Yeltsin had adopted democratic ideas late in life and in a superficial fashion. The electorate’s unhappiness with the results of his reforms quickly induced him to go back to more authoritarian habits. Surveys of popular opinion in the early 1990s made depressing reading for him and his government. Citizens of the Russian Federation had started by welcoming political democracy and being willing for market economics to be given a try.1 As real average incomes went into steep decline, people resented the top stratum of an elite which had become rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of officialdom under communism. As Yeltsin’s popularity waned, so nostalgia grew for the safe and stable conditions remembered from the years before 1985. Brezhnev’s rule began to be recalled with enthusiasm.2 The disintegration of the USSR was regretted. People were bewildered by the denigration of military, economic and cultural achievements of the Soviet period. The floor was giving way beneath the Kremlin reformers, and Yeltsin found it difficult to introduce his policies without extensive consultation with the representative bodies – the State Duma and the Council of the Federation – which had been established by his own new Constitution.
He stuffed his successive governments with politicians who lacked qualms about this approach. The dogged Viktor Chernomyrdin was retained as Prime Minister, and Yeltsin never attempted to bring Gaidar back to power. Nevertheless Yeltsin treated Chernomyrdin pretty shabbily, frequently indicating dissatisfaction with the government’s performance; but it was not until March 1998 that he risked replacing him with an economic radical in Gaidar’s mould. This was Sergei Kirienko, still in his mid-thirties, from Nizhni Novgorod. The financial collapse of August 1998 did for Kirienko and the State Duma’s intransigence induced Yeltsin to appoint Yevgeni Primakov to the premiership. Primakov’s willingness to have dealings with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation irked Yeltsin. Equally annoying was the Prime Minister’s high standing in popular opinion. In May 1999 Primakov was dropped and his post was given to former Minister of the Interior Sergei Stepashin. But when Stepashin refused to keep the state anti-corruption investigators away from the Yeltsin family’s affairs, he too was removed from office. In August 1999 the obscure Vladimir Putin, ex-head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), became Prime Minister. It was a giddying carousel on the fairground of Russian governance.
Yeltsin’s hands at the controls grew ever shakier, apart from when it came to decisions about sacking his associates. He was resorting extravagantly to the comforts of the vodka bottle, and in Berlin in 1994 he drunkenly snatched a conductor’s baton and led an orchestra through a rendition of the folksong ‘Kalinka’. His drinking aggravated a chronic heart ailment. Suffering a collapse on a flight across the Atlantic in the same year, he was too ill to meet the Irish Taoiseach at Dublin airport.3 For the duration of the 1996 presidential electoral campaign he had to be pumped full of palliative medicines. Afterwards a quintuple cardiac bypass operation proved necessary.
Neither Yeltsin nor his governments retained much support in the country. Prime Minister Chernomyrdin formed a party, the archly named Our Home’s Russia, to contest the Duma elections of December 1995. He had a huge advantage over the opposition since the new party had unrivalled financial resources and powers of patronage and secured unobstructed access to TV news programmes. Yet Chernomyrdin took only 65 seats out of 450. The lacklustre Gennadi Zyuganov and his Communist Party of the Russian Federation obtained 157, and the allies of the communists – the Agrarian Party and Women of Russia – added a further 23. This made Zyuganov the leader of the largest block in the Duma. Yeltsin, however, refused to compromise with him and insisted on keeping Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister. Zyuganov, filled with new confidence, denounced both Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin. The Duma elections, he declared, supplied a popular mandate for a reversal of the whole reform agenda. The USSR should never have been abolished. Economic privatization had reduced millions of households to poverty. The country’s assets and interests had tumbled into the grasp of Russian plutocrats and the IMF, and Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were the agents of this dénouement. Zyuganov made the case for a government of communists to restore well-being in state and society.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation had been widely thought to be at death’s door since it drew its support mainly from pensioners and from workers in the decaying sectors of industry. Yet there was a tenacity about Zyuganov, and his increasingly Russian nationalist statements continued to attract popular approval. His party comrades in the Duma, moreover, were well-organized and one of them, Gennadi Seleznëv, became its Speaker. Despite having equipped himself with abundant powers under the 1993 Constitution, President Yeltsin had to let his governments come to terms with Zyuganov whenever the communists stirred up controversy in the Duma about his behaviour, health or policies. Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin continued to trim back the project of reforms. The headlong rush into capitalism was slowed. The inclination to perceive Russia’s national interests in international relations as identical to those of the leading Western powers faded. The chaotic relationship between the centre and the republics and provinces in the Russian Federation began to be regularized. Yeltsin more and more rarely devoted his speeches to the theme of the communist totalitarian nightmare between 1917 and 1991.4
