The Soviet Union had ended not with a bang but with a whimper. Its communist party, its ideology, its flag and state anthem and its October Revolution disappeared. All this had occurred with extraordinary abruptness. Nobody, not even those at the apex of public power, had had a chance to ponder the general significance of the events in all their momentousness.
Politics remained volatile; a premium was still placed upon the swift implementation of fundamental reforms. But in the person of Yeltsin, Russia had a leader who had always been decisive. After the Soviet Union’s dismantlement, moreover, he had an incentive to display this characteristic. Having played a prominent part in the demise of the old order, he had to show that he could create a better economy and society. His room for choice in policies was at its greatest in his first few months of unrivalled power when his popularity was at its peak. The first half of 1992 was crucial for his prospects. Two main options were discussed by him and his advisers. The first was for him to call fresh elections so as to obtain an unequivocal political mandate for economic reform; the second was to proceed with economic reform in expectation of an eventual approval at elections to be held later.
Yeltsin selected the second alternative; and on 2 January 1992 he permitted Gaidar, his First Deputy Prime Minister, to introduce free-market prices for most goods in the shops of the Russian Federation. Thus the government gave up its right to fix prices for consumers. It was a big change of stance. Gaidar indicated that ‘price liberalization’ would be just the first of a series of reforms which would include measures to balance the budget, eliminate state subsidies and privatize virtually the whole economy. A transformation of industry, agriculture, commerce and finance was heralded.
It is easy to see why Yeltsin selected the second option. Imperious and impulsive, he had an aversion to Gorbachëv’s procrastinations; he must also have sensed that the political, economic and national élites at the centre and in the localities might retain a capacity to distort the results of any election he might at that stage have ordained. To Yeltsin, economic reform by presidential decree appeared the surer way to bring about the basic reform he required in the Russian economy. The choice between the two options was not a straightforward one; but Yeltsin’s decision to avoid the ballot-box probably caused more problems for him than it solved. It inclined him to use peremptory methods of governance which previously he had castigated. It also compelled him to operate alongside a Russian Supreme Soviet which had been elected in 1990 and whose majority was constituted by persons who had little sympathy with his project to create a full market economy.
Yeltsin and Gaidar made things worse for themselves by refusing to explain in any detail how they would fulfil their purposes. They reasoned among themselves that citizens were fed up with the publication of economic programmes. Yet Gaidar’s reticence induced widespread suspicion of the government. As prices rose by 245 per cent in January 1992,1 suspicion gave way to fear. Russians worried that Gaidar’s ‘shock therapy’ would lead to mass impoverishment. Moreover, they had been brought up to be proud of the USSR’s material and social achievements and its status as a superpower. They were disorientated and humbled by the USSR’s disintegration. Russians had suddenly ceased to be Soviet citizens, becoming citizens of whatever new state they lived in; and their bafflement was such that when they spoke about their country it was seldom clear whether they were referring to Russia or the entire former Soviet Union.
Gaidar appeared on television to offer reassurance to everyone; but his lecturely style and abstract jargon did not go down well. Nor did viewers forget that earlier in his career he had been an assistant editor of the Marxist-Leninist journal Kommunist. Gaidar had never experienced material want; on the contrary, he had belonged to the Soviet central nomenklatura. Even his age – he was only thirty-five years old – was counted against him: it was thought that he knew too little about life.
Yeltsin knew of Gaidar’s unappealing image, and endeavoured to show that the government truly understood the popular unease. Aided by his speech-writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, he used words with discrimination. He ceased to refer to the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic as such; instead he usually called it the Russian Federation or simply Russia. At the same time he strove to encourage inter-ethnic harmony. He addressed his fellow citizens not as russkie (ethnic Russians) but as rossiyane, which referred to the entire population of the Russian Federation regardless of nationality.2 While denouncing the destructiveness of seven decades of ‘communist experiment’, he did not criticize Lenin, Marxism-Leninism or the USSR by name in the year after the abortive August coup. Evidently Yeltsin wanted to avoid offending the many citizens of the Russian Federation who were not convinced that everything that had happened since 1991, or even since 1985, had been for the better.
