Imperium

THE SEQUEL CONTINUES

RUSSIA OPENED its twentieth-century history with the Revolution of 1905 and is closing it with the revolution that resulted in the breakup of the USSR in 1991.

HISTORY IN this country is an active volcano, continually churning, and there is no sign of its wanting to calm down, to be dormant.

THE RUSSIAN WRITER Yurii Boriev compared the history of the USSR to a train in motion:

The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly — stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev’s place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward. (Yurii Boriev, Staliniad, 1990)

And thus we come to the Epoch of the Three Funerals (Brezhnev’s, Andropov’s, Chernenko’s), during which the passengers of the train do not even have the illusion that they are going anywhere. But then, in April 1985, the train starts to move again. This is its last journey, however. It will last six and a half years. This time Gorbachev is the engineer, and the slogan GLASNOST — PERESTROIKA is painted on the locomotive.

THE MORE ABSTRACT a meaning one gives to the appellation “Russia,” the easier it is to speak about it. “Russia seeks a path,” “Russia says — no,” “Russia goes to the right,” and so on. At such a high level of generality, many problems lose their significance, cease being relevant, vanish. The ideological and national macroscale marginalizes and invalidates the difficult, vexing microscale of everyday life. Will Russia remain a superpower? When juxtaposed against such a monumental question, of what import is the one that so perturbs Anna Andreyevna from Novgorod — when will they let her live normally for a while? The language of the ubiquitous political discourse forces out, from the mass media and, what is worse, from our memory, the vocabulary with which one can express his private problems, personal drama, individual pain. They do not have a roof over their heads? This is no longer of concern to us; it is a matter for the Salvation Army or the Red Cross.

And yet it is impossible to avoid this abstract approach. One can present the enormous scale of the unfolding events only through language and concepts that are general, synthesizing — yes, abstract — all the while remaining aware that time and time again one will fall into the trap of simplifications and statements easily undermined.

THERE ARE writers who imbue the notion of “Russia” with a mystical meaning, ascribing to it the mysterious, unfathomable qualities of a holy thing. The poet Fiodor Tiutchev writes that “One cannot comprehend Russia with one’s reason … one can only have faith in Russia.” Dostoyevsky believes that Russia is for Europe something enigmatic and incomprehensible: “For Europe, Russia is one of the riddles of the Sphinx. The West will sooner discover the perpetuum mobile or the elixir of life than plumb the essence of Russianness, the soul of Russia, its character and disposition.”

The faith in Russia sometimes assumes a religious coloring. I saw a demonstration in Moscow during which a large crowd was delivering a litany to Russia with as much devotion as pilgrims to Jasna Góra recite prayers to the Mother of God.

OTHER RUSSIAN writers stress that Russia is unlike any other country, that one should treat it as something exceptional, as a distinct and unique phenomenon. “When one speaks of Russia,” writes Piotr Chaadayev, “one often regards it as a state like any other; this is not at all the case. Russia is a whole separate world.” Constantine Aksov claims the same thing. “Russia,” he writes, “is a country utterly without precedent, not even slightly similar to European states and countries.”

AT FIRST, I didn’t envisage a great journey. I wanted only to travel to the Caucasus, where I had been two decades earlier, at the end of the sixties. That small area, conquered by Russia and then forcibly incorporated into the USSR, interested me truly, for I am most fascinated by the mental and political decolonization of the world, and there, beyond the Caucasus, just such a process was unfolding. The twentieth century is not only the century of totalitarianisms and world wars, but also history’s greatest epoch of decolonization: more than a hundred new states have appeared on the map of the world, entire continents have won — at least formal — independence. The Third World was born and a great demographic explosion began — the population of poorly developed countries began to increase at a rate three times greater than that of wealthy countries. A dozen problems result from this, which will be the worry of the twenty-first century.

The same process of Third World expansion that led to the breakup of the colonial empires of England, France, and Portugal could also be felt within the last colonial empire on earth — the USSR. By the end of the eighties, the country’s non-Russian inhabitants constituted nearly half of its population, whereas the governing elite was ninety-five percent Russian or composed of the Russified representatives of the national minorities. It was only a matter of time before awareness of this fact would move these minorities toward acts of emancipation.

SO INITIALLY I planned to travel, as I had done earlier, from Moscow to Georgia, then to Armenia and Azerbaijan. But I was told that this was impossible. The border between Armenia and Azerbaijan is closed; there is a war over which no one has any influence.

This was a shock to me.

