Between 1986 and 1993, from the launch of Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratic reformation through the initial period of Boris Yeltsin’s tenure as the first president of post-Soviet Russia, Russia found itself at a fork in the road. One choice was the well-worn totalitarian and imperial path; the other was that of transforming Russia into a normal country, a home for people wanting to live normal lives. Unfortunately, Russia’s choice of one of the worst possible paths forward was partly conditioned by history and partly foisted upon it by the new Russian elite. Why did perestroika—Gorbachev’s democratic reformation—fail? Why did Russia slide toward a new type of reactionary politics accompanied by a totally unjustified foreign policy of revanchism?
The fall of a colossus such as the USSR is always an impressive spectacle even if observed from a distance, a safe distance that provides a panoramic view. But may one really speak of safety when the clay feet of ideology and violence crumbled in a country bristling with nuclear weapons and potential ecological time bombs?
For those buried under the wreckage, the spectacle was not something to be contemplated from any distance, safe or otherwise. They lacked both the time and the moral strength to ponder what until recently had been the reality of the USSR, what lessons to draw from its collapse, and what consequences might follow.
Gorbachev’s perestroika and the Yeltsin period that followed evoked a strong reaction comparable to that of the Bolshevik coup after the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a weak provisional government. One of the main consequences of Yeltsin’s presidency was that he created the opportunity for a slow-motion coup d’état in which members of the special services seized key positions in the country—that is, to the revolution of the Chekists. Thus, in 2000 Russia was being run by the special services in the guise of Vladimir Putin.
The entire Soviet period of Russian history, when punitive state institutions played an extraordinarily important role in politics, prepared the ground for this outcome. The influence of the special services receded after Josef Stalin’s death, but the KGB continued to exert an inordinate impact on Soviet politics and the lives of Soviet citizens. The special services also retained their covert influence on even the most highly placed Soviet officials. If the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the law, then the KGB was above the law. Not a single law could be adopted and implemented without its agreement. The CPSU, which, in the pre-perestroika era, lauded itself as “the mind, the honor, and the conscience of our epoch,” became dependent on its own instrument of repression and coercion. The tail began to wag the dog.
The situation only began to change during perestroika. The dismantling of the totalitarian system implied the inevitable transformation of the KGB into a normal special service. Even the KGB’s notorious Fifth Department, concerned with ideology and political investigations, was supposedly abolished. In its stead a department to defend the constitutional order was established. But what transpired was merely a change of the signboard; in essence nothing really changed. Under attack, the totalitarian system desperately fought to survive even prior to the first attempt at revenge during the 1991 coup.
The Soviet totalitarian system established after the Bolshevik coup of 1917 was so all embracing that it functioned like an unknown law of public life. Moreover, just like the Phoenix bird, it was capable of arising from the ashes. It would be a simplification to conceive of the totalitarian system as a straightforward aggregation of punitive and other coercive institutions and the punishment of dissenters. The reality was much more complicated. For example, Alexander Yakovlev, the theoretician of perestroika, accurately wrote, “I apply the definition of ‘punitive’ to the entire system, for all of the organs of power were punitive—the special services, the army, the party, the Young Communist League (YCL), the trade unions, even the Junior YCL organizations.”1 I should add that KGB agents had penetrated the entire state apparatus as well as the so-called Soviet public organizations and cultural associations.
Not only did Gorbachev’s change of political direction—the demolition of totalitarianism—fail to gain the support of the overwhelming majority of the population, but also most of the Russian political elite likewise gave it the cold shoulder. Despite their dissatisfaction with the period of so-called stagnation, during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) and his fleeting successors Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, most people were not ready for even half-hearted democratic reforms. Therefore, these reforms, although real, remained unimplemented.
The only ones to support Gorbachev’s reforms were liberal Soviet intellectuals and other dissenters who were then able to say and write what they pleased. Because of their extremely small numbers and fragmentation, however, they enjoyed a degree of influence very briefly and only when Gorbachev gave them some support. Within the Soviet bureaucracy anti-reformist and reactionary moods prevailed. This was inevitable, given the traditions and mentality implanted in the nation from the time of Vladimir Lenin and Stalin—that is, if one can even refer to the multiethnic and multifaith conglomerate that inhabited the USSR as a nation. At the very least, everyone else was indifferent to the reforms or did not embrace them for a variety of objective reasons, including a decline in their standard of living. In sum, only a tiny portion of the population embraced the reforms as necessary.
The overwhelming majority of the peoples of the USSR were committed communists of the Leninist-Stalinist school who either did not believe that abuses of power occurred or, worse, who actively supported such abuses by engaging in denunciations and other inhumane behavior. As a matter of reflexive self-preservation, after the repressions had ended, those who had discarded Stalinism expunged this terrible period of history from their minds, especially after Nikita Khrushchev’s superficial and half-hearted condemnation of Stalin in 1956. The USSR had fallen into the trap of selective and restricted truth. The abuses of Lenin and his henchmen continued either to be idealized or ignored. Stalin was viewed as a leading statesman who had merely “carried things too far.” The collectivization of agriculture that had destroyed Russia as a great agricultural power; industrialization, which had been accomplished by an unpaid prisoner labor force; and victory in the Second World War, achieved by the people despite their mediocre commander in chief—all were presented as the tyrant’s personal achievements. In the collective consciousness of the people, Stalin’s “individual shortcomings” and “occasional excesses” evidently took a backseat to these “magnificent accomplishments.” As happens so often in Russian history, lies triumphed over historical truth and common sense.
At the start of perestroika the generation in power had grown up in Stalin’s lifetime and admired him. Most successful persons lived according to his “precepts,” fostering evil. Everyone knew that under Stalin the “organs of state security,” which had swelled like cancerous tumors with their innumerable agents, were omniscient. Writers, poets, journalists, scholars, and YCL and Communist Party activists, as well as what some called “simple people,” pursued their callings in this environment. From time to time they all received tangible benefits from their baseness: Some achieved advancement in their careers, others boasted of publications and undeserved fame, still others gained improvements in their living conditions, and their children received a suitable education. The swarm of informants, the legions of handlers from the “organs,” and the local executioners were not conscious of their own crimes, let alone willing to acknowledge them. These people were the ones who, during the Gorbachev reforms era, were from thirty to forty years old, forming the generation upon which great hopes were placed.
The process of creating “a Soviet person” comprised several stages. It began with kindergarten and school, then the Junior YCL and YCL organizations, followed by the GULAG and everything that belonged to it, including the “law enforcement organs,” the courts, and, in the times of Lenin and Stalin, the extrajudicial organs. Just what did the valiant secret police teach those who had the misfortune to make their acquaintance on political and other grounds? The first lesson was that force decides everything. The second lesson was the impunity they possessed and the utility of lying. The investigators lied, often inventing accusations and “extending” sentences and not just for “politicals” but for ordinary criminals as well. Those under investigation also lied, slandering both themselves and totally innocent people in the hope of easing their own lot. The third lesson was the absence of justice. Judges handed out sentences to please the investigators or other authorities; the extrajudicial organs did not even bother with formalities.
The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was entirely correct in comparing the GULAG to a metastasizing cancerous tumor. The incremental growth of the system of concentration camps and a concomitant increase in the number of victims led to far-reaching consequences. Among the most serious was the wide dissemination of camp “culture” throughout all strata of the Soviet and, later, the Russian population. The “organs of law and order” used torture, fear, and humiliation to “educate” the prisoners. Common criminals who were “socially close” to the authorities were also sent into the camps, and they inflicted their ways upon others, primarily the “enemies of the people”—that is, the political prisoners. This practice also became state policy.
Inhuman living conditions and excessive work norms that, if unfulfilled, led to a reduction in the already scanty prisoners’ rations, which were insufficient to maintain their strength, made elementary physical survival the chief goal of the prisoners. Many of the morally steadfast perished. Other prisoners survived by jettisoning anything that smacked of humanity, including decency, conscience, and morality. It was they who disseminated camp culture among the rest of the population. Millions passed through the GULAG and raised children and grandchildren. Their influence spread into morals, habits, and language.
Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading Soviet dissident who exposed the abuses of punitive psychiatry, wrote that according to the most conservative calculations, the number of prisoners in the GULAG at any one time was not less than 2.5 million persons, constituting 1 percent of the population, and they served an average term of approximately five years. The rate of recidivism was no more than 20–25 percent. Thus, according to Bukovsky, almost a third of the country passed through the camps.2
It is revealing that the romanticism of criminality occupies an important place in contemporary Russian culture. At the core of this “romanticism” is a senseless cruelty, a complete disrespect for human life, and a rejection of everything humane, leading to absolute legal nihilism. In turn, these victims of the regime, partly through their descendants, constructed the guillotine for democracy in contemporary Russia. But there existed another very large stratum of the population that comprised torturers, executioners, guards, judges, and prosecutors. None of them received any punishment whatsoever for their terrible crimes, which were not subject to any statutes of limitation. No one was even condemned from a moral point of view. These butchers and sadists, just like their henchmen, walked away with heads held high and likewise raised their children and grandchildren.
There was yet another category of people who poisoned democracy and Russia’s normal development—namely, the legions of informers who condemned their victims to inhuman tortures or death. Informers were motivated by numerous reasons: many from “ideological considerations”; others for the sake of their careers, for the receipt of some sort of benefits, for the elimination of a more successful rival in love—there are too many to list—but mostly from selfish motives.