Although these adjustments came easily to the opportunistic President, he did not want to concede more than was absolutely necessary. He and his coterie were determined to hold on to power. In spring 1996, when Zyuganov was beating him in the national opinion surveys, he contemplated a plan to suspend the presidential election. His aide and chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov encouraged him, arguing that a communist restoration had to be prevented at all costs. A ‘red scare’ atmosphere was fostered in newspapers and on television. A decree of suspension was drafted. Not until the last moment was Yeltsin persuaded that he would do more damage than good by trampling on democratic procedures.5 Not that he stopped being devious. He agreed a secret deal with Boris Berezovski and a handful of other exceptionally wealthy businessmen who were commonly known as ‘the oligarchs’ whereby they would receive a lucrative stake in state-owned mining enterprises in return for bailing out the state budget and financing Yeltsin’s electoral campaign.6 He also came to an agreement with rival presidential candidate Alexander Lebed. With his booming voice and confident comportment, Lebed had a substantial following in the country. As reward for urging his supporters to vote in the second round for Yeltsin, Lebed was to become Secretary of the Security Council and principal negotiator for the Russian side in the conflict with Chechnya.
Zyuganov had started the electoral campaign with advantages. Even though he fought it with obsolete techniques, he was confronting an incumbent whose health problems were acute. Nevertheless the second round of the voting in July 1996, after the other candidates had been knocked out, gave a thumping victory to Yeltsin. Money, patronage and a brilliant media campaign had done the trick for him.
Despite his good performance in the presidential polls, though, Yeltsin lacked a stable, loyal majority for his policies in the State Duma.7 He did not attend its proceedings or negotiate with its leaders, leaving it to his prime ministers to manage some kind of accommodation. Chernomyrdin worked behind the scenes offering attractive deals to groups of deputies. Party politics lost much importance as various leading figures were bought off. Vladimir Zhirinovski and the Liberal-Democratic Party noisily criticized the government but did not always vote against it. Duma debates commanded little public respect or attention. Press and TV were concentrated upon the President and ministers except when something scandalous was happening in the chamber. Zhirinovski increased his notoriety in 1996 by physically assaulting a female Duma deputy; but his party’s fortunes did not benefit in subsequent elections. The situation was staider in the Council of the Federation but hardly more helpful in easing the passage of Chernomyrdin’s legislation unless he gave in to their demands for special concessions to region after region. This was pork-barrel politics par excellence.8
Of all the republics in the Russian Federation it was Chechnya which caused the greatest trouble for Moscow. Having declared unilateral independence in 1991, its leader Dzhokar Dudaev had continually cocked a snook at Yeltsin. He had presided over the thorough criminalization of economic activity in Chechnya and given haven to Chechen protection racketeers operating in Russia’s cities. He permitted the application of Sharia law. He declined to pre-empt Islamist terrorist raids from inside Chechnya upon nearby Russian areas. While Dudaev was right that Chechnya had remained with Russia solely because of the superior military power of tsars and commissars, he was not the simon-pure democrat and liberator depicted in his propaganda.9
In December 1994 Yeltsin’s Minister of Defence Pavel Grachëv had persuaded him that the Russian Army would quickly crush the Chechen rebellion. The motives for the invasion were murky. Grachëv wished to divert attention from his corrupt management of the armed forces’ finance and equipment. Powerful members of Moscow’s business elite also aimed to secure tighter control over their oil assets in the Chechen capital Grozny. Yet Grachëv had misled everybody about the readiness of his troops to take on the Chechens. After Grozny fell to artillery assault by land and air, Dudaev and his commanders organized resistance in the mountains. Terrorist actions were intensified in Russian cities. Moscow TV stations and newspapers had reporters in Chechnya who told of the Russian army’s incompetence and of the atrocities carried out by its troops. Such was the confidence of the Chechen fighters that even after Dudaev was killed, having been traced through his satellite-connected mobile phone, the armed struggle continued. But the cost in human lives mounted, and a truce was arranged for the duration of the presidential campaign; and Lebed soon succeeded in producing a peace agreement which left both sides with their honour intact. Military hostilities would cease; the Chechens would in practice govern Chechnya without interference and the independence question would simply be deferred.
