin committed to a policy of low inflation, it could no longer simply print money. It had no choice but to issue an increasing amount of debt to make up for insufficient tax collection.

In 1996 and 1997, the Kremlin knew that something had to be done. But how could Yeltsin take on regional governors and big oligarchs simultaneously? Both obstructed efforts to raise revenue, yet both had immense clout within Yeltsin’s own government as well as the Duma. In October 1996, the Kremlin established the Temporary Extraordinary Commission to boost tax revenue. The name was chosen to remind tax cheats of the Extraordinary Commission (Cheka), a brutal Soviet secret police service. The deputy premier responsible for the security services was tasked with overseeing tax collection, and the tax enforcement agency regularly dragged in businessmen for “meetings” during which they were “encouraged” to pay taxes.⁴⁷

Yeltsin’s tax collection effort in 1996 and 1997 was reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s revenue-boosting schemes in St. Petersburg—except that it did not work. Tax revenues did not substantially increase. In December 1997, the Temporary Extraordinary Commission declared it would seize the two firms with the largest tax debts. But each of these firms was owned by a powerful oligarch—one by Berezovsky, the other by Potanin. Both oligarchs put up a fight, using their media assets and political clout to push back against the government’s tax claims. The government succeeded in bringing in some revenue, but only after a bruising battle and a long delay.⁴⁸

Yeltsin’s struggle for tax revenue was marked by more defeats than victories. When the Kremlin proposed tax changes in 1998 to centralize revenue collection, its plans were attacked by regional governments. Alexander Lebed, the former presidential candidate who now governed Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk region, threatened to stir up separatist feeling by declaring that he considered Moscow nothing more than a “neighbor from beyond the Urals.”⁴⁹

In response, the Kremlin escalated its battle for tax revenue by naming as the new tax chief the hard-charging Boris Fedorov, who promised a take-no-prisoners approach. Yeltsin also fired Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet gas minister who was widely believed to defend Gazprom’s interests. The president replaced Chernomyrdin with little-known Sergey Kiriyenko, a political neutral who was inclined to take on powerful interests.⁵⁰ The stage seemed set for a crackdown on influential energy firms and the oligarchs who ran them.

Yeltsin’s new team pounced, tearing up existing agreements with Gazprom. The government wanted Gazprom to pay taxes when gas shipped rather than when it received payment from customers—a method of ensuring that Gazprom paid taxes according to a predictable schedule. On July 2, 1998, Kiriyenko ordered the tax service to begin seizing Gazprom assets and threatened to use the government’s stake in Gazprom to change the company’s management. The firm’s share price fell by 14 percent. Yet Gazprom had a powerful arsenal with which to respond. It began by cutting the amount of gas it supplied to industries, hoping to force factories to close and thus spark a political crisis that would force Yeltsin to negotiate. Then Gazprom mobilized supporters in the Duma to obstruct plans to seize the firm’s assets, with Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov declaring that “splitting up Gazprom is tantamount to splitting up Russia.” The Duma voted 307 to 0 to demand that Yeltsin refrain from seizing Gazprom assets. Even oligarchs without ties to Gazprom, such as Boris Berezovsky, backed the gas monopoly’s position as a means of sending a message to the government: efforts to increase tax collection would be resisted.⁵¹

The government had no choice but to settle. A deal signed in late July was described as a compromise. Gazprom agreed to make slightly higher monthly tax payments, though it was alleged to have violated its promises beginning the following month. In exchange, Yeltsin’s government publicly stated that there would be no question of seizing Gazprom’s property and accounts or replacing its board of directors or chairman Rem Vyakhirev. Gazprom had won. “Who do you think you are?” Vyakhirev had asked Prime Minister Kiriyenko, as the dispute raged. “You’re just a little boy.”⁵²

Try as it might, Yeltsin’s government could not increase tax revenue. Russia teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. At one point in June 1997, having poorly managed its spending plans, the Kremlin had to borrow several hundred million dollars from hedge fund magnate George Soros to fund the government for a week between when pensions were paid and when a new bond was issued.⁵³ Had Soros said no, Russia would have had to postpone payments to millions of pensioners. Chaotic management boded poorly for the stability of state finances, particularly as Russia’s debt burden grew, and financial distress spread across emerging markets from Asia to Latin America throughout late 1997 and early 1998. Russia’s economy seemed to be recovering from the tumult of the early 1990s, but Yeltsin’s government looked scarcely more stable than Gorbachev’s—and everyone remembered how disastrously that ended.

