A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

Epilogue The End of the USSR

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the reappearance of Russia were momentous events, but events that are difficult to describe in any depth. The main outlines are clear, as much of its fall took place in public under intense scrutiny by the Soviet population, Russian and foreign journalists, and the governments of the world. Yet many of the crucial decisions took place behind closed doors and are too recent to be the object of study by historians. Many of the major events of the time have already fallen from memory, and others have been probably exaggerated in popular accounts as well as in the few academic attempts at analysis. Real sources scarcely exist, and sensational memoirs and fragments of information do not make good history. To complicate matters, perceptions of the events outside Russia and among the Russian and most former Soviet populations differ profoundly. All that is possible is a sketch of the events and of some of the more obvious social, political, and economic trends of a quarter of a century of upheaval, with some attention to the understanding of these events and trends by the Russians who lived through them.

Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in March of 1985, just a few hours after the death of Chernenko. He brought with him a new team – among others, Aleksandr Iakovlev as an adviser and Boris Yeltsin, whom he put in charge of the Moscow party organization. Gorbachev belonged to a new generation: born in 1931, he graduated from Moscow University in law in 1955. The last Soviet leader with a university education had been Lenin. After university Gorbachev soon became the party boss of his native Stavropol’, an agricultural district in the plains north of the Caucasus. In 1979 he entered the Politburo. Iakovlev was older, born in 1923, and had risen through the party propaganda network in the 1950s. He spent 1958 at Columbia University in New York on an exchange, and was ambassador to Canada from 1973 to 1983. These two men would lead the attempt to reform the Soviet order. Their nemesis was another party boss from the provinces, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, born the same year as Gorbachev, graduated from the Technical University in Sverdlovsk, also in 1955, and went on to become the party boss of the Sverdlovsk region, one of the USSR’s key industrial regions. He remained at that post from 1976 until Gorbachev brought him to Moscow.

The first year or so after the appearance of Gorbachev brought little change on the surface. Indeed the most spectacular event of his first year in office was the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986. The country that had sent the first man into space could not maintain the safety of its reactors. Gorbachev called for a radical improvement in the economy at the 1986 party conference, but got nowhere. Andrei Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow late in the year, but most of the policy discussion still remained behind the closed doors of party meetings. In 1987 Gorbachev began to call for “restructuring” (perestroika in Russian), publishing a whole book to promote his vision. He soon added to this glasnost’, which meant something like “openness” or perhaps even “transparency.” The idea was simply that major issues should be part of public debate, not just discussion behind closed doors within the party elite. At the same time a whole series of measures began to open the economic structure to non-governmental enterprise. The first important example was the law that permitted “cooperatives” to function, which were, in fact, small private businesses such as restaurants. Largely unnoticed at the time, the leadership also took steps to speed up the economy by making use of the Komsomol, the Communist League of Youth. Founded in the Civil War as a means of mobilizing the young behind the party’s goals, it had become an essentially bureaucratic organization, a lifeless adjunct to the party. Now it was encouraged to set up “Youth Scientific-Technical Groups,” which were allowed to engage in tax-free entrepreneurial activities, mainly with electronics and automobiles. In these groups the later oligarchs took their first steps.

Just as important as these changes in attitude and policy was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Gorbachev seems to have decided on this move almost immediately, but he did not announce the withdrawal until 1988. Within a year, the Soviets were out of Afghanistan, which then fell into civil war. The ensuing years of Perestroika were politically exciting, as new publications sprang up in Moscow and Leningrad and many other parts of the country. Issues from the Stalin era and other dark parts of Soviet history were the objects of intense discussion. Former dissidents like Sakharov for a moment were national heroes. Not all of this ferment was the result of newly found freedom: the first article to appear critical of Lenin was written on command from the authorities, and historians who questioned its nationalistic conclusions were told it was not for discussion. In parts of the country, such as the Ukraine or Central Asia, the press continued in the Soviet mode. Nevertheless in most of the central press, in film, in literature, at the theater, and at the dinner tables of ordinary people, intense arguments raged and no one any longer took account of what the authorities thought or did. The excitement of political debate, the first such debate in seventy years, went along with a rapidly deteriorating economy. Gorbachev’s first economic reforms removed many of the mechanisms of the Soviet economy but put nothing in their place. A real market did not yet exist. The supply of consumer goods, already very poor in the early 1980s, fell catastrophically. The state also began to lose control of the periphery. In 1988 Armenia began to make claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in neighboring Azerbaidzhan. Moscow was unable to resolve the dispute, and Armenia began to reject the authority of the Soviet state.

