The twists and turns of Russian politics are cause for wonder. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, nurtured by the communist totalitarian system that elevated him to the summit of power in 1985, is the one who pulled it down. Another communist who also occupied high positions in the party hierarchy of the USSR and who supposedly metamorphosed into a democrat, Boris Yeltsin, became the first president of post-Soviet Russia. He, in turn, virtually bequeathed power to retired KGB officer Vladimir Putin, who throughout the post-Yeltsin period consistently and methodically uprooted the shoots of democracy. Putin viewed the democratic reforms undertaken in the twilight years of the Soviet Union as a foul legacy, and he pronounced the demise of the USSR the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.
In 1983 President Ronald Reagan characterized Russia, then called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as an “evil empire.” This definition shocked even those Russian patriots who loathed the Soviet Union. Only later was Reagan’s truth acknowledged. It was this president who via diplomatic means made a substantial contribution to the transformation of the USSR into a democratic and lawful state. Of course, it was possible only because Mikhail Gorbachev was pursuing the very same goal.
Evil empire is an accurate description of the USSR. It really was an empire that disseminated its messianic evil throughout the occupied territories of Central and Eastern Europe and the “socialist-oriented,” Third World developing countries. Yet the basic features characteristic of the Soviet state system did not take root in these places, nor could they since they contradicted human nature itself.
For centuries Russia was an empire founded on universal servitude. After the Bolshevik coup of 1917, it was a dictatorship of a systematic ideology, Marxism-Leninism. The ideological dictatorship not only embraced all the new territories but also strived to implant its philosophy of servitude in other countries.
Nevertheless, the definition of evil as the complete opposite of good was not applicable to the USSR. In the post-Stalin period it was not applicable even to those in power, as witnessed by the fact that the liberalization of the country during Gorbachev’s perestroika “descended from on high”—that is, it came from a higher authority, decreed and implemented by those whom we may call dissidents within the system. This concept requires explanation. The within-system dissidents were an extremely small but very influential category of Soviet functionaries. Liberated from the normal logic of the system, they were not supportive of the status quo in the Soviet Union. They were often influential and highly placed; consequently, they prospered by Soviet standards. Outwardly their lives appeared normal: they enjoyed the use of official black automobiles, official means of communication, virtually free annual leaves in rest homes from which ordinary people were barred, and medical care accessible only to the chosen few. Without any formal arrangements or publicity, but in full knowledge of what they were doing, they did what they thought was right, using their positions and influence to change the Soviet system. They took fundamental risks in doing so. Russia is greatly indebted to them for the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism.
There is a simple and logical explanation for the appearance of such within-system dissidents at all levels of the Soviet hierarchy. The system co-opted the most qualified and talented personnel. Naturally, these persons had been brought up to respect communist dogmas, but these dogmas were by no means monolithic. For example, the writings of the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were not at all like the works of their later years. Vladimir Lenin spoke and wrote so voluminously that one could find absolutely contradictory pronouncements of his on practically any topic if one wished to engage in such an exercise. I myself buttressed arguments concerning the need for a variety of democratic reforms with citations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, our revered “Founding Fathers.” I kept mum with regard to other, diametrically opposed citations.
Even in their inner selves, however, it was impossible for those inside the system of Soviet power to be totally free of its dogmas. One’s upbringing and education, which differed little from hypnosis; one’s lifestyle; one’s circle of acquaintances—all these inevitably had an influence. There was also the obligatory dinning into one’s head of Marxism-Leninism, the daily exaltation of socialism, which was sometimes elevated to an absolute lie—the Big Lie. We should not forget that neither the genuine dissidents nor the within-system dissidents rejected the system itself in those times.1 My own upbringing, education, and experience speak to this point.
After Gorbachev came to power and preparations for democratic reforms began, it seemed to the within-system dissidents that overcoming the inertia of evil and, transforming the USSR into a normal democratic system, was within reach. Instead, the attempt to liquidate evil in the USSR during perestroika wound up destroying the country.