Here let us recall the prophetic words from The GULAG Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “The young learn that baseness is never punished on this earth, but always brings rewards. How bleak and terrible it is to live in such a country!” This applied to all of the unpunished butchers of the Stalinist regime.
Moreover, in accordance with a secret OGPU circular from February 1923, the following were condemned to physical extermination:
Political parties and organizations:
1) All former members of pre-revolutionary political parties; 2) All former members of monarchist associations and organizations; 3) All former members of the Union of Independent Landholders, as well as the Union of Independent Farmers during the period of the independent Central Parliament (Rada) in Ukraine; 4) All former members of the old aristocracy and nobility; 5) All former members of youth organizations (Boy Scouts and others); 6) All nationalists of whatever stripe.
Officials of tsarist institutions:
1) All officials of the former Ministry of Internal Affairs; all officials of the guards, the police, and the gendarmes, all secret agents of the guards and the police, all ranks of the border guards, and so forth; 2) All officials of the former Ministry of Justice: all members of the circuit courts, judges, prosecutors of all ranks, Justices of the Peace, judicial investigators, officers of the court, heads of rural courts, and so forth; 3) All officers and junior officers of the tsarist army and navy without exception.
Covert enemies of the Soviet regime:
1) All officers, junior officers, and rank-and-file soldiers of the White army [anticommunist forces], irregular White Guard detachments, Petlyura units, various rebellious subunits and bands that are actively fighting against Soviet power. Persons who have been amnestied by Soviet authorities are not exempted. 2) All civil officials of the central and local organs and departments of the White Guard government, of the army of the Central Rada, the Hetman administration, and so forth; 3) All religious figures, bishops, Orthodox and Catholic priests, rabbis, deacons, monks, choirmasters, church elders and so forth; 4) All former merchants, owners of shops and stalls as well as “NEP men”; 5) All former landowners, large-scale tenants, and rich peasants who in the past utilized hired labor. All former owners of industrial enterprises and workshops; 6) All persons whose close relatives occupy an illegal position or are continuing armed resistance to the Soviet regime in the ranks of anti-Soviet bands; 7) All foreigners regardless of nationality; 8) All persons having relatives or acquaintances abroad; 9) All members of religious sects and communities (especially Baptists); 10) All scholars and specialists of the old school, especially those whose political orientation is not known to this day; 11) All persons who were earlier suspected or convicted of contraband, espionage, etc.3
Any commentary on this comprehensive list would be superfluous.
The foundation of Soviet and Russian totalitarianism is slavery, with deep historical, psychological, and philosophical roots. Pyotr Chaadaev, the nineteenth-century philosopher-critic of Russian society and culture who urged that Russia should orient itself toward Western European civilization, noted the “inverse action of religion” in Russia. The Roman clergy, he noted, provided an example by freeing their own slaves, but the Russian people descended into slavery only after becoming Christian.4 After seizing power, the Bolsheviks palmed off a new form of the worst kind of slavery under the guise of freedom. It enabled them not only to restore serfdom, which had been abolished by the tsar in 1861, but also to extend it to the entire population.
As a weapon to achieve this qualitatively new level of enslavement, the Soviet government made use of the innate reflex toward freedom discovered by the Nobel laureate Academician Ivan Pavlov, a reflex that was suppressed by hunger and other means of deprivation. Pavlov believed that the combined effects of terror and hunger would transform the freedom reflex into a reflex toward slavish submissiveness. In Soviet Russia words substituted for reality and elicited reflexive obedience. Soviet power, according to Pavlov, created animal-like relations among people such as what exists in the jungle among beasts.5
This discovery by a leading physiologist came at an opportune moment for Soviet power and, much later, for the Putin regime. “Utilizing such ancient and dependable mechanisms as semi-starvation and inescapable poverty, permanent terror and forced, stupefying labor, the [Communist] party tirelessly hammered down simple Soviet people in the country it had conquered,” writes V. D. Topolyanskii. “Millions of prisoners in the socialist zone were required to jettison their innate tendency toward independent thinking, renounce the outmoded habits of personal responsibility toward succeeding generations that the Bolsheviks perceived as harmful, forget feelings of personal dignity, and be imbued with sensations of permanent happiness in life-long slavery.”6
There is something “magical” about slavery—not just for the slaveholders but for the slaves as well. It is simpler for the slaveholders. They find it convenient not to have to deal with real persons but with a species of obedient bio-mechanisms. With regard to the slaves, if slavery implies certain conditions—for example, a comprehensible goal that is within reach, the absence of responsibility, or even a degree of comfort—then the slaves may be content. (Even the Stalinist underlings were slaves, although they lived not badly by the standards of that time and place.) Many of them simply don’t notice the circumstances in which they live; they misperceive their normal condition as freedom. This is the sort of slavery that Russians chose for themselves. Perhaps it is why in reality they have known nothing else for practically their entire history.
Another dimension of Russia’s de facto thralldom is feigned piety. A striving to appear “better” in the eyes of public opinion—in other words, a sanctimoniousness—long ago became a way of life for the conformist majority. The Bolsheviks found the prevailing spiritual and intellectual slavery very much to their liking as they built on the Russian people’s habituation to what, in comparison to that of the Bolsheviks, was the moderate savagery and petty tyranny of tsarist power. Stalin and his ilk proclaimed a new state religion and established a historically unprecedented slave-owning theocratic state.
The doctrine of the Bolshevik religion combined traditional elements of Russian Orthodoxy and paganism. Elements borrowed from these antecedents included, among others, idolatry—flagrant examples of which were the public exhibition of Lenin’s mummy and the countless portraits and statues of the “Founding Fathers”—and the practice of sacrifices. The latter involved both human sacrifices—for example, in the show trials and in the GULAG—and financial sacrifices in the form of party and trade union dues and of the obligatory purchase under Stalin of state bonds and, later, of lottery tickets.
These new dogmas, which were universally disseminated throughout the USSR, required that complete control be established over the physical and spiritual lives of its citizens, who were forced to follow these dogmas. Soviet authorities effectively used varied means to achieve this goal.
The Soviet slaveholding system mandated that everything without exception belonged to the state, including intellect, qualifications, and knowledge. It was the basis for the suppression of individual sovereignty and the elimination of even its outward appearance. For example, unless applicants possessed a workbook and references, no personnel department had the right to hire them. References had to be signed by the so-called triangle: the enterprise or institutional leader (the shop, department, etc.), the party organizer, and the trade union organizer. Even brilliant specialists were unable to secure a good job if they had bad references or, even worse, no references at all. There was no alternative for procuring employment. This requisite was the first element of the system in which Soviet citizens, like serfs, were dependent upon the state.
A second element was the state monopoly on housing. Along with the system of internal passports, it enabled the state to dictate to its citizens where to live and work. In essence, Stalin’s introduction of internal passports, and a system of passes for controlling people’s travel and changes in their place of residence, strengthened serfdom via legislation. It would be difficult to conceive of a more effective policy for controlling the people.
The Soviet slaveholding system paid special attention to educating the “new person.” The measures employed included massive hypnosis of the subjects of the communist empire and liquidation of “vestiges of the past,” including the maniacal destruction of Russian science, medicine, and culture, as well as quotidian culture, or the “old way of life.” Those who embodied this culture were isolated from society in concentration camps; the luckier ones were expelled abroad.
The Iron Curtain was an effective barrier against the emergence of any kind of heresy. Soviet citizens were prohibited from going abroad, the circulation of foreign newspapers and magazines was banned, and Western radio stations broadcasting in Russian were jammed. Censorship and secrecy were the most effective prophylactics. Soviet people could know very little about the world around them—only that which the state permitted and only according to the interpretation that the state deemed necessary.
The coercive measures employed differed greatly depending on the specific goal. For example, those persons wishing to secure what, from the time of the Bolshevik coup, were the minimum benefits that constituted “well-being” had to cozy up to the authorities or, even better, join the nomenklatura, the privileged elite of Soviet society. The state’s establishment early in the Soviet era of special retail stores where one could purchase foodstuffs unavailable elsewhere at subsidized prices, and the retention of these special stores until the end of the communist regime, clearly demonstrated the unbreakable connection in Soviet thinking between one’s social position and the opportunity to obtain quality foodstuffs and other “benefits and privileges.” To obtain the level of supply ordained from “above,” those who enjoyed access had to play by the “rules of the game,” and they included membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Those who ignored the rules of the game were severely punished. The most egregious example of this was the persecution of Boris Pasternak after publication abroad of his book Doctor Zhivago in 1957 and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. The Stalinist tradition of public reprisals against dissenters long survived the dictator’s death in 1953. Another level of “coercive means” was the elaborately devised, differentiated, and diverse mechanisms of punishment and reeducation for various kinds of “heretics” to teach them and others a lesson.
The system of punishment, including the notorious GULAG, was the most effective means of all. Punishing criminals and struggling against “heretics” were far from the only, or even the primary, goals of this monstrosity. According to the great criminals who came to power for the long term in November 1917, the concentration camps, as they were openly called at the time, were meant to achieve very concrete economic tasks. Soviet-style state capitalism, or the planned economy, required universal compulsion to labor. The scheme was grounded in the colonization of unassimilated territories using prisoners’ labor. What a truly revolutionary approach! That is why the GULAG was supplied with an inexhaustible influx of prisoners, who were viewed as a slave labor force. Economic considerations were obviously among the reasons for the abnormally long prison sentences in the USSR.
Another extremely effective mechanism of punishment was punitive psychiatry, which I have already discussed at length.
