Chapter 2
RUSSIA AND THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY
The visit to Saint Petersburg had been surprising and even a little unnerving. Anatoly Sobchak, the reformist mayor of the city, had invited a group of professors from Stanford to help him think through the creation of a great new Russian university. It was 1992 and I was about a year removed from my stint in Washington as special assistant to the president for Soviet affairs. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed and I looked forward to my first visit to the Russian Federation. Once there, it was painfully clear to me that the Russians were struggling to find their footing in radically changed circumstances.
The artifacts in Sobchak’s office were testimony to the temptation to situate the new squarely within the confines of the past. A map of the Russian Empire at its height and a portrait of Peter the Great adorned the walls. The symbol of the tsar, the double-headed eagle, sat on his desk. In one interpretation, the eagle looked both ways to remind his subjects that the tsar was at once human and divine.
Sobchak explained that the “European University” he envisioned would return Russia to its rightful place as an intellectual leader of the continent—a role that the Soviet “interlude,” as he called the previous seventy-five years, had destroyed. Almost as an afterthought, Sobchak mentioned the recent decision to change the name of the great city of Leningrad back to Saint Petersburg. It had been controversial. World War II veterans were unhappy, he noted, but he said he would find some way to honor their sacrifice at the siege of Leningrad, which cost one million Russian lives. The change marked progress, he said, and now it was time to move on. I couldn’t help but think that this kind of progress was decidedly backward-looking. The Russian nationalist restoration was well under way.
That evening, Sobchak held a reception for our group in one of the grand halls of the Winter Palace. The room was filled with Russian intellectuals, dressed in the all-black attire that was so popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Quite a few of them had also appropriated the names of the time. I met several Chekhovs, Tolstoys, and at least one Pushkin. These descendants, real and imagined, of Russia’s great literary figures of the past were staking a claim to the country’s future.
I broke away from the crowd and walked around, admiring, as I had on many occasions, the extraordinary beauty and artistry of Russia’s greatest architectural treasure. A former home to the tsars, the palace is part of a complex of buildings on the Neva River. Its pastel rooms of blue and green are dotted with malachite columns and gold chandeliers. I eventually spotted a short, pale man with icy blue eyes standing alone in a corner. He seemed quite uncomfortable, dressed in a Soviet-era suit. I don’t know what compelled me to seek him out and introduce myself; perhaps I felt a little bad for him because he seemed out of place. I walked over and stuck out my hand. The deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg and I said very little, or at least I remember very little of what was said.
Almost a decade later, President George W. Bush and I waited for the Russian president to arrive for their first summit in Slovenia in June 2001. The same pale man from the Winter Palace party walked briskly toward us. President Putin extended his hand and we exchanged greetings. I didn’t say that we had met before. Neither did he.
Vladimir Putin personifies Russia’s struggle to find its footing. As a KGB officer in East Germany he witnessed Gorbachev’s reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Yeltsin’s young prime minister he participated in the chaotic birth and failure of Russia’s quasi-democratic institutions. In the end, he rode the wave of the population’s frustration and fear, pulling the country back to its authoritarian past.
Winston Churchill once called Russia a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” When looking at Russia’s journey, it is tempting to fall back on arguments about the country’s uniqueness. I have heard more than a few exasperated people—experts, government officials, and commentators—revert to “It is just Russia” as an explanation.
It is tempting too to reference Russia’s brutal and troubled history. The country began in the late fifteenth century as a collection of principalities that were systematically kludged together into the Russian state. A ruling dynasty arose in Moscow as the four tsars of the Rurik clan defeated and in some cases bribed landowning families (called boyars) to pledge allegiance to the central state and to build the core of what would become the Russian Empire. Loyalty was maintained by sheer force and fear. It was not unusual to see the severed heads of those who disobeyed displayed on stakes along the walls of the Kremlin fortress, which was made the headquarters of the new state by Ivan the Great.
What authority the tsar did not command by brute strength, he sought by fealty to the Orthodox Church. As head of the church, the ruler of Russia was believed to be both human and divine. The tsar protected and enriched the church, and the hierarchy of the church returned the favor. To celebrate a military victory, Ivan the Terrible commissioned a new cathedral near the Kremlin that was so beautiful it remains a symbol of Russia to this day. He in turn made sure that the masterpiece, St. Basil’s Cathedral, would never be copied: The architects’ eyes were reportedly put out so that they could never design anything again.
Then, in 1584, Ivan the Terrible died without a capable heir. His son Fyodor became tsar, but real power fell to a Russian boyar named Boris Godunov, and when Fyodor died in 1598, the Rurik dynasty died with him. Pretenders to the throne arose with alarming frequency, only to be murdered in their beds (quite literally) by other pretenders. Foreign rulers picked at the carcass of the vulnerable Russian state and sent their own candidates (in some cases their own children) to lay false claims to the Russian throne. When Boris Godunov died (he was driven to madness by the apparitions of those he had killed), Russia plunged into a long civil war. This period came to be known as the Smuta, the Time of Troubles.
Surely, one would think, an episode from five centuries in the past could not possibly have resonance today. Yet I will never forget going to the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow in the early 1980s to hear a performance of Mussorgsky’s great opera based on this story. The spectacular coronation scene used the Kremlin bells, which can be heard clearly since the theater is only a few blocks away. Since they are the same bells that rang for Godunov’s coronation, the experience was a bit chilling.
At the end of the opera, as the dead Godunov lies on the floor, the chorus implores the people to weep. And much to my surprise, the audience began to weep. Every Russian knows that the Time of Troubles is about to begin. Many years of civil war, in which the country is plunged into chaos at home and devoured by foreign powers, are upon them. And they take it personally.
They know that a young boyar will finally emerge in 1613 to establish the Romanov dynasty in the Kremlin. He and his heirs will expand the Russian Empire through wars abroad and brutal suppression of dissent at home. In doing so, the Russian identity and a sense of security will be built through conquest, religious orthodoxy, and authoritarian rule.
The vast landscape with no natural boundaries and certainly no oceans to protect it will eventually incorporate large parts of the Eurasian landmass. It will survive for three hundred years, until too many lost wars and internal revolt destroy tsarist rule and bring Lenin and the Bolsheviks to power. There will be more repression and more hardship. Yet the vast empire will be rebuilt, and within a few decades the Soviet Union will occupy essentially the same territory as the Russian Empire that it had destroyed.
Then twenty-five million Russians will die in World War II as another foreign power seeks to conquer. The Russian nation will rally and defeat the Nazis, extending Soviet power deep into Eastern Europe and establishing a “ring of socialist brother states” to protect its borders.1 And it will stand astride Europe and Asia as a nuclear superpower, feared across the globe, until on one December night in 1991, the flag of the Soviet Union will come down from the Kremlin for the last time. Fifteen republics of the old Soviet Union will become independent states. And Russia’s borders will be pushed back almost to those of Peter the Great.
The Russian language has a word, vopros, which means “question,” “issue,” or “problem.” Those who study Russia know that the country’s history has been characterized by a series of questions: Lenin’s famous challenge to his Bolshevik comrades, “What is to be Done?” A constant obsession among the people with “Who is to Blame?” And terrible geography and a troubled history that cause Russians to ask, “Who are we?” and “What is Russia?” These questions have defied answers throughout the centuries and provoke another: Can democracy ever take hold in this rough and vast land?
Every country has some aspect of its history that could be used to explain why democracy can’t succeed. Russia’s modern story has a familiar theme in failed democratic transitions around the world: weak institutions that never took hold against a backdrop of economic decline and social instability. Russia is not Mars and the Russians are not endowed with some unique, antidemocratic DNA.
Yet there is a facet of this story that is unique to Russia. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred contemporaneously with the birth of the new Russian state, which added a dimension of complexity and turmoil that was indeed different. The borders of the state, the identity of its people, and the system of economic and political governance were all in play at the same time. That is where the long, tortured history does matter and helps to explain why the transition to democracy was not a transition at all: It was the collapse of the Russian state within the collapse of the Soviet Empire. And in the end, it was too much to overcome.
The First Opening: “I Want the Soviet Union to Be a Normal Country”
Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to change the course of history by changing the Soviet Union. When he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1985, the political and economic systems were in deep crisis, and Moscow was mired in a costly war in Afghanistan, with America challenging Soviet power there and across the globe. President Ronald Reagan had launched huge defense budget increases and military-technological programs that Moscow could not match.2
And the country had seen three leadership changes in four years. The succession of aging Soviet leaders, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, dying one after another was a metaphor for the state of the Soviet Union itself.
The Russians used black humor to good effect to highlight the circumstances. A man tries to attend Brezhnev’s funeral, an old joke went.
“You need a ticket,” the guard tells him.
He returns for Andropov’s.
“Where’s your ticket?” the guard asks.
When the man comes for Chernenko’s service, he tells the guard, “It’s okay—I bought the season pass.”
The people and even their leaders referred to zastoi, stagnation, to describe their circumstances.
Gorbachev was a breath of fresh air. And the next four years produced surprise after surprise as he endeavored to throw off the yoke of Soviet zastoi. The term that he chose, perestroika, encompassed a host of new ideas, all intended to shake up the central planning of the economy and introduce, carefully at first, competition, price reform, and market forces.
