Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  It is worth heeding the words of Andrei Illarionov, a respected economist and former adviser to Putin who is now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington DC: “In our view what happened was the nomenklatura revenge of the Soviet bureaucracy and special services.” Illarionov characterizes the economic reforms of the early 1990s as a “bureaucratic-nomenklatura type.” He believes they were directed toward providing “exceptionally favorable conditions in the new economic and political system for the nomenklatura bureaucracy left over from the Soviet Union.” Moreover, he is convinced that all the mistaken decisions of the Russian authorities were made “for the benefit of the nomenklatura, including the special services,” who wanted “to receive the property inherited from the USSR. In order to achieve this goal it was necessary to destroy their real and potential economic and political competitors, and thereby secure the economic and political instruments of power, including the means of coercion, to defend their new property and new position.”1 Naturally, it would have been more accurate had Illarionov made it clear that really only an infinitesimal part of the Soviet nomenklatura participated in the redivision of property.

  Yet his valuable testimony indirectly indicates that the purposeful destruction of the Soviet Union’s ruling mechanisms was inevitable. By devoting themselves wholly to self-enrichment, a tiny fraction of the nomenklatura and the ruling apparatus succeeded in landing on its feet. They did so in the name of “the public” by, among other things, seizing control of the mechanisms that governed their own activities. In other words, a small number of the old guard adapted to the new rules of the game and then adopted these rules as their own. Toward the end of the Soviet period, for example, I know of one very highly placed official who would perform no government service unless he personally received 1,000 percent per hour of his nominal salary.

  Moreover, in the late Soviet period the system of decision making was able to neutralize plans for the suicidal, pseudo-liberal economic reform. It was already functioning without the previous obligatory assent of the KGB and the Central Committee of the CPSU, as well as personal connections among various state officials. Finally, as a result of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the stagnant but resilient Stalinist administrative command system had become moribund and outside the control of the special services, which were playing the key role in shaping post-Soviet Russia. Of course, the special services, accustomed to total power, were loath to accept this situation and strove to restore, and even enhance, their role. Their ideal was a Stalinist model of governance, and they painstakingly began to reconstruct it at the first opportunity. In sum, the institutions of government had to be destroyed in order not to interfere with the total makeover of Russia.

  The decisions made by Russian leaders, like those made by their Soviet predecessors, are often bewildering. To grasp their meaning, not infrequently one must resort to ingenious and improbable explanations such as extremely far-fetched plots, perfidy, and so forth. In reality, nothing is as it seems, and nothing works the way it appears to work. In making decisions, the authorities almost never proceed from the actual state of affairs for several reasons. The first, even in the best of circumstances, is the pervasiveness of half-truths or lies embedded within most of the information upon which national policies are based. Again, there are several reasons for such misinformation. Officials at every level of decision making who report up the chain of command almost always take into consideration just what their superiors want of them; therefore, the leadership receives information that almost invariably is distorted and sometimes even unrecognizable. Add to this the fact that personal ambitions of the reporting officials almost never coincide with national interests and that their well-being and sometimes their careers depend upon the content of their reports. Thus, accurate information, which rarely reaches the desks of the leadership, is not deemed credible. Accumulated lies trump everything else.

  Under Yeltsin the practice of manipulating Russia’s top leadership reached unprecedented heights. He made decisions intended to please those who had most recently had his ear. Among those with easiest access to him were such odious figures as his daughter Tatiana Diachenko; his chief bodyguard Alexander Korzhakov; the tennis coach Shamil Tarpishchev, whom Yeltsin had appointed minister of sport; and other members of his “family.” Lubricated by whatever amount of alcohol was needed to do the trick, he made decisions that served the interests of his advisers.

  It is a truism that everywhere power seeks to preserve itself. However, in Russia preservation became virtually its primary motive. For example, when Yeltsin, who loved to emphasize that he was the “guarantor” of the Constitution, was threatened with impeachment, he did not even consider the possibility of leaving his position. Instead of following the basic law, he was preparing to arrest the parliamentary deputies.

  Beginning with the Yeltsin era, among the Russian authorities who were suffering from their own growing inferiority complex, the acquisitive reflex overrode all others. To the rulers in Moscow, all of Russia’s wealth, let alone their own personal wealth, was too little. Corruption and the pillaging of their own country were far from being the only indicators of their greed. While I was serving on the Security Council staff, I saw how my colleagues dreamed of arranging large-scale arms sales to whomsoever they pleased, apart from countries such as Poland that were unsympathetic to the Kremlin. Well aware of American concerns about Russia’s observance of a nuclear missile nonproliferation agreement, I was unconvinced of the accuracy of the information we were providing our foreign colleagues. Moreover, when I received relevant material from the ministries and departments that I was supposed to redraft into documents for the country’s leadership, I had more questions about this material than did my foreign interlocutors.