The army was in an especially difficult position in Soviet slaveholding society. Military personnel were excluded from the purview even of the existing legislation. Battalions’ constructing generals’ dachas or “objects of the national economy” and soldiers’ harvesting crops—all amounted to slavery under the name of “honorary rights and duties.” The officers were also slaves. While the soldiers could again become relatively free after serving their compulsory two years, the officers could not escape military slavery until they retired after completing their term of service.
Were there any free individuals in the USSR? No. But the prisoner in the GULAG and a member of the party-state nomenklatura, for example, experienced different kinds and degrees of servitude.
Paradoxically, those with the least spiritual and material needs may be considered the freest. How may we compare the freedom of hereditary alcoholics (of which, regrettably, there is no small number in Russia), whose only interest in life is their bottles, with the freedom of a scholar, a writer, or an artist? Even the highest-ranking Soviet officials were slaves to Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist dogmas, to the Iron Curtain, to political investigations, to the benefits extended to them in connection with their duties.
From this perspective, the nomenklatura is quite an interesting phenomenon. To reach this level one had to ascend the lengthy party-bureaucratic career ladder. For the overwhelming majority this was impossible without immersing themselves in the dogmas of the communist quasi-religion—in the spirit of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness—or, at the very least, adapting to it. The slave thus becomes a slaveholder yet remains in a state of slavery (and even the members of the highest-ranking Soviet leadership were in such a position). What could be more unnatural and more dangerous? Let us not forget that we are speaking of the very people who ran the country or held responsible positions during perestroika and of their successors.
The mild democratic reformation that was perestroika was doomed to defeat because it was top down, carried out by a narrow circle of the leadership. Moreover, to a significant degree the reformers themselves were dogmatic and set themselves unrealizable goals, including the humanization of the Soviet regime by relying on the CPSU. To no lesser degree perestroika could not be implemented successfully due to the absolute power of the repressive organs, the CPSU and the KGB, in the first place. Even though they were the most odious manifestations of the Soviet totalitarian system, though, they were far from monolithic.
Here I should emphasize that perestroika alienated many people because it coincided with the start of the antialcohol campaign.7 Also, it proclaimed many incomprehensible slogans such as “Acceleration,” put forward vague goals and tasks, and instituted glasnost, or “transparency,” which unmasked the sins of the past as well as of contemporary Soviet life.
The political struggle over the “democratization of Soviet society” unfolded primarily at the ideological level. Was “socialist democracy” a good thing? Was free enterprise compatible with Soviet-style socialism? Was a multiparty system permissible in “monolithic” Soviet society? Could a “formal approach” to human rights be adopted in the USSR? Could the USSR provide freedom of choice to the “people’s democracies” (Eastern bloc countries) and reach agreement with the “imperialists”—for example, on problems of disarmament—and cooperate with them to neutralize Iraqi aggression against Kuwait? These were the questions that engaged people. It was basically at this level that the struggle between dogmatism and common sense was waged.
The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War, but as subsequent events showed, it did not write finis to it. The politicians who came to power in Russia after the fall of the USSR, starting at the top with Boris Yeltsin, were insufficiently competent and inadequately prepared for the challenges they faced. Consequently, they were unable to work for the interests of the nation either in foreign or domestic policy. This occurred in large measure because of the glaring gap between the pro-Western aspirations of the liberals in Yeltsin’s entourage and the constantly growing mood of revenge in society and in the state apparatus. This mood characterized not only the military and the special services but also significant numbers of diplomats, politicians, and economists.
Yeltsin, as well as most of his democratically inclined associates, had only a very remote understanding of Western values. This was to be expected considering their life experience, education, and upbringing in Soviet times. Naturally, on the crest of the political struggles of the 1980s, when a man who until quite recently had been the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional Communist Party organization was thrust into the national leadership of the democratic opposition, some things had to be explained to him. One must give Yeltsin his due: he did grasp some of what he was told but not enough for a deep understanding of what was going on in Russia and abroad. The liberal system of coordinates was quite unfamiliar to him. An important question is, who exactly prepared Yeltsin for the role of democratic leader? Even if one dismisses any conspiracy theories, even if the persons who pulled his strings were progressive, they were still Soviets with the characteristic aberration of political outlook that label implies.
The special services, including agents who had penetrated every layer of society, also played an important role in Yeltsin’s ascent. Such agents are in a very distinct category. The overwhelming majority of them do whatever they consider necessary in discharging their specific functions or while awaiting new instructions. This is why many of them are not merely successful but also brilliant, especially since they are assisted by one of the most powerful special services of all times and places. When they get a new set of orders, they don’t ask whether it is from a committed democrat, a liberal, a state official, or a communist. Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, these “sleeper agents” objectively did quite a bit of good. Then they were awakened. Those who had only recently stood on the barricades of democracy, either literally or figuratively, and even helped to build them now began to destroy them even more effectively.
In his memoirs, Alexander Korzhakov, the former chief of the Presidential Guard, which later was elevated to an independent ministerial-level department—the Presidential Security Service—made a strikingly frank acknowledgment of the role of special service agents in contemporary Russia. As a man who knew very many agents, he wrote, “If a miracle occurred and a list appeared in the press just of those agents whom citizens knew by sight, a political crisis would occur in the country. To the questions of who our leaders are, who is governing us, the straightforward answer would be—agents of the special services.”8 The fundamental sources and vectors of influence upon Yeltsin are clear. What is not at all clear, however, is why this scandalous confirmation by such a well-informed source remained practically unnoticed. Perhaps from squeamishness? Not very likely. Perhaps from the new ruling ideology of “political correctness” that, in the name of decency, permitted one to close one’s eyes to the most scandalous things, especially when it was advantageous to do so?
Speaking of Yeltsin’s presidency, it should be pointed out that at least in his outward action, the “early” Yeltsin appeared different from the “later” Yeltsin. His authoritarian ways, initially clearly visible only within the halls of power, were illuminated during the political crisis of September–October 1993, pitting Yeltsin’s executive authority against a legislature dominated by his opponents. This confrontation culminated in Yeltsin’s order to shell the Supreme Soviet on October 3, resulting in numerous casualties. This action unambiguously signaled a retreat from democracy. It was partly to be expected with the popularity of communists and fascist nationalists in Russia, on the one hand, and the unwillingness of Yeltsin and his circle to give up power, on the other. One may confidently mark the beginning of the authoritarian period in post-Soviet Russia from this date. One also should not lose sight of the fact that the members of the new Russian elite, upon which Yeltsin was extremely dependent and whose foundation was agents of the special services, would never have relinquished their power and wealth. For the time being, Yeltsin was the guarantor of that power and wealth.
The outcome of the ill-considered cascade of privatization that commenced from the start of Yeltsin’s rule was the rise of a kleptocracy. (However, it is also possible that the kleptocrats skillfully carried out privatization in their own interest.) Along with the new secret police, with which it frequently overlapped, the kleptocracy squeezed out the very persons who had brought Yeltsin to power—namely, the democratic leaders of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The kleptocrats attempted to fashion a democratic leader out of yesterday’s party hack. By December 1992 the liberal government of Premier Yegor Gaidar had ceased to exist. After the shelling of the Supreme Soviet in October 1993, democratic leaders continued to be eliminated from Yeltsin’s entourage and to lose influence. Deprived of his democratic entourage and constantly in need of guidance (or support) because of his incompetence, Yeltsin fell under the influence of the siloviki and the nouveaux riches, who had no interest in promoting democracy in Russia. All they needed (and what they still need) was the semblance of democracy. Still Yeltsin evidently had absorbed a lesson or two from his tutors during his transformation into an ambiguous symbol of Russian democracy. For example, there were no serious assaults on freedom of the mass media during his administration. During this period, however, gross and massive violations of human rights began, first with respect to Chechnya. The First Chechen War started on December 11, 1994, and was not concluded until the fall of 1996. During the war the entire spectrum of rights, including the right to life, was destroyed for the inhabitants of this republic. From the outset, political rights were effectively suppressed by Yeltsin’s authoritarianism.
During Yeltsin’s term the symbiosis of all levels of power, business, and the criminal world occurred. This was particularly dangerous, given the criminalization of the law enforcement organs that were boldly penetrating the highest levels of state power. They succeeded in doing this in the late Yeltsin era. Corruption at every level became the basic feature of Russian power. Everything was for sale. In Yeltsin’s first term, government officials already began selling their services to business. A few words from the “appropriate” minister conveyed to a particular firm cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Press secretaries sold the rights to interview their bosses. Even deputies’ inquiries had their price. Corruption penetrated medicine, education (including secondary education), and all aspects of life. However, the full-scale flowering of corruption came after 2000.
Under the distinct influence of the special services, Yeltsin and his entourage viewed Russia as a Russian Orthodox country and consequently interpreted religious freedom narrowly as freedom for Russian Orthodoxy alone. Right after the collapse of the USSR, this led to denying the rights of those who were not Orthodox.
Yeltsin’s most egregious mistake was underestimating the human factor in pursuing his reforms. The Russian people, hoping to better their conditions quickly, endured massive impoverishment and lost all their savings early in Yeltsin’s rule. His entire presidency was marked by flagrant and massive destruction of a wide range of socioeconomic rights, with wages withheld over many months. The manipulation of election results also began during Yeltsin’s presidency. By the time Putin came to power, people were already so accustomed to such manipulation that they no longer reacted negatively. What developed in Russia under Yeltsin was a system of rule that may be called authoritarian kleptocracy, which transformed bandit capitalism into oligarchic capitalism—that is, a system fully controlled by, or at least entirely dependent upon, a narrow circle of persons who ran the country.