The Russian President eschewed the word ‘capitalism’ and spoke in favour of a ‘market economy’.3 It would also have been impolitic for Yeltsin to recognize that the USA and her allies had won a victory over Russia: he refrained from mentioning ‘the West’ as such; his emphasis fell not on the East-West relationship but on Russia’s new opportunities to join ‘the civilized world’.4
Yeltsin towered above his team of ministers in experience. This was inevitable. The most illustrious ex-dissenters were unavailable. Sakharov was dead. Solzhenitsyn insisted on finishing his sequence of novels on the Russian revolutionary period before he would return home. Roy Medvedev’s reputation had been ruined by his role as adviser to Lukyanov, a collaborator of the putschists. In any case, the veteran dissenters – including the less prominent ones – adapted poorly to open politics: their personalities were more suited to criticizing institutions than to creating them. Yeltsin retained some of Gorbachëv’s more radical supporters. After the August coup, with Yeltsin’s encouragement, Gorbachëv had brought back Shevardnadze as Soviet Foreign Minister and Bakatin as chairman of the KGB, and these two stayed on with Yeltsin for a while. But Shevardnadze went off to Georgia in 1992 to become its President, and Bakatin resigned after the dissolution of the USSR.5
Necessarily the team around Yeltsin and Gaidar consisted of obscure adherents: Gennadi Burbulis, Anatoli Chubais, Andrei Kozyrev, Oleg Lobov, Alexander Shokhin, Sergei Shakhrai and Yuri Skokov. Most of them were in their thirties and forties, and few expected to hold power for long. Only Vice-President Rutskoi and the Speaker in the Russian Supreme Soviet Khasbulatov had previously held influential posts. Rutskoi was contemptuous of the youthful ministers, calling them ‘young boys in pink shorts and yellow boots’.6
But the young boys shared Yeltsin’s enthusiasm to effect change. The fact that they assumed that their tenure of office was temporary made them determined to make a brisk, ineradicable impact. What they lacked in experience they made up for in zeal. Yeltsin was raring to give them their opportunity. Where Gorbachëv had feared to tread, Yeltsin would boldly go. Having seized the reins of Great Russia’s coach and horses, he resolved to drive headlong along a bumpy path. Yeltsin saw himself as the twentieth-century Peter the Great, tsar and reformer.7 Those who knew their eighteenth-century history trembled at the comparison. Peter the Great had pummelled his country into the ground in consequence of his dream to turn Russia into a European power and society. Would Yeltsin do the same in pursuit of an economic transformation approved by the International Monetary Fund?
Yeltsin and his cabinet knew that the old communist order had not entirely disappeared with the USSR’s abolition. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had vanished; Marxism-Leninism and the October Revolution were discredited. But much else survived from the Soviet period. The Russian Supreme Soviet contained a large rump which hated Yeltsin. The local political and economic élites, too, operated autonomously of Moscow; they worked with criminal gangs to promote their common interests as the market economy began to be installed. In the internal non-Russian republics of the RSFSR the leaderships talked up nationalist themes and gained local support.
The methods of communism were used by Yeltsin to eradicate traces of the communist epoch. He rarely bothered with the sanction of the Supreme Soviet, and he visited it even more rarely. He confined deliberations on policy to a small circle of associates. These included not only Gaidar and his bright fellow ministers but also his bodyguard chief Alexander Korzhakov (who was his favourite drinking mate after a day’s work). He sacked personnel whenever and wherever his policies were not being obeyed. In provinces where his enemies still ruled he introduced his own appointees to bring localities over to his side. He called them variously his ‘plenipotentiaries’, ‘representatives’, ‘prefects’ and – eventually – ‘governors’. These appointees were empowered to enforce his will in their respective provinces. In the guise of a President, Yeltsin was ruling like a General Secretary – and indeed with less deference to ‘collective leadership’!8
To his relief, price liberalization did not lead to riots on the streets. The cost of living rose; but initially most people had sufficient savings to cope: years of not being able to buy things in Soviet shops meant that personal savings kept in banks were still large. Although Yeltsin’s popularity had peaked in October 1991,9 there was no serious rival to him for leadership of the country. He intended to make full use of his large latitude for the strategic reorientation of the economy. Nor did the industrial and agricultural directors object strongly to his proposals. For they quickly perceived that the liberalization of prices would give them a wonderful chance to increase enterprise profits and, more importantly, their personal incomes. Politicians from the Soviet nomenklatura, furthermore, had long been positioning themselves to take advantage of the business opportunities that were becoming available.10
Confidently Yeltsin and Gaidar proceeded to further stages of economic reform. The two most urgent, in their estimation, were the privatization of enterprises and the stabilization of the currency. The first of these was to be privatization. Its overseer was to be Anatoli Chubais, who was Chairman of the State Committee for the Management of State Property. His essential task was to put himself out of a job by transferring state enterprises to the private sector.