The pace of change quickened. Behind the scenes, the Komsomol entrepreneurs had accumulated vast sums, and were soon joined by Soviet banks and industrial ministries, which converted themselves into “firms” oriented toward the growing market. In 1989 the Ministry of Natural Gas Industry became Gazprom, and it was only one of many such organizations. Essentially, a kind of privatization was taking place behind closed doors. Other changes were public. Everywhere in the country Gorbachev’s policy was to replace the hierarchy of party offices with “Soviet,” that is to say, government, offices. In many cases the local party boss simply moved across the street to head the local government, but the change meant that the party suddenly was becoming irrelevant. Inside the party opposition to Perestroika was growing. Then Gorbachev announced that the old Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislature of the USSR, would be replaced with a “Congress of People’s Deputies.” Elections to the new Congress would be real and open: there was to be more than one candidate for each seat. The result was a more or less free election, the first since 1917, but the results were mixed. Gorbachev wanted the new Congress as a vehicle to move ahead the process of economic liberalization as well as “democratization,” newly included in the agenda of reform. Unfortunately the composition of the new Congress meant a stalemate. Moscow and Leningrad predictably elected strongly reformist deputies, most of them from the intelligentsia, as did many Russian provincial cities and districts. The Ukraine, however, still firmly under party boss Leonid Kravchuk, and the Central Asian republics elected conservative deputies opposed to reform. The Baltic republics, swept by a wave of nationalism, were more interested in separation than reform, and the Transcaucasian republics were focused on their mutual quarrels. The elections also brought Boris Yeltsin into the public eye. In 1987 he had fallen afoul of Gorbachev, who had then removed him from his Moscow post. Now as a deputy to the Congress, he used the platform to criticize the pace and scope of reform. He also began to affirm the need for the Russian republic to look after its own rights and needs, and not defer to the central, or Soviet, authorities. The year 1989 also saw the collapse of Communist power everywhere in Eastern Europe, climaxed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. Even anti-Soviet Communists in Rumania were overthrown. Gorbachev accepted all this, apparently hoping it would lead to better relations with the West.

The next year Gorbachev formally became the head of state of the USSR, completing the transfer of formal power from party to state institutions. It did not help him. In the ensuing months growing nationalism in the Baltic republics and Georgia created a whole new series of problems. In Georgia the colorful dissident writer Zviad Gamsakhurdia was elected president in 1990, leading to an immediate conflict with Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Georgian government tried to impose Georgian language on the two minorities, banned local parties, and then shortly after abolished their local autonomy. Soviet troops had to come and separate the contending parties. Thus all three Transcaucasian republics were now in turmoil. Gorbachev was losing control over the country. Nationalist ferment in Lithuania led to a violent confrontation with Soviet troops and many deaths in January 1991. In June, Yeltsin won election to the leadership of the Russian republic by a big majority, in large part because there was no real opposition in the field against him.

By 1991 the economy seemed to be reaching a nadir, and the authority of the state was at an all-time low. Yet public politics still revolved around the battle of reform versus retention of the Soviet system. The public advocates of reform were mostly from the intelligentsia, and were increasingly impatient with Gorbachev, whom they saw as too slow and inclined to compromise. Advocates of the old system seemed to come mainly from the ranks of the party elite, increasingly under threat from Gorbachev’s reforms, economic as well as political. In the background and unnoticed by all, new groups were forming and waiting in the wings, political clans and a few new entrepreneurs working largely within the Soviet structure, but using it to form de facto businesses. The Communists intent on preserving the system then unwittingly provided the opportunity to destroy it.