No one really thought that the threshold had been crossed to a solution. Already the implications were dire for Russia’s self-liberation from the authoritarian past. Leading liberals Grigori Yavlinski and Yegor Gaidar were among the few politicians to censure the invasion. Yeltsin recognized his blunder over Chechnya too late and was a shadow of his former self. Practically the entire political establishment had casually accepted the use of massive and at times indiscriminate violence in pursuit of the state’s ends. There was scant appreciation of the damage done to the prospects for a healthy civil society to emerge.
The usually critical leaders of the Western powers did little more than go through the motions of upbraiding the Russian government. The perception was that Yeltsin, warts and all, was the best President available and that his economic and diplomatic achievements earned him the right to prolonged support. It was noted too that Chernomyrdin, while abandoning the laisser-faire zeal of Gaidar, continued to strengthen the roots of capitalism in Russia. Even Gaidar had avoided genuine ‘shock therapy’ for the ailing economy for fear that a drop in people’s living conditions might provoke civil disturbances. Chernomyrdin maintained the policy of enormous state subsidies for fuel, lighting, telephones and transport, and he ensured that tenants should receive the deeds to their apartments without charge. He also devoted resources to keep the prices of farm produce low. Moreover, fiscal regulations gave incentives to firms to eschew sacking employees; the incidence of unemployment stayed low.10 At the same time Chernomyrdin and his successors pressed ahead with economic measures which brought little benefit to anyone outside the tiny circles of the wealthy. By 1995 sixty-five per cent of industrial enterprises had been privatized. The market economy had been installed.
Markets in Russia, however, were of a very distorted kind. Competition was cramped by the dominance of a few ‘oligarchs’ over the banks and the media as well as the energy and rare metals sectors. Criminal gangs and corrupt administrative clientèles compounded the difficulty. The rule of law was seldom enforced. The economic environment was so unpredictable and indeed downright dangerous that the most successful entrepreneurs stashed away their profits in Swiss bank accounts. Fraud was rampant. About half the funds loaned to Russia by the IMF were illegally expropriated by powerful individuals and diverted abroad.
Not all the economic data were gloomy. Although gross domestic output continued to diminish after 1993, the rate of diminution was slowing. In comparison with most states of the CIS, indeed, Russia had an economy that seemed very vibrant. Tajikestan and Georgia were in desperate straits and even Ukraine could not afford to pay its debts to Russia for gas and petrol. The Ministry of Economics in Moscow in 1995 predicted that the Russian economy would at last start to expand again in the following year. The prognosis was proved wrong. Among the problems was the justified reluctance of foreign enterprises to set up branches in Russia while contracts were hardly worth the paper they were printed on. The government’s financial management also left much to be desired. In 1997 it issued state bonds to balance the budget. The terms were hopelessly disadvantageous to the government if ever the rouble fell under severe pressure. Global financial markets were febrile at the time and the dreaded run on the rouble duly occurred in August 1998. Russia unilaterally defaulted on its international loan repayments and Sergei Kirienko, despite not having been Prime Minister when the state bonds had been issued, stepped down.11
Yeltsin’s reputation was in tatters, but the Russian financial collapse quickly turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The devaluation of the rouble increased the costs of imported goods and inadvertently provided a stimulus to domestic manufacturing and agriculture. Shops and kiosks bought up and sold Russia’s own products. By 1999 the beginnings of economic recovery were unmistakable and gross domestic output was rising; and these small steps forward were rightly treated as success.