How could someone here declare that there is something happening in the USSR over which Moscow has no influence? It was this — the acknowledgment on the part of the imperial powers of some impossibility — that was for me the real revolution! I remember twenty years ago, in Azerbaijan, wanting to visit the Svierdlov kolkhoz rather than the Kirov kolkhoz, but being told that this was impossible: Moscow has given us such and such a program, we cannot change anything. The telephone calls began, the questions, the explanations. Finally, a reply: Agreed, let it be Svierdlov. And all this was over a trifle, an absurdity. But the system depended on that kind of punctiliousness, on a psychotic control of every detail, an obsessive desire to rule over everything. Yurii Boriev writes about some of the matters with which Stalin occupied himself. He issued orders of this kind: “Transfer the sewing machine belonging to tailor’s shop number 1 to factory number 7. J. Stalin.”

And here we have a major event — two republics close their borders and are conducting a war — and Moscow can do nothing about it!

I experienced a second shock a day later, upon arriving in Yerevan. I went for a walk and suddenly encountered, in the streets, groups of armed, bearded men. I saw that they were not Red Army. Passersby said that they were divisions of the independent Armenian liberation army. It was incomprehensible to me that there could be troops in the Imperium that were not part of the Red Army or of the KGB. Knowing the country and the system from earlier years, I was awaiting the moment when Russian troop divisions would move on the capital of Armenia, massacre the young men, and as punishment resettle thousands of the city’s inhabitants in Siberia. But nothing of the sort happened.

The third surprise, on the evening of that same day, was a scene I witnessed on the television screen, during a report from a session of the Supreme Council. One of the deputies was quarreling with the secretary-general of the Central Committee — with Gorbachev. I stiffened. Quarreling with the secretary-general? Once, this meant execution. Later — the irreparable destruction of one’s career. And now — the deputy left the podium to general applause.

Summing all this up, I thought: This is the end of the Soviets! For me, the Imperium fell apart then, in the fall of 1989, on the route from Moscow to Yerevan. Everything that happened later was merely the tossing of additional debris onto an already-existing pile of rubble.

I BELIEVE that only those for whom Stalinism-Brezhnevism is part of their life experience can perceive and comprehend the depth, extraordinariness, and immensity of the transformation and revolution that took place in the USSR between 1985 and 1991. I met young fellow reporters in the course of my travels. What they were seeing they deemed interesting, but part of the normal run of things. For me, everything was unprecedented and astonishing; I could not believe my own eyes.

A FEW WORDS about 1985.

The crisis of the Communist system — and concomitantly of the USSR — becomes at this time increasingly profound, clear, sharp:

• The Third World national liberation movements linked with Moscow wither away and die.

• Communist parties in Western countries collapse and lose their meaning.

• Poland’s Solidarity, despite the repressive power of martial law, creates a permanent and widening breach within an actual Socialist system.

• Moscow increasingly falls behind in the arms race with the West, lags more and more visibly with its outdated technology and low labor productivity, loses position after position in the game to control the world.

As the superpower is sapped of its strength and sinks into twilight, a whole generation of leaders departs with it. In the several years preceding the historic 1985, Kulakov, Rashidov, Suslov, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Ustinov, and Andropov die one after the other. The last of this group, Chernenko, dies on March 11, 1985. Others, like Gromyko and Grishin, are increasingly infirm, wallow in alcoholism or, like Aliyev, in monstrous corruption.

Public opinion does exist in this country, although in the preperestroika years it was expressed differently than in democratic states. People made their views known through silence, not speech. The way in which they were silent was significant and said volumes. The way in which they looked at something or at someone had its eloquence. Where they appeared and where they were absent. The way (slowly) in which they gathered for a forced meeting and the way (instantaneously) in which they then dispersed. Despite the government’s contempt and arrogance vis-à-vis society, it nevertheless paid attention to the kind of silence that prevailed in that society. I met a student in Petersburg who, during a Komsomol congress in that city (during Brezhnev’s time), was “responsible for the atmosphere in the hall.” Public opinion in 1985 is best expressed by the title of a film made at the end of the eighties by the Russian director Stanislav Govoruhin—Tak zyt’ nielzia (One Cannot Live Like This).

And all those crises in which the Imperium is at this time immersed internationally and domestically occur under conditions of universal, everyday human misery, ubiquitous material want and hopelessness. For one must remember that that which was called the privilege of the governing elite was only a relative privilege, existing against a background of penury. The resident of a wealthy country could often laugh at such privileges. For instance, scandal broke out somewhere in the Ukraine because the trunk of the car of some Party official sprang open as he was driving and passersby noticed that there was kielbasa inside. I was myself a witness to another scandal in Ufa — rotten apples were being sold in the market, while workers of the apparat could buy apples that were admittedly worm-eaten, but not rotten! How many times, as I entered various apartments, did my hosts greet me at the door with the words: “Rishard, izvini nashu sovietskuyu nishchetu!” (“Forgive us our Soviet misery!”) Sometimes the subject of evening conversation was the standard and quality of life in wealthy countries. At the end of my accounts, the Russians would smile and say with a certain resignation in their voice: “Eto nie dla nas.…” (“That is not for us.…”)

IN SUCH A SITUATION, in March 1985, on Andrey Gromyko’s recommendation, Mikhail Gorbachev is chosen secretary-general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A month later, during the Party’s April plenum, he delivers the speech that ushers in the era of perestroika and glasnost.

