Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (Transnational Institute Series)

Boris Kagarlitsky

Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin Neo-liberal Autocracy

Pluto

P

Press

LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Boris Kagarlitsky 2002 The right of Boris Kagarlitsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1507 0 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1502 X paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kagarlitsky, Boris, 1958Russia under Yeltsin and Putin : neo-liberal autocracy / Boris Kagarlitsky. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1507–0 (hard) — ISBN 0–7453–1502–X (pbk.) 1. Russia (Federation)—Politics and government—1991– 2. Russia (Federation)—History—1991– I. Title. DK510.763 .K345 2002 947.086—dc21 2001006176

11 10

10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, England

Contents

List of Abbreviations

vi

Introduction

1

Part I

The Making of Yeltsin’s Russia

1 The Inevitable Reaction 13 2 The Russian Intelligentsia between ‘Westernism’ and ‘Patriotism’ 50 3 The Rise of the Yeltsin Regime 77 Part II 4 5 6 7

A Monarchist ‘Republic’

Word and Deed The Corporatist Model and Social Conflict The Post-Soviet Left The Road to Default

Part III

105 133 159 188

The Twilight of the ‘Second Republic’

8 The Drift to the Left (1998–99) 9 The War of the Kremlin Succession 10 The Putin Regime

205 223 251

Conclusion Notes and References Index

280 290 299

List of Abbreviations

APR CPSU FEP FNPR GkChP GKOs GRU GUO IMF KGB KPRF KRO KSPR LDPR MFP MRP-PDP

Agrarian Party of Russia Communist Party of the Soviet Union Foundation for Effective Politics Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia State Committee for Extraordinary Situations state bonds military intelligence Directorate of Security International Monetary Fund Committee of State Security, Soviet secret police Communist Party of the Russian Federation Congress of Russian Communities Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Russia Liberal Democratic Party of Russia Moscow Federation of Trade Unions Marxist Workers’ Party–Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NDR ‘Our Home is Russia’ NKVD Stalin’s secret police NPG Independent Union of Miners of Russia OVR Fatherland–All Russia RAO EES United Energy System of Russia RASP Russian Assembly of Social Partnership RKRP Russian Communist Workers’ Party RSDRP Russian Social Democratic Labour Party RSPP Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs SOTSPROF Federation of Socialist Trade Unions of Russia SPS Union of Right-Wing Forces SPT Socialist Party of Workers USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VTsSPS Soviet Trade Union Council

vi

Introduction

Historians who study the Russia of the 1990s will inevitably face three questions: how to characterize the processes occurring in our country during this time; how to define the periods into which these processes should be divided; and, lastly, what assessment to make of the society that emerged out of these processes. Western journalists, as well as neo-liberal ideologues and the politicians who were running the country from 1991, were united in describing what was happening as ‘reform’. The label stuck, and to avoid all use of it is now impossible. But if we look at the realities of the period, ‘reform’ is almost the last word we should be tempted to use in order to describe what was going on. ‘Reforms’ are normally understood as limited changes, aimed at preserving the state and the social system. In Russia, we have unquestionably undergone a change of system. As for the state, the Soviet Union ceased to exist in the first stage of the ‘reforms’. Western leftists of the 1970s also used the term ‘reform’ in a more radical sense, speaking of structural reforms and even of reforms aimed at systemic transformation. It is true that reforms were never implemented in the sense the left theoreticians had in mind. But the most important thing is that the concept of systemic reform, if it does not presuppose a continuous process, at least presumes respect for existing institutions, and a minimization of violence. What took place in Russia was totally different. There was neither respect for institutions (especially during the years 1990–91 and 1992–93), nor a desire to avoid bloodshed. Some writers have characterized what happened as a bourgeois, democratic or even ‘criminal’ revolution. Hence, for example, the politician and researcher Oleg Smolin argues that, during the 1990s, Russia lived by the laws of revolution, and that ‘the political leaders were subordinated to the objective logic of revolutionary development, often finding themselves in the position of the hero of literature who, after releasing the genie from the bottle, was unable to contend with it’.1 Smolin’s view can only be accepted if, like the writers of the first half of the eighteenth century, we consider any radical political overturn to be a revolution. Russia in recent years has witnessed a series of such overturns – in 1991, in 1993 and in 1998–2000. At first glance, these episodes beg to 1

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be compared with revolutions; in each case, old institutions were destroyed. The leaders of Yeltsin’s Russia, however, avoided making comparisons with the revolutions of the past, and in this they were absolutely correct. Revolution involves more than radical changes. Unlike transformations ‘from above,’ revolutions are made by the masses. The participation of millions of people makes a revolution an elemental process subject to its own laws (the statistical regularities of mass consciousness), a process which cannot in practice be controlled by the usual methods. It is precisely this mass participation that gives rise to the ‘objective’ logic of which Smolin speaks. In Russia in the 1990s (unlike the Soviet Union in 1988–991), the masses either did not participate in the process of change, or actively opposed it . In 1993 they tried to storm the Ostankino television centre; in 1994 they went on strike; and in 1998 they blocked railways by sitting on the tracks. This mass resistance, however, was limited and sporadic, quite unlike the revolutionary waves of the past and, no doubt, the future. For all the incompetence and savagery of the rulers, the political process remained totally controlled and, on the whole, predictable (all that was needed was to understand the goals and interests of the contending elites). Historical tradition, of course, includes the concept of ‘revolution from above’, and as Antonio Gramsci described it, ‘passive revolution’. Historical changes whose time has come, and which have not been carried through by the mass movement, are finally implemented by the elites, though in a halfhearted manner. ‘Revolution from above’ is almost always authoritarian. While carrying out the tasks of the revolutionary movement, it simultaneously acts in the fashion of counter-revolution where this movement and the democratic hopes of the masses are concerned. Even such terms as ‘revolution from above’, however, cannot be applied to Yeltsin’s Russia. Historical tradition, both positivist and Marxist, makes a close association between the concepts of revolution and progress. Liberal and socialdemocratic critics of revolution have maintained that, in the overall historical perspective, revolutionary movements, by trying to force the pace of progressive changes, have instead slowed them down. Marxists, by contrast, consider revolutions the ‘locomotives of history’. Both, however, see an unbreakable bond between social progress and revolutionary explosions. It is possible, of course, to reject the very idea of ‘social progress’ as ‘outmoded’, as ‘having failed to justify itself’ and so on. But if this is done, then together with the concept of ‘social progress’ the category of ‘revolution’ must also be thrown overboard, along with a large number of the categories which social science has employed over the last two hundred years. Meanwhile, the most important point is that nothing better than the idea of ‘social progress’ has so far been put forward as an alternative. To describe the changes in Russia in the late twentieth century as ‘progress’ is something the tongue simply cannot manage. In the course of ten years the country suffered an unprecedented economic collapse – one of

INTRODUCTION

3

the most profound peacetime declines in all of modern history, matched or exceeded only by the declines in other fragments of the former Soviet Union. In 1999 it was calculated that in the best circumstances, simply to regain the level of 1990, the last ‘pre-Yeltsin’ year, would take at least a decade. Between 1991 and 1998 overall agricultural and industrial production fell by half. Even in the relatively prosperous oil industry, output was down by 44 per cent. Capital investment in 1996 was a mere 23.8 per cent of the 1990 level, even though the Soviet economy was already suffering from an investment shortage. Technological backwardness intensified. Most tellingly, the population experienced a sharp fall, the result both of increased death rates and of declining numbers of births. During the period of the Civil War, from 1918 to 1920, the Russian population fell by 2.8 million. During the years of Yeltsin’s ‘first presidency’ alone, from 1992 to 1996, the decline was 3.4 million. Economists are united in describing the course of events as ‘regression’.2 During a revolution, production generally falls and people suffer. The economic shocks, however, open the way to establishing new social relationships, which create new conditions for economic growth and ensure the development of education, providing broader masses of the population with access if not to power (most revolutions, as we know, have ended with dictatorship), then at least to modern modes of life. The main sociological significance of revolutions lies in the fact that they dramatically increase the vertical mobility of the population. What happened in Russia was precisely the opposite. Society became more elitist, and in the sense of the social dynamic, less democratic. Education went into decline, while the main economic and social structures that had triumphed in 1992 and 1993 could never have been called progressive, either from the point of view of capitalist criteria or from that of socialist theory. What occurred in Russia between 1990 and 1999 was not ‘reform’, still less ‘revolution’. It was Restoration. This restoration was the natural continuation of the political cycle began by the Russian Revolution of 1917.3 Yeltsin’s Russia, proclaiming itself the successor to tsarist Russia, reproduced many features of the old society’s backwardness. The restoration regime was in many ways a parody, a farce. Its leaders were comic, almost like characters in an operetta. But millions of people who were subject to their power were not in the least amused. If the French Revolution took twenty-six years to complete its path from the rise of the democratic movement to the restoration of the Bourbons, the analogous process in Russia took far longer. Contrary to accepted opinion, historical processes have not accelerated particularly with the appearance of the mass media, since ‘historical tempi’ are determined not by the speed of transmission of information, but by the dynamic of mass consciousness, which has not changed so much compared with the nineteenth century. In so vast a country as Russia, and with econcomic, social and cultural changes of extraordinary depth, the process could not help but proceed slowly. Most

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importantly, the Stalin regime succeeded in doing something that no other post-revolutionary dictatorship has even managed. Thanks to its totalitarian technologies, Stalinism was able to put Russia in political cold storage for two and a half decades. France, which became the classic country of political struggle, provided us with the terms and ideas that we use to analyse most revolutions. On this level, Russia, despite all its peculiarities, is not an exception. Overall, the historical dynamic of the Russia revolution repeats that of the English and French revolutions. The period from 1917 to 1929 was one of revolutionary dictatorship, when, as Lenin himself defined it, the Bolsheviks acted in the role of ‘Russian Jacobins’. Then, with Stalin’s victory over the ‘old Bolsheviks’, there began the Thermidorean period from 1929 to 1941, as described by Trotsky. From 1941, the Stalin regime’s Bonapartist traits became increasingly pronounced. This was expressed in a reconsideration of the attitude to tsarism in Soviet historiography (especially to such figures as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great), in a reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, and in the partial restoration of old titles, rituals and symbols (for example, epaulettes and the rank of general in the army, ministries instead of ‘people’s commissariats’ and so forth. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the system began an agonized search for new political and economic mechanisms that would ensure it success in its rivalry with the West. From 1959, the Soviet economy began experiencing difficulties, and growth rates declined. Ultimately, however, there were no radical changes. The result was defeat in the Cold War and, as a result, restoration. The events of the 1980s and 1990s can also be readily divided into several periods. ‘Stagnation’ under Leonid Brezhnev was followed by a struggle for power lasting several years, and then by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. After that, the collapse of the Soviet system began. The crisis of 1989–91 was the system’s death agony. The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) still existed, but every republic was already living its own life. Gorbachev was still reckoned to be president of the union, but behind him there now loomed the figure of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s Russia was founded as a state in the course of the months from August to December 1991. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was disbanded, and the place of the party nomenklatura was taken by a motley assemblage of ‘democratic’ politicians, who in 1989 or 1990 had won positions in free elections to the soviets (it is a separate matter that many of the ‘democrats’ had come from the very same nomenklatura). After the agreement on the liquidation of the union signed by Yeltsin at Belovezhskaya Pushcha in December 1991, the new state no longer existed de facto, but de jure. By analogy with Weimar Germany, the state established under Yeltsin can be called Belovezhskaya Russia. The years 1992 and 1993 can be described as the Gaidar–Khasbulatov period. This was the time when the authorities, on the initiative of Yegor Gaidar, implemented the first wave of neo-liberal reforms. Gaidar was

INTRODUCTION

5

initially vice-premier in charge of economic policy, and later acting prime minister. In December 1992 he left the government, but remained the chief ideologue of the ruling group. Meanwhile, the opposition was concentrated in the same soviets which in 1989 and 1990 had provided Yeltsin with his power base in his struggle with the CPSU and the ‘union centre’. The Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, was thus as natural a leader for the opposition during these years as Gaidar was for the neo-liberals. The opposition to the regime was chaotic and unstructured. At this point only a minority of the population was opposed to the authorities, but it was an active minority. Correspondingly, the opposition scene was dominated by radical, activist parties, large and small. The largest and most influential of them was the Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RKRP), headed by Viktor Anpilov. This was a left-traditionalist, Stalinist grouping, but it had a culture of direct action; its members were ready to fight the militia on the streets, building barricades. At the same time, the young left intelligentsia was trying to unite around the Party of Labour. In the autumn of 1993 members of both parties, despite sharp theoretical differences, joined forces on the barricades around the White House. On the social level, this period saw the ascendancy of mindless ‘new Russians’, rapidly enriching themselves through the plunder of state property, and just as rapidly killing one another off. Might this be called a period of primitive accumulation? For the entrepreneurs, yes, but not for the economy. What was occurring was not the strengthening and consolidating of capital and enterprises. On the contrary, powerful productive structures were disintegrating, in order to allow the flourishing of primitive brokering operations and of banks that at times still operated on the level of medieval usury. There are no grounds whatever for maintaining that the money and property accumulated by the ‘New Russians’ during this period became capital in the full sense. The distinguishing feature of capital is its ability to grow, and of the capitalist enterprise, its capacity for expanded reproduction (which distinguishes it from a feudal undertaking). Nothing of the sort was to be observed in Belovezhskaya Russia. Private property had triumphed, but not all private property is capitalist. As opposition to the regime grew dramatically stronger in the autumn of 1992, a drawn-out political crisis began. Gaidar soon left the government, to be replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin, but, despite some waverings in January and February 1993, the regime’s course did not change; this was confirmed by the return of Gaidar to the government on the eve of the coup d’état of autumn 1993. This coup, however, marked the political end not only for Khasbulatov as the loser, but also for Gaidar as the victor. Decree no. 1400, with which Yeltsin put an end to representative authority in Russia, was the culmination of the regime’s struggle against the institutionalized opposition. After the shelling of the parliament, the active resistance was broken. The period of

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the destruction of institutions and of the chaotic division of property drew to a close. In December a new constitution was put into force, establishing new rules of the game. The Yeltsin regime took on the more or less stable form of the ‘second republic’. In these conditions, Gaidar’s ‘cavalry charge’ was no longer needed. The cautious economic manager Viktor Chernomyrdin moved to the forefront, and acquired real power. ‘We’ve always stolen, and we always will steal’, Chernomyrdin proclaimed.4 Now, however, the thievery would be different. Not confused, disorderly and slapdash, but deliberate and according to definite rules. As Brecht once observed, there is no comparison between robbing a bank and setting up a bank. The years from 1994 to 1998 can be characterized as the Chernomyrdin–Zyuganov period. If Chernomyrdin was the face of the authorities, Gennady Zyuganov was the face of the opposition. The ‘new Russians’ were still getting drunk in restaurants and killing one another, but they were no longer the people controlling the economy. In Russia, oligarchic capitalism was being established. Financial flows, the mass information media, raw materials resources and political influence were becoming concentrated in the hands of a few dozen ‘families’, of which the most influential was the Kremlin ‘family’ taking shape around Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. Against the background of a continuing decline in production there was a certain stabilization of the system, a sign of which became the ‘strong national currency’, maintained at the level of 5–6 rubles to the US dollar. In the larger political picture, there was only one opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). All the rest were either gradually shrinking into insignificance, or turning into KPRF satellites. This was an opposition that played by the rules, that was part of the system, that was pseudo-parliamentary (since parliament, in the shape of the new Duma, had no power). Unlike the situation in 1992 and 1993, when a minority was campaigning actively against the neo-liberal course, the discontent was now passive, despite being almost universal. The outcome of political struggles was no longer decided on the streets, and neither, in the final analysis, was it decided in elections either; the elections merely reinforced the relationship of forces that was being established. Political struggle was taking on an abstract, virtual character. Ivan Zasursky, perhaps the outstanding student of the post-Soviet press, termed this the ‘mediation of politics’.5 Events took place mainly in government offices, while the population was assigned the role of observers, and of objects of information manipulation. This period of the ‘second republic’, a happy enough time for many, came to an end in 1998 and 1999. The crisis of the existing order began with the weakening of the ruble in the spring of 1998 under the impact of the Asian economic collapse. At that time the ruble was successfully propped up, but the fiery letters on the wall were now easily discernible. The departure from the scene of the highly experienced Chernomyrdin and the advent of the new,

INTRODUCTION

7

youthful Prime Minister Sergey Kirienko was the first sign of the looming crisis. Then, in August and September 1998, came the crash. The ruble rate crumbled, the government halted payments on its internal debt, and the economy went into free fall. Political instability again became the norm. In the course of a year we first saw the second coming of Chernomyrdin, whom the Duma refused to confirm in the post of prime minister; then the leftcentrist cabinet of Yevgeny Primakov; then, for two months, the poker-faced rule of Sergey Stepashin; and finally, the enthronement in the Moscow White House of the former state security chief Vladimir Putin. The events of 1999 and 2000 marked the death agony of Yeltsin’s Russia. But this was not yet the end of the epoch of restoration. To be precise, this was merely the beginning of its end. The question naturally arises: what sort of society arose in Russia during all these years? What have we built (or restored)? Is it capitalism? The degree of continuity with Soviet times is striking, though this continuity has seen the survival, for the most part, of the worst elements of the old society – bureaucratism, authoritarianism and corruption. On the other hand, the changes are also striking, though there is no cause to rejoice at them. We have seen the appearance of millionaires and jobless, a collapse of production accompanied by an increase in the number of banks, and so forth. At the end of the twentieth century, in fact, very much the same system held sway in Russia as at the beginning – peripheral capitalism. Of course, there cannot be an absolute identity here, since seventy-four years of Soviet power did not pass without leaving a trace. Russian capitalism, it follows, is at the same time not entirely capitalism, and in a certain sense it is not capitalism at all. It is important to note, however, that in tsarist Russia capitalism was by no means fully realized either. Russia is a capitalist country to the extent that it is part of the global capitalist economy, of the world capital market and of the international capitalist division of labour. At the same time, Russia remains communal, corporatist, authoritarian ‘Asiatic’ and even feudal-bureaucratic. A sort of transmuted variant of bureaucratic collectivism, continuing the social tradition of the Soviet statocracy, holds sway here. The difference is that the ‘socialist’ decorations have been taken down, and the real elements of socialism that existed in Soviet society have been extirpated or weakened. The bureaucratic collectivism and corporatist relationships of post-Soviet Russia seem hopelessly backward compared with the dynamically developing Western capitalism of the 1990s. It is simply important to understand that all these backward structures and formations, which at first sight distinguish Russian society from that of the West, do not in reality constitute a barrier to the development of capitalism, but, on the contrary, provide its most important precondition, a sort of ‘competitive advantage’ of the Russian oligarchy. To get rid of one without undermining the other is impossible. Without bureaucratic collectivism to maintain stability in

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society, Europeanized commercial firms could not flourish, and comprador capital could not keep the people obedient. Lenin and other revolutionists of the early twentieth century considered tsarist capitalism backward and underdeveloped, comparing it with ‘advanced’ Germany and Britain. The real situation was more complex. Lenin himself found in Russia a combination of the most advanced forms of bourgeois organization (in the banking sphere, and in some branches of industry) with forms that were completely pre-bourgeois. He described this structure as ‘multi-layered’, without analysing its historical and economic nature. The reality was that Russian capitalism was not so much backward as peripheral in its relationship to the capitalism of the West. Its backwardness was the result of its peripheral status and of its dependency, not the other way round. Where participation in the world division of labour required modernization, modernization occurred, and at impressive rates. But this merely served to aggravate the stagnation in other sectors. Rosa Luxemburg, writing her economic works almost contemporaneously with Lenin’s, understood the peculiarities of peripheral capitalism far more profoundly. Later, the same questions were examined, using more modern materials, in the works of Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and other left sociologists – works that were banned in the USSR. According to Rosa Luxemburg and her followers, the main peculiarity of peripheral capitalism is that ‘built into’ it are numerous non-capitalist structures. In this sense, all sorts of deviations from the Western ‘norm’ are in themselves an absolute norm of development. The exploitation of the periphery by the centre proceeds along many paths; the direct neo-colonial serving of foreign interests by the comprador bourgeoisie is merely the simplest, and ultimately, the least effective. Much more important is the fact that the natural logic of the international capital market dictates that financial flows should be centralized. Wherever an ‘open economy’ occurs, a spontaneous redistribution of resources begins, to the benefit of the more wealthy and developed countries of the ‘centre’. Meanwhile, from a certain point, the wealth and developed status of these countries become the result, above all, of their ‘central’ position in the system. In becoming part of the ‘periphery’, Russia doomed itself to a continual deficit of financial resources, to capital flight and to the export of raw materials. For a peripheral country, Russia was excessively developed, and this dictated the inevitable collapse of its industry, technology, science and education. The sole counterweight to this spontaneous process was state intervention. The people who are now beginning to talk of this are not Bolsheviks, but such ideologues of capitalism as the billionaire George Soros, who prides himself on having introduced to Russia new textbooks free of ‘Marxist ideology’.6 The consequences of neoliberal policies have, after all, been so catastrophic that they threaten a complete disintegration of society. This no longer suits even the people who are growing rich from these policies.

INTRODUCTION

9

Since 17 August 1998, the trajectory of development has been easy to work out. In the area of ideology and politics, neoliberalism has been replaced by conservatism; ‘Westernism’ and cosmopolitanism by moderate nationalism and the cult of the ‘strong state’; and bogus democracy by more open authoritarianism. In the economy, the role of the state has grown. This has suggested a return to the Soviet model. In the post-revolutionary ‘mobilization economy’, powerful state intervention was a means of changing the situation, of overcoming backwardness, accelerating development, levelling social and regional disproportions, and finding a way out of the logic of ‘peripheral development’. But in post-Yeltsin Russia (as is usual in a society that has undergone restoration), the state is profoundly conservative, and its intervention has only one aim – to stabilize the social and economic situation in the form it has assumed over the past decade. This means preserving peripheral capitalism as well. Dependence on the West also remains inescapable, despite all the patriotic rhetoric. The concluding stage of the restoration was the appearance on the political scene, as successor to Yeltsin, of the former state security official Vladimir Putin. As one foreign analyst remarked, what was involved was an attempt to create an ‘isolationist, “national”, “self-reliant” Russian state capitalism’, uniting the leading groups of property-owners that had come into being during the Yeltsin years. This state capitalism has turned out to be even more like the pre-revolutionary model than the market economy that existed in Russia in the 1990s. Just like its pre-Soviet prototype, it is incapable of carrying out the tasks of developing the country, and of ensuring its independence in a globalizing world. In other words, the nationalist adherents of the ‘strong Russian state’, just like the liberal ‘cosmopolitans’, in the final instance act in the interests of the Western elites, only with different methods, under different conditions, and perhaps without themselves recognizing what they are doing.7 The restoration regime has been transformed in a natural manner from liberal to conservative, from ‘reformist’ to traditionalist. It is becoming more and more authoritarian, since there is no other way it can survive. All this is just as inevitable as was the collapse of the Soviet system. History, however, continues. In its own fashion, restoration is a continuation of the development of revolution, creating the preconditions for a new revolutionary cycle. The restorations in both Britain and France were followed by ‘glorious revolutions’ (in France, even by several revolutions in the course of half a century). In this sense, Russia clearly will not be an exception.

Part I

The Making of Yeltsin’s Russia

1

The Inevitable Reaction

In 1996, ten years after the beginning of perestroika and five years after the onset of neo-liberal reforms, the Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa published a savage criticism of the new market strategies in his book Farewell, Russia! Chiesa argued that the reason why these strategies had failed was their excessive radicalism.1 After the crash of the ruble in August 1998, even liberal Western specialists on Russia were united in writing about the failings of the reformers – ‘misperception, collusion, corruption, and blindness’.2 Also coming under fire were American and European reformers who had acted as consultants to the Russian authorities. At about the same time Larisa Piyasheva in Kontinent unleashed an equally furious attack on the government’s economic policies, maintaining that all the failures were the result of inconsistency and of insufficient radicalism. The favourite of the International Monetary Fund, Yegor Gaidar and his associates reiterated endlessly that during the years while they had been in power everything had been done correctly, and that if a determined offensive had not been mounted there would have been no progress whatever. Anyone who knows anything at all about Russian history will appreciate how weighty this argument is. It is quite natural for former ministers to say that while they were in office a correct course was followed, and that after they resigned the government strayed off into the thickets of bureaucratism, inefficiency and nomenklatura rule. But the people who have headed the government since Gaidar resigned in 1993 also have a good deal to answer. Unlike the ‘ideological romantics’, they are professionals who know the real techniques of administration. Their methods reflect the real situation in the state apparatus, which not even the most radical critics of bureaucratism and ‘nomenklatura rule’ have argued should be destroyed. Everyone has turned out to be right. Meanwhile, the bulk of the population has remained poor, and production has continued to collapse. Nevertheless, despite growing nostalgia for Soviet times, not even the leaders of the Communist Party were prepared to assert, during the 1990s, that the old system was in good shape or that it could have continued to exist unchanged. To attribute its collapse to the ‘policies of glasnost’ and to the 13

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attempts at reform would be absurd. These liberal measures simply laid bare the contradictions that had accumulated within the system over many years. If reforms were indispensable, might an alternative strategy for change have been possible? It is significant that the triumph of glasnost and pluralism by no means bestowed freedom of speech on people who defended reformist ideas that differed from the ruling ideology of the free market and privatization. The last years of the Soviet Union were a time when supporters of self-managed socialism, who had initially been quite numerous, were denied access to the mass media, were isolated, and were ultimately suppressed as a political force. Nevertheless, it would be naive to blame the failure of the left in the years from 1988 to 1991 solely on the information boycott. In the late 1980s history was clearly on the side of the ‘market reformers’, just as in the late 1990s it clearly turned against them. The crisis of the Soviet planning system made a turn to the market inevitable and indispensable. ‘Real socialism’ never became ‘genuine socialism’, a society guaranteeing its citizens more freedom and more opportunities than the capitalism of the highly developed countries. This meant that, however great the achievements of the Soviet system, capitalism clearly defeated it in global competition. The degeneration of the Soviet system, a process that took on critical momentum in the 1970s, in the late 1980s led to full-scale national catastrophe. Dring the perestroika years it was fashionable to speak of Soviet society being in a dead end. This was quite true, especially since developmental dead ends are by no means rare in history. But there is only one way out of a dead end – backwards, in other words, through reaction. The tragedy of Soviet society lay in the fact that, by the late 1980s, reaction was the only way out of stagnation. Alternative variants had unquestionably existed, but these chances had been squandered hopelessly in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union was still capable of dynamic development. By crushing the ‘Prague Spring’, and rejecting economic reforms, the Soviet leadership of those years predetermined all the catastrophes that followed. Not only was 1989 not the end of history; it was not its beginning either. So long as the communist bloc existed, Eastern Europe was forced to live in the straitjacket of a one-party system, but rapid modernization was meanwhile occurring there. For ordinary members of society, social opportunities that had been completely unattainable in earlier times were opened up. When political crisis gripped almost all the countries of the Soviet bloc after the death of Stalin, a solution was found in combining repressions against the active opposition with internal reforms that improved the position of the majority. This turned out to be highly effective. Living standards rose without interruption until the mid-1970s. Eastern Europe became a consumer society, with steadily increasing freedoms. The anticommunist ideologues of the 1990s preferred to forget how harsh the political regimes had been in most of the countries of Eastern Europe before and during the Second World War. In Russia, there had never been any

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serious experience of democracy. In the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, the political system grew less and less rigid, allowing people to hope for further gradual progress. A ‘classical’ totalitarian regime had been installed in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, when the private sector in the towns had finally been abolished; independent peasant holdings had been expropriated; the inhabitants of the countryside had been ‘dekulakized’ and driven into collective farms; opposition groups in the party had finally been crushed; and when an economy that combined state regulation with the market had been replaced by a system of centralized planning. These new relations, however, did not come into being in an empty space. The revolution of 1917, like all revolutions, proclaimed slogans of social liberation. Objectively, however, the new authorities were faced with the task of modernizing the country. It had been the inability of the tsarist regime and the Russian bourgeoisie to carry out rapid modernization that had led to the catastrophic defeats in the war against Japan in 1904–5 and during the First World War. Capitalist industrialization not only created large industrial enterprises in Russia, but also gave rise to all the contradictions that characterized the early industrial society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, it did not ensure the dynamic development that would have allowed Russia to stand on the same level with the West. A proletariat and a social democratic movement appeared, but the ruling classes, unlike those in the West, had neither the resources nor the experience to avoid a social explosion with the help of compromises, increases in living standards and partial satisfaction of the demands coming from below. The task of modernization, that had not been carried out by the old regime, was inherited by the new one. The new regime’s own future now depended on its ability to implement this process. The shift of power from the soviets to the Bolshevik Party, the imposition during the Civil War of a one-party dictatorship, the subordination of the trade unions to the state and the gradual imposing of an authoritarian regime within the party itself, meant that the party lost not only its democratic, but also its socialist character. The working class, which, as before, was proclaimed to be the ruling power, and which to a certain degree still provided a base of support for the regime, was subordinated to the new party-state bureaucracy that had taken shape in the depths of the revolutionary movement. Socialist and Marxist theoreticians looked perplexedly at the new state that had arisen out of the revolution, but that was tragically unlike what they had expected. The poverty and cultural backwardness of the masses, wrote Leon Trotsky, had once again been embodied in the sinister figure of the ruler with a big stick in his hands. From being the servant of society, the bureaucracy had again become its master. Along the way, the bureaucracy had attained such a degree of social and moral alienation from the popular

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masses that it could no longer permit them any control either over official actions, or over the incomes of the functionaries involved.3 Making an analogy with the French Revolution, Trotsky described this as the ‘Soviet Thermidor’. Post-revolutionary Soviet society did, in fact, pass through the same phases as French society, though in other forms and over a different time-span. To a degree, the ‘Thermidorean’ regime of the revolution’s bureaucratic heirs took on an imperialist character, beginning a process of military expansion, subjugating neighbouring countries and installing in them regimes organized in the image of Big Brother. Like Napoleon’s expansion in nineteenth-century Europe, however, the Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe was not simply an attempt to seize foreign territory for the sake of exploiting its resources and population. Along with the Soviet model of power came new social relations, which, for the lower classes of society, opened the way to education and a political career. The countries of Eastern Europe underwent rapid modernization. In other words, as in the early nineteenth century the humiliation of national feelings and the loss of freedom of dependent peoples was accompanied by real social progress. Moreover, by creating its own military-political bloc, the Soviet Union effectively shifted its border westward, securing itself against the invasions that had occurred repeatedly during Russian history (in this sense, the Soviet movement to the west was subject to the same geopolitical logic as was followed by Napoleon at the beginning of his movement to the east). The Stalinist Thermidor, like the French one, was in essence a counterrevolution that grew out of the revolution itself, and which, to a significant degree, represented a continuation and culmination of the revolution. For this reason, the attempts to separate Stalinism from Bolshevism and the efforts to reduce Bolshevism to the status of a preparation for Stalinism are both equally absurd. Although the socialist perspective was lost, and the class essence of the regime gradually changed, this did not by any means signify that the policy of modernizing the country was abandoned. Indeed, from this time modernizing and industrializing Russia became the regime’s principal tasks. The ‘construction of socialism’ was presented mainly as the construction of a large number of modern industrial enterprises. The very term ‘construction of a new society’, which arose initially out of the mistrust shown by the Bolsheviks for the natural processes of social development, took on a thoroughly concrete, material, technological meaning. If bourgeois modernization in Russia ended in failure, the bureaucratic project that allowed the concentration of vast resources and all the available social capital in the hands of the state made it possible to multiply growth rates by several times, taking no account of the price that society would have to pay as a result. The mechanisms of rule that were established were required to ensure the most rapid and effective fulfilment of these tasks; for the first time in human history, the social structure became a direct continuation of the structure of government. The ruling class was merged with the

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state to such a degree that it could no longer be called a class in the full sense. Civil society was non-existent, and any human activity that strayed from the sphere of state control was simply suppressed. The approach that had triumphed was supremely simple: that which could not be controlled, should not exist. Everything was reduced to the principle of simplifying control. All writers were drafted into a single union, and the same was done with all the architects, artists and cinema directors. The peasants were stripped of their own holdings and were joined up to collective farms. Wherever possible, small enterprises were replaced by large ones, since this expedited the tasks of centralized management. Much would later be written about the inefficiency of Stalinist methods, about the huge losses and the human victims. Even if the moral aspects are ignored, it is obvious that the deaths of millions of people cannot strengthen a country’s economic potential. But for the Stalinist system at that time, all that was important was industrial growth rates. The main lesson drawn by the regime from the defeat of tsarist Russia was that even successful industrial development would not allow the country to stand on the same level with the West unless the corresponding rates of industrialization were ensured – unless a critical mass arose that would allow competition with Europe on equal terms. In other words, from the point of view of its own criteria and tasks the Stalinist regime was effective. It did not ensure the production of high-quality goods, or increases in living standards, nor high profitability in enterprises. But it guaranteed dizzying growth rates. The system that had taken shape had nothing in common with the ‘realm of freedom’ of which the founders of socialism had written. Nevertheless, millions of people who had suffered the torments of war and who were accustomed to a day-to-day struggle for physical survival perceived it as the ultimate expression of social justice. Moreover, despite not being socialist, it unquestionably rested on a whole range of socialist ideas in its theory and practice. It was this that permitted the genuine successes of the Soviet Union in the early stages of its history, and that made the collapse of the USSR such a heavy blow for the left movement throughout the world. Soviet society was divided into the rulers and the ruled. Naturally, the ordinary citizen existed solely as an object of rule. The centralized apparatus of control stood opposed to the mass of workers. But the system was not only sustained by fear and repression. After the traditional forms of self-organization of society and the links between people were destroyed, and masses of people were effectively declassed, the population itself needed a centralized state. The authorities administered production, ensured that children were taught in the schools, guaranteed free health care, provided work and organized leisure. The elemental declassing of the masses began during the Stolypin reforms, which failed to create a class of independent farmers, but which undermined the traditional village commune. The destruction of social ties continued during the First World War, the revolution and the Civil War. Millions of

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people were torn from their long-time homes, cut off from their relatives and their accustomed environment. Large numbers of workers departed for the countryside, while peasants flooded the cities. During the years of the New Economic Policy, when peasants were allowed to work their land, and industrial output in the cities began slowly to rise, signs of social stabilization appeared. The New Economic Policy, however, could not carry out the task of accelerated modernization. This task was fulfilled by Stalin’s policies of the 1930s – at the cost of destroying the existing social ties. The compulsory collectivization of the countryside, accompanied by forced-draft industrialization and terror, tore the delicate social fabric apart. Once again, millions of people moved from the countryside to the cities, to be transformed in the course of a few days from peasants to unskilled urban workers. The narrow layer of hereditary workers was simply swept away by the wave of Stalinist industrialization. The Second World War and the new waves of repression completed the process. Society, in the old sense of the word, simply vanished. Only the social-political system was left; social being and economic development simply became impossible outside the structures of the state. This declassed society, without stable social bonds, traditions or culture, inevitably needed controlling from outside. The all-powerful bureaucracy no longer merely guaranteed modernization; it ensured the survival and reproduction of the population. This was why the system retained its stability even after the mass terror came to an end in the 1950s. The bureaucracy itself changed radically. It did not become a ruling class in the traditional Western sense of the word; classes only exist where there is a social structure distinct from the structures of the state. But this was no longer the old state bureaucracy, that had existed in Russia for many centuries. In any European society, the bureaucracy normally carries out the will of the ruling class. While administering the state, the functionaries also, naturally, have their own interests. Very often, the result of bureaucratic management is strikingly unlike what was expected. At the same time, the apparatus does not promote its own goals and priorities; in the process of carrying out decisions, it merely interprets in its own fashion the will of the people higher up. In the Soviet system, by contrast, the apparatus took the decisions itself, and interpreted them itself. The bureaucracy, without ceasing to be above all an executive apparatus of power, no longer enacted the will of a ruling class, but took the place of an absent ruling class. In the strict sense, this was no longer an old-style bureaucracy, but a ‘statocracy’, a classstate, a class-apparatus. All classes in Stalinist society were declassed in the strict sense, and in this regard, the ruling elite differed little from other social layers. However, it possessed one important advantage: it was organized, and fused with the state power. The contradictions inherent in the position of the ruling elite constantly gave rise to grotesque situations, and often to fantastic irresponsibility, which ultimately harmed the interests of the bureaucracy itself. However, these weak points of the system emerged in their full strength only