Nevertheless the economic crisis was not simply an accidental result of the vagaries of financial markets at home and abroad; for the government’s incompetent policies had made a bad situation a lot worse. Such strength as the Russian Federation retained in the world economy anyway rested on the export of its natural resources. Oil and gas were in the lead. Not far behind came gold, diamonds and nickel. Wood pulp too was sold abroad – the result was a shortage in the supply of paper for Russian newspapers! The only finished industrial goods to be sold in any amount across Russian borders were armaments, and even in this sector there was the difficulty that the government was constrained by the Western powers to stop selling weaponry to traditional customers such as Iraq and Iran. Such an economic strategy had been followed by governments from Gaidar’s onwards. Indeed the structure of Soviet foreign trade had similarly been built on the export of natural resources. What was new after the collapse of the USSR, as Zyuganov pointed out, was the process of de-industrialization. Russian factories no longer produced as much output as in 1990 (which was a poor year for the Soviet economy). The Communist Party of the Russian Federation urged the need for tariff walls for the restoration of industrial production.
Communists were brisker in supplying criticism than practical policies. Indeed they appeared reconciled to permanent opposition, and their willingness to abandon tenets of Marxism-Leninism was remarkable. Zyuganov declared himself a Christian believer; his prolific pamphleteering was inspired more by anti-communists like Nikolai Berdyaev, Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler than by Lenin.12 One prominent communist even owned a casino.
Such a party had become ever more incapable of reversing the changes made since 1991. Its most telling criticisms in the State Duma were aimed at the government’s foreign policy. Yeltsin had planned with Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev to sustain Russia as a power in alliance with the most influential Western countries: both believed in the need for a warm partnership with the USA and Yeltsin spoke confidently about his ‘friend Bill’ when reporting on his summit meetings with President Clinton. Yet the partnership was never remotely near to being an equal one. Russian economic distress disabled the government from competing with American technological advance, military power and global diplomacy. The only residue of old glory lay in Russia’s possession of ageing nuclear weapons: this was the sole reason why Clinton bothered to hold summit meetings. The Russian financial system’s dependence on the USA’s sanction for the IMF to go on lending to Russia meant that Yeltsin could never easily refuse an American diplomatic demand. Kozyrev’s ‘Atlanticist’ orientation was put under assault in the Duma and the press.
Yeltsin responded in characteristic fashion by publicly rebuking Kozyrev as if he himself had not had a hand in setting the orientation. He spoke about the need to protect the singular interests of the Russian state, and both he and Kozyrev warned that the government could not stay indifferent when other states of the former USSR discriminated against their ethnic Russians. The stringent linguistic and cultural qualifications for Estonian citizenship became a bone of contention. Within the CIS, moreover, Russia increasingly used its supply of oil and gas to neighbouring countries as an instrument to keep them within the Russian zone of political influence.