The ruination of minds, which the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov called Russia’s main disaster after the Bolshevik coup d’état, brought about the further disintegration of the country. In turn, it provoked a crisis of Yeltsinocracy and the further powerful onset of revenge and reaction.
A strange fate befell Russia in the twentieth century. From the time of Lenin, the country prepared to fight the whole world. Initially Russia was supposed to be the launching pad for the “world proletarian revolution.” Later on even more confusing reasons were offered. The entire history of the USSR until Gorbachev’s reforms was directed toward achieving impractical goals. Naturally this led inexorably to collapse. The senseless arms race not only sucked dry the material resources of the USSR but also its intellectual resources. The normal development of nonmilitary production became impossible.
In trying to make the USSR an impregnable fortress, the Soviet leadership destroyed it. The decisive loss in the Cold War during the years of stagnation (1964–85) set the stage for the USSR’s repudiation of traditional, Soviet aggressive messianism during the Gorbachev era. Orthodox communists viewed this sensible adjustment in Soviet foreign policy as a retreat from “Leninist norms” and as a surrender to the “imperialists.”
After the breakup of the USSR, Gorbachev’s thorough and rational approach to changing the Soviet role and position in the international system devolved under Yeltsin to the absence of any real foreign or domestic policy. This led to the complete loss of Russia’s international positions and maximum economic and financial weakening. By 2000 a country that had been built as a fortress had collapsed into ruins.
Russia’s downward slide in the world economy demonstrates this point. Between 1992 and 1997, its GDP decreased by almost 40 percent, industrial production by almost 50 percent, and agriculture by 35 percent. By the latter date Russian production constituted just 2 percent of world production, and Russia’s per capita GDP ranked forty-fifth in the world.
Russia’s dependence on foreign markets increased. The share of imports in consumer goods reached 50 percent, and many Russian products practically vanished from the domestic market. Imports of equipment grew as the capacity of the domestic machine-building industry declined. An economic model emerged based on the export of energy and raw material resources and the import of machines, equipment, foodstuffs, and consumer goods.
Financial stabilization was officially proclaimed as the main economic goal of all Russian governments from 1992 to August 1998. This meant overcoming a high rate of inflation and shrinking the budget deficit. To accomplish this, the money supply was squeezed to the maximum possible extent, budgetary expenditures and the budget deficit were curtailed, and the latter was covered with the help of so-called noninflationary sources: domestic short- and long-term treasury bills and state bonds and foreign loans.9
Russian authorities declared these goals achieved in 1998.10 However, this had been accomplished by squeezing the money supply to the limit, making it impossible for production to function normally. On January 1, 1992, the money supply in Russia constituted 66 percent of GDP; by the beginning of 1998 it had dropped to 14 percent and continued to contract mostly with the help of noncash methods—that is, the working assets of enterprises.
The lack of an adequate money supply required for normal commodity-production exchange led to complete disorder in the monetary payments system. By September 1, 1998, creditors’ loans amounted to the enormous sum of 2.3 trillion rubles, or close to 85 percent of annual GDP. Approximately 70 percent of the transactions between enterprises were carried out through barter or via quasi-monetary means. The contraction of the money supply and the crisis in payments created artificial limits on demand and accelerated the decline in production.
The high profitability of short- and long-term treasury bills and federal loan bonds, and the opportunity for banks to reap large profits from dealing in them and in currency transactions and from manipulating budgetary funds, led to a complete separation between the financial system and the real economy. Financial resources were concentrated in the financial markets, while the real economy was practically bled white. These developments constantly reduced the tax base and made it more difficult to fulfill the revenue side of the budget, thereby requiring even greater curtailment of expenditures and the supplementary contraction of the money supply. Budgets were not met even in sequestered form. The entire chain repeated itself over and over again in a vicious circle.
A second vicious circle came about in connection with the growth of internal and external government debt. The domestic debt in treasury bills and state bonds as of October 1, 1998, constituted 387.1 billion rubles. Moreover, the redemption of previously issued treasury bills and state bonds required the increasing issuance of new series. The funds needed to service the external debt also grew. To pay off the old debts, more and more new credits were needed.
The decision by the government and the Bank of Russia on August 17, 1998, to depreciate the ruble drastically demonstrated the need to find a way out of the existing situation. A devaluation of the ruble was implemented to reduce the budgetary deficit via inflation and to increase revenues. To emerge from under the curtain of debt, a default was declared.
Naturally, these decisions failed to yield positive results. In fact, the negative results were overwhelming. In August inflation stood at 3.7 percent and in September at 38.4 percent. The major banks that had invested their assets in frozen treasury bills were now on the brink of bankruptcy; the interbank credit and currency markets stopped functioning. Payments ceased. Russia forfeited the confidence of foreign creditors and became utterly dependent on the decisions of international financial organizations for the provision of credits. At the very least, Russia became dependent on ineffectively utilized financial assistance from the West.
The threat of further devaluation of the ruble remained, presaging renewed inflation. There were enormous hard currency savings (according to expert estimates, from $40 billion to $60 billion, which far exceeded all potential foreign credits and investments). At an exchange rate of 15–18 rubles to the dollar, this equaled 600 billion to 900 billion rubles, a sum that was one and a half to two times greater than the budget revenues approved by the State Duma. The total value of government debt relative to GDP exceeded 138 percent. The ratio of external debt to GDP exceeded 110 percent.
The level of imports of new industrial machinery and equipment was eight to ten times lower than what was needed simply to replace obsolete and depreciated working stock. By this time, fully two-thirds of the basic working stock was outmoded. Even in the most successful export-oriented branches, the share of new equipment had decreased by two to three times compared to 1990.
The technological level and physical condition of the majority of main and branch enterprises in the fuel and energy sector not only failed to meet contemporary standards but in many cases also failed to meet safety and environmental protection standards. More than half the equipment in the coal industry had exceeded its designed working life as had 30 percent of gas pumping units. There was more than 50 percent amortization in over half of oilfield equipment and more than a third in the gas industry. In oil refining the amortization on assets exceeded 80 percent, and it was projected that in the near future half of the capacity of all the electric power stations in the country would have to go off-line. By this time more than half the main oil pipelines had been in service for more than twenty-five years. As many as half the atomic power stations needed refurbishing.
Russia’s transport system was also antiquated. The rate of replacing rolling stock was reduced, leading to a sharp growth in the average age of the equipment, which was increasingly in poor condition. A large fraction had been in use beyond its designed service life, resulting in a drastic decline in safety and an increase in transportation costs. Losses in the merchant marine fleet and the destruction of the Arctic transportation system were a very real possibility.
The economic crisis caused serious social problems. People’s disposable real income was 40 percent lower than before the reforms of 1991. The gap between rich and poor increased dramatically, exacerbating social tensions.
Meanwhile, there was also an ecological crisis. Serious and even very serious ecological problems existed on almost a fifth of Russian territory. More than 60 percent of the urban population breathed unhealthy air containing various toxic substances in concentrations far exceeding maximum permissible levels. Approximately 40 million Russians breathed air with more than ten times the maximum permissible concentration of toxic substances. The regions of Moscow, Samar, Sverdlovsk, Irkutsk, and Kemerovo and the Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk territories were the worst offenders in this regard.
The Don, Terek, and Ural Rivers were dead. The waters in the Volga, Oka, Kama, Don, Ural, Tom, Irtysh, and Moscow Rivers were no longer potable. About half of the water draining into these rivers was polluted. Water purification systems could not cope with the toxic substances. Almost 70 percent of the Russian population consumed polluted drinking water.
Virtually no enterprises in Russia employed nonpolluting technology. An insignificant portion, less than one-fifth, of waste products was utilized and rendered harmless; the remainder piled up. Almost 1.5 billion tons of toxic and dangerous tailings, including mercury, chrome, and organic chlorides, poisoned the soil, causing irreversible degradation of the natural environment in an area of more than 2.47 million acres. Technological waste from urban industries was spread over distances of hundreds of miles (for example, 125 miles in the Moscow region). In the greater part of Russia’s European territory, soil pollution as the result of leaching of lead meant that people in numerous cities were exposed to lead pollution at more than ten times permissible levels. Across the length and breadth of Russia the soil was polluted with other heavy metals and arsenic.
Russia represented a flagrant example of just how dangerous progress is in the hands of irresponsible politicians. If nuclear blackmail was no longer a reality internationally, then inside Russia the nuclear factor operated powerfully and continuously without any deterrents. Even leaving aside the nuclear power plant meltdown at Chernobyl in April 1986, when radioactive contamination affected a wide area with a population of some 4 million people, the situation regarding nuclear power plants was intolerable. As a result of radioactive pollution from catastrophes and accidents between 1956 and 1967 and irresponsible attitudes toward nuclear waste, Russia was unquestionably the worst offender in the world. Most of the spent nuclear fuel was stored in on-site storage tanks, posing a threat to the safety of persons living in the vicinity of the nuclear power plants. Almost all nuclear power plants were located in densely populated European Russia, and about a million persons were exposed to dangers from them. It will take a century and a half to reprocess the spent nuclear fuel. This fact didn’t bother the authorities who, going back to the Soviet era, welcomed spent nuclear fuel and nuclear materials from other countries for reprocessing.