Though the reforms were cautious, they were in fact pretty radical when one remembers the tenets of central planning on which the Soviet economy had rested for sixty-five years. Inputs and outputs were determined not by supply and demand but by a series of plans, adopted every five years by the government. Remarkably, the plan was intended to lay out every transaction within an economy serving nearly three hundred million people over eleven different time zones.
One year the plans for forks and towel racks got mixed up. Workers produced, nonetheless, according to the plans. No one stopped to notice that the towel racks were incredibly light and the forks unbelievably heavy. They were shipped to the stores, where Soviet consumers presumably made do with what they got. This was the nature of central planning, and it governed everything from the production of shoes, refrigerators, and automobiles to the provision of machine tools for heavy industry and armaments for the military.
One of the first reforms allowed for small, privately owned restaurants, which were called “cooperatives” to give them socialist cover. Sitting in one of them during a visit to Moscow in 1988, I was struck by how good the food was and the care with which it had been prepared. I had never seen pasta in the USSR or vegetables so fresh. When I was a graduate student there in 1979, it was common to enter a state-owned restaurant (they were all state-owned) and be told that there were no tables, this despite the fact that the place was absolutely empty.
If you were seated, the food was barely edible stale bread, chicken that was mostly skin, and whatever vegetables happened to be around—usually cucumbers and the occasional tomato. The staff mostly didn’t bother to try since there was no reward for good service or good food.
Gorbachev’s new entrepreneurs could not have been more different. They wanted customers, they needed customers, and they treated them well. I asked one of the owners about the freshness of the food. He drove every morning, he said, to a farm on the outskirts of the city, paid the farmer twice what the state would offer, and therefore got the very best produce available. Then he drove back to Moscow and he and his wife prepared the evening meal. They had to charge a little more, he explained, but customers kept coming.
There were other signs that a rudimentary form of capitalism was starting to take hold. In the past, every Soviet grocery store looked like every other grocery store: dingy, poorly lit, and with few products on the shelves. But when under perestroika the managers could “lease” the store and were allowed to keep some of what they made (though it wasn’t called profit), they began to work to gain customers. Window displays competed with one another to draw buyers in.
The reforms of perestroika were accompanied by glasnost, a series of political changes that were intended to reduce resistance to the economic overhaul. Gorbachev seemed to believe that he could safely remove the key constraints of the political system—propaganda and fear. He wanted, he told many people, including me, to make the Soviet Union a “normal country.”
Like the economic reforms, glasnost (roughly meaning “transparency”) started modestly. The Communist Party took the lead, publishing revisions of the whitewashed history of the country. For example, there had long been a debate about how many people perished in the purges of the 1930s under Josef Stalin. The British-American historian Robert Conquest was excoriated by academics for claiming in 1968 that twenty million had been killed. As late as the mid-1980s, some scholars described the number of victims as only “many thousands.”3 Yet when the official story was told, we learned that Conquest’s numbers were gruesomely accurate. Approximately one in three party members (and many ordinary citizens) were branded as traitors and purged during Stalin’s reign. Many were executed outright, while others were sent to Siberia and similar detention camps, where they died under the harsh labor conditions and a few, very few, lived to tell the story when glasnost made it safe to do so. Under glasnost, great dissident writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who had chronicled the brutality of the Stalinist years (and beyond) were welcomed back into the good graces of their country.
The Soviets’ intention, though, had been to control the narrative—careful and selective in what was to be criticized and thrown aside and what was not. But that strategy would prove unsustainable, and criticism began to reach beyond history’s confines to the modern leadership.
During a monthlong visit to Moscow in 1988, I walked along the Old Arbat, a street not too far from the American ambassador’s residence. The cobblestoned pathway was filled as it had always been with people selling artifacts. I picked up a matryoshka (the little nesting dolls that contain ever smaller versions of themselves). This one was in Gorbachev’s likeness, and he held inside him each of his predecessors until one arrived finally at a tiny little Lenin. That’s odd, I thought. It seemed, well, disrespectful.
I continued down the pathway to a place where a street theater performance had drawn a large crowd. Struggling at first with the colloquial Russian, I soon realized that the comic was making fun of Gorbachev, his anti-alcohol campaign, and the Kremlin’s general incompetence.
Yet Russia had almost always (Stalin would have been an exception) allowed a little mild satirical criticism of the government. During tsarist times, writers like Nikolai Gogol made fun of stupid bureaucrats in satires like The Inspector General.4
This was different, though. Underneath, something more fundamental was taking place. The people of the Soviet Union were losing their fear of their rulers. Gorbachev believed that stripped of fear and the lies about history, the population would rally to the goodness of the country and embrace a new and vibrant future.
Instead, the political landscape kept shifting. What many assumed would simply be a loosening of constraints within the existing system soon became an attack on the system itself. Intellectual debate (and even television commentary) started to turn to forbidden subjects like whether the party could and should maintain a monopoly on power.
Gorbachev himself had an interesting view that I had a chance to discuss with him when he visited the United States in 1990. The Soviet Union, he thought, was not ready for a multiparty system. That wasn’t surprising. But then he noted that “factionalism” was already growing within the Soviet Communist Party and that would eventually be the basis for new parties. Well informed about the political histories of other countries, he reminded me that some of America’s greatest leaders (like George Washington) never belonged to a party. Japan had been ruled by one party (the LDP), but factions had provided turnover in the political leadership through elections, he said.
Moreover, Gorbachev said that eventually he saw a day when the Soviet Union’s political system would be the far-left part of a European spectrum of parties—communist, social democrat, conservative. This, he said, should have been the outcome of the Russian Revolution. The problem was that the political system had been hijacked by Josef Stalin and separated from Europe. I thought his was an interesting if flawed take on Soviet history. Yet it revealed that Gorbachev’s faith in a reformed Soviet Union was real.
Already in 1987, just two years after becoming party secretary, he had proposed plans for democratization of local government and the CPSU. That year, for the first time, local elections would feature more than one candidate in some constituencies. And though only about 4 percent of the elected deputies were from contested elections, some well-known people actually lost in their election bids. This carefully orchestrated change nonetheless began to stimulate others to push the envelope of reform. In May of the next year, a group of pro-democracy activists formed the Democratic Union. They “declared their organization to be a political party, the first opposition party to the CPSU in seventy years.”5
The pace of change accelerated throughout 1988 with the Gorbachev reforms targeting the role of the party itself in governance. There had always been parallel structures in the Soviet Union—the party and the government. For instance, Pravda (Truth) was the party’s newspaper and Izvestiya (the News) belonged to the government. Still, any high-ranking member of the government was also a member of the party, and there was little doubt that real authority rested in the Politburo of the CPSU and its general secretary.
Gorbachev proposed a presidential system for the USSR, changing the institutional basis for leading the country. Power would now rest in the president, not in the general secretary. The 1977 constitution was amended as well, creating a bicameral legislature with the Congress of People’s Deputies as the lower house and the Supreme Soviet as the upper house. This was an early attempt to create a legislature, theoretically independent of the party. (“Soviet” is the Russian word for “council,” so the name of this organization did not mean that it was a part of the Communist Party.)
The new rules also set “a freer and fairer process for elections.” As scholars have noted, “They were only partially free and competitive.”6 Yet in the elections the next year, dozens of independent and reform-minded candidates defeated party regulars. Then, in 1989, the Supreme Soviet banned censorship of the press.
Gorbachev took the subordination of the party to the government seriously—though in never standing for election to the newly empowered Soviet presidency, he forfeited a chance to create a popular mandate for the position and for himself. Nonetheless, he valued the trappings of the office. In planning the U.S.-Soviet summit for the summer of 1990, we were told that Gorbachev should no longer be referred to as “General Secretary of the Communist Party” but as “President Gorbachev.” And to prove the point, he arrived in Washington in 1990 in an Aeroflot plane proudly carrying the flag of the Soviet Union and the letters CCCP (the Russian abbreviation for the USSR).
He wanted to act like a president too. Standing in the office of George H. W. Bush at Camp David, Gorbachev expressed interest in the calendar that the president pulled out of his pocket. “That’s a smaller version of my schedule,” the president said. Apparently, Gorbachev asked who produced the schedule. “Well,” President Bush replied, “my scheduler who works with my chief of staff.” “I don’t have one of those,” Gorbachev said, not making clear whether he meant a scheduler or a chief of staff. Those of us on the White House staff had always wondered, because scheduling a call with Gorbachev was a nightmare. No one ever seemed to know where he was or what he was doing. He didn’t use the Communist Party apparatus, apparently not trusting it, and he didn’t yet have a presidential one.
President Bush dutifully asked if he should send some people to show the Soviet president how to run an office. Gorbachev readily accepted. And in the fall of 1990, Chief of Staff John Sununu led a delegation of American staffers to Moscow to help set up the Gorbachev presidency.
These changes were not intended to destroy the CPSU’s hold on power. Gorbachev intended to democratize and modernize the Communist Party, giving it greater legitimacy among the Soviet people. He seemed to believe that it could gain the trust of the people, no longer needing coercion and repression to command their loyalty. Yet by creating and allowing new institutional arrangements, he provided space for other forces that he could not control. And in short order these seemingly breathtaking changes were revealed to be too little too late. Pressures from the left (conservatives in Russian political parlance) and from the right (liberals) left little room for Gorbachev’s middle ground.