Hardening the line of foreign policy, Yeltsin sacked Kozyrev in December 1995. Yet he could do little about the series of encroachments by Western powers. Finland had joined the European Union earlier in the year and schemes were made for the eventual accession of many countries in Eastern Europe in the twentieth-first century. This was embarrassing enough. Worse for the Russian government was the NATO’s refusal to disband itself after the Cold War’s end and the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution. Quite the contrary: NATO set about territorial expansion. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became members in 1999. NATO forces were sent into action in Bosnia in 1993–1995 and Kosovo in 1999 as inter-ethnic violence intensified. In both cases the Russian government protested that insufficient effort had been invested in diplomacy. Yeltsin sent Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy to Belgrade to plead with Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosević to come to terms with the Americans and avoid the bombing of his capital. But to no avail. Having lost its position as a global power, Russia was ceasing to carry much weight even in Eastern Europe.
The Russian Foreign Ministry and various Moscow think-tanks recognized that policy should be formulated on the basis of a realistic appreciation of Russia’s reduced capabilities. They recommended that Russia should seek other partners in world diplomacy without alienating the USA. The benefits of ‘multipolarity’ in global politics and economics were touted. The European Union, China and India were courted by Russian diplomats with a revitalized enthusiasm.
Nothing about this steady endeavour was going to capture the imagination of a public unaccustomed to seeing its government treated casually by the USA. It was Yeltsin’s good fortune that few public bodies took him to task. The Russian Orthodox Church supported his invasion of Chechnya and his diplomatic stand on the Kosovo question. Its hierarchy had little interest in the routine of politics. At times of national emergency, especially in late 1993, Patriarch Alexi II offered himself as an intermediary between Yeltsin and his enemies; but generally the Church, needing the government’s assistance in defending itself against the resurgence of other Christian denominations, was quiescent. So too was the Russian Army. Yeltsin never had to face the overt criticism by serving officers that Gorbachëv endured. Military critics no longer held seats in representative public institutions. The platform of criticism had been sawn from under them. The armed forces performed poorly in Chechnya. Although their finances had been savagely reduced, there was no excuse for their incompetence and brutality in the taking of Grozny. Even the media were easy on Yeltsin’s regime. They exposed corruption in his family; the NTV puppet show Kukly (‘Dolls’) satirized him as a bumbling idiot. But his policies rarely suffered assaults of a fundamental nature.
The reason was that Church, high command and media had more to lose than gain by the regime’s removal. A communist restoration would have disturbed their comforts at the very least. Yeltsin had prevented any such disturbance. He had also not needed to resort to violence again in Moscow. The order of Russian state and society was beginning to settle into a durable mould.
At the central level of politics it had proved not unduly difficult for former members of the Soviet nomenklatura to establish themselves in the new Russian elite. Typically, they were persons who had been in the early stage of a career when the USSR fell. In business circles too there were many entrepreneurs with a solid background in the communist party or the Komsomol before 1991. Newcomers were not excluded. Most of the ‘oligarchs’, for example, had worked in posts outside any nomenklatura.13 This mixture of old and new in the post-communist establishment was also observable in the localities. Mintimer Shaimiev had moved smoothly from being communist party first secretary of the Tatar Provincial Party Committee to installing himself as President of Tatarstan.14 So blatant a transition was in fact unusual in the Russian Federation. (It was much more common in ex-Soviet Central Asia.) But whoever emerged to lead a republic or a province was likely to bring along an entourage with administrative experience from the Soviet period. Patronage remained an important feature of local public life, and traditions of ‘tails’ and ‘nests’ were little affected by recurrent elections. The ruling group in nearly every locality used whatever trickery – or even illegality – was needed to hold on to power.15
The prime beneficiaries of the ‘new Russia’ were politicians, businessmen and gangsters. In some cases the individual might be all three things at once. Wealth was celebrated in public life. Successful sportsmen such as Yevgeni Kafelnikov or entertainers like Alla Pugachëva led an extremely luxurious life. Sumptuous dachas were built. Apartment blocks were bought up and renovated to the highest standards of opulence. Children were sent to English private schools. Domestic servants, chauffeurs and personal hairdressers were employed. Foreign limousines, clothing and holidays were treated as nothing out of the ordinary by families who had suddenly got rich as capitalism flooded all over Russia. The ultra-rich were seldom eager to keep their wealth a secret and were determined to keep their gains exclusively for themselves. They bought yachts and villas on the Mediterranean – the Black Sea had become too vulgar for them. Forsaking the Russian countryside, they purchased mansions in Hampstead and estates in the English home counties. They dressed in Versace or Prada outfits. Their limousines were Mercedes. Not since 1914 had the excesses of Russian material abundance been shown off so excessively.