In some sense perestroika and glasnost are the artificial lungs hooked up to the increasingly enfeebled, dying organism of the USSR. Thanks to them, the USSR will survive for another six and a half years. I mention this because Gorbachev’s enemies claim that he assumed the leadership of a flourishing USSR and brought about its breakup. It was just the opposite — the USSR was disintegrating for a long time, and Gorbachev extended its life for as long as it was possible to do so. I mention it also because (this is one of the world’s great paradoxes), just before the breakup of the USSR, the view of that country as a model of the most stable and durable system in the world had gained wide acceptance among Western Sovietologists, and especially among a group of American political scientists. The main proponent of this way of thinking was Jerry F. Hough, a professor at Duke University. As Theodore Draper notes (New York Review of Books, June 11, 1992), there was not one American political scientist who predicted the collapse of the USSR.

That is why, when the USSR ceased to exist at the end of 1991, one could hear exclamations of surprise and consternation around the world. How is that possible? So stable, and yet it fell? So indivisible, and yet it crumbled? From one day to the next? But this “from one day to the next” applied only to the final act. In reality, the process of disintegration began much earlier.

FOR ME, perestroika was the combination of two great processes to which the society of the Imperium was subjected:

• A mass detoxication to cure fear

• A collective journey into the universe of information

Someone who wasn’t brought up in an atmosphere of general, animal fear, and in a world without information, will have difficulty understanding what this was all about.

The foundation of the Soviet Imperium is terror and its inseparable, gnawing offshoot — fear. Because the Kremlin abandons the politics of mass terror with the deaths of Stalin and Beria, one can say that their departure is the beginning of the end of the Imperium. The thaw under Khrushchev and then the years of stagnation alleviate somewhat the frightful nightmare of Stalin’s epoch, but nevertheless do not radically eliminate it. The persecutions of dissidents continue; people still lose their jobs if they think otherwise than they are supposed to; censorship rages on, et cetera. Only perestroika and glasnost introduce a significant change. For the first time people begin to express their opinions publicly, to have views — to criticize and postulate. They overdo this, of course, get drunk on it, which in the long run becomes extremely tiring, because everyone, everywhere, is endlessly talking, talking, and talking. Or writing, writing, and writing. A deluge of words, billions of words — in assembly halls; on all the airways; on tons, hundreds of tons, of pieces of paper. This overabundance of speech, this agitated stream of words, is abetted by the Russian language itself, with its broad phrasing, expansive, unending, like the Russian land. No Cartesian discipline here, no aphoristic asceticism. One must wade through the torrent of some lecture or struggle through countless pages of text before one arrives at a sentence of value. How one must toil to attain this gem!

Not only can one talk now, but there is also something to talk about. For, simultaneously, the voyage into the universe of information began. To generalize and simplify, one of the fundamental differences between the first half of our century and the second half (especially the most recent years) is the radically different access to information that characterized each of these epochs. In this regard, a man living in the first half of the century, especially in the USSR, was closer to the caveman than to the man who today sits before a computer and who, just by pressing the keys, can immediately obtain all the information he wants. Lev Kopieliev, a Russian dissident writer, draws attention to this difference in his book The Idols of My Youth, writing that insofar as information is concerned, even adults were children then, whereas today even children are adults. During the first half of the century in the USSR, people really knew very little. Access to information was one of the real privileges. The archives of the KGB were more closely guarded than the arsenals of the weapons of mass destruction. One Russian journalist (I do not remember his name) recalls that when he asked Brezhnev, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, to whom one was allowed to write concerning the situation in that country, Brezhnev replied: “Write everything, but only in a single copy, and send it only to me.”

And now there are suddenly references to Katyń, to Kuropaty, to Solovki.…

AFTER FIVE YEARS of great effort and tension, Gorbachev is increasingly fatigued, disoriented, and nervous. He is visibly losing his initiative and dynamism, and his politics, until now so creative and, given Russian circumstances, so innovative and extraordinary, are becoming routine, indecisive, concessionary. In December 1990, his minister of international affairs and a tried-and-true ally, Eduard Shevardnadze, warns publicly that the country’s conservative forces are preparing a coup d’état and offers his resignation. Gorbachev doesn’t react. His entourage now consists of people he himself appointed to the highest positions and who will soon betray him. They are all Party bureaucrats, agents of neo-Stalinist reaction.