  Russian authorities usually do not understand the mentality and, consequently, the motivations and objectives of their foreign partners. It is worth noting that the Russian tradition includes the practice of exploiting official positions for self-enrichment or other personal benefits. (It is a curious fact that bribery was legalized by Ivan the Terrible, whose boyars [high-ranking noblemen] did not receive salaries but supported themselves by means of requisitions from the local population. This mode of payment for their services was officially called feeding.) The lack of control over the officials, on the one hand, and the ruin and poverty of the country, on the other, inevitably led to pervasive corruption and other extremely serious consequences.

  An important element in the decision-making mechanism is the state apparatus itself. Despite the many obvious defects of the Soviet Union, its system of processing documents greatly hindered making decisions that obviously contradicted the national interest; however, this same system equally inhibited making necessary decisions. In a nutshell, without exception all the leaders of the relevant ministries and departments had to indicate their approval of whatever measures were under consideration. Often reservations entered by one or another government ministry or department sufficed to block the adoption of pernicious measures or, at least, to mitigate their consequences. After the breakup of the USSR, the situation changed drastically. For various reasons the overwhelming majority of the most competent officials found themselves out of government. Ministries and departments were now headed by persons known to be mediocrities. These officials repeatedly leapfrogged above their level of competence to positions of leadership. The system of securing agreement was abolished, but no other filters were introduced.

  The most paradoxical feature was that although it seemed the bureaucracy was dependent on those in power, at the same time it actually bossed them about. For one thing any decision might remain unimplemented if the bureaucracy chose to drag its feet. Also decisions might be ill justified but sent upward to high-level officials who, suffering from a lack of time and competence, were unable to judge them correctly. Even worse a decision that had not been adopted might be passed off as one that had been, while a resolution that actually had been adopted might not be register
ed and, thus, deemed invalid. To illustrate these points, I share some observations about what went on in the inner sanctum of power during the Yeltsin era and the early Putin period.

  Let us consider the Russian position on one of the key aspects of the country’s defensive posture—namely, the treaty on antiballistic missile defense. For various reasons the treaty was coming apart at the seams, yet in accordance with its unfortunate tradition of spinning the truth, the Foreign Ministry gleefully reported that everything was going splendidly and that no changes were necessary in the position Moscow had adopted many years earlier. Noting a certain surrealism in this attitude, we prepared changes in the position, coordinated them with the military, and sent the proposals to the president. We received neither an answer nor an acknowledgment. We called Sergei Prikhodko to learn the fate of our proposal; his deputy, Alexander Manzhosin, who in 2007 would head the Presidential Foreign Policy Directorate, responded. His answer was worthy of Kafka.

  “You know,” said this worthy, who had important responsibilities in the area of foreign policy on behalf of the president, “we don’t understand anything about this, and so we’re leaving it just like the Foreign Ministry proposed.”

  What an admission! The deputy head of the Foreign Policy Directorate declares, without a trace of embarrassment, that neither his boss nor he and his colleagues understand anything—and don’t want to understand anything—about a crucial question of Russia’s foreign policy.

  The same work ethic prevailing among officials in the Security Council foreshadowed their response to threats. Their standard approach was that their work should be measured by the magnitude of the threat they discerned. To curry favor with the Presidential Administration, several departments felt it practically their duty to pass along information that exaggerated the threats. Given the preponderance of precisely such information, it was sometimes difficult and, for some officials, impossible to maintain a balanced approach in the Security Council. However, this does not mean that no balanced and useful work was going on there.

  After Andrei Kokoshin became secretary of the Security Council, we became fully engaged with the problem of the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means of obtaining them. We must give the Americans their due: they correctly identified Minister of Atomic Energy Yevgeny Adamov as the person responsible for violating the nonproliferation agreement. It was only in 1999 that the effort to expose him bore fruit. (His subordinates and those who had anything to do with him were terrified of the man they referred to as “Stalin from Ordynka Street.”2) Only with great difficulty did we manage to receive reliable information about Adamov’s illegal activities. Yevgeny Primakov, who was then the prime minister, appointed an official commission to investigate the activity of this blatantly criminal minister. Armed with the results of the commission’s labors, Primakov signed a memorandum to President Yeltsin that we had drafted spelling out Adamov’s official misdemeanors and proposing that he be dismissed from his post given his illegal business dealings in nuclear technology.

  If everything had gone properly, Adamov’s dismissal would have been only the overture to what should have followed. He should have been held criminally accountable, and, most important of all, the many opportunities for trade in nuclear secrets would have been exposed and order returned to export controls. However, nothing of the sort occurred. Although an attempt was made to block the commission’s report and to withhold it from Yeltsin—most likely by Tatiana Diachenko, who was close to Adamov—this resistance was somehow overcome. But the report to Yeltsin had no effect. It was as if Adamov, to put it mildly, had not committed any of the official offenses that violated written and unwritten laws, as we had demonstrated. It was as if the prime minister had not spelled out the blatant outrages to the president. It was as if his memorandum and our protocol were nothing more than a bad joke that was best quickly forgotten or ignored. However, there was one consequence of our work: V. Malkevich, who then headed the Russian Federal Service on Currency and Export Control (VEK) was dismissed from his post, and Putin disbanded the service. The upshot of this failure to implement the commission’s findings was that suspicion naturally arose that the proliferation of nuclear missile technology was a carefully concealed government policy.

