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

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  When Putin came to power, he created an almost ideal mendacious and hypocritical regime that combined the demagoguery of Soviet totalitarianism that he was intimately familiar with, partly from his “undercover” work for the Soviet Embassy in the German Democratic Republic, and the dirty tricks and technological activities of the special services. Consequently, he succeeded in winning the trust not only of those of his fellow citizens who were susceptible to vacuous but beautiful words but also of many persons abroad. A KGB officer is accustomed to playing to his interlocutor and lying in order to ingratiate himself and not fail in his current mission. What sort of an agent would he be otherwise? If he makes a mistake, he immediately wriggles out of it; moreover, others always prepare the ground in advance to implement his plan. But if the plan fails, then he makes every effort to deny his own role in the unsuccessful provocation. This is hardly the mark of diplomacy.

  As a staff member of the Security Council, I was well aware that Putin said exactly what each one of his foreign interlocutors wanted to hear. Putin was not in the least embarrassed that he said diametrically opposite things in conversation with his next interlocutor. There is a bit of Russian jargon meaning “to play the role of an agent.” Thus, Putin, an old hand at putting on an act, does it with everyone in succession. As the saying goes, a fish rots from the head.

  Unfortunately, my observations are very relevant to contemporary Russian diplomacy and political life as a whole. In sum, most of what transpired in the headquarters of the Russian Foreign Ministry and its missions abroad makes for a rather dismal picture.

  There is a saying in Russian, “If you have power, you don’t need intelligence.” At some point in Russian history this became a virtual call for action, a kind of distillation of the absolute. The well-known result of the mindless buildup of military and other means of coercion was the defeat of the USSR in the Cold War and its subsequent collapse. While diplomacy is one of the key intellectual centers of any country, unfortunately, once again Russian diplomacy is not up to the current challenges.

  Some Russians nurture a pathological hatred of European civilization. This hatred, which I personally abhor, derives from a morbid rejection of everything outside the parameters of the familiar rules and stereotypes drilled into their heads by the Bolsheviks and their miserable existence, according to which, for example, slavery and filth are natural. This hatred will prevent Russia from becoming a civilized country in the foreseeable future. It will continue to cringe before any supposedly elected authorities and to revel in its own abnormality until at least a third generation has grown to maturity in conditions of freedom, democracy, and, correspondingly, of self-respect. Incidentally, those who call themselves patriots consist predominantly of the xenophobic public.

  Returning to the subject of the post-Soviet breakdown of the Foreign Ministry, one must give Yeltsin or his puppet masters their due. After numerous failures to fill the position of foreign minister of Russia when it was still part of the USSR, he appointed the young and talented diplomat Andrei Kozyrev to the post. However, Kozyrev lacked sufficient knowledge and experience to become a powerful and influential minister of foreign affairs of one of the greatest world powers during the nadir of its transformation. Most of all he lacked the trust and support of the president, who was being manipulated by the special services.

  In the first half of the 1990s, Russian foreign policy was a rather strange amalgam of a progressive, pro-Western orientation on some issues along with the most utterly reactionary and vengeful approaches toward, for example, Latvia and Estonia, as well as support for the criminal activities of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia. Such dualism derived from the interests of players involved in intra-governmental conflict in which foreign policy often played the role of small change. Kozyrev himself was basically interested in the domestic situation. On his watch the diplomatic service lost its professionalism and creativity to a significant degree, but despite the massive exodus from the ministry of its most talented officials, the service nevertheless managed, barely, to survive.

  Yevgeny Primakov, who replaced Kozyrev as foreign minister, was largely responsible for destroying the diplomatic service. He sharply changed the direction of Russian foreign policy, denied its humanitarian role, and “tightened the screws” inside the ministry. All this was done while Russia was diplomatically impotent. (Incidentally, when Primakov was appointed prime minister and was flying to the United States on a visit on March 24, 1999, he ordered the pilots to turn his plane around over the Atlantic and head to Moscow as a protest over the start of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. This act was enthusiastically welcomed by supporters of confrontation with the West, but it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the practice of diplomacy.) After Primakov’s appointment as Russian foreign minister in January 1996, Russia’s foreign policy almost instantly became anti-Western. NATO was proclaimed our prime enemy, just as during the Cold War, and our allies included Milošević; Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, known in the West as “Europe’s last dictator”; and Primakov’s old friend Saddam Hussein. Russia began to consort with anti-Western regimes. Consequently, at that point many of the remaining creative and democratically inclined officials left the diplomatic service.