The critical year 1991 arrives. It begins with bloody events in Vilno and Riga. Troops from the KBG attack an unarmed demonstration in Vilno with tanks — more than a dozen people die; dozens more are wounded. The Lithuanians encircle their Parliament building with concrete barricades. The interior, when I enter it, calls to mind a fortified castle under siege. Sandbags in the windows, everywhere young armed volunteers keeping guard — they are expecting an attack at any moment. President Landsbergis, tense but composed, is among them, giving them courage. In Riga and in Tallinn, as in Vilno, concrete barricades protect the buildings of the newly declared national parliaments. The most imposing barricades are in Tallinn. To reach the Parliament, one must walk through corridors built to resemble the labyrinth of Minos.

Who is responsible for the blood spilled in Vilno and in Riga? ask the democrats in Moscow as they point to Kriuchkov, the chief of the KGB, and Pugo, the minister of internal affairs. But Gorbachev doesn’t dismiss them. Does he lack the strength? Does he not know what to do?

In the summer he goes with his family on vacation to the Crimea.

His entire entourage, with Vice-president Yanayev at the forefront, moves to attack. On August 19, a three-day coup begins. Tanks surround the so-called White House — the seat of the government and of the Parliament of the Russian Federation, as well as the office of its president, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin condemns the conspirators and organizes a defense of the White House.

The coup is suppressed and its leaders are imprisoned. It is revealed later that the tank corps sent out to battle for control over the nuclear superpower had been given nothing to eat for two days. Many of them did not have boots — they were wearing sneakers. The women helping to defend the White House took pity on them, went off to their homes, and brought them back something to eat. The fortified tank corps assured the compassionate ladies that they would not fire — and they kept their promise. Several days later, the Moscow press reported that when the coup was beginning, the mother of its leader, Yanayev, was lying in the Kremlin hospital. At the news of the revolt, which would give power to her son, the hospital’s patients dragged themselves out of their beds and went to the old woman to give her their most heartfelt congratulations. When the revolt failed and Yanayev was arrested, these same patients again dragged themselves out of their beds, but this time they went to the director of the hospital, categorically demanding the expulsion of the old woman.

Gorbachev returns from the Crimea. On Sunday, August 25, the funeral of the three Russian victims of the latest events takes place. A million people converge on the Kremlin, where the procession begins, to pay their respects. I hear someone’s faraway voice, reaching me from a loudspeaker. People in the crowd are talking; no one is paying any attention.

“Who is that speaking?” I ask.

“Gorbachev,” someone answers, and keeps on talking.

No one is listening to Gorbachev any longer; he has ceased to interest people.

• • •

HISTORY IS MADE before our eyes, at every moment, every hour. I am witness during this funeral to the birth of a new class. As we are standing on Kalinin Prospekt waiting for the front of the funeral procession, a tall young man in a shabby oilcloth coat walks up to the crowd and cries: “Defenders of the White House, step forward!”

Silence. No one moves. But after several more requests, a student — judging by his appearance — emerges from the crowd. A moment later, someone else. Before long, a large group of these defenders has gathered. The man in the oilcloth coat soon realizes that the volunteers are starting to form a crowd of their own, so he stops the recruiting. He begins to write down the last names of those who have stepped forth and tells them to come to a meeting on the following Tuesday. They will form an organization, or the movement of the Defenders of the White House. They will receive badges and identification cards. Some years from now they will become ministers, generals, ambassadors.

AFTER THE AUGUST coup Gorbachev resigns as secretary-general of the CPSU. Soon thereafter, Yeltsin dissolves and illegalizes the Communist Party. I am in Kiev at the time. The massive building of the Ukrainian CP is glaringly deserted. Two policemen stand in front of the main entrance, replying to every question with silence and a shrug of the shoulders. And where is the support of the system, the Party apparat? They have already managed to assume new administrative positions in government and commerce or are heading up joint ventures — outposts of the nascent capitalism.

Gorbachev must feel increasingly alone. He is still enormously popular in the West. The West would like to live in harmony with the rulers of the Kremlin, but it has one condition — that they be likable, that they smile, that they be well dressed, relaxed, cheerful, humorous, courteous. And now, after six hundred years of hopeless waiting, such a man appears: Gorbachev! London and Paris, Washington and Bonn, all open wide their arms, rejoice. What a discovery! What a relief!

Elderly American ladies set off in droves to visit Russia.

“Let’s go to Moscow! Let’s have lunch with Gorbi!”

Russians observe all this wide-eyed.

The Russian peers of the American lady tourists, standing in line for hours for a piece of meat or cheese, regard the secretary-general with somewhat less enthusiasm.