Chubais published projects on the need to turn factories, mines and kolkhozes into independent companies, and seemed to be about to facilitate the development of ‘popular capitalism’. But the crucial question remained: who was to own the companies? In June 1992, Chubais introduced a system of ‘vouchers’, which would be available to the value of 10,000 roubles per citizen and which could be invested in the new companies at the time of their creation. He also enabled those employed by any particular company, whether they were workers or managers, to buy up to twenty-five per cent of the shares put on the market; and further privileges would be granted to them if they should wish to take a majority stake in the company. But Chubais’s success was limited. At a time of rapid inflation, 10,000 roubles was a minuscule grant to individual citizens; and the facilitation of internal enterprise buy-outs virtually guaranteed that managers could assume complete authority over their companies; for very few workers were in a mood to struggle with their managers: strikes were small scale and few.11
Chubais and Gaidar had ceded ground because the economic and social forces ranged against the government were too strong. The administrative élite of the Soviet period remained in charge of factories, kolkhozes, shops and offices. In particular, twenty-two per cent of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies had come from the highest echelons of party and governmental agencies of the USSR; thirty-six per cent were officials of a middling level; and twenty-one per cent were drawn from local political and economic management.12 Although about a quarter of deputies in early 1992 were committed to basic reforms, there was a drift into the embrace of the thirteen anti-reformist caucuses in the Russian Supreme Soviet in the course of the year.
Outside the Congress, furthermore, several dozens of parties had recently been formed. Lobbying organizations emerged to increase the pressure on the government. Trade unions of workers had little influence. Only the miners caused trepidation to ministers – and even miners did not bring them to heel. But directors of energy, manufacturing and agricultural companies were more effective in pressurizing Yeltsin. Their lobbyists were men who had walked the corridors of power before the end of the USSR. Most famous of them was Arkadi Volsky, who headed the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Another was Viktor Chernomyrdin, chairman of the vast state-owned gas company known as Gazprom. Even more remarkable was the decision of the Agrarian Union to choose Vasili Starodubtsev as their leader despite his having been imprisoned for belonging to the State Committee of the Emergency Situation in August 1991. Throughout the first six months of 1992 such lobbyists raised the spectre of economic collapse if existing enterprises were allowed to go to the wall.
They proved willing to bargain with Chubais. Their basic demand was that if the government was going to insist on the de-nationalization of companies, this should be done without ending state subsidies and without threatening the immediate interests of the directors or workers. It was only when Chubais gave way on this that the Supreme Soviet ratified his programme of privatization on 11 June. This was the last success of the radical economic reformers for a year.13 They knew that they had made compromises. But their rationale was that they had introduced enough capitalism to ensure that the members of the old Soviet nomenklatura would not permanently be able to shield themselves from the pressures of economic competition.14 Market relationships, they trusted, would eventually entail that the previous cosy relationships within whole sectors of industry, agriculture, finance, transport and trade would break down. Thus a revived Russian capitalism would consign the communist order to oblivion.
Rutskoi and Khasbulatov thought otherwise and aimed to continue stymieing Chubais’s programme. From midsummer 1992, both cast themselves in the semi-open role of opponents of Yeltsin. Usually they took care to criticize him by castigating Gaidar. But it was primarily Yeltsin whom they sought to harm.
Yeltsin gave ground to the preferences of Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. In May he had promoted Chernomyrdin, Gazprom’s chairman, to the post of Energy Minister. In July Yeltsin appointed Viktor Gerashchenko as head of the Central Bank of Russia. Whereas Gaidar wanted to decelerate inflation by restricting the printing of paper roubles, Gerashchenko expanded the credit facilities of the great companies. Inflation accelerated. Yet the public heaped the blame not on Gerashchenko but on Gaidar. In June Yeltsin had made him Acting Prime Minister in order to stress that economic reforms would somehow continue. But vehement hostility to Gaidar remained in the Russian Supreme Soviet, which rejected Yeltsin’s subsequent recommendation that Gaidar should be promoted to the post of Prime Minister. In December, Yeltsin yielded to the Supreme Soviet and instead nominated Chernomyrdin to the premiership. On 5 January 1993 Chernomyrdin introduced a limit on the rates of profit on several goods – and some of these goods also had governmental price controls applied to them. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were delighted.