In August of 1991, while Gorbachev was taking a brief vacation in the Crimea, the vice-president, the Ministers of Internal Affairs and of Defense, and several other high officials decided to declare an emergency and take power to reverse the entire process of reform. They brought several regiments of troops into the city, but found little support. Most local governments either rejected their appeals or like the Ukrainian leadership, sat on the fence. The people of Moscow were clearly against them, and Yeltsin as head of the Russian republic government led the opposition, famously standing on a tank to rally the people. The coup leaders kept Gorbachev isolated in the Crimea in his dacha, hoping to hang on, but it was no use. After a few days of almost bloodless confrontation, they surrendered.

The outcome was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev returned to Moscow, but the country was in chaos. As he struggled to hold on, Yeltsin met with the leaders of Belorussia and the Ukraine in a hunting lodge in the Belovezha forest in Belorussia. The three of them abolished the Soviet Union. Other republics were not asked: the Baltics and Georgia had already declared independence, but the Central Asian republic leadership groups were aghast at the prospect. The public was not asked either: early in 1991 there had been referenda on the status of the union, and most people, including in the Ukraine, had voted for more autonomy but to also preserve the union. This, of course, had been the desire of the local leadership in Kiev and elsewhere. Now Yeltsin was in power and the leaders had changed their minds. After seventy-four years of existence, the Soviet Union came to an end.

The first result, visible already in the weeks after the coup, was a transformation of the economy unlike anything earlier discussed in public by the main reformist groups. One part of this policy of privatization was already largely complete: the transformation of state production units and banks into private firms. Many or most of these had an effective monopoly over one or another area of the economy, and they constituted the cream of the financial system and the “real” economy. The other part of the policy was “voucher privatization.” In theory everyone would get vouchers for property in the new system, but the vouchers were largely worthless. Some people papered their bathroom walls with them. In fact the state simply turned over its remaining resources to freshly baked “businessmen” at fire sale prices. Real private businesses existed only at the level of small businesses, which were heavily taxed and consequently conducted business to a large extent outside the law.

The central role of the state and connections of the new owners with important figures in the government did not mean that the transformation of power into property was an orderly process. Rival clans of businessmen intrigued with powerful political clans for favor. Gangsters became a regular feature of Russian business, and fought one another other with armed bands. Every week expensive cars turned up in Moscow parks with the cars and their occupants riddled with machine gun bullets. Chechen and other Caucasian gangs controlled the peasant markets and other lucrative sources of profit.

While a new elite of oligarchs came into being, the standard of living of the population collapsed. Hyperinflation wiped out the savings of ordinary people. Doctors, teachers, coal miners, and factory workers were not paid for months or even years at a time. Many people lived on a barter economy, and the formerly better off grew potatoes in the yards of their dachas. An overvalued ruble meant that Russia suddenly became a dumping ground for the world’s goods. Cheap vodka poured into the country from Belgium and Germany with labels picturing Rasputin, and the American Snickers candy bar became so ubiquitous that economists used its price as a benchmark of inflation. The infrastructure, already frail from years of neglect, began to collapse. Culture disappeared. The great theaters and orchestras lived on the proceeds of foreign tours. Few films were made, and movie theaters showed American “action films.” Scientists moved abroad or tried to find foreign grants. The intelligentsia, for the first time since the middle nineteenth century, ceased to play a major role in Russian life. Emigration boomed, not only Jewish emigration but also the departure of other ethnic and religious minorities and many ordinary Russians. Only Moscow and a few other areas maintained a limited prosperity, fuelled by the new businesses and the rapidly expanding state bureaucracy. While the Yeltsin years seemed to the West an era of “democratization” and the transition to a market economy, they seemed to most Russians a dark night of anarchy, poverty, and total unpredictability.