He must of course be aware of this. He must feel the emptiness all around him growing. One of the pillars of the system is the so-called telefonnoye pravo (law of the telephone), by which the more highly situated official telephones the one below him and issues instructions. Dismiss Smirnov. Execute Korsakov. The more lowly situated functionary must perform as told without asking any questions. If he refuses, he himself will be dismissed or executed. Such a system of communication ensures that later there will be no paper trail, no proof of decision making. Responsibility vanishes into thin air. Telefonnoye pravo also works in the opposite direction. Before the more lowly situated official makes any decision, he calls the higher one and asks for his approval. Thus, among other things, it is the number of telephone calls from below, their kind and significance, that allow the higher official to ascertain whether he is still important. Many former Party bosses have written in their memoirs that they concluded that their fall was being prepared from the fact that the telephones on their desks rang with decreasing frequency, then fell silent altogether. This signaled the end of one’s career, demotion, dismissal, and — once — death.

At the end of 1991, the telephones on Gorbachev’s desk ring less and less frequently. The center of power has moved elsewhere: as of June 12, the president of the Russian Federation is Boris Yeltsin, who gradually seizes the reins of government over the greater part of the territories of the Imperium.

It is Yeltsin who in November suspends and illegalizes the ruling Communist Party. (At that point it has close to twenty million members.) It is on his initiative, without Gorbachev’s knowledge (or at least without his consent), that the leaders of the Russian Federation, as well as of the Belorussian and Ukrainian republics, meet at the beginning of December in the Białowieza forest and resolve to create a new union — the Commonwealth of Independent States. Two weeks later, the leaders of the five Central Asian republics join this initiative. The shape of the new Imperium starts to emerge.

Gorbachev remains alone.

On December 25 he resigns as president of the USSR. The red flag with the hammer and sickle is removed from the Kremlin.

The USSR ceases to exist.

I FOLLOWED the fate of perestroika and the process of the downfall of the Imperium on two screens simultaneously:

• on the screen of a television set (or, rather, on the screens of dozens of television sets, because I was constantly changing cities, train stations, hotels, and apartments), as well as

• on the screen of the country’s ordinary, daily reality, which surrounded me during my travels.

It was an unusual collision of two theaters:

• the theater of high politics (the television transmitted for hours on end the deliberations of the Supreme Council, of various congresses and conferences), as well as

• the theater of pedestrian existence — lines on a dark and freezing morning, nights in cold Siberian apartments, joy at the news that a mess hall had been opened and that one would be able to get a bowl of warm soup.

This schizophrenic perception in two different dimensions directed my attention toward the fundamental, even unbridgeable, gap that exists in our epoch between the time of material culture (or everyday life) and the time of political events. In the Middle Ages, both these times had a more or less convergent, compatible rhythm: cities were built over centuries and dynasties lasted centuries.

Today it is different: cities are still built over decades, but rulers often change every few years or even every few months. The political stage revolves many times faster than the stage of our daily existence. Regimes change, governing parties and their leaders change, but man lives just as he previously had — he still does not have an apartment or a job; the houses are still shabby, and there are potholes in the roads; the arduous task of making ends meet still goes on from dawn to dusk.

Perhaps that is why many people turn away from politics: it is for them an alien world, animated by a rhythm different from the one that punctuates the life of the average human being.

Television contributed greatly to the collapse of the Imperium. Merely by showing political leaders as normal people, by allowing everyone to look at them from up close — to see how they quarrel and become nervous, how they make mistakes and how they perspire, how they win, but also how they lose — by this lifting of the curtain and thus admitting the people to the highest and most exclusive salons, the salutary and liberating demystification of power took place.

Belief in the mystical nature of power had been one of the tenets of Russian political culture. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, portraits of the czar — as saint — hung in the churches. The Bolsheviks adopted this tradition readily and with alacrity. The lives of the leaders were enveloped in the deepest mystery. The leader resembled a pharaoh/mummy. He walked stiffly, did not smile, and remained silent, his gaze fixed on an indeterminate point in space. Staffs of Sovietologists extrapolated the structure of power in the Kremlin by analyzing the sequence in which names appeared in various communiqués. And they were right to do so, because detailed and rigid instructions governed the sequence, the number of times, the exact page of the newspaper, and the size of type in which the name of a given leader could be printed. Functionaries responsible for Party protocol watched over this obsessively. Look, Mikoyan stepped onto the platform ahead of Ustinov, there’s something to this! And all of Moscow would be abuzz with gossip and conjectures.

The growing role of television in politics has led all coup plotters to change their tactics: formerly, they would assault presidential palaces, governmental and parliamentary seats; now they try first and foremost to gain control of the television-station building. Recent battles in Vilno and Tbilisi, in Bucharest and in Lima, were waged over television stations, not the president’s palace. The screenplay of the latest film about a coup d’état: tanks roll out at dawn to capture the television station while the president sleeps peacefully, the Parliament building is dark; there isn’t a soul around. The plotters are headed for where the real power lies.