They had plentiful reason to think that Yeltsin had been given a shock that would permanently deter him. Disenchantment with him was spreading throughout society in 1992. Food production was only nine per cent down on the previous year;15 but the funds of the government were so depleted that most kolkhozes were unpaid for their deliveries to the state purchasing agencies.16 Industrial production continued to fall. Output in the same year was down by eighteen per cent on 1991.17 Inflation was 245 per cent in January.18 Whereas kolkhozniki could survive by means of their private plots and sales of their surplus products at the urban markets, workers and office employees were hard pressed unless they had nearby dachas where they could grow potatoes and vegetables. Some folk simply cut out a patch of land on the outskirts of towns to cultivate produce or keep rabbits, pigs or even cows.
Others moonlighted from their jobs, selling cigarettes at Metro stations. Factories, mines and offices no longer asserted work-discipline: like the kolkhozes, they frequently lacked funds to pay their workers; and, being unable to maintain regular production, they no longer needed everyone to be on site in working hours. Pensioners eked out a living similarly. Many of them queued for hours in shops to buy basic products and to sell them on the pavement at double the price to busy passers-by.
The economy was reverting to ancient techniques of barter. Foreigners were astounded by the adaptiveness of ordinary Russians; but this was because they had taken too much account of official Soviet propaganda. Petty thefts from enterprises had been an established way of life in the USSR: grocery-shop counter staff kept back the best sausages; bookshop salespeople secreted the most sensational books; factory workers went home with spanners and screwdrivers. Such prized acquisitions could be traded among friends. Capitalism had not existed in the Soviet Union since the 1920s; but personal commerce had never been eliminated. Under Yeltsin, the attempt was no longer made to harass those who tried, legally or even illegally, to gain a few little luxuries in an economy where such luxuries were in constant deficit. The militia might occasionally clear the streets of pedlars, but this was usually in order to receive the bribes that were their method of surviving on inadequate wages.
Such trading was one thing; it was much harder to kick-start a market economy into motion on a larger scale. For most people, the replacement of communism with capitalism was most obviously manifested in the tin kiosks erected in all towns and cities. The goods they sold were a curious assortment: soft-drinks, alcohol, bracelets, watches, Bibles, pens and pornographic magazines. The kiosks also got hold of goods of domestic provenance which were in chronic under-supply such as razors, flowers and apples. At first there was a flood of imports, but Russian enterprises became active in production, often presenting their goods in fictitious foreign packaging (including allegedly non-Russian vodka). Prices were high, profits large.
And so popular disgruntlement grew even though the kiosks’ operations were helping to end the perennial shortage of products. Poverty of the most dreadful kind was widespread. Tent-settlements of the homeless sprang up even in Moscow. Beggars held out their hands in the rain and snow. Most of them were frail pensioners, orphans and military invalids. Without charitable donations from passers-by they faced starvation. The incidence of homelessness increased. Meanwhile everyone – not only the poor – suffered from the continuing degradation of the environment. In areas of heavy industry such as Chelyabinsk, the rise in respiratory and dermatological illnesses was alarming. Spent nuclear fuel was casually emitted into the White Sea. Not since the Second World War had so many citizens of Russia felt so lacking in care by the authorities. The old, the poor and the sick were the victims of the governmental economic programme.
Virtually everyone who had a job, however, kept it. The exceptions were the soldiers of the Soviet Army who were being brought back from the garrisons of Eastern Europe since 1990, and many were compelled to retire from service. Conditions were often dire for those who remained in the armed forces. The state construction of housing blocks had more or less ceased, and in the worst cases, public lavatories were requisitioned as military residences. Through 1992, too, contingents of the Soviet Army were divided among the newly-independent states of the CIS and a Russian Army was formed.
Russian Army contingents, however, were located not only in Russia but across the entire former Soviet Union, and uncertainty persisted as to what should be done with them. In Moscow, crowds gathered daily outside the Lenin Museum off Red Square protesting at the USSR’s dismemberment. Stalinists, Russian nationalists and monarchists mingled. There was even a man with a huge billboard offering all and sundry a cheap cure for AIDs. This congregation was menacing, but also a little ridiculous: its dottiness outdid its activism. But its members were nostalgic for the Soviet Union, for orderliness and for Russian pride and power that was echoed amidst the population of the Russian Federation. Naturally this feeling was strongest among ethnic Russians. They constituted eighty-two per cent of the Russian Federation,19 and many of them worried about the potential fate of relatives and friends now living in what were formally foreign countries.
They worried, too, about the situation in Russia. Not since the Second World War had life been so precarious. By the mid-1990s the life expectancy of Russian males had fallen to fifty-nine years and was still falling. Alcohol abuse was widespread. But most problems faced by most citizens were beyond their control: declining health care; the pollution and lack of industrial safety standards; and the fall in average family income. Even those people who had jobs were not always paid. Salary and wages arrears became a national scandal.