During President Yeltsin’s administration (1991–99), Russian authorities already began to adopt thinly disguised revanchist positions, first with respect to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; then toward the war in former Yugoslavia; and later with respect to other issues. The changes brought about by Gorbachev’s “Democratic Reformation”—to use leading reformer Alexander Yakovlev’s term—including withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, ending the Cold War, slowing the arms race, terminating support of terrorism and other “anti-imperialist” (that is, anti-Western) forces were now judged to be evidence of failures. Moreover, according to a twisted sort of logic, the source of all of Russia’s real and imaginary disasters was said to be democracy, which had never actually existed in Russia. What began was not simply a retreat but rather a headlong flight away from the shoots of democracy and a return to the Cold War and the attempts to impose one’s will on others without considering their interests or the interests of other countries. No later than the year 2000, a consistent assault began at home against human rights and democratic freedoms along with a restoration of the dictatorship that the outward show of free elections and democratic institutions could not conceal. The revival of Soviet-style Russian imperialism proceeded full steam ahead, including the proliferation of images of the enemy and the psychology of defending a besieged fortress. To a lesser degree, attempts were also undertaken to remilitarize the country.
There is no shortage of explanations for why Russia has again chosen a road to nowhere. Many writers have sought to explicate why there has been an unprecedented backlash in Russian politics after the year 2000 and why there has been an explosion of political murders, persecutions, and punishments of nonconformists under the present system of Putinocracy. What follows is one such explanation.
There is probably nothing more painful than breaking long-standing habits and stereotypes, whether it is the consumption of narcotics or the habits of thought and action. In the past thirty years the people of Russia have experienced at least two such traumatic breaks. The first was a rejection of the Marxist-Leninist dogmas on which the generation of the Soviet “builders of communism” was raised; they witnessed the dethroning of the gods, goddesses, icons, and other “sacred objects” during the Gorbachev Reformation. Many Russians viewed support for the Velvet Revolution in Eastern Europe in 1989, to say nothing of the reunification of Germany the following year, as a “surrender of the fruits of victory” in the Second World War. Likewise, they perceived the USSR’s real steps toward disarmament and its support of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm as tantamount to abandoning one’s foreign policy positions and “capitulating to imperialism.”
This break, however, primarily affected the elite. The second break, the dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, was very difficult to bear for the majority of the population who was simultaneously impoverished by the depreciation of the currency. After the start of Yeltsin’s economic reforms in the early 1990s, those persons who considered themselves members of the elite felt disoriented. To be sure, it was the very same Moscow, the very same Kremlin. But objectively the country and the population had shrunk, and Russia’s economic, foreign policy, and military potential had changed as had the entire system of international relations. The Soviet imperial monster had fragmented into fifteen states, and the Third World countries with a “socialist orientation” and other “progressive forces” were left without a guide and fell into the abyss. Russians, who had been accustomed to superpower status, found all of this very hard to swallow.
Objectively speaking, Russia was given a unique opportunity to become a normal country. The short-term democratic gains of perestroika could have developed into a new qualitative breakthrough not only on a national but also on a civilizational level. This, however, did not happen. The people who came to power in Russia were incapable of positive thinking, of discarding stereotypes, of reconsidering reality. Yeltsin’s team, which took over in 1992, was a strange mixture of theoreticians of democracy and mid-ranking Soviet functionaries who had ascended not only the many steps in their official careers but also the levels of their own incompetence. In addition, frequently a significant number of them were disguised siloviki.
With its ambiguity, untranslatability, and widespread diffusion, the concept of siloviki, which came into general usage during the Yeltsin period, requires some explanation. In part the concept derives from the Soviet expression “power ministries and departments,” which traditionally meant the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as the Committee for State Security (KGB). In addition, on account of its influence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was included, although its power consisted only in the importance of the questions with which it dealt, its knowledge, and its ability to conduct negotiations and, if desired, to find mutually beneficial compromises.
In the post-Soviet period, the number of power ministries and departments significantly increased. To the traditional siloviki—that is, the Ministries of Defense, Internal Affairs, Justice, and Foreign Affairs and the Federal Security Service (FSB, as the direct heir of the KGB)—was added the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which had its own troops; the Foreign Intelligence Service (previously the First Division of the KGB); the Investigations Committee; the Federal Guards Service (formerly the Ninth Division of the KGB); the Federal Courier Service; the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring; the Chief Directorate for Special Programs of the Russian President; the Administrative Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation; and the Federal Narcotics Control Service which, however, was dissolved in April 2016, and whose duties were transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Some also include the General Procuratorate among the siloviki. Because siloviki are defined not only by power (for example, their possession of troops or repressive function) but also by their direct subordination to the head of state, it would be no exaggeration to say that one of the main siloviki is the Presidential Administration (especially if following the Constitution), an institution that also supports the staff of the Security Council. Apart from tradition, it is precisely according to this logic that the Ministry of Internal Affairs belongs among the siloviki.
