The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  No State Council would be able to impose central authority to the previous degree. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania appealed to the rest of the world to give them diplomatic recognition; and Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachëv, had long since supported their right to complete independence. At last the West gave the three states what they wanted. Meanwhile the humbling of Gorbachëv continued in Moscow. Having suffered at Gorbachëv’s hands in October 1987, Yeltsin had no reason to be gentle. At any rate he had never been a gracious victor. When the two of them had appeared together at the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR on 23 August, Yeltsin ordered the Soviet President about as if he were the junior office-holder. With a peremptory gesture of his hand he rasped out that the recently-compiled list of the State Committee’s collaborators should be made public: ‘Read them out!’ A doleful Gorbachëv had no choice but to release the list to the media.

  No politician in twentieth-century Russia had effected so stupendous a comeback as Yeltsin. No one was as daring as he. Nor was anyone luckier. Gorbachëv could easily have finished him off politically in 1987. Certainly Ligachëv would have done just that. But Gorbachëv, once he had defeated Yeltsin, showed a degree of magnanimity which no previous Soviet leader had exhibited towards vanquished opponents.

  Good fortune had blessed Yeltsin several times in his life. Born in a tiny village in Sverdlovsk province in 1931, he nearly died at his baptism when a tipsy priest dropped him in the font. His grandmother plucked him out to stop him drowning.27 Young Boris was a rascal. Once he and his pals played with a hand-grenade they found in the woods. There was an explosion, and Boris lost two fingers of his left hand.28 Yet his personality was irrepressible. His father had been sentenced to three years of forced labour for criticizing conditions of construction-site workers in Kazan;29 but the young lad managed to keep this quiet when he entered the Urals Polytechnical Institute to train as a civil engineer. A natural athlete, he was quickly picked for the city’s volleyball team. In the vacations he travelled widely in Russia despite his poverty by climbing on to train carriage-tops and taking a free ride. He never lived life by the rules.

  On graduating, he worked in the construction industry. In 1968 he switched careers, joining the Sverdlovsk Province Party Committee apparatus. Eight years later he was its first secretary, and in 1981 became a Central Committee member. Sverdlovsk (nowadays known by its pre-revolutionary name, Yekaterinburg) is Russia’s fifth largest city. Yeltsin was its boisterous leader in the communist party tradition: he ranted and threatened. He broke legal and administrative procedures to achieve results for his province. He also used charm and guile. In search of finance for an underground rail-system in Sverdlovsk, he asked for an audience with Brezhnev and whispered his case into the ailing General Secretary’s ear. Sverdlovsk obtained the funds for its metro.30

  It was already evident that his style had a populistic streak. In Sverdlovsk he had turned public ceremonies into carnivals. Whole families walked in parade on the October Revolution anniversary and Yeltsin addressed them on the city’s main square. One year on the eve of the anniversary, when his car swerved into a ditch sixty kilometres from Sverdlovsk, he bounded over the fields to the nearest village and commandeered a tractor and a drunken tractor-driver to get them to the morning parade on time.31 On his transfer to the capital in 1985 he was already an audacious crowd-pleaser. His anti-corruption campaign in Moscow made him an object of hatred among the existing party personnel. But he did not mind about their criticisms; he understood that his popularity rose every time he was victimized by the Politburo from 1987. The more dangers he ran, the better he was liked in ordinary homes.

  He had a mercurial personality. As Moscow party chief in 1985–7, he had been a bully and had sacked officials in their thousands without investigation of individual cases. But subsequently the Inter-Regional Group in the Congress of People’s Deputies since 1990 had given him an education in consultative procedures, and he learned how to listen and to act as a member of a team: this was not typical behaviour for a communist party official.

  His apparent goal, after the arrest of the putschists, was the inception of a combination of democratic politics and capitalist economy in a Russia unrestrained by the USSR. On 23 August he suspended the legal status of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Russia. Gorbachëv complied by laying down the office of Party General Secretary. Yeltsin’s pressure was unremitting. On 28 October he made a lengthy, televised speech to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies declaring his intention to implement an economic programme based upon the principles of the market. A few days later, on 6 November, he issued a decree banning the Soviet communist party altogether. He stipulated, too, that the ministers of the RSFSR had precedence over those of the USSR; and he applied a veto on any USSR appointments he disliked. Between 6 and 8 November he announced the composition of his full cabinet. He himself would be RSFSR prime minister while Yegor Gaidar, a proponent of laissez-faire economics, would be his Finance Minister and a Deputy Prime Minister. It would be a cabinet for drastic economic reform.