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later, when the system was in decay. Moreover, in the initial period the effectiveness of work within the apparatus was ensured through terror, which affected the elite almost as much as those further down, and operated a sort of ‘natural selection’, with the losers being physically liquidated. On the outside, the system of rule resembled a monolithic pyramid, beneath the base of which was a mass of declassed workers without rights. On closer examination, however, it turned out that the ‘monolith’ was never completely homogeneous. In addition, the ‘big’ pyramid contained thousands of small and tiny pyramids that exactly reproduced its structure. At the very top was the ‘great leader and teacher’, Comrade Stalin, whose power was absolute. Nevertheless, every high-ranking party boss in his province, every minister in his department, and every enterprise director in his (rarely, her) plant was a petty Stalin, holding the power of life or death over subjects. It is well known that under Stalin’s labour legislation, which decreed prison terms for people who were late for work by twenty minutes, the fate of subordinates depended on the plant director. He or she could hand them over to the NKVD for the slightest misdemeanour, or could conceal major violations. From this began the corporatist relations in Soviet production, with enterprises transformed into something like an industrial version of the traditional Russian commune. The despotic power of bosses at the local level ensured them an unusual degree of independence. The centre set the tasks and selected the personnel. These people answered for success with their heads. It still did not occur to anyone, however, to try to plan every trifle from the centre. In the system as it existed, this was simply not necessary. All that was required was to concentrate resources on the main sectors, to ensure that the maximum number of heavy industrial plants were built as quickly as possible, and to entrust the management of these plants to ‘loyal sons of the party’. There was simply no time to think of anything else. The system was primitive, but effective; the reason for its success was its very primitiveness and simplicity. An industrial society was, on the whole, constructed; the war was won, and Russia, as the Soviet Union, was transformed into a superpower. Economic growth continued, despite mounting difficulties. Until the late 1940s the centralized economy and harsh authoritarian management ensured the country’s modernization. After industry had mainly been established, administering a more complex economy through the earlier mobilizational methods became increasingly difficult. Carrying through a technological revolution required genuinely new approaches. Paradoxical as it might seem, the system at first took the path of increasing centralization. The terror came to an end, and during the 1950s bureaucratic control over the ‘commanders of production’ tended to increase. People no longer answered for success with their heads, but the importance of the accountssheets remitted to the centre increased dramatically. From the early 1960s growth rates in the Soviet economy fell steadily, and capital investment was

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in short supply. This shortage was closely linked to the low efficiency with which the available resources were used. The success of industrialization meant that society had changed in qualitative terms. Consequently, different methods of administration were needed. As early as the 1950s, when modern (for that period) heavy industry had been established, and the economy had mainly been rebuilt following the destruction caused by the World War, new problems began appearing. The Cold War, and rivalry with the USA; the appearance of new military technologies; and the need for economic collaboration with the countries of Eastern Europe that were now within the Soviet sphere of influence, all served to confront the regime with the need for serious reconstruction. The more complex problems could no longer be resolved by the earlier primitive methods. The unpaid labour of gulag inmates was now unsuited to the tasks, and a romantic ardour for production could no longer be relied upon. In the conditions of peacetime a new worker, able to master more complex technologies, was needed. Many scientists performed magnificent work in sharashki, laboratoryprisons where scientific discoveries were made as guards looked on from behind barbed wire. Mass production, however, could not be carried out in such a fashion. Geniuses might work in confinement simply from love of what they were doing, but ordinary skilled workers or engineers needed normal conditions of work that would allow them to reproduce their labour power, to acquire essential knowledge and to re-educate themselves. The minimum need, in short, was for a free hired worker, who had to be provided with a standard of living which, if not equal to that in the West, was at least comparable to it. The independence and rights of workers had to be guaranteed, at least to some degree, and for this it was essential to limit the arbitrariness of local bosses, imposing certain common norms of management throughout the whole country. The policy of the ‘thaw’, implemented by Nikita Khrushchev after the death of Stalin, was an attempt to meet this need. The camps were shut down, and on the basis of the sharashki, powerful scientific research institutes were set up, often headed by former prisoners. The armed forces began to be modernized and industrial technology was renewed. Until the late 1980s, equipment installed in the 1960s formed the basis for production in most enterprises. After terror was replaced by more benign forms of control, the ‘material self-interest’ of workers began playing an important role. Accordingly, the consumer market started developing rapidly. In essence, despite the huge lag behind the West in terms of living standards, the Soviet Union in the 1960s was beginning to be transformed into a consumer society. This involved not only substantial changes to the culture and psychology of workers, but also the creation of a new economic structure suited to the mass production not only of tanks and tractors, but also of goods for the population. In turn, the population and the leadership itself came to evaluate the existing system not only on the basis of its ability to ensure the

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country’s national independence, its armed might, its greatness as a ‘world power’, or the promised revolution of social equality, but also on the basis of whether the system could secure continual increases in consumption. The modernizing potential of the Soviet system was clearly exhausted by the end of the 1970s. In some countries this occurred earlier, in others later. In the USSR, the growth rate of the economy began declining as early as 1959, when the country’s post-war reconstruction was essentially complete. The first attempt to solve the problem was the economic reforms of the late 1960s. These proposed a decentralization of decision-making. However, as the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed, such a decentralization would inevitably be followed by a new stage of political democratization, and a weakening of the positions of the ruling party-state bureaucracy. By the early 1970s, therefore, the reforms had been reversed (and in Czechoslovakia, suppressed by force of arms). Czechoslovakia, which had suffered the least wartime damage, and had possessed the most developed economy in pre-communist times, was the first country to find it had no prospects for development within the context of the existing system. This is why the movement for reforms in 1968 was supported and even initiated there by a significant section of the party and state elite. The Soviet Union itself, however, was not ready for change. Moreover, the oil crisis that hit after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 directed a powerful flow of petrodollars into the USSR. At the same time, cheap Soviet oil stimulated a continuation of industrial growth in the ‘fraternal countries’. During the Brezhnev years, the main slogan in the USSR became ‘stability’. This ‘stability’ was obtained at the price of rejecting a search for new paths of development. The new social compact involved the population renouncing demands for a broadening of civil liberties, in exchange for increased consumption. This also corresponded fully to the ideas set out in the programme of the CPSU that had been adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress. There, ‘communism’ was depicted exclusively as a consumer paradise, a sort of gigantic American supermarket from which every citizen could freely and without paying cart away everything needed to satisfy his or her ‘continually growing requirements’. The cult of consumption, built into the system and oriented toward continually growing production, was supposed to stabilize the system and provide it with new stimuli. In fact, it served to undermine it. Precisely at this time, the bases were established for the present-day corruption, not only at the pinnacle of society, but throughout all its strata. Brezhnev’s policy of ‘stabilization’ also had another contradictory side to it. Constructing its economy on the basis of exporting raw materials and importing technology, the USSR increasingly became drawn into the world capitalist system, as its periphery. As in other peripheral countries, technological dependency was aggravated by a growing external debt. In analogous fashion, the countries that politically were still Soviet satellites were also transformed economically into a semi-periphery of the West.

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The system of rule grew increasingly bureaucratized and complex. Taking any decision needed the agreement of ever greater numbers of officials, and conflicts of interest began appearing between bureaucrats. The party apparatus remained the core of the system, acquiring important new functions. It was required not only to administer the country, but also to coordinate the actions of different bureaucracies, to act as an arbiter in conflicts and to make the final decision in disputed cases. This in its turn created new contradictions between the party apparatus and ‘economic managers’. On the one hand, the party elite continually interfered in matters of productive democracy, often defending non-economic interests. On the other hand, it tried to ensure a certain balance within the system. Because the economic apparatus had established its own system of authority, enterprise directors found themselves subject to dual control. For the central ministries and departments to control the lower levels of administration effectively, they had to receive information about their activity and to provide them with plan targets in the form of systems of ‘indices’, making it possible to summarize and evaluate information. The more complex and developed production became, the more indices were needed. The more indices there were, the easier it became for enterprise directors and the ministries themselves to manipulate them. Meanwhile, the party authorities at the local level were far less interested in formal indices, and far more interested in solving social problems and in ensuring that the decisions they took matched the ideological line of the party at a given stage. From the point of view of the economic apparatus, the interference of the party organs represented an obstacle unless the party chiefs could provide them with access to hard-to-obtain raw materials, equipment or building supplies. On the other hand, the meddling of the party apparatus allowed many industrial managers to manoeuvre between two forces, the local party authorities and the central ministries. It was also through the party apparatus that horizontal links, direct informal contacts between enterprises of different sectors, were often established. Paradoxically, the intervention of party organs made up, to a significant degree, for the absence of market structures. The growing economic significance of the party organs in turn prepared the way for their acceptance, in the late 1980s, of a ‘market’ ideology. The possibilities of corruption were also enhanced. The more the party officials were preoccupied with ‘deficits’, the more prospects they found for enriching themselves. The attempt that was made in the years from 1965 to 1969 to bring order to this system through decentralization and through broadening the rights of the local economic bureaucracies ended in failure, because the central departments and the party chiefs were unwilling to forgo their powers. Some changes, however, were made. The outcome, in an economy that was growing endlessly more complex, was bureaucratic decentralization. The centre was becoming choked with information which it could not process effectively, but the people who controlled the centre refused to delegate

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powers to officials further down. Attempts at reform, meanwhile, damaged the equilibrium of a system which, despite its constantly growing difficulties, nevertheless worked after a fashion. The sole alternative was to create parallel centres. Ministries began propagating at an unbelievable rate. If management within the various sectors became easier, because each central ministry was now concerned with a smaller number of enterprises, the difficulty of planning development and coordinating interests grew rapidly. The position of the party apparatus also became increasingly difficult as the bureaucratic pluralism of interests burgeoned. If the structure of power in the 1930s had been like a pyramid, with the leader at its apex, by the 1970s it was a complex structure with many summits, wound about like a spider’s web with a network of party organs. The so-called property of all the people was increasingly being turned into corporatist and in essence private property. ‘The people who administered so-called state property on behalf of the state (functionaries on all levels), often acted now as its real owners’, notes the political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov. ‘These people became more and more independent of the state, while the state character of property in the USSR increasingly became a mere convention.’4 This was a period of growing corruption, not only at the top levels, but throughout all strata of society. Imported consumer goods and technology were paid for using petrodollars. This money, however, did not suffice, and funds had to be borrowed abroad. The 1970s was a time of cheap credit. As a result, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Soviet Union finished up among the largest debtors to the West. This policy was fatal for these countries. The USSR increasingly became part of the periphery of the Western world, its economy subject to the same logic of dependency as the economies of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The ineffective bureaucratic machine was gradually disintegrating. This period was marked by a rapid spread of corruption at the top levels. At the same time, the population was decaying morally, its submissiveness purchased at the cost of an artificial rise in consumption. In addition, the social dynamic had changed. Since 1917, Russian society had been subject to a revolutionary impulse, with millions of people from the lower classes gaining the chance to raise their status. Hundreds of thousands of them perished in the camps and in the war, but there was nevertheless a constant stream of new, talented people to take their places. Free education and health care ensured this constant social democratization. The Soviet system did not become, and could not become, socialist in the Marxist sense of the word. Nevertheless, for millions of people it fulfilled some of the promises of socialism. During the 1970s, this democratic social dynamic gradually petered out. The nomenklatura, the managerial strata and the privileged sector of the intelligentsia consolidated their privileges. Vertical mobility in society declined dramatically.

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As a rule, the mass of working people remained atomized. The shift of millions of people to the cities, a process that had continued during the 1960s, impeded the formation of a hereditary working class, although, by comparison with the years of Stalinist terror and war, social bonds had become more durable, and people were now much less dependent on the state. Meanwhile, new middle layers were rapidly coming into being. The more complex economy was giving birth to a whole layer of privileged managers and scientific workers. The new cultural needs of the population called into being a culture industry. The press and television developed, and a new cultural elite became established. The continuing shortages of goods and services, along with the simultaneous growth of living standards, effective demand and consumption, created the conditions for the rise of a developed and prosperous commercial mafia, which gradually penetrated the most diverse elements of social life. For all their heterogeneity, the middle layers were united by their similar way of life, more or less uniform level of education and, finally, by their shared model of consumption. This was very important as the culture and ideology of the new consumer society took shape. The middle layers also had in common a contradictory relationship to the authorities. Within the system, almost all these groups enjoyed privileges and rights that elevated them dramatically above the mass of simple mortals. Whether these rights were granted from above, as in the case of the intellectual elite, which received extensive benefits starting with the right to additional living space amid a shortage of housing, and finishing with journeys abroad; or whether the system of privileges had come into being spontaneously, as happened with the managers; or whether everything was appropriated arbitrarily and illegally, as with the commercial mafia, in any case the system provided far greater opportunities to members of the middle layers than to ‘ordinary’ citizens. At the same time, the middle layers were thoroughly estranged from the real authorities. Endless conflicts were aroused by the inevitable interference of the party apparatus in ‘other people’s affairs’. Finally, the middle layers had a much higher level of education and were far more competent than the party functionaries who ruled over them. These groups were least of all in need of patronage from the apparatus. The middle layers were the closest of all to the people who wielded power, and felt the pressure of the authorities more powerfully than anyone else. The middle layers felt that the ruling elite needed them, but would not admit them to its ranks. It was quite natural that, although the middle layers were not the most oppressed strata of society, it was precisely here that the desire for radical change began to arise more rapidly than anywhere else. This was where the opposition took shape, and it was in this milieu that ideas of a new social order began to develop. Both the dissidents and the reformers came from the middle layers. When the masses, outraged by the policies of the ruling bureaucracy, rose in revolt in Novocherkassk in 1962, they appealed to the revolutionary

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tradition of 1917. There could not be even a mention of a transition to capitalism, just as an alternative socialist model was not proposed either. The people were simply demanding that the system carry out its own promises, that it provide them with a life corresponding to the officially proclaimed slogans (‘Everything for the Good of Working People’, ‘Open the Road to the Youth’, ‘Children are the Only Privileged Class’ and so forth). The worker uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and in Poland in 1956 and 1970 followed the same pattern. By contrast, when the middle layers entered into conflict, the call was always for changing the rules of the game, for changing the structures of rule and for redistributing power. In this sense the opposition of the middle layers, for all its limited nature, was exclusively ‘constructive’. Meanwhile, it was quite natural that reformist ideas proved far more influential than dissident ones, although the dissidents attracted more attention. Because the middle layers were also the only sector of society that had its own voice, and because they were its most organized element, they began to speak in the name of society as a whole. In this situation the illusion that their own interests coincided fully with those of the country as a whole was quite natural and logical both for reformers and dissidents. By the early 1980s the possibilities of the ‘Brezhnev’ model were exhausted. Oil prices had stabilized, and the place of the oil shock was taken by a drawn-out crisis. The time had come when accounts would have to be paid. The crisis of rule demoralized the elite circles, undermining their faith in the effectiveness of the system far more than the decline in economic growth rates or the growth of popular dissatisfaction. Taking any decision became more and more difficult; the bureaucratic labyrinths were becoming ever more intricate and involved, leading even experienced professional functionaries into dead ends. By the late 1970s, the crisis of rule had given rise to a ‘crisis of supply’. The shortages had become an everyday problem, not only for ordinary consumers but also for plant directors. The centralized system of resource distribution suffered increasingly frequent breakdowns. Planned deliveries failed to materialize, and it was impossible to find out where things had finished up. The paradoxical reaction of the managerial apparatus to the collapse of the supply system was to form a sort of ‘grey market’. Direct links sprang up between enterprises, which did not so much buy products from one another as exchange shortages. The development of a barter market and of direct ties, together with the simultaneous accumulation of ‘hidden reserves’, made the work of centralized supply even more difficult and unmanageable. At the same time, the country was hit by a crisis of investment. Because the central organs did not have precise information about what was happening, while resources were being distributed arbitrarily through ‘grey’ and ‘black’ markets, state investment projects could not be completed on time. For many departments, meanwhile, building new enterprises became the most reliable means of

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extracting additional resources from the centralized funds. Construction was begun, but not finished. Capital investments did not yield results. This, in turn, became one of the most important sources of inflation. The constantly growing volume of uncompleted construction formed a breach through which billions of rubles, unmatched by goods, poured into the economy. The money that was invested in building new enterprises not only failed to bring any return, but also led to new shortages and required new spending, since it flowed into wage payments which did not create end products that could be sold on the market. The financial crisis meant that citizens and enterprises piled up huge savings. Only a part of these funds were held in savings accounts and other bank deposits. Other parts were held ‘in the stocking’, filled various ‘black cashboxes’ or circulated on the black market. The collapse of the official regulatory mechanisms led to the spontaneous formation of a sort of shadow system of regulation that merged directly with the criminal world. A holy place, as they say, is never empty . . . As a rule, corruption is the natural companion of ineffective bureaucracy. In any society, the level of corruption is inversely proportional to the efficiency of administration. In Soviet society, however, the mafia not only grew fat on the failures of the system, but in practice began turning into a shadow government, far more effective and stable than the officially proclaimed authorities. By the early 1980s, the breakdown of the system was obvious. Using the last of its strength, the Brezhnev leadership tried to pretend that nothing was amiss, but the bureaucracy, confronting the crisis of rule, demanded changes. With Brezhnev’s death, these changes became politically and psychologically inevitable. The bankruptcy of the system was unmistakeable even to its ideologues. If new CPSU leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his prime minister Nikolay Ryzhkov could console themselves during their first years in power with illusions about the ‘perestroika’ of society, by 1988–89 the situation had flown quite out of control. The bureaucratic apparatus had lost its coherence, disintegrating into warring groups. One ministry, and one republic, would denounce another, and all would join in attacking the central government and the party apparatus, which tried as they might to bring order to the chaos. Initially, the party apparatus still had a certain resilience, but amid the general collapse it could not hold out for long. The struggle between factions and groups intensified, especially since the top party elite was never completely homogeneous. In the countries of Eastern Europe, the old regimes collapsed even more rapidly, though in each country the process had its own specific features. The national leaders sought feverishly for a new strategy. The one they settled on was privatization and capitalization. By 1990 there was not a single Eastern European country where a traditional ‘communist’ regime remained intact. The monopoly of the Communist Parties on power had been

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ended, and centralized administration of the economy liquidated. ‘Communist’ ideology was being replaced by the ideas of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal reform was based on the dominant tendencies of the preceding years. It strengthened and consolidated these tendencies, bringing them to their logical conclusion. Russia became part of the periphery of the West not only in economic terms, but also politically, sacrificing its superpower status along with a massive part of its economy. Social differentiation split society definitively into a privileged minority and an impoverished majority, destroying institutions that earlier had provided an upward path for people from the lower strata. The events of the period from 1989 to 1991 were not a turning-point, but the culmination of a preceding process. This was why the Communist Parties surrendered power so readily. Meanwhile, the masses, corrupted by the ideology of parasitic consumption, were incapable of acting as an independent force. Marxist ideologues, used to repeating high-flown formulae about the working class, were astonished when the turn to capitalism failed to encounter stiff resistance from the workers. Meanwhile, the neo-liberal policies could only be successfully implemented because they rested on the social ‘inheritance’ of totalitarianism. To a significant degree, society remained declassed; people failed to recognize their interests, and normal social bonds were lacking. Classes did not exist in the full sense of the word. The mass movement was inevitably transformed into the actions of a mob, that was easily manipulated with the help of the mass media (as people began saying later, it could be ‘zombified’). People were used to appealing to the state for help, and to protesting against state injustices, but they had no experience of life in a society where the state was powerless, and the population had to resolve its problems independently. In essence, the only socially organized forces in the East remained the bureaucracy and the middle layers . . . The old nomenklatura, whose rule had brought the country to crisis, remained the only social group capable of controlling the situation and overseeing changes. It could no longer rule in the old fashion, but no-one could replace it at the helm of state administration. Before us was a crisis, but no alternative. A new class, capable of taking power from the old oligarchy and shaping a new model of society, did not exist. Only the old oligarchy, or some part of it, was able to do this. As in France after Napoleon, the collapse of the imperial system meant a partial restoration of the old pre-revolutionary relations, but on the basis of respect for the property and rights of the new ruling elite that had arisen as a result of the revolution. In this sense ‘perestroika’, and the Yeltsinist ‘second republic’ that succeeded it, were a sort of analogue in Russian history for the restoration of the Bourbons in France. If reaction is the only possible way out of a dead end, this does not mean that it becomes progress. But every backward movement of society creates its own dynamic, giving rise to its own interests, ideology and even

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enthusiasts. Soviet society’s need to move backwards also created a specific form of degenerate consciousness in which terms and concepts were turned inside out. In the newspapers, right-wingers came to be called ‘leftists’. Leftists became ‘rightists’, restoration became ‘revolution’, the destruction of the state became ‘the rebirth of Russia’, and reaction became ‘progressive changes’ or ‘reforms’. The substitution of one concept for another is a typical device of propaganda, but if society’s backward movement had not been historically necessary, this propaganda would hardly have had such stunning success. It was society’s need for reaction, at times sensed intuitively, which forced the no-longer-young supporters of ‘true communism’ and the grandchildren of the old Bolsheviks to give enthusiastic support to privatization and the destruction of the USSR. Here we are not talking about the managing directors of reaction, who had an eye only for their own interests, but about millions of their sincere admirers, people with nothing or almost nothing to gain from the changes taking place. The more masochistic this support for the reforms appeared, the more sincere it was, since people felt certain that they were making sacrifices for the sake of the future. However paradoxical it might seem, this was true up to a point; in order to move forward, society had to step back. The trouble was that people confused the unavoidable with the desirable, and for human beings and society, such an error is tantamount to a moral catastrophe. This situation was also predetermined by the defeat of the left critics of reform. Unlike the traditionalists, they recognized the inevitability of reaction, while at the same time refusing to participate in it and trying to resist it. This was not in the name of a vanished past, but of a future that had not yet been born. At a time when the real choice for society could be summed up in the formula ‘stagnation or reaction’, it could hardly be expected that alternative ideologies would attract mass support, especially since prolonging stagnation would simply lead to a new reaction, more belated and more catastrophic. It must be acknowledged that the reformer-reactionaries coped magnificently with their task. In fact, they overfulfilled their historical target by many times, and society finished up in a new dead end. If there was no way out of the dead end of centralized planning except through the market, it is now necessary to seek an anti-market route out of the dead end of market mechanisms. No propaganda about the superiority of the market can alter this. The need for statization of the economy is spontaneously maturing, and is becoming so urgent that even entrepreneurs themselves are feeling it.5 Of course, this statization is beginning from a ‘blind passage’, without an appropriate ideology or programme, just like the first economic experiments of perestroika, which led ultimately to wholesale privatization. Privatizating industry in Russia has been impossible. Our industrial structure was created from the beginning on the basis of state ownership,

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and there is no other way it can function. The circumstances that have made any and all scenarios of widespread privatization unworkable were well known to experts long before the first fiascos began to be suffered. The economy was constructed on the basis of monopoly. Where there is no competition, privatization merely reinforces and consolidates monopolism (it is no accident that nationalization has been resorted to in the West where it has been impossible to overcome ‘natural monopolies’ by market methods). Soviet productive enterprises not only belonged to the state, but were themselves part of the state, and to a degree were among the lower links in the organization of society, carrying out the same role as communes and municipalities in Europe. Privatizing the VAZ or KAMAZ factories is like trying to privatize Bristol or Frankfurt. All the cases of successful privatization that are familiar in world practice have involved the ‘digesting’ of state property by established market structures which have proven their viability. The effective demand for Russian property was negligible; neither ‘shadow capital’, nor labour collectives, nor Western firms had the funds to purchase significant parts of the huge Soviet state sector at market prices. This meant that the redistribution of property had to be consciously subjugated to an anti-market mechanism. The greater the scale of the redistribution, the greater the antimarket, administrative tendencies in the economy. Contrary to today’s wisdom, these tendencies are not necessarily malign. But to have neo-liberals implanting the ‘free market’ through a strengthening of administrative controls is a contradiction in terms. Such a thing could only happen in Russia. In such circumstances, any attempt to suggest a ‘better scenario’or a ‘more just approach’ to privatization is the same as research in the field of squaring the circle. But things that are impossible from the economic point of view (or from that of good sense) may be quite realistic from the administrative-political angle, especially if the authorities back these measures up with an appropriate propaganda campaign. As soon as privatization became a purely administrative act, and any possibility of an alternative was excluded, discussing the scope and purpose of privatization ceased to have any point. For an administrator the question of what can and should be privatized, and of what is impossible and impermissible, boils down to the question of the limits to his or her powers. Everything that is within the administrator’s jurisdiction can be privatized. As a result, the Russian authorities even had to impose various restrictions and make various clarifications. In documents drawn up in Moscow in 1991–92, for example, it was stipulated that the air was not subject to privatization. The consequences were not long in appearing. The privatization turned out to be either fictitious or barbaric. Where the privatization remained on paper, the state continued after privatization to carry out most of the functions of an owner, only less efficiently and without receiving any benefits (the profits finished up in private hands, while the losses were ‘socialized’). Where de-statization did in fact occur, the situation was even worse.

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Private property does not automatically mean the existence of capitalist property relations, much less of ‘civilized’ones. Elements of capitalism have indeed arisen among us, but they are closely intermingled with all possible forms of economic barbarism. The ideologues of reform have tried to dismiss this as a feature of the ‘transition period’, or as representing ‘the costs of primitive accumulation’ (as in Europe in the sixteenth century). An optimist might decide that it is only necessary to wait for two or three hundred years, and the problems will solve themselves. Unfortunately, the real situation is by no means so rosy. Real private property in Russia is assuming pre-capitalist forms, and therefore represents one of the main obstacles to establishing any sort of modern economic relations. It is precisely for this reason that, as the administrative reforms go ahead, we are seeing a growing collapse of scientifically advanced production and a strengthening of technological backwardness. Whatever we care to examine – labour relations, the mechanisms of government, relations between property owners and so forth – we see something more like progress toward feudalism. The very idea of ‘reforms’ in which the state itself can be privatized piece by piece, and state property can be handed over ‘for services rendered’ (especially property that is linked to particular obligations), is something from the realm of feudal concepts. The organizers of the ‘great privatization’ knew in advance what their actions would lead to. Writing in Moskovskie Novosti during the heat of perestroika, none other than Yegor Gaidar warned of the catastrophic consequences of a future transformation of private property into a ‘new stereotype of economic thinking’.6 The ‘reformers’acted consciously when they redistributed power and resources between ‘elite’ groups. The treatment received by the hoodwinked majority of the population, who had supported reaction under the slogan of ‘progressive change’, was of course quite different. Implemented through administrative methods, the ‘reforms’ are necessitating new emergency methods to restore order to the economy. There will be no real economic recovery until all the rules of the game are again subjected to radical changes, and this will not be achieved without a radical transformation of the structure of property ownership. It has already proven impossible to escape from the chaos using the ‘state market regulation’ discussed by moderate leftists in Russia and Ukraine. The demand for some at least of the privatized enterprises to be returned to the state has been raised spontaneously during the crises at ZIL and other Soviet industrial giants. Without state support these enterprises would not survive restructuring in any case. As early as 1995–96 re-nationalization was already beginning through government credits and investments. In practice, a significant part of the property that was handed over for a song to new owners has been taken back by the state. Any government that tries seriously to restore order to the economy will have to formalize de jure the renationalization that has occurred de facto.

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A demand for socialist ideas is arising only gradually, and socialist ideologues themselves are reluctant in many cases to formulate their thoughts in radical terms. Unlike the situation in the late 1980s, when admirers of capitalism were restricted by Soviet censorship, the main restraining factor in Yeltsin’s Russia was fear of the power of official propaganda. For ten years this propaganda shaped public opinion, remodelling mass consciousness like a lump of clay. But suddenly, the ideologues and image-makers have discovered that the old methods no longer work. Public consciousness has escaped from their control, and within it, processes with which the elites are having to reckon seriously are taking place. A shift has occurred in society; the time of reaction has drawn to a close. The temptation to become a socialist is very great in a society where capitalist reform has failed. But this reform has not passed without trace; it has left behind it many new socialists and left-centrists. In the 1995 State Duma elections there was a veritable stampede of candidates and parties to left-centrist positions. Activists of one social democratic organization learned to their astonishment that former Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov had become their leader. The left-centre filled up with state functionaries, generals, showbusiness personalities and for a time even the director of Russian state television, Oleg Poptsov. Orthodox ‘Westernizing’ democrats drew on the support of a few free trade unions in order to give their campaigns a more ‘social’ tinge. The political organization known as the Congress of Russian Communities also recruited a number of socialists. Meanwhile Grigory Yavlinsky (leader of Yabloko, the party that tried to play the role of a loyal liberal opposition to Yeltsin’s regime), delivering an address while abroad, spoke of his sympathy for social democratic ideas. It can easily be seen that with a few exceptions the 1995-model ‘leftcentre’ consisted of the same politicians and groups that in 1993 had made up the right-centre or the centre ‘as a whole’. The main problem for such leftists and socialists was not even in showing the public how they were better than rivals who were proclaiming exactly the same slogans, but in explaining what their leftism and socialism consisted of. Capitalism came to Russia as an ideology of modernization, but the modernization did not occur. The result was a revolution that shook the world. This was in the early decades of the last century. At the end of the century, capitalist modernization was again being proclaimed in Russia. But this time its chances of success were significantly less. In order to create a bourgeois order, you need at the very minimum a bourgeoisie. But a bourgeoisie does not arise of its own accord out of private entrepreneurship. Early in the twentieth century Max Weber wrote that it was not the thirst for profit and the striving for wealth at any cost that gave birth to the capitalist system. Greed and money-lust were widespread in societies that were still remote from capitalism. In Russia, commercial capital arose under the patronage of a despotic state, but, instead of preparing the

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ground for a flowering of productive entrepreneurship, this capital became an obstacle to the development of production. Effective bourgeois entrepreneurship can arise only where the desire for easy money is successfully reined in. This was why Protestantism played such a huge role in the rise of European capitalism. It is also the reason why, in all countries to which bourgeois modernization came relatively late, a decisive role within it was played by the state. A peculiarity of the situation in Russia is that the capitalization of society coincided with the collapse of the USSR and with a profound crisis of the state. After the fall of the Soviet system the bureaucracy decayed so completely that it was no longer fit for constructive activity. This decay was predetermined both by the rapidity and scale of the capitalization, and also by its superficial character. Instead of restoring the state, the bureaucracy is profiting from its disintegration. To the degree that Russia is now part of the world system, included in the processes of globalization, it is a capitalist country. But neither the production that is occurring for Russia’s internal market, nor the labour relations and other social relationships that exist within the domestic economy can be described as capitalist. In principle, this situation is not unique. Lenin in his time complained that Russia was suffering not only from capitalism, but also from its inadequate development. Rosa Luxemburg noted that capitalism, with each of its wars of international expansion, drew into its orbit countries with non-bourgeois relationships. Moreover, the non-bourgeois character of an internal economy often became a crucially important ‘competitive advantage’ within the framework of world trade. Hence the free market in Britain aided the development of slavery in the American south. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the ‘second edition of serfdom’ in Eastern Europe and the strengthening of the serf-holding order in Russia were closely connected with the integration of these regions into the world market.7 The present-day ‘success stories’of Russian exporters have not been based on copying Western methods of enterprise management. The largest corporations have retained all the features of traditional Soviet enterprises. The elite that has chosen such a model of ‘integration into the world system’, however, is not able to modernize the country. On the contrary, the elite has a vital interest in maintaining Russia’s backwardness and its archaic social structures, albeit with ‘European’ stage scenery. The handing out of property, even at no more than symbolic cost, will not stimulate entrepreneurship. In precisely the same way, workers who have received the charitable gift of 51 per cent of the shares in their factories do not become collective entrepreneurs. The principle behind such distribution is neither capitalist nor socialist, but feudal-bureaucratic. Capitalism can arise in natural fashion only out of petty entrepreneurship. But here, the neo-liberal reformers have been even more harsh than the last communist governments, headed by Ryzhkov and Pavlov. This is acknowl-

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edged even by the right-wing press. ‘After small business emerged, the promises of the Gaidar government to support this sphere of activity turned into the direct suppression of entrepreneurship of any kind’, writes the newspaper Izvestiya. ‘If we compare the business legislation of this epoch with that of the time of Ryzhkov, it soon becomes clear that the laws of the Gaidar period shut off any possibility that small business might develop.’8 Meanwhile, the left press has sought to show that ‘small business gets along fine with communist ideology’. According to the newspaper Glasnost, petty proprietors would do well to understand that ‘life would be easier and simpler for them if communists held the reins of power’.9 One way or another, the forced implantation of capitalist forms of ownership ‘from above’ has been incompatible with the gradual ripening of entrepreneurship ‘from below’. This requires fundamentally different priorities in the area of economic policy, and different tax and credit systems. When the government handed out property, it deprived itself of its main source of income, and was forced to tighten the tax screw. Small businesses were forced either to shut down or to move into the ‘shadow economy’, operating on a semi-legal basis. Successful bourgeois development, whether from above or below, thus proved to be impossible. In present-day Russia, as in any feudal-bureaucratic society, politicians are far more important than entrepreneurs. They do not carry out the orders of a social elite; they themselves are this elite. They are motivated neither by ideas nor by public interests, but are concerned solely with the private interests of their particular sponsors, whom they are, moreover, ready to betray at the first opportunity. It is quite wrong to suppose that they need power for its own sake. Savouring power in the renaissance sense, revelling in it as the triumph of the will and delighting in commanding people and creating something out of nothing, is quite alien to them. The main thing for them is not power itself, but its attributes – luxury cars, personal bodyguards, lavish meals, half-witted flatterers and longlegged secretaries. In short, all the trumpery which the state provides in order to maintain the distance between the leadership and ordinary people, to impress and delude the simple-minded. Russia’s present rulers, however, are not fooling ordinary people, but are fooling themselves. It would be naive to think that what is at work here is unprincipled Machiavellianism. Genuinely unprincipled behaviour demands at least some notion that principles exist, while Machiavellianism requires a sense of the meaning of power and the tasks of the state. For Russia, to make the shift from muddle-headedness to unprincipled behaviour would be a real moral revolution. Russia in the 1990s has neither politics nor politicians as Europeans understand these terms. It is not simply that people do not believe in the politicians; the politicians do not believe in themselves either, and this is why they try to hide behind generals and show-business stars.10 Talk of the growing influence of the military is baseless. The army has shared the fate of other structures; it is torn by factional struggles and undermined by

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corruption and inefficiency, as well as being deprived of clear tasks and reference-points. A popular general might present himself as the saviour of the homeland, but when a whole legion of squabbling generals flashes before the public, this turns into farce. Parliament and the army are quite different spheres. A general who becomes president remains a general; the principle of oneperson command applies in both cases. But a general in parliament is no longer a general. A characteristic trait of real military politicians is a demonstrative hostility to politics. All the Bonapartes and Pinochets came to power while publicly keeping their distance from political parties. They counterposed their cold professionalism to the petty vanities and parliamentary ambitions of the civilian politicians. In this sense, the only military politician in Russia has been General Anatoly Romanov, who commanded the Russian forces in Chechnya. He stood out favourably not only by comparison with the men in civilian suits who filled the television screens, but also with his colleagues in epaulettes. While everyone else was arguing about war and peace, he created a reputation for himself as a resolute soldier who was working consistently to end the conflict, as a friend of the Chechens and a defender of the interests of Russia – all without making a single political statement. For precisely these reasons, Romanov represented a danger to many people. This was why he fell victim to a ‘mysterious’ assassination attempt, suspiciously like the assassination of Kirov on the eve of the great terror. The parliamentary elections of 1995 provided a reflection of what was occurring in society. No electoral law, no matter how good, would help if society were incapable of organizing itself. The ten years of victories for ‘reform and democracy’ were a time when the objective preconditions for democratic development, preconditions that had ripened slowly and with difficulty in society between the 1960s and the 1980s, were undermined. Compared to 1991, the setbacks were obvious. In the late 1980s, people were not only hoping for change, but were actively pursuing it. The seeds of civil society had begun to sprout. The present-day apathy of the bulk of the population is no accident. Nor is it simply the result of weariness after so many changes. Something far more tragic has occurred. Society has suffered a defeat in its efforts to free itself of the state. The attempts to implement workers’ self-management were crushed, and the shoots of free entrepreneurship were trampled underfoot. In Russia, the demand for strong government authority is growing. But the ‘strong state’ which many ordinary people want is nothing like that demanded by the elite. In the short term, the combination of repression with social demagogy may be a recipe for success, but it will not solve the country’s problems. If democracy is impossible, that does not make dictatorship a viable alternative. For ten years we have been ‘struggling against totalitarianism’, even though totalitarianism has ceased to exist. If there had been totalitarianism

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in the mid-1980s, there would not have been perestroika. The situation is now different. Political scientists in the 1930s outlined the conditions for the rise of totalitarianism: the atomization, alienation and apathy of citizens; the ineffectiveness of organs of representative democracy; and a simultaneous rise in social tensions. If these problems cannot be solved, the natural reaction is a flight from freedom. In the early 1990s society was not yet ready to flee from freedom. But by the final years of the decade the situation had changed dramatically. Fortunately, there was no real organized force ready to install a totalitarian dictatorship in the country. The leader of the nationalist forces in the parliament, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was capable of frightening only the faint of heart. The generals were fighting among themselves. The leaders of the communist movement were dreaming of ministerial portfolios, not of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It should not be forgotten that dangers often come from unexpected directions. The Russian Supreme Soviet was terrified by the comic-opera putsch of August 1991, and was then blown away by tanks under the command of its own former chairperson. If a full-blooded dictatorship comes to power in one or another of the post-communist countries, it will be on the pretext of saving democracy. In any case, the authorities in Russia have remained weak. The state has not managed to strengthen itself as the process of change has gone ahead. It used to be considered that if society was weak, that meant the state would be strong. Now we have before us a feeble and disoriented society, ruled by a state power in a condition of semi-collapse. For all the talk about the consolidation of Russian statehood, achieving this goal has been impossible. The effective exercise of state power is possible only where the authorities have organic links with the citizens, links that are based on tradition, on broadly accepted legitimacy, or on the clearly expressed will of the majority of the people. None of this applies in the Russian Federation. We do not have a modern state system; what exists is a chaotic system of rule which survives according to the principle: each receives as much power as he or she is able to appropriate. The power of each boss is limited only by the will and influence of other bosses. ‘The establishment transformed nomenklatura property and nomenklatura privileges into private property and private privileges’, writes the liberal political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov. The power of the nomenklatura has remained intact, even if the people involved have shed their former ideological cover. The party and economic-administrative elites, together with operators in the shadow economy, have transformed themselves into ‘new Russians’, and have remained the privileged class of post-communist society. The state underwent changes in the same degree as the class to which it was connected, and in point of fact even earlier.