On the left, powerful figures like Politburo member Yegor Ligachev feared (correctly, it turns out) that the CPSU was committing suicide. Ligachev was stripped of responsibility for ideological matters as a result of his views and put in charge of agriculture. Everyone understood the significance of that, since the portfolio had often been a sign of political exile. Still, open criticism in the Soviet press and the appearance of reactionary factions within the Party itself grew more urgent and more common. But Gorbachev pushed ahead, declaring at the 28th Party Congress in July 1990 that the Politburo of the Party would have no role in governing the country. Earlier that year, Gorbachev engineered an amendment to Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution that eliminated the CPSU’s monopoly on power and allowed the creation of multiple parties.
While these decisions terrified conservatives, they were not radical enough for the liberals, led by Boris Yeltsin. He had been expelled from the Politburo three years earlier and in July 1990 abruptly resigned his membership in the CPSU.
From that time on, he would lead the pro-democratic forces and he would do so in a way that created another, ultimately fatal fissure in the political landscape. Yeltsin would begin to advocate for loosening the ties of the republics within the Soviet Union itself, insisting on something closer to confederation than a unitary state. Ironically, Yeltsin used a provision of the Soviet constitution that gave the republics the right to secede. No one had ever thought it important, but it shows that sometimes a law on the books can suddenly have new resonance in changed circumstances.
Gorbachev tried to preempt Yeltsin, proposing change after change that would give more power to the republics. But again he was too late: Yeltsin created parallel structures in the Russian republic that effectively ripped the heart out of the Soviet Union. After all, what was the Soviet Union without Russia at its core?
Desperate to hang on to a coherent Soviet state, Gorbachev sponsored a referendum in March 1991 on the question of unity. And though large majorities voted to preserve the Soviet Union, six republics (Armenia, Georgia, Moldavia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) boycotted. And more critically, Russian voters backed an empowered Russian presidency. When Yeltsin was elected president of Russia in June 1991 he had an institutional base from which to demand independence for the republics. Soon there was nothing left of Soviet power.
Lifting the Iron Curtain
Internal reforms for a great power do not take place in isolation. Foreign policy had to be altered too. And the change in the Soviet Union was a dramatic one.
The Soviet state emerged in 1922 from the remains of the Russian Empire, fueled by the fiery ideology and rhetoric of class conflict and the epic struggle between communism and capitalism. The belief that both could not survive was perhaps best captured in Nikita Khrushchev’s threat to “bury” the West, and his ill-advised timeline of a couple of decades until the triumph of socialism.
Though the passion about and belief in socialism’s triumph waned over the years, giving way to peaceful coexistence and ultimately détente with the West, the notion of two systems in competition with one another remained a defining characteristic of the international system throughout the Cold War. In everything from the space race to Olympic hockey, a victory for the Soviet Union was taken as a victory for socialism. As a child I remember our shock and dismay when the Soviet Union launched the first man into space in 1961. On the other hand, Americans were heartened when U.S. chess prodigy Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky to become the world grandmaster, and when Van Cliburn became the first non-Russian to win the international Tchaikovsky piano competition in 1958. This little girl studying piano wanted to be Van Cliburn. In 1980 the defeat of the Big Red Machine (as the Soviet hockey team was nicknamed in the West) by a collection of young American amateurs at the Olympics in Lake Placid was seen as a stinging loss for communism and a victory for capitalism and democracy. That was the zero-sum nature of the relationship between East and West.
Gorbachev rejected that view. He went in search of a foreign policy that was sustainable—no longer requiring the overreach of wars like Afghanistan and a defense budget that consumed more than 25 percent of the GDP—and he abandoned “class struggle” as an organizing principle.7 Within a coterie of the Soviet establishment, led by intellectuals such as Alexander Yakovlev, a future adviser of Gorbachev, the argument emerged that the modern world required cooperation, not conflict. The international equivalent of the “normal” domestic politics of the new Soviet Union became the “Common European Home.” In this context, Gorbachev’s view that the Soviet Union would simply take its place on the continuum of European political forces made perfect sense.
Though we were skeptical in the White House at first, it became clear that Gorbachev meant what he said. The Soviet Union ended its war in Afghanistan and its forces went home. Eastern Europe was freed to go its own way and Soviet troop strength was cut back dramatically on the continent.
On the economic side, Gorbachev sought to be welcomed into the international capitalist system. Soviet economists were regular visitors to Washington, London, and Paris to learn about how those economies worked. As these inquiries increased, it was easy to forget that central planning and communism had once been hailed as a viable, even preferable alternative to capitalism in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and, of course, Eastern Europe. Now its failure was obvious and the Soviets were fully prepared to admit it, though their understanding of capitalism was flawed at best.
At one of the sessions with his counterparts, my colleague Mike Boskin, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George H. W. Bush, gave a little lecture on markets. At the end of his talk, the Soviet finance minister raised his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Boskin,” he began. “But there is one thing I don’t understand. Who sets the prices?”
The desire of the Soviet reformers to be accepted into the fold was incredibly strong—a pull that would fade as time went on. In one sad episode, Gorbachev sent a letter to the meeting of the G-7 taking place in Paris in 1990. He essentially asked to be invited. The startled leaders didn’t welcome him that year, but, fearful that his reforms were losing ground, they did invite him to the G-7 in July 1991, one month before the coup attempt against him and five months before the Soviet Union collapsed altogether. That is how the G-7 became the G-8.
Gorbachev had managed to secure a place for the Soviet Union in his “Common European Home.” But it had come at a cost. As one exasperated East German intellectual put it, “If there is not class conflict, what is the argument for two Germanys?” Pretty soon that would be answered too and Germany would unify completely and fully on Western terms.
On a visit to Moscow in February 1990 as Soviet influence in Germany was waning, I met with Gorbachev’s adviser on the United States. It was already dark at half past four in the afternoon and snowing outside as I waited in the Kremlin anteroom. Finally, Vadim Zagladin appeared. He was an hour late. “I am sorry,” he said. “But every day we come to work to see what disaster has befallen us now.”
I delivered my points about how the unification of Germany would benefit everyone. There would be no losers in ending the Cold War. “Stop,” Zagladin said. “There used to be two Germanys—one was yours and one was ours. Now there will be one and it will be yours. That, Professor Rice, is a strategic defeat.” I couldn’t say much, because he was right.
Gorbachev insisted on signing away the Soviet Union’s “Four Power Rights and Responsibilities” and returning Germany to full and complete sovereignty, not in the Kremlin but in a Moscow hotel.8 That is how forty-five years of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe ended—in the lobby of a hotel. The Soviet Union’s military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, dissolved a few months later, and NATO did not. Gorbachev had gone too far, and as Soviet power collapsed across Europe, the Cold War ended and Moscow suffered a humiliating “strategic defeat.”
Hard-liners finally rallied and launched a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. But it was too late. The army was split, some supporting Yeltsin and the reformers and others holding views even more conservative than those of Gorbachev. The KGB was split and no one could fully count on its loyalty. Boris Yeltsin and Russian institutions had emerged as an alternative to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union—a challenge from the radical side. Gorbachev reportedly asked his defense minister whether the army would stand by him if he tried to resist Yeltsin’s demands. The defense minister said he was not sure.
In short order Yeltsin engineered the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States to replace the Soviet Union. Gorbachev did not resist. And on December 25, 1991, the Hammer and Sickle, the flag of a superpower with thirty thousand nuclear weapons and four million men under arms, was lowered from above the Kremlin for the last time. More than seventy years of communism ended quietly and was buried with few mourners and little fanfare. But the demise of the Soviet Union left a mark on the emerging new Russian state and tainted the critical and chaotic first years of its attempted transition to democracy. Perhaps it also sealed its failure.
The Second Opening: The New Russian State Is Born
Political choices do not take place on a blank canvas: What has gone before matters. Gorbachev’s effort to make the Soviet Union a “normal” nation introduced important democratizing reforms, essentially for the first time in the country’s history. The only other episode had been tragically brief. Alexander Kerensky established an independent parliament, a freer press, and rule of law when he took power after the abdication of the tsar in March 1917. The victory of the Bolsheviks eight months later put an end to that experiment. And thanks to the telling of history in Soviet times, few Russians knew that story.
The Gorbachev reforms were thus pathbreaking: the creation of a quasi-independent parliament; a presidency divorced from the Communist Party structure; careful but palpable freeing of the press; and the first civil society institutions that advocated on behalf of non-political causes.9 Unfortunately, these fledgling institutions would soon be overrun by the chaos engulfing the country.
In the wild days immediately after the end of the Soviet Union there was unbridled joy and optimism in the West that capitalism and democracy would take hold in Russia and in the Baltic states. Observers were less sanguine about the newly independent Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Most of their new leaders did little to encourage hope, falling almost immediately into corruption and infighting or simply transferring power to authoritarian communists who now called themselves nationalist democrats.
But Russia seemed different. The country enjoyed a high level of economic development, a population that was almost 100 percent literate, and relative ethnic homogeneity.