  When he became prime minister, it seemed that Primakov made a good choice in naming Igor Ivanov as his successor. Ivanov knew the Foreign Ministry very well and had worked as deputy director of the foreign minister’s secretariat. (He was effectively in charge of current and operational matters under Eduard Shevardnadze when the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs was on an upswing.) But here, too, a misstep occurred. Ivanov did something unbelievable: he appointed his acquaintances from the secretariat to leading positions in the Foreign Ministry even though the scope of the secretariat’s activity was very specific. To be sure, the secretariat did employ some natural talents who were willing to question their superiors’ judgment, but they were the exceptions. The general rule in the secretariat was subservience. “What would you like me to do, sir?” It was precisely these kinds of persons whom Ivanov promoted. From then on Russian diplomacy became irrevocably the domain of lackeys. There is no other way to describe a service whose officials were devoid of any convictions or, if they had any, carefully concealed them. That was not how things were even in the bad, old Soviet times. Back then, professionalism, which demanded a thorough knowledge of problems as well as experience, had been the foundation on which one’s positions were based.

  Frequently diplomats could neither do what they thought was necessary nor act as they thought was correct. Of course, the desire to make a career is a normal phenomenon. But by what means? By knowledge, professionalism, mastering one’s brief? Or by an automatic and mindless obsequiousness, servility, and intellectual and moral subservience? Unfortunately, right after the breakup of the USSR, the latter approach began to predominate in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of course, there had always been ministry officials who made their careers via cringing, but their careers generally never got very far. The purge of the USSR Foreign Ministry after its merger with the Russian Foreign Ministry caused irreparable harm to the diplomatic service. Kozyrev’s directive establishing white, gray, and blacklists for advancing further in the diplomatic service severely damaged the attitudes and esprit of diplomats at every level. Although it was not his intent, with this purge of the apparatus, Kozyrev provided a false moral reference point for the ministry. Under Primakov the liberals had to hide their convictions; everyone held their fingers to the wind. Then Ivanov made toadyism the law.

  Starting with Ivanov, diplomatic work became meaningless as well as devoid of purpose and substance since toadyism is inconsistent with diplomacy. Under his sway, work consisted basically of drafting triumphant reports on the mythical achievements of our foreign policy. No one felt any need to amend previously staked-out positions.

  Sergei Lavrov, who replaced Ivanov in 2004 and remains Russia’s foreign minister at present, is the faithf
ul executor of the most noxious directives from higher-level government authorities. He is even more reactionary than Yevgeny Primakov was.

  The Russian Diplomatic Academy as it had existed earlier became a thing of the past. Many of those who considered themselves its supporters actually parodied it. The art of dialogue and finding mutually acceptable solutions ceased being integral parts of Russian diplomacy. Instead, it began to discharge functions that were not essential to this type of activity. Its distinguishing characteristics were provocation, demagoguery, disinformation, ignorance and misunderstanding of its subject matter, and a degree of dogmatism that was unprecedented even in Soviet times. (Parenthetically, it might be noted that the long-serving Soviet minister of foreign affairs during the Cold War Andrei Gromyko—known as “Mister No”—looks like a profound foreign policy thinker in comparison with some of the Russian Federation’s ministers. On occasion, Gromyko exhibited both common sense and sparks of creativity in what he did. I am referring in the first instance to the policy of détente and agreements to reduce the danger of war.)

  The pompous facade of the tall building housing the Russian Foreign Ministry hides the loathsomeness and desolation within. I am not referring to the swarms of cockroaches inside but to other “delights” unworthy of a self-respecting headquarters. The main problem is the wasteland inside the heads of those serving in it. A diplomatic service that proposed employing nuclear weapons in domestic conflicts such as that in Chechnya has no right to be called by that name. Diplomacy shorn of any sense—what could be sadder and more unnatural?

  Postscript to an Epoch of Hope

  In the process of dismantling Soviet totalitarianism, colleagues who shared my democratic ideals and I tried to get rid of sticky, omnipresent spiderwebs. At their center was an enormous, ideological law enforcement Spider that had earlier been called the leadership of the Communist Party and the KGB—in short, the TsK GB, or the Central Committee of State Security. After the breakup of the USSR, neither the CPSU nor the KGB existed any longer under their prior names, but the monster behind them survived essentially unchanged.

  In totalitarian states the Spiders are rather different from those depicted in scholarly literature. This particular Spider does not kill all those who fall into its web. The basic poison it deploys is hypnosis, which it uses to manipulate the people of Russia. When the poison failed to work, the Lenin-Stalin era Spider dispatched its victims to the GULAG, the country’s most important building sites, which were founded on slave labor. It also sent people there to meet the “needs of production”; moreover, the production demands continued into the post-Stalin period.

  The Spider now has other means at its disposal as well—from shooting to depriving one’s freedom to administering polonium-210 (which was used to kill Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006). Punitive psychiatry, which worked for the totalitarian Spider and was terminated only toward the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika, has been revived under Putin’s “vertical of power.”

  Unlike in an ordinary spiderweb, the Alpha Spider in the totalitarian spiderweb coexisted with smaller spiders.