Sometimes the siloviki are automatically assumed to be “hawks.” Of course, this is not without foundation. For example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs—a department that is very hospitable to hawks—has always had an entire nesting site for hawks, but there are also “doves” in the Ministry of Defense and in other “military” departments.
This is one of the reasons that the word siloviki is untranslatable. Another, no less important reason is that there is no analogous situation to that in which many siloviki are effectively outside the sphere of legislative action, to say nothing of any sort of control, and report only to the head of state. Even during Soviet times, the power ministries and departments were subordinate, at a minimum, to the Politburo. It seems that this is precisely why the concept of siloviki is impossible to translate.
The unwillingness and inability of Russian authorities to understand and acknowledge the changes in Russia’s place and role in world affairs, and their lack of any vision of the new possibilities, inevitably led to serious consequences, including withdrawal symptoms from dictatorship at home and abroad. The Kremlin and the elite experienced a real break, like that of the most inveterate drug addict.
A win turned into a loss. At a fork in the road, instead of choosing the uncertain but hopeful path toward a better and democratic future, Russia’s new leaders turned back and toward the phantom glory and repressive authoritarianism of the Soviet past with dire consequences for their country and the world.
Working in the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the late 1980s on assignments that included the elimination of punitive psychiatry, I constantly ran across physicians’ diagnoses asserting that one or another patient “represented a danger to himself and those around him.” As a member of a working group drafting a law governing psychiatry, I always posed the question, just what sort of danger is indicated? Then I thought to apply this term to my own country. Could anyone really doubt that the USSR, which had destroyed millions of its own people for the sake of some abstract “radiant future” and had been seriously preparing for nuclear suicide, really represented a danger to itself and the rest of the world? Under Gorbachev it seemed that this danger could be overcome. On the one hand, power had ceased to be a refuge for the superannuated; instead, the authorities were trying to heal the country. On the other hand, power had not yet entered into the stage of “fiddling while Rome burned.” Its collapse into the infantilism of the Putin-Medvedev era was entirely unforeseen.
This infantilism was no less dangerous than the senility of Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko, who preceded Gorbachev in power. Why do I use the term infantilism? Egocentrism and an unwillingness and inability to consider others are characteristic of infantilism. So, too, is hysteria, one of whose distinctive features is a pronounced tendency to engage in theatrics and an urge to focus attention on oneself. Such demonstrations are very typical of the Kremlin under Putin. In particular, they manifest themselves in an ostentatious eagerness to confront the West and to engage in a new cold war. The thinking of hysterical persons is based on emotion; reasonable arguments and facts have little meaning for them. Their hysteria also affects those around them. This, in turn, plays into the hands of those in power, since hysterical people are very open to suggestion and easily manipulated. Given their inability to distinguish between reality and their own fantasies, infantile adults typically live in an imagined world. Infantile leaders such as Putin are always playing games—not with lead soldiers but with human lives. They care nothing about suffering inflicted on others.
Psychiatrists are familiar with the peculiar psychological disorder of “shared psychotic disorder” (known as folie à deux [madness of two])—that is, when a healthy person develops the delusional symptoms of another individual, and the affected person can be more dangerous than the transmitter. Similarly, the Kremlin cynically infects those around it with the phantoms of benefits and power. Meanwhile, via a process of autosuggestion, it convinces itself this is how things really are. The Russian people are easily convinced that they have been constantly humiliated by quasi-democracy, by the decolonization of countries in Eastern and Central Europe that have been occupied as a result of the Second World War, and, finally, by the normalization of relations with the West.
The Kremlin is quite effective in palming off these false notions on the people, who readily embrace them. One of the main goals in so doing is to divert the attention of those habitually deceived persons, humiliated by their impoverishment, toward problems other than their own. This tactic is a throwback to Soviet times, when a large part of the population subordinated its own real interests to the sham interests of the state. Following the collapse of the USSR, the Kremlin’s conceptual shell game succeeded quite well because it had been skillfully prepared and facilitated by the influx of petrodollars when prices were high, making it easier for many ordinary Russians to identify their own interests with the interests of those in power.
For many Russians, carefully fabricated myths trumped their own well-being. The ephemeral and mindless dreams of “restoring the greatness of the USSR” pushed them to support such criminal adventures as those in Chechnya, in Georgia, and in Ukraine.