  He none the less accepted the call to return to the Novo-Ogarëvo talks. He darkly hinted through his press secretary that if the USSR were to break up, Russia would seek to redraw its borders at Ukraine’s expense. 32 In fact his aides had been working on contingency plans for Russia’s complete secession even before the August coup; and subsequently Yeltsin lost no chance to weaken the draft powers of the Union he was discussing with Gorbachëv. So what did Yeltsin really want?

  Gorbachëv’s proposal was that the USSR should give way to a ‘Union of Sovereign States’. There would still be a single economic space and a unified military command; there would also be regular consultations among the republican presidents. Gorbachëv concurred that the Union President would not be allowed to dominate the others. His despair was such that he offered to step down in Yeltsin’s favour as Union President if only Yeltsin would agree to maintain the Union. ‘Let’s talk man to man about this,’ he implored Yeltsin.33 But Yeltsin was inscrutable. There were reasons for him to keep his options open. Of special importance was the refusal of Leonid Kravchuk, the Ukrainian President, to join the discussions. On 18 October, when a Treaty on the Economic Commonwealth had been signed, Ukraine declined to send a representative. In such a situation, on 24 November, Yeltsin rejected Gorbachëv’s request to him and to the other republican leaders to initial the Union Treaty.34

  The people of Ukraine, including most of its Russian inhabitants, were terminally exasperated with Gorbachëv, and on 1 December they voted for independence in a referendum. The voters cast their ballots for a variety of reasons. Supporters of radical economic reform wanted freedom to carry it out fast; opponents of such reform advocated independence because they, too, wished to be liberated from Gorbachëv. And Ukrainian nationalists simply wanted independence. The result of the referendum was a disaster for the proposed Union of Sovereign States. Without Ukraine, such a Union was unrealizable.

  Yeltsin arranged an emergency meeting with Ukrainian President Kravchuk and Shushkevich, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Belarus (as Belorussia now insisted on being called), in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha near the Belarusian capital Minsk. On 8 December, Yeltsin and Kravchuk persuaded Shushkevich to agree to the formation of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an even weaker combination than the very weakened version of the Union lately proposed at Novo-Ogarëvo.35 The Commonwealth would maintain a unified economic area and unified strategic military forces. But it would have its central offices not in Moscow but in Minsk, and there would be no president. The declaration of the three Slavic republics presented the other republics with a fait accompli. They could either join the Commonwealth or go it alone. On 21 December eight further Soviet republics assented to membership: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The dissenting republics were the three Baltic states and Georgia.

  Perhaps the Ukrainian referendum was the pretext that Yeltsin had been
waiting for to break up the USSR in line with a basic hidden strategy. More likely is the possibility that he simply had a keen wish to get rid of Gorbachëv and to assume unconditional authority in Moscow. It may also be that, being a very impulsive leader, he was merely reacting to situations as the mood took him.

  What was indisputably clear was that the game was up for Gorbachëv. If there was not even to be a Union of Sovereign States, he had no function to discharge except the declaration of his retirement. He bowed to the inevitable and accepted that the Soviet republics were about to go their own ways. He did this with a heavy heart, predicting that the break-up of the Union would lead to military and political strife as well as economic ruin. But he had fought for the Union, and lost. On 25 December he gave a short speech on television. He spoke with simple dignity: ‘I leave my post with trepidation. But also with hope, with faith in you, in your wisdom and force of spirit. We are the inheritors of a great civilization, and now the burden falls on each and every one that it may be resurrected to a new, modern and worthy life.’36 The USSR would be abolished at midnight on 31 December 1991.

  Into oblivion would pass a state which had caused political tremors abroad by its very existence in the 1920s. A state whose borders were roughly the same as those of the Russian Empire and whose population embraced an unparalleled number of nations, religions and philosophies. A state which had built a mighty industrial base in the 1930s and had defeated Germany in the Second World War. A state which became a superpower, matching the USA in military capacity by the late 1970s. A state whose political and economic order had introduced a crucial category of the lexicon of twentieth-century thought. From the beginning of 1992, that state was no more.

  Part Five

  * * *

  Zhirinovski’s newspaper Liberal ridicules Yeltsin as a saint leading a truck full of Western products such as Pepsi Cola. The truck is painted with the sign ‘Market’.

  26

  Power and the Market (1992–1993)

  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 gratitude 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 have called at that stage. To Yeltsin, economic reform by presidential decree appeared the surer way to bring about the transformation that the country obviously needed. 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 only 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 barely known individuals: 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?