EACH GREAT transformation, change of regime, social revolution, is divided into three stages:

• The period of the destruction of the old system

• The period of transition

• The period of the construction of the new order

The former Soviet Imperium finds itself currently in the period of transition in which elements of the old system mingle with the forerunners of the new order. The notion of the transitional period is today the answer to everything. Things aren’t going well? Too bad, it’s a transitional period. Supplies are inadequate? That’s understandable; it’s a transitional period. The old bosses are still ruling? Don’t worry; it’s only a transitional period.

Taking into consideration the immensity of the country, as well as the fact that profound historical processes take long stretches of time, one can assume that this transitional period will last quite a number of years.

The main task, content, and idea of the transitional period are implementing large-scale economic and political reform, changing the regime, and creating a new quality of life.

Two historians — the Russian Natan Eydelman and the American Richard Pipes — define the two fundamental perspectives on all reforms in Russia.

Eydelman: Reform in Russia always came from above. The call always had to originate at the very summit of power, gradually trickle down, and there be realized. This feature was responsible for the limited character of the reforms. At a certain moment the impetus for reform weakened, the reform got stuck, stood still.

Pipes: Reforms in Russia are dictated by external circumstances and events. One such circumstance might be a Russian setback in the international arena, the country’s undue marginalization in the game to control the world. Russia’s shrinking international role is an argument for the reform camp, which persuades conservatives and other opponents that the country should be rendered efficient and modernized so that it can regain its global standing.

That is how it was until now. How it will be in the future — time will tell.

As I mentioned, Sovietologists did not foresee the sudden collapse of the USSR. But even those who believed and prophesied that this superpower would one day fall expressed fears that before the Bolsheviks would surrender power and depart, they would set the country afire and drown it in a sea of blood.

Nothing of the kind happened.

The fall of communism in this state occurred relatively bloodlessly, and in ethnic Russia, completely bloodlessly. The great Ukraine announced its independence without a single shot being fired. Likewise Belorussia.

We are witnessing in the contemporary world the growing phenomenon of velvet revolutions, bloodless revolutions, or — as Isaac Deutscher expressed it — unfinished revolutions.

Characteristically in these revolutions, although the old forces are departing, they are not departing completely, and the battle of the new with the old is simultaneously accompanied by various adaptive processes, taking place on both sides of the barricade. The operative principle is the avoidance of aggressive, bloodthirsty confrontatiqns.

It is interesting that today blood flows only where blind nationalism enters the fray, or zoological racism, or religious fundamentalism — in other words, the three black clouds that can darken the sky of the twenty-first century. In places where it is a matter of the transformation of the social structure and the various forms of class struggle that accompany this, the process takes place much more gently and, yes, bloodlessly.

GOING BACK TO RUSSIA: What remains today, in 1994, of the old system, of the former USSR? There remains:

• The old nomenclature. It is still in power. It is the governmental, economic, military, and police bureaucracy. All told, as Russian sociologists compute, around eighteen million people. There is no alternative to this nomenclature for now. The opposition never did exist as an organized force. Dissidents were always few in number, and the majority of them left the country anyway. Some time has to pass before a new political class will arise. It is a process that always takes years.

• Two enormous armies: the Russian army (formerly the Red), as well as domestic troops. There are the border troops and the railroad troops. The air force and the navy. All told — several million people.

• The powerful KGB and the militia.

• All of middle and heavy industry, still in the hands of the state, including the highly built-up military-industrial complex, an enormous armaments machine employing some sixteen million people in production and in research institutes. The captains of this industry play an important and active role in political life.

• The state as landowner. In agriculture, kolkhozes and sovkhozes predominate.

• The whole sphere of old habits of thought, of social behavior, and of benighted views that had been inculcated into people for decades.

• The old legal system.

In addition to these institutions of the old regime, there is also another large and tragic legacy of communism — the awareness of the terror and repression, of the persecutions that began in 1917 and that lasted for decades, assuming in certain years the character of mass extermination. The historians and demographers who occupy themselves with this matter differ significantly in their estimates of the scale of the perpetrated murder. The minimum estimate was calculated by the demographer Siergei Maksundov. According to him, between 1918 and 1953, 54 million citizens of the USSR perished of unnatural causes (including the victims of the First and Second World Wars). The maximum estimate is given by Professor I. Kurganov, who computed that between 1918 and 1958, in the camps, in prisons, and on the fronts of both world wars, 110.7 million citizens of the USSR lost their lives (Znamia, January 1990).

Another kind of legacy of the totalitarian system is the universal poverty of this society. The poverty of apartments, the poverty of the kitchen, the poverty of life.