Russian society, destroyed by the Bolsheviks, had been atomized into a mere collection of people lacking in social solidarity. In the post-Soviet period, through the efforts of its masters, it became an illusory electorate.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, the condemned man must become friends with his own executioner. This is precisely what the communist regime—beloved by many of its slaves—succeeded in achieving. Putin’s regime has also managed this quite well. In Nabokov’s novel, the condemned man, understanding the savagery and unreality of the world around him, rebels against it, pulls it down, and thereby abrogates his own execution. In Russia, unfortunately, this has not happened. To be sure, a protest movement has begun, and people come out on the streets from time to time to defend their own dignity. But this movement, and every one of its participants, has been ill-served by the so-called democratic leaders. Many of the condemned Russian dissidents have become reconciled to their fates.
The regime in Russia since the year 2000 is usually identified with Vladimir Putin. This is a mistake that has cost both Russia and its foreign partners dearly. When, after two consecutive terms in office, Putin entrusted Dmitry Medvedev with safeguarding his presidential chair between 2008 and 2012, many in Russia as well as abroad believed that changes for the better were imminent. In fact, Putin had merely carried out another successful special operation. Medvedev secured the support of Russian liberal idealists, and the West waited, in vain as it happened, for Medvedev to implement his wonderful promises. The main point was lost from view. It was not a question of personalities. No matter how painful it is to admit, albeit with several caveats, the special services had really come to power for the long term. And they will never share this power with anyone nor give it up voluntarily.
Russia is sick. Its illness is complex and psychosomatic in character. This presents itself, among other ways, as manic-depressive psychosis accompanied by acute megalomania, persecution complex, and kleptomania, all compounded by dystrophy given the objectively declining economy. The latter is true despite what was an intermittently satisfactory financial situation, at least until the imposition of increasingly tough Western sanctions in 2014. An obvious manifestation of this diagnosis is that Russia’s military organization has been in a state of accelerating disintegration since the Yeltsin era. The inadequate remilitarization of the country or at least the appearance of this, beginning under Putin, does not contradict this reality.
Social psychologists assert that persons who have spent considerable time in places where they were deprived of their freedom, such as prisons and mental institutions, are often drawn back to such places after they are liberated. There everything is clear: they are clothed, shod, fed, given drink, sent to sleep according to a strict regimen, and awakened in the morning. But in freedom everything is different. “Yesterday I was given freedom, what shall I do with it?” Vladimir Vysotsky, Russia’s great bard of the 1970s, declaimed this prophetic question.
How many times has Russia willingly rushed into bondage, mistaking it for freedom and democracy, thinking that it would bring happiness to itself and to those near and far? It did so without realizing that such a condition was freedom from responsibility, freedom from conscience, freedom from choice, freedom from individuality, from one’s own opinions. For the Russian people, crippled by those in power and imbued with false values, this condition was their only choice. It is the choice of those for whom fear of the authorities is virtually embedded in their DNA, the choice of a generation educated in a single way of thinking, without alternatives, bled white by the aftereffects of “class struggle” and of the Leninist-Stalinist concentration camps. This is also the only possible choice for many of the younger successors of that generation.
Russia was also affected by kleptomania, when one steals not only from others but also from oneself, from one’s own future. This phenomenon began in 1917, when the Bolsheviks, an unscrupulous gang of thieves and persons who were not only poverty-stricken materially but also spiritually destitute, came to power. Since that time the thieving has not stopped. It acquired a special, truly Bolshevik scope during the period of privatization in the 1990s when the entire country was pillaged. Since that time the thievery has changed; there is no less robbery, but it is of a different sort. Corruption reigns everywhere at a level, according to Transparency International, that puts Russia in the same category as Azerbaijan, Guyana, and Sierra Leone.2 Meanwhile, the number of billionaires is growing in this impoverished country.
Russia is sick, a disgrace that was already nurtured by Josef Stalin and by Nazism. Of course, at present, entire nations are not seeing their people deported as the Chechens and others were in Stalin’s time. But it is a fact that the ultranationalist society Pamyat’ and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia were organized on the initiative and with the participation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB. To this day, Russian Nazism, initially encouraged by the Soviet authorities, is cared for and cultivated by the state.
The communist regime brainwashed an inert people. It did so by means of mass executions, concentration camps of the GULAG, and mind-numbing and morally destitute propaganda. Sadomasochistic perversions became the norm of life in Russia, where the state mocked the people, and they in turn were delighted by their humiliation.