The Great Crash

Vladimir Putin was appointed head of the FSB—the KGB’s successor agency—in July 1998 amid a growing financial crisis. His portfolio now included all manner of threats to Russia’s security, above all the risk of terrorism from Chechnya, where Moscow was waging a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against separatist forces. But it was impossible to ignore the economy. Warning signs had been visible for months. On October 28, 1997, Russia’s stock market plunged by 20 percent, evidence that investors had growing doubts. A series of market crashes and currency crises in Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere led skittish investors to pull money from emerging markets, dragging assets downward. The price of oil, a major source of Russian tax receipts, declined by over 15 percent in 1997, placing further pressure on the already cash-strapped government. Meanwhile the IMF, unhappy with the slow pace of tax reform, refused to transfer to the Kremlin a $700 million tranche of a promised loan.⁵⁴

Pressure intensified in the summer of 1998, just as Putin was taking the reins of the FSB. In late May, after the government announced that no one had bid in a privatization auction for Rosneft, an oil firm, markets plunged 10 percent in a day, fearing that the failed auction presaged stormy waters.⁵⁵ As credit markets tightened, Russia’s government had to offer ever-higher interest rates to entice investors to hold its debt. Because much of the government’s debt was short term, it had to be rolled over on a regular basis. Higher interest rates meant that the government had to pay more to service its debt, widening its already large budget deficit. This in turn required more debt issuance. Fearing the Kremlin was in an unescapable circle of debt, investors took flight.

The ballooning debt paralyzed the government. Yeltsin’s ministers had tried every trick to increase tax revenue, with little success. Spending was already low in comparative terms, and attempts to cut spending further would anger the Duma, threatening a political crisis. That was the last thing Yeltsin needed. He turned again to the IMF, dispatching aides to Washington to request $35 billion needed to avert default. Hoping to stave off yet another emerging market financial collapse, the fund transferred $4.8 billion to the Kremlin in early July.⁵⁶

But even that massive sum was not enough. Financial markets had lost faith that Russia could ever pay its debts. Investors suspected that the government would have no choice but to default and devalue the ruble—so they had to get their money out of Russia immediately, selling rubles and buying dollars. As foreign investors and the country’s own oligarchs rushed out, markets swooned. This put pressure on the country’s banks, whose capital was tied up in Russian assets. As asset prices fell, these banks faced insolvency. The final straw was a letter published by Soros warning that “the meltdown in Russian financial markets has reached the terminal phase.”⁵⁷

Despite Yeltsin’s public promise that “there will be no devaluation of the ruble,” the show was over. As the Kremlin’s reserve ran dry, Russia’s leaders had only two options—printing money and inviting hyperinflation, or defaulting on the debt and devaluing the ruble against foreign currencies. Soros’s letter publicly urged the government to choose the latter option. Yeltsin’s ministers, their backs against the wall, concurred. Russia declared that it would not pay its debts, nor would it defend the ruble at its current peg against the dollar. On August 17, Sergey Kiriyenko announced that the ruble was being devalued. By the end of 1998, the ruble had fallen to a third of its precrisis value.⁵⁸ As the ruble slumped, inflation peaked at over 100 percent in mid-1999, devastating Russians’ purchasing power.⁵⁹ The new middle class was hard hit. Whatever optimism remained about the prospects of capitalism in Russia had been extinguished.

The Return of the Old Guard?

The crash of 1998 discredited Russia’s liberal reformers even among the small share of the population that retained faith in them. Throughout the 1990s, liberals had warned of a Communist revanche. The Communist Party remained the largest faction in the Duma. Its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, nearly defeated Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election, and Yeltsin was saved only by a flood of shadowy campaign cash from the oligarchs. Now, two years later, the liberals were humiliated and impotent. At the darkest moment since the Soviet Union collapsed, the Communist old guard seemed poised to retake power.

In Russia’s far-flung regions, politicians began rolling back markets and reinstituting state control. In the Far East, authorities in Vladivostok were reported to have reintroduced administrative control over food distribution networks. Alexander Lebed, the populist governor of Krasnoyarsk, announced that the government would begin controlling prices on consumer goods. Kaliningrad, the small exclave on the Baltic Sea, declared it would no longer remit taxes to Moscow.⁶⁰ The basic institutions of Russia’s nascent capitalist system were at risk.

The Kremlin, too, seemed ready to revert to Soviet ways. As the liberals’ credibility collapsed, Yeltsin tacked desperately to the left, seeking a deal with the Communists in the Duma. Yeltsin purged his government of leading liberals and tapped a group of old Soviet bureaucrats to replace them. Yuri Maslyukov, who headed the central planning agency in the final days of the Soviet Union, was named deputy prime minister with responsibility for the economy. Russia’s central bank, meanwhile, was handed back to Viktor Gerashchenko, the Soviet banker who presided over a disastrous hyperinflation when he ran the central bank in the early 1990s.