There was even more to the man-made hell in Russia. More than thirty-five hundred chemical works processed an incalculable amount of dangerous substances such as chlorine, ammonia, hydrochloric acid, and others. They often utilized antiquated and outmoded equipment, posing a threat of poisoning some 116,000 square miles with a population of about 54 million people. More than half the population of Russia was exposed to an elevated risk of technological and natural catastrophes due to poor management in combination with natural conditions. Almost 70 percent of accidents were caused by fires, explosions, and open gas and oil gushers, creating dire environmental consequences. Every year more than five hundred large-scale oil and gas pipeline ruptures occurred. As a result of the leakage of petroleum products, almost all the rivers in northwest Siberia, many other rivers, and the southern part of the Barents Sea were polluted with oil. Yet Russian authorities steadily reduced aggregate expenditures on environmental protection. In 1997 they were 60 percent less than in 1992 and constituted just 0.04 percent of total budgetary expenditures.
Economic and financial ruin combined with the horrendous state of the environment produced catastrophic consequences for the nation’s health. Over a six-year period (1990–96), the incidence of diseases such as tuberculosis increased 1.9 times, syphilis 49 times, drug addiction 6.5 times, and alcoholic psychosis 4.2 times. Deterioration in the health of pregnant women (for example, over six years the rate of anemia among them almost doubled) led to an increase of illness among newborns (1990, 14.8 percent; 1996, 31.3 percent among the total number) as well as to premature births. Twenty percent of preschool children suffered from chronic illnesses. By the time they graduated from high school only 15 percent of children could be considered healthy.
In several industrially developed districts, up to 40 percent of illnesses were caused by the harmful effects of air, water, and soil pollution; poor-quality foodstuffs and raw materials; production processes; and general conditions of life. The high levels of bacteria and viruses in drinking water caused acute intestinal infections and viral hepatitis A. The constant consumption of drinking water containing high levels of natural and man-made chemical pollutants contributed to the elevated incidence of illnesses.
Genetic damage is one of the dangerous consequences of environmental pollution. Studies of the frequency of genetic defects among urban residents exposed to varying levels of air, drinking water, and food pollution demonstrated that the degree of damage was linked to the overall level of environmental pollution by mutagenic and carcinogenic substances.
In Russia, 60,000 out of 1.2 million–1.3 million children born annually suffered from developmental birth defects and congenital illnesses. One of every four of these babies was seriously ill. Some died soon after birth; many others were invalids from childhood. About 15 percent of the population suffered from congenitally predisposed diseases such as diabetes, bronchial asthma, hypertension, psoriasis, and other illnesses. In 1999, deaths exceeded births by almost 1.7 times. Premature mortality also remained high. In the 1990s the working life for men decreased by five years and for women by one year.
In the face of this situation the authorities simply ignored the breakdown of public health and deteriorating conditions in society. They also did virtually nothing about chronic late payment of wages.
In October 1999 50 million persons, or more than 33 percent of the population, had incomes below the minimum living wage, as compared to 35 million people, or less than 25 percent, just one year earlier. In 1999 the wealthiest 10 percent of the population enjoyed incomes more than fourteen times greater than the poorest 10 percent. The difference in rates of savings was even greater: the wealthiest 20 percent of the population (by income) had 80 percent of all savings, while the poorest 20 percent had only about 1 percent. Minimum income guarantees were woefully inadequate, or less than 10 percent of what constituted a subsistence wage for the working population. The paltry measures taken to alleviate the financial crisis of 1998 were mostly cosmetic and manifestly insufficient.
Objective as well as subjective factors were responsible for this state of affairs. In a step for which no preparations had been made, the union republics with a high degree of specialization departed from what had formerly been an economically integrated USSR, inevitably destroying the economic ties among them and leading to the breakdown of industry in the territory of the former USSR. Subjectively, massive privatization, also implemented without preparation, frequently led to the irrational utilization of Russia’s economic potential.
The failure of the Belovezhe Accords (1991) to regulate even a single real issue in relations among the post-Soviet states predetermined that the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) would be stillborn. The most contentious problems were the status of Crimea, which Khrushchev had given to Ukraine in 1954; the ownership of the Black Sea fleet; and the status of the Russian-speaking people in the post-Soviet states. Putin would subsequently tackle all these issues unilaterally.
The situation was exacerbated by the growth of anti-Russian sentiment in the CIS that was provoked in large measure by Boris Yeltsin himself and his team. This sentiment initially arose during the struggle for sovereignty of the Soviet republics, during which an aggressive form of nationalism was ignited. It later grew due to gross errors committed in Russia’s relations with the newly independent states. Among them were Moscow’s anti-Georgian policy, largely the result of Yeltsin’s personal antipathy toward Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze; Moscow’s support of the Abkhazian separatists; its meddling in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh; and its position regarding the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova.
There were no agreed-upon borders with other states of the CIS; thus, their external boundaries with Russia simultaneously became Russia’s borders. The problem was compounded by Russia’s dependence upon events within the CIS. The lack of reliable state borders made it difficult for Russia to deal with cross-border crime and turned Russia into a convenient staging ground for contraband, including narcotics, and facilitated illegal migration into Russia and, through transiting its territory, to third countries.
Moscow was troubled by the massive and largely uncontrolled migration of Chinese into the depopulated Far East and several districts of Siberia as Chinese citizens began to dominate several spheres of economic activity in the Far East. Moscow seriously feared changes in the demographic composition of the population in several border regions. According to various statistics, between 400,000 to 2 million Chinese were living illegally in the Far East region of the Russian Federation. Officials in Moscow were deeply concerned that the number of Chinese in the Far East would come to exceed that of the Russian population. Their concern stemmed from the fact that about 9 million people lived along Russia’s Siberian and Far Eastern border with China, while more than 100 million Chinese lived in the adjacent regions of China. Given China’s overwhelming population and the Russian authorities’ inability either to stop the massive migration of Chinese or to guide it into a positive channel, Moscow saw this influx as a serious threat to national security that might lead to Chinese military aggression against Russia under the pretext of defending the Chinese population.
The disintegration of all aspects of the nation’s military establishment, however, is what struck terror into the hearts of the masters of the Kremlin. It never occurred to them that the military in its previous form was quite unnecessary. But the significant diminution of defense potential, the sharp curtailment of the armed forces, and the loss of some of the most important elements of defense industry and of defense-related science, along with the reduction of the state’s overall operational readiness and its decreased capacity for military mobilization, were viewed as nothing short of a catastrophe. Objectively speaking, there really were several grounds for worry. Among them were an unsecured border, air and missile defense systems riddled with holes, and diminished air force and naval efficiency. They are just several general instances, but things were bad throughout the military establishment. No one had even thought of undertaking a fundamental reassessment of military-political doctrine.
Russian political and military leaders reacted very badly to the changes in Russia’s military capabilities compared to those of Soviet times. Moscow ascribed its own mistakes and miscalculations, to say nothing of the objective tendencies of the evolving world situation, to the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the loss of its influence in Eastern Europe that had already occurred in Soviet times.11 Complaints about the sharp shift in the balance of forces in Europe accompanied assertions that changes had occurred in the substance and trends of the disarmament process, resulting in the need to review relevant treaties and agreements. Moscow was particularly troubled by the strengthening and expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the eastward advancement of its infrastructure.
The expansion of NATO is a special page in the history of Russian politics. As the Cold War ended during perestroika, the USSR and NATO were on the threshold of establishing a relationship of partnership and cooperation. The breakthrough was supposed to occur at the Rome meeting of the NATO Council on November 7, 1991, that Soviet minister of foreign affairs Eduard Shevardnadze was going to attend.12 He was unable to do so, however, because of the domestic political situation.13
The West’s negative reaction to Russian president Yeltsin’s statement in December 1991 that Russia desired to become a member of NATO offended the Kremlin.14 However, cooperation continued, if only formally, until the appointment of Yevgeny Primakov as minister of foreign affairs in 1996. He poisoned the attitude of the Kremlin, parliament, and the previously neutral public toward NATO. From then on, the position Russia adopted toward NATO’s enlargement was irrational and illogical.15
Overall a paradoxical situation developed regarding national security. While remaining a mighty nuclear power, Russia virtually lost its nonnuclear defensive capability. With good reason both the Russian military leadership and the Kremlin concluded that the effectiveness of the army and its ability to guarantee the security of the borders were practically nil. From the start Russia’s military reform was doomed to failure, primarily because of the yawning gap between the military-political ambitions of the country’s leadership and part of the Russian population, on the one hand, and Russia’s economic resources, on the other.
From the outset there was no way to achieve the postulated missions. The half-hearted character of the decisions that were adopted foreordained the growth of negative tendencies in the military establishment. It acquired greater airs than it had boasted in Soviet times and became an independent threat to the security of Russia as well as that of other states. In this context it suffices to recall the bombastic talk about the need to raise the army’s fighting spirit by achieving military victory in Chechnya. The situation in the army merited special attention. Russia’s disdain of the USSR’s former allies in Central and Eastern Europe caused Moscow to underestimate their interests and influence. Viewing these countries as unfriendly, Moscow itself largely provoked the consequences that were inimical to its own interests. It was absurd virtually to ignore the states that were candidates for entry into NATO while, at the same time, trying to prevent NATO’s expansion.