Obviously, Russia’s totalitarian history would be a concern. Yet Gorbachev had in seven years loosened the constraints without mass violence and handed the reins peacefully to Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, in turn, proved a popular leader, made even more legitimate by his valiant defense of the people and the nation in front of the Russian White House in the summer of 1991. The image of Yeltsin facing down the coup plotters from the top of a tank and turning the army against them gave the country a rallying point. The Russian people had reason to believe that they were finally about to erase hundreds of years of revolution, oppression, and political turmoil. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia could become a normal country.
And the West wanted desperately to help. It is true that Russia was not offered a Marshall Plan, comparable to what had been done to support European reconstruction after World War II. But the circumstances were different. Russia was not without resources given its vast oil wealth, a well-educated population, and high levels of industrialization. The question seemed to be how best to unleash the forces that had been held back by Soviet communism. The raw clay for a successful democratic transition was present and abundant.
This explains in large part the path adopted by the United States and Europe to assist the Russian democratic transition. Large numbers of experts, both governmental and private, deployed to Moscow to help establish capitalism and provide advice on how to develop democracy. While a few voices suggested that too much was being expected too soon, proponents of radical surgery prevailed.
The Soviet economy needed to be transformed. That much was clear. But in retrospect, those who advised the Russians, not to mention the Russians themselves, had no earthly idea how to break up and reconstitute the deeply dysfunctional economy. The recent successes in transforming the Polish economy gave a false sense of certitude to the effort. But Poland was, as we will explore, very different, with nascent institutions of democracy and capitalism that proved essential in its success.
In Russia, the speed of change clearly outpaced the development of rules of the game and institutions to contain the new forces. Events quickly overwhelmed what was left of Gorbachev’s reforms and raced ahead of what Yeltsin’s government could achieve.
We have seen that America’s Founding Fathers worried about creating a state that would be too strong and thus a threat to democratic values. But they understood that the state had to be strong enough to carry out certain functions: protecting the country from foreign enemies; the establishment of a national currency; the maintenance of civil order; the ability to tax its citizens fairly; and the confidence that the states would carry out federal laws. Somewhere between chaos and authoritarianism lay democracy.
Russia did not find that sweet spot. Rather, the period was characterized by wild schemes to privatize the economy rapidly, creating massively rich new elites while real income plummeted and poverty levels soared for the general population. Organized crime emerged as a potent force, offering protection to companies and individuals (for a fee) that the state could not provide. Regional and local authorities simply ignored the policies of the central government. The Russian citizen experienced daily life as one of humiliation, deprivation, and chaos.
The economic collapse of the country was at the core of the despair. “Shock therapy,” a term given to rapid reform of an economy, didn’t capture the earthquake that Russia experienced. In 1988, 96 percent of the Russian labor force was dependent on the state for employment and almost all of the population’s income came either from this source or from direct transfers from the state (pensions, child benefits, and so on).10 By 1994, the non-state sector accounted for more than half (55.3 percent) of total employment, and 70 percent of all state assets had been privatized.11 Over the same time frame the number of people living in poverty went from 2 percent of the population to 50 percent.12 That meant that nearly seventy-four million people saw their income and earning power plunge in that period as they joined the ranks of the officially poor. From 1991 to 1998, Russia’s GDP contracted by roughly 30 percent, wiping out many Russians’ savings and precipitating a capital flight from the country of nearly $150 billion from 1992 to 1999.13
The numbers are staggering, but, if anything, they understate the impact that one could see on the streets. On a visit to Moscow in 1993, I again walked along the Old Arbat. But where in 1988 the atmosphere crackled with the energy and excitement of perestroika, this time the scene was very sad indeed. Old ladies were trying to sell broken teacups and pottery for whatever they could; men begged passersby for bread; and recently discharged soldiers—withdrawn from Eastern Europe with no place to live at home—exchanged Red Army greatcoats for a few dollars.
Who Is to Blame?
Russia’s first privatization program was passed by the Supreme Soviet and signed into law by Yeltsin in 1992. It allowed managers and employees of enterprises to acquire shares in newly private companies through vouchers. Shares were also set aside for private citizens, who could buy them through banks.
To be fair, Russia faced the daunting task of privatizing 225,000 enterprises and doing so rapidly. Two well-regarded economists, Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, with the help of foreign advisers devised a voucher scheme. It was based on a successful but much smaller effort in the Czech Republic.
The terms were extremely favorable for the insiders, who could buy up to 51 percent of the company at a discount and use the enterprise’s money rather than their own. Eighty percent of firms adopted this program, which resulted in the privatization of roughly half of the companies, including three hundred of the nation’s largest. The effect was immediate. When one visited these enterprises, as I did on several occasions, it was not surprising to be handed a business card. “Plant Manager” had been crossed out and the holder of the card was now the “CEO.”
A particular subset of these privatizations tried to convert the Russian defense industry to civilian use. The Soviet Union’s military had commanded the best resources and technology, employed the best workers and scientists, and produced the country’s only globally competitive goods—military equipment. Why not use these industries as a leading edge to rebuild the economy?
Together with my Stanford colleagues, former secretary of defense William Perry and David Holloway, one of the West’s leading experts on the Soviet military, I visited two of these conversion projects in 1992. The first CEO that day was explaining that his plant was adept at making really hard materials. He kept emphasizing really hard. It wasn’t long before we understood exactly what he was saying. These workers had perfected the materials that were used to harden Soviet nuclear missile silos. Now they were trying to figure out what commercial value this could possibly have. Later that afternoon, we visited another plant where the CEO proudly displayed baby carriages and a giant food processor—made of the titanium that had been used to produce military equipment. It was surreal.
The second privatization program, though, would ultimately shift the landscape more dramatically. This program was initiated by presidential decree and not by legislation. By 1995, there were still many state-owned enterprises that needed to be privatized. Moreover, the Russian government was running out of money due to capital flight and a rapidly devaluing currency. Moscow needed a way to fund its budget. A number of individuals who had become quite wealthy in the first privatizations of banks provided loans to the government with the proviso that they would receive a stake in various companies if the money was not repaid. It was a good bet. The corrupt and secretive bidding process handed some of the country’s biggest assets to these men. Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich acquired oil giant Sibneft in a sweetheart deal; Vladimir Potanin bought Norilsk Nickel for $170 million, though its annual profits were $400 million, and he was named deputy prime minister; and Mikhail Khodorkovsky would acquire a controlling share of Yukos, the large oil company, for $309 million. Within a few years his personal fortune would reach as high as $15 billion.
This is how these oligarchs and many like them came to be. Arguably, the state received the loans it needed and many of the companies were reorganized, given new management, and brought to profitability by those who acquired them. But the fire sale of Russian state assets lives on today in the consciousness of ordinary citizens and Russia’s rulers, who use it to intimidate, cow, and extort loyalty from the very rich.
It is said that Vladimir Putin (a wealthy man in his own right) told the oligarchs that he had a deal for them. He would not challenge their ill-gotten gains if they stayed out of politics. Most followed the script, and when Mikhail Khodorkovsky did not, the Kremlin made an example of him, breaking up his company and jailing him for ten years. Popular jealousy of the oligarchs has been one of Putin’s most potent weapons against those who are wealthy and influential enough to challenge him. In other words, it was easy to find an answer to the question “Who is to blame?”
The Russian State Is Overwhelmed
Clearly, the abrupt shift to capitalism outpaced the establishment of rule of law and institutions that could regulate against its excesses. The Russian state couldn’t contain the economic effects that it had unleashed. Before long, it could no longer provide security to the population either. Organized crime became a daily fixture of life in Moscow, providing protection to small shopkeepers and oligarchs alike. And with that came a spike in violence that made the capital city feel unsafe for both citizens and visitors.
In May 1994, I got out of the car at my favorite Moscow restaurant, the Café Pushkina located on Tverskaya Street, just a few blocks from the Kremlin. All of a sudden there was a big commotion behind us. The driver said, “Oh, there is a man with a machine gun.” I looked back to see two burly bodyguards, bracketing an equally burly “businessman.” They were toting Czech Samovals. My escort pushed me into the restaurant, where my host suggested that we sit “away from the window.” Apparently this was a common occurrence in the summer of 1994. I remember thinking that my friend Andrei seemed relatively calm.
The police could no longer control the streets, caught between the Russian mafia and rampant corruption within their own ranks. Homicides tripled from 1988 to 1994. Brazil had about the same number of people as Russia at that time, and in 1988 it had nine thousand more homicides than Russia; yet by 1994, Russia had fifteen thousand more homicides than Brazil.14 The absolute numbers are not very high, but the spectacular nature of the crimes in Russia gave a great sense of insecurity to a population unaccustomed to random violence.
Bombings and assassinations of businessmen, journalists, and bankers added to the chaotic atmosphere. Just weeks after I stayed at the Radisson Hotel in central Moscow, the lobby nearly became a shooting gallery as special forces troops stormed in without warning to raid a suspected meeting of mafia chiefs.
The erosion of state capacity and authority didn’t stop with the inability to control criminal elements. Regional and local officials took full advantage of Moscow’s weakness. Anxious to reap the benefits of privatization, some of them tailored their political programs for maximum personal gain. Federalism can be a means to greater efficiency. Political and economic decentralization can be healthy. The United States is not the only country with strong regional powers: Germany, Brazil, and India all lodge considerable authority in their states.