These appointments sparked fear in financial markets. One economist labeled Gerashchenko “the worst central banker in the world” after his first, calamitous stint as head of the Bank of Russia. Maslyukov was little different, with one IMF official recounting that he operated like “a Soviet manager,” had “no feel for the market,” and was “economically illiterate.”⁶¹ The Kremlin’s new Soviet tilt was confirmed by Yeltsin’s choice of Yevgeny Primakov as prime minister. Primakov had served as an adviser to several Soviet leaders. With Soviet cadres back in charge, many analysts reasoned, surely Russian capitalism’s days were numbered.

Yet Primakov’s government did the opposite of what most observers—including many of the prime minister’s supporters—expected. He tackled the budget deficit, not primarily by hiking taxes, as many in the Duma wanted, but by slashing spending. Consolidated government spending fell from 48 percent of GDP in 1997 to 34 percent by 2000.⁶² The budget that Primakov passed in February 1999 was coupled with pressure on oligarchs and regional governments to pay taxes.⁶³ By 2000, the combination of harsh spending cuts and aggressive tax collection jolted the budget into surplus. The liberal reformers of the 1990s may have been discredited—but the Soviet-style politicians who led the government after the 1998 crisis maintained many of their most controversial policy goals: balanced budgets, reduced inflation, and a market-based private sector.

The IMF may have thought that Russia’s new leaders were “economically illiterate,” but it was impressed with the results. The IMF’s official history of its relations with Russia notes that though the fund feared the new government would adopt inflationary policies, “in fact, the authorities pursued reasonably tight monetary and fiscal policies.”⁶⁴ Gone were the days when Yeltsin was the only Russian leader who opposed double- or triple-digit inflation. Now even the Communists seemed resigned to tight monetary policies. On the central question in Russian politics in 1998—whether to adopt policies that would exacerbate inflation—Primakov bucked the demands of many in the Duma. He stuck to his line even as inflation quickly ate away the real value of wages and pensions.

Russians were surprised to discover that Primakov, the former deputy chairman of the KGB, intended to implement policies that won IMF approval. Yet Primakov’s background was not as hostile to policies of austerity as his Communist Party links might suggest. The Soviet Union had stood for state control, not for vast deficits or hyperinflation. Primakov and others like him associated deficits with Gorbachev’s disastrous tenure as Soviet leader, when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of unpaid bills—not a period that anyone wanted to repeat. In addition, the memory of the painful hyperinflation of the early 1990s was fresh. Inflationary policies had been backed by many industrial bosses and ex-Soviet bureaucrats at the time, but loose money proved no panacea. Across the Russian elite, a new consensus was emerging, favoring tighter monetary policy and lower deficits. Primakov’s pairing of former Communists with orthodox economic policy may have seemed counterintuitive. But it was as good evidence as any that the crash of 1998 marked a watershed in how Russia’s elite thought the economy should be governed.

Primakov was not the only official in Yeltsin’s government with former KGB ties to embrace this new fiscally conservative consensus. Vladimir Putin, who managed the FSB throughout the economic crisis, grew steadily in Yeltsin’s estimation. In 1999 Yeltsin moved to thwart Primakov’s political ambitions by sacking him as prime minister. Dissatisfied with Primakov’s replacement, Yeltsin promptly fired him, too. Yeltsin then asked Putin to serve as prime minister. On August 9, 1999, Putin was confirmed in the position. Given how quickly Yeltsin cycled through prime ministers, Putin may not have assumed he would stay in the role for long. But on December 31, 1999, at the end of the millennium, Yeltsin shocked Russia by announcing his resignation and turning over the Kremlin to Vladimir Putin.

Even for a politician as ambitious as Putin, this was a rapid ascent. Just four years earlier he was a behind-the-scenes politico in St. Petersburg. Upon moving to Moscow he had rapidly won the trust of Yeltsin and his colleagues. Yet Putin also appeared to represent a new political era. He was relatively untainted by the political battles of the 1990s, since he spent most of the decade outside of Moscow. To most Russians he represented a breath of fresh air.

In political terms, then, Putin took power with a clean slate, unencumbered by the legacy of a decade-long bare-knuckle brawl between Yeltsin and the Communists. Moreover, the 1998 crisis had forged a stronger elite consensus on economic policy, so Putin did not face as stark a choice between the policies advocated by liberal technocrats and those backed by Communists and industrial bosses in the Duma. Yet the structures that defined Russia’s economy remained. Oil and gas revenues continued to play a major role in funding the government. The tax system barely functioned. The country’s industrial base was comatose; its small firms were mired in corruption and red tape. For a decade the government had funded its budget deficit by printing money, causing high inflation, as the economy lurched from crisis to crisis. This was Vladimir Putin’s economic inheritance.