From within the Kremlin’s walls Russia’s overall situation appeared catastrophic. Japan had claims on the Kuril Islands. China was engaging in demographic and economic expansion in Russia. The Russo-Mongolian border was uneasy. Relations with neighboring Georgia were tense. As for Chechnya, although it was a part of Russia, since it was close to Turkey, the border there had particularly symbolic value. Kaliningrad, the former East Prussian Königsberg that was annexed to the USSR after World War II and is a Russian exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania, experienced significant difficulties, and doubts arose as to whether it would remain part of Russian territory. Despite many attempts to break the stalemate on resolving the extremely serious problems of the Kaliningrad region, the authorities firmly refused to do anything at all. Their arguments were more than slightly peculiar and contradictory. On the one hand, they said that “the European Union will give us everything themselves.” On the other hand, they asserted that the Kaliningrad region was an internal matter and that no Europeans had any business sticking their noses into it. Objectively speaking, however, Western help was badly needed to resolve such problems as organized crime, drug addiction, AIDS, and prostitution, the indicators of which were literally off the charts in this region.
In addition to these objective difficulties, for Russia, a no less important consequence of the Soviet Union’s collapse was the loss of its global influence. The traditional Soviet mentality was unable to cope with this. However paradoxical it might seem, surveys of public opinion showed that superpower status was more important to people than their own well-being.
Given both objective reasons and the mentality of Moscow politicians, between 1992 and 2000 Russian foreign and domestic policy became unpredictable. The Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were unable to come to terms with the loss of a superpower role, the enlargement of NATO in 1999, and the loss of Russia’s former sphere of influence. Missing from view were objective trends in international relations as well as the leaders’ own mistakes and miscalculations.
Russia’s real and imagined vulnerability, the generations-long psychology of a besieged fortress, the great power syndrome combined with the basically false thesis that the fall of the USSR and what followed were due to the nation’s defeat in the Cold War—all taken together led to the kindling of revanchist feelings. The democratic reforms that had recently been undertaken were blamed for all the ills that had befallen Russia. Of course, the attempts to observe democratic standards and human rights during perestroika were facilitated by revelations regarding the many contradictions and conflicts in the USSR, with interethnic ones in the first instance. What disappeared from the view of those bent on revenge was the inconvenient truth that all the nation’s disasters were due to domestic, not foreign, reasons. The pernicious consequences of self-destruction were basically ascribed to the external adversary. This position was extremely convenient and accorded with Russian traditions since it enabled the authorities to disclaim responsibility. Instead of rethinking the new realities, they rattled their sabers and shifted responsibility onto an external threat. The processes that led toward the disintegration of the country, however, deserve special consideration.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, serious grounds existed for supposing that Russia might disintegrate. This situation arose partly from Boris Yeltsin’s 1990 preelection populist slogan “Take as much sovereignty as you want!” Bashkortostan, Buriatia, Tuva, Sakha (Yakutia), and Komi—all constituent republics of the Russian Federation—responded to this appeal in one way or another by behaving like sovereign states.
Some members of the Russian Federation appropriated for themselves Russia’s sovereign rights. Some of the contemporary symptoms pointing toward the disintegration of the country included the following:
• the priority of republic legislation over federal laws,
• the right to nullify laws and other normative acts of Russia on the territory of a republic if they contradicted the laws of that particular republic (Sakha [Yakutia], Bashkortostan, Tuva, Komai, and Tatarstan) or the sovereign rights and interests of a member of the Russian Federation (Dagestan),
• the right to declare a state of emergency (Buriatia, Komi, Tuva, Bashkortostan, Kalmykia, Karelia, North Ossetia, and Ingushetia),
• the right to impose martial law (Republic of Tuva),
• the republic laws about military service (Bashkortostan, Sakha (Yakutia), and Tuva),
• the procedures for establishing territorial military and other detachments (Sakha [Yakutia]),
• the need to secure permission from a member of the federation before deploying military units on its territory (North Ossetia),
• the right to regard as its exclusive property all natural resources on its territory (Ingushetia, Sakha [Yakutia], and Tuva), and
• the right to proclaim its own territory as a zone free of weapons of mass destruction (Tatarstan, Sakha [Yakutia], and Tuva).16
Moreover, in Ingushetia, Kalmykia, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, and the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, the republic constitutions were viewed as the fundamental law with juridical supremacy over the Russian Constitution. Analogous norms were contained in the statutes of the Khanty-Mansiiskii Autonomous District and Irkutsk region.
A paradoxical situation developed regarding the budget. Thus, the tax advantages conferred upon them by the federal authorities meant that compared to the other members of the federation, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Sakha (Yakutia) transferred to the federal budget only half the taxes they collected.
The disintegration of Russia was also facilitated by the fact that the constitutions (statutes) and legislation of many of the members of the Russian Federation contained numerous provisions violating constitutional rights and freedoms that were linked to the particular status of the inhabitants. Restrictions were placed upon their citizens’ freedom of movement and choice of place of residence.17
The regions were increasingly less oriented toward financial assistance from the federal center. A vivid example of this was the declaration by Kirsan Iliumzhinov, president of the Republic of Kalmykia, on November 17, 1998, concerning the possibility that Kalmykia might unilaterally alter its status to associate membership in the Russian Federation (providing that its budget not be included in the federal budget) or that Kalmykia might withdraw altogether from membership in the Russian Federation. Karelia counted on help from Finland, which, according to the Kremlin, was interested in recovering the Karelian territories it had lost in the Second World War. The Southern Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and the Maritime Province hoped for financial assistance from Japan and reoriented themselves toward the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, thereby creating the preconditions for regional sentiments to develop into separatist ones.
Along with the decrease in the regions’ financial dependency on the center was a noticeable diminution of Moscow’s importance as the focus of centripetal forces. But what perhaps troubled Moscow most was the desire of many military units deployed in the member states of the federation to be subject to local leadership rather than to the federal center.
The political and historical illiteracy of the Kremlin masters and their inability to assess the consequences of their own decisions, combined with the country’s and the region’s objective difficulties, brought about an extremely complicated situation in the North Caucasus. The economic situation there during the Yeltsin era was marked by a fall in production; deterioration in the financial condition of industrial enterprises, almost half of which operated at a loss; and a decline in agriculture. These factors promoted the growth of separatist sentiments in the North Caucasus. Moscow complained about the extremely tense situation in Chechnya that was destabilizing the sociopolitical situation in the entire region, especially in Dagestan, the border districts of the Stavropol region of southern Russia, and Ingushetia.
The problem of Chechnya typified the state of affairs in Russia primarily because it was mostly artificial. The First Chechen War (1994–96) was one of the most terrible and senseless crimes of the bloody twentieth century.
In the prologue to the war, first the Chechens did essentially just what Yeltsin advocated when he was battling for the post of chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1990: they took as much sovereignty as they wanted. The second act of the prologue to the Chechen tragedy was when Yeltsin brought air force general Dzhokhar Dudaev to power in Chechnya. The last act was the transfer to Chechnya of a large part of the gigantic Soviet army arsenal located on its territory.
There are many versions of how the war in Chechnya began. The standard one points to Chechnya’s quest for independence and acquisition of sovereignty.18 Among the reasons for the First Chechen War that deserve to be considered are the so-called oil factor, the supposed financial machinations of Russian and Chechen bureaucrats in which someone ditched or dumped somebody else, and even “the need to restore the army’s fighting spirit after Afghanistan.”19
Obviously, one should not overlook the purely political elements. President Yeltsin, who was seriously ill, had become unpopular. The events of October 1993—the clash between Yeltsin and the Russian parliament—clearly demonstrated the shakiness of his rule. Its end would have brought catastrophe down upon his closest associates (including what Yeltsin himself referred to as his “family”) and the corrupt members of his government. The war in Chechnya might have been devised as a means of strengthening Yeltsin’s power, perhaps as an excuse for introducing a state of emergency, for gradually extending it to other parts of the country, and postponing the 1996 presidential election. One should not forget that war is a lucrative business, especially when it is fought on one’s own territory, and consequently entails rebuilding what was destroyed or its equivalent.
The attempt by the Russian special services to overthrow Dzhokhar Dudaev in October–November 1994 failed. Russian minister of defense Pavel Grachev then promised to seize the Chechen capital, Grozny, quickly and without losses. With the “war party” ascendant in Moscow, in December the Kremlin launched a large-scale war on its own territory against its own citizens that led to the genocide of the Chechens, one of multiethnic Russia’s nationalities.
The results of the First Chechen War were tragic. Gen. Alexander Lebed estimated the number of dead as 80,000 to 100,000. Most of the victims were civilians. In the battle for Grozny alone (December 1994 to February 1995), 23,000 to 25,000 people died. Of these casualties, 18,700 were killed as a result of Russian bombing and artillery strikes.
An extremely complicated situation arose as a result of the First Chechen War. Russia itself seized Chechnya and categorically opposed its departure from the federation, but Chechnya could be retained as part of Russia only via large-scale reconstruction of the republic. In addition to Russia’s having insufficient resources, reconstruction failed because of thievery in both Moscow and Grozny. The goal of retaining Chechnya within Russia should have entailed according it either a special status or an undefined status within the Russian Federation such as was envisioned by the Khasavyurt Agreement.20
Considering Stalinist and other crimes against the freedom-loving republic, the second and more humanitarian option—namely, letting Chechnya go21—was unacceptable to the Kremlin both on ideological grounds and, above all, in order to prevent a chain reaction leading to the disintegration of Russia. However, maintaining the relations that developed after the end of the First Chechen War at the time actually facilitated the process of disintegration.
