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 élite. 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 so-called 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 distressing 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 the 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 a
fter 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 a million.18 Most kolkhozes simply redesigned themselves as agricultural co-operatives 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 élite, 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 1994–6 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 country 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.
28
Experimenting with Retrenchment (2000–2008)
Vladimir Putin achieved an impressive victory in the presidential election of March 2000. He had left nothing to chance against challengers who matched his zeal to promote Russian state interests and national pride. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, let it be known he was ready to stand on behalf of the Fatherland party. Immediately the government-controlled TV stations released charges about his political and personal integrity. Then Yevgeni Primakov offered a further threat after bringing together the Fatherland and All Russia parties and announcing his candidacy for the presidency. Yet again Russian television stations conducted an operation against the challenger, and Primakov too decided to withdraw his candidacy. This left Zyuganov and Zhirinovski to put forward their standard hopeless case. Opinion polls universally predicted an electoral landslide and Putin made a virtue of refusing to campaign. His nonchalance was counterfeit currency at a time when his subordinates were working hard at conveying his image of cherubic militancy in the news bulletins and suppressing any untoward reports from the Chechnya front. A flattering biography was prepared and rushed into print. Youthful vigour, sobriety, competence, persistence, patriotism: these were the qualities which commended themselves to voters. No second round of voting was required. Putin won the election in the first round, receiving fifty-three per cent of all votes cast.
Yeltsin and Patriarch Aleksi II gave their blessing at the Kremlin inauguration ceremony. Down the aisle of the St Andrew’s Hall walked Putin like a hunter eyeing the trees on either side of him for quarry. His address to the audience, televised live, indicated a determination to set a new tone in public life. He spoke about democracy and the rule of law. But much more insistent was his emphasis on state power and institutional order. Compliance with higher authority was going to be demanded. Russia’s place in the world would be asserted. Putin was combative in appearance and mode of delivery. He had not needed to go cap in hand to wealthy businessmen to get himself elected. Diminutive in stature, he towered over the proceedings and restored dignity to his office.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 63