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In sum, it is not ‘communism’ but the new epoch that began with the collapse of communist power that ‘represents the apotheosis of bureaucracy in Russia. The state is at last serving not God, not the autocracy, not communism, but itself.11 It would be wrong to underestimate the changes that have occurred. The state is now very different. We have been Europeanizing ourselves for ten years, and the result is that our country has become strikingly like Africa. In Africa too, the urge to become like the West has been accompanied by the comprehensive destruction of indigenous traditions and structures, which have been declared to be ‘abnormal’. The process has resulted in the victory of traditions which are in fact local, but which represent the very worst of the local heritage. These traditions are of course masked by European terms. But if we give a new title to a Russian gorodnichiy (headman), renaming him a mayor or prefect, he will not take fewer bribes. There is no bourgeoisie, in the capacity of a ruling class, in post-Soviet Russia. There are rival groups, which have failed to become a real class. They proudly called themselves elites, but it would be better simply to describe them as bosses, since they do not fit Western theories of elites. In the felicitous words of Moscow journalist Anna Ostapchuk, ‘our elite still dreams that it is a nomenklatura dreaming of being an elite’.12 The strength of these groups lies outside society; they have a certain significance only when they hold office. If private capital is not kept strictly separate from the state, that means it is not private. Money in present-day Russia only has real significance when it can be exchanged for power; this is the only real convertibility not only of the ruble, but also of the dollar. Nor does the concept of interest groups have any meaning. There are only groups that form and disintegrate around various people, either government leaders, clans, people with common geographical origins, or those who have managed to gain control of particular valuable resources. Sociologists who study the composition of post-Soviet society remark that it is not really society at all, but rather a ‘socium of cliques’.13 Because of this, representative organs represent only themselves, while political parties are created around particular leaders, without any ties to mass movements. In December 1996 the Moscow weekly Itogi published an enthusiastic biography of Boris Berezovsky, one of the country’s most powerful business entrepreneurs who had also become deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council. The story related in this piece is disturbingly like that of Chichikov, the hero of Gogol’s nineteenth-century novel Dead Souls: Berezovsky set up the company LOGOVAZ, and at first simply dealt in Zhiguli cars. But he soon found this too restrictive. The ambitions of this mathematician no longer fitted within the framework offered by the products of the Volga Automobile Works. Not even acquiring the status of a privileged dealer in the products of Mercedes-Benz and other prestige car firms could divert him for long. He conceived the idea of building his own

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plant and of producing a Russian ‘people’s car’. To this end, the AllRussian Automobile Alliance (AVVA) was set up, with Berezovsky as its general director. The scheme to produce a ‘people’s car’ required a good deal of money, from Russian sources, and not from the state budget. At that time there was no shortage of trusting investors. Russians were promised that if they handed over their savings, they would receive good dividends and a cheap car to boot. People put their names on the customary lists. Three years went by. The plant, the author of the scheme declared, was being built in Finland; meanwhile, the AVVA shareholders had received nothing. Berezovsky’s enemies then accused him of setting up a vulgar ‘financial pyramid’, and of ‘enriching himself at the expense of the people’. Berezovsky snarled back at them that he had never promised the investors a quick return, and that the situation was difficult because their earlier contributions had been eaten up by inflation. By this time, the interests of the AVVA general director had in any case outgrown the car business. In 1994 he became first deputy chairperson of the company Russian Public Television, and in effect the owner of the first, ‘Ostankino’ television channel.14 Is this not strikingly similar to Gogol’s story of the church that ‘began to be built, then burnt down’, or of the public building that was left uncompleted, even though private mansions, owned by the people in charge of the construction, appeared at the other end of town? The only possible alternative to nomenklatura business is criminal business. The historian Roy Medvedev, referring to the findings of a survey of Russian millionaires conducted by the Institute of Applied Politics, reports: Forty per cent of the respondents admitted that they had earlier been involved in illegal business, 22.5 per cent that they had in the past been charged with crimes, and 25 per cent that at the time of the survey they had links with the criminal world. These were merely the people who owned up.15 Compared to these individuals, the old bureaucrats seem like models of probity and conscientiousness. In circumstances where there is no bourgeoisie, only a bourgeoisified nomenklatura trying to find its place in the system of global capitalism, the relationship between political and economic life is quite different from that in Western society. ‘The deterioration of the economic situation is now usually seen as the main factor behind the political crisis’, Pastukhov writes. ‘In reality, everything is the other way round.’ Whatever economic steps the government might take, it cannot overcome the crisis, because the crisis is caused by the government itself. ‘Hence overcoming the economic crisis by purely economic means is impossible.’16

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The country needs a radical political alternative. But the traditional slogans of proletarian politics meet with an obstacle in the form of . . . the absence of a proletariat. The great mass of hired workers behave in ways that are quite un-proletarian. This is not surprising; the workers depend on enterprise managers who do not pay wages, but who nevertheless guarantee ‘employment’. The managers, meanwhile, are indistinguishable from state functionaries, or from the commercial operators outside the plant gates. Everything is interwoven, and everything is connected. Because of this, there cannot be social partnership; partners have to be free of one another, and on an equal footing. In terms of all the indices, the position of workers in the mid-1990s was worse than at any time since the death of Stalin. But proletarian revolution is impossible where workers cannot come together for joint actions. There is no cause for rejoicing in this ‘social peace’; it is a sign of the decay of society. Behind the patience of the masses is an enormous potential for hatred. If people cannot act in their own self-defence, they can only wait for salvation from elsewhere. For salvation, and for revenge. The atomization of the populace gives rise to the demand for dictatorship. It is possible and necessary to use elections to support at least the rudiments of genuine political life that remain intact within our representative organs. But elections in themselves will not solve the problems of society, if society itself remains in its present state. Most likely, elections will simply mark the beginning of a new spiral of political instability. In the present situation, there is nothing more irresponsible and harmful than optimism. It can only be hoped that the present crisis is not the beginning for Russia of an irreversible historical decline. Great peoples and states have often simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Russia has more than once demonstrated an ability to raise itself out of the depths of a real national catastrophe. But we still have to cover a long, tortuous path of crisis and instability before we can speak of the country having emerged from crisis. Against a background of obvious breakdowns of the market mechanism, the liberal press has begun to put its main hopes on a future moral rebirth of the ‘new Russians’. Journalists have set out to show that the people who have stolen vast amounts of wealth can no longer simply send it abroad; they are now building mansions and establishing businesses in their homeland. Love for real estate, in short, is gradually expanding to include love for the homeland. This, the authors of the optimistic articles argue, means that Russian business will become socially responsible, humane and nationally oriented. ‘Yes, the situation is beginning to change fundamentally’, Co-Chairperson of the Round Table of Russian Entrepreneurs Oleg Kiselev maintained in the autumn of 1995. ‘Earlier, all you needed was to be first in the rush for a particular resource, but now it means little that you’re the first to bite off a

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piece of the pie. Figuratively speaking, you have to chew it up, digest it and assimilate it.’17 The new property-owners are not just investing their capital in real estate; they are also acquiring shares in industrial enterprises. Thanks to state policies, buying up enterprises is more advantageous; real estate prices in some parts of Russia have already exceeded Western levels, while industrial installations are still going for a song. Entrepreneurs report proudly that they are putting money into industry. This is not entirely correct. They do not have the funds needed for serious investment in the construction or reconstruction of plants. You can buy an enterprise for a derisory price, but you cannot build a new workshop and buy imported equipment for it in the same manner. Serious investment programmes require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Moreover, it is simpler to buy up plants than to ensure that they operate efficiently. To speak of the ‘accumulation of capital’ in the conditions of a declining economy is impossible in principle. This process has not even begun. All that is occurring is the redistribution of capital from state corporatist structures to private corporatist ones. Meaningful industrial growth requires a huge concentration of capital. In Russia, capital has been dispersed. ‘What accumulation of capital is taking place in Russia? Where can it be seen?’ wonders the economist Yu. Olsevich. ‘This took place somewhere, when entrepreneurs at the dawn of capitalism founded enterprises, merchant capital flowed in, and so forth. But what accumulation is taking place among us?’18 If Boris Berezovsky ‘and associates’ bought the company Sibneft for 100 million, and after four years this company was worth 1.5 billion, this did not occur because the actions of these people increased the value of the company, but because the price was absurdly low. What occurred was a redistribution of the basic assets of industry, of its material and financial resources. This redistribution was accompanied by enormous losses. As Viktor Pelevin notes bitterly, the fundamental law of the post-Soviet economy is that ‘the initial accumulation of capital is turning out to be the final accumulation as well’.19 The essence of what has occurred is expressed particularly well by a story related in the newspaper Pravda-5. In the city of Zheleznogorsk-Ilimsky, where there was an ore concentrating combine, three workers from the combine stole parts from the electric motor of a locomotive and sold them for 1.9 million rubles, causing losses to the railway of 110 million rubles. The city was without water for three days after thieves cut off a good length of cable on the territory of a pumping-station.20 And more in the same spirit. In other words, the damage inflicted by the thieves on society was many times greater than the direct gains they made themselves. Chubais and Berezovsky, on their particular level, acted in

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exactly the same fashion as the three toilers in Zheleznogorsk-Ilimsky who dreamt of getting the money to go on a drinking binge. The only difference is that the workers did not know what they were doing, while Chubais and Berezovsky understood perfectly what the effects of their actions would be. Socially responsible business is also in a difficult position. Any propertyowner understands that it is better to give up a part of something than to risk the whole. But in the present situation what entrepreneurs need to do is not just to give something up, but to re-order all their activity, renouncing not only super-profits, but also long-established sources of profit. What is antisocial in Russia is not just outlandish profits, but the very methods through which profits are obtained. A new element in popular consciousness is the stereotype of the ‘new Russian’, who, almost as a matter of principle, is unwilling to invest money in production. However, it is by no means true that the ‘new Russians’ feel a pathological hostility for production. As one of their number put it, they face ‘a simple choice: either the banks will die, or the real sector [manufacturing] will go under’.21 The shutting down of production is an indispensable condition for the survival of business. Production will be profitable only if the state creates the appropriate conditions. If we look more closely at a few of the positive heroes who are building and producing something, we immediately notice that they have one trait in common. These are people who are monopolists on the local level. Alongside the ‘natural monopolies’ of the fuel and energy complex, there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of ‘casual monopolies’ in Russia today. A mini-brewery somewhere in Siberia abruptly begins making fabulous profits. This is not because its beer is any better, or its technology particularly advanced. The reason is simply that import duties together with transport charges have made bringing good-quality beer from abroad or from European Russia unbelievably expensive. Add to this friendly relations with someone in the local administration and everything falls into place. The most prosperous sectors of Russian business would inevitably suffer, and in some cases simply collapse, if the economy were normalized. A sackrace champion has no chance in a real athletic contest. Russian entrepreneurs have an objective interest in the continuation and reproduction of the crisis, in order to retain their ‘casual monopolies’. This does not mean, however, that they consciously want the crisis to continue and deepen. To confess as much, even to themselves, would also be to confess that their own successes were not due to their own labours, talents, acuity and so forth, but to quite different factors. This would be contrary to human nature. ‘The relations between our bankers and bureaucrats often recall a gloomy, over-long novel’, the newspaper Vek observed during 1997. ‘When they are together, they find it constricting, but when they are apart, they find it dull.’22 Russian business entrepreneurs are by no means incorrigible villains. They sincerely support all the government’s stabilization programmes, and

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even prompt the authorities to take more resolute steps. But only up to the point where these measures yield concrete results. As soon as this happens, dissatisfaction and even resistance follows. Hence the bankers demanded that the ruble be stabilized, but took a hostile attitude to the hard-currency corridor. Among ‘new Russians’, the desire for social peace inevitably degenerates into the demand for a ‘strong state’. Comprador capital unexpectedly becomes patriotic, and democrats mutate into authoritarians. So long as ‘social guarantees’ amounted, so far as the rich were concerned, to their right to leave freely with their capital, democracy suited them fine. The protection of mansions, however, requires not civil rights but well-paid police. Now the ‘new Russians’ need more order, more state authority. They can savour Western liberal values during their holidays abroad. Some commentators place their hopes on the new generation, which is to be educated and humane. The offspring of the ‘new Russians’ will return from their Western universities having mastered advanced management methods and assimilated the culture of social compromise and high moral principles of European Protestantism. Is it really true that in Russia in 1991 there were no educated and decent people? For some reason, the people who succeeded in business were quite different. Often, people appeared among the entrepreneurs who had earlier been known for their intelligence and honesty. But after a year or two in business they became brutalized. Yes, you can send the offspring of the ‘new Russians’ to the best Western universities. Only, the result will be as in Karel Capek’s ‘Great Bandit Story’. Imagine that such an educated young gentleman returns from Oxford, and Papa begins to initiate him into the vital questions of business: who needs to be given how much in bribes, where to hire a good killer in order to settle accounts with insolvent partners, how to evade taxes, and who to drink with. And more in the same vein . . . For a new Russian, educating a child to be honest means creating a deadly enemy in your own home. Much the same thing happened with the old Russian merchants. The heirs of merchant families who received a European education often turned out to be outstanding people. But their achievements were not in the field of business. They collected works of art, opened theatres, gave money to socialists and even went over to the revolution. One would like to believe that the children of the new Russians will also grow up to be decent, educated people. But this can only mean one thing: they will have to get out of business. They may become intellectuals, revolutionaries or terrorists. They will have to break with their parents, whose ideas and way of life can only be repellent to any honest, educated individual. The refined graduates of the best universities are likely to be replaced in business by the new semi-bandit generation, arising out of the social depths or from the ‘second rank’ of present-day entrepreneurship. But this will not happen without a serious struggle. When the new generation of the elite is

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forced out of business, its members will give battle on the field of politics. There, they will prove very dangerous adversaries for the businessmen. The Western politicians who think that young people who have studied in America and Europe will defend the interests of the West when they are at home in Russia will soon discover their mistake. It is not only Russians who are liable to tread several times on the same rake. Western-educated elites in their time formed the core of all the national liberation and revolutionary movements in the Third World. The more people there are in the country who have a Western education, who speak foreign languages fluently and who have modern professional habits, the more they will strive to force foreigners out of the positions which the latter occupy, and to replace them with people from among their own number. The logic behind the forcing of Russians out of key posts in the republics of the former USSR was the same. The succeeding of one generation by another will in fact bring about important changes for the better. But this will not happen in anything like the way the professional optimists expect. The change of generations presupposes an ideological rupture, political shocks and a social explosion. It will not be long before this happens. The children of the new Russians are already appearing on the horizon. ‘Civilized’ capitalism cannot arise out of the ‘savage’ variety on its own. The transition from one to the other cannot occur except through a succession of shocks and revolutions. But what will appear as a result? An improved capitalism, or something else? Russia’s previous experience indicates that attempts to overcome backwardness and savagery inevitably thrust the country on to the road of bold historical experiments. Meanwhile the authorities, who express the interests of the new rich, have a sense of foreboding, and are evolving from liberalism to national-conservatism. Before our eyes, ardent supporters of the ‘Western model’ are turning into convinced defenders of ‘Russian values’. It is no accident that the billionaire Berezovsky and the banker Potanin went to work for the government. They know that the fate of their businesses depends on this. The ‘new Russians’ can no longer permit themselves economic and political liberalism; they are becoming supporters of and participants in the state sector. The new nationalism of the elites is a logical continuation of their earlier championing of everything Western. A new goal – holding on to what they have managed to grab – is now taking priority. Putting the affairs of the state in order, guarding against the claims of the dispossessed, enlisting the aid of the state in solving problems with which the private sector is failing to cope – all these are now familiar objectives. Once again, as in the years from 1989 to 1992, the people who were the first to recognize the new tasks have gained the chance to steal a march on those who were more tardy. The economic slump has made a new redistribution of property essential; for lack of other food, the predators are having to consume each other. Hence also the growing hostility to foreign firms, which operate more efficiently, and the

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demands and hopes for protectionism and state assistance. For the same reason, the ‘growth of national consciousness’ is occurring with particular virulence among the most backward and corrupt elements of the ‘new Russians’. Russian entrepreneurs have no intention of surrendering their sacred right to suck the blood of their compatriots. This is something they will defend to the last. The patriotism of Russian merchants was always constructed on this basis, just like nationalism in backward colonial countries. The first to experience the new situation were the bankers. In 1994, when the serious prospect arose that Western banks would penetrate the Russian financial market, our banking empires unexpectedly felt themselves to be helpless dwarves. The result, as market analysts recognized, was that bankers began to encourage a process of ‘new statization’of their own banks.23 A similar situation arose as private capital penetrated industry. If petty capitalists did not want to be swallowed, they had no choice but to demand protection from the state. The new property-owners are finding that the market has already been seized by Western firms. Their goods are better, their advertising is sophisticated and, most important, they have real money with which to develop production. The very people who yesterday were calling for the maximum openness of the economy, who were enraptured by liberal values and who worshipped the West, are now denouncing foreign domination, crying out for the protection of Russian producers, and demanding that the state defend them. They dream of import tariffs and quotas that would allow them to continue exploiting obsolete equipment and selling uncompetitive products. Lacking sufficient funds of their own, they demand that the state grant them credits, draw up investment programmes, and provide regulation and support. Defending national producers does not necessarily mean encouraging mismanagement, and protectionism does not result automatically in inefficiency. But anyone who is familiar with our business and with the Russian state machine can guess what happens in practice. State protectionism can only work where there is a strong state sector, independent of private interests, and where the state answers to society rather than to a few lobbying groups. Unless there is a strict separation of the public sector from the private, government intervention in the economy will always be aimed only at rescuing favourites. We have already seen this, for example in the banking crisis. The ideologues of ‘market socialism’ have assumed that the state should take on itself the task of resolving strategic questions, while leaving numerous petty and tactical matters to private business. The ‘new Russians’, by contrast, are convinced that the state should burden itself with the countless petty concerns with which they themselves are failing to cope. Meanwhile, making strategic decisions should remain their own private monopoly. Because the elite is heterogeneous, each interest group attempts to seize its own piece of the state.

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When private capital is weak, a strengthening of the role of the state is inevitable. But the statization of the economy can take various forms, ranging from Roosevelt’s New Deal to German fascism, from Soviet ‘communism’ to Austrian ‘socialism’. The issue will not be decided by the theoretical advantages of one or another model, especially since there are no ready-made answers. Everything will depend on the relationship of the contending forces. Representatives of the elites begin directing support to nationalist politicians. The latter respond by telling them horrifying tales about corruption by foreign influences and world Jewish capital. Little by little, the sponsors are penetrated by the ideas of those they have sponsored. The man who pays the piper finishes up dancing to the tune . . . However shrill it might have been, the nationalist opposition of the first half of the 1990s was quite unserious. The country’s leaders used it as a bogey-man to frighten Russian citizens and Western public opinion. This role was played to perfection by Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s comic-opera Liberal Democratic Party and by numerous fascist groups, which multiplied their ranks with the connivance of the government’s security organs. By the middle of the decade the situation had changed. The more acute the crisis of the regime, the more obvious became the interest shown by the elites in national-conservative ideology. In 1995 the first attempt was made to establish a serious ‘national force’. The candidate for this role was the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO), an electoral bloc headed by General Lebed and Yeltsin’s former comrade-in-arms, the technocrat-patriot Yury Skokov. In the 1995 elections the KRO suffered a total defeat, and in the 1999–2000 political cycle no longer played a significant role. Nevertheless, the organization’s ideas made a huge impact both on the ruling circles and on the opposition. By 1999–2000 all the main political groupings – the Communists; Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who by this time was heading the Fatherland movement; the governors from the Unity movement, considered close to the Kremlin; and, finally, Yeltsin’s officially designated successor as president of Russia, Vladimir Putin – had all to one degree or another embraced ‘national-technocratic’ ideas and the corresponding vocabulary. The forerunner of the Russian KRO was the International Congress of Russian Communities, founded by Dmitriy Rogozin. The ‘Manifesto for the Rebirth of Russia’ prepared by ideologues from this organization provides very instructive reading. Dividing the population into ‘Russians’, including the ‘Great Russian, Little Russian and White Russian peoples’, ‘native nonRussian peoples’ and ‘Russian speakers’ drawn toward ‘non-Russian’ cultural traditions, the authors of the manifesto proclaimed their goal to be the establishing of a thoroughly Russian state.24 In the words of the manifesto, ‘nationalism represents the instinct of a nation for its self-preservation’.25 Consistently rejecting internationalism (‘the subjecting of a nation to forced labour in pursuit of goals alien to it’), the authors of the manifesto

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equated communism with socialism and fascism.26 They acknowledged, however, that among the communists there were ‘sensible politicians who think on a national basis’. As for Nazis, the manifesto’s authors were ready to collaborate with them regardless of the ‘adventurism’ of the Nazi leaders. Even if these leaders themselves are incapable of becoming genuine Russian nationalists, the forces behind them and the members of the Nazi organizations generally link their fates with the adventurists only for lack of other ways of expressing their convictions. The state-patriotic movement has to provide them with such a choice. Russian nationalists have to force patrioticized bolshevism and ‘Russified’ national socialism out of politics.27 Among their goals, the KRO ideologues listed not only restoring order to the economy by means of state regulation and through a campaign against corruption, but also wiping out pornography and defending ‘the gene pool of the Russian nation’ through a struggle against alcoholism and drug addiction, ‘especially in areas where large numbers of Russians are concentrated’.28 Rejecting ‘formal’ democracy of the Western type, the authors of the manifesto aimed to restore ‘traditional’ Russian forms of autocratic and corporatist statehood. Such a text might be regarded simply as a curiosity (especially since Rogozin firmly distanced himself from it), except for the fact that it was distributed by KRO supporters together with official documents of Skokov’s election campaign. Although the manifesto has not become an official document of the KRO, Skokov and the people around him have acted very much in its spirit. Skokov has stressed his ‘Russian national priorities’, and has reiterated that ‘showing concern for Russians is the best way of defending the interests of all peoples and the national power of Russia’.29 Initially, many analysts sought to attribute the KRO’s success to the popularity of its ‘number two’, General Lebed. Others predicted rapid collapse for a bloc that included technocrats, military officers, trade union officials, entrepreneurs and enterprise directors, provincial leaders and Moscow politicians. Like any coalition, the Congress of Russian Communities was heterogeneous. But this very heterogeneity made the KRO an effective political machine for carrying out certain tasks. The corporate links between trade unions and enterprise directors served to maintain unity in this area, so long as most workers remained passive. Skokov was also helped by the dissatisfaction of regional trade union heads with the inconsistent and demonstratively moderate policies of the Moscow leaders of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia. Meanwhile, provincial technocrats found in the KRO an all-Russian organization that reflected their concepts of order and efficiency.

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The political model embraced by the KRO was clearly aimed at replacing ‘formal’ democracy with corporatist agreements. ‘This is a pledge of equal rights and fraternal relations between commodity producers, trade unions and their federations; and the organs of executive power. We believe that such a mechanism can allow workers to participate effectively in making decisions that directly affect their interests.’30 Skokov called for ‘inventorizing’ the results of privatization, while at the same time stressing that there should be no deviation from the strategic course announced in 1992 and 1993; these decisions, he argued, reflected ‘the will of the people’.31 In the carrying out of reforms, Skokov stressed, ‘the principle of transferring state property to private hands should not be rejected’.32 In essence, what was involved here was defending the interests of the ‘new Russians’, who had seized hold of the levers of economic power but were not up to the job of manipulating them. The category of ‘commodity producers’ was supposed to unite private entrepreneurs, enterprise directors and trade union officials; counterposed to them was ‘parasitic’ capital oriented toward ‘foreign’ interests. The criticism of the ‘comprador’ course, together with the ideology of ‘Russian national priorities’, made possible a quite convincing fusion of patriotic rhetoric and social promises. From a sociological point of view, the Soviet labour collective was always a sort of ‘industrial community’. When Skokov urged a ‘community approach’ as the principle behind ‘Russian corporate unity’,33 he therefore had no trouble reaching an understanding with both directors and trade unionists. In essence, the KRO lay claim to the place – vacant since the fall of the CPSU – of a general state political structure. According to Skokov, this structure would function as ‘a union of the best forces in Russian society, above parties and encompassing the whole people’. It would join together ‘the genuinely popular initiative and vital creativity of the masses with the intellectual and organizational potential of the elites – scientific, creative, industrial, military and political’ – around ‘a single goal, the revival of Russia’.34 In this case, however, the place of communist ideology was taken by a patriarchal-communitarian concept of capitalism. The rise of the KRO was evidence not only of a reorientation by the stateentrepreneurial elite, but also of the weakness of the left, which sought to combine socialist ideas with Russian nationalism. The programme of the left nationalists was borrowed almost in toto by the KRO, with the difference that neither in the KRO’s aims nor in its ideology was there anything leftist. The left tradition presupposes social solidarity and the ‘horizontal’ unity of working people, while nationalism counterposes to this the principle of hierarchy and vertical organization. Both leftists and conservative-nationalists see in the state a mechanism for the realization of their economic goals. Their views on the nature and social tasks of the state, however, are directly contrary. Hence, despite raising similar social demands, leftists and nationalists can never combine successfully. However much communist leaders

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tried to collaborate with the KRO, nothing came of this. In a single country, there cannot be two organizations seeking the allegiance of the whole people. Early in the twentieth century, leftists in Russia counterposed their own values – of solidarity, justice and freedom – to national capitalism, to the reciprocal obligations of patriarchalism and to the power of the state bureaucracy. Compared to the Russian capitalism of tsarist times and to its ideologues, Russian leftists, including the Bolsheviks, represented a thoroughly ‘Westernizing’ force. It is quite possible that leftists will again play this role in post-Yeltsin Russia. But before this can happen, the left will have to undergo a painful ideological and political crisis. Nor will this be painful only for left-wing politicians. The problem does not lie in any inability of foreigners to understand Russians, especially since Russians do not understand themselves. If the majority of the Russian population clearly perceived their interests and were able to organize themselves, even if only in self-defence, the country’s history would have followed a quite different path. But in one way and another, through trial and error, people are nevertheless finding a correct road, and nowhere in Europe does ideology play so huge, and at times fateful, a role in social life as in Russia. Ready-made schemes, imported from abroad, are especially attractive in that they free people from the need to think. But they also have a drawback: they don’t work. Not because Russians have a distinctive soul, but because these schemes cannot be superimposed on our social reality. You can create twenty centrist blocs, and translate dozens of tomes on the experience of European social democracy into Russian, but nothing will come of it. In Russia in the early twentieth century Marxism ‘worked’ because it found an echo in the social and cultural processes occurring in society. It is now impossible to import the experience of Western leftists into Russia. The country lacks a social base for left-centrism and social democracy. Nor are the conditions present for the appearance of a genuine, serious liberalism. But is this such a bad thing? For a renewal of economic growth, it will also be essential to nationalize a number of the ‘new structures’ that arose in the 1990s. These include, above all, the commercial banks and holding companies, that have become a kind of siphon draining funds out of industry and out of the country. Unlike European banks, these bodies cannot play a positive role in the development of industry. Their capital is so limited that, even if they join forces, they are unable to implement large industrial development projects. No accumulation of private productive capital takes place in this system; it is capable only of sucking resources out of production, in order to finance consumption by the ‘new Russians’. The compulsory merger and nationalization of banks is a well-known method of state regulation, used in the most diverse countries, from the USA and Austria to Mexico and Peru. The point is simply that in Russia, as is to be expected in a barbaric state, the bulk of private capital is concentrated not

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in production, but in enterprises engaged in brokerage activities and usury. This means that any measures that affect this sphere will evoke furious opposition from the ‘new Russians’. Unfortunately, a clash of interests cannot be avoided. The ‘new Russians’ are not a progressive group, but a barbaric oligarchy that places a brake on progress, just like some ruling elites in Africa and the most backward countries of Latin America. However much one might complain about the ‘mafia-party origins’ of our ruling clans, the fact remains that nothing would be different even if the national elite consisted of people with irreproachable dissident reputations. The collapse of the Soviet system was not the result of pressure from the ‘forces of progress’, but stemmed from the system’s own degeneration. Restoring Russia’s economy is impossible unless radical changes are carried through. It is clear that the left can and must play a decisive role in reviving the country. But this will happen only if the left remains true to its traditions and principles. The economic, social and political reaction that has triumphed in Russia and the world as a result of the collapse of the USSR bears within itself the seeds of its own downfall. However the victors might try to drive the country and the world back into the nineteenth century, all they are achieving is to create the conditions for the appearance of new radical movements. Once again, as in the late nineteenth century, Russia has reached a fork in the road, with both tracks leading in unknown directions. We have not matured enough for socialism, but life under capitalism is unbearable. We are unable to catch up with the West, but neither can we allow ourselves to remain in backwardness. We are not ready for democracy, and we do not want dictatorship. Foreign experience is quite unfitted to our situation, but without it development is inconceivable. Finally, society is politicized through and through, but genuine political life is impossible because of the decay of society, and this decay in turn is made worse by the bankruptcy of politics. Political life in today’s Russia is like a drama (a tragedy?) without a positive hero. It only remains to hope that this hero will appear as the action unfolds. The historic task – in the final accounting, a question of survival – is becoming the search for new forms of social being, without which neither politics nor the functioning of the economy is possible. This social being cannot be bourgeois, since there is no bourgeoisie. Nor can the perspectives for the development of the economy be capitalist, because of the ineffectiveness of the existing model. Left-wing ideology can become an important factor in the organization of society precisely because this ideology is collectivist. In its time, the myth of the proletariat played an enormous role in the creation of the working class. The task of the left in Russia is not only to express already existing interests, but also to aid in the forming of interests. And, at the same time, to establish itself as a political force.

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The restoration of social being is not the same thing as a celebration of democracy, but it represents the only chance for democratic development. Collectivism does not always guarantee freedom, but without it there is no way our freedom can any longer be defended. Left-radicalism, ripening in natural fashion in a country where capitalism has failed, will not necessarily become the ideology of progress, but without it progress is impossible. Lenin’s book What is to be Done? could have been written only by a socialist from Russia. It would never have entered the head of a European social democrat that it was necessary to create a party of workers before the rise of a mass working class, and then to ‘import’ proletarian consciousness into the ranks of the proletariat. But this theoretical absurdity was generated by the absurdity of Russia’s actual history. People must either organize themselves to take part in joint actions, or reconcile themselves to their fate. But passivity and submissiveness in the lower orders of society will not bring stability, since the source of the destabilization is the people at the top. Today we are seeing the historical costs of this path. But we are also seeing the real contradictions of the new period, the striking repetition of the past to which triumphant reaction has doomed us. This means that the ideological factor, as in the past, will play a huge role. We need to master the lessons of the Russian Revolution, while trying to avoid its errors and crimes. The alternative, as many agree, takes the form of a mixed economy that would include elements of democratic socialism, state management and democratic capitalism.35 But this model will not come into being except as a result of veritable political and social earthquakes. And it will not be realized without radical changes to the structures of the state and to the ideology prevailing in society. Ultimately, what is involved here is not a rejection of market mechanisms, but a radical rejection of market ideology in the economy, as well as the existing structures. We need quite different reference points, criteria and goals of development. What is involved is a change of ethics and values.