In other ways, too, life was precarious. As the criminal and governmental organizations got closer, the use of direct violence became commonplace. Several politicians and investigative journalists were assassinated. Entrepreneurs organized the ‘contract killings’ of their entrepreneurial rivals; and elderly tenants of apartments in central city locations were beaten up if they refused to move out when property companies wished to buy up their blocks. Criminality was pervasive in the development of the Russian market economy. Governmental officials at the centre and in the localities were routinely bribed. The police were utterly venal. Russian generals sold their equipment to the highest bidder, sometimes even to anti-Russian Chechen terrorists. Illicit exports of nuclear fuels and precious metals were made; the sea-ports of Estonia were especially useful for this purpose. Half the capital invested abroad by Russians had been transferred in contravention of Russian law. The new large-scale capitalists were not demonstrably keen to invest their profits in their own country.
And so Russia did not build up its economic strength as quickly as neighbouring Poland and Czechoslovakia; and its legal order was a shambles. Sergei Kovalëv, the Russian government’s human rights commissioner, was increasingly isolated from ministers. The Constitutional Court retained a degree of independence from the President, but generally the goal of a law-based state proved elusive. Everywhere there was uncertainty. Arbitrary rule was ubiquitous, both centrally and locally. Justice was unenforceable. The rouble depreciated on a daily basis. It appeared to Russian citizens that their entire way of existence was in flux. On the streets they were bargaining with American dollars. At their kiosks they were buying German cooking-oil, French chocolate and British alcohol. In their homes they were watching Mexican soap-operas and American religious evangelists. A world of experience was being turned upside-down.
Nor were the problems of Russians confined to the Russian Federation. Twenty-five million people of Russian ethnic background lived in other states of the former Soviet Union. In Tajikestan (as its government now spelled its name), the outbreak of armed inter-clan struggle amongst the Tajik majority induced practically all Russian families to flee for their lives back to Russia. In Uzbekistan the local thugs stole their cars and pushed them out of prominent jobs. In Estonia there was discussion of a citizenship law which would have deprived resident Russians of political rights. Large pockets of Russians lived in areas where such intimidation was not quite so dramatic: north-western Kazakhstan and eastern Ukraine were prime examples. But Russians indeed had a difficult time in several successor states in the former Soviet Union.
Yeltsin hinted that he might wish to expand Russia at the expense of the other former Soviet republics, but foreign criticism led him to withdraw the remark. Other politicians were not so restrained. Vladimir Zhirinovski, who had contested the 1991 Russian presidential elections against Yeltsin, regarded the land mass south to the Indian Ocean as the Russian sphere of influence. Widely suspected of being sheltered by the KGB, Zhirinovski’s Liberal-Democratic Party had been the first officially-registered non-communist political party under Gorbachëv; and Zhirinovski had supported the State Committee of the Emergency Situation in August 1991. His regret at the USSR’s collapse was shared by communist conservatives who obtained a decision from the Constitutional Court in November 1992 allowing them to re-found themselves under the name of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Its new leader Gennadi Zyuganov and his colleagues cut back its ideology of internationalism and atheism while maintaining a commitment to the memory of Lenin and even Stalin.
The threat to Yeltsin came from such self-styled patriots. Unequivocal advocacy of liberal political principles became rarer. Several prominent critics of authoritarianism fell into disrepute: the most notable example was Gavriil Popov, mayor of Moscow, who resigned in 1992 after accusations were made of financial fraud. Sergei Stankevich, who had seemed the embodiment of liberalism, became gloomier about the applicability of Western democratic traditions to Russia – and he too was charged with being engaged in fraudulent deals. The few leading surviving liberals such as Galina Starovoitova and Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner were voices crying in the wilderness.
Russian politics were gradually becoming more authoritarian; and Yeltsin’s shifting policy towards Russia’s internal republics reflected this general development despite the amicable signature of a Federal Treaty in March 1992. Chechnya had been a sore point since its president, Dzhokar Dudaev, had declared its independence in November 1991. Tatarstan, too, toyed with such a project. Several other republics – Bashkortostan, Buryatiya, Karelia, Komi, Sakha (which had previously been known as Yakutia) and Tuva – insisted that their local legislation should take precedence over laws and decrees introduced by Yeltsin. North Osetiya discussed the possibility of unification with South Osetiya despite the fact that South Osetiya belonged to already independent Georgia. Yeltsin also had to contend with regionalist assertiveness in the areas inhabited predominantly by Russians. In summer 1993 his own native region, Sverdlovsk, briefly declared itself the centre of a so-called Urals Republic.20
Yeltsin, the man who had urged the republics to assert their prerogatives against Gorbachëv, asserted the prerogatives of ‘the centre’. Taxes would be exacted. No separatist tendencies would be tolerated: the frontiers of ‘Russia’ were non-infringible. National, ethnic and regional aspirations were to be met exclusively within the framework of subordination to the Kremlin’s demands. A firm central authority needed to be reimposed if the disintegration of the Russian state was to be avoided during the implementation of economic reforms.