  The threads of the totalitarian spiderweb entangled the entire country, including almost every single person. It snagged them organizationally via the Communist Party, the Soviet government, the professional organizations, and, of course, the law enforcement organs—namely, the KGB and the militia, which worked for this monster. It also ensnared the people psychologically and morally via the hypnosis of their upbringing and education; through the state means of mass information, intimidation, and punishment of dissidents; and through the powerful system of mythmaking that few could stand up to. Feeding on human flesh and human souls, the spiders acquired and maintained power and material benefits. The Alpha Spider could not have held out for long without the Beta, Gamma, and other smaller spiders: the leaders of ministries and departments, local bosses, bureau heads.

  Twice the Spider loosened its grip on the totalitarian spiderweb. The first time was in the period of Khrushchev’s thaw following Stalin’s death. During Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s and in the early Yeltsin period, the spiderweb thinned out, and the weakened Spider sitting at its center became even more embittered and even more eager to catch its prey. Russia was at a crossroads after the breakup of the USSR. The future fate of the country depended on whether the Spider would succeed in restoring its spiderweb. Paradoxically the democratic reforms impregnated the totalitarian monster, and its young spread out all over Russia, even venturing beyond its borders.

  After the failure of the attempted 1991 coup d’état, it seemed that the totalitarian web had been broken and the Spider had breathed its last. This widely shared delusion was caused when the communist totalitarian ideology seemingly had vanished in virtually an instant. In reality everything turned out otherwise. During Yeltsin’s presidency, the mechanism of totalitarianism and the suppression of the individual already began to regain strength. The KGB was disbanded, but it was replaced by new special services, each of which encroached upon human rights in its own way and frequently interfered with the authority of the other special services. (For example, under Yeltsin the Presidential Guard Service along with the Federal Security Service substituted for the then supposedly nonexistent political police and intervened in politics and in the “sorting-out process” between businessmen and others.) The CPSU, the “ruling and guiding force of Soviet society,” returned under Putin with the new name of United Russia; its program consisted solely of supporting him. Officials from the special services and the military occupied the leading positions in both foreign and domestic policy as well as the economy. There was no place in Russia for an ordinary citizen, nor any respect for his or her rights. Concepts of national security, grandeur, and geopolitics reigned. The old monster of totalitarianism was reborn and grew vigorously. Although it appeared in a different form than in the Soviet period, its spiderweb became unprecedentedly dense, solid, and suffocating.

  Thus, all the attempts to destroy the spiderweb that had entangled Russia failed. Its strands were stronger and held the people in their grip. This occurred in large part because the masses blamed the disasters that overtook the country on the democratic changes from the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, it was democracy rather than the bitter opposition to it that many people associated with the shootings in Tbilisi, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Vilnius. This misconception greatly strengthened the Spider’s web, especially during Yeltsin’s presidency when the special services, which had striven hard to discredit democracy, began crawling back to power.

  The majority of the authentic Russian intellectual elite seems entangled by strands of fear or strands of money and material goods. Intellect is also a commodity, but the Russian word intelligentsia denotes intellectuals who are burdened with convictions and a conscience. By no means do I oppose or wish to denigrate either of the two concepts; I simply point out that in Russian the word intellectual has a somewhat different meaning than in the West, where, for example, it is not unusual for intellectuals to resign from the government when they disagree with its activities. As for Russian intellectuals, a category to which several members of the Putin government must be assigned, their moans of disagreement with what is going on, along with their zealous implementation of its most dubious missions, merely evoke feelings of squeamishness. This contrast is precisely why it is necessary to stipulate that membership in a particular elite is not defined either by the position one occupies or by one’s social status. For example, it would be wrong to include in the category of “intellectual elite” the most successful persons of the Putin-Medvedev period, those occupying the most important government positions and boasting incalculable fortunes. Nor can those intellectuals who traded in their convictions for a variety of benefits be included within this “elite.”

  The condition of the Russian elite raises another point of concern since it is the quality of the elite that defines the level of society and its value. After the breakup of the USSR,
the “political elite” appeared to change. In reality, however, it remained essentially the same and was headed by Yeltsin, who had been a staunch communist. Moreover, its quality deteriorated as its ranks swelled with officers and agents of the special services.

  Members of the scientific and artistic elite were squeezed on one side by their fear of a return to the past and, on the other, by their own impoverishment and that of Russia as a whole. These twin pressures led members of the creative professions to trip over themselves to support President Yeltsin and the authorities. The natural consequence was their loss of internal freedom, one that subsequently accelerated with the state’s takeover of the mass media. With the elimination of the Fourth Estate, a victory that Putin celebrated at the beginning of his administration, Russia reverted to the Soviet practice of unremitting mass hypnosis of the people.

  The widespread diffusion of computers, the Internet, and mobile phones has significantly increased the sensitivity of the spiderweb to any sort of deviation from the Spider’s needs. While comfortably sitting in an armchair, one may easily read others’ correspondence and listen not only to their phone conversations but also to those conversations conducted close by when equipped with listening devices.