2

The Russian Intelligentsia between ‘Westernism’ and ‘Patriotism’

The Russian intelligentsia loves to meditate on itself. There is nothing bad about this; reflection is an indispensable element of thought. The trouble is that in the course of time, the self-analysis has increasingly been replaced by self-justification and self-praise. Unlike Western intellectuals, who as Sartre put it, are ‘technicians of practical knowledge’, the Russian intelligentsia has traditionally been united not on the basis of corporatist ties, shared education or qualifications (though all these have been present). The main unifying factor has been the paradoxically ambiguous position which the members of the intelligentsia have occupied in Russian society. Their high degree of authority has been combined with an obvious lack of demand for their knowledge. Russia has always suffered simultaneously from an overproduction of educated people, and from a lack of education. Society has been incapable of making full use of the abilities and knowledge of the members of the intelligentsia, but has not ceased to need them. People who somehow managed to be born in Russia with mental gifts, and to acquire knowledge somewhere in ‘misty Germany’ or in a good Russian university, inevitably felt ‘superfluous’. This was not because Russia had no need of them, but because this society and their own role in it did not suit them. THE TWILIGHT OF THE SOVIET INTELLIGENTSIA It was in Russia that the self-consciousness of the intelligentsia took shape, and this self-consciousness later had a considerable influence on intellectuals in the West. Members of the intelligentsia were supposed to realize that their role in society was not merely technical, but also moral. On this level, the concept of the ‘real member of the intelligentsia’ (unlike a ‘pseudomember’, or one of the merely educated, in the sense described by Solzhenitsyn) was very important. A real member of the intelligentsia, according to the radical sociologist Aleksandr Tarasov, is:

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a creator, a creative individual, a genius, a person engaged in the search for truth, in the rational (scientific) or sensible (artistic) cognition and mastering of the world. Real members of the intelligentsia understand their individual roles as cognizing subjects, and their social roles as educators and liberators. Real members of the intelligentsia are bearers of critical thought. They resist conformism and philistinism.1 In the view of the political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, the radical neoliberalism of the 1990s was born of the ideology and psychology of the Soviet intelligentsia. For three decades the Soviet intelligentsia, the child of the Twentieth Congress, was the conscience of the nation, and preserved the cultured tradition in conditions of totalitarianism. At the same time, living beneath unthinkable tyrannical pressure, the intelligentsia built up within itself a colossal charge of negative energy. The absence for decades of the opportunity to exert a practical influence on the state of affairs was transformed into an unbridled thirst for a universal restructuring. The Russian reformers simply unleashed this energy that had accumulated over the years.2 It is hard to say whether there is more naivety or cunning in this. In the one sentence we read of the horrors of totalitarianism and of the Twentieth Congress, which limited this totalitarianism and made it quite bearable for most intellectuals. Whatever might be said about the intelligentsia as a whole, the immediate work of ‘reforming’ Russia was not by any means carried out by former dissidents, nor by people who in earlier times had been remote from power, but on the contrary, by intellectuals who had been close to the Soviet regime. The Gaidar family and the party functionary Gennady Burbulis not only felt thoroughly comfortable under the Soviet system, but also occupied definite political positions within it.3 The milieu of the neoliberal reformers cast out individuals with a dissident or semi-dissident past, even when these people were prepared ideologically to give the neo-liberals their support. There is no special reason to seek anything peculiarly Russian in the radicalism of the neo-liberals. Such people behave in exactly the same way in Britain, Mexico, Zimbabwe and Argentina as they do in Russia, despite the lack in these countries of a Soviet intelligentsia. The scale of the damage inflicted on society by neo-liberal policies is limited only by the resistance which society is able to mount. On this level, Eastern Europe really is almost unique. In the 1990s the Soviet intelligentsia, which had prided itself on its traditions of independence and resistance, not only failed to take its place in the front ranks of the opponents of the new regime, but, on the contrary, for an extended period considered this regime its own, and, later, was

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prepared to make its peace with the authorities for much longer than other layers of society. It cannot be said that the intelligentsia suffered less from the restoration than other strata. As early as 1992–93 it was dealt a crushing blow. As Sogrin notes: Drastic funding cuts meant that in science alone, according to data from the State Committee on Statistics, the number of people employed at the beginning of 1993 had fallen by 27 per cent compared to 1990. The number of employees of the Academy of Sciences was down by 24 per cent; of the branch sectors, by 30.4 per cent; and of institutes of higher education, 11.8 per cent. Many of the most talented scientists were forced to emigrate in order to find work and earn a living. In the course of a year, the ‘brain drain’ amounted to 3500 people. The publishing of ‘unprofitable’ scientific literature was reduced sharply.4 There was no place in the conception of the neo-liberal economy for an intelligentsia of the Russian type. Everything had to be subordinated to concrete practical tasks, and to the sort of tasks that could be fulfilled quickly and would yield direct benefit. Fundamental science, philosophical quests for the meaning of life, art that stepped outside the sphere of simple entertainment, and the critical analysis of society – all this was anathema to neo-liberalism. Nevertheless, the intelligentsia showed real enthusiasm in supporting the reforms, one of whose aims was the annihilation of the intelligentsia itself. What was the reason for this strange and at first sight, irrational behaviour? It cannot be grasped without an understanding of the history of the Soviet intelligentsia. For the old intelligentsia, two things were of key importance: criticism of the regime, and serving the people. It is true that the relationship to the authorities was always extremely ambiguous. The intelligentsia in Russia was not the product of natural cultural and social development, but a creation of the authorities. On the basis of its own views, the government (according to Pushkin, ‘the only European in Russia’) enlightened the country, implanting advanced civilization, or, at worst, what it thought was civilization. This required a mass intelligentsia of professors, teachers and engineers. How many of them were needed, no-one knew precisely, since the government’s own ideas on the necessary enlightenment were obscure. The intelligentsia multiplied and spread just like the bureaucracy, but unlike the latter, it did not enjoy power or privileges. It did, however, possess the advantage of education. It became the social grouping with a professional interest in modernization, Europeanization and the broadening of democratic freedoms. From the moment when the intelligentsia, with its democratic, modernizing demands, overstepped the bounds assigned to it, conflict with the authorities became inevitable. In this conflict, the intelligentsia found a

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new point of support – serving the people, who were in profound need of freedom and enlightenment, even if they themselves did not realize this. All this, however, applies to the old Russia. The revolution transformed not only the social system, but also the relationship between the intelligentsia and the authorities. And although the intelligentsia suffered extremely heavy repression during the 1930s, its numbers and influence grew rapidly during the Soviet period. The new authorities also introduced enlightenment. They needed universal literacy, along with modern science and technology; also required was professional training for cadres. Although the repressions of the 1930s became one of the key myths in intelligentsia consciousness, the members of the Soviet intelligentsia, in their great majority, were not descendants of the victims of repression. Overwhelmingly, they were descended from workers and peasants for whom Stalin’s repressions cleared the way for advancement. Bitter condemnation of the terror, combined with a desire to make the maximum use of its fruits, became the first moral and cultural contradiction of the new intelligentsia. There is nothing unnatural here; we can delight in the palaces of St Petersburg, even though they were built on human bones. History is forever forcing one generation to build its prosperity on the sacrifices and sufferings of another. The problem was not in the link between Stalin’s purges and the rise of the new intelligentsia, but in the fact that the intelligentsia has been unwilling to admit to this link. The attitude of the intelligentsia to the authorities was also contradictory, but this was not acknowledged either. The artistic intelligentsia condemned the regime that limited their creative freedom, but accepted prizes from it, and participated actively in the creative unions which the regime had established. Scientists sympathized with dissidents, but continued conscientiously developing weapons of every conceivable category. Unlike the old intelligentsia, which expressed its opposition by throwing bombs, setting up clandestine organizations and printing subversive leaflets, the new intelligentsia, despite its love for anti-Soviet jokes and samizdat literature, was reformist-minded. No samizdat could compare in popularity with Novy Mir and other ‘thick journals’, published quite legally in huge editions. The intelligentsia was mortally offended when Stalinist sociology called it a ‘layer’. In reality, this was a perfectly natural definition. How else could the intelligentsia have been described? As a class, or as a corporation? Eventually, the unfortunate Stalinist term disappeared from the textbooks, giving way to the more respectful ‘stratum’. The meaning did not change in the least, but the intelligentsia felt more comfortable. This was often an unadmitted struggle for social status and, even more, for respect on the part of the authorities. The intelligentsia, despite its criticism of the leadership, valued this respect very highly. The attitude of the Soviet intelligentsia to the regime was neither immoral nor hypocritical. In the depths of their souls, the members of the intelligentsia

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were certain that the regime represented the people. Unlike the Russian liberals and revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, educated people in Soviet times were convinced that the authorities sprang genuinely from the population, reproducing its weaknesses and shortcomings. The members of the Soviet intelligentsia considered themselves superior in cultural terms both to the state authorities and to ordinary people, while at the same time sincerely wishing them well. The criticism of the regime was addressed, ultimately, to the regime itself. This was true not only of the specific genre of ‘private memoirs’, which were written in huge numbers by social scientists from the academic institutes, and not only to the legal social commentaries of the liberal Novy Mir (or, on the other hand, of the traditionalist Nash Sovremennik). It was also true of a considerable part of the samizdat materials. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn appealed to ‘the leaders of the Soviet Union’, while Aleksandr Zinovyev argued that what existed in the USSR was not democracy, but was ‘popular power’. If old Bolsheviks declared to Stalinist hangmen that the party was always right, the intelligentsia of the 1960s unmasked the partocracy for the good of the partocrats themselves. In recounting the past, numerous members of the intelligentsia have excluded their earlier motives and values from their memory. There will always be a great deal of work in Russia for psychoanalysts. When, for example, the famous actor Igor Kvasha related in the mid-1990s that the central idea behind his creative activity had always been anti-communism, I could not help recalling him on the stage of the Sovremennik Theatre in the role of Sverdlov. He played this role for years, and judging by everything, was very proud of it.5 There is no need to be ashamed of the past; the need is to analyse it. What the members of the Russian intelligentsia should be ashamed of is what they are doing right now. Their complaisant amnesia is far more immoral than their earlier illusions. The abrupt turn in the late 1980s from opposition to rapturous love of the leadership was very easy for the intelligentsia, precisely because its platonic romance with the leadership had never ended. For many years members of the intelligentsia had told the regime, ‘Look how disgusting you are’, and suddenly, during the years of perestroika, the regime had come to agree with them. Gazing into the mirror of glasnost, the regime had become horrified, and had called on educated people to repair its image . . . The love for the leadership passed quickly from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. What was important was not the person, but the principle, and a former leader was no longer a leader. The intelligentsia began its ‘rise to power’, though mostly in secondary roles. This, however, was enough to raise its self-esteem dramatically. Most of the educated people who enthused over Gaidar had not the slightest understanding of his ideas. They saw in him ‘someone from our circle’, a living proof of the convergence between the authorities and the intelligentsia. The ecstatic approval given to Yeltsin was followed by a general pilgrimage to Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, in whom the intellectuals saw

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the most serious contender for power. Then, when Luzhkov’s position became shaky and Yeltsin went into retirement, the same members of artistic and scientific circles threw their no less unanimous support behind Putin. No-one was bothered either by embezzlement, or by the genocide in Chechnya. Moreover, by the end of the epoch the intellectuals had learned not only to ‘forget’ the vices of the authorities, but also to declare these vices to be great virtues. During the second Chechnya war, it was precisely intellectuals who were demanding that the Chechens be exterminated. The ordinary people were superfluous to this scheme. If the merger with the authorities had earlier become permissible because of the popular character of the regime, it had later become essential to defend the regime from the people because of the regime’s ‘enlightened nature’. It will be remembered that, in Russia, the government is the only European, and European civilization, which gave rise to democratic values, can be forgiven a great deal. The once integral complex of ideas – enlightenment, love for the people, democratic ideals, free thought and bringing culture to the leadership – thus became differentiated. For people who found the leadership unacceptable, there was only one possible course: returning to the tradition of Russian populism. But this required breaking not only with the regime, but also with the intellectual elite, which, during the years of change, had itself become as one with the authorities. There is now almost general agreement that the ideology of post-Soviet liberalism is nothing other than Soviet-communist ideology turned inside out. The culturologist Tatyana Cherednichenko described this very aptly as a ‘reversed ideology’. Before us is the same ‘sole correct doctrine’, only turned on its head. ‘In the reversed ideology, the bourgeois/socialist duo is also present, only with the value signs changed to their opposites (civilized capitalists counterposed to Bolshevik barbarians).’6 It is important to note, however, that in the process of ‘reversal’, the system of ideas has lost its integrity. Not to the point of being destroyed, but it has disintegrated internally. In Soviet ideology, everything was interconnected. There was even a place for dissidents and loyal reformers, though neither group was officially recognized by the state. Changing the places of the plus and minus signs, the ‘reverse ideologues’ discovered that the answers did not tally. The concepts of ‘freedom’, ‘justice’, ‘culture’ and ‘popular character’, which in the traditional political consciousness were closely intertwined, had become confused, and were annulling one another. Consciousness became kaleidoscopic, even though all the loose fragments in this kaleidoscope corresponded to the building-blocks of the old structure. This ideological disintegration has been accompanied by social stratification of the intelligentsia. For Russia, this is a quite new phenomenon. In both tsarist and Soviet times the intelligentsia was a more or less homogeneous mass. There were of course differences between a Moscow professor and a village schoolteacher (or a rural doctor in the pre-revolutionary period), and

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between engineers and people involved in the humanities. There were the famous debates between ‘physicists’ and ‘lyricists’ in the 1960s. Nevertheless, the very fact that these debates occurred proves that a common milieu existed. The similarities were greater than the differences. Everyone read the same ‘thick journals’, and the same Literaturnaya Gazeta. They read the same books, and listened to the same music. The pre-revolutionary intelligentsia included a certain number of wealthy people. Their wealth, however, had nothing to do with their membership of the intelligentsia, and was not linked to their cultural or scientific activity. The merchant Tretyakov spent the money he made in business in order to establish an art gallery; the idea that the gallery might be turned into a profitable business would not have entered his head. The intelligentsia of the old Russia took shape in a pre-capitalist epoch, and so never underwent the social stratification which in the West as well only became fully evident in the 1970s. These characteristics of the Russian intelligentsia were reinforced in Soviet times. Wealth and luxury came to be associated with corruption; money was seen as harmful to art, and science tried to live according to communist principles (even if the scientists and scholars thought of themselves as convinced anti-communists). The conflict between ‘culture’ and ‘money’ is as old as the hills, but, for Russia, the position of the cultural figures who have now come to stand on the side of ‘money’ is something quite new. Art has become stratified, and show business has appeared, bringing with it sums of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Scientific research has come to be divided into the well funded and poorly funded. Ordinary teachers, engineers and doctors have finished up equally remote both from show-business stars and from the high priests of ‘fine art’. A symptom of the crisis has been a sharp drop in the print runs of the ‘thick journals’. The problem is not only a lack of money; the readers have disappeared. The place of the earlier unity has been taken by incomprehension, irritation, and eventually by social hostility. One might perhaps rejoice in the fact that the intelligentsia has ceased at last to be a ‘layer’. It has become divided into an elite and the masses, into bourgeois and proletarians. The leaders of the cultural elite have become part of the commercial-bureaucratic elite. It is striking, however, that until now the members of this cultural elite have failed to recognize the conflict described here. They still remember the homogeneous intelligentsia of earlier years, and still consider themselves part of it. Furthermore, they are convinced that the ‘masses’ are following behind them. This is why they are forever addressing the public with appeals, collective letters and recommendations. It cannot be said that no-one listens. On the contrary, political propaganda through the medium of show business is highly effective, as the elections of 1996 showed. The people influenced by it, however, are the least educated sector of the population, people who have never read the thick journals, and have never even suspected that such publications exist.

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The bulk of ‘intellectual workers’ experience only incomprehension, mixed with embitterment. These feelings are particularly well expressed by Aleksandr Tarasov in his article ‘Ten Years of Shame’, which accuses the intellectual elite of ‘treason’. Not only has this elite rejected its own values and elementary corporatist solidarity, but it has also become a ‘parasitic layer’. Instead of defending the principles of enlightenment and liberation, the intellectual elite has also had an interest in spreading ignorance and servitude, since from the point of view of its members, every enlightened and liberated individual is an economic rival.7 The cultural and psychological homogeneity of the intelligentsia has been lost as well. Until the mid-1990s the cultural model was the ‘person of the 1960s’. Generation after generation sang the songs of Okudzhava and read the novels of Trifonov. Society, however, has changed, and tastes have become different as well. So too have the ‘people of the 1960s’ themselves. Meanwhile, the generation that is now aged from 25 to 30 no longer remembers the glorious past of these people; it knows only their present. To the new generation, Freddie Mercury means more than Okudzhava, and the rock group Chief is more interesting than Vladimir Visotsky, the idol of the generation of the 1970s. Closer does not mean better, but what does all this indicate? Especially now, when the experience and culture of the older generation of the intelligentsia has been totally discredited – through the efforts of this older generation itself. According to some, all this needs to be thrown on the dust-heap of the Soviet past, while others see in the heroes of the 1960s only the presidential aides of post-Soviet times. We can forgive Pushkin his frightful poem ‘On the Capture of Praha’,8 simply because he is Pushkin. But somehow, it sticks in one’s craw to listen to songs by Okudzhava about commissars in dusty helmets, after their author’s declaration that he felt no pity for the defenceless people who died in the White House. The culture of the 1960s was closely bound up with its epoch and ideology. Discrediting both, the ‘people of the 1960s’ destroyed themselves in the spiritual sense, without even noticing what was occurring. Does this mean that the Soviet intelligentsia vanished along with them? In a certain sense, yes. You cannot bring back the past, and an interrupted tradition cannot be restored, since the very point of tradition is its continuity. But after perishing in the chaos of ‘catastroika’, the intelligentsia can be reborn. The preconditions for this are being created by the present regime itself, along with its cultural and business elites. The more Russia becomes part of the peripheral capitalist world, the more attractive, and at the same time the more subversive, the idea of modernization. This was the source of the radicalism in tsarist Russia and in post-war Latin America. Plebeian rage, mixed with European education, gave birth to Russian Revolution, the Latin American ‘new novel’, terrorism and futurism. What will emerge from the experience of the post-Soviet crisis?

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‘WESTERNISM’ In the 1830s, when educated Russian society was completely carried away with Hegel, someone came up with a marvellous joke. In the joke, an Englishman, a German and a Russian are urged to write a treatise on camels. The Englishman goes to Egypt, settles among camels, eats their food, shares their concerns and becomes one of them in every way. On returning, he writes a detailed empirical account of the life of camels. The German, by contrast, retires to his study and starts eliciting the pure idea of the camel from the depths of his spirit. Once the idea has been extracted, the German publishes his treatise. The Russian waits until the German has published his work, then translates the German’s treatise into Russian. With large numbers of errors. The copying of models and the imitation of foreign examples is something characteristic of the periphery. However, the initial models are not necessarily borrowed from an alien culture. They can also be local. In the late 1970s two Hungarian dissidents, writing under the psuedonym ‘Mark Rakovsky’, noted a strange peculiarity of the political culture in societies of the Soviet type. The crisis of the system brought about a general disillusionment with communist ideology and stimulated a search for alternatives. Social democratic, liberal and patriotic ideas became increasingly attractive. However, the social, cultural and economic conditions that had fostered the development of these ideologies in the West were absent in Eastern Europe. Even information was lacking. The main source of knowledge about ideas hostile to communism was the same Communist Party textbooks. In sum, the monsters born of the fantasy of Stalinist ideologues materialized in practice. The liberals, social democrats and nationalists turned out to be exactly as they had been described in the Short Course of the History of the Party – blinkered, unprincipled, greedy and socially irresponsible. In Eastern Europe after 1989, the search for an alternative to communist ideology became a matter of state importance. The restoration of capitalism was inevitably accompanied by idealization of the past – in Russia, of the tsarist empire, and in the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe, of the period between 1918 and 1945. The search for a ‘golden age’ was begun by anticommunists, who after 1991 were joined in this diverting pursuit by Communists who had been forced out of power. The hope of returning to the past is always a utopia. Compared to the early twentieth century, the social, economic and even democratic structure had changed radically in all the countries of Eastern Europe. In the Soviet republics, the ethnic mak-eup of the population had changed as well. The dream of restoring a ‘golden age’ was a reactionary delusion, since the societies that had been transformed by decades of Communist power were on a far higher level of social and economic development than the ones to which it was proposed to return. The masses proved astonishingly credulous, failing even to consider the degree to which the programmes presented to them corresponded to their

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interests. Indeed, how could people come to an understanding of their interests in a society of the Soviet type, where all the conflicts and contradictions were quite different from those in the world of market relations? The Soviet system was not ‘irrational’ through and through, as was maintained later by the nomenklatura intellectuals who managed to refashion themselves into the ‘work superintendents of perestroika’. The problem was simply that this society was capable of carrying out only one relatively straightforward task; everything was subordinated to the accelerated industrialization and modernization of society. When the modernizing potential of the system was exhausted, consumption became the only true Soviet ideology. At the same time, their internal problems went unsolved. From the moment when the system proved incapable of satisfying the consumer expectations it had itself aroused, it encountered growing political dissatisfaction, multiplied by philistine resentment. There was no working class; there were only consumers, standing in line to spend the money they had earned in the factories. There were no elites, merely groups admitted to a higher level of consumption and desiring still more. The ‘communist’ system did not allow people to become conscious of their interests and to unite in order to defend them. In that society, the only activity in which individual citizens acted independently was consumption; everything else was organized for them by the state. This is why in 1989, all over Eastern Europe, millions of people were so phenomenally naive, and allowed themselves to be manipulated so easily. The movements of 1989 were just as much a revolt by enraged consumers as an uprising by an awakened ‘civil society’. In each of the East European countries the process had its specific features, but there was a certain common trajectory of development. The revolt of the masses ended with the triumph of the nomenklatura, which had freed itself of its earlier social obligations. History has shown that for some the dream of a consumer paradise was a tragic illusion, while for others it quickly became a reality – at the cost of ruin for the country as a whole. There is a desire to blame the events of 1989–98 on bureaucratic sabotage, turncoat Communists, ‘influence pedlars’ and ‘criminal elements’. These were all present, but the decisive factor was something different. What was it that allowed all these groups to unite? What was it that helped them keep under control millions of people who had been cast in the role of victims? Ultimately, both the fate of the losers and the guilt of the winners was determined by something else: total consumer irresponsibility. No-one, or almost no-one, set out to ‘bring a great country to its knees’. But everyone, not only villains but victims as well, was intent on reaching the ‘consumer paradise’ about which they had read in the Programme of the CPSU, and which they had seen in reports from American supermarkets. Consumption and corruption were the only real mobilizing factors in Soviet society in the late 1980s. Soviet citizens believed sincerely in the triumph of the pure principles of democracy, just as people in the Middle Ages

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believed in angels and demons, but their real interests required something quite different. The few leftists were isolated from society and rejected by the intelligentsia. Ten years later the situation had changed. The disillusioned, plundered majority of society had rejected the old intellectual elite, but there was no new radical intelligentsia either. The rise of a new intellectual stratum (even of a sort of cultural vanguard) is essential if the present crisis is to be overcome. It should not be thought, however, that this will come to pass of its own accord. However theoreticians might exert themselves, ideologies are formed on the basis of the political experience of the masses. This experience is not straightforward. In theory, the market forces everyone to become conscious of his or her interests, and of the degree to which these interests conflict with the interests of others. Workers discover that they are not merely consumers, but also hired workers. Experience of the market is an indispensable school for all anti-capitalist movements. Lenin was correct here when he said that the trade unions, defending the economic interests of the workers, were a school of communism. Meanwhile, the ruling elite, having turned themselves into a class, are beginning to think strategically, to think of their long-term interests, and to understand that to bring their own country to ruin is not the best road to enrichment – and not the safest. In sum, we are seeing the appearance of a ‘real’ bourgeoisie, and together with it, of a ‘good’, ‘effective’ liberalism. Or, on the other hand, of a Western-style social democracy. If worst comes to worst, of a ‘real’ communist party. However, this is occurring somewhat differently. The liberals maintain that we have not yet seen ‘real’ reforms, only ‘nomenklatura vulgarity’ that has spoiled everything. Among the communists, however, there are more and more people who declare that the Soviet past was not genuine socialism, and that the leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation are not even communist. All these people are correct, in their fashion. But why have things turned out just this way? It is interesting that in this case the social optimism of the Marxists and the soothing prognoses of the liberals were constructed on the same foundations. Both groups believed in the transforming and educating powers of the capitalist market. This theory, however, was constructed entirely on the basis of Western European experience. The change of regime in 1989–91 did not by any means signify a change in the general trend of development. The transforming of Eastern Europe into a periphery of the West began under Brezhnev. The removal of the structures of communist power opened the way for the the countries of Eastern Europe to be turned definitively into a peripheral region within the capitalist world system. In this sense the years from 1989 to 1991 were not a turning point, did not mark the beginning of a new stage, but merely saw the culmination of processes that had developed in the course of the preceding decade. It is this which explains the astonishing readiness with which the communist elites yielded up power. Nevertheless, capitalism lives by quite different rules in the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’. What is involved here is

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not ‘specifically Russian characteristics’, the ‘accursed past’ or a ‘deviation from the norm’. The division of capitalism into centre and periphery is something quite normal; the one cannot exist without the other. The critics of neo-liberalism were as one in condeming the new elites for trying to return society to the nineteenth century, and to install in Eastern Europe a social order that had long since disappeared in the West. Comparing the capitalism that has come into being in the east of the continent with the capitalism that holds sway in the countries of the European Union, it is not hard to reach such a conclusion. But it is necessary to disappoint the reader; the question is not at all one of ‘savage’ captialism. If the problem boiled down to that, everything would be simple. It would only be necessary to wait for two or three decades, and everything among us would become ‘as among human beings’. We would have real entrepreneurs, honest liberals, civilized leftists and respectable deputies. In the epoch of ‘savage’ capitalism in Europe, there was neither the International Monetary Fund, nor a developed system of stock-market speculation, nor transnational corporations. The ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ Eastern European structures are intimately linked to the ‘advanced’, ‘civilized’ Western ones. Moreover, during the 1990s, Western capitalism itself was not by any means evolving in the direction of greater ‘civilization’. To explain the processes occurring in the East on the basis of ‘backwardness’, ‘underdevelopment’ or the costs of ‘primitive accumulation’ is quite absurd, since the general principles of neo-liberal reform are applied in both Eastern and Western Europe, just as in the countries of the Third World and in the United States. In the 1990s, post-communist capitalism was not being ‘civilized’, but Western capitalism was turning savage. It was simply that the scale and consequences of the reforms on the periphery were far more striking than in the centre. The difference was that, in the West, neo-liberal policies were encountering the deeply entrenched defensive institutions of ‘civil society’. The bourgeoisie was being forced to wage a drawn-out positional war against the welfare state. By the late 1990s, with the adoption of the Maastricht Accords, the advent of the Euro and the establishing of a European Central Bank independent of governments and the population, it might have seemed that this war had been won. The defences of ‘civil society’ had everywhere been breached, and the bases of the welfare state had been undermined. ‘Civil society’ was disintegrating before people’s eyes, turning into a collectivity of consumers. This process, however, had been going on for almost two decades, and the victory of the neo-liberals was unquestionably turning out to be Pyrrhic. Just as today’s Russia has not come to resemble yesterday’s Britain, tomorrow’s Britain will not finish up like today’s Russia. In post-communist countries, where ‘civil society’ has been weak, it has been possible to consolidate the neo-liberal model far more rapidly and consistently through the ‘cavalry charge’ method. Post-communist democracy has proven just as ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘backward’ as the local capitalism.

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Here as well, however, the problem has not by any means lain in the absence of traditions or a shortage of time. In both cases there is a single, general explanation: from 1989, the Eastern European societies were definitively integrated into the capitalist world system, as part of the periphery. With very few exceptions, the countries of the periphery have no chance of becoming fully fledged parts of the West. The resources needed to expand the ‘club of the elite’ in the world simply do not exist, and possible success for some countries can mean new problems for others. Here, as in a firstdivision football league, the number of places is limited. If Russia, playing by these rules, wishes to become part of Europe, then some other country will have to drop out of it. The development of peripheral capitalism follows a logic different from that which applies to the countries of the ‘centre’. The notorious accumulation of capital – which is supposed to ensure the rise of a local entrepreneurial class – has turned out to be impossible, since a spontaneous redistribution of investment resources, to the advantage of the ‘centre’, is constantly occurring within the framework of the globalized world economy. As a result, ‘development’ for most of these countries turns into the accumulation of backwardness. Of course, the rules of the game are constantly being broken; this explains the success of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, of Japan in the 1960s, and of South Korea and China in the 1980s. Countries that break the rules, however, run definite risks. Most importantly, they are compelled to issue a conscious challenge to the system. There is, however, another way, put exquisitely in an old joke about the Brezhnev era: you can draw the blinds in the train compartment, and bounce up and down on the seat as though you are going somewhere. The main thing is to hide the real situation from yourself. We also have a parliament, trade unions, entrepreneurial associations and parties. We can make ourselves out to be enlightened Europeans (though it is true that the harder we try, the worse the result). We can carry on pretending that we are modernizing our backward capitalism. We can occupy ourselves with perfecting our political system. We can enjoy rich intellectual lives, while waging war on one another. PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY VERSUS FALSE PATRIOTS Political life in the conditions of peripheral capitalism is structured in imitation of Western analogues. The parties and the terms are the same, but behind them is invariably concealed a peculiar local essence. Politicians who fail to take this into account finish up losing. It is enough to recall the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The former set out to be social democrats, as in Germany. The latter, at first, aspired to the same. The Bolsheviks, however, quickly realized that they could not be Germans. The Mensheviks also differed fundamentally from their Western comrades, but were unwilling to admit this either to themselves or to those around them. Meanwhile, when

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the ideology of Bolshevism was exported to the West, the communist parties there also turned out to be quite different. This did not happen in the epoch of ‘Eurocommunism’, but much earlier. The ‘Eurocommunists’ were simply honest in admitting what had already been a reality in the 1920s. Parties which operate in the conditions of Western society cannot be the same as those in the capitalist periphery. They may be oppositionist or radical, but their opposition and radicalism will nevertheless be manifested differently. The institutions characteristic of Western democracy have arisen in practically all the countries of Eastern Europe, including Russia. It is a different matter that our political system combines, in exquisite fashion, a ‘European’ façade with a sturdy, thoroughly traditional ‘Asiatic’ authoritarianism. But even if the constitutional order changes, the parliament acquires real power, and the president ceases to be a tsar for life, the political system in Russia will function differently from in Western Europe. The problem is not with our traditions, but with the fact that our society differs strikingly from that of the West. Even if the words used are identical, behind them stands a different practice. This is not a question of ‘time’ or ‘experience’. Both time and experience serve merely to reinforce the differences. The social and cultural divide between Russia and Europe is now greater by a whole order of magnitude than a decade ago. The reason does not lie in the mistakes of anyone in particular, but in the very road along which we are proceeding. During the past ten years, despite superficial innovations, a monstrous de-modernization of the economy has taken place. We not only produce less, but lag much further behind than in Soviet times. This too is the normal state of affairs for peripheral capitalism. In any case, when ideologues devote themselves to searching for ‘specific national characteristics’, the results are no better than imitations of Western schemes. The ideologues try to find these specific characteristics not through analysing particular economic processes and social structures, but by looking into the depths of their souls. In most cases, nothing of value is found there. The search for distinctiveness is reduced to extolling their own narrow-mindedness. In such circumstances the prevalence of pseudo-debates, the rivalry of pseudo-parties, is inevitable. Not a single question can be resolved, since all are formulated incorrectly. It is amusing to note that, when discussing the West, our commentators are able to see the clash of interests on particular questions. But when the talk shifts to our own country, the struggle between left and right over questions of social reform is replaced by disputes between ‘Westernizers’ and ‘children of the soil’, ‘democrats’ and ‘patriots’. Even these concepts, however, are not formulated correctly. If we suppose that patriotism is not merely a euphemism for anti-semitism, and ‘democratism’ something more than simple anti-communism, the suspicion inevitably creeps in that both sides in this great battle of ideas are simply fooling themselves and their listeners.

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In Russia there are neither patriots nor democrats, at least, not in the sense in which they exist in the West. Much has already been written about the dubious democratism of Russian professional democrats. At the dawn of the epoch of the Enlightenment, Voltaire declared: ‘Your opinion is profoundly odious to me, but I am ready to give my life for your right to express it.’ In Russia, professional democrats think differently. They are constantly appealing for someone or something to be banned, dissolved, crushed or thrown into irons (it is a different matter that this rarely happens). They not only called for the disbanding of the parliament in 1993, but they exhibit, in principle, a marked anti-parliamentarism. Consider how furiously they attack the Duma – not the Communist fraction, but the institution itself, the ‘deputies’ in general. To the ‘democratic’ press, the word ‘deputy’ is a term of abuse, a synonym for ‘red’. The Russian ‘Westernizers’ willingly reconciled themselves to the authoritarian 1993 constitution, but when in 1998 a government appeared that rested on a parliamentary majority (in accordance with European norms), cries erupted to the effect that democracy was in danger. A year later, the same liberal circles were united in welcoming the imposition of Vladimir Putin’s ‘strong state’, and the practising of genocide against the Chechen people. Behind all this is concealed an extremely profound, almost physical loathing for most of the population of their own country, for ‘those people’, who live in the wrong way and fail to want what is required, and who, most importantly, are hopelessly deformed by the ‘totalitarian past’. This antidemocratism of Russian ‘democrats’ is linked closely with their anti-patriotism. For them, their own country is not only strange, but alien and anomalous. It annoys and frightens them. Naturally, these contradictions often remain unrecognized; people are simply scared of drawing the logical conclusions from their own premises, of thinking their own thoughts through to the end. It is because of this that they feel hopeless. The patriots, meanwhile, are profoundly mistaken about themselves. To judge by the people who go along to the ‘patriotic assemblies’, one would have to conclude that a ‘patriot’ is an elderly figure from Soviet times who irritably dismisses everything foreign, nostalgically recalling past imperial greatness. This ‘patriot’ is obliged to denounce Jews without let-up, and to suspect anyone of Caucasus nationality of being a ‘Chechen terrorist’. The less education a ‘patriot’ has had, the better, because it has been well known since the time of Griboedov that all evil comes from books, especially if these books have been translated from English or French.9 The ‘patriot’ is thoroughly provincial, conservative and steeped in an imagined past. Real historical knowledge is repugnant to such a person, as are any other manifestations of critical consciousness. If our country only has patriots such as this, then things really are desperate! But are provincialism, stupidity and illiteracy the real content of patriotism? If this is the case, then what was the story with the American and French revolutions? After all, it was these

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revolutions that formulated the ideology of patriotism, and spread it about the world. The idea of patriotism is just as ‘imported’ and ‘Western’ as, for example, the ideas of socialism, liberalism and democracy. There is no doubt that people loved their homeland long before the epoch of the Enlightenment, but this was neither a political programme nor an ideology. The very concept of a homeland underwent changes; people might recognize themselves as French, American or Russian, or perhaps simply as ‘locals’, or as ‘true believers’. They could hold out as desperately for their little plot of land or for their church as for the glory of a great empire. The propaganda war which liberal journalists in Russia wage against everything ‘national’ and ‘patriotic’ testifies to their deep incomprehension of the principles of the Western democracy to which they swear fealty. Since the time of the American and French revolutions, democracy has been a system founded on the power of the people within the framework of the national state. What is understood by the ‘nation’ is a different question. From the point of view of the Enlightenment and Marxist tradition, all the citizens of a country belong to the nation, irrespective of their religion, skin colour or the length of their noses. The nation is united by common citizenship and shared history. Everything else simply divides it. A state which does not respect either its own history or its own citizens has nothing in common with democracy. The ideas of patriotism appeared along with modern democracy, and make up an organic part of democratic ideology. The British sociologist Benedict Anderson notes in his book Imagined Communities that the first ‘national liberation’ movement was the uprising of the Americans against the British, and that the opposing sides did not differ from one another either in language, religion or skin colour! The problem was that the Americans could no longer remain citizens of a foreign state, in which they did not have the right to a deciding vote. They wanted to elect their own government, to levy their own taxes and to determine their own future. In short, they merely wanted to introduce democracy. Since the time of the French Revolution, the concepts of citizen and patriot have been synonyms. In an autocratic state, there cannot be patriots; there are only faithful subjects. In imperial Russia there were no Russians; there were Great Russians. There was no nation; there were the ‘orthodox’. There were nobles, who could not be beaten; peasants, who could; and people of different ethnicity, with whom one could do anything one liked. The concept of patriotism required abandoning the division of citizens on the basis of caste, religion and ethnic origin, since all citizens were children of the one homeland. The ideology of patriotism does not permit the dividing of one’s compatriots into ‘bluebloods’ and ‘riff-raff’. Nor does it recognize exclusive rights of a ‘titled nation’, or divide the country’s inhabitants, like horses in harness, into native and non-native.