But in Russia federalism had simply become an excuse for local leaders to do whatever they wished. This was true not only of governors but of mayors as well. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, improved the city in many ways, including raising money to restore beautiful old treasures like the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. But his wife owned the real estate around many of the restoration projects and benefited greatly. These personal deals were the rule, not the exception.
Boris Yeltsin, who had once exhorted the regions to “grab as much authority as they could,” would soon see the disasters that were unfolding as taxes went unpaid, decrees were ignored, and the regions prospered as the national government faltered. Beginning in 1994, he signed a series of “treaties” with different regions to try to bring order to governance. But the Russian state had been seriously wounded. The centrifugal forces that had collapsed the empire and freed Ukraine, Belarus, and the other republics of the Soviet Union seemed to be rolling back toward Moscow itself.
The country was in chaos and the Russian people could see and feel it all around them. Pensioners who were forced now to live with their children were humiliated. Soldiers sleeping in Gorky Park, having returned from Eastern Europe with nowhere to go, were humiliated. Industrial workers with no job to do were humiliated.
The Soviet Union was gone and Russia was failing. Even the symbols of the nation seemed to be trapped in purgatory. Standing on the White House lawn at the arrival ceremony for Boris Yeltsin in 1994, I listened to an unfamiliar song. I turned to a Russian diplomat and asked him if it was the new national anthem. “No,” he replied, “it’s just some song by Glinka.” At the Olympics in 1992, the athletes of the former Soviet Union marched under the Olympic flag and stood on the podium to hear the Olympic hymn. One of the skaters said poignantly that he had trained all of his life for the moment of the gold medal ceremony. “And now I stand on the podium to hear a song I have never heard under a flag that I do not recognize,” he said. In 2000, at the urging of Vladimir Putin, the Russian parliament would vote for a new national anthem: the tune from the anthem of the Soviet Union—with new words. Confusion and fear had engulfed the Russian people. They were exhausted and ready for order.
Still, with all the chaos surrounding and devouring Russia, things might have turned out differently. Democratic transitions do not succeed suddenly, and, conversely, they do not fail in one moment either. There are, in retrospect, important inflection points that might have taken a different turn.
The Third Opening: The Elections of 1993
Despite the troubles, the political system was developing in favorable ways. New political parties and coalitions dotted the landscape in 1992–93, hundreds of independent newspapers sprang up across the country, and small numbers of civil society groups began to flourish. The worsening economic situation formed the backdrop for disaffection with the government’s policies. Demonstrations were commonplace and for the most part tolerated by the government. Some of democracy’s scaffolding was emerging.
But at the top of the political system, constant conflict between the parliament and the president seemed to throw the new Russian state into crisis on what seemed like a daily basis. Boris Yeltsin was a mercurial figure, often bristling at challenges to his power and ideas. There were repeated fights over economic policy. At one point, in December 1992, the Congress of People’s Deputies stripped Yeltsin of the extraordinary powers that they had only recently granted him and forced him to fire his prime minister.
The parliament challenged the president on political matters too, including the growing power of the republics and the nature of constitutional reform. When Yeltsin outlawed a coalition of reactionary political parties, the National Salvation Front, the Supreme Court ruled his action unconstitutional.
Yeltsin was increasingly frustrated with what he saw as interference with his efforts to overthrow old economic and political structures. In a speech to the Civic Alliance in February 1993, he said that he could no longer “tolerate the parliament’s parallel government.”
In a temporary truce, the president and the parliament were able to agree on a political referendum that for the moment forestalled a complete breakdown of civil order. In that vote, Yeltsin won the backing of 59 percent of the population, but 49 percent wanted new elections for parliament and the presidency.
Many Russians came to think that constitutional reform was the only answer to the clear dysfunction of the new institutions. Not surprisingly, the presidential administration and the parliamentary committee produced radically different versions of a proposed new constitution. Yeltsin wanted a strong presidency. The opposition, including his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, accused him of wanting a dictatorship. Yeltsin suspended Rutskoi, who took his case to the Constitutional Court.
One could imagine this tug-of-war between the president and the parliament and their invocation of the courts as a hopeful sign for democracy. It was not. While Russian citizens suffered economic ruin and the streets of Moscow grew more dangerous by the day, the politicians in Moscow, struggling over constitutional questions, seemed out of touch with the concerns of the people. Governance ground to a halt.
Yeltsin suspended the parliament. The Constitutional Court declared his decree unconstitutional. The Congress of People’s Deputies voted to impeach him. And in short order, violent demonstrations rocked Moscow. After a day of rioting, Yeltsin moved to crush the rebellion with military force. Army units stormed the parliament, and Rutskoi, who had tried to surrender, was arrested for plotting a coup. The Constitutional Court was suspended. One hundred and forty people were killed in the confrontation.
It was against this backdrop of violence and confrontation that Russian voters went to the polls to elect a new parliament and vote on the constitutional referendum in December 1993. The final results were not released for two months. When they were, liberal parties had won only 34.2 percent of the vote. The parties that were a loose confederation of oppositionists to Yeltsin won 43.3 percent.
In fact, liberal parties had been unable to organize effective campaigns, instead criticizing and undermining each other. An eleventh-hour effort to present a unified bloc fell apart when the leaders of the main parties refused to cooperate. After their crushing defeat in 1993, these same leaders became dispirited and even less capable. Several parties became closely identified with single personalities, like Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko (which means “apple”), rather than with political platforms. The parties had no reach into the population and no real program for governing. Outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, these liberal forces ceased to matter at all.
The rough birth of Russia’s first constitution in 1993 and the lingering animosity toward the president by parliamentarians doomed the chances for the legislative and executive branches to govern effectively. In fact, Yeltsin ruled more and more by decree, particularly on economic matters, ignoring the parliament whenever possible. For all that he had done to free the Russian people, he did little to transfer his personal standing and authority into the institution of the presidency. His rule became self-centered and erratic.
The first president of a country sets the tone for how future presidents will behave. Just imagine if George Washington had given in to the desire of many to make him king. Instead he understood that the presidency had to be something more than the person who inhabits it at any one time. Nelson Mandela refused to serve a second term to show others that the office is not meant to be a personal fiefdom. Yeltsin did not see this, acting arbitrarily with increasing frequency. This prevented the young institutions of the new Russian government from gaining strength and legitimacy as they were simply cast aside.
By the election of 1996, Yeltsin’s message had become undeniably populist—a direct appeal to the street, not to democratic institutions. He criticized his own prime minister for “forgetting about people living on wages and pensions.” Facing a runoff after receiving only 36 percent of the vote, Yeltsin ordered a sweeping shake-up of his government. It was as if he divorced himself from responsibility for all that was happening to his country.
The democratic opening was overshadowed too by Chechnya and the rise of terrorism in Russian cities. By 1994, the restive Muslim-majority republic in the country’s unstable south had slipped into civil war. Following the collapse of peace negotiations in the fall, Yeltsin ordered the invasion of Chechnya by forty thousand federal ground forces. For twenty months the war raged, with more than five thousand Russian troops and tens of thousands of Chechens dead. The war was unpopular but tolerated. When in 1995 the militant Chechen leader Shamil Basayev took a thousand people hostage in Russia proper, the government agreed to restart peace talks. Still, from that time on, Russia could add to its list of woes terrorism at home, stemming from the suppression of the majority Muslim populations of the south. In time, Basayev would fall into bad company, training with al-Qaeda, radicalizing further, and producing calls from the Russian population for tougher measures against those hated minorities suspected of endangering the homeland.
And finally there was the matter of Boris Yeltsin’s health. The president was repeatedly hospitalized, disappearing from the public eye with frightening frequency. As Russia slipped deeper and deeper into trouble, particularly during the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Boris Yeltsin failed to inspire confidence in his people or among leaders abroad.
In 1999, an exhausted Yeltsin named a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, to become his fourth prime minister in a year and a half. Then, on December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigned, leaving Putin as Russia’s president in an acting capacity. Putin was elected three months later in March 2000. Many believe that he was chosen because he alone—the former KGB colonel—was prepared to protect Yeltsin’s family and its ill-gotten gains. This single act would have a dramatic effect on Russia’s future. One only needs to remember that one of the other candidates to succeed Yeltsin was the late liberal hero Boris Nemtsov.
The Democratic Opening Closes
Knowing now that Vladimir Putin would become an autocrat at home and an aggressor abroad, it is hard to go back and look dispassionately at the circumstances in which he came to power. By the end of the decade of the 1990s, the Russian state needed to be rebuilt, confidence had to be restored in its leadership, and the chaos had to be ended.
The Russian people were frightened. Throughout the country’s history, times of trouble had been associated with a weak state, weak leaders, and enemies that picked at the bones of its vulnerable territory. The strong state and a strong man were associated with order and safety. That would become the rallying cry of Vladimir Putin, chosen by a frail and spent Boris Yeltsin to succeed him as president.
By the time Putin took power, Yeltsin’s efforts to contain unrest in Chechnya were failing. Russian cities increasingly experienced terrorist attacks from the troubled region. The origin of some of these incidents was suspicious—leading many to believe that Russian security services might have been involved. Whether it was on the basis of a pretext or indeed in response to actual terrorism, Putin’s forceful actions in Chechnya were welcomed by frightened Russians and enhanced his reputation as a tough guy who would defend the country.