This almost worst-case development of events in Russia was brought about by a series of maneuvers at various levels. Among them we must single out psychological factors, which, in Russia, play a disproportionately large role, especially because of the high degree of suggestibility and the ease with which the majority of the population can be manipulated. Russians lacked the opportunity to acquire an instinct for freedom and an immunity from attempts to oppress them. The ruling authorities make very effective use of this, especially with respect to compromising freedom and liberalism.
Such an outcome was facilitated by the fact that although mass repression ended with Stalin’s death in 1953, the mechanism for suppressing dissenting thought had been preserved and even perfected. Thus, Russia slid into a state of socioeconomic and political decay that not even Gorbachev’s benevolent therapy and Yeltsin’s cruel measures were unable to halt. The remission of Russia’s diseases was short lived. That the majority of the population joyfully accepts Putin’s repudiation of democracy unequivocally confirms the seriousness of the state of national affairs.
Revanchism has already brought Russia catastrophes from the early twentieth century to the present. For example, after its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), and against the background of serious setbacks on the front during the First World War, the Bolshevik reaction triumphed. The defeat of Moscow’s decade-long intervention in Afghanistan, marked by the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, led to the genocide of Russia’s own citizens in Chechnya. More recently, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its de facto military intervention in Ukraine have catalyzed a stiffening Western response. There is no reason to suppose that revanchism, which germinated under Yeltsin and flowered luxuriantly under Putin, will turn out well for anyone.
Traditionally, the reality of what Russia actually is, has nothing in common with how both Russians and foreigners alike perceive it. Russia’s rulers have perfected the art of lying and hypocrisy to achieve their own objectives. One of the most vivid modern examples is the myth that the Bolshevik coup and everything that followed from it, including the Stalinist genocide of Russia’s own people, were done for the sake of the people themselves. Not only were they proclaimed to be free and happy, but they came to believe it themselves. Prevaricating, cruel tyrants were often immensely popular, while those leaders who tried to improve the lives of the people and who spoke the truth were hated. A prime example is Gorbachev, who liquidated the system of totalitarianism and came close to destroying the nation’s slave mentality. Rather than being honored, many considered him a “traitor to Russia’s interests.”
Gorbachev and the very tight circle of his comrades in arms—notably Eduard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, and a few others—performed the dirty work of cleaning out the Augean stables of totalitarianism. But Gorbachev made so many mistakes that he was unable to hold onto power.
Something akin to a law of nature appears to operate in Russia. It not only dooms the infrequent and short-lived attempts at liberal reforms and sensible domestic and foreign policy to failure, but each reaction to such attempts also throws the country so far into reverse that it seems as if the people had been inoculated against freedom. The situation in Russia today looks very gloomy. The Russian authorities beat people, throw them into prisons and camps, and ruin them and exterminate undesirables. They liquidate freedom of the media, preserving only its facade, and eliminate judicial independence, parliamentarianism, and other elements of democracy. Yet some Western politicians and scholars continue to pretend that everything is really not so bad.
Pragmatism is surely necessary in politics, but it cannot be the only motive for government action. Western policies based solely on ensuring the delivery of Russian oil and gas are unworthy of the West. Ignoring flagrant and massive violations of the entire spectrum of human rights in Russia, its rapidly progressing slide toward totalitarianism, and the reality of new threats to international security such as Russia’s actions in Ukraine are equally unworthy.
Russia forfeited its future by choosing as its president in 2000 a mumbling, stammering, knock-kneed, brow-furrowing ex-KGB agent who speaks the language of the gutter and values power above everything else. He is prepared to do anything to preserve this power. He attained the summit of baseness and cynicism thanks, in part, to the indulgence, until very recently, of his foreign partners.
Scarcely had he come to power when Putin began to establish a “dictatorship of the mediocre over the imbeciles.”3 He had no problem with mediocrity, either his own or that of his close associates. It was harder to fool that part of the population who had already acquired a certain taste for freedom of the media and, consequently, for having opinions of their own. He worked on this problem from his first day in power and dealt with it brilliantly.
The intentions and moral direction of Putin and his associates became crystal clear after the murder in October 2006 of the popular journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had courageously opposed the Kremlin. Almost no one doubted this act bore the fingerprints of the hand of power—whether of Moscow or of the Chechen capital Grozny was not important. Even more sinister was the poisoning in London one month later of the former lieutenant colonel of the FSB Alexander Litvinenko by means of the rare radioactive substance polonium-210. This murder was so shocking that suspicion arose that it might have involved some sort of bizarre ritual; otherwise, the use of polonium was difficult to explain. Moscow concocted a number of fantastic explanations including, for example, that Litvinenko had committed suicide in order “to annoy Putin.”