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The ideology of patriotism was brought to us from France together with other ideas of the Enlightenment and revolution, ideas which aroused such fear in conservative society. In the early nineteenth century, such ideas were the latest French fashion. Pushkin’s Onegin could appear as a cosmopolitan, a patriot, a romantic hero, a Quaker or a canting hypocrite, depending on which mask was currently most admired in educated society. The French republicans called themselves patriots. The Decembrists in Russia were also patriots; out of love for the homeland they sought an end to such revered national traditions as the trade in peasants and the suppression of dissident thought. The idea of patriotism, as it took shape on the threshold of the nineteenth century, demanded the renewal of the country, the rejection of inertness, traditionalism and provincialism, only not in the name of a mythical ‘communion with the West’ or with anyone else, but so that citizens could affirm their own national dignity and independence. The American Revolution showed that democracy and independence are interlinked in the closest possible fashion. The essence of democracy is that a country’s fate is decided by its citizens alone, and not by a parliament in Westminster to which the inhabitants of Boston have not sent deputies, and not by the International Monetary Fund, whose policies are not formulated in Moscow. In such circumstances, how patriotic is our ‘opposition’? Its antidemocratism forces us to look sceptically on its patriotism. Public figures who call themselves patriots are forever sounding off about the glorious past, without wanting either to understand the past, or even to give it serious study. The fact is that our past is not only glorious; it is also where the roots of our shameful present must be sought. The self-declared patriots tell us about our national interests, but they cannot explain with any coherence what these interests are. In reality, all the existing political groups are so inclined to talk about ‘allnational’ interests because they have not grown to the point of articulating class interests (whether in the Marxian or Weberian sense is not important). They express the interests of very narrow groups, so narrow that to speak in their names seems somehow indecent. At best, the parties have their clienteles, and at worst, a handful of wealthy sponsors. Because the parties all have different sponsors, it is not surprising that each party interprets the general national interest in its own fashion. Nothing has emerged in the way of a ‘national idea’, since historically such ideas come into being through the agreement of social interests. Reconciling the interests of cliques and grouplets is impossible. The formation of a ‘genuine’ left movement in post-Soviet Russia is proceeding with difficulty, and it is quite possible that the collapse of the Popular-Patriotic Union established by Zyuganov’s Communists marks not only the beginning of the end for the KPRF in the form in which we know it, but also the first step toward the emergence of new organizations of the left.

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These organizations will become a political reality only when they cease to hide behind pseudo-patriotic rhetoric and return to the values that are normal for leftists, including taking a class approach. For today’s KPRF, such a class approach is just as taboo as it is for Gaidar. The latter will never state openly that he represents only a group of ‘new Russians’, and not Russians in general. The KPRF cannot openly admit that it ceased long ago to rest on the working class, or any other class. It is a simple matter to mask one’s reluctance to speak openly of one’s social predilections by using ‘national’ rhetoric. Nevertheless, Gaidar and other liberal ‘Westernizers’ have let slip this chance. For some reason, they have failed to establish a ‘real’ right-wing party in Russia; they are lacking in the conservative-patriotic principle without which the right cannot succeed. Margaret Thatcher did not declare herself an enemy of British national traditions, even if she destroyed them in practice. Both Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan appealed to historic memory, to the glorious past. From the moment when KPRF chief Gennady Zyuganov promised to combine ‘red’ and ‘white’ ideas on the basis of derzhavnost’ [translator’s note: this essentially untranslatable tsarist-era concept combines Great Russian chauvinism with a reverence for authoritarian rule, and has overtones of clerical obscurantism] and ‘love for the Homeland’, the Communists found it more and more difficult to define their attitude to their own Bolshevik past. Zyuganov quoted tsarist Prime Minister Stolypin and the nineteenth-century conservative ideologue Count Uvarov. The person who should have been quoting them, however, was Yegor Gaidar! The party officials who decorated their presidiums with portraits of Lenin could not understand how the Bolsheviks could have campaigned against their own government in wartime. The idea that the homeland could wage unjust wars was incomprehensible to them, just like the idea that the authorities and the people were not one and the same. Lenin, in his article on the national arrogance of the Great Russians, spoke of the need to break with the authoritarian tradition of the past, simultaneously calling for the cultivation of the popular tradition of democratic resistance to the authorities. Zyuganov’s understanding of history and patriotism is directly counterposed to that of Lenin. After KPRF Central Committee member General Albert Makashov publicly made anti-semitic statements, communists in the West began sending the KPRF perplexed letters, in some cases threatening to cut off all relations if Makashov and his co-thinkers were not expelled from the party. Naively, these foreign communists failed to understand that the KPRF leaders would undoubtedly have expelled someone like Lenin from their party, either for his links with the Jew Trotsky, or because of his defeatist position during the years of the First World War. Of prominent communists in Yeltsin’s Russia, the only one who seemed genuine was Viktor Anpilov, a true follower of Stalin who did not conceal the fact. The Stalinist bloc which Anpilov founded did not, at any rate,

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deceive either itself or the public. As the wrapper on a pornographic video might have promised, what you saw of Anpilov’s group was what you got. EDUCATION AS A SUBVERSIVE FORCE From all this, it is easy enough to draw the didactic conclusion that, in order to deserve their names, the so-called patriots should have become real democrats, and the so-called democrats, patriots. Nor would it have hurt the Communists to have become, at least for a while, communists instead of simply party members. It would be wrong, however, to console oneself with illusions; nothing of the sort was ever going to happen. The truth is that, unless you are out to fool people by uttering empty words, you need to talk seriously about an economic programme. Here, none of the political parties has measured up. The problem as it now presents itself is far deeper than a simple verbal misunderstanding, or an inadequate grasp of Western theories, whether Marxism, monetarism or nationalism. The problem is that, while arguing furiously about words we do not understand, we have been proceeding together along a path of imitation development. This path leads into a dead end; it guarantees the accumulation of backwardness and dependency. Russia’s efforts in 1917 to escape from this path were impressive, but, as subsequent experience has shown, unsuccessful. Even if these efforts had ended in a great success, on the moral level this would hardly have justified the extinguishing of millions of lives. But does this mean that once Russia has ‘returned to the bosom of world civilization’ (that is, reconciled itself to a role as part of the backward periphery of the capitalist world system), it cannot make another attempt to transform itself? In our situation, for our country to transform itself means ‘only’ finding definite answers to definite questions. The truth is that this requires a radical transformation of the entire political culture, a change of elites (including the opposition elites) and of the rules of the game, both domestic and foreign. Do we have the strength for this? Is it necessary? Are the risks too great? The alternatives can now be formulated in starkly simple fashion: either catastrophe, or a miracle. Retaining the present state of things also amounts to catastrophe. Russia collapsed in 1917 not because the Bolsheviks wanted this, or because the war brought things to this pass, but because such a vast European country, with such huge potential, simply could not fit within the framework of imitation development. A miracle is a rejection of the imitation road. But the question is: who will work the miracle? One thing is clear: there will be no help from either ‘God, the tsar or a hero’ (whatever you might say, this is well put!). A basis for hope must not be sought in the speeches of ideologues, but in the analysis of social processes. Russia does not possess classes, nor a society in the full sense of the word. There are, however, points at which new social structures are crystallizing.

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This applies especially to the notorious middle class, not to speak of the entrepreneurs. Our middle layers, at least until August 1998, consisted overwhelmingly of prosperous consumers of Western products. The country could no longer afford to retain a middle class such as this. Not even in the framework of peripheral development. It makes more sense to speak of a new technological elite that has survived and undergone a painful process of consolidation, of ‘specialists’ who are sometimes to be found in the private sector, but who are employed mainly in the enterprises of the military-industrial complex. As the war in Yugoslavia showed, this modernized elite is a bearer of anti-Western moods. This is quite natural. The members of this elite need to work, produce and conquer domestic markets. Independence is thus a tempting prospect for them. The question is: how broad will this layer be in the Russia of the early twenty-first century? One of the consequences of neo-liberal policies has been a decline of education. The formal reason given for this has been a lack of money in the state treasury, but the real cause is a far more profound shift that has occurred in society. The Enlightenment concept of progress, based on the dissemination of knowledge, has turned out to be in contradiction with the ideology and social practice of neo-liberalism. Knowledge is more and more specialized; it is becoming a privilege and a secret, which has to be concealed from the uninitiated. Members of the older generation of the intelligentsia, observing the graduates of post-Soviet schools, have been indignant at the decline of literacy and the spread of ignorance. But if we look at the society in which young people are faced with living, the conclusion that forces itself upon us is quite the reverse. For the type of society that had come into being in Russia by the late 1990s, the level of education of the population was excessive. If the majority were destined to dig in mud, and a minority to count its gains, what need was there for all these geography, history and literature lessons? Why did we need computer literacy, if there was to be no mass computerization? Even in the United States, about a third of the population not only lacks access to computers, but, while present social relations apply, will never have it. Why do we even talk about such things in the case of Russia? A good, wide-ranging education is essential for a narrow layer right at the top, for people who in any case are becoming part of the ‘global elite’, and who therefore have few links to a specifically Russian culture. Since the mid1990s, the Russian elite have had their children educated in the West, which is logical, since the task of these people will not be so much to rule Russia as to manage flows of international capital. At the same time, a small layer of the elite intelligentsia has been guaranteed its positions irrespective of the degree to which the mass of society is degraded. Moreover, the positions of the educated elite have even grown stronger. The fewer educated people there are, the less the competition, and the higher the price attracted by education. Contrary to the accepted stereotypes, the formal existence of democratic freedoms does not conduce to education either. When society is split into

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impoverished masses and a privileged elite, the debility of the population is a question of life and death for maintaining the stability of the political system. The Soviet system was oriented toward economic growth, the development of industry and modernization. For this, the level of mass education needed constantly to be raised. Meanwhile, to ensure that the masses did not use this knowledge incorrectly, the KGB and censorship were required. Censorship and the inquisition, it will be recalled, appeared together with the printing of books. It was precisely at this time that the state realized the contradiction between the need for education and preserving stability. The more literate the people became, the more work there was for the secret police. Under conditions of officially proclaimed freedom, all these wonderful mechanisms are unavailable. But if there are correct ‘cultural policies’, censorship and secret police are not particularly necessary. The more the population are weak, illiterate and confused, the less the danger that they will make use of their civil rights. If a country has entered the world division of labour as a supplier of raw materials and energy sources, if its society is divided into the super-rich and the impoverished, education even becomes dangerous. The less you know, the more satisfied you are with your station. ‘Shuttle traders’ with higher university degrees might cope excellently with their new calling, but they do not feel happy. There will need to be a new generation, for whom the work of a shuttle trader will represent the height of their potential capacities. The division of society into ‘riff-raff’ and ‘blue-bloods’ is absolutely incompatible with the idea of universal education. In traditional society, the elite enjoyed the privilege of literacy. To read books, to write complicated texts and to rule the country were all privileges of gentlemen. The lower orders of society could not lay claim to power, precisely because of their lack of education. They were not even capable of understanding complex economic and political matters. In post-Soviet Russia, writes the sociologist V.P. Belov: the economic illiteracy of the population on questions that directly affect everyone is guarded painstakingly, like a precious national possession. Illiterate workers, who do not know their rights and do not know how to defend them, are a godsend for the social partners. Such workers are not even dangerous when sitting on the rails, where they try to wage a pointless economic war against people who are just as much the victims of Russian-style capitalism as they are themselves. The most such workers can demand, and which they might obtain, is to have employers from time to time pay out at least a little in wages.10 In Western Europe after the Second World War the left, coming to power in most countries, decided to put an end to all this by establishing a system of universal high-quality education. To Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne, where the children of the elite studied, dozens of ‘red brick’ uni-

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versities were added; these were for people from working-class families. From the very first, the aim was political: to alter the relationship of forces in society by making it possible for the lower orders to take advantage of democracy. The result was the student uprisings of the 1960s and, in the early 1970s, talk of the imminent collapse of capitalism. Since the late 1970s, the Western elites have deliberately implemented policies aimed at debasing the quality of secondary schools, and limiting access to tertiary education. The impact of these policies has been considerable. Institutions that once were free now charge for tuition; cheap education has become expensive. Universalism in education has been replaced by specialization, and professional cretinism has been nurtured to the point where any ‘irregular’ situation lands people in a complete impasse. Those at the very bottom can no longer use education as a ladder for vertical mobility. The numerous middle class and petty bourgeoisie, however, still retain their positions. Antonio Gramsci noted in his time that changes in the West follow the logic of ‘positional warfare’, while in Russia everything is decided as if by cavalry charges. So it was with education. In the 1990s, education in Russia was rolled back faster than had been managed over twenty years in Europe and the USA. The experience of former Soviet citizens who have left for the West shows that, only recently, people who had studied in our country had a decided advantage over their Western colleagues; combining Soviet education with Western opportunities, they quickly achieved professional success. By the end of the 1990s, however, this was gradually vanishing into the past. Each new new generation in Russia is worse educated than its predecessor. There was always a gap between the graduates of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ institutions, but now it is increasing many times over, leaving no chance for the latter. In short, everything is conforming to the norm. There is no ‘conspiracy’ here against the country or against the education system. What is at work is the logic of the system, the laws of development of peripheral capitalism, under which we have now been living for at least a decade. This is far more terrible than any ‘conspiracy’ or ‘intrigue’. Nevertheless, the situation is not hopeless. The education system, as we know, has a certain inertia. In relatively favourable periods, we complain about this. In the present situation, however, it is a huge blessing. For at least a decade, the level of education will exceed the requirements of society, throwing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of potential rebels on to the labour market. On a cultural, social and psychological plane, even a poorly taught graduate of a post-Soviet high school is quite different from someone who has only finished fourth grade. We are indeed a barbarized society, and the process of universal barbarization reflects Russia’s new place in the world as a peripheral state, doomed to serve the ‘civilized countries’. But we have not yet become thorough barbarians, and most likely we will not do so. We are like the people of the early middle ages, already forgetting classical Latin, but still able to understand it.

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The generation that can read and write in literate fashion, that knows Pushkin and has not totally forgotten when the crusades took place, has not yet died out. It will manage to see out another few decades, with a good chance of transmitting its traditions and knowledge, if not to its children, then to its grandchildren. No television or computer programs will prevent this. The important thing is something else: whether we understand why we are doing this. What is the use of education to our children? Today this is not so much a guarantee of personal success in life, as a chance (not a guarantee, but just a chance) of collective salvation. By preserving knowledge and culture, we prevent ourselves from being turned definitively into barbarians. This is our collective self-defence, our resistance. It is our sole hope of again becoming a great country, when antiquated rackets and nostalgic recollections will not help us. People who consider themselves capable of more than society allows them are potential rebels, revolutionaries, subversive elements. It is typical of young people that they have an exaggerated view of themselves. Over time, society teaches us to reconcile ourselves to failures and defeats, but this does not happen without a struggle. Dissatisfaction with their position in the world and a feeling of shame for their country, together with unclear prospects for their lives, is turning the generation that is now completing high school into a mass of people truly dangerous to society. CULTURE VERSUS CAPITALISM Talk of a crisis or even of a collapse of culture became a commonplace in Yeltsin’s Russia. Everyone lamented that there was no money. The state was not providing it; the ‘new Russians’ were grabbing all and giving little. Commentators also complained endlessly that there was no cultural policy. The impression was created that everything boiled down to money and official resolutions. Was culture really in the hands of bureaucrats to such an extent? After all, it was no secret that there had been times when the money available for culture was less, and the conditions for creativity worse. How many great works were written ‘for the desk drawer’, were created under bombardments, in times of hunger and catastrophe! Today as well there are, for example, actors who save themselves from hunger by building mansions for ‘new Russians’, or by working as domestic servants. The surprising thing is that, unlike their better-fed colleagues, making speeches about the crisis at dinners and presentations, they are not performing any worse on stage. A cultural policy can be of such a type that it would be better not to have one at all. Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, had a cultural policy. He gave Europe classicism, and made French rather than Italian the language of art. By the end of his reign, France was dying of hunger. Stalin also had a cultural policy, which made possible, for example, the films of Eisenstein. However, this policy hardly justifies nostalgia for the Stalin era.

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There is indeed a crisis of culture, but its causes should not be sought in the area of finance and state policy. The problem before us is much more fundamental. It is connected with the role which ‘cultural figures’ have taken to playing in our society. It is well known that neither ‘high art’ nor fundamental science lives according to the laws of the market. Nor, as it happens, do education and health care. Even the famous British public schools, where hefty fees are charged for tuition, are by no means commercial establishments. No society, even the most capitalist, can reduce all its social norms to the rules of commercial exchange. Under capitalism, the demands of the market have to be tempered by extra-market and even anti-market factors. This has been the case ever since the early bourgeois revolutions. The famous ‘Protestant ethic’ was necessary to capitalism not because this ethic encouraged enrichment at any price (no ethic was required for this), but on the contrary, because it brought the thirst for profit within definite bounds, setting limits on its harsh moral norms. It was precisely because of this that capitalism preserved numerous religious and cultural institutions which it had inherited from previous epochs, and which were inspired by quite different traditions. Under capitalism, culture has played a dual role. For the very reason that culture has been profoundly anti-bourgeois, it has been indispensable to the bourgeoisie as a stabilizing and compensating factor. Culture has been allowed to live according to its own logic; if it did not do so, it would not be needed at all. It is a quite different matter that living by its own laws, culture, like education, has constantly transgressed the bounds of the permitted. From being a stabilizing factor, culture has become a subversive one. It has provided a stimulus to everyone who has been unwilling to live by the general rules. People such as Marx, Brecht, Sartre or Marcuse were natural products of the academic and creative milieux. The universities have become hotbeds of free thought, while even in Hollywood the number of ‘reds’ reached such levels by the late 1940s as to attract the attentions of Senator McCarthy. From time to time the intellectuals have been put in their place, but doing without them has been impossible. The 1990s saw a great deal turned upside down, and not only in our culture. For intellectuals to have abandoned their traditional values is by no means a specifically Russian phenomenon. Throughout the whole world after 1989 great numbers of people began to feel as though history had come to an end, and that consequently only one task remained for art and science: to entertain and gratify the victors. The situation in Russia was nevertheless something of an exception. In the West, even in the epoch of neo-liberalism, it does not enter anyone’s head to publicly renounce what constitutes the essence of creativity. In Russia, however, the collapse of the Soviet system and of its values totally liberated intellectuals from the chimera of conscience. Collapsing together with the official Soviet ideology were the ethics that had been present within Soviet society, including the dissident ethic, which had

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also developed out of experience of life within this particular system over many years. The values of the generation of the 1960s, values which had prevailed among us until the end of the 1980s, vanished into the past. Theie place was not taken by new values, but merely by new temptations. It was these that filled the newly appeared vacuum, becoming in essence the sole motivating factor. From the very first day of the changes, cultural figures made haste to join the new elite, showing scorn not only for their less favoured colleagues, but also for the demands of their own calling. Joyously they took to extolling the laws of monetary exchange, forgetting that even during the European bourgeois revolutions doing this publicly had been considered bad form. The great artist David did not paint pictures glorifying the work of the shopkeepers. He depicted the civic virtues of the ancient Romans, whom the shopkeepers were supposed to take as examples. Power, even cruel and tyrannical power, has often been glorified and poeticized. Many extremely beautiful monuments have been erected in honour of rulers who, to put it mildly, have not been distinguished by their humanity. London is packed with statues of generals who won some minor war or other against a little-known African tribe. Not a single monument, however, has been erected to the heroes of stock-market speculation. A philistine cannot be the object of poetry. Brokers and shopkeepers are anti-aesthetic. State functionaries are even more so, and, if they hold sway in society, it does not follow from this that they can be presented as an ideal. The bourgeoisies of the West have always understood this. Russia does not have a real bourgeoisie, and never will have; as a result, the new proprietors of life honestly believe that their narrow ‘professional’ view of the world is a model for everyone and everything. It is not given to them to rise to the level of expressing a class interest; the most they can concern themselves with is their ‘image’. Cultural figures who have flung themselves into the embrace of bankers are just as useless for capitalism as they are for the resistance to capitalism. To be precise, they are useless precisely in the capacity of creators, of the people who provide life with an ethical and aesthetic dimension. From the point of view of propaganda, however, they are a valuable acquisition for any elite. The greater their real creative services during their previous lives, and the more highly they were regarded by decent people, the more valuable they now are for prosecuting foul deeds. In return for prizes and awards, people are making speeches to suit whoever gives the awards and sponsors the prizes. The bosses and sponsors change, and it is even possible to confess, let us say, to having made a mistake with Yeltsin. And then to find a new patron, and do everything the same. On the side, you can still carry on your accustomed cinematic or theatrical work. There is no need to earn success here; it is guaranteed by previous services and by effective mass media work.

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None of this is new. Propaganda has always worked this way. The only surprising thing is that, in Soviet times, many of the people who have eagerly entered the service of the new propaganda never agreed to such a role, no matter what the inducements. A different time, of course, offers different temptations. There are people who conducted themselves heroically at the front, but who tremble at the shout of the boss. Now we find that many of the people who firmly and emphatically rejected the temptations of official recognition from the Soviet authorities have lost all their human dignity on seeing their first ‘wad of bucks’. Meanwhile, by no means everyone rejected the blandishments of the Soviet regime. For all that, we are witnessing a tragedy on a Shakespearean scale. The only difference is that, unlike Macbeth, the people who frequent the dinners and presentations do not see ghosts behind their tables, and do not try to wash their hands clean of blood. They do not accept even a small share of guilt for the bloodshed in Chechnya, for the hungry rural teachers, or for the children who have been left homeless. The fact that they personally have not killed or robbed anyone is beside the point. The important thing is that for these people, responsibility is an abstract concept. Macbeth saw ghosts because the earlier hero was still alive within him. In our case, people have managed quite successfully to squeeze the citizen out of themselves, drop by drop. As the commentator Yevgeny Bunimovich writes: In Russia, a grandiose new stage of privatization is unfolding before our eyes. After the factories, banks, mineral deposits, pipelines and natural monopolies, the authorities are now seeking actively to purchase, take over, conquer and privatize the Russian intelligentsia, its spiritual authority and moral strength that were built up over centuries despite now being seriously degraded. We must give the Kremlin analysts their due; to appropriate the conscience, honour and dignity of the nation along with its oil, gas and electricity is truly a strong move . . .11 The trouble is that a conscience that has been put up for sale is not a very valuable acquisition. The question thrusts itself upon us: what will the Russian elites do when they run out of cultural figures? After all, they are working with people whose reputations were established in Soviet times. These days, it is much more difficult to establish a reputation in the arts, because professional reputations are not made on the platforms of congresses, or over servings of hors d’oeuvres. In order to make a name for yourself, you have to work. In ‘polite society’, however, no-one is interested in this side of things. If someone stages good productions, important sections of the public simply never get to hear of it. To use the term that is fashionable nowadays, there are no communications media. Ordinary newspapers are now read much less, and of the specialized press, devoted to the theatre or cinema, almost nothing remains. The television serves above all to project propaganda, but this is not the only problem. To become famous for working

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some kind of swindle is easy, but to attract notice for one’s artistic achievement is more difficult; such are the laws of the genre. The theft of books from a library is news, but the publication of a good book is not. It is hard to ‘sell’ something clever and complicated. It is hard to show it on television. This is not the fault of anyone in particular – just the fault of the system itself. Not only is it practically impossible to attract the attention of the public to an artistic event; the public itself has almost ceased to exist in the accepted sense of the world. The ‘thick journals’ are in decline, and informal contacts within the milieu of the intelligentsia are becoming increasingly difficult; a process of social stratification is occurring. The distance between a successful Moscow intellectual and a provincial schoolteacher used to be considerable, but now the gulf between them is unbridgeable. The one is well-fed, the other hungry. Both their thinking and their interests are now quite different. It is of course to be lamented that there is not enough money to support the arts, but the arts will nevertheless survive. While Russia and the Russian language survive, the culture will be preserved. What we are seeing now is not the ‘collapse of culture’, but merely the crisis and degeneration of the Soviet cultural elite. Admittedly, the spectacle is distressing, but it should not rob us of hope for the future. Meanwhile, the rise of a new type of intellectual, of a new cultural milieu, will need time. This process is not only slow, but also painful. The truth is that we do not in essence have any other cultural tradition apart from the one we inherited from the Soviet Union of the 1960s, and this applies even to people who have little recollection of that epoch. Nevertheless, it can be said with great confidence that a new tradition can only be born out of the experience of resistance, of standing up to the world of commercial interests and to the ‘values’ of the ‘new Russians’. This will be a resistance dictated not by any ideological schemas, but by the very nature of creativity.

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The Rise of the Yeltsin Regime

After destroying the Soviet Union and doing away with the ‘command economy’, the Russian elites pledged to turn over a new page in the history of Russia. They proclaimed the founding of a ‘new’ state, while simultaneously promising to restore the greatness of the old, pre-Soviet Russia. Changes poured down on the people like a natural disaster. According to some, what was happening was like a nightmare. To others, it seemed that they themselves and all those around them were going mad, or at least suffering from a severe nervous disorder. This was happening not only to individual people, but also to the state. THE MAKING OF A LEADER In Russia’s thousand-year history, few of its rulers have contrived to do the country so much damage, in so short a time, as Boris Yeltsin. Nevertheless, however the opposition might have protested, and whatever acute crises the country might have experienced, Yeltsin was forever stepping from the water bone-dry. He got away with everything – the destruction of the Soviet Union, the collapse of industry, a drastic fall in living standards, the lost war in Chechnya, and corruption scandals in his own family. Yeltsin, described ironically as a ‘guarantee of instability’, proceeded solemnly from defeat to defeat. He reached his ‘peak form’ in the period between 1991 and 1993. These were the years when he managed to transform himself from a communist reformer into a radical liberal, while retaining a significant number of his supporters. He further succeeded in crushing the opposition of his former allies and trampling on the first shoots of popular power, while preserving his reputation as a ‘fighter for democracy’. At this time the career of Russia’s first president was still in the ascendant. The shelling of the parliament was the high point of this career, and unquestionably represented Yeltsin’s greatest victory. From this point, the trend was downwards. From 1993 Yeltsin was preoccupied mainly with hanging on to power, and his entourage with the question of what would happen to them when the ageing autocrat made his exit. 77

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Nevertheless, before turning into the increasingly inert puppet, the Brezhnev-like ‘Kremlin patient’ of the final years of his rule, Russia’s first president achieved a good deal that required energy, decisiveness and daring. It is hard to think of a politician who at each step has made as many absurd mistakes as Yeltsin. In another country and in different circumstances, any of these mistakes would have finished him as a politician. During his days as First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk Provincial Committee of the Communist Party, Yeltsin incurred the displeasure of the aged Brezhnev by overdoing his expressions of devotion. To mark the seventy-fifth birthday of the general secretary, Yeltsin presented him with a gold cigar-case, which Brezhnev refused. By the standards of this time, this was an unthinkable scandal. Yeltsin, however, rode it out. Later, after Yeltsin had been presented by Gorbachev with the post of head of the Moscow party organization, one failure succeeded another. Not a single initiative by the new leader of the Soviet capital was crowned with success. The Muscovites, however, became enamoured of Yeltsin – for his open manner, simplicity and vigorous popular vulgarity. When Gorbachev and Yeltsin parted ways, Yeltsin repented publicly at a plenum meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee, but he was nevertheless stripped of his job as Moscow party head. Then followed something quite unimaginable: the disgraced politician, in a less than sober state, jumped (or allowed himself to be thrown) from a bridge in a sack, and almost drowned! Finally came his famous speech in the USA, which the ‘father of Russian democracy’ could not utter coherently, since his tongue was tied in knots, and he was barely able to stand on his feet. Oleg Davydov, writing for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, described the ‘Yeltsin phenomenon’, noting the man’s astonishing ability to extricate himself from difficult situations of his own making. Indeed, Yeltsin’s life story reads as a continuous chain of catastrophes. In his memoirs he recounted with delight how, as a child, he had led some friends into the forest, where the whole group had almost perished when he had used something heavy to strike a hand grenade one of them had found by chance. The grenade, naturally, exploded, but the young Boris Nikolaevich again survived, despite losing two fingers. Yeltsin’s autobiography Confession on a Set Theme, written in 1989, provides more than a little cause for reflection. At first glance it is strongly reminiscent of the memoirs of other Soviet leaders. Leonid Brezhnev’s autobiography Virgin Soil was extraordinarily ‘epic’, containing nothing apart from a calm, uniform narration of feats and victories, ordeals and goals. The same with Yeltsin: ‘We held open bureau meetings and closed ones’, ‘I met with activists, with various specialists, with workers, collective farmers and rural residents’, ‘We developed a programme in line with the main orientations, serious, profound and extensively worked out’, ‘We tried constantly to think up various meetings, fairs, functions and festivals, so that people should sense their unity with the city, so that they should always feel a sense of pride in their native Sverdlovsk, Nizhny Tagil and other cities of the

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province.’1 We shall never know how effective all these measures were, since the only thing that is important in this instance is where the efforts of the hero are directed at any given moment. If it is necessary to meet with the masses, he breaks all records for numbers of meetings with people. If it is necessary to set up a chess club, a luxurious building is constructed, and a triumphant opening ceremony is organized. There is not a word about whether the instruction in the club is any good – this is something quite outside the hero’s sphere of interest. To some degree, the epic character of the text is explained by the fact that Yeltsin, like Brezhnev before him, did not write his book himself, but merely issued instructions to ‘literary collaborators’. The text became depersonalized, and the author’s experiences and recollections, even the most individual ones, were somehow ‘objectivized’. Nevertheless, the autobiographies of Brezhnev and Yeltsin do, in their own fashion, reveal to us the cast of mind of these people. The epic hero is always right. He is alien to doubt, to ironic reflection on himself and, indeed, to reflection of any kind. For him, there are no such concepts as ‘choices’, ‘alternatives’ or ‘variants’. However strange it might seem, there is no concept of a ‘goal’ either. All that we find is a multitude of large and small tasks, posed by someone or other or else ‘objectively present’. The hero floats with the current, from one post to another, from one event to the next. All events, whether a schoolyard fight or Yeltsin’s appointment as the party chief of Sverdlovsk Province, are of equal significance. In this, the ‘epic quality’ of the text is revealed. The title Confession on a Set Theme was no accident. When his first autobiography appeared, Yeltsin was still building socialism together with the Soviet people. In his second autobiography, Notes of a President, he is already fighting against ‘reds’ and defending the values of capitalism. Yeltsin never, anywhere, explains how this switch came about, or how he made the choice. This is honest, after a fashion. Yeltsin never made a choice; he simply followed events, tagging along behind the majority of the Russian elite. In formal terms he headed the process, but in reality he floated with the current. This was his strength. Yeltsin spent his youth in the ‘thaw’ period. His student years coincided with the first dissident protests, with the unsanctioned meetings on Mayakovsky Square, with heated debates on the future of socialism, with the publication of daring writings in Novy Mir. The future ‘victor over communism’ simply failed to notice any of this. On the whole, there is nothing in the text of the Confession on a Set Theme to suggest that the future president showed an interest in politics. He lived in the same way as millions of Soviet people, for whom the existence of the system was just as natural as the change of seasons and the succession of day and night. It is as though there are two Yeltsins in the Confession on a Set Theme. One is the reckless, muddle-headed man, given to pointless adventures, to ‘three

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and thirty misfortunes’; a person forever involved in absurd, hair-raising escapades, but who is extraordinarily lucky, continually emerging unscathed from his difficulties. The other Yeltsin is the functionary, the boss, the party official. The first of these personae is far more attractive than the second, though his adventures reveal someone not especially burdened with intellect. To start with, a drunken priest forgot the future president in the baptismal font during the christening ceremony, and almost drowned him. The child was pulled out at the last moment, and somehow revived. At school, the young Boris Nikolaevich amused himself by sticking gramophone needles in the teacher’s chair. Naturally, such pranks were followed by the appropriate punishments, but the future president nevertheless finished school, and even gained entry to an institute. As a student, he began travelling about the country, and promptly lost his watch and clothing playing cards with some criminals with whom he was travelling on the roof of a train. Having stripped the student down to his underpants, his fellowtravellers offered him one more game – this time, for his life. Yeltsin played again, and won. When his studies came to an end and his working days began, the mishaps continued. Several times the young Yeltsin, together with a wheelbarrow, plummetted down ‘three metres’ from scaffolding, but somehow he always remained in one piece. Another time, the motor of his truck stalled right on a railway crossing. Then the future president, while working as a crane driver, set off home forgetting to secure the crane to the rails. During the night, naturally, a real gale blew up, and the crane began to move. ‘Of course, it would have totally collapsed’, Yeltsin explains, with even a hint of surprise. Leaping out of the house in only his underpants, the future leader of Russia managed to climb into the cabin and stop the crane at the last minute, at the very end of the rails. Later, there would be more of the same. Becoming a powerful official in the building industry, our hero does not cease putting his foot in it. When a worsted plant was handed over, it was suddenly discovered, practically within twenty-four hours, that again from carelessness and sloth a 50-metre underground passage had not been built from one section to another. Improbable though it was, this was true. A separate blueprint existed for this passage, but it had been lost. At the same worsted plant, ‘when everything had been handed over and the equipment began to operate, the building suddenly began to shake loose, and this huge metal structure, together with the reinforced concrete slabs of the floors, began to move’.2 In the president’s biography these and many other stories, no less instructive, act as a sort of Soviet analogue to the labours of Hercules. There is something very Soviet about this; we ourselves create the problems, and then we struggle heroically with them. When Yeltsin becomes a boss, he shows himself to be tyrannical and boorish, which does not prevent him from getting along famously with other

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bosses, who are no better. Thus the next chief summons Yeltsin and begins to abuse him in no uncertain terms: ‘You so-and-so, something’s gone wrong!’ Then he grabs up a chair. I do the same, and we move toward one another. I say, ‘Keep in mind, if you make even the slightest movement, my reactions are quicker, I’ll hit first.’ That’s what our relations were like.3 The builder Yeltsin could unhesitatingly insult party officials, but he nevertheless rose up the ladder of power. He was appointed secretary of the Sverdlovsk party committee, then head of the whole province. Boris Nikolaevich was never a victim of the system. The system always picked out and elevated people such as him. The system needed executive personnel who were quiet conformists, but at the same time it painstakingly fostered people of another type: aggressive, energetic, self-confident conformists. The former lived by the principle: ‘You’re the boss and I’m a fool.’ The latter immediately and proudly declared: ‘I’m the boss and you’re a fool.’ In the Brezhnev period this combination of conformism with energy, aggression and stubbornness was termed ‘an active, vital position’. Such people were valued and promoted; in conditions of stagnation, with the leadership totally lacking in new ideas, people like Yeltsin were supposed to lend the system at least a certain dynamism. NOMENKLATURA ‘DISSIDENT’ The qualities which had helped Yeltsin to advance to the front ranks of the party elite continued working to his advantage when a power struggle broke out in the country, and a section of Gorbachev’s entourage began feverishly searching for a ‘back-up variant’. Any scandals that were revealed simply enhanced Yeltsin’s popularity. Large numbers of people in Russia were not particularly appalled by the fact that a political leader abused alcohol. Arguments that the ‘nuclear button’ should not be entrusted to someone in a less than sober state did not frighten anyone in the country. The ordinary citizen saw Yeltsin as ‘a real muzhik’, a regular guy. On this level Gorbachev, though respectable and popular in Europe, lost out completely. Even liberal intellectuals, who might have been expected to appreciate Gorbachev’s ‘European style’, went into raptures over Yeltsin’s ‘muzhik simplicity’ and his aura as a ‘man of the people’. It is hard to say whether Gorbachev, when he introduced the post of president of the USSR, realized that he was creating a quite new situation. Nevertheless, Gorbachev at that moment opened up a path for Yeltsin to the summit of power. Earlier, power in Russia had lain with organizations, institutions and establishments. Russian tsarism was institutional. The autocrat did not seize the throne; rather, the system guaranteed the rights of autocrats. Tsars who got out of control were simply killed; it was no accident

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that, in the nineteenth century, people used to joke that Russian autocracy was limited by the constant possibility of a coup d’etat. Russian coups, unlike those in the West, did not change the system but stabilized it. The Communist Party was also a system of institutions. The ascent of leaders to the summit of power in the ‘communist’ system followed the same rules as in Western democracies. It was necessary to serve the organization; meanwhile, the organization had to ensure rewards in the form of a deputy’s mandate, a ministerial post and a spacious office. When Gorbachev created the post of Soviet president, promising that the country’s main leader would be chosen by popular election, he severed the link between loyalty to the organization and a successful political career. From then on, an imposing appearance and a gift for demagogy would mean more than years of faithful service to the party. The struggle for power was reduced to seizing the post of top boss. Anyone who could not become president of the USSR could become president of something else. Each president was freed from all political and moral responsibility to the organization through which he or she had risen, not to speak of responsibility to the electors. The choice of a president, however, could only be made from among those who, if not already in power, were on its threshold. There was simply no-one else in the country who was sufficiently well known. For this contest of careerists, Yeltsin proved better prepared than any of the rest. In 1987 he had suffered at the hands of Gorbachev, who had unjustly removed him from the post of head of the Moscow party organization (Russians love victims). Without principles or intelligible ideas, he was particularly dependent on advisers, behind whom stood international financial institutions and the shadow capital that had gathered strength under Gorbachev. The mild, respectable ‘Gorby’ no longer suited people who needed a strong regime, untroubled by considerations of legality. What these people needed was a ‘tough muzhik’. Yeltsin was suited to the role of leader-autocrat, and strove to win it. He was free of any remnant of nomenklatura ethics, and of any feeling of responsibility. Lacking any coherent understanding of where he was going, or why, he was prepared to burn his bridges. What he wanted was power, and he got it. Court journalists would try to explain Yeltsin’s success as the result of ‘an ability to take bold and unexpected decisions’, an ability supposedly revealed in the course of his struggle for power. It is hard to imagine anything further from the truth. Yeltsin’s actions were easily predictable. Every time his mistakes caused another crisis, the president first went into hiding. Before the 1989 elections, when crowds of dissatisfied people took to the streets of the capital shouting his name, Yeltsin did not go out to meet his admirers, did not march at their head, but simply disappeared. During the first stages of the August 1991 events, he also kept his silence. Several hours went by before he came out with a condemnation of the ‘putschists’. It was only when the situation had become completely clear, and it was obvious that nothing

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threatened him, that Yeltsin appeared before the people and, in picturesque fashion, standing on an armoured car, began issuing his commands to the rejoicing populace. A fear of taking decisions was one of the few real virtues Yeltsin displayed as president. Each time his advisers urged on him another draft of an anticonstitutional decree, he began to vacillate, and put off signing it. A long-established school of apparatus conformism was making its effects felt: never hurry with decisions. All Moscow knew of forthcoming decrees, in some cases several weeks before they were signed. They often remained unsigned as a result. In all of world history there has never been another president who in the space of two and a half years has made three attempts at a coup d’etat, two of them unsuccessful. Only the striking weakness of the constitutional order and the absence in society of an elementary consciousness of legality can explain the fact that he got away with all this. However, the president’s advisers who dreamt of making him a Russian Pinochet were also hopelessly mistaken. To become a real villain, you need a firmer character. The Sverdlovsk party apparatchik was clearly unsuited to the role of a Bonaparte. Yeltsin has been described as having a genius for destruction; he destroyed the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, as well as overseeing the collapse of the Russian economy. Some have even seen this as his ‘strong side’ (he ‘cleared the field’, ‘created a new situation’). Others have seen in Yeltsin the perfect embodiment of the most repellent features of the Russian soul, of the most shameful traits of the Russian national character: irresponsibility, trust in one’s luck, ignorance and boorishness combined with servility to stronger parties, great-power self-satisfaction coexisting with an inferiority complex in relation to the West; in short, of everything that has always stood in the way of progress, that has been incompatible with European culture and freedom, that has always hindered the country’s successful modernization. This is what sustained tsarism and totalitarianism. Over centuries, the authorities in Russia exploited, developed and encouraged the vices of the population in order to strengthen their own position. It is true that the authorities did not, by any means, always suffer from the same vices; quite the contrary. The government at times managed to be ‘the only European in Russia’, to show dynamism, organization and responsibility. This time, however, the authorities became genuinely ‘popular’, in the worst sense of the word; there was nothing in them to distinguish them favourably from the mass of their subjects. Such authorities are incapable of implementing even forced modernization. They cannot even impose an effective dictatorship; they can only become corrupt and demoralized, deepening the crisis of society. For Russia to rid itself of Yeltsin proved just as difficult as for people to swear off their bad habits and vices, for an alcoholic to give up drinking.