The ongoing collapse of the economy was paralleled by a collapse of state power. National republics like Tatarstan began to assert “sovereign” rights, though no one knew exactly what that meant. In purely Russian regions provincial governors, mostly from the old Communist apparatus, got themselves elected and challenged the central powers. Yeltsin responded in many cases by driving them out of office and appointing governors himself, but local legislatures were harder to control. Yeltsin’s largest political problem, however, was the Russian parliament, the Supreme Soviet of the Congress of People’s Deputies, in Moscow. The new president was never able to translate his own electoral victories into a secure majority in the Supreme Soviet, mainly because he was never able to create a political party to serve his aims. The result was a series of deadlocks, and increasing opposition to Yeltsin. Popular despair over the consequences of economic reform created a political vacuum and gave the Supreme Soviet a chance to try to block further privatization measures. Yeltsin’s vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi, elected with him in 1991, joined his opponents as did the speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Chechen by birth. When Yeltsin ordered the Supreme Soviet dissolved, contrary to the constitution, the Supreme Soviet impeached Yeltsin and proclaimed Rutskoi president. In response demonstrators supporting Rutskoi and Khasbulatov barricaded the parliament building, the “Russian White House,” seized the mayor’s office and then the television tower on October 3, 1993. The next day Yeltsin brought in tanks that shelled the Russian White House, a moment shown live on television throughout the world. Yeltsin inaccurately portrayed his opponents and their leaders – both his former allies – as attempting to restore Communism, a fantasy noticed by a few Western journalists. Most Russians thought the conflict an unprincipled struggle for power and the levers of privatization. US President Clinton spoke in favor of Yeltsin’s actions and accepting his description of the events, sending Russian opinion of America into a decline from which it never recovered. Yeltsin rewrote the constitution to give more power to the president, and renamed Russia’s legislature the Duma to recall tsarist times.

Even worse was to come. In the North Caucasus, Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudaev proved completely intractable to Yeltsin’s attempts to make a deal. As Chechnya was a major center of oil production, much was at stake. In October 1994, Yeltsin sent troops to take Grozny, the Chechen capital. The result was an ignominious failure, and government bombing killed thousands of civilians, many of them Russians living within the city. Fighting continued until 1996, when the Russian air force managed to track down Dudaev and kill him with a missile strike. Grozny was in ruins.

The Yeltsin years were also the time of the emergence of some dozen oligarchs, many of them from the Komsomol networks of 1987–88, who came to head huge personal business empires, usually centered on banks and controlling vast production units and all the important electronic and print media. All of them had close connections with the government, but acted largely on their own and in ruthless competition with one another. For the mass of the population, the standard of living continued to fall. The mortality rate skyrocketed, much of it the result of massive vodka consumption – the product of despair and cheap imported liquor. The birth rate fell well below the rate needed to reproduce the population. In spite of all this, Yeltsin managed to achieve his re-election in 1996. Crucial to his victory was the work of Anatolii Chubais, the head of the privatization program, who was well connected with Russian oligarchs and foreign sources of support. Another crucial factor was the absence of any other candidate than Gennadii Ziuganov, the head of the Russian Communist party. Ziuganov preached a strange mixture of Soviet ideology, Russian nationalism, and sheer eccentricity, and found support among the elderly and provincial workers, as well as masses of protest votes. Yeltsin entered his second term, sick from heart attacks and heavy drinking, which he displayed in public on several occasions. Western governments and companies moved into the former Soviet republics in Transcaucasia and Central Asia in search of new oil and gas supplies. Although there was a respite in Chechnya, Russia was at its nadir.