Furthermore, Yeltsin did not intend to go on giving way to the demands of Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and the Russian Supreme Soviet. He tried to shunt Vice-President Rutskoi out of harm’s way by assigning him agriculture as his legislative responsibility just as Gorbachëv had got rid of Ligachëvin 1989. There was less that could be done about Khasbulatov, the Supreme Soviet Speaker, who gave plenty of parliamentary time to deputies who opposed Gaidar’s monetarist economic objectives.21 But at least Yeltsin prevented Chernomyrdin, the Prime Minister since December 1992, from adopting policies still closer to those advocated by Khasbulatov. Yeltsin insisted that Chernomyrdin should accept Gaidar’s associate Boris Fëdorov as Minister of Finances; and the cabinet was compelled, at Yeltsin’s command, to adhere to Chubais’s programme of privatization. Yeltsin was biding his time until he could reinforce the campaign for a full market economy.
To outward appearances he was in trouble. His personal style of politics came in for persistent criticism from the newspapers and from the large number of political parties which had sprung up. For example, it was claimed that Russia was governed by a ‘Sverdlovsk Mafia’. Certainly Yeltsin was operating like a communist party boss appointing his clientele to high office; and he steadily awarded himself the very perks and privileges he had castigated before 1991. He was chauffeured around in a limousine and his wife no longer queued in the shops. He founded his own select tennis club: he seemed ever more secluded from other politicians in the country.22
Yet Yeltsin made a virtue of this by stressing that he would always ignore the brouhaha of party politics. Like Nicholas II and Lenin, he habitually denounced politicking. Yeltsin had backed Gaidar in 1991-2, but not to the point of forming a party with him. He was a politician apart and intended to remain so. Moreover, the great blocks of economic and social interests in Russia had not yet coalesced into a small number of political parties. The problem was no longer the existence of a single party but of too many parties. The distinctions between one party and another were not very clear; their programmes were wordy and obscure and the parties tended to be dominated by single leaders. The far-right Liberal-Democratic Party was described in its official handouts as ‘the Party of Zhirinovski’.23 Russia had not yet acquired a stable multi-party system, and this circumstance increased Yeltsin’s freedom of manoeuvre.
In March 1993 the Russian Supreme Soviet provided him with the kind of emergency in which he thrived by starting proceedings for his impeachment. Yeltsin struck back immediately, and held a referendum on his policies on 25 April 1993. Fifty-nine per cent of the popular turn-out expressed confidence in Yeltsin as president. Slightly less but still a majority – fifty-three per cent – approved of his economic policies.24 Yeltsin drew comfort from the result, but not without reservations; for fifty per cent of those who voted were in favour of early presidential elections: not an unambiguous pat on the back for the existing president. Yet in general terms he had gained a victory: his policies were supported despite the unpleasantness they were causing to so many people. Undoubtedly Yeltsin had outflanked the Supreme Soviet; he could now, with reinforced confidence, claim to be governing with the consent of voters.
The trouble was that he would still need to rule by decree in pursuit of a fuller programme of economic reform leading to a market economy. Furthermore, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were undaunted by the referendum. They still had strong support in a Supreme Soviet which could thwart the introduction of any such programme; they could also use the Supreme Soviet to prevent Yeltsin from calling early political elections. The result was a stalemate. Both sides agreed that Russia needed a period of firm rule; but there was irreconcilable disagreement about policies, and each side accused the other of bad faith in their negotiations.