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BACKWARD ‘MODERNIZER’ The Yeltsin regime pledged to modernize Russia and to consolidate ‘Western values’ within it. In fact, the political system that took shape turned out to be barbaric and even archaic. The bloc that was formed between the Westernizing reformers on the one hand, and Yeltsin and the provincial bureaucrats surrounding him on the other, gave the liberal members of the elite what they valued more than anything else: power, and the support of millions of people who would never have listened to the elite itself. This was why the liberal, Westernizing intelligentsia became so enamoured of Yeltsin. This was their ideal of the popular leader: someone utterly remote from civilization of any kind, but prepared to use harsh measures to implement reforms urged on him by ‘civilized’ advisers. Something like a tame monster. The former secretary of the party provincial committee carried out the instructions of the International Monetary Fund with the same zeal he had shown in implementing his various campaigns in Sverdlovsk. Conscientiously and stupidly, without considering either the point of his actions or their consequences. As leader of the neo-liberal reforms, Yeltsin was irreplaceable. When the people were asked in the referendum of the spring of 1993 whether they respected Yeltsin, most of those who cast ballots answered ‘yes’, but in the elections the following December the citizens massively rejected the liberal bloc, Russia’s Choice. Between these two events a great deal had transpired: the shelling of the parliament; attempts to introduce censorship; and a further turn in the spiralling economic crisis. Nevertheless, on the very day when the electors rejected Russia’s Choice, they still voted for the constitution, giving Yeltsin unlimited power. Of course, the election results were rigged, and no more than half of the citizens voted. All the same, it is easy to see how much more powerful Yeltsin’s influence was than that of the reformers. In order to carry out their Western-style modernization, the ‘reformers’ were obliged to put their faith in the archaic elements of Russian national consciousness, and on intellectually and morally bankrupt leaders from the Russian political elite, including a president who in the West would not be entrusted even with the post of mayor of a minor provincial town. In such circumstances, the ‘reforms’ were doomed. Every tactical success turned into a strategic defeat. With the help of Yeltsin, elections could be won, and the law broken with impunity. But introducing European structures and modes of behaviour in this way was impossible. Indeed, Russia was becoming more remote from the West with every day that passed. Even the people who were consciously and cynically trying to turn their homeland into a raw materials colony of the ‘civilized world’ were disappointed. Keeping order among the natives required, at the very least, a functioning colonial administration. The some-time head of the Sverdlovsk party committee, however, could not raise himself even to level of a Victorian-era British sahib.

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Since the triumph of private property found its expression in a series of expropriations of state and private assets, while the consolidation of the rule of law manifested itself in violations of the constitution and in illiterate decrees which, by 1994, were already numbered in the thousands, it was impossible even to think of any stability and ‘irreversibility’ of the reforms. Panicked, the reformers hunted for a replacement for Yeltsin ... and could not find one. Meanwhile the ‘people’s president’, sensing that something was wrong, began little by little to apply pressure to the reformers, removing them one after another from the government. Yeltsin and the reformers, however, could no longer get by without one another. The ‘modernizers’ and the ‘savages’, the provincial functionary and the Moscow experts, were bound one to another until death. The Yeltsin regime overcame numerous crises of its own making. The journalist Oleg Davydov has noted how Yeltsin in his memoirs writes about various near-fatal situations into which he fell repeatedly from early childhood, and which were usually his own fault. From all these scrapes the future president emerged safe and sound, which cannot be said for the people who happened to be in his vicinity. Yeltsin’s actions in the post of Russian leader were strikingly reminiscent of these childhood pranks. The regime itself brought the country to ruin, and itself struggled to repair the damage. The authorities themselves provoked civil war in Moscow in the autumn of 1993, then went on to win a brilliant victory, calling in tanks and bombarding their own parliament. The regime itself began the war in Chechnya, was soundly beaten, and then extracted itself from its predicament by concluding peace. Davydov concludes that the ‘theme’ of Yeltsin’s life is ‘close shaves with disaster and miraculous salvation from it’, while most of the disasters he ‘creates with his own hands’. All of Yeltsin’s administrative work proceeded in triple form, passing through successive phases of ‘error’, ‘crisis’ and ‘deliverance’.4 In Davydov’s view, Yeltsin throughout his life has unconsciously or halfconsciously reproduced one and the same situation. First he has himself provoked a crisis, placing himself, everyone round about, and during his time as president, the entire country on the brink of catastrophe. Then he has fallen into prostration. Finally, mobilizing all his capacities, he has saved himself through heroic efforts, at times sacrificing other participants in the events. His repeating of this pattern, though less than deliberate, has been remarkably consistent. Events developed along these lines after the famous ‘Decree no. 1400’, when Yeltsin, by disbanding the parliament, provoked a minor civil war; during the first Chechnya war of 1994–96; and during the 1996 presidential election campaign. The same pattern defined his actions as president during the crises of 1998 and 1999. Davydov, using a chess analogy, was later to term this the ‘Yeltsin three-move problem’.5 Davydov links the formation of this unconscious desire for crisis with the future president’s experiences as a child. After his father was unjustly arrested, young Boris was spoiled by his mother. Then his father returned

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from the labour camp, and the main form of education received by the son consisted of beatings, cut short only by his mother’s salutary intervention. At the root of Yeltsin’s behaviour: there lies an elementary psychological mechanism which arose during his childhood after his father’s release, and which consists of the superimposing on one another of two parent paradigms. Indulged by his lonely mother, the boy demands attention, is naughty, commits shocking and disgraceful acts, and makes ‘mistakes’. Then comes Papa and deals him out a painful thrashing (a ‘crisis’). Silently, and perhaps even with gratitude, the boy accepts the blows. At the height of the thrashing, however, his mother bursts in, and he is rescued (‘deliverance’). So when the adult Yeltsin unreels his trademark ‘three-move problem’, he is recreating the ‘archetypal scene’ of a clash between his father and mother over their son.6 As a psychological type, Yeltsin is very Soviet; like the hero of Gorky’s poem, he ‘seeks out storms’. As president, he became at times a stern father to his people, like Stalin and other autocrats. At other times, he became a rescuing and comforting mother to himself, though not to the people. It is said that the president is unpredictable, that no-one knows how he is going to behave in the next moment, what he will do. Why is this impossible to predict? It is perfectly obvious what he is going to do. All that is needed is to understand his character, to see which stage of his three-act cycle he is in at a given time. If the cycle has just concluded, you have to expect ‘mistakes’ (when about to commit these, and at the moment of committing them, he is most often lively and ‘jocular’. If the ‘mistake’ has already been made, then along with the president you need to wait patiently for the ‘crisis’, in the run-up to which (and during it) the president will delay and procrastinate for a time, accumulating the potential for ‘alarm’. Finally, as the ‘crisis’ recedes, quick and decisive actions begin; this, properly speaking, is the stage of ‘deliverance’. Everything here is absolutely predictable, and each time, proceeding from the current context, it is possible to understand the material from which the master will mould his actions (that is, what he will actually do).7 The relations between the president and his entourage also recalled those within a family. At times Yeltsin would play the role of the ‘darling son’, watched over by ‘Mama’. For some reason, the people who played the role of ‘Mama-defender’ turned out to be solid ‘muzhiks’, Premier Chernomyrdin or General Korzhakov. Sometimes, Yeltsin himself began to watch over a ‘darling son’, usually a young head of the government – Yegor Gaidar, Sergey Kirienko, Sergey Stepashin or Vladimir Putin. It is true that the

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president was fickle. The roles changed quickly, and politicians who lost Yeltsin’s favour were quickly and firmly forgotten – at best. Taking their lead from the deft hand of Oleg Davydov, journalists began to describe the president’s associates as ‘the family’. This designation came to seem even more natural when, from 1996, Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko began increasingly to set the tone in the Kremlin team. Meanwhile, the important thing is not Yeltsin’s psychological peculiarities, which Davydov analyses in the spirit of Carl Jung. The social nature of the administration was such that its politics could not be different. Yeltsin was merely the ideal mouthpiece for a regime that rested on a bloc of the lumpen-bourgeoisie with the corrupt bureaucracy, a sort of unstable ‘coalition of cliques’. Social disarray is a condition for the survival of such a regime. Therefore, the regime itself from time to time provoked crises, which allowed a precarious balance of forces to be maintained. Nevertheless, it is hard to rid oneself of the thought that Yeltsin turned the whole country into a gigantic arena for the realization of his complexes. This is natural for any despot, for any state in which a system of personal power holds sway. For a country in which the will of millions is subordinate to the interests of thousands, and to the whims of a single individual. THE ROAD TO YELTSIN’S CONSTITUTION: DECEMBER 1993 The beginning of the transition from the USSR to the new Russia was marked by the elections of 1990. Prior to this, everything still fitted within the more or less predictable scenario of perestroika, proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev. Neither the party forums of the late 1980s, with their declarations of the necessity of reform, nor the conflict between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, nor the discussions at the All-Union Congress of People’s Deputies, nor even the rise of mass opposition movements and the miners’ strikes of 1989 bore witness as yet to the collapse of the state. But the team that had begun perestroika had now lost control over the situation. This team’s own decisions had called to life new social forces which found their scope restricted by the framework of the Soviet state. As a result of the 1990 elections, all the republics acquired their own authorities, independent of Moscow. The local bureaucracies, until this time confined to playing secondary roles, gained in self-confidence. The newly fledged deputies in the republics did not care particularly for the bureaucrats, but in order to wield power genuinely, despite the wishes of the union centre, they had to rest on the local apparatus. After Gorbachev became president of the USSR, Yeltsin made himself president of Russia. Lesser figures satisfied themselves with positions as mayors. In August 1991 everything came to an end. An attempt by the union bureaucrats to change the relationship of forces to their advantage led to the setting up of a State Committee on the Emergency Situation, the fate of which could be divined without much difficulty. Then followed an operetta-style

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coup, which culminated in the total liquidation of the remnants of the union structures. In December 1991, by agreement between the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the Soviet Union was abolished at Belovezhskaya Pushcha. The Communist Party was dissolved. The army began to be divided up and shared out. Then came the turn of the Soviets and of the state sector of the economy. The ‘property of all the people’ was turned into a limitless reservoir of funds for personal enrichment. The Soviets, which had brought Yeltsin to power, were declared to be relics of totalitarianism. These structures were not merely elements of the state system. They were part of the accustomed way of life, carrying out not only political and economic tasks, but also a multitude of social and even cultural ones. They performed these functions crudely and inefficiently, but now no-one would perform them at all. Many of the figures who, in the autumn of 1991, had welcomed the dissolution of the USSR soon finished up in opposition. Some were reacting to the growth of dissatisfaction among voters, others experienced pangs of conscience, and yet others simply felt that it was no longer the union structures that were collapsing, but their own Russian ones. Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoy and speaker of the Russian parliament Ruslan Khasbulatov were thus transformed from comrades-in-arms of Yeltsin into his enemies. The resistance of the Soviets was not broken immediately. In December Yeltsin threatened to disperse the Supreme Soviet, but did not carry out his threat. Then he tried to introduce a ‘special procedure for governing the country’, but once again retreated. The first test of forces was the referendum called by the authorities in April 1993; this was conducted under conditions of strict television censorship, and featured a degree of manipulation of public opinion that was without precedent even in Soviet times. The referendum yielded ambiguous results; a third of the population did not turn out to vote, and a call for the early election of deputies failed to pass. The regime, however, could now refer to the population’s trust in the president. The voting in April was the prelude to the bloodshed in October. Throughout 1993 the authorities had a single preoccupation: how to rid themselves of the deputies, the laws and the Constitutional Court, which still retained its free initiative. In September came the denouement. First the militia beat people on the streets, and then tanks fired on the parliament building. The defenders of the constitution were declared to be ‘rebels’, but once defeated they were not put on trial, just as there were no trials of the members of the GKChP.8 According to press accounts, the ‘Vimpel’ and ‘Alpha’ special forces units were ordered to seize the White House and kill everyone inside. The ‘Vimpel’ group refused to carry out this criminal order, and as a result was disbanded (some of its soldiers were subsequently employed by then foreign intelligence chief Yevgeny Primakov, who felt no particular sympathy for the course pursued by the Kremlin). The ‘Alpha’ group

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accepted the order, but interpreted it in its own fashion, agreeing to the surrender of the defenders of the parliament. The authorities were faced with the prospect of having to stage a public trial of people whose sole crime consisted of precisely following the letter of the law. The problem was solved through a deal with the opposition in the new State Duma. The amnesty adopted in the spring of 1994 was formulated in such a way that it was somewhat unclear who was being absolved of guilt – the people’s deputies and General Rutskoy, or Yeltsin and his associates. One way or another, Khasbulatov and Rutskoi went free, the latter even becoming governor of Kursk Province a few years later. Consolidating Yeltsin’s victory required free elections and a new constitution that would guarantee the president and his team complete impunity, and, most important, defend the rights of the new property-owners. The power of the Soviets was to be replaced by the regime of the ‘second republic’.9 On 12 December 1993 elections were held under new rules set out in a presidential decree. They were accompanied by chaos in the Central Electoral Commission, and by constant breaches of rules and deadlines. The result, as advertising prospectuses say, exceeded expectations. Half the electors did not turn out to vote, and of those who showed up at the polling stations, the overwhelming majority voted for opponents of the regime. In hindsight it emerged that things were even worse; the newspaper Izvestiya published materials indicating that in the official figures the number of citizens who had shown up at the polls was boosted substantially, so that the referendum would be recognized as valid, and the constitution as having been adopted. Even supporters of Yeltsin were forced to acknowledge that during the elections, massive fraud had occurred in the counting of votes. It is true that the consulting group headed by Aleksandr Sobyanin, after conducting a study ordered by the authorities, affirmed that the electoral commissions, appointed by the regime from among especially loyal people and invested with unlimited powers, had... favoured the opposition. Sobyanin nevertheless concluded that the electoral commissions had overstated the number of people who had voted, in order to ensure the success of Yeltsin’s constitution. According to Sobyanin’s figures, only 46.1 per cent of electors had voted, instead of the reported 54.8 per cent; consequently, the referendum was invalid. ‘It is significant’, writes Aleksandr Tarasov: that Sobyanin’s group first sent its report ‘to the leadership’, that is, to Yeltsin. The result was that the group was disbanded and Sobyanin was sacked. Sobyanin then made the report public. Since the report undermined the very concept of the legality of all the higher authorites by this time existing in Russia, including the State Duma, the authorities ignored it. It is interesting that according to reports in the Russian press, the results of research conducted independently of Sobyanin were published in Western newspapers; the authors of these studies also

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concluded that only 46 per cent of participants in the referendum had voted for the new constitution. In other words, the entire Second Republic regime was absolutely illegal.10 The decisive service in the adopting of the constitution was performed by the opposition. Having agreed to take part in the elections and the referendum, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and Zhirinovsky’s ‘liberal democrats’ mobilized their supporters to vote, ensuring that electors would turn up at the polling stations. If this had not been the case, no amount of fraud would have saved the constitution. Zhirinovsky called openly for the constitution to be supported, while the Communist Party leaders voiced formal opposition, but still called on their supporters to take part in the referendum. In the conditions of 1993, this was tantamount to supporting the coup d’etat. At a time when most of the left parties and groups were boycotting the elections or were barred from participating in them, Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party effectively monopolized the right to represent the left opposition in Russia. It was from this moment that the KPRF became not simply the largest left party in the country, but also the only ‘serious’ one. The Kremlin was extremely worried about the adoption of the constitution. The polling stations were still operating, and the ballot boxes had not yet been unsealed, when official spokespeople began declaring that the Fundamental Law had been approved. Subsequently, the Central Electoral Commission attempted to justify itself, repeatedly providing more exact figures for the number of voters. As the ‘exactitude’ increased, the number of people who had voted ‘against’ continually diminished. The figures in the calculations did not add up, and the percentages announced did not correspond to the totals cited for the number of voters. However, even if the Central Electoral Commission were correct, the constitution still would not have been adopted. Under the still-valid law governing referendums, this required a vote in favour by 50 per cent of the overall number of citizens entitled to vote. Yeltsin’s constitution was supported by only a third at most. THE EQUILIBRIUM OF SEMI-COLLAPSE The date when Russian sovereignty had been declared in 1990 and Yeltsin had been elected president of Russia in 1991 – 12 June – was proclaimed ‘Independence Day’. Although no-one could explain precisely which conquerors we had been liberated from, one thing was indisputable: with the collapse of the USSR, all state doctrines would have to be formulated afresh. New concepts of foreign policy, defence and federalism would be needed. Yeltsin had begun by waging a struggle against the union centre for the sovereignty of Russia. It was completely logical that at this stage of struggling for power he would attempt to secure the support of the regional elites, promising them the opportunity to ‘seize’ for themselves as much sovereignty

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as they wanted. This slogan worked; the regional chiefs supported Yeltsin against Gorbachev, at the same time taking almost limitless powers. After Yeltsin’s power in the Kremlin was consolidated, the problem took on a new aspect: if not to strip these excessive powers from the regional leaders, then at least to confine them within certain boundaries. The conflict between Moscow and the leadership of the Republic of Tatarstan, which proclaimed itself a ‘subject of international law’, ended in a compromise. A more serious crisis broke out in the North Caucasus. There, a real war almost erupted between two subjects of the federation, Ingushetia and Northern Osetia. This was followed by military action in Chechnya. Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudaev proclaimed independence, while an armed opposition called for reunification with Russia, at the same time organizing contraband trade in stolen Russian weapons. From 1991 to 1994, however, the situation froze in a state of ‘neither peace nor war’. Dudaev anticipated that, after a few years of resistance, talks would begin, and that these would define a special status for Chechnya. In Moscow, however, the decision was different. The unresolved Chechen problem became a factor in Russian internal politics. It was used to change the relationship of political forces between the authorities and the opposition, to increase the popularity ratings of the authorities, and so forth. The inevitability of the Chechen war was thus determined in advance, and its sources must be sought not in the Caucasus, but in Moscow. History shows that a crisis of the state is always followed by a powerful rise in centripetal tendencies. Both in the Russian regions and in the former Soviet republics, nostalgia increased for the now-destroyed unity. The coming to power of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus marked a shift in mass sentiment. At the head of the Belarus state was a convinced opponent of ‘independence’. Without Russia, however, the union could not be reassembled, and Russia was less interested than others in restoring the old bonds, since it had suffered less from the collapse of the union. It was stuck in a condition of half-collapse, of sluggishly flowing national catastrophe. The state had not suffered definitive destruction, but neither had it taken on real integrity. Both at the centre and the local level, the authorities sensed dimly that sooner or later the relationship of forces would change, and that victors and vanquished would appear. However, politicians on the all-Russian axis, both from the government and the opposition, did not especially welcome the prospect of conflict with the local elites. Nor were the local elites anxious to be involved with the centre, understanding that they would not win an all-out clash. After the autumn of 1993, when the Yeltsin regime crushed the opposition in the capital, the regional elites preferred to avoid disputes with the centre, provided that the centre did not intervene in the internal politics of the regions. An unstable equilibrium arose. Everyone understood that this solution was not definitive, but in the existing situation it suited almost everyone.

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ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE During the 1990s Russia experienced a comprehensive economic catastrophe. Industrial production fell by half. Living standards declined dramatically, and life expectancy was shortened. Liberal apologists for the regime argued that the official figures on the decline in output did not include the informal and ‘shadow’ economies, and that the situation was therefore better than it seemed at first glance. The trouble was that the decline affected above all the most capital-intensive sectors of modern industry, science and the sphere of application of advanced technologies. The ‘informal’ sector developed for the most part on the technological level of the early middle ages. In other words, the decline was not a side-effect of modernization. On the contrary, it was born of the primitivization of the economy. The catastrophe had been in gestation for a long time, and was not the result only of Yeltsin’s policies. The inefficiency of centralized planning and the half-measures of the Gorbachev years also played a role. The Yeltsin regime, however, managed to turn an economic crisis into a national disaster. As early as 1990 the television, newspapers and magazines, in most cases still controlled by the CPSU, began to conduct a campaign in support of privatization. People who had doubts about the new miracle-working prescription were denied a voice. No-one discussed the advisability of the measures being urged, or their scale, or the possible consequences; the discussion proceeded on a purely ideological level. De facto privatization began even earlier, when directors of state enterprises were given the rights of property-owners. The directors established numerous cooperatives and firms, into which funds were siphoned from the state sector. The privatization of profits antedated the privatization of property by at least a year. Once capital had been accumulated, it was possible to move on to the next phase of ‘reform’. Yegor Gaidar, the chief architect of neo-liberal reforms in Russia in the early 1990s, was quite frank in this respect. His government saw one of its tasks as being precisely ‘the exchange of nomenklatura power for property’. For those who found this off-putting, Gaidar explained: ‘It sounds unpleasant, but if we are to be realistic, if we are to proceed from the relationship of forces that had come into being by the late 1980s, this was the only road to the peaceful reform of society.’ Like it or not, this was the ‘optimal solution’, a ‘step forward from “imperialism” to a free, open market’.11 The situation that arose in the early 1990s is depicted exquisitely by Viktor Pelevin in his novel Generation P. Meanwhile the same faces, of which everyone had become thoroughly sick over the past twelve years, were shown on the television. Now they said exactly the same things for which other people had been jailed, only

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the statements now were far more bold, unflinching and radical. [Just imagine] It is Germany in 1942, and Doctor Goebbels is shouting hysterically over the radio about the abyss into which fascism led the nation. A former commandant of Auschwitz heads a commission on the apprehension of Nazi criminals, SS generals talk simply and clearly about liberal values, and the whole business is headed by a gauleiter from East Prussia who has finally seen the light.12 The point, of course, is not in the personalities so much as in the social nature of the regime. In a number of Eastern European countries, former party bureaucrats were removed from the levers of power (and the liberalminded intelligentsia in Russia acknowledged, with sighs, that these countries had achieved more). The general course of development in these countries, however, was precisely the same as in Russia. The ease with which the changes occurred in the ‘fraternal countries’ was predetermined by the political and social shifts in the Soviet Union, and the trend of development was general throughout all the states of the former ‘communist bloc’. The nomenklatura could no longer rule in the old way, but it quickly learned to rule in the new. In order to retain and strengthen their positions in the changed circumstances, the ruling circles had themselves to come up with a new model of power and a new structure of property. The nomenklatura became bourgeoisified. It transformed itself, incorporating new people into its ranks. Alas, the new elites were even more parasitic than their forebears. They were incapable of ensuring the country’s development, and uninterested in doing so. We received peripheral capitalism while totally lacking a national bourgeoisie. There could not, however, have been any form of capitalism in Russia other than the peripheral variety. In the final accounting, this is the sole instance in world history when capitalist structures have been immediately established in the epoch of globalization. They were established for the specific purpose of servicing the centres of the world system. Critics of neo-liberalism were outraged at the way property was divided up. The State Duma deputy Oleg Smolin writes that, in order to speed up privatization to the utmost, to create a base of social support for the new authorities and, at the same time, to guarantee their own material interests for several generations ahead, the organizers of privatization conducted it to the advantage of people who either had significant financial means or were filling high posts in the social hierarchy. To this end, privileged conditions were officially established for the managerial apparatus in obtaining a share of the former ‘property of all the people’. Besides this, and on a much greater scale, the conditions for such appropriation were established unofficially. Most of the highly profitable enterprises were divided up in such a way that the ‘tastiest bits of the pie’ went to ‘insiders’. The family of former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin thus became participants in the privatization

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of Gazprom, while the Yeltsin family featured in the privatization of the company Aeroflot – Russian International Airlines.13 The question is nevertheless being asked: might things have been different? A careful look at the ‘conditions for the task’ shows that in principle, the outcome could not have been otherwise. Property could not have been sold in post-Soviet Russia. The key thing here is not the moral qualities of the politicians. In 1990 and 1991 even liberal economists were calculating the potential monetary demand of the population for the means of production at no more than 100–150 billion rubles. Meanwhile, the overall value in early 1970s prices of the basic assets in the USSR that in their greater part were subject to privatization came (minus land) to 2 trillion rubles! Even if we suppose that in the sphere of the ‘shadow economy’ there were quantities of capital not taken into account, effective demand could not have exceeded an additional 2 or 3 per cent. The hope that the enterprises would be bought up by foreigners was also in vain. The amount of free capital in the world is limited. Russia was not the only country that had undertaken to privatize its property. On this level, all the former communist states were competing among themselves, and also with the countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia (not to speak of the continuing privatization in Western Europe). Moreover, and fortunately for the world economy, not all capital was being directed into buying up state property. A certain amount was also being invested in production; the countries of South-East Asia were attracting multi-billion-dollar direct investments with their booming growth. In such a situation, in short, the large-scale privatization of state property in Russia was possible only if one binding condition were satisfied: everything had to go on the cheap, in practice for nothing. Foreign capital could buy property on a massive scale only if it went at throwaway prices (which was in fact the case). The result was that, from the very beginning, Western investors were included in the game on the basis of the rules of ‘bandit capitalism’, and could no longer act as ‘efficient and responsible owners’. The property could not be sold, so it had to be given away. Having begun by criticizing communism and socialism as ‘ideologies of redistribution’, the neo-liberals in Russia and Eastern Europe themselves quickly shifted to a policy of redistribution, on a historically unprecedented scale. Only this time, what was involved was dividing up resources used by many people, and handing them over to a tiny, privileged minority. The result was that, from the very outset, the construction of captialism could proceed only on a nonmarket, or more precisely, anti-market basis. As the economist Oleg Pchelintsev notes, the whole spirit of this procedure constradicts the proclaimed goals, since the absolute law of the market is the reciprocal nature of transactions. Here, we were beginning with a gigantic programme of gift-giving, a true ‘black partition’.14 Post-Soviet capitalism was doomed from the very beginning to turn out ‘incorrect’ – corporatist, bureaucratic and mafia-ridden. The trouble was not only with the peculiarities of the Soviet past, but also with the very logic of

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the development of the periphery within the framework of the world capitalist system. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that capitalism integrates non-capitalist structures into itself, by no means necessarily transforming them according to its own image and likeness. Becoming part of the world system, these structures inevitably undergo a certain transformation, but it is far from true that they always become capitalist. This applies to slavery in the USA, to landlordism in India or nineteenth-century Russia, and to the post-Soviet enterprise. Luxemburg saw the main function of the non-capitalist elements of the world system as being the consumption of goods produced in the ‘centre’. Later experience showed that the periphery is not only a market for the sale of goods, but also a reservoir of cheap labour power and a source of cheap raw materials. It is the latter role that has been assigned to Russia. Since neither shadow nor ‘legal’ private business had enough funds by 1991 to buy a large portion of the enterprises, the ‘voucher’ scheme was introduced. Anatoly Chubais, who headed the State Property Committee throughout the ‘reform period’, repeated constantly that his main concern was impoverished old people, to whom he was giving a chance. The consequences of voucherization, however, provide an unmistakeable answer to the question of whose interests the distributor of property was supposed to serve. Each of the country’s citizens received a certificate with a face value of 10,000 rubles (the Marxist sociologist Aleksandr Tarasov called these ‘sucker bait’). The value of the basic assets of enterprises was frozen in effect at the level of the 1960s, while in the conditions of the free market, all other prices had risen by hundreds of times. By mid-1992, enterprises were being sold for prices which at most represented 10 per cent of their market value. For the ‘new Russians’, even this gift was not enough. Controlling the market for securities as well as the State Property Committee itself, they beat the market price of a voucher down to 3,000–4,000 rubles, buying out huge numbers of ‘suckers’ for a song. By concentrating the vouchers in ‘investment funds’, they could seize any enterprise almost free of cost. The voucher scheme also had another significance, no less important. On the psychological level, the country’s entire population was turned into accomplices in the theft. People who refused to take their vouchers were in the minority. As was to be expected, the overwhelming majority of people not only received nothing from the voucher privatization, but suffered directly from it. Moreover, practically everyone knew from the very beginning that the losers would outnumber the winners. For some reason, however, everyone counted on being among the winners. Voucherization, therefore, was not only a form of mass deception, but also a kind of bribery and demoralization of the workers. Another form of bribery was the transfer of part of the shares in enterprises to the ownership of the labour collectives. In practice, neither the voucher schemes, nor the direct participation of workers in privatization allowed

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them to really participate in the seizure of property. An example is provided by the Vyborg Cellulose and Paper Combine (TsBK), where in 1999 a real war broke out between the workers and the foreign owners. At the beginning of privatization the workers received 17 per cent of the shares, and by 1999 workers held no more than 1.5 per cent. As soon as ‘liberalization and reform’ began, wages at the enterprise ceased being paid, and cuts began to be made to the workforce. At the same time, the prices of literally everything soared upward. In these conditions, shares were bought from the workers at their face value of 2,000 rubles each. ‘For hungry people who had not been paid their wages, this was a vast sum’, a trade union representative subsequently related. The remaining 1.5 per cent of the shares would have been sold as well, but ‘interest in them had vanished’.15 In the course of voucher privatization and the redistribution of property that followed, the workers were deceived and robbed, but on the moral plane they themselves bear part of the responsibility for what happened, since instead of going on to the streets, occupying their factories and defending them from seizure by private capital, they themselves took vouchers and, at meetings of the labour collectives, discussed different variants of privatization. In this sense, our people got what they deserved. The effective declassing of the masses was a part of Soviet social history. Accordingly, the workers in the 1990s behaved not as ‘conscious proletarians’, but as shortsighted consumers – and this was only natural. The voucher privatization was accompanied by a new redistribution of property at the top levels of society. Earlier, stock-market speculators and mafia groups had served the directorial elite and the nomenklatura as these layers had enriched themselves. Now, the speculators and mafiosi became an independent force. It was they who technically controlled operations with the vouchers, while at the same time developing other types of commercial activity. In the course of 1991 these groups were joined by middle and upperlevel party and Komsomol functionaries. The collapse of the CPSU had allowed these functionaries to free themselves from all control and to appropriate vast assets. The sometime officials succeeded in exchanging power for property, while retaining their connections and influence. AFTER PRIVATIZATION Privatization gave rise to contradictions that were new to Soviet society. For decades, the Soviet productive combine not only gave people work, but also provided many of their social needs (for housing, child care, leisure, health care and much more). From the point of view of the free market, this was unproductive expenditure that lowered efficiency, but there was no new structure that might have taken on these tasks. The state, that had given away its property for a trifle, no longer had the means. A market solution to social problems, even on the level to which Soviet citizens had been