The turning point came as a consequence of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98. This crisis had repercussions in Russia, and in August 1998, the State Bank let the ruble fall sharply. The results were immediate: Russian goods began to replace imports in Russian stores in a matter of weeks. The rickety financial structure that was the centerpiece of the oligarchic business empires collapsed. Russian industry began to revive. The few remaining financial oligarchs of the 1990s now were joined by an increasing number of new oligarchs, whose fortunes rested on industry and the extraction of resources. Rising revenues from the sale of oil and natural gas, mainly to the European Union, made Russian finances healthy again. The war in Chechnya revived in 1999, but this time to Russia’s favor. After a series of bombings of apartment houses in Moscow and other Russian cities that were attributed to Chechen militants, the Russian army moved in on Chechnya, this time slowly but deliberately. By the spring they had retaken Grozny and most of the area, and established a new government led by Ahmad Kadyrov, a Muslim cleric and erstwhile supporter of Dudaev.

Yeltsin, evidently exhausted by the years of upheaval, heavy drinking, and bad health suddenly resigned and appointed his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, as his successor on the last day of 1999. No one knew why Yeltsin chose Putin, nor even if Yeltsin’s was the deciding voice. Putin had served twenty-five years in the KGB, five of them in East Germany, but then joined the political team of St. Petersburg’s reformist mayor Anatolii Sobchak. In 1996 he went to Moscow, at some point attracting Yeltsin’s attention. Much younger, ascetic by contrast to Yeltsin, and a colorful personality, he attracted world attention and very quickly acquired popularity among the overwhelming majority of Russians. He remained president through two elections until 2008.

Putin very quickly put together a new order. He inherited a constitutionally strong presidency from Yeltsin’s 1993 rewrite of the constitution, but more important, his team managed to create a pro-government political party that supported the president in the Duma. He regularized the practice of appointing provincial governors, and appointed military officers and some of his former comrades from KGB to important offices. President Putin was much more powerful than his predecessor, though most Russians still saw the state as the instrument not of the president, but of the now ever more numerous oligarchs. The Chechen war gradually died down, though terrorist acts continued sporadically, like the assassination of Ahmad Kadyrov and the seizure of school children in Beslan, both in 2004. If foreign journalists saw all these changes as creeping dictatorship, the Russian population felt that order was coming back. A new prosperity was as important as order and relative stability. Moscow and other large cities went into an orgy of home improvements, as a new middle class emerged and began to replace aging Soviet appliances with Siemens and Bosch washing machines and dishwashers. Huge traffic jams appeared every day as millions bought cars for the first time: ancient used Volkswagens and gleaming new Japanese SUVs. Hundreds of thousands began to take vacations abroad to Europe and the Middle East in search of the sun. The Turkish coast at Antalya was packed with Russians all year around. The birth rate inched up, nearing the replacement rate for the first time in decades. Culture revived, with massive expenditures on projects like the reconstruction of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Publishing boomed, spurred by the new mass market in detective stories and romance novels, many of them translated or imitated from Western models. Serious journalists and scribblers turned out endless biographies and “exposés” of current politics as well as pseudo-historical accounts of Russian history. Historians continued to publish ever more massive series of documents from Soviet history, concentrating on the Stalin era but eventually reaching into the 1950s. After a few years it was fairly clear that the new prosperity was not just the result of oil revenues from sales to the European Union: the internal market had begun to grow and increasing trade with China began to revive old Soviet-era factories. Prosperity began to spread outside Moscow and the oil-producing areas to St. Petersburg and provincial cities. Small business increasingly became a normal part of the economy as the Putin government removed the punitive taxes of the Yeltsin era. Verbally, Russia began to challenge American hegemony in the world. Though still isolated from most world economic organizations, and with only a de facto ally in China, Russia reentered world politics after a decade of absence.