Putin was systematic in centralizing power after his ascendance to the presidency. On the surface, some of his reforms seem aimed simply at reversing the corrosion of state power. In 2001, the laws were amended to establish a mechanism for “federal intervention” if regional lawmakers persistently violated the Russian constitution or federal laws.15
Putin changed the way that members of the Federation Council were chosen, replacing governors with “senators” selected by the central government to represent the governors. Putin established the State Council as a forum for the governors, but it was now purely advisory. And in 2004, new legislation created seven federal jurisdictional districts and placed those under super governors, all appointed by the Kremlin.
These moves taken together might have been seen as a way to rein in out-of-control regional leaders and put Moscow back in the game. But five of the seven new regional governors had, like Putin, made their careers in the KGB or armed services. This began the ascendancy of the siloviki (“powerful”)—men who had largely come from the same institutions: the security services.
Meanwhile, the raging war in Chechnya, which had resumed in 1999, continued to produce violence in Russian cities. The calls for a crackdown reached a crescendo in September 2004 after an attack on a kindergarten at Beslan. More than 150 children were slaughtered and the population demanded an answer. Putin drew upon the anger and the not too thinly disguised racism against those from the Caucasus in order to solidify the Kremlin’s assault on the independence of the regions.
As Moscow’s grip tightened, tax reforms after 2005 sealed the fate of healthy federalism, making the regions dependent on a revenue-sharing formula devised annually in the capital. Putin would then take a final step in recentralizing power over the regions, abolishing the election of governors and appointing them in Moscow. But this decision appeared to be a bridge too far and was so unpopular that then-president Dmitry Medvedev reversed course in 2012 and reinstated direct elections of governors. That lasted one year. In 2013, Putin returned to the presidency and reversed Medvedev, cynically citing concerns for the well-being of minorities in the regions.
The genius of these steps was that they were rooted in a certain reality: The regions had taken advantage of Moscow’s weakness, and the imbalance between the center and the periphery had to be addressed. The Kremlin, though, blasted through an equilibrium that might have created sustainable federalism and concentrated power again in the center—indeed, in the hands of the president himself.
All other nascent institutions of Russian democracy were crushed in their cribs one by one. The parliament was transformed from a raucous and admittedly ineffective legislature to the president’s rubber stamp. The 2003 election reforms banned parties from forming election blocs to receive seats in the State Duma (the lower house), reduced the minimum number of parties to be represented in that chamber from four to two, and increased the financial requirements for the formation of parties. Independent liberal parties that had enjoyed some popularity in the 1990s found themselves under attack after 2000 and by the middle of the decade unable even to register.
By the time Putin became president in 2000, the “right forces,” meaning liberals, were already disorganized, fighting among themselves and ill-suited to challenge the emerging authoritarianism at the center. Political parties continued to exist, but in time, only those that were loyal to the president gained access to the government-controlled media, particularly television.
And Putin made certain that the media would help to doom political opposition. During the 1990s there were hundreds of independent newspapers, ranging from responsible ones, like Vremya (the Times), to simple scandal sheets. The press was most assuredly free with criticism of the government, reporting on official corruption and open debate about Russia’s political future. The print media was largely untouched well into the first decade of Putin’s presidency. That is because he concentrated first on the electronic media, perhaps realizing its greater reach and impact.
Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, independent television stations, funded by the newly rich, sprang up across the airwaves. Three outlets had national reach—RTR, which was always state-controlled; and ORT and NTV, owned, respectively, by oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gusinsky. In a period spanning about five years, Putin hounded both men with trumped-up criminal charges until Berezovsky fled and Gusinsky was convicted of tax evasion and forced to sell his station and his two independent newspapers as well, Itogi (Issues) and Sevodnya (Today).
The Kremlin’s policies toward the independent press were becoming more and more repressive. And journalists were increasingly targeted for harassment and, in some sad and celebrated cases, death.
Anna Politkovskaya, for example, had refused to be intimidated in her efforts to bring the truth about the Chechen wars to the Russian people. She bravely traveled to the war-torn region repeatedly to chronicle the abuses of the Russian military there. Even after she was poisoned in 2004 while reporting on events in Beslan, she refused to quit. “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance,” she declared after that attack on her life.
On October 7, 2006, she was murdered in her Moscow apartment. Two weeks later, I was in Moscow for diplomatic meetings. I started the day, though, in a hotel conference room where Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya, and several of her colleagues from Novaya Gazeta were gathered. No words seem adequate at times like that. The sense of deep grief and anguish was overwhelming. I promised the support of the U.S. government in pressing the Russian government to find her killer. But of course I knew—as did her colleagues—that the Kremlin had no interest in doing so.
That moment felt to me like a watershed in Russia’s democratic transition. The killing of a celebrated journalist was only part of the story. There was something even more dispiriting—the looks of resignation and desperation on the faces of the mostly young journalists in that room. They had lost faith in a democratic future for Russia. You could feel it.
Still, for a brief time another medium—the Internet—seemed poised to escape the Kremlin’s control. On a subsequent trip to Moscow, I asked our ambassador to arrange a meeting with some of Russia’s young entrepreneurs and businesspeople. Before leaving for Spasso House (the U.S. residence), I was watching television in my hotel room, something that I always did immediately upon touching down in order to activate my “Russian ear.” I knew that the electronic media had been under siege, but I was not prepared for what I saw. The news was mostly a celebration of the exploits of Vladimir Putin, with some favorable economic news thrown in for good measure. Frankly, it looked a great deal like Soviet TV programming when I was a graduate student in 1979. There were, to be sure, popular Western-style programs that would not have been possible in the Soviet era: American shows like The Sopranos and Friends; Klub Vesyólykh i Nakhódchivykh (Club of the Funny and Inventive), a competitive comedy show that had been banned by Soviet censors; singing contests and documentaries about expensive automobiles. But the news was pretty close to pure propaganda.
At the session with the young Russians later that day, I brought up the state of television. One young man stopped me. “Let me tell you what you saw on the news,” he said. “The first story was about the great man [Putin]. The second about whatever successor to the great man is in favor today.” I understood the reference. The presidential “elections” were about a year away and everyone knew that Putin would choose either Dmitry Medvedev or Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. “The third story,” he continued, “was about whatever innocent people you Americans killed today. And the fourth—the amazingly good state of agriculture.”
“That’s about it. Doesn’t that trouble you?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
“Who watches television?”
“My friends and I all get our news from the Internet.” Everyone nodded in agreement.
To the degree that the Internet was a safe haven for open expression in 2007, it didn’t last. When Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, he completed the extermination of media outlets that might challenge him. Bloggers like Alexei Navalny who used the Web to organize politically were arrested. Other reformist websites first experienced outages and then were shut down altogether. In July 2012 the Duma passed a law allowing the government to create a list of websites that were to be blocked without any mechanism of appeal. While the measure was portrayed as intended to block pornography and extremist content, it silenced legitimate websites. In 2014, Vkontakte (VK), known as the Facebook of Russia, came under the control of Putin’s allies. The sin of VK had been its use as a vehicle to organize anti-Putin rallies during the elections. Its young founder, Pavel Durov, was forced to step down, and in 2015 he left the country.
Step by step, young institutions that might have sustained Russian democracy disappeared—independent regional leaders, the free press, and what was left of a working legislature after Yeltsin’s assault on it. The remnants of an independent judiciary disappeared in the political prosecutions of oligarchs that Putin targeted and laws that brought appointments to the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, under the Kremlin’s control. The last vestige of an incipient democracy was a civil society that fought the swing toward authoritarianism more valiantly than liberal politicians were ever able to do.
Many of the NGOs were well funded by outside private sources and Western governments, including the United States through USAID. The National Endowment for Democracy is a private organization with a board made up of esteemed citizens but it does receive U.S. government funding. Together with its European counterparts, it helped to sustain these young Russian institutions. The leaders traveled abroad for conferences and their names were well known in the international community that advocated publicly for them.
At home, these organizations were popular and noted for doing good works. For instance, on one of my trips I met an extraordinary woman, Svetlana Kotova, whose own limited sight led her to appeal to the conscience of the country on behalf of people with disabilities. Everyone knew that in Soviet times, when society idolized the perfect Soviet man, the disabled were treated like trash—literally swept off the streets by the police. Kotova’s compassionate outcry to overcome this history was so popular that even Putin tried to ride her coattails, inviting her to hold a summit on the disabled at the Kremlin in 2005.
But eventually the Duma passed laws requiring NGOs to register and to disclose foreign funding. Soon the law made it illegal to receive resources from abroad under the guise of protecting the national security of the country. Hundreds of the organizations dried up, and the few that remained endured prosecutors’ charges and police raids. Like every authoritarian, Putin knew that allowing citizens to organize in private space had political ramifications no matter how compelling the social good. With the demise of civil society, the destruction of the nascent institutions of democracy was complete.
The events that followed the ascendance of Vladimir Putin and transpired over roughly fifteen years raise a disturbing question: Is it really possible that one man could dismantle the institutional basis for democracy in his country in so short a time span? We have seen how the conditions of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the chaos that unfolded laid the groundwork for the rise of authoritarian government in Russia. But unlike Saddam Hussein or the Kim dynasty in North Korea, Putin does not rule as an absolute tyrant. Rather, he skillfully constructed and nurtured an alternative institutional basis from which to undermine liberal change.