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accustomed, would have required big wage increases, that would have been impossible without decisively undermining enterprise competitiveness. The attempts by enterprises to hand over part of their functions to the municipalities ended in complete failure everywhere except in a few of the richest cities. In many cases, the process took place in the opposite direction. For example, the administration of the settlement of Sovetsky in Leningrad Province transferred its water supply, heating and communications installations to the earlier-mentioned Vyborg TsBK. According to the ironic remark of a Moscow journalist, the local authorities were ready to give everything to the workers. ‘They would willingly hand over the bank, the telegraph and the bridge to the latter.’ There was no money in any case for maintaining the infrastructure. ‘What [the owners] are unwilling to give the workers is the combine itself, the sole source of earnings for the local population.’16 The collapse of social policy stimulated inflation. The privatized enterprises, while contributing nothing to the budget, required subsidies. The budget deficit, already colossal, expanded even further thanks to the ‘encouragement of privatization’. The government relied in the first instance on providing cheap credits to the ‘privatized sector’. The finance ministry tried to solve the problem by levying super-high taxes, which led to a new fall in output. Both enterprises and private individuals began evading taxes. Unable to counter this massive resistance, the government introduced more and more new imposts, penalizing the few who were still prepared to pay. Budget revenues steadily diminished, while expenditures increased without let-up. More than half of the volume of industrial production was lost, and the technological level declined. Privatization did not promote the formation of a competitive market, instead giving rise to uncontrolled monopolies which exploited the consumer. The indices of enterprise performance deteriorated. In the privatized sector, the productivity of labour steadily fell losses increased, the competitiveness of production fell, and foreign markets were lost. The economy plunged into an ‘investment hole’. As early as the 1970s, the rate of technological innovation in the Soviet economy had begun to slow. If the question had been only of a growing lag behind the West, that would not have been so bad. But machinery was wearing out and breaking down. By the early 1990s, substantially greater sums than in the 1970s and 1980s needed to be invested each year simply in order to allow industry to operate in normal fashion. In practice, the very reverse happened. The ‘commercial structures’ were not about to modernize production. They did not have the money required, and they preferred to invest abroad the profits they were extracting. After being privatized, the enormous truck producer KAMAZ promptly suffered a disastrous fire. The Russian government handed over sums of many millions from its budget to allow the now-private plant to be rebuilt, but, despite this, the production of trucks did not return to normal. Industrial

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accidents became an everyday matter. Plants burnt down, gas pipelines exploded, trains were derailed and aircraft crashed. The only serious investor, it was found, remained the authorities, central or local. Other privatized vehicle plants followed KAMAZ in demanding huge sums from the state, threatening to halt production and throw tens of thousands of workers onto the streets. The government of the city of Moscow was forced to buy the ZIL and AZLK vehicle plants from their private owners. In the course of this it emerged that the privatization had taken place in violation of the anti-monopoly legislation. In the case of the ZIL plant, there was even a special letter from Gaidar and Chubais stating that the law did not extend to this enterprise. After the private owners had run the enterprises into the ground, the city authorities began restoring them at the expense of the taxpayer. Capital flight became a real economic disaster. According to figures cited by the newspaper The Moscow Times, throughout the whole Yeltsin period capital flight from Russia amounted to US$1–2 billion each month. As well as direct transfers of money, the methods used included ‘phony importexport documents and insider price manipulations’. According to expert accounts, the overall quanity of capital that ‘fled’ the country between 1992 and the end of the Yeltsin era exceeded US$150 billion. Liberal economists attributed the capital flight to high taxes, a poor legislative base, entrepreneurs’ uncertainty about their future prospects and crime. The Moscow Times noted other causes as well. Often, entrepreneurs hid money from their own business partners, or set out ‘to conceal pillage of natural resources or stripped factory assets’.17 Typically, the most active exporters of capital were companies that were in a privileged position, and did not have any reason to complain of difficult conditions for business development. Among them were the oil company Yukos, the second-largest in Russia; Aeroflot – Russian International Airlines; and even the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, which in principle was supposed to combat capital flight. Ultimately, the flight of capital was merely a natural manifestation of the logic of the ‘open economy’ in the framework of the bourgeois world system. Capital is redistributed between countries, in natural fashion abandoning the countries of the periphery and becoming concentrated in ‘centres’ where the possibilities for using it are better. Capital flight was accompanied by a brain drain. There was no work for scientists at home, and they were forced to seek sustenance abroad. Russian Academy of Sciences President Yury Osipov calculated that, compared to 1990, total appropriations for science in Russia in 1993 had fallen for various programmes by a factor of 4 to 10. Over the same period, more than 500 scientists left to take up permanent foreign residence, while a further 1,700 had left for ‘prolonged trips abroad’. Russia was flung back decades, losing almost all the achievements of the post-Stalin period. In the space of a year, inflation wiped out savings that people had spent many years accumulating. From the winter of 1993,

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problems with heating residential buildings began arising regularly in many regions. Developments in the years from 1992 to 1994 were particularly dramatic. Huge plants shut down. Russian products, including goods that enjoyed a ready market abroad, disappeared from the shops. Private retail outlets that had been opened in 1990 and 1991 by small entrepreneurs now closed their doors. City streets, however, were turned into endless flea markets, where it was possible to buy anything. People made money by buying goods and reselling them, or sold off their own possessions, hoping somehow to stay afloat. Each day there were fewer buses on the streets, but more rats. Where once there had been public telephones, there were now empty booths. Ragged old women sold one or another cheap object in pedestrian underpasses. The streets recalled rubbish tips. Transport and housing became more expensive. Free services became a memory, and things that for most people had been normal items of consumption became inaccessible luxuries. As birth rates slumped dramatically and death rates rose, the population of Russia fell by more than 3 million. The life expectancy of an average male in Russia ended up lower than in Indonesia, the Philippines or Pakistan. Diseases once thought to have been conquered, diphtheria and in some places cholera, again made an appearance. The numbers of people infected with scabies and lice increased sharply. Typhoid fever began spreading once again. A shift to compulsory medical insurance ushered in the collapse of the entire health care system. Ambulance services, hospitals and regional polyclinics were left completely without funds. Consumption of meat fell by 23 per cent, of fish by a quarter and of milk by 28 per cent. In the pre-reform years, the average Russian family had spent a third of its income on food. By 1993 it was necessary to pay 70 per cent of earnings for a significantly worse diet. According to figures cited by chief sanitary inspector of Russia, Yevgeny Belyaev, for the first time since the end of the Second World War the majority of Russian citizens were chronically malnourished. The buying power of the population fell to the levels of the 1950s. The country had not known such shocks in peacetime since the era of Stalin’s ‘reconstruction’ in the 1930s. THE COMPRADOR MODEL The foreign debt led to the open financial dictatorship of the International Monetary Fund. If dependent capitalism in Eastern Europe developed according to a ‘Latin American’ scenario, in Russia the scenario was African. Predetermining this scenario were changes in state institutions. The bureaucracy reached dimensions unprecedented in Soviet times. In Moscow, where all the central ministries and departments remained after the collapse of the union, there were not enough government buildings. The orgy of theft of state property, together with the collapse of the constitutional order, undermined all respect for the law. Corruption became part of everyday life, crime grew at catastrophic rates and ‘normal’ entrepre-

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neurship became indistinguishable from criminal activity. Western firms that had penetrated the limitless expanses of the ‘wild East’ became hostages to the culture that had taken shape (not without their help), undergoing ‘barbarization’. Instead of the promised growth of the ‘middle class’, social polarization intensified. In 1993, 20 per cent of the population received 50 per cent of the income, while about a third of citizens lived in poverty. The bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which had maintained its positions despite the dividing up of property, aspired to stability. Achieving its goals in 1992–93, it then became more and more conservative. Following the elections of December 1993, these elements removed Gaidar and his colleagues from the levers of power. Their representative was Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who promised stabilization and support for production. By contrast, the ‘new Russians’, bankers and speculators, representatives of the ‘young generation of reformers’, strove to continue their risky game. To them, factories were no more than mountains of scap metal to be sold at a good price. Property seemed more valuable than infrastructure, the price of the dollar more important than indices of production, and the export of oil far more profitable than its refining. The capitalization of Russia proceeded beneath the slogan of ‘modern consumption’. In the final analysis, the object of consumption became the very plants and factories, taken over by owners with a lumpen-criminal psychology. Since the West was declared the source of progress, the elite felt no pangs of conscience in helping foreigners to bring the country to ruin. Uniting bureaucratic and comprador capital were corruption and a desire to use the power of the state to exert control over resources. Dividing them were different approaches to the question of how to dispose of the booty. All the Eastern European reforms were based on one or another formula of compromise between these two groups. Only in Russia, however, did the lumpen-comprador group achieve a comprehensive triumph. The success of the ‘new Russians’ was linked to the fact that they were supported by elements among the enterprise directors and ministerial functionaries. The production for export of oil, gas, coal and industrial raw materials enriched managerial executives of the ‘Soviet school’ no less than ‘Westernizing’ financiers. By the end of 1993, however, the vast exports of raw materials from Russia had led to price falls on world markets. While exporting more raw materials, Russia received less money. The accelerating breakdown of the railway system brought increased transport costs, and domestic prices rose even higher than international ones. Leading figures in the fuel and energy complex began sounding the alarm. The weakness of the neo-liberal project found expression in the fact that the ‘reformers’ were simply unable to call a temporary halt even when their own interests required it. The principle asserting itself here was that of the bicycle: stop, and you fall off. The ‘new Russians’ were simply not prepared for running the country under conditions of stability, since they had no idea how to extract money from the development of production. Not only the

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indispensable personnel and knowledge were lacking, but also the necessary structures. Nor was the capital available. Hence the irreconcilable struggle of the ‘reformers’ with the ‘opposition’ within their own camp. This gave rise first to the conflict with the parliament that blew up into a two-day civil war; then, by early 1994, the conflict had relocated itself within the government. The economic catastrophe turned into a paralysis of power. The bloc formed by the ‘financial’ and ‘production’ elites made it possible to press ahead on the neo-liberal course. The frictions between them bore witness to the impending collapse of the entire project.

Part II

A Monarchist ‘Republic’

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October 1993 was a decisive turning-point for the fate of Russia. The ‘October Revolution of Boris Yeltsin’ ushered in a period of institutionalization of the regime. On the whole, Yeltsin’s constitution was observed. This was not without a certain difficulty; the authorities were constantly in danger of ‘falling outside the field of legality’, and rumours of a new ‘revolution from above’, of the cancelling of elections and the banning of opposition parties, accompanied Russian political life throughout this period. Nevertheless, until the end of 1999 the Kremlin tried to stick by the rules. The only resort to violent methods by the Russian authorities was in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996. Russian society took a profoundly negative attitude to this war, but in essence, what happened in Chechnya was no longer part of Russia’s internal political life. LAW AND DISORDER Yeltsin’s constitution was not obeyed because it was better or less contradictory than the last ‘Soviet’ constitution, which had been blown away by the tanks in October 1993. It was worse. Its text abounded in ‘dark places’, in inconsistencies and contradictions. What, for example, happened to the ‘separation of powers’ if the regional governors were also senators, sitting in the Council of the Federation? What happened with the numerous rights that were proclaimed, but not guaranteed? A more convincing explanation of the fact that the constitution worked more or less was the fact that it corresponded to the aims and objectives of those who had drafted it. In essence, the constitution had been put together by Yeltsin in order to strengthen his personal position. The Fundamental Law of the Russian Federation, adopted in 1993, was a most peculiar document. For example, the way it dealt with the question of a vote of no confidence in the government was quite unique. After an initial vote of no confidence, nothing would happen whatever. If in the course of two weeks another such vote were carried, once again nothing would happen. But after a third vote of no confidence, the parliament would 105

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be dissolved. The government, in which the deputies had expressed their lack of trust, would of course remain. The president was given the opportunity to constantly blackmail the Duma with the threat of dissolution. There was no need, however, to follow up on these threats. The deputies, having understood the lesson of 1993, criticized the government at length in their speeches, but when it came to voting, proved exceptionally obedient. This was an assembly of the defeated, a parliament of the intimidated. As Pastukhov admitted, after 1993 the main ‘guarantee’ of stability was ‘the uncertainty of the opposition that repressive methods would not be used against it’.1 In Russia, from 1993, the basis of the political system (just as in Kazakhstan, Belarus or Georgia) became ‘strong presidential power’. Formally, Russia stood in the same ranks with the presidential republics of the West, but what existed in practice was a quite specific phenomenon that had no analogy in the countries of developed capitalism. According to the Hungarian researcher Tamas Krausz: The Russian presidential system should not be confused either with that of America or France, since despite all the ‘institutional identity or similarity’, it has a different social base, historical function and psychology. The Russian presidential power is of course a particular authoritarian regime, and Yeltsin stands closer to Pinochet than to Reagan and Thatcher. At the same time, a new historical phenomenon is involved, since the Yeltsin regime represents such a peculiar mix of particular elements of bourgeois democracy, political dictatorship and autocracy, a mix that later on will itself become a source of analogies for the present and future development of countries that have undergone a change of regime. This is what constitutes the historical uniqueness of Yeltsinism as a presidential system.2 The specific character of the Yeltsin presidency is explained by its historical and social role. As they were integrated into the capitalist world system, the countries of the former Soviet Union ran up against an almost unresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, the dividing up of property, the dramatic increase in material inequality, and the redistribution of resources to the advantage of the world capitalist centre gave rise to such social stresses that supporting democratic institutions was practically impossible. Bourgeois tradition supposes that a numerous middle class constitutes the basis for stable democracy. The degree to which this is true is another question, but what is indisputable is that in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan during the period of capitalist restoration, the middle class was small and weak. The type of regime that was thought necessary in these circumstances was an authoritarian one. On the other hand, however, the integration of the former Soviet republics into the world system required the adoption of a whole series

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of standards, including legal ones. Without respect for the law, private property cannot function efficiently. The hyper-presidential constitutions in Russia and other post-Soviet countries were an attempt to resolve this contradiction. The constitutions gave their blessing to regimes of personal power, reducing to a minimum the ability of society to influence the political process, while at the same time creating a certain ‘legal’ basis for the personal power of the president, and investing this power with a ‘democratic’ form. The West took a completely tolerant attitude to this variety of democracy provided that the regime’s economic and foreign policies matched Western interests. When the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan extended their terms in office through referendums, official figures in Washington did not rate this as a particular breach of civil freedoms. In exactly the same way, the persecution of the opposition in these republics and in Georgia went totally unnoticed in Western Europe and the USA. While issuing condemnations of the bombing in Chechnya, Western diplomats did their utmost to ensure that these declarations had no practical consequences for Russia. But when the president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, extended his term using the same methods as his colleagues in Central Asia, a storm of indignation erupted in the West. As a president, Lukashenmko was not in fact better or worse than others. Compared to the leaders of Kazakhstan, Georgia or Uzbekistan, he might even have been considered a democrat. To his misfortune, however, he dared to defy the will of the International Monetary Fund, rejecting its economic prescriptions and refusing to privatize industry. Worse still, he also refused to enter into geopolitical partnership with the West, trying to resurrect his republic’s links with the former ‘fraternal republics’ of the USSR. Just like Yeltsin, Lukashenko disbanded a parliament that did not suit him, and redrafted the constitution. In the West this was met with an outrage as vehement and unanimous as the support that Yeltsin had attracted when he did exactly the same. Meanwhile, in Belarus as in Russia, the hands of the president were untied once the new order had been imposed, and the opposition was deprived of all influence on decision-making. From this point, the president could swear loyalty to the norms of the constitution as much as he liked, since these norms no longer contradicted the principle of autocracy. Nevertheless, the main reason why legal norms were generally observed in Russia between 1994 and 1999 was the economic stabilization achieved by the government of Viktor Chernomyrdin. This was a strange stability, since production was continuing to fall. All the same, the system managed to consolidate itself to a degree. In place of the ‘new Russians’, there were now oligarchs. The country’s basic assets had been divided up, and large financial-industrial groups had been established, with almost all the major financial channels and the most profitable areas of production under their control. It was not by chance that

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journalists bestowed the name ‘oligarchs’ on the leaders of these groups. The influence exerted by the oligarchs was ensured not only by their vast financial resources, but also by their closeness to the authorities. As described by one Moscow journalist, the oligarchs were capitalists who depended ‘totally and absolutely on the state’.3 Since the oligarchs did little investing, it was the government that ultimately ensured the reproduction of the model that had been established. Nevertheless, the regime in turn depended on the oligarchs, who lobbied for its interests, paid for the political and propaganda campaigns of the official politicians, and often simply supported ‘necessary’ state functionaries. It could be said that corruption became a functional part of the system. It was a type of link between the bureaucracy and leading economic interests, a link without which both the development of enterprises and the taking of decisions by the state would have been impossible.4 The corruption in turn was regulated and ‘normalized’. Within such a system, fighting against corruption became not only pointless, but also harmful; any serious effort to mount such a struggle would soon throw economic relationships into disorder, and paralyse the state. Radically lowering the level of corruption, it could be said, was impossible without destroying the whole logic of ‘capitalism Russian style’. Eradicating it completely was unthinkable; so long as the bureaucracy and the authorities existed, corruption would be present in some form. THE RUSSIAN LUXEMBOURG An important difference between the years from 1994 to 1999 and the preceding period was the appearance in Russia of something resembling a new middle class. This no longer consisted of the ‘freeloaders’ who had gathered around MMM, the pyramid company that became a symbol of commercial fraud, following its collapse. The new social group that had arisen in the large cities clearly bore the marks of peripheral capitalism. In theory, small entrepreneurs should have belonged to the ‘middle class’, but their situation remained wretched. In 1998 sociologists noted that many small entrepreneurs were ‘scarcely making ends meet’, and that ‘on the basis of their living standards’ they could not be ‘assigned to the middle strata’.5 In the 1970s sociologists wrote of ‘Belgium in India’; this was not even a middle class in the Western sense of the word, but consisted simply of people employed in the most modern and prosperous sectors of the economy, people associated with exports, imports and services to the rich, and whose incomes were comparable with those in Europe. In terms of social status, they were scarcely superior to their colleagues who were sunk in poverty. It was simply that a secretary working for a transnational corporation earned several times more than a very similar woman working for a small provincial employer. We now find not only ‘Belgium in India’, but also ‘Luxembourg in Russia’. This latter also has its entrepreneurs and workers, its elites and

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lower orders. But what an abyss separates them from the vast majority of their fellow citizens! Between 1994 and 1998 the population of the ‘Russian Luxembourg’ did not increase substantially, but its material position improved markedly. The ‘new Russians’ were simply not able to eat, drink or carry off everything, so a spontaneous redistribution began in favour of those further down. In order to see this, it was enough to wander through the shops where the purchasers were not exclusively ‘new Russians’, or to watch the streets, where along with luxurious Mercedes cars there also appeared large numbers of less expensive, but still eminently respectable vehicles. Members of the new middle class bought computers, logged onto the Internet, and subscribed to ‘glossy’ magazines. Since most of the ‘Russian Luxembourg’ was located in Moscow, St Petersburg and a few other large cities, it is not hard to see how important the loyalty of this stratum was for the authorities. As in the countries of the Third World, the ‘new middle layer’ expanded as the result of an influx of managers working for transnational corporations, and, at times, of employees of the export-oriented sectors. Considering the extremely low price of labour power in Russia (from 5 to 10 per cent of Western levels), it is significant that the sums spent by companies on administration and marketing were often not just comparable to those in the West, but exceeded them. On the one hand, this swollen and exceedingly expensive managerial apparatus reduced the efficiency of the companies (this was equally true both of Russian and transnational firms). On the other hand, it helped broaden the social base of the Yeltsin regime, and created the impression that an internal market was appearing. Nevertheless, the decisive role in the development of the new middle stratum was played by the growth in demand from the rich for various services. These were services in a very broad sense, from the servicing of accounts in commercial banks to ideological services in the press and on television. Unlike the situation in the West, managers in productive enterprises were represented very weakly in the Russian middle class. The inhabitants of the ‘Russian Luxembourg’ received their income in the final instance from the same ‘new Russians’ or the same state. But since most of them were dynamic, educated professional people, they were convinced that their prosperity was the result of their own efforts, and not of the ‘system’. They preferred not to reflect on the fact that everything in society was interconnected, and that ‘honest’ incomes were inseparable from ‘bandit’ spending. And indeed, are good hairdressers, chefs or computer programmers obliged to know where their clients’ money has come from? Although the inhabitants of the ‘Russian Luxembourg’ thought the outrages being committed in ‘great Russia’ had nothing to do with them, they did not feel grateful to the authorities, and constantly complained of the ‘corruption’, ‘inefficiency’ and ‘bureaucracy’ that held sway in society. Up to a point, the authorities in turn could take an indulgent attitude to such grumbling, understanding that the people involved were wonderfully integrated into the

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existing system, and were therefore uninterested in bringing about changes to the larger picture. In 1998 the crash of the ruble struck at precisely these layers, turning many prosperous ‘yuppies’ into unemployed, stripping them of their accounts in failed banks, and leading to the closure of numerous subsidiaries and branch offices, in the most various fields, that had sustained a whole army of professional employees. Until this time, the ‘middle layers’ had felt relatively secure, and honestly believed they had gained as a result of the reforms. As a result, they had provided the social base of the regime. THE 1995 ELECTIONS If the victory of Zhirinovsky’s LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) and the Communists in the 1993 elections had been a sensation, the success of the Communist Party in the parliamentary elections of 1995 surprised noone. It occurred against the background of a general leftward shift in the countries of Eastern Europe, of mutterings from the middle strata, and of increasing dissatisfaction with the Kremlin regime on the part of the provincial masses. Understanding the situation, the Kremlin analysts tried to establish a twoparty system artificially, out of parties controlled by the president. The right wing would be represented by the movement Our Home is Russia (NDR). The task of building and heading this structure was immediately entrusted to Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin. On the ‘left’ wing, a bloc headed by State Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin was hurriedly set up. From the very beginning, it was clear that nothing would come from this manoeuvre. Provincial leaders flocked to sign up with Chernomyrdin’s party, leaving Rybkin to the whims of fate. The NDR was quickly given the label ‘party of the authorities’. The ‘Ivan Rybkin Bloc’ was distinguished only by television advertising clips about the bull-calf Vanya, which people were evidently supposed to associate with the speaker of the State Duma. Because the sole task of this ‘left’ bloc was to support the regime’s right-wing policies, its image-makers and propagandists could not possibly explain to the public just what Rybkin stood for. The inevitable failure of the Ivan Rybkin bloc was accompanied by the no less impressive failure of Chernomyrdin’s movement, which barely managed to surmount the 5 per cent barrier required by the law, and which met with defeat almost everywhere in the territorial constituencies. During the years from 1996 to 1999 the incidence of electoral falsification and ballot-rigging was to rise steeply – in direct proportion to the rise in the influence of the local leaderships. In 1995 the governors still had not felt themselves to be in complete control of the situation, and many of them were faced with fighting their own election campaigns. As a result, the votes were counted more or less honestly, with catastrophic consequences for the ‘party of power’. For Yegor Gaidar and his supporters, the elections were a complete catastrophe. The population rejected neo-liberalism and the ‘architects of

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reform’. Not only did Gaidar and his group fail to make their way into the Duma, but they even received fewer votes than the ultra-lefts. Also experiencing failure was the Congress of Russian Communities, founded by Yury Skokov and General Aleksandr Lebed as a sort of new, centrist opposition. In ideological terms, Skokov and Lebed enjoyed considerable success; their slogans were appropriated by the Communists and later by the ‘Fatherland’ party of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov. They themselves, however, could not take advantage of the fruits of their success, since they had neither experienced organizers nor solid structures. In the presidential elections of 1996, Lebed would manage third place. In 1995, however, people were being urged to vote not for a charismatic general with a menacing voice and barracks sense of humour, but for candidates who were anonymous functionaries, and who, moreover, quarrelled constantly with one another. The innumerable petty groups had no chance whatever, though all for some reason supposed that winning 5 per cent would cost them nothing. The result was that the electors were confronted simultaneously with several liberal organizations, around a dozen left and left-centrist ones, the pseudofeminist coalition ‘Women of Russia’, and even a quite improbable electoral bloc of workers in housing and communal services. In order to take part in the elections, it was necessary to collect petition signatures. Accordingly, groups that possessed local structures, or had money with which to pay signature-collectors, could easily make it on to the ballot. Here, the housing and communal services workers were ideally placed; who would refuse to sign for the people responsible for ensuring that the sewerage worked in their apartment? The only thing that the signature-collectors did not take into account was the fact that the voting was secret. After placing their signatures on the petition list of some obscure party or bloc, electors, once they were shut up in the polling booth, put a cross next to the emblem of the LDPR or the Communist Party. A minor sensation of the 1995 elections was the vote for the ‘social democratic’ bloc headed by former Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov. Even though Popov had contrived to turn himself from a liberal into a social democrat in the run-up to the elections, he still received fewer votes than he had collected signatures. The success of the KPRF should not be exaggerated. The paradoxical result of the new electoral law that had been drawn up on the initiative of Kremlin analysts was that the Communist Party received close to an absolute majority of places in the Duma without having gained even a quarter of the votes. Of more than forty contending blocs and parties, only four managed to cross the 5 per cent barrier set by the law – Gennady Zyuganov’s KPRF; Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR; the liberal ‘Yabloko’ movement of Grigory Yavlinsky; and Chernomyrdin’s ‘Our Home is Russia’. Together, these groups received a little more than 50 per cent of the vote. The victors then simply divided all the places in the Duma among themselves. The same happened in the single-mandate electorates, where in order to win it was enough to obtain the largest tally of votes. Some candidates were elected with

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as little as 12 to 15 per cent of the total votes cast. The communists enjoyed a clear advantage as the largest party, with a stable influence in all regions of the country. Their level of support ranged from some 15 per cent in the ‘white’ regions (Moscow, St Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and so on) to 30 per cent in the ‘red’ regions of non-‘black earth’ Russia. The support for other parties varied much more, depending on the locality. The Communists came to the Duma in 1995 as the largest party, and with presidential ambitions. Under the conditions of Yeltsin’s ‘second republic’, however, parliamentary elections decided nothing. The real struggle would unfold in 1996 around the elections for president. Here, the authorities had no intention of losing. WAR In 1995 and 1996 the Yeltsin regime clearly set itself the aim of proving that the constitution was workable, that the authorities could maintain themselves in power with the help of elections, and that the opposition parliament could be kept under control without resort to tanks. On the whole these goals were achieved, but the background to the electoral battles was bloody fighting in the mountains of Chechnya. The more or less democratic procedures in the capital were augmented by the bombing of villages and lawlessness by Russian soldiers in the Caucasus. The war in Chechnya was launched on the eve of the 1995 parliamentary elections. It was meant to figure as a ‘small victorious war’, after which the ratings of the authorities would increase dramatically. Not only are victors spared being put on trial, they are forgiven everything – including the shelling of the parliament, the collapse of the economy and the impoverishment of the population. The victorious war did not happen. Nevertheless, the war in Chechnya did have the effect of strengthening the Yeltsin regime – though not in the way that the people in the Kremlin had originally planned. If, a year before the outbreak of the first Chechnya war, some impudent analyst had suggested that supporters of Gaidar would join with followers of Anpilov to stand on Pushkin Square and shout ‘Put the Yeltsin gang on trial!’, he or she would have been suspected of falling into dementia. Russian life, however, is richer than any kind of maniacal raving; we have not only turned nightmares into reality, but have created, in huge quantities, things that would not appear even in nightmares. Late in 1994 the Chernomyrdin government bestowed some unexpected gifts on business circles and the population. On 2 December agents of the Chief Directorate of Security (GUO), a sort of personal security service of President Yeltsin, spent more than an hour beating up employees of MOSTBank, one of Russia’s most influential financial institutions, by the doors of the Moscow mayor’s office. The GUO operatives then picked a fight with agents of the FSK, the former KGB. Following protests from the bankers, the

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president promised to sort the business out, and actually did so – he sacked the head of the Moscow FSK, who had tried to put a stop to the pogrom. Ten days later massive columns of tanks roared onto the territory of the mutinous Chechen republic, along the way shooting up peaceful settlements and killing the health minister of neighbouring Ingushetia. Aircraft and artillery poured tons of bombs and shells onto the Chechen capital, the city of Grozny, which had been built by Russian generals in the nineteenth century in order to terrify the Chechens. Despite a television propaganda campaign, the movement against the war quickly began gathering strength. Nor were the hopes of the government that it could play on racist anti-Chechen prejudices borne out. On the contrary, surveys indicated that the attitude of Russians toward the Chechens, who had become the victims of aggression, changed for the better. No small role was played by press reports of the artillery bombardments and bombing; the Russian population of Grozny suffered more from these than anyone. The war on Chechnya was still more absurd because for three years the Russian government had allowed the Chechen president, General Dzhokhar Dudaev, to do exactly as he liked. For his part Dudaev, after declaring Chechnya independent of Moscow, had done nothing to make this independence a reality. Russian laws remained in force on Chechen territory, and the Russian ruble continued to circulate. There were neither border controls, nor customs barriers. Residents of Chechnya remained Russian citizens, dealing with their problems through the appropriate structures of the Russian Federation. Tax payments were not being forwarded from Chechnya, but other Russian regions also refused to pay taxes from time to time. The only thing that Dudaev had done was to set up armed formations subject to him personally, just as Yeltsin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov had done. To the delight of philatelists, the Chechens had also issued a series of their own postage stamps with a portrait of Dudaev, the quality recalling matchbox stickers. It is quite clear that Dudaev was not seeking independence so much as a special status for Chechnya within the framework of Russia or of a future Eurasian Union, the need for which the Chechen general spelt out in repeated statements. The Moscow politicians in turn observed what was happening in Chechnya without particular alarm. The semi-independent republic was a marvellous place for laundering the millions stolen in the capital and for arms smuggling, activities around which people from the Moscow ruling circles were warming their hands. Nevertheless, the crisis of the regime, the economic collapse and the unremitting failures in all areas of foreign and domestic politics forced Yeltsin’s associates to look for escape routes. While making a mess of its every attempt at constructive activity, the Yeltsin administration was inevitably winning the political crises. The clearer the prospect of defeat in the elections became, the more necessary it was to provoke a crisis.

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A small victorious war seemed an attractive way to increase the popularity of the regime, suppress opposition and, at the same time, perhaps, to postpone the elections and get rid of nervous individuals from the regime’s own ranks. With military action being launched within Russia for the second time in a year and a half, it was only to be expected that the nerves of many ‘democratic’ politicians would give way. Among the most nervous were those who had been linked to Dudaev through earlier dealings. Gaidar and most other members of the ‘Russia’s Choice’ fraction began to protest. To their surprise, they finished up in the same camp with the left and the Communists. Everything that had happened, however, was quite natural. The radical liberals such as Gaidar had already done their work, and the victorious oligarchy no longer needed them. They could be thrown overboard as political ballast. The crowd on Pushkin Square on 12 December 1994 included everyone from supporters of Anpilov to followers of Gaidar. The red flags predominated, however, and the Duma liberals felt uncomfortable. In the early days of the war, the Communist Party and the Yavlinsky group spoke out against it in the Duma, but neither formation was ready to head an extra-parliamentary anti-war movement. As spontaneous dissatisfaction with the war increased, in political circles the desire to criticize it diminished. Gennady Zyuganov and the KPRF which he headed had never been noted for their internationalism. For these people, solidarity with the military chiefs who had vowed to smash the Chechen ‘bandit formations’ was more important and came more naturally than solidarity with the soldiers’ mothers who were demanding that their sons be brought home. Social democratic politicians preferred on the whole to stay silent and not show their faces at the demonstrations. The leaders of the FNPR labour federation lacked the resolve even to condemn the bombing of Chechnya, limiting themselves to an expression of ‘concern’. The people who initiated the extra-parliamentary anti-war campaign were members of radical-democratic and pacifist groups, activists of the Party of Labour, Trotskyists and anarchists. Zhirinovsky, not for the first time, supported Yeltsin. Another figure to declare his solidarity with the government was Aleksandr Barkashov, the leader of Russian National Unity, the country’s best-known fascist group. In 1993 the presence of Barkashovites at the ‘White House’ had been grounds enough for the official television to accuse all the parliament’s supporters of ‘fascism’. A year and a half later, Barkashov was appearing on state television expressing support for Yeltsin. Meanwhile the ‘democratic’ mass media, which in October 1993 had joined in supporting Yeltsin, became the object of sharp attacks from the authorities. History is just. Could people who a year and a half earlier had fought for a hyper-presidential constitution, unlimited executive powers and the use of tanks, really have failed to guess that once this mechanism was unleashed it would no longer stop of its own accord? For some psychologically incom-

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prehensible reason they had been sure that if the parliament were crushed, demonstrators shot down, and the law treated with contempt, this would not affect their own rights. They found nothing reprehensible either in the fact that the armed forces were firing cannon shells in their own capital, or in the situation in which the representative branch had been made a senseless appendix of an executive power outside any form of control. It was only when they saw television news clips of tanks in Chechnya that they became indignant at the violence of the state and the arbitrariness of national leaders. The paradox lay in the fact that this time, unlike the case in 1993, Yeltsin acted strictly within the framework of his constitutional powers. These powers had been defended in the first instance by the liberals Yegor Gaidar and Sergey Yushenkov. They, of course, had thought all these prerogatives would be used only against Communists and the left. Justice, however, triumphed. It was time at last to understand that all heads are equal before a police club. The only figure in the Yeltsin administration who seems to have felt real pangs of conscience was Sergey Kovalev. A dissident human rights defender during the Brezhnev period, Kovalev in 1993 uttered not a single word against the disbanding of the parliament, the violation of the constitution or martial law. But after the beginning of the Chechen war, Kovalev to the astonishment of the authorities left Moscow and shifted to Grozny. Every day he reported from the Chechen capital on the bombardment of residential areas and the death of peaceful citizens. The authorities, who only shortly before had extolled Kovalev as a ‘true defender of human rights’, now accused him of showing a lack of objectivity, and of failing to understand the situation. The scenario for the Chechen crisis was not original. The authorities made use of old materials that had acquitted themselves well in 1993. These included a gradual escalation of tension and coercion, the provoking of street demonstrations, and the pumping-up of hysterical emotions in the camp of the opposition. Even small details were repeated; once again, trouble was stirred up on a weekend. The only difference was that in October 1993 both the political crisis and the use of force had occurred in Moscow. This time, however, the two parallel processes were separated in space; the tanks rumbled about Chechnya, imposing a blockade on Grozny, while the political hysteria was unleashed in the Russian capital. It is striking how powerless Gaidar, Yushenkov and the other liberals from the presidential circle, people who had themselves taken part in preparing earlier provocations, proved to be when the provocation was turned against them. They were quickly and easily driven into the same trap into which the former ‘parliamentary opposition’ had fallen earlier. The need for unending struggle against external and internal enemies is implicit in the very nature of authoritarianism. This is why Yeltsin’s allies and fellow-travellers sooner or later became victims. The circle narrowed constantly; first the Communists were defeated, then wavering democrats were thrown overboard, and then came the turn of the ‘Westernizing’ privatizers themselves.