The end of the Soviet Union left the new Russia with many dilemmas. One of them was very basic: What is Russia? And what is to be the political ideal to cement the state? In the Yeltsin years the government struggled with this issue largely by itself, for society was essentially flattened, desperate merely to survive. In theory, the ideology of the new regime was democracy, but for most Russians that simply meant the public pronouncements of the people in power. When the Russian air force bombed Grozny in 1994, one of the older Russian residents told Western reporters, “I survived the Nazis, now I have survived the democrats.” A variety of intellectuals and political groupings tried to come up with new ideologies to replace Marxism, most attempts being a Russian nationalism similar to that propagated by Ziuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The Yeltsin government realized that “democracy” meant to ordinary Russians nothing more than kleptocracy and anarchy and tried to fill the vacuum, often to comic effects. The television stations, then entirely in the hands of pro-government oligarchs, ran endless programs about the Romanov dynasty and often imaginary pre-1917 traditions. Yeltsin not only renamed the parliament the Duma, in recognition of the 1906–1917 institution, he also restored the double-headed eagle as the state symbol of Russia, a dynastic emblem of autocracy, not democracy. The government decided that Russia needed a “state ideology” and appointed a committee headed by a nationalist mathematician to come up with one. After a year the committee dissolved itself because it could not come up with anything reasonable.

The Putin presidency inherited a state that had little legitimacy with the population. The Soviet Union after the war had been legitimate to most people; that is, they may have thought all the policies were wrong but it was still their state. The new Russia was nobody’s state, even if most people approved of Putin. Many Russians believed that the new elite was even further from the population than the Communists had been. Ordinary people said of the new elite, “they don’t ask us” about what they were doing. As the years passed, the population began to look back more positively on the Soviet era, and the Putin government responded by memorializing Soviet heroes from the war or the space race, and suggesting that history textbooks should be less negative about that part of the Russian past. Increasing segments of the population were better off after 2000, but in what country did they live? What was Russia? The boundaries that collapsed in 1991 were not created by the Soviets, but the Russian Empire centuries before. These were not abstract questions. Millions of people had personal ties with the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and even more remote areas. They still lived in terms of the former Soviet space, not just Russia. Narrow Russian nationalism turned out to be a failure with no wide echo in the population, young or old. The new Russia moreover did not reflect the social values of substantial parts of the population. At least the new state did not become an ethno-state, like most other ex-Soviet republics. At Putin’s 2000 inauguration the Russian Orthodox clergy were seated in the audience alongside the rabbis and imams, an arrangement that in a strange way retained the traditions both of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. If the Caucasus remained a problem, official terminology included all citizens of Russia as “rossiane” (roughly, people of Russia), not just “russkie” (Russians in an ethnic sense), a terminology impossible to translate but highly significant for its attempt at inclusiveness.

In the Perestroika era, a popular joke was that the Soviet Union was the only country in the world with an unpredictable past – a comment on Soviet historical ideology and the speed and superficiality of its replacement. Indeed Russia had been a land of thinly populated northern forests for the first eight or nine centuries of its existence, but it turned into one of the world’s most populous countries and is still the world’s largest in area. It was the world’s fifth industrial power in 1914 while still overwhelmingly rural. Then it embarked, or the Bolsheviks embarked it, on a utopian scheme to realize a new socialist order of society, one without classes or exploitation. At the same time they sought to become a fully industrialized modern state. In the latter goal it largely succeeded, if at colossal cost. For a short time, the Soviet Union was a superpower, or was almost one. For most of the twentieth century Russia was even a major player in world science and in literature, even if these never reached the heights achieved in the era of the tsars. The fate of the socialist dream is more a matter of irony than tragedy: the ruling party that was to create the new order, after seventy years of effort, effectively decided that wealth was better than power, that inequality was better than equality and it privatized itself. The result was a hybrid society, with private businesses that are not quite private and government institutions not quite governmental. The smaller and less powerful but (for many) richer state that succeeded the Soviet Union appeared on the scene mimicking the old Russia, with an ambiguous place in the world and in the eyes of its people. Whether or not it can realize the potential created by the previous millennium of Russian (and Soviet) history remains to be seen.