Magazines sprang up to cater for such tastes. Most people who bought them were not wealthy; but they had to have an above-average income to afford a copy and ogle at how the ‘new Russians’ expected to live. As fortunes were made the competition grew to show them off. Birthday parties were celebrated by paying American or British rock stars to give private performances. Sons and daughters of the oligarchs were treated as celebrities.
At the same time there remained a possibility that wealth won so quickly and often so illicitly might one day soon be confiscated or stolen. Big businessmen protected themselves with personal bodyguards and financial sweeteners to influential politicians and police. They surrounded their dachas with hi-tech surveillance equipment. The poodle was for indoor companionship; in the grounds, the Rottweilers were the patrol dogs of choice. The danger usually came from fellow businessmen. Courts were only for the ‘little people’. Defence of funds and property effectively depended on firepower if bribery of officials failed, and company owners remained vulnerable unless they could assemble adequate means of defence. At restaurants and night-clubs no one was surprised to see guards with Kalashnikovs in the foyers. The atmosphere at the stratospheric level of Russian business was frantic. This in turn induced its practitioners to enjoy their earnings to the full in case they suffered a financial or personal disaster. Most oligarchs felt notoriously little inclination to share their wealth with charities. With a few exceptions their civic commitment was negligible.
A disproportionate number of them were non-Russians, especially Jews, which provided parties on the political far right with the pretext to make anti-Semitic propaganda. Russians ignored the fascists even while detesting the oligarchs. More congenial to Russian popular opinion were measures directed against people from the north and south Caucasus. Yeltsin, in a breach of multinational tolerance, backed Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s attempts to eject Azeris, Armenians and others from the capital. Demagogic tactics of this kind reflected an awareness of the widening resentment of the new street vendors and entrepreneurs – and people from the south of the former Soviet Union were prominent among the capital’s stallholders.
A long ladder separated the families at its top from the vast impoverished majority of citizens at its base. Russia – like other societies – had its wealthy, middling and poor strata. But the poor were a disturbingly large section of society. By the end of the twentieth century about two-fifths of the population lived below the poverty level as defined by the UN.16 The data were geographically diverse. Moscow and, to a lesser extent, St Petersburg had an economic buoyancy denied to the rest of the country. Inhabitants of big cities, moreover, did better materially than the rest of society. The Russian north and most parts of Siberia suffered especially badly as the state subsidies for salaries and accommodation in places of harsh climatic conditions were phased out. The standard of living also plummeted even in central cities whose economy depended on an industrial specialization which was beaten down by superior foreign imports. Machine tool production slumped in the Urals and the mid-Volga region with appalling consequences for the employees and their families. Large industrial firms in the USSR had provided cafeterias, kindergartens and sports facilities, and trade unions had organized holidays for their members. A whole way of making existence bearable was put in jeopardy.
Most people took shelter in the systems of mutual support that had helped them survive in the Soviet decades. Families and friends stuck together as they had always done. Cliental groups remained intact. The alternative was for individuals to take their chances on their own; but there was much risk so long as economic opportunities were outrageously unequal in society and political and judicial bias was flagrantly in favour of the rich and mighty. Limitations on freedom remained in Russian reality.