The third option, the one that eventually triumphed, if only nominally and temporarily, was isolating Chechnya within the boundaries of Russia and creating a kind of Chechen ghetto behind barbed wire. This decision was not implemented straight away because of its expense and the lack of the requisite means to do so.22
Public opinion on both sides of the conflict, decisively influenced by Moscow’s official propaganda, was extremely hostile.23 For a long time, law enforcement agencies “found” so-called Chechen imprints on every major terrorist act. Two derogatory terms were employed to designate the peoples inhabiting the Caucasus—namely, persons of Caucasian ethnicity, a phrase used in official documents even though there was no such ethnicity, and blacks (from the hair and eye color of a majority of the people from the Caucasus). The unspeakable cruelty of Russian troops both during and after military engagements inevitably incited hatred on the part of the Chechens.
The situation grew much worse after Vladimir Putin’s appointment as Russian prime minister on August 10, 1999, and President Yeltsin’s announcement that Putin was to be his successor. Two days earlier, Chechen fighters led by Shamil Basaev and Khattab had crossed the border into Dagestan and occupied four Dagestani settlements but were forced to return to Chechen territory. On September 4–6, the incursion into Dagestan was repeated. This served as the pretext for the beginning of Russian military actions against Chechnya, including the bombardment of Chechen territory.24
That same month, apartment houses were blown up in Moscow and Volgodonsk.25 The total number of victims of terrorist acts for just the period from August 31 to September 16, 1999, was more than 530 persons, of whom 292 were killed.26 Thus began the Second Chechen War, which the Kremlin hypocritically referred to as an antiterrorist operation.27
Chechnya became an extremely large irritant in relations between Russia and Georgia. Among other reasons it was because of the situation in the Pankisi Gorge, a part of Georgia that was not controlled by Tbilisi and that, according to Moscow, provided a sanctuary for Chechen fighters.
The situation in Dagestan, neighboring Chechnya on the east, was extremely unstable. The complicated situation was brought about by the weakness of the authorities as well as interethnic contradictions, criminal depredations, especially along the border with Chechnya, and a host of other reasons.
Things were also difficult in the Stavropol territory of southern Russia, where the sociopolitical situation was greatly complicated by its proximity to the Chechen Republic from whose territory there were constant incursions by Chechen fighters who ran off with cattle and matériel. The situation along the “border” with Chechnya periodically heated up. Not infrequently there were instances of discrimination on the basis of nationality in the Krasnodar territory. Local authorities took decisions aimed at depriving national minorities of the right to education and access to medical care as well as depriving them of the right to possess residence permits, to register marriages, and so forth.
The Kremlin’s Chechen folly reflected the mentality of the Russian authorities who were panic-stricken in the face of Islam. Yeltsin’s verdict was simple: cut off Islamic fundamentalism. In early May 1997 I received a directive from the highest level to draft appropriate “measures and proposals.” Not without difficulty, I succeeded in transforming the assignment by drafting a document compatible with freedom of religion. Nothing came of it, however, despite the fact that Yeltsin liked the draft.
The Chechen War, in tandem with the Russian leadership’s gross errors and miscalculations regarding interreligious and nationality policy, exacerbated the problem of Islam. As often happened, the authorities in Moscow confused cause with effect and attempted to present the spread of “several tendencies of Islam” as the prime reason for many of the problems in Russia. They concocted a thesis claiming that the Islamic factor had been turned into a weapon in the struggle for spheres of influence among the leading world powers and that Islamic extremism was deliberately being channeled into Russia so that it would be concentrated there and not spread to the United States and Western Europe. In other words, the Americans and the West Europeans were supposedly seeking to turn Islamic extremism against Russia to protect themselves from it.
Meanwhile, it was true that certain forces in Russia made use of the revival of Islam in Russia as an effective means of political struggle. The nationalist leaders of several member republics of the Russian Federation played the card of political extremism rallying under the banner of Islam. Given the Kremlin’s persistent stereotype of the Caucasus as a “single entity,” it claimed that all the contiguous states and territories would be affected. The authorities were extremely fearful that the developing sociopolitical and economic situation would facilitate the spread of pan-Islamism, an aggressive form of Islamic fundamentalism, including Wahhabism, which Moscow accused of being responsible for all the troubles.28 Moscow blamed the spread of Wahhabism in the republics of the North Caucasus and other regions of Russia for the flourishing of radical nationalist organizations and the exacerbation of interethnic and interreligious relations. Given the spread of Islam in the central districts of Russia, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Kalmykia, and the flourishing of Islam in Siberia and the Far East, the Kremlin was frightened that Russia might break up along the “arc of Islam.”
In this way the Kremlin identified an enemy in the form of Islam. Next came the reflex action of looking for guilty parties to blame for what in reality were self-inflicted disasters. Another tradition of Russian “political culture” also surfaced—the habit of viewing everything that differed from the familiar (and for the Kremlin that meant only Russian Orthodoxy) as alien or, worse than alien, actually hostile.
While noting that the “Islamic problem,” as the Kremlin perceived it, was an artificial construct, one must acknowledge that, in part, it had an objective dimension largely rooted in Soviet history. By assisting the “revolutionary,” “friendly,” and “anti-imperialist” Islamists, as well as Islamist terrorist regimes and organizations in the struggle against “world imperialism”; by sustaining them financially; and by training their fighters on its own territory, the USSR had flung a boomerang that was bound to return upon itself. Likewise, the Soviet Union’s aggression against Afghanistan was repaid with the antagonism of part of the Islamic world. The de facto prohibition of Islam in the USSR provoked the creation of underground, informal Muslim structures, which, in a number of cases, became radicalized.
After the end of the Soviet dictatorship, Islam firmly occupied second place among religions in Russia in terms of its number of adherents and its geographical range.29 In addition to its religious and ideological role, Islam provided a national-religious identity for part of the population, a banner for national liberation struggles, and a means of contending for power in the traditionally Islamic, newly independent states and nationalities in other countries of the CIS as well as in Russia itself.
At this time a majority of the population in Dagestan was religious; 60 percent held deep religious convictions and actively propagated Islam. The number of followers of Wahhabism swelled. According to Moscow, a characteristic of the Dagestani Wahhabites is their manifest hatred of Russia and of adherents of what had been the traditional sect of Islam in Dagestan who were seen as “accomplices of Moscow.” Moscow also said that the Wahhabites maintained close relations with the Chechen rebels. The siloviki and their supporters claimed that the ultimate goal of the radically inclined leaders of the Wahhabites was to transform Dagestan into an Islamic state with the help of powerful external support and the Chechens.
The authorities viewed the spread of Wahhabism in the republics of the North Caucasus and other regions of Russia as a serious threat that might significantly spur the activity of national radical organizations and further exacerbate interethnic and interreligious relations. Characteristically, Moscow blamed the spread of Islamic extremism in Russia on the Arab countries, the United States, and Western Europe, all of which supposedly were striving to confine Islamic extremism to Russia, thereby weakening Russia and facilitating its “guided disintegration.” In this connection, Russia’s own mistakes and miscalculations were either minimized or entirely ignored.
The Arctic region, which, in addition to the sea waters, includes wide swathes of territory on the mainland and the islands of the northern Arctic Ocean totaling more than 1.16 million square miles, is one of the richest and most vulnerable parts of Russia. To illustrate the significance of the Arctic territories for Russia, it is enough to point out that in 1996 they were responsible for 11 percent of the national income and 22 percent of its exports while containing only 1 percent of the population.
However, the government’s life support system and supply of goods and provisions that previously existed were destroyed and a new system not put in its place. All kinds of expeditions and scientific activity were sharply curtailed. State support was withdrawn from the fleet of atomic-powered icebreakers and the infrastructure of the Northern Sea Route. The result was that by the year 2000, the society and economy of the Arctic, eastern Siberia, and the Far East were in crisis. An entire economic system was destroyed, and a mass exodus of qualified specialists occurred. Many enterprises were shut down. In most regions in the north, the construction industry virtually collapsed. In many cases transportation costs constituted at least half the price of products. The peoples of the north, each of the many numerically small ethnicities, were in a particularly disastrous situation. In several regions there was a very real danger of an ecological catastrophe.
The uncontrolled outflow of people, specialists above all, from the Arctic to the central regions of Russia triggered by the closure of enterprises and airports and the disbandment of military units led to the destruction of the existing infrastructure, the growth of social tensions, and the upsurge of criminality in the region. With enterprises shuttered, including factories in “one-factory” towns, entire population centers were liquidated. In the period starting from 1991, the population of the Far North District and administratively equivalent localities shrunk by more than a million persons. Because savings had been devalued and moving costs were high, pensioners, invalids, and those who had become unemployed by force of circumstances were unable to leave and turned into virtual hostages. More than 200,000 persons wanted to leave in the year 2000. Meanwhile, an estimated 380 settlements housing more than 200,000 persons were to be closed by the end of 2000.
Moscow’s impotence impelled the leaders of several republics within the Russian Federation to seek to resolve the old and new economic and sociopolitical problems more autonomously and independently of the center. They also sought to play a more significant role in both domestic and international affairs in their own regions.
Meanwhile, there was an increase in the activity of various ethnic groups and popular movements of Far Northern peoples as they formulated ideas of national and regional separatism and posited the goal of achieving sovereignty within Russia. The sharpest interethnic friction occurred in several districts of the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic, particularly in the Allaikhovskii District, where the leaders of the Evenki community began dividing up the property of state farms and demanded that the best arable land and pasture be allotted to the native inhabitants. The actions of the local authorities in Yakutia aimed at limiting and restricting the rights of various segments of the population led to a significant exodus of the Russian-speaking population of the region. Starting in 1992, every year on average more than 2,000 persons left the northern districts of Yakutia.