The third legacy is the staggering demoralization of significant portions of society — the growth of all types of gangs, the terror exercised by armed bands, the criminal power of the rackets. In addition, the ubiquitous presence of the most diverse mafias, reaching as far as the highest rungs of power. The active and impudent black market in weapons, including missiles. The defiant and terrifying thievery. Epidemic corruption. Alcoholism, rape, cynicism, as well as omnipresent, common churlishness.

The fourth and final legacy is the ecological depredations — smoky cities, the universal lack of ventilation in places of work, poisoned rivers and lakes, nuclear-waste dumps. And above all, fifty-six antiquated and overburdened nuclear power plants — fifty-six potential Chernobyls, which nevertheless cannot be closed down because they illuminate large cities and supply energy to many factories.

THE PERIOD of transition in which the Imperium now finds itself, and in which it will remain for years, actually began in 1991. In its course, the gap between the time of material culture and the time of political events might become even more pronounced. There will certainly be many political developments; in material progress — significantly fewer.

What is happening on the political stage? A fierce battle for power is being waged by various groups. Anti-Yeltsin forces want to overthrow the president and his government. It is difficult to determine clearly which of these groups standing on either side of the barricade are progressive and which conservative, difficult to say whether in general such criteria have any meaning or application here. Officially, it is said that Yeltsin’s group wants reform and the opposition groups (active mainly in the Parliament) do not. But is it really this way? The need for reform is today an objective necessity dictated by the time and the situation, and any team that attains power must somehow reform and change the disintegrating economy, because otherwise the country will perish, and that very team with it.

Of course there is the question of the tempo of reform. But how can one measure and define this? Experts maintain that in 1992 Russia took a step forward, but that this step could have been larger — and even, significantly larger. In other words, while the country has apparently taken a step forward, has it really just stayed in place? As a result, the society is tired and disenchanted. Perhaps it is disenchanted because Yeltsin and the many Western experts advising him estimated the chances of reform too optimistically, forgetting that reform will mean the transformation of a reality that is a granite boulder shaped over seventy years by blood and iron. How much time, strength, and money one must have to crumble this boulder! It seems to me, the backwardness of this country, its indigence, neglect, and ruination, are so great that a year seems too short a period during which to expect clear progress. Let us wait ten, twenty, years.

And yet this year of disenchantments has been sufficient to put a chill on the political atmosphere of the country.

Everyone has forgotten about perestroika and glasnost.

The democratic camp, so active during the struggle against communism, has been pushed to the margins of the political stage and finds itself either in disarray or simply forgotten. In general, democracy is spoken about less and less in Russia.

A mood of waiting and apathy prevails throughout society; people are largely apolitical.

Forces calling for the consolidation of power (especially of central power) and a strong, mighty nation are gaining the upper hand. It is a climate that encourages authoritarian methods of government, favorable to various forms of dictatorship.

AND THE FUTURE?

A difficult question. Almost no prognoses about the contemporary world come true. Futurology is in crisis; it has lost its prestige. The human imagination, shaped for thousands of years by a small, simple, and static world, today cannot grasp, is no match for, the reality that surrounds it, which is augmenting at a rapid rate (especially due to the advances in electronics and the accretion of information), in which there is increasingly more of everything, in which millions of particles, elements, units, and beings are in continual motion, in battle, in new configurations, arrangements, and assemblages, all of which it is no longer possible to seize, to stop, or to describe.

Despite these difficulties, one can assume that three processes will come to predominate in Russian life.

The first is the battle between the forces of integration and disintegration. Nationalism. Russians will want to maintain a large and strong state, an imperial superpower, whereas various non-Russian minorities will pursue more and more explicitly their own, autonomous goals. These minorities now constitute only twenty percent of the population of the Russian Federation (eighty percent, or 120 million, are Russians), but the non-Russian population is growing at a rate five times greater than the Russian, which means that the percentage of Russians is decreasing rapidly. The dominance of the Russian language is likewise shrinking. Fewer and fewer people in the territories of the former USSR speak Russian, and it is being studied less and less. In the course of my journey, I had difficulty communicating in Russian in several places, especially when speaking with young people. Older people know Russian best, the young know it less well, and small children almost not at all.

(About Russians still: twenty-six million of them live beyond the borders of the Russian Federation, chiefly in the Ukraine land in Kazakhstan. Their future is uncertain.)

The process of the “Asiatization” of the Russian Federation caused by the rapid increase of the non-Russian population is accelerated by the emigration of Germans and especially the large emigration of Jews. The latter feel threatened by the growing anti-Semitism, the specter of new persecutions and pogroms.

This battle between the forces of integration and disintegration might also take place among the republics over the question of borders. The question concerning the borders of the territories of what was once the USSR is a potential time bomb. Between 1921 and 1980, the then republics of the union underwent more than ninety territorial changes and border revisions. In 1990, there were more than fifty border conflicts among them, and today that number is even higher. Many of these borders, as in Africa, cut across lands inhabited by the same people. (Such is the case with the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.)