No greater limitation existed on life in general than conditions of employment. Wages fell far below the rocketing rate of inflation. Few Russian citizens could buy the imports of Western industrial products or even the bananas or oranges that had suddenly appeared in the kiosks. Workers in the factories and mines were lucky if they were paid at the end of the month. Teachers, doctors and often even civil servants suffered the same. Pensioners were treated abysmally. Privatization of state enterprises was accomplished by the issuance of vouchers for shares to all adults; but the vouchers lost value in the inflationary times. Directors tended to do much better than the other employees because of their inside knowledge. Some of the sting was removed from popular resentment by laws granting apartments to residents as private property; but building blocks fell into disrepair for want of continued finance by local authorities. Life remained hard for most people for bigger part of the decade and they coped by the well-worn methods of eking out a diet of bread and sausages, bartering their possessions and hoping that conditions would eventually improve. De-communization exhausted society.
Bit by bit, though, the situation eased somewhat. Staple foods in the shops increased in attractiveness and variety. Beer and vodka remained cheap; and breweries, distilleries and bakeries were among the most dynamic sectors of the consumer-oriented economic sectors. Basic clothes became more attuned to the aspirations of fashion.
Resistance to the general trends was therefore very weak. The labour movement, which had begun to arrest itself under Gorbachëv, fizzled out after 1991. The Federation of Independent Trade Unions called for a general strike in October 1998 with uninspiring results.17 Across the economy the advantage remained on the side of the employers. Not every segment of Russian business went along with the policy of privatization. Notable opponents were the collective farm directors, who obstructed the government’s desire to break up the kolkhozes into small, privately owned farms. By the mid-1990s the number of such farms had stabilized at only a quarter of million.18 Most kolkhozes simply redesigned themselves as agricultural cooperatives with the same director in charge and the same workforce under him. The point was that very few rural inhabitants welcomed the chance to go it alone: credit facilities were poor and the supply of the necessary equipment and fuel was unreliable. Yet if the countryside with its demoralized and ageing population was predictably conservative in outlook, the towns too disappointed those radical reformers who had believed that the abolition of the Soviet political structures would induce mass support for rapid change.
Russians made the best of a bad situation, as they always had done. Their energies were given mainly to their domestic conditions. They practised their DIY skills. They gardened (and produced food for their own tables). They took up hobbies, bought pets and watched TV. Western popular culture – rock music, sport and pornography – flooded into the country.
This caused affront to the established cultural elite, but younger writers relished the change and wrote incisive commentaries on the blending of the old and the new in Russian society. The satirical novels of Victor Pelevin caused a stir; and the poignant ballads of Boris Grebenshchikov and his rock group Akvarium searched for meaning in Russian history from its origins to the present day.19 Two of Grebenshchikov’s stanzas ran as follows:20
Eight thousand two hundred versts of emptiness,
And still there’s nowhere for me to stay the night with you.
I would be happy if it wasn’t for you,
If it wasn’t for you, my motherland.
I would be happy, but it makes no odds any more.
When it’s sky-blue everywhere else, here it’s red.
It’s like silver in the wind, like a sickle to the heart –
And my soul flies about you like a Sirin.
The words reprise Soviet motifs of redness and the sickle. The old tsarist measure of length – the verst – is introduced. A still more ancient figure like the mythic Sirin (who was half-woman, half-bird) appears. The style brings together Soviet balladeering and the songs of Bob Dylan. The concern with Russian national themes was also favoured by novelists; and the film director Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark depicted current reality through the metaphor of a vessel trying to preserve the best of national culture and history from a life-threatening flood.21
Russians for two centuries had been accustomed to accepting moral guidance from their artists. Few young artists or poets felt comfortable about such a public role. The removal of the Soviet political and ideological lid decompressed the cultural order in Russia. Ideas of extreme diversity and experimentalism became the norm. Post-modernism flourished.