Characteristically it was Yeltsin who took the initiative in breaking the stalemate. He plotted simply to disperse the Supreme Soviet, hold fresh parliamentary elections and propose a new Russian Constitution to the electorate. The plan was his own, and he approached his military and security ministers about it at the last moment in summer 1993. Chernomyrdin was on a trip to the USA when the discussions were held, and was told of them only upon his return.25 Yeltsin planned to lock the Supreme Soviet deputies out of the White House. But he had made no allowance for his plan being leaked to Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. At least this is the kinder interpretation of his activity; the other possibility is that he was out to provoke a violent showdown with his adversaries and therefore wanted them to know of his intentions.26 What is beyond dispute is that he flaunted his intention to resume the government’s campaign for a market economy; for on 18 September he pointedly brought back Yegor Gaidar as First Deputy Prime Minister.27
In any case, when on 21 September the President duly issued his Decree No. 1400, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were ready for him. Together with hundreds of Supreme Soviet deputies, they barricaded themselves inside the White House: they had arms, food and a determination to topple Yeltsin. Immediately Yeltsin, hero of the peaceful defence of the White House in August 1991, ordered his Defence Minister Grachëv to lay siege to the same building. In fact there continued to be much entering and leaving of the White House, and the White House’s defenders attracted a group of prominent enragés to their side, including Albert Makashov, Vladislav Achalov and Viktor Anpilov. Makashov and Achalov were army generals who had long wanted Yeltsin deposed by fair means or foul; Anpilov had founded a Russian Communist Workers’ Party which rejected Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation as being altogether too respectable. A violent outcome was not inevitable, but neither side was greatly predisposed towards reconciliation.
Rutskoi and Khasbulatov had become hostile to any compromise with Yeltsin and by now thought of themselves as protectors of parliament and legality; and indeed Yeltsin’s act of dispersal was a breach of the limits of his constitutional authority.28 Yeltsin for his part affirmed that the parliament had been elected in 1990 whereas he had put his policies to a referendum in April 1993. The country’s government, he added, should not be held permanently in abeyance because of the perpetual stalemate between president and parliament.
Doubtless most citizens of the Russian Federation would have preferred a compromise. But it was not to be. Rutskoi, cheered by the crowd of supporters outside the White House, thought that a popular majority was on his side; he declared himself Acting President and announced that Achalov was his Defence Minister: it did not occur to him that this was bound to throw a wavering Grachëv into the arms of Yeltsin. On Sunday, 3 October, Makashov’s armed units tried to storm the Ostankino TV station in Moscow, and Rutskoi recklessly urged the crowd outside the White House to march on the Kremlin. Yeltsin resorted to direct armed action. In the early hours of 4 October, he and Chernomyrdin pushed Grachëv into retaking the White House.29 A gaping hole was blasted in the building before Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and their supporters would concede defeat. They were arrested and detained in the same Sailors’ Rest Prison where several of the August 1991 plotters were still being held.
These ‘October Events’ were quickly exploited by Yeltsin, who sanctioned further steps towards the construction of a market economy. According to an optimistic calculation, average personal incomes had recovered by the end of 1994 to a level only ten per cent lower than they had held in 1987.30 Privatization of companies, under Chubais’s direction, proceeded apace. By the end of 1994 two fifths of the working population in the Russian Federation were employed by private enterprises.31 Shops, stalls and street-vendors began to offer a variety of consumer products not seen on open sale for over six decades. Even more remarkable was what happened in the bakeries. The need to secure cheap basic foodstuffs for the towns had troubled governments in the Russian capital throughout the century. The question of grain supplies had been the touchstone of every ruler’s claim to efficient governance. Yeltsin put his confidence on parade: in the last quarter of 1993 the remaining price controls on consumer products were lifted; in particular, bakeries were at last permitted to charge what they wanted for bread.
Not everything went his way. Gross domestic product in 1993 fell by twelve per cent over 1992.32 And although there was a rise in general comfort in Moscow, things were much more unpleasant in most other cities, towns and villages. To some extent, the fault did not lie with Yeltsin’s government. He had taken office with the expectation that the Western powers would provide finance to enable him to set up a ‘stabilization fund’. Such a fund would have been of important assistance during the period of transition to a market economy: it would have helped both to sustain social-security benefits and to make the rouble freely convertible into the world’s other currencies. The Western powers, however, were impressed more by the limitations than the achievements of the Russian economic reforms.
Such limitations were considerable. Massive state subsidy was retained for the gas and oil industries; the fact that Prime Minister Chernomyrdin remained on friendly terms with his former colleagues in Gazprom made it unlikely that the subsidy would quickly be withdrawn. The kolkhozes, despite having been turned into private economic organizations of one kind or another, were another sector which continued to receive easy credit from the government. Ministers also refrained from introducing the long-awaited legislation on land privatization. Furthermore, there were persistent constraints upon entrepreneurial activity. The government did precious little to impose the rule of law. Businessmen did not have the predictable framework for their operations which they craved. The powers given to local administrations to grant or withhold trading licences impeded the emergence of an untrammelled market economy.