This trend fundamentally changed the ethnic composition of most of the industrial centers of Russia’s Far North and was among the reasons for shuttering a number of major industrial enterprises. The human and intellectual potential of Russia’s northern regions suffered significantly, given the absence of a broad system of training and retraining specialists.
Preserving the numerically small indigenous peoples of the Far North remained a pressing problem. Industrial expansion in several northern regions made the survival of these peoples problematic. The broad-scale development of natural resources in Russia’s northern territories drastically undermined the foundations of the traditional economy, as large areas of reindeer pasture and hunting grounds (more than 49.4 million acres) were declared off-limits and many rivers were ruined. The widespread reduction of their natural habitat and degradation of the conditions needed to pursue their traditional economic activities and their way of life could lead to the disappearance of individual tribes.
It was against this background that the Chinese expansion referred to earlier caused anxieties in Moscow. In long-range perspective, Moscow feared the danger of China’s claims to 579,000 square miles of the Far East and Siberia that it considered historically its own.
The dissolution of the USSR highlighted the problem of the Kaliningrad region, which is located between Poland and Lithuania on the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea and separated from the rest of Russia. It had a population of 941,000 according to the 2010 census and an area of 5,800 square miles, or around the size of Connecticut. The region’s special significance derives from its location in the center of Europe as part of the Baltic Sea zone and its proximity to economically and militarily powerful European countries. The Kaliningrad region possesses an advantageous geographical position at the intersection of the main freight routes from the East to the Northwest. The transportation corridors that cross the region link Russia with Western Europe via the shortest route. Moreover, Kaliningrad contains Russia’s only year-round, ice-free port complex on the Baltic Sea.
From Moscow’s perspective the military-strategic significance of the Kaliningrad region was much greater than its economic importance since it vastly expanded Russia’s ability to protect its western borders from the sea and anchored Russia’s naval presence on the Baltic. The loss of the Kaliningrad region as a military-strategic zone, an economic center, and an important transportation hub would inevitably signify Russia’s retreat from the Baltic Sea.
From the establishment of the Kaliningrad region in 1946 on part of the former East Prussia, it was basically used for military purposes. Therefore, the regional economy was wholly financed from the state budget and oriented toward imported raw materials. After the breakup of the USSR, the region was placed in an extremely difficult position because of the virtually complete loss of its productive enterprises’ ties with Russian enterprises. Its contacts with suppliers of raw materials and goods were significantly weakened. On top of this, a sharp decrease in military orders occurred, there was a lack of funds to convert production facilities to civilian purposes, and state support for the fishing industry was cut off. The rupture of traditional economic relations with the noncontiguous regions of the former USSR led to a deeper recession in the region’s economy than that in Russia overall and seriously impacted social stability.
Realizing that it was impossible to provide broad-scale financial assistance to the Kaliningrad region, Moscow decided to establish a free economic zone in its territory. At the same time, the regional administration received supplementary authority to manage regional development. These steps contributed to the criminalization of the local organs of power. Moreover, regional authorities were granted additional financial powers, in particular the right to retain in the local budget a higher share of tax revenues than regions in central Russia, of hard currency receipts from the sale of regional export quotas, of Ministry of Finance tax credits, and of receipts from the sale of auctioned quotas for imported goods within the framework of the federal earmark program.
After the breakup of the USSR, the Kaliningrad region changed from an exporter of agricultural products to a major importer, importing up to 85 percent of its foodstuffs. The grain harvest shrank by more than 50 percent, 90 percent of potatoes and vegetables were grown by the local population, the machine and tractor stations decreased by a factor of three, and by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were obsolete. Experts calculated that in order to provide the minimal consumption needs of the regional population, $30 million worth of foodstuffs had to be imported annually.
Real income and consumer buying power decreased, and the percentage of persons with incomes below subsistence level increased. According to the State Committee for Statistics, 42 percent of the population lived below the poverty level in 1999. According to a sociological survey conducted on March 13–15, 2000, 66.6 percent of respondents rated their material position as “poor.” At the end of 1999, the unemployment rate in the Kaliningrad region was 13.8 percent of the working population, significantly higher than in Russia overall. If one included hidden unemployment, then the figure would be much higher. The death rate regularly exceeded the birth rate. In 1998 it was 163 percent; in 1999 it was 180 percent (13,617 deaths versus 7,549 births). The problems of youths were exacerbated by an epidemic of drug abuse, the spread of AIDS, and an ever-increasing rate of prostitution. This list far from exhausts the problems in this area.
Thus, the Kaliningrad region was in a terrible state. Moscow did virtually nothing to improve the situation. Kaliningrad’s privileged economic status was revoked for good reason. Instead of serving as an instrument for regional economic development, it had turned into a powerful stimulus for the growth of corruption and organized crime. The practically coerced change of governors Moscow initiated did not improve things. This was not surprising, since Moscow paid little heed to the problems in the region, and when issues were brought to its attention, it limited itself (in line with Soviet tradition) to words and administrative measures.
Russia’s position regarding numerous West European proposals to help it solve the problem of the Kaliningrad region was extremely irrational. Moscow said it was a domestic problem of the Russian Federation and would be dealt with by itself. Meanwhile, the Kaliningrad region continued to collapse.
Naturally, given certain conditions, Russia will manage to preserve its territorial integrity. Yet hypothetical disintegration scenarios could assume many forms. The following are the most plausible.
The first candidate for independence from Russia is Chechnya, followed by other republics of the North Caucasus. In this case, one cannot exclude the possibility that the country will break up along the line of the “Islamic arc.”
There is a considerable chance the Kaliningrad region may secede from Russia, especially since a change toward greater cooperation with the European Union would confer significant economic and social benefits.
Another candidate for secession from Russia is St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. This is the most self-sufficient entity with a developed economy, science, education, and culture, and it possesses an outlet on the Baltic Sea and a port infrastructure.
Although not viable under current conditions, the trans-Ural region, well-endowed with useful mineral and other natural resources, given the right sort of investments might objectively be interested in changing its status. One cannot predict what course events may take here, given the possible competition of potential investors in the region, the Chinese factor, and many other circumstances.
The transfer of the Northern Territories (the Kuril Islands) to Japan is only a matter of time; such is the historical and political logic.
If the Kremlin continues to place its bets on the “vertical of power” structure rather than on resolving real problems, Russia may wind up not only without the North Caucasus, Siberia, and the Far East but quite possibly without part of its European territory.
Thus, in the year 2000, Russia approached an imminent national catastrophe. The federal authorities had virtually lost all control over the situation.
Something else, however, was troubling the deities in Moscow: what would happen to them personally as a result of Yeltsin’s inevitable departure from power? The coming change of president in accordance with the Constitution was dubbed “the year 2000 problem.”
The question of who would be the future power holders greatly exacerbated the financial and political crisis of 1998. In this context it needs to be emphasized that—contrary to the assertions of the Russian authorities as well as of widely regarded opinion makers—political, not economic, reasons were the foundation of the negative phenomena occurring in Russia. The economic difficulties that the country was experiencing were among the consequences of Russia’s failure since 1992 to devise genuine foreign and domestic policies. As a result, the traditional Soviet dualism—that is, the disparity between political declarations and actual goals and plans—continued to prevail and was rife with unforeseeable consequences. Overall, the desire of the executive authorities to guarantee their own personal security played the decisive role in determining their actions in the course of events.
The upcoming election campaign of the “party of power” was significantly complicated by the fact that prior to Vladimir Putin’s launching the Second Chechen War, there were no favored figures within the president’s retinue or in high government posts. The “patriotic” path breaker in the wider arena of Russian politics was the KGB protégé Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder of the grossly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party. Putin, who was much more cunning, followed the path blazed by the flamboyant Zhirinovsky and Gen. Alexander Lebed, who had run for president in 1996. Putin himself practically gushed an ostentatious form of “patriotism.”
The victory in the 1999 parliamentary elections of a newborn movement whose only slogan was unconditional support for Vladimir Putin, and his victory in the presidential election of 2000, sounded the death knell of democracy. The persons who came to power were irreconcilable enemies of democracy, human rights, and the application of humane principles to Russia’s domestic and foreign policies.
Besieged, badly managed fortresses will fall, sometimes from the unwise expenditure of resources and from epidemics, filth, and other problems brought about by the siege. This can occur even if the siege exists only in the minds of the powers that be. Many of Russia’s problems were occasioned precisely by this imaginary siege. The country’s resources were wasted on senseless military pseudo reforms and on the appearance of supporting national security (a component of which was a “financial stability” that led to collapse) as viewed by the authorities rather than on constructing a space within the country in which one could live normally.
It is difficult to imagine another country where the leaders treated their people, their own earth, and their own natural wealth in such a barbarous fashion.
The destruction of a people is senseless and pointless as well as an extremely rare event in world history. It is usually associated with tyrants such as Adolf Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot. What occurred first in the USSR and then in Russia is so senseless and so protracted that it constitutes one of the greatest puzzles in history. Russia’s tragedy reflects the inherently odious features of Russian power, power that is burdened by the vices of stunted intellectual and moral development and is confident of its absoluteness and its impunity. The crimes that brought Russia to the blind alley in which it found itself in the year 2000 were committed by very different kinds of persons, from orthodox communists to the quasi-democrats under the early Yeltsin. These leaders were responsible for Russia’s degradation at the time Boris Yeltsin betrayed democracy by handing the reins of power to his appointed successor, Vladimir Putin.