The confrontation between Christianity and Islam might become another source of this border conflict. Islam is undergoing a violent rebirth, is the religion of people speaking Turkic languages, and there are around sixty million of these people in the territories of the former USSR.

Besides the battle between forces of integration and disintegration, a second process will be the progressive polarization of society according to the material conditions of life. At one pole the rich will congregate (and grow richer), at the other the poor (and grow poorer). As in every society with a low standard of living, the contrasts in Russia will be especially sharp, striking, provocative. This will be capitalism, or pseudocapitalism, in its most primeval, ruthless, aggressive form.

The third process will be development itself. I define the nature of this development with an awkward term — enclave development. In a highly developed European country, in Holland, for example, or Switzerland, the entire material world around us is developed at more or less the same level: the houses are neatly painted, there are panes in all the windows, the asphalt on the roads is smooth and the traffic lines well demarcated, the stores everywhere are well stocked, the restaurants are warm and clean, the streetlamps are lit, and the lawns are evenly mowed. In a country with enclave development, however, the landscape looks different. An elegant bank stands amid shabby apartment buildings; a luxurious hotel is surrounded by slums; from a brightly illuminated airport one plunges into the darkness of a grim, squalid city; beside the glittering display window of a Dior boutique, the dirty, empty, and unlit windows of local shops; next to impressive cars, old, stinking, crowded city buses. Capital (largely foreign) has constructed its fragrant and shining sanctuaries, these excellent enclaves, but it has neither the means to nor any intention of developing the rest of the country.

RUSSIANS ARE debating — what should be done? Some say: Return to the roots, to old Russia. Solzhenitsyn maintains that czarist Russia was a splendid country, “rich and flowering” (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, How to Rebuild Russia?). Then, unfortunately, the Bolsheviks came and ruined everything. And yet witnesses of that earlier epoch paint a less idyllic picture of Russia:

And once again after years I traverse your roads,

And once again I find you, the same, unchanged!

Your deadness, immobility, and senselessness.

Your fallow lands

And thatchless cottages and rotten walls.

Your squalor, foul air, boredom, the same dirt as earlier,

And the same servile gaze, now impudent, now dejected.

And although you were freed from slavery,

You do not know what to do with freedom — you, the people …

And everything is as it once was.

(Ivan Turgenev, “The Dream”)

And Anton Chekhov wrote in 1890:

… we have let millions of people rot in prison, destroying them carelessly, thoughtlessly, barbarously; we drove people in chains through the cold across thousands of miles, infected them with syphilis, depraved them, multiplied criminals, and placed the blame for all this on red-nosed prison wardens. All civilized Europe knows now that it is not the wardens who are to blame, but all of us, yet this is no concern of ours, we are not interested.

(Letters, volume 1)

Return to the old culture? But Russian culture was either aristocratic or peasant — whereas now there is no aristocracy or peasantry. The middle class, the bourgeoisie, was never numerous here — and was, frequently, foreign.

THE PROBLEMS, dilemmas, that face this society, and above all the intelligentsia, the democrats.

For instance, society and the state. How can one involve society in governing the country? How is the state to be democratized?

The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debts, has nothing to eat, is a slave.

Simultaneously, it is a land rich in natural resources — in oil, in gas, in iron ore. But these are natural resources whose exploitation and profits are easy to monopolize, particularly by a strong bureaucratic-authoritarian state. In this way both the soil’s poverty and its riches undermine the people and bolster the regime. It is one of the great paradoxes of Russia.

AND YET this country’s future can be seen optimistically. Large societies have great internal strength. They have sufficient vital energy and inexhaustible supplies of all kinds of power so as to be able to raise themselves up from the most grievous setbacks and emerge from the most serious crises.

China was able to lift itself up from the depths of humiliation and hunger and to begin to develop independently and successfully. Likewise India. Likewise Brazil and Indonesia. The large populations of these countries, their complex cultures, their ability to endure and their ambition to create, have produced, even under difficult circumstances, astonishing results. This general law of human evolution certainly applies to Russia as well.

And one more thing: the West, whom Russia fascinates but also fills with fear, is always ready to come to its aid, if only in the interests of its own peace. The West will refuse others, but it will always help Russia.

OVER THE FIELDS of Russia, in the winter, Nicholas from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace drives his troika:

Again checking his horses, Nicholas looked around him. They were still surrounded by the magic plain bathed in moonlight and spangled with stars.

“Zakhár is shouting that I should turn to the left, but why to the left?” thought Nicholas. “Are we getting to the Melyukóvs’? Is this Melyukóvka? Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what is happening to us—”