In today’s interconnected world, the creeping and subtle authoritarianism of illiberal elected leaders is a greater threat to democracy than if they were to crush it with tanks in the city square. Vladimir Putin uses just enough repression to cow the population but not too much so that blood runs in the streets. And he enjoys a significant hold on the loyalty of enough of his citizens to sustain his power.
While it is hard in Putin’s Russia to know how reliable polls are that show him to be popular at the level of 70 percent or better, there is no doubt that he has a loyal base of support. When Putin came to power in 2000, his support was remarkably broad, reflecting roughly the demographics of the country. His supporters spanned all age groups, income brackets, and levels of education. Today, his most ardent support comes from rural voters, older people, the military, and those middle-class citizens who are dependent on the state for their income. And Putin has taken care of them with largesse ranging from enhanced pensions to spending on infrastructure projects outside of the cities in his most reliable districts.
Indeed, he is regarded as the leader who fixed a broken pension system. More than 35 percent of the country’s electorate is composed of pensioners (Russia is an aging country with low birth rates and high morbidity and mortality). In the 1990s, pension income dropped by as much as 40 percent, and simply receiving a check had become an unreliable waiting game. In 2002, Putin set repairing the system as one of his chief goals, and despite economic arguments to the contrary, he refused to raise the generously low retirement age: fifty-five for women and sixty for men. Not surprisingly, this has endeared him to the old.
Additionally, Putin’s opposition is largely based in Moscow. In fact, in the election of 2012, the one district that he did not win was the capital. But rural voters love him, and it is in those districts that his image, burnished by favorable stories on state television, is most heroic. Putin maintains contact with these voters through his selection of presidential envoys to each federal region.
The story of Igor Kholmanskikh illustrates the point. In the span of just a few months, Kholmanskikh went from being an unknown tank factory worker in the Ural Mountains to Putin’s presidential envoy to the region. He first appeared on the national scene during one of Putin’s televised call-in shows in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, ridiculing anti-Putin protesters in Moscow and offering to bring his crew of factory workers to help the police “defend stability.” Putin later featured him at campaign rallies as the epitome of the Russian worker, and Kholmanskikh’s efforts on Putin’s behalf were duly rewarded. After Putin’s return to the presidency, Kholmanskikh was appointed his personal envoy to the Ural Mountain region, becoming the first such envoy to serve without any prior government or political experience.
This story bears a strong resemblance to the folklore of an era long past. Heroic laborers who through hard work and grit industrialized the country and farmed the land have long been admired, whether in Russia or in the Soviet Union. Their towns have changed little in decades—they are rough and polluted rust belts. Their isolated villages and farms would look at home in the late nineteenth century. When the president needs support, his presidential envoys find it easy to arrange it for him far from the glittering streets of the country’s cosmopolitan cities.
While there is a popular base for Putin, his more important political allies are those oligarchs whom he has courted and sometimes coerced into loyalty, and the men of the security services—the siloviki—who share his KGB upbringing and disdain for Russia’s weakness after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Fueled by oil wealth, personal fortunes, and the power of the state, this syndicate really runs Russia. It is hard to tell whether Putin is just first among equals or something more. But slowly, the men who were once members of the prestigious First Directorate of the KGB in Soviet times and served together in espionage across the world have become the dominant personalities in modern-day Russia.
They share too a suspicious, almost xenophobic view of the outside world. And it is this that has served to unify Russia’s authoritarian turn at home with an aggressive foreign policy abroad, aimed at redressing the “tragedy,” as Putin called it, of the Soviet Union’s demise.
“Ukraine Is a Made-Up Country”
It had been a difficult NATO summit in Bucharest. In President Bush’s last year in office, we hoped to solidify the commitment of the alliance to Eastern Europe. The expansion of NATO to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and then all the way to the Baltic states had been relatively seamless—a joint project of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The new members were energetic, devoted to the principles on which the alliance had been founded—the defense of democracy and liberty in Europe and beyond. For most of Europe and even the United States, the other purpose of NATO—keeping the Soviet Union or now Russia at bay—had long since lost salience. We had really come to believe that the Cold War was over, Europe was whole, free, and at peace, and even if they didn’t like the outcome, the men in the Kremlin were resigned to it. It turns out they were not.
With every round of NATO enlargement, Moscow felt the pain of lost influence. NATO tried to extend a hand of friendship to Russia. The creation of a NATO-Russia Council in 2002 was intended to show the Kremlin that the alliance was no longer trapped in Cold War thinking.
Russia’s first ambassador to the council spoke neither English nor French. He was apparently not unpleasant, but he was worthless as a diplomatic link between East and West. A few years later the Russians sent one of their most disagreeable officials, the head of a nationalist political party, to be ambassador to NATO. Dmitry Rogozin made it clear that he had no desire to be in Brussels nor any plans to cooperate on just about anything. One had to conclude that Moscow had no intention of making the council work.
To be fair, the personal dynamics in the meetings of the council were complicated and often hard. After years of resentment of their treatment at the hands of Moscow, the new Central European members didn’t hesitate to remind the Russians that they had lost the Cold War. “Welcome to NATO, Sergei,” the Polish foreign minister said to the Russian foreign minister. “Yes, you are always welcome to visit the alliance,” the Czech or Romanian would say, in a tone dripping with sarcasm. I always found myself a little embarrassed by the whole thing, but forty-five years of pent-up resentment is hard to wash away.
Russia’s tolerance for NATO expansion—and, it turns out, Germany’s—finally reached its limit at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. The elected and pro-Western governments of Ukraine and Georgia wanted to be admitted to the Membership Action Plan (MAP). MAP was not membership but a kind of incubator status for countries that needed to make major political and military reforms in order to fulfill the requirements of NATO membership. There was nothing automatic about acceptance in the alliance, and it took a long time. Albania had waited ten years after being accepted into MAP to join the alliance.
Still, for several members of NATO, particularly Germany, launching Ukraine and Georgia on this path was unacceptable. They argued that the alliance should not take on the defense of corrupt, unstable new governments whose territory was riddled with ethnic conflicts and border disputes. The United States and the new East European members argued that the purpose of MAP was to overcome these difficulties. Nothing was guaranteed for membership.
After difficult negotiations—at one point among Chancellor Angela Merkel, the East Europeans, and me—we came up with a communiqué that affirmed NATO’s open door and said that Ukraine and Georgia would become members someday. They were denied MAP for the moment, but it kept their hopes alive. The East Europeans were unhappy but resigned to the decision. A key fissure was exposed nonetheless. Poland, the Czech Republic, the Balts, and others reasoned that Moscow still needed to be deterred. A day would come, they believed, when the alliance would again have to resist Russian aggression. That was not the view of Germany.
Though President Bush wanted Ukraine and Georgia to be granted MAP, we were all aware that it would have created an awkward situation. Vladimir Putin had been invited to a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on the last day of the summit. He had been outspoken in his opposition to any further “expansion” of NATO by any means, including MAP. The Russians had begun to talk in the language of the past about encirclement and threats to their security. The communiqué allowed Putin to come to the meeting (he would likely not have come had MAP been granted). It also allowed President Bush to go ahead with the visit to Sochi for his last meeting with Putin, who was stepping down as president as well. It was one of those moments when you breathed a sigh of relief, even if the outcome didn’t feel quite right.
Putin walked into the room, greeted everyone, and sat down. At the beginning, his speech sounded almost perfunctory and a bit valedictory. I was listening in Russian because I always found that interpreters didn’t quite get Putin’s harsh and combative tone. All of a sudden, I thought that my Russian was failing, and so I started going back and forth between the English translation and the Russian. Did he really just say that Ukraine was a made-up country? Yes, he did. There it was, a declaration that was so Soviet, or actually tsarist, that I couldn’t believe my ears.
We know now that from the time of the Soviet Union’s breakup, Vladimir Putin mourned the collapse of empire and looked for an opportunity to return the Russian people to greatness. When he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century (quite a statement for a country that lost twenty-five million people in World War II) he added a rationale: because twenty-five million Russians had been “orphaned” in other newly independent countries. There were ethnic Russians in the Baltic states, Poland, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Georgia. Putin has taken it as his historic duty to unite them and “protect” them.
This historical messianism is dangerous. Already in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, one of the justifications was protection of the Russian populations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Of course the real cause was Putin’s disdain for the pro-Western democratically elected government of Mikheil Saakashvili. This was followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the creeping occupation of eastern Ukraine, setting Putin’s Russia against Europe and the United States.16 But these acts of aggression have solidified his popularity at home. In 2013, Putin’s standing was at a low point—still well above 60 percent, but headed downward. His expensive Sochi Olympic adventure had turned out to be not very popular.
The annexation of Crimea propelled Putin to new highs. What most of the world saw as an outright violation of international law—countries don’t annex the territory of their neighbors in the twenty-first century—Russians saw as returning the territory to its rightful home. In their version of events, Catherine the Great conquered Crimea in 1783; the idiot Nikita Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as a gift for three hundred years of Russian-Ukrainian friendship in 1954; when Ukraine became independent in 1991, Kiev didn’t give it back. Vladimir Putin set all of that right. Crimea was once Russian, and it was Russian again.