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It is typical that the ‘serious people’ from Gaidar’s party, who had held on to their money and power, quickly took their distance from their former idol. The multi-millionaire Boyko and the foreign minister Kozyrev both forsook him. The head privatizer Chubais kept silent. Another ‘distinguished economist’ to distance himself from Gaidar was Boris Fedorov, who was expecting high-level posts in the financial sector. These people could not risk their positions for the sake of political games in a powerless parliament. Kozyrev and Boyko did not even try to appeal to the members of the party to whose leadership they had just been elected! They took their leave calmly, without even getting around to slamming the door. The liberal press, which still believed in the myth it had created about the ‘fourth estate’, also spoke out against the war. Throughout the preceding years liberal journalists had constantly been unmasking Soviet imperialism and Russian nationalism, which in their view had been intimately associated with ‘communism’. When the first Chechnya war began, significant numbers of liberal journalists were simply unable to reorient themselves, especially since the authorities did not even trouble to give them preliminary ‘explanations’ (this mistake was corrected when the authorities prepared for the second Chechnya war). The prominent student of the Russian press Ivan Zasursky writes: After the unanimously adopted position of the Russian press and television failed to bring any changes whatever to the regime’s policies,’ ‘the press was faced with a serious dilemma. It was necessary either to recognize the supreme authority of the president, verging on dictatorship – and in the process, to recognize that this dictatorship had been founded on the efforts of the ‘democratic’ press and television – or to show the regime who was master in the house, that is, to show that as before, the ‘democratic’ press had real influence on state policies, and that the dictatorship was at least enlightened. The result was that Izvestiya, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Argumenty i Fakty, Moskovskiy Komsomolets and also NTV and the state television station RTR changed their loyal attitude to the president to one of acute opposition. The only media organs to stay loyal were the first, ‘Ostankino’ television channel, and the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. So began a conflict betwen the press and the authorities which was to last for almost two years. Despite the fact that the media were able to do serious damage to the party of the authorities, the ‘fourth estate’ ultimately met with defeat, even though it might have seemed to outsiders that the clash had ended in a draw.6 DEFEAT In the final analysis, what stopped the war was not articles and television news clips, nor protests by soldiers’ mothers, but catastrophic defeats suffered

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by the army on the battlefield. The soldiers invariably explained their failures by arguing that the Moscow politicians, journalists and pacifists were stopping them from prosecuting the war. In fact, it was the endless failures of the army that fuelled anti-war moods in Russia and forced the politicians to look for compromise solutions. With more than 1.5 million people under arms, Russia could not concentrate more than 25,000 soldiers in Chechnya at any one time. The reason lay in the low level of battle-readiness of the troops, and in problems of supply and organization. ‘The first reason for the Russian defeat in Chechnya,’ noted Pavel Felgenhauer, the military observer for The Moscow Times, ‘was the military’s inability to move sufficient forces onto the field of battle to crush the resistance and control the territory. The second reason was inadequate preparation of the forces.’7 Adding to the lack of battle-worthiness of the army – demoralized, illtrained and with no idea why it was necessary to go to war against Russian citizens – was corruption in the army command. The soldiers went into battle under the muzzles of automatic rifles carried by special forces troops; they deserted, pillaged and refused to carry out orders. At the same time, reports were seeping into the press of officers engaging in commercial dealings with the enemy, of high-ranking commanders selling the insurgents weapons and ammunition, and sometimes even selling their own servicemen into captivity. The troops spent the winter in the open field. Money allotted for rebuilding the economy in regions controlled by the army was shamelessly stolen. Tanks were driven into bogs, where they remained stuck. In the very first days of hostilities several colonels were captured. Several high-ranking officers resigned. After the first skirmishes with the Chechens, the army group that was advancing on Grozny from the east halted its advance and dug in. Practical-minded locals stole tanks and armoured personnel carriers in order to use them in agriculture. Rank-and-file soldiers and officers started fraternizing with the population. Warriors of the Russian army became a common sight in a flea-market in a suburb of Grozny, where the besieged Chechens fed them and treated them to cigarettes. Military experts ironically called the Chechnya war ‘Operation Bog Storm’. Finally, the ‘super-accurate’ laser sights malfunctioned, and bombs and rockets missed their targets, sometimes by several kilometres, even falling on the territory of Russian republics bordering on Chechnya. The only success the armed forces scored with their high-technology weapons was the killing of General Dudaev. The Chechen leader was killed by a rocket that homed in on the signal emitted by his cellular telephone while he was conducting some important conversation – presumably with some Russian official or other, about a forthcoming truce. As a result of Dudaev’s death, decisive influence in the Chechen ranks shifted to radicals whose attitude to Russia was far more hostile. Unable to capture Grozny with a lightning assault, the Russian commanders took out their frustration on the peaceful population, bombarding the city without let-up. The number of victims rose with each

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passing day. One of the first air raids on Grozny succeeded in devastating Moskovskiy Street, where there was not a single military target. Journalists who were in the war zone suffered as well. Although the entire world, including Russian residents, saw on television how Russian aircraft were dropping bombs on the city, the official propaganda claimed that the authorities knew nothing of the bombing, and that the Chechens were bombing and shelling themselves. This feat of propaganda was only surpassed during the second Chechnya war when Russian television, citing official military sources, reported that the Chechens were packing explosives into cars that then joined columns of refugees; when Russian aircraft appeared, the Chechens themselves detonated these explosives. In the final days of 1994 Yeltsin pledged to halt the bombardment of the Chechen capital, evidently as a New Year’s gift to the war-ravaged population. Immediately after this speech, when the promises had raised the hopes of Grozny residents and encouraged them to leave their bomb shelters, the most ferocious air raid of the entire war began. This was followed up with a massed attack by tanks and infantry. The New Year’s assault on Grozny turned into one of the most shameful defeats in the history of the Russian army. The generals made every possible mistake detailed, with appropriate warnings, by the military textbooks. The disaster that followed was later described and analysed in numerous books and articles abroad, but was never seriously examined by Russian military strategists themselves. British journalist Rob Ferguson wrote: On 31 December 1994, young Russian conscripts in tanks and armoured personnel carriers advanced into the bombed ruin of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Many had hardly left their schoolrooms. They came from Rostov in the south; from Vladivostok on the Pacific; from the Urals; from Moscow and St Petersburg; from the Arctic north. They came from small provincial towns and from the great, decaying, broken-spirited industrial heartlands of Russia. The column passed down Pervomayskoye Street towards the presidential palace, and towards the units of Chechen streetfighters lying in wait amongst the ruined apartment blocks. Armour piercing, rocket propelled grenade launchers were fired at point blank range as the Chechen snipers and light machine gunners pinned the terrified soldiers down inside their vehicles. Grenades were dropped from balconies. View points were covered with tarpaulins. Those who clambered from the ambushed vehicles fell alongside the shattered tank tracks and the burning armour that served as crematoria for those still trapped inside. As Russia celebrated the new year hundreds of young men lay dying in agony and terror in the Caucasus.8 The tanks that had broken through into the city were quickly cut off from the infantry, and knocked out. Airborne troops who had landed in the area

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of the railway station were surrounded. The army lost half the machines that had been thrown into the battle, and around 2,000 troops killed or captured. The Russian forces were retreating in disorder at the very time when the official propaganda was already proclaiming to the world that the city had been taken and the presidential palace seized. After this failure, the federal forces began systematically destroying Grozny. Unable to capture the centre of the city, the besieging forces systematically demolished neighbourhood after neighbourhood, trying to advance gradually toward the presidential palace. Meanwhile, fighting engulfed almost the entire territory of the republic. Skirmishes also began occurring in neighbouring Daghestan. The drawn-out siege of Grozny allowed the Chechen irregulars to launch a partisan war in the rear of the Russian forces. The Chechens fought selflessly and professionally, which cannot be said of the Russian army. Soldiers not only deserted, but at times even crossed over to the Chechen side. Journalists reported that, at night, troops would puncture the tyres of their own armoured personnel carriers with bayonets. According to reports from Chechen sources, more than twenty Russian soldiers were shot by firing squad for attempted desertion. The fact that the government sources repeated endlessly that there were no ‘defeatist moods’ among the troops, and that the soldiers were ‘ready to fulfil any order’, confirmed indirectly that discontent was ripening. It was not only rank-andfile soldiers and junior officers who were grumbling; after arriving in the Caucasus and familiarizing himself with the situation, Colonel-General Eduard Vorobyev, the deputy commander of the Russian land forces, handed in his resignation. Deputy Defence Minister General Gromov came out with a public criticism of the Chechnya war. Then, throughout the country, the television showed the commander of the Russian airborne forces, General Podkolzin, making an anti-war speech at the funeral of a colonel killed in Grozny. Such declarations by military figures in a country at war are a phenomenon almost unknown in the whole world, but perfectly natural in Russia in 1994 and 1995. For five years the ruling circles, for the benefit of the West, had been destroying and humiliating their own army; now they found to their surprise that this army could no longer wage war, and had no wish to do so. It is true that, by the end of 1995, order in the army had been restored. The generals who had criticized the war were removed. But this did not increase the battle-readiness of the forces. The turning-point in the war was the raid by the Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev on Budennovsk, when his reconnaissance and sabotage battalion seized hundreds of peaceful inhabitants of the small Russian provincial town as hostages. These people were then exchanged for journalists, who acted as a living shield. In the words of the journalist Anatoly Baranov, one of the participants in the events, Budennovsk became a mixture of ‘national humiliation and belated Russian boldness, of state

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impotence and state hypocrisy’.9 The generals hid from journalists and openly lied, while Basaev gave interviews, commented ironically on what was happening and posed for the cameras. For the press, and for significant numbers of Russians who hated the authorities, Basaev became a sort of Chechen Robin Hood, a hero and a symbol of the will to resist. The image of Basaev that was created by the press was thoroughly idealized, but it took on its own life on the television screens and in the consciousness of the masses. After Basaev had returned victorious to Chechnya, it became more or less clear to eveyone in Russia that winning the war was impossible. Even people who could not bring themselves to admit this openly recognized it in the depth of their hearts. The shame of Budennovsk was followed by an absurd defeat near the village of Pervomayskaya, where a group of federal forces headed by three ministers and employing tanks, artillery and aircraft failed to cope with the Chechen battalion of Salman Raduev. From here it was a direct road to the catastrophe of August 1996, when Chechen detachments commanded by Aslan Maskhadov captured Grozny, keeping the remnants of federal army units surrounded within it. The Russian generals could do nothing except threaten to use their artillery and air power to wipe the city from the face of the earth (together with their own soldiers trapped within it). It was obvious that both technically and politically, this was quite beyond their powers. When the threats were not fulfilled, the federal centre had no other option apart from effective capitulation, sealed by the Khasavyurt peace accords. Former Soviet Army colonel Aslan Maskhadov was elected president of Chechnya, and was officially recognized by the Russian authorities. In 1996 it seemed to everyone that with this, the war had ended. Unfortunately, it was not to be. PROPAGANDA AND BRUTE FORCE In the early 1990s a large section of the Russian press was ‘democratic’. This meant that it supported capitalism ‘not from fear, but from conscience’, sometimes out of disinterested motives, and sometimes not especially so, but in both cases sincerely enough. For large numbers of journalists, the events of 1993 undermined this belief in the ‘democratic mission’ of Yeltsin and his regime. After the bloody reprisals carried out on the crowd at Ostankino and the shelling of the White House, even many of those who earlier had called heatedly for stern measures began to reconsider their positions. The place of sincere sympathy for the authorities, however, was quickly taken by material dependence on them, and on the oligarchs with whom they were closely connected. The journalists had campaigned for a free market and private entrepreneurship. By the mid-1990s they had discovered that for a free press to survive under capitalism was not at all simple. The cost of newsprint had

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risen sharply, while circulations had fallen. People were becoming impoverished, and could not read publications that were growing more expensive. In 1990 and 1991 the press had received from the government free of charge, or at a discount, the buildings which housed the editorial offices, equipment and presses. By 1993 and 1994 all this had been exploited to the maximum, and was partly worn out. If the industry was to remain at a modern level, technical re-equipping was essential, and this required investment. Television, which was capable of yielding real profits, also needed to attract outside investors. Regardless of their allegiances, the mass media were already making huge losses in 1992 – 15 million rubles in the case of the pro-Yeltsin Komsomolskaya Pravda, and 6 million in that of the opposition Sovetskaya Rossiya. The debts owed to the Pressa printing house reached 200 million rubles. From the Gaidar government, the newspaper Izvestiya had received a huge building on Pushkin Square; this allowed the publication to make ends meet, but even for Izvestiya, things were becoming tight by 1993. For readers, the cost of obtaining newspapers was increasing. People who had earlier subscribed to the central press now preferred cheaper local publications. In 1993 Izvestiya had retained only 25 per cent of its earlier subscribers, Komsomolskaya Pravda 15 per cent, Nezavisimaya Gazeta 39 per cent, and the weekly Argumenty i Fakty, which had enjoyed the largest circulation not only in Russia but in all Europe, had held on to 35 per cent of its subscribers after losing 17 million readers in the space of a year! The age of all-Russian newspapers was vanishing into the past; from now on, the unity of the field of information would be maintained by television. The liberal journalists who were campaigning for the abolition of subsidies to all branches of the economy simultaneously demanded subsidies for themselves. Meanwhile, the state was no longer capable of subsidizing propaganda in centralized fashion as it had in Soviet times. Moreover, it had no interest in doing so. The Soviet experience had shown that in the absence of direct press censorship, the press could readily make use of subsidies while at the same time criticizing the government that doled these subsidies out. The efforts to introduce censorship in 1993 met with failure, and after this the press reacted indignantly to various feeble attempts by state functionaries to interfere in the creative process. The control exerted by private capital was far more rigid, and at the same time far more acceptable ideologically and psychologically. The transfer of the mass media to the oligarchs had created the conditions for restoring political censorship while leaving formal democratic liberties completely untouched. The history of Nezavisimaya Gazeta was tragic. In 1993 it was a symbol of resistance to censorship and of struggle for freedom of the press. The newspaper withstood a direct confrontation with the authorities, but not the economic crisis. In May 1995 it ceased appearing. A split occurred among the editors. One section of the journalists united around deputy chief editor Aleksandr Gagua, who, at a general meeting, was proclaimed chief editor.

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The founder of the newspaper, Vitaly Tretyakov, seemed to have reconciled himself to what had happened. However, Gagua’s decision to accept money needed for resuming publication from business figures who supported the Congress of Russian Communities provoked a new crisis, this time political. On 12 September 1995 the editorial offices were seized by agents of a private security firm hired by Boris Berezovsky. Gagua was removed, and Tretyakov restored to his post. The newspaper began reappearing, but now with Berezovsky providing the money. Tretyakov deserves credit for managing to uphold the reputation of Nezavisimaya Gazeta as a serious and authoritative publication even after its takeover by Berezovsky. But this was no longer the ‘NG’ to which the Moscow intelligentsia had been accustomed in the years from 1993 to 1995. Berezovsky’s influence, though little evident in the normal day-to-day life of the newspaper, emerged starkly with every political crisis that affected the magnate’s interests. When the Primakov government came to power in 1998, Berezovsky launched a real war against it, and ‘NG’ could not stand to one side. The same occurred in the autumn of 1999, when the newspaper had to defend Berezovsky from charges that he was linked with terrorists. So it was too during the second Chechnya war, when Tretyakov’s publication effectively became the mouthpiece of the Russian general staff. Berezovsky’s capture of Nezavisimaya Gazeta was only one among a number of scandalous instances in which well-known publications were seized by ‘politicized capital’. In an analogous conflict, the newspaper lost its independence. Komsomolskaya Pravda also succumbed to the will of ‘outside investors’, mounting no particular resistance. The same fate befell Novaya Gazeta, after it had tried unsuccessfully to maintain its independence. In 1995 and 1996, ‘politicized capital’ thus appeared on the scene. As Zasursky notes, its goal was less to make profits from selling newspapers and advertising than to expand its political influence. The ‘anti-market’, and at first glance irrational behaviour of Russian business entrepreneurs can be explained quite simply: at this time, political influence provided access to the redistribution of resources (privatization) on a scale beside which the very modest profits to be made from the Russian media seemed trifling. After 1996, the goal of acquiring property was transformed into the desire to retain it.10 As in the Soviet period, the press again became an instrument of propaganda, only this time, not government propaganda but that of private interests. Meanwhile, the media as a whole came to be divided into two parts, depending on the tasks they were required to fulfil. Some conducted propaganda campaigns aimed at the masses. Others sought to have an effect on the political elites. These, to use Zasursky’s phrase, were ‘influence newspapers’.

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Powerful media holding companies came into existence. Some, like Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-MOST group, were formed openly; others, like Vladimir Potanin’s ONEKSIM-Bank or the group controlled by Boris Berezovsky, preferred not to do this initially. Journalists described Berezovsky’s group as a ‘shadow holding company’, since the Moscow billionaire chose to pretend that he exerted no influence on the press. Nevertheless, it was Berezovsky who held the decisive position in the television industry, controlling the huge television company ORT, as well as his numerous newspapers. With Berezovsky, Zasursky writes, everything proceeded according to the model of ‘Russian privatization’ devised by new Russian financiers for industrial enterprises with so-called ‘red directors’. The aim of this strategy was to buy the workers rather than the enterprises. As well as tax evasion, this was no doubt the purpose behind the television channel’s system of dual salaries, whose size in the case of leading executives was decided personally by Berezovsky and his trusted protege Badri Patarkatsishvili.11 Throught the use of such methods, Berezovsky was able to establish almost total control over the enterprises in his holding company, even though he held comparatively small packets of shares, and at times did not formalize his relations with his partners at all. Meanwhile, the journalistic elite was not going unrewarded. Controlling large enterprises in the information and propaganda complex, this elite not only served the oligarchs and the authorities, but also dictated terms to them. In 1999, according to the newspaper Moskovskiy Komsomolets, the journalist Sergey Dorenko demanded US$1.5 million, or US$125,000 a month, from Berezovsky – and got it. Tatyana Koshkareva, who as head of the information service of the television channel ORT was in formal terms Dorenko’s superior, was forced to satisfy herself with a mere US$20,000 a month. The newspaper observed ironically that with such a difference in incomes, Dorenko could hardly expect to be treated with special favour.12 However important the political interests of the oligarchs, the journalistic and managerial elites of the leading newspapers, radio stations and television channels also had their own interests to assert. Alongside the media holding companies, moreover, politicized capital was assembling commercial holding companies; one of these took shape around the newspaper Moskovskiy Komsomolets, and another around the Englishlanguage Moscow Times. The politicized holding companies were not in the least averse to making money, just as their commercial brethren by no means stood aside from politics. It was politics, in the final analysis, that was the best source of money. While joining forces to propagandize the values of liberal capitalism, Zasursky notes, the mass media and the oligarchs who stood behind them also competed on the ‘market of influence’. At times, these conflicts took on

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the character of real information wars. For the participants in them, these wars turned into veritable gold mines. By the mid-1990s, an information-propaganda complex had taken shape in Russia, defending its own interests and exerting considerable influence on the general situation in the country. Along with the agrarian, fuel and energy, and military-industrial complexes, the information-propaganda complex lobbied for its interests in parliament and within the government. Using the mass media to further their aims, the oligarchs were at the same time forced to expedite the development of the media, usually at the expense of other sectors of the economy. While output in most sectors fell, in the information-propaganda sector it increased, despite enormous problems. Wages and employment figures grew, and technology was quickly upgraded. New print publications, radio stations and television channels were opened, while broadcasting zones were expanded and satellites launched. The growing and increasingly prosperous new middle class was demanding more and more media productions, in the process making them commercially profitable again. By 1995–96 the restructuring of the sector was essentially complete. In 1992 and 1993 the ‘Soviet’ model of the press had collapsed, and with it, the hope that real journalistic freedom would appear; two or three years later, the new model was in place. Advertising, commercial or political, had become the sole purpose. Both commercial and political advertisements featured the same people, using very much the same methods. Commercial advertising often had an ideological function as well, while concealed within political messages there was often commercial information being disseminated to order. This was put exquisitely by one of the heroes of the novel by Viktor Pelevin, Generation P: You know, you and I are ideological workers, if you haven’t realized it yet. Propagandists and agitators. For that matter, I used to work in ideology before, too, on the level of the Komsomol central committee. All the others are bankers now, I’m the only one . . . So I tell you, I didn’t need any reconstructing. Before it was ‘The individual is nothing, the collective everything.’ Now it’s ‘The image is nothing, the craving is everything.’ Agitation and propaganda will never die. The only thing that changes is the words.13 In his book on Russian journalism, Ivan Zasursky observes that the press elite is marked by a ‘spirit of corporativism’. At the basis of this corporativism is this elite’s privileged position. Other writers note ‘attempts by the media to assume control over presidential staff appointments, and using these appointments, to construct a mechanism of rule’.14 It is another matter entirely that in 1994–95 and 1996–97, when the media community was trying in one degree or another to put pressure on the Kremlin, these efforts were not crowned with success. Viktor Pelevin goes further, describing a

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regime that rests on its propaganda departments as a ‘mediacracy’. It can be called a democracy, Pelevin maintains, but it is a demo-version of democracy, not the real thing.15 The more privileged the position of the press elite, the less its regard for professional ethics. ‘Black PR’, and the writing to order of supposed news articles, became everyday practices. For a small consideration ranging from a hundred to a few thousand dollars, journalists placed in their publications reports that someone or other needed to have appear in print. Readers, naturally, were not told that someone had paid for these reports. If such a report was a conscious falsehood, the price was higher; in journalists’ slang, such a piece somehow acquired the name ‘jeans’. Zasursky writes: The phenomenon of corruption in journalism, deserves to be discussed as a separate topic. In all-Russian publications, it is encountered in the most diverse forms, beginning with reports from the provinces written to order for a thousand dollars, and ending with reportage, paid for through the advertising department, on new discounts offered by cellular telephone operators. ‘Black PR’ and ‘jeans’ pose a serious problem for any set of editors. Still more disturbing, however, is the institutionalization of corruption in the all-Russian media. It is well known that this is where one finds the notorious 2 per cent of journalists whose salaries exceed those paid in the provincial media by tens and indeed hundreds of times. Of course, the shortage of qualified personnel in the capital, and the huge number of publications, are very important for determining salary levels. But if we take into account the fact that high salaries are also a characteristic of the ‘newspapers of influence’, the picture appears somewhat different, especially since many highly paid employees receive their salaries in envelopes to this day. Moreover, salary levels are determined individually, and are not stipulated by labour contracts. In conditions of economic crisis, this state of affairs robs many Moscow journalists of the ability to defend their own views and to take independent positions.16 The information-propaganda complex not only became an important economic force, but also had its own ideas on the country’s development. As defined by its interests, the ideal situation would be a permanent election campaign, interspersed with terrorist acts, wars, natural disasters and criminal-sexual scandals. Ordinary people prefer stability and a measured flow in their lives, but for the press this is fatal. Its ideal material is shocks of every possible description. A starving population, bombed-out homes and burnt-out factories can look thoroughly picturesque; for the slogan ‘Bread and circuses!’, therefore, the modern information-propaganda complex substitutes the puzzled question: ‘What do you need bread for, if we have circuses?’ The ideological function of the mass media appeared above all in the way the stories of present-day calamities were supplemented by the promise of future prosperity, which would come without fail provided the

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demands of liberal capitalism were met. Another theme of the propaganda was the counterposing of Russia, anomalous and in decline, to the ‘civilized world’ of the West. In this case the ideal was found not in the future, but simply in another place, and the possibility of attaining this ideal had become a purely individual matter. Paradoxically, the unending paeans to the Western way of life were combined with an almost total lack of information about foreign countries. In Soviet times, from a third to a half of television news programmes consisted of international reports, but in Yeltsin’s Russia news broadcasts without a single international topic became the norm. The ideologue of the new mediacracy Gleb Pavlovsky declared cynically that selling newspapers was not even the main point of the exercise; the point was to trade in political influence. Hence the profitability of media business is measured by the profitability to the owner of selling his stock of media pressure to the authorities. This sale is either to the authorities themselves, as blackmail, or to an opposition group that is bidding for power (a ‘palace coup’). The mass media as political intermediaries have a material interest in maximizing political risks, since the higher the risk, the greater the normal profit on the market for ‘political money’ or ‘influence money’. The task of the media is not to expedite communication by political forces, but on the contrary, to confuse, to misinform, and to keep the situation in an artificially tense, stressful state of uncertainty. Pavlovsky sees nothing reprehensible in any of this, since such behaviour is to be explained by ‘simple market motives’.17 The main achievement of the information-propaganda complex in Yeltsin’s Russia was to create a synthesis of the Western and Soviet propaganda cultures, a synthesis that acted as the basis for a sort of total propaganda. The opposition press described the reworking of consciousness by the mass media as ‘zombification’. The essence of zombification was that the space between a report and its perception disappeared; it was as though the consciousness of the radio listener or television viewer was dissolved in a stream of propaganda images. These images arose out of the synthesis of commercial advertising and political propaganda. The advertising was ideological through and through, and the propaganda made use of the technology of advertising. A new context was created, and mass consciousness was continually immersed within it. In people who were not inclined to reflection, the television pictures, the billboards on the streets and the slogans repeated by politicians were meant to create something like a system of conditioned reflexes – as with Pavlov’s dogs. As Viktor Pelevin wrote, this was like being possessed by a spirit. The difference was that this spirit did not exist; all that existed were the symptoms of possession:

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This spirit is conditional, but at that moment when a television viewer entrusts a surveying group with arbitrarily redirecting his or her attention from one object to another, it is as though he or she becomes this spirit, while the spirit, which does not in fact exist, takes possession of this person and millions of other viewers.18 The fictitious reality of propaganda cannot of course take the place of actual reality, but it can transform the way reality is perceived. At a certain moment, a person turns off the television set. But an effect arises like that which a magnet has on an iron bar; even after the influence is removed, the mind exhibits the same behaviour. The thoughts involved arise spontaneously, and are like a background against which all other thoughts appear. In sum, ‘a sort of filter’ appears in people’s consciousness, and it is through this filter that reality is perceived.19 Nevertheless, propaganda is not all-powerful. The history of Yeltsin’s Russia is not only a chronicle of successful attempts at manipulating mass consciousness, but also the history of how the methods used gradually lost their potency. To keep people’s attention and control their consciousness, it was necessary to continually raise the dose of propaganda, since the masses were developing a sort of immunity to information technologies. The less effective the manipulation, the more the ruling groups had to rely on naked force, or at least, the threat of force. Force is itself an extremely valuable information commodity. It is spectacular. It arouses emotions. In this sense, the war in Chechnya was a veritable gift to the information-propaganda complex. Moreover, the active criticism of the authorities in television broadcasts and in the newspapers won the media back the trust of the population. This trust was then exploited in order to carry out new manipulations during the presidential elections of 1996. If the mass media had not attacked Yeltsin so furiously in 1995, they could not have had such success in boosting his rating a year later. After the short-term conflict between the media elites and the authorities over Chechnya, their new reconciliation began. The mediacrats were put in their place; it was shown that they could not and should not try to decide policies independently. Meanwhile, the Kremlin and the oligarchs reaffirmed their privileged status. Oleg Smolin was correct when he noted that the Yeltsin regime used the press and television ‘as their main means of governing’, the media taking the place of ‘direct coercion’.20 During Yeltsin’s 1996 election campaign a fusion took place between the information-propaganda apparatus and the state. A typical instance was the appointing of Igor Malashenko, the head of the ‘independent’ television channel NTV, to the job of establishing the president’s ‘image’. It was NTV which had been harshest in criticizing the Kremlin in 1994 and 1995. In

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1996 the same television company became the principal mouthpiece for the Kremlin’s propaganda. The presidential elections of 1996 were indeed a triumph of the propagandist’s art. Everything was decided by the television, the press, and spectacles of every imaginable kind, organized by the authorities. The propaganda blows raining down on the population had such force that for a certain time, actual reality was replaced by its virtual counterpart in the minds of many people. Ivan Zasursky described this as the ‘media-ization of politics’.21 INFORMATION WARS The decisive role in the propaganda war was played by the television. In a country where people could not afford to buy the national newspapers, it was the television that ensured the unity of the information space and, to a certain degree, maintained the link between citizens and the state. Proceeding on this basis, the ideologues of Yeltsin’s election campaign set themselves the task of: creating an image, that is, a symbolic image, of a reality that needed to exist, but which in the short term could not be realized in practice. Miracles do not happen; after the elections, the problems would remain, and would have to be solved by the usual methods. To keep a chance of winning, it was essential to create an image such that ‘the solving of all the problems had begun’. In other words, we were staging something that we had neither the time nor the capacity to create . . .22 The authors of this cynical utterance were Gleb Pavlovsky and a group of intellectuals associated with the Foundation for Effective Politics (FEP). It is significant that many of the people employed by the FEP were by no means supporters of the regime, and that Pavlovsky himself, in his public statements, was inclined to be critical of it. This combination of ‘intellectual’ criticism of the authorities with serving them on a day-to-day basis (and for considerable rewards) provides a classic example of the venality and lack of principle that reigned among the members of the ‘mediacracy’. Nor were these individuals above using ‘dirty tricks’. Representatives of the FEP related proudly to colleagues that they had managed to sabotage a press conference called by the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov, ‘so that the journalists arrived for their meeting with Zyuganov either two hours early or two hours late’. The FEP also devoted itself to spreading a wide range of rumours. At times, the mass media spread information that seemed completely incredible. For example, it was reported that if Zyuganov were to win, he would cancel all the television serials. Or, that the reason for the enmity

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between Zyuganov and Yeltsin was ‘CPSU gold’ found by Yury Luzhkov during the reconstruction of the Manege Square.23 In fact, the efforts to create a ‘positive image’ for Yeltsin yielded only very modest results. The tactic of daubing the Communists with mud and of spreading absurd rumours to scare people off voting for Zyuganov began to backfire. The campaign aimed at youth, and devised by Sergey Lisovsky within the framework of the ‘Vote or you Lose!’ programme, also brought very meagre gains. Lisovsky spent vast sums to hire popular performers, and sent them about the country transforming pop music concerts into proYeltsin political meetings. The television provided constant advertising for this campaign. However, the cost did not justify itself. Aleksandr Tarasov states: It was in vain that Lisovsky raked a whole pile of money out of the budget for this programme, and in vain that he forced the president, with a heart condition, to prance stupidly about a stage to pop music. Most of the audience at the ‘Vote or . . . ’ functions were adolescents aged from 14 to 16, who of course could not vote in the elections. Surveys a year later in Volgograd and Astrakhan showed that the overwhelming majority of the young electors who attended Lisovsky’s concerts did not go to vote at all. Of those who did, most voted for Lebed, Zhirinovsky or Zyuganov, or against all the candidates. They voted – and lost.24 The regime was in direct peril of being defeated at the polls, something it could not allow in any circumstances. It would have to change its propaganda strategy, and here, a group of American consultants entered the picture. According to the journal Time, it was this group that enjoyed the dubious credit of having ‘rescued Boris’ in 1996.25 From this point, the key aspects of the propaganda campaign became scaring the population with the prospect of civil war, and appealing to the Russian tradition of obedience and love for those in authority. If the intellectuals of the FEP had tried to present the Yeltsin regime as the bearer of something new and modern, the Americans turned to the most traditional, conservative, authoritarian stereotypes of mass consciousness. They agitated among the very people whom the FEP had written off as supporters of Zyuganov. As was to be expected, the American team achieved far more. Fear of civil war was the decisive factor that gave the Kremlin victory in 1996. What took place was in fact pure blackmail. The voters were given openly to understand that whatever happened, Yeltsin would not be going anywhere. If he won, he would stay in power by peaceful and ‘legal’ means, and if Zyuganov won, Yeltsin would still remain, by means of a coup d’etat. There really were plans for such a coup. This was later confirmed by generals Korzhakov and Kulikov, who were close to the president (the first

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of these defended the plans, while the second, by contrast, expressed doubts about them). One way or another, the threat of repression and civil war, a threat which, since the events of 1993, had seemed absolutely real, exerted a decisive influence on the thinking of the masses. Of special importance was the fact that fear of a coup paralysed the political will of the opposition, which in the depths of its soul preferred to lose rather than once again to fall victim to repression. Finally, the alternative ‘Either Yeltsin, or the Communists’ also played a part. In the first round of the elections, the mass media were already working actively to pose this alternative. Describing how the elections of 1996 were conducted in Vorkuta, the sociologist V.I. Ilyin noted: ‘In public consciousness, the following dilemma was successfully constructed: either Yeltsin, or the Communists, who were associated exclusively with Stalinism. Among the people of Vorkuta, Stalinism aroused memories of the city as a concentration camp.’26 Despite the media brainwashing, however, around half the people of Vorkuta did not turn out to vote. Of those who decided to vote anyway, most made their decision on this basis: ‘Even Yeltsin, so long as it’s not the Communists.’27 The propaganda victory achieved by the Kremlin and the mediacrats was to be Pyrrhic. The doses of information therapy administered in the course of the elections were so huge that after this, ‘information technologies’, administered on a lesser scale, were no longer effective. The result was a series of defeats for the ‘party of the authorities’ in gubernatorial elections during the years from 1996 to 1998. In industrial regions of non-black earth Russia the so-called ‘red belt’ had become established. The victorious opposition candidates were not radicals yearning to launch a ‘march on Moscow’; on the contrary, they were moderate pragmatists, ready to strike deals with the Kremlin for the sake of subsidies and political influence. But although the ‘red belt’ did not represent a political challenge to the Kremlin, it nevertheless compelled the president and his associates to make adjustments to their policies in the provinces, and to make concessions on a whole series of questions. The pace and scale of privatization were moderated, and in some provinces a de facto re-nationalization of factories took place, to the benefit of the local authorities. The regional elites became an independent power centre, alongside the Moscow oligarchs, the government functionaries and the mediacrats. A second consequence of the 1996 elections was the outbreak of information wars between oligarchs. As Zasursky notes, ‘during the presidential elections of 1996 a new class of media rulers took shape, and in the course of the campaign, passed through a school of the manipulation of public opinion’. It was not simply that these people were no longer capable of acting in any other fashion; the reputation of all publications, without exception, ‘had fallen so low that it no longer made any sense to be afraid of ethical competition’.28 Meanwhile, the united bloc of bureaucrats and oligarchs that had been victorious in the elections of 1996 had disintegrated.

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The reason for this was not only an excessive self-confidence that set in once it had become clear that there was no need to fear unpleasant surprises, either from the opposition or the masses. No less important was the fact that the resources being consumed by the oligarchy were running out. Fewer and fewer unprivatized enterprises remained, and fewer of the unattached resources that could be redistributed to one’s own advantage and swallowed. A fierce struggle began for the remaining state packets of shares in profitable companies. The shattering of the united oligarchic-bureaucratic bloc did not at all signify that private proprietors and the state had moved into opposition. Rather, various groups of functionaries had concluded alliances with different, competing groups of oligarchs. A split had thus occurred within the state apparatus itself. As a result, the struggle came to be conducted primarily by political methods. The most important of these was the publication in the press of compromising materials – ‘kompromat’ – aimed by one group against another. ‘Unlike the American muck-rakers of the early twentieth century’, writes Zasursky, ‘the Russian practitioners of this art did not address themselves to the public. Their basic aim was to have an impact on the politicized elite.’29 It was necessary to undermine the position of your opponents in the apparatus of power, and to support your friends. Centralized information-propaganda campaigns were replaced by information wars. First of all, the television company NTV declared to the whole country that a ‘coup d’etat’ had taken place when security guards arrested two presidential image-makers who were trying to remove from the main government office building a cardboard photocopying-paper box stuffed with dollars of which no record existed. Then, a still more massive war erupted in 1997–98 when Vladimir Potanin’s ONEKSIM-Bank, not without help from Anatoly Chubais, received a packet of privatized shares in the company Svyazinvest at a discount. Berezovsky and Gusinsky mounted ‘information reprisals’ that substantially weakened Chubais’s positions in the structures of power. Then, publications close to Yury Luzhkov began a campaign to discredit VicePremier Boris Nemtsov, whom Luzhkov at the time viewed as a dangerous rival for the presidency. Also lying behind this conflict was a fight for government orders between the Moscow vehicle plant AZLK and the Nizhny Novgorod-based GAZ. Nemtsov, from Nizhny Novgorod, championed the GAZ-produced Volga as the Russian automobile in which state functionaries should be ‘re-seated’. Luzhkov had his own projects for prestige cars. The bureaucrats, meanwhile, had no intention of ‘re-seating’ themselves in Russian cars, preferring German Audis and Mercedes. Finally, after August 1998 an information war broke out between Berezovsky and Luzhkov. This was already a conflict of a different type. Earlier, the conflicts had all ended with the parties being reconciled. This one, however, was a war to the death. During Yeltsin’s years in office, the mass media had totally discredited themselves as a ‘fourth estate’. Or, more precisely, they had shown that the

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power they wielded was no less corrupt, and perhaps even more so, than every other power in Russia. With their advertising-propaganda campaigns they had effectively destroyed the unified information space, disorienting, disorganizing and estranging people. But they themselves had finished up victims of their own policies. Losing their moral authority, they had also lost their value in the eyes of the bureaucracy and of politicized capital. In the process, they had prepared the way for a transition to new ‘technologies of rule’, based on censorship and the use of open coercion.

5

The Corporatist