From time immemorial, Russians have been brought up to possess a slave psychology. Serfdom was only done away with in 1861. But serfdom under the tsarist regime was quite humane compared to the social order established under the communist dictatorship. The slave-communal psychology is also firmly embedded in the heads of those in power, not only from their upbringing, but also from what they imbibed as they accumulated power. Power in Russia is traditionally identified with various blessings and perquisites unobtainable by “ordinary mortals.” Their recipients become dependent on these privileges.
It is a cliché to extol the long-suffering nature of Russians. This is actually a reflection of their powerlessness and their habit of fulfilling the “will of those on high,” whether it is the department head, the municipal head, or the head of the country. A belief in the “good Little Father Tsar” is virtually the foundation of the national mentality.
This mentality is the source of the complete misunderstanding of what democracy is. One cannot speak of democracy when both the people and the authorities neither know how nor desire to implement existing legislation. There can be no democracy in a nation whose politics rest upon lies. Of course, in politics a certain degree of hypocrisy and verbal trickery is inevitable. But the political cynicism in Russia, a country where democracy has supposedly triumphed, is off the charts.
Another component of Russian political culture that is likewise incompatible with democracy is the authorities’ view of citizens as virtual bond slaves, serfs, or their own property. For its part much of the population views power as something holy, unshakable, virtually ordained by God.
These are certainly bitter words, yet I begin from the premise that Russia is a great nation. It has given to the world many geniuses who have been noted for their steadfastness and heroism. Unfortunately, Russia is a nation that has been crippled by its rulers.
Summing up, Russia, like the former Soviet Union, again presents a danger to itself and to those around it. Russia has become transformed into a degraded and absolutely disorganized power. The anarchy, constantly growing xenophobia (in the broad sense of the term), terrorism, and much else that have persisted for many years at all levels and in all spheres of activity in Russia embody not only significant dangers for the region but also for civilized society itself. Many of these dangers are now too obvious to ignore any longer.
One must give one’s due to the Soviet leaders, beginning with Lenin. They implanted the shoots of discord and hatred throughout the world. It was they, too, who created much of the infrastructure, including international terrorism. Therefore, it is impossible to understand and deal with contemporary Russia and the international problems arising from its policies if one ignores the history of the communist monster and its successor. It is precisely this history that the following chapters explore.
Chapter 1 focuses on the unexpected role of the Soviet Foreign Ministry under Eduard Shevardnadze in leading the struggle for democratic reforms inside the USSR during perestroika. Chapter 2 examines the fateful coup d’état against Soviet president Gorbachev in August 1991 and the paradoxical achievement of its goals even though the coup itself failed. Central to these events was the rise of the secret services to a position of paramount power. Chapter 3 probes the roots of Russia’s tragedy by exploring the psychology of servitude that began centuries ago during the imperial era and well served the totalitarian regime that the Bolsheviks instituted in 1917. Gorbachev’s attempt from above to institute democratic reform encountered widespread resistance from below and culminated in the breakup of the USSR and the rise to power of Boris Yeltsin, an easily manipulated product of the old system that had little inkling of democracy.
Chapter 4 enters the corridors of power to discuss the decision makers and decision-making process of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin. It describes the disintegration of the Russian foreign policy establishment and the compromised state of Russia’s intellectual elite. Chapter 5 focuses on the rise of the secret services, whose embodiment is Vladimir Putin and whose presence is ubiquitous. To replace Marxism-Leninism, the new leaders have propounded the Russian national idea—a toxic mixture of autocracy, Russian Orthodoxy, and the supposed superior virtues of the Russian people. Chapter 6 details the methods by which Putin and his associates methodically destroyed the fledgling institutions of democracy begun during perestroika. Their techniques included violence, lies, suppression of dissent, and phony spy scares. Chapter 7 argues that Russia, nostalgic for the superpower position it occupied in the Cold War, has reverted to a policy of revanchism, expansion, and militarism that poses a threat to its neighbors as well as to itself. Rather than confronting Putin, until the Kremlin annexed Crimea and launched a proxy war in eastern Ukraine, Western powers turned a blind eye both to Russia’s domestic repression and to its foreign adventurism. Finally, the conclusion asserts that only the eventual emergence of an authentic Russian elite imbued with liberal and democratic values can break the hold on power of the current criminal authorities whose grip is secured by a hypnotized and subservient public.