  The story of Adamov and nuclear affairs was quite typical of contemporary Russia. The double standards of Russian politics were revealed in all their glory. Lip service was paid to the notion that national security was the primary concern, but in reality the authorities took no interest in the fact that an actual threat was being created. Is this some sort of schizophrenia? Some sort of perverse kleptomania when you steal the right to your own security?

  I will not try to judge the reliability of the rumors and reports in the mass media concerning Adamov’s links with the criminal world. Their very appearance, however, speaks volumes. It was also a matter of considerable curiosity to learn that Adamov was supposedly the only member of a foreign government to possess a Social Security card in the United States and, according to the same information, to direct an American company. However, addressing these questions was not within the competency of the government commission. They should be the province of the services responsible for ensuring state security. Without parading their connection and through their own channels, these same services should refute information appearing in the press if it does not correspond to the truth.

  During the period I served on the Security Council, Ivan Rybkin, Andrei Kokoshin, Nikolai Bordiuzha, Vladimir Putin, Sergei Ivanov, and Vladimir Rushailo rotated through the position of secretary. Rushailo left the most vivid impression. The first shock was when in his initial meeting with foreign interlocutors Rushailo read verbatim a set of talking points we had drafted for him to use. Its reference section, which was for his eyes alone, contained extremely sensitive information that should not have been revealed to his interlocutor under any circumstances. However, droning on with the same intonation, Rushailo continued, “Eyes only—current situation . . .” And he read it out loud to the end. He was very satisfied with the discussion. His interlocutors were even more so. My colleagues and I decided that the less he knew the better, and as far as we were able, we stopped providing him “sensitive” information.

  A few words about the other secretaries—except for Putin, as I was ill when he served in that position—are in order. Rybkin, as far as I know, restrained the Russian hawks from resuming the slaughter in Chechnya. At least that is what I saw and heard. During his tenure, my like-minded colleagues and I worked toward that end, and he not only refrained from hindering us but even helped a little.

  Under Rybkin I spent a lot of time working on Chechnya. In addition to the daily work flow, I tried to create a mechanism for extending foreign humanitarian assistance to this long-suffering republic. To work out a concrete plan, I spent several days in Grozny in September 1997. Only there was it possible to understand every detail about how to secure the safety of the personnel from international humanitarian organizations, on the one hand, and guarantee that aid got through to those intended, on the other. Leaving aside my other impressions, I will say a few words about the humanitarian situation in Chechnya at that time.

  My Chechen interlocutors said that since August 1996, or for more than a year, not a single pill or any other pharmaceutical supplies had reached them. The problem of childhood nutrition was extremely acute. Production facilities in Chechnya had been totally destroyed, and Moscow had done nothing to remedy the situation, getting away with making formal replies. Through its embassy the Russian Foreign Ministry was blocking all efforts from abroad to supply humanitarian aid to Chechnya.

  The infrastructure of secondary and higher education, as well as of public health, was also destroyed. As of September 1, 1997, poverty kept one of every five children from attending school. Parents lacked the funds to clothe, shoe, feed, or send their children to boarding schools. The epidemiological situation was extremely worrisome. Experts predicted that
in a year to a year and a half, one out of every three residents of Chechnya would be infected with tuberculosis. Under any scenario, containing the epidemic within the boundaries of the republic would be impossible. The situation was fraught with the danger that other serious epidemics might also occur.

  To initiate wide-scale international action, all Rybkin had to do was sign a single letter (albeit to many addresses). But he was not too lazy to cross out every letter, which was very unusual. I was unable to receive an explanation regarding such an unexpected finale to something that he had earlier agreed to. From then on I began to withdraw from the problem of Chechnya.

  As a self-sufficient egocentric, Kokoshin initially believed he could manage without a staff. For some reason he smugly announced this publicly, but he was soon convinced otherwise. After his dismissal he inflicted official punishments on entirely innocent officials for failing to implement the president’s directives, which they had not even seen. Kokoshin simply piled the presidential papers onto his desk, where they remained without any action being taken. He was interested only in nonproliferation and export controls. His rudeness to his subordinates was legendary.

  Bordiuzha was the most capable of the secretaries of the Security Council for whom I worked. He impressed me as an honest, energetic man, who worked hard with only a short break for a nap. Consequently, he often fell into a somnambulistic state. Sergei Ivanov struck even people who had been around a while with his superficiality, hypocrisy, and prejudices. Every feature of his face radiated self-infatuation and fox-like cunning, his speech was vacuous, and he dressed garishly.

  Living in a hall of distorting mirrors that reflected false information, residual dogmas, and ideological clichés; not forgetting their personal interests for a single second; and being manipulated by their subordinates, the Kremlin bosses were incapable of adequately responding to the sum total of Russia’s domestic and foreign problems, which they themselves often created with their mistaken decisions. Sergei Dovlatov thought that hell is within us.3 It is difficult not to agree. But Russian satirical writings (and drawings) on the model of Francisco Goya’s Los caprichos show how easy it is to create a man-made hell in just a short time.