Yet much had been achieved under the premiership of Chernomyrdin, and Yeltsin acted to maximize his political advantage after the ‘October Events’ by arranging national and local elections and a constitutional referendum. The arrest of his Vice-President and Speaker removed his two most awkward antagonists from contention, and seemed to leave him free to devise a strategy unimpeded by considerations of compromise with the Supreme Soviet. He aimed to endorse the newly-formed political party of Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s Choice (Vybor Rossii); his favoured option was to go for a more drastic economic reform than Chernomyrdin approved. But Yeltsin had reckoned without the widespread revulsion caused by his action on the White House. The ‘October Events’ were an unsolicited gift to those of his opponents who claimed that he was violent and unpredictable.
Yet despite its roughness and imperfections, this was the first Russian parliamentary election where nearly all political parties could operate freely. The problem was that Russia still had a super-fluity of parties, and it made sense for electoral pacts to be formed among them. Russia’s Choice led a block committed to rapid economic liberalization. The Yabloko (‘Apple’) block favoured a somewhat slackened pace of change and a retention of subsidies for state-owned industry. There were also three blocks which brought together communist sympathizers; these were led respectively by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation itself and by the Agrarian Party and Women of Russia. Others stayed outside all blocks. Chief among these was the Liberal-Democratic Party, whose leader Vladimir Zhirinovski insisted that only his organization was not somehow linked to ‘the authorities’.
A bias in Gaidar’s favour was recognizable in both the amount and the content of central TV reportage. This was important; for rallies were few, posters were flimsy and unplentiful, newspapers were delivered intermittently and the local networks of the parties were patchy. Citizens got most of their information from their television sets. Yeltsin left nothing to chance: he even issued an instruction that no political broadcast could be made on television that referred critically to the draft Constitution.
Seemingly he obtained most of what he wanted. His Constitution draft secured the necessary approval of the electorate, albeit by a narrow majority. This meant that Yeltsin had virtually unrestricted authority to appoint his prime minister, to prorogue parliament and rule by decree. The static warfare between parliament and president appeared unlikely to recur. The new parliament was to be renamed the Federal Assembly. This Assembly would be bi-cameral: the first chamber was the State Duma, the second was the Council of the Federation. And the Council of the Federation, being constituted by leading figures in the legislatures and administrations of the republics and provinces, would be heavily influenced by the President’s wishes and would act as a check upon the State Duma. Of the 450 seats in the State Duma, furthermore, half were elected by local constituencies and half by national party lists. This system was designed to limit the ability of local political élites, especially those of a communist orientation, to resist the brave capitalist boys of Tsar Boris.
But not everything went well for Yeltsin. There had been signs of problems during the electoral campaign. In particular, Gaidar, a stilted public speaker at the best of times, was out of his depth. His pudgy, shiny face had never endeared itself to most voters and his language was as incomprehensible as ever; and even Yeltsin, appealing at the last moment for a vote in favour of his proposed Constitution and his preferred parties, looked uncomfortable in his addresses to the public on television.
By contrast Zhirinovski, having conjured up funds to buy time on the broadcast media, showed panache. He was the only politician who could speak the language of the man and woman in the street. His vulgar aggressiveness appealed to those Russian citizens who had suffered from the effects of Yeltsin’s policies, especially the provincial industrial workers, the middle aged and the serving officers. Zhirinovski was not the only threat to Yeltsin’s plans. There was also Zyuganov and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Zyuganov was an unprepossessing speaker and a writer of some of the stodgiest prose in the Russian language. And yet like Zhirinovski, he exposed the political and economic dislocation that had occurred in 1991. His charisma was negligible; but his party stood well with those sections of the electorate which were discomfited by Russia’s separation from the former USSR, her decline in global power and her inability to guarantee general material well-being.
The surge of support for Yeltsin’s adversaries was hidden by the ban on the divulgence of public-opinion surveys in the last weeks of the electoral campaign. But the talk in Moscow on 15 December, when voters went to the polls in the mildly snowy weather, indicated that Yeltsin was in trouble. Although he won sanction for the Constitution, he was troubled by the other results. To his consternation, the State Duma contained sixty-four deputies from the Liberal-Democratic Party and 103 from the block led by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation under Gennadi Zyuganov. Russia’s Choice supplied only seventy deputies. There had been much unfair manipulation before voting day and probably there was downright fraud in the counting of the votes; but still the results were compiled with a sufficient degree of fairness for a snub to be delivered to Boris Yeltsin.