The intelligentsia in any case was losing its leverage on public opinion. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn ceased to be taken seriously. Returning from America in 1994, he was given a weekly show on TV; but his humourless sermons on the need to restore Orthodox Christian values were unpopular and he was taken off air. Writers in general found it hard to touch the hearts of their public. Meanwhile the national press was beset by problems with paper supply and with distribution facilities. Billionaires who bought newspapers seldom wanted columnists who subjected the new capitalism to a thorough critique. Intellectuals themselves were baffled by the nature of the changes since 1991. Many sought to make what they could out of the marketplace; they were ceasing to act as the conscience of the nation. The Russian Orthodox Church enjoyed expanded congregations in comparison with earlier years when persecution had been intense. But secularism proved to be a tenacious phenomenon and the clergy’s refusal to renew liturgy or doctrines restricted the possibility of appealing to people who had no prior knowledge of Christianity. Scientists and other scholars too lost prominence in public life as the struggle to earn their daily bread acquired precedence over involvement in politics. The Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow retained its old prestige but without the former impact.
The government sought to fill the media with its vision of Russia. The attack on communism continued but patriotism was more increasingly emphasized. Electoral disappointments indicated that a gap had widened between official policies and popular expectations. Chernomyrdin was no man of ideas and had no inkling about how to regain the trust of Russians. His remedy in July 1996 was to announce a competition, with a $1,000 prize (which was more than two years’ wages for an office worker at the time), to answer the question: ‘What is Russia?’ The search was on for a fresh definition of ‘the Russian idea’. Hundreds of diverse entries appeared in the governmental newspaper. If Chernomyrdin was baffled before posing the question, he was just as confused when he read the attempted answers. The winner, philologist Guri Sudakov, offered bland words about Motherland and spirituality.22 Meanwhile Russians elsewhere went on disputing the whole topic with their usual gusto and there was never any prospect of a broad consensus.
The pluralism in culture high and low testified to the vivacity of Russian society below the carapace fixed upon it by the political and economic authorities. This vivacity had existed before Gorbachëv’s perestroika but it was only after 1985 that it came fully into the open. The pity was that the ruling group under Yeltsin made little attempt to enlist such energy and enthusiasm in the cause of fundamental reform. Probably the chances of success were very small. The invitation to participate in the country’s reformation had been extended by Gorbachëv and had evoked an inadequate response. But at least Gorbachëv had gone on trying. What obstructed him were the effects of decades, indeed centuries of political oppression which had made most people reluctant to engage at all in affairs of state. Increasingly Yeltsin, ill and distracted, had not bothered to try – and it may reasonably be asked whether his commitment to fundamental reform had ever been deeply felt. Certainly there were several influential members of his entourage who had always disliked aspects of the reform project.
The movement towards a more authoritarian political style accelerated in August 1999 when Yeltsin replaced Sergei Stepashin with Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister. At first the change in personnel did not seem to matter. Both Stepashin and Putin had backgrounds in the security agencies. Furthermore, Putin was obliged to behave as obsequiously to the President in public as every Prime Minister since Chernomyrdin. Continuity in policy and practice appeared the likely outcome.
Putin came to office with an agenda for the north Caucasus. Already Stepashin had secretly been planning a second invasion of Chechnya. In September there were bomb explosions in Moscow apartment blocks which were blamed on Chechen terrorists. The circumstantial evidence pointed away from Chechens and towards a provocation by the Federal Security Service, and the explanations offered by Bureau director Nikolai Patrushev were derisorily implausible. Nevertheless they were believed at the time by most Russians. The authorities had the pretext it needed, and Putin, in consultation with Yeltsin, ordered the Russian Army into Chechnya. Lessons had been learned from the 1994–1996 campaign. This time the government closely controlled news reporting. Firepower was maximized and, as Russian armed forces approached Grozny, warnings were given for civilians to evacuate the city. Piloting his own plane, Putin went down to visit troops near the front line. His popularity soared as total military victory appeared in sight. Yeltsin was already treating him as his heir. And then, on 31 December 1999, the entire county was taken by surprise when the President in a dignified address announced his retirement.23 Putin was to become Acting President with immediate effect. The Yeltsin cavalcade was over.