Putin has played the politics of Russian identity brilliantly. The problem is that Russia has rarely been a defined geographic entity; it is more like a tide that has gone deep into Europe when it is powerful and receded to the outskirts of Moscow when it is weak. Putin has relied on this sense of vulnerability to build a narrative of a West that takes advantage of Russia, does not accord it respect, and encircles it. He has employed raw nationalism to remind the Russian people that they are great and deserving of the respect that, in his narrative, they have been denied. Popular culture, television, and movies have been harnessed to build images of great (mostly blond) Slavs—soldiers, farmers, workers who are the Russian ideal type. And he has clothed them in the garments of religious orthodoxy and conservatism—singling out gay people, ethnic minorities (who are often branded as extremists), and female rock stars whose profane language offends many.
Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s former chief of staff and once a candidate to succeed him as president, was charged with writing a kind of manifesto to guide Russia’s development. The document emphasizes Russia’s uniqueness—neither European nor Asian—and warns that the Russian soul is weakened by Western ideas of tolerance and multiculturalism. It is a dark and insecure take on who the Russians are and what is needed to sustain them. One has to wonder if this is really where Russia is going. If it is, there are tough times ahead for a creative and brilliant people whose political choices have always managed to retard the country’s progress and driven so many of its best and brightest to simply give up and leave.
Does It Really Have to Be This Way?
Russia’s failed experiment with democracy is an undeniably sad story for a people whose culture and intellectual life rivals the world’s great civilizations. It begs the question of whether there might have been an alternative path, or perhaps whether there is still a different road ahead for Russia. Will there be another democratic opening?
Putin’s authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness abroad remind us that a great deal is at stake not just for the Russians but for the entire world in the answer to that question. Theoretically, the talented and creative Russian people, long known for their prowess in mathematics and science, should be leading the knowledge-based revolution. There is no reason that the economy has to be dependent on commodities—oil, gas, and minerals—for more than 70 percent of its exports. Consider this: When was the last time you bought a consumer product made in Russia?
For a brief moment in the interregnum when Putin stepped down as president and Dmitry Medvedev succeeded him, it looked as if Russia might try to take a different course. Medvedev came to power saying bluntly that Russia should not be a nineteenth-century extractive industries economy. He visited the great technology centers of the world in search of ideas to build a Russian Silicon Valley.
In June 2010, he visited the actual Silicon Valley. I received a call from President Obama informing me that Medvedev wanted to come to Stanford. The president asked me to make certain it was a good visit. Medvedev turned up in blue jeans and an Armani jacket and read his speech from an iPad. He completely looked the part of a young, hip entrepreneur.
After several hours in Silicon Valley visiting companies like Google and Facebook, Medvedev and I sat down with a few others to talk. Listening to venture capitalists, engineers, and business leaders clearly had an effect on him. “I get it,” he said. “It is an ecosystem.” One sensed some sadness in the realization that what he had seen in Palo Alto could not easily be transported to Russia. But he tried, supporting the building of Skolkovo, touted as Russia’s high-tech hub.
I visited Skolkovo the next year. Palo Alto it was not. The huge, several-stories-high modern-style campus outside Moscow was a kind of metaphor for Russia’s notions of innovation. It was big, centralized, and already incredibly bureaucratic. The Kremlin told the scientists and engineers that they should innovate but almost immediately started dictating what that would mean. Not surprisingly, Skolkovo has produced little and is now under constant criticism from conservatives who never liked the effort. The question is whether the prosecutors will soon follow.
Some efforts have fared better, like the state-owned venture fund Rosnano. Founded to invest in nanotechnology and its applications, the fund is headed by Anatoly Chubais, a wily veteran of Soviet and Russian politics and perhaps a little more attuned at how to maintain support. And there are private equity funds (that are mostly private), such as DST and software companies like Yandex, that are well respected internationally for their competence and talent. But it is not clear that this young Russian technology sector can survive the exigencies of the security state and the country’s isolation from the international economy due to Ukraine-related sanctions.
The best hope for a different Russia probably rests with those who are engaged in the tech sector. They would seem to be a natural constituency for a more liberal political direction. And they are not alone. In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians have studied abroad in American and European universities, business schools, and law schools. They have worked in Western firms and still do. These mostly young people should be the vanguard of a movement to give Russia another chance at democracy.
Moreover, they should be able to garner support from a middle class that has become accustomed to travel, imported goods, and personal freedoms unmatched in Russia’s history. These people hold thirty-year mortgages on their apartments, buy their furniture at IKEA, and spoil their children at McDonald’s.
On the other hand, Putin counts on the siloviki and the erosion of democratic institutions to prevent the rise of opposition that might rally these constituencies that are not dependent on him. He probably counted too on the high price of oil to fund the largesse that he doles out so that Russians have a sense of well-being.
In this regard, there is a prevailing myth in the country about the Putin years that bears watching. He undeniably brought stability and order to a people who were hungry for it. But the prosperity that Russians have enjoyed was almost totally the result of the bonanza of oil and commodities prices and a sensible decision to put money away in reserves for turbulent economic weather.
Now, with the price of oil at half of the $103 a barrel needed to sustain the Russian budget, the strategy has fallen on hard times. There are reports of strikes and riots among workers in the rural Russian heartland on which Putin relies for support. Inflation is once again eating away at the salaries and pensions of ordinary Russians. Putin’s claim to have made Russians not just more secure but also more prosperous is beginning to ring hollow.
Yet it is hard to imagine internal opposition to Putin that is significant enough to unseat him. For a brief moment in December 2011 and the winter of 2012, people again took to the streets to protest the creeping authoritarianism in their country. It didn’t last. Putin brutally crushed the dissent, jailed his opponents, and was elected once again to the presidency in a process widely criticized as fraudulent. With the closing of that window for democracy in Russia, Putin cemented his rule. If he fulfills all of the terms available to him, he could be president of Russia until 2024.
Some hope that those around him, the siloviki, will start to see Putin’s policies as antagonistic to their interests. The theory is that in a den of thieves, there is no trust and no friendship, only self-interest. In part, the sanctions against those in his inner circle are aimed at provoking splits among the hard men of the Kremlin. Perhaps. But if you are going to challenge the king, you had better kill him. It is more likely that the fates of these men are so inextricably woven together that no one will risk breaking ranks.
Recently, Putin has begun replacing some high-profile members of the siloviki. Sergei Ivanov, the man long thought to be closest to him, was fired as chief of staff. Younger men more beholden to the president are being promoted to important security and political posts.
If he cannot be challenged by the siloviki, can Putin himself experience a Gorbachev-like epiphany and reverse course? That is hard to imagine. He is too personally identified with the Russian nationalist, conservative course on which he launched his country. And he believes in it.
One of my last meetings with him at the Kremlin was not long before the invasion of Georgia in the summer of 2008. It was “one on one,” meaning just the two of us and an interpreter. “You know us, Condi,” he began. (Somehow, Putin rather liked me, I think. When I became secretary of state he told me that it was good to have a Russian specialist in that role. “Now the relationship will get the attention it deserves,” he said.)
Yet whenever he began, “You know us, Condi,” I could sense that something was coming that would be difficult to swallow. This particular time, I was right. “Russians have always been at their best when they have been ruled by great men. Peter the Great, Alexander II. Russia needs a strong hand,” he said. I resisted the temptation to ask if Vladimir the Great was in that succession. But I suspect that is exactly what he had in mind.
And now he is acting it out. He presents himself as a strong, conservative ruler who has the backing of the Orthodox Church. He has the support of the salt-of-the-earth people—soldiers, workers, and farmers. Intellectuals do not love him but they are fearful of crossing him. He has a security apparatus that enforces his arbitrary application of the law. And the motherland (or Rodina, as Russians call it) is once again secure.
There thus isn’t much room for the controlled chaos that is democracy in this version of Great Russia. But authoritarian systems are brittle, and the good news for Russia is that there is an educated and sophisticated population in waiting should an opportunity for democracy come.
Russians are different than they were before Gorbachev. They are accustomed to travel, study abroad, and enjoy the better things in life. Surely a return to the fearful and isolated lives of their parents and grandparents holds no allure for them.
The problem is that the interests of these elements of the Russian population have found no institutionalized way to express their views, mobilize around particular reforms, and seek political change. Even before Putin’s assault on civil society, the sector was small—aimed at a few social issues, but lacking political direction. Political parties have failed to excite the passions of the citizenry and to penetrate their political consciousness or command their active participation. Russia is a classic case of new political institutions being created but divorced entirely from the life of the people and the society. The Russian people never came to own their institutions, trust them, use them, or give them legitimacy. And their leaders gave them little reason to do so. The rule of law, an independent judiciary, and political parties that connect to the people have all been ephemeral in post-Soviet Russia.
Nor is there certainty that a challenge to Putin’s rule would come from these “enlightened” forces. There is an undercurrent of nativism and conservatism in the Russian population that can be tapped by the right leader. The Orthodox Church remains a bulwark of reactionary views and political influence.
If Russia gets another chance to move toward democracy, it will need institutions that can connect the population to politics and channel the violent energy of radical change. The failure to do that until now is the essence of the story of Russia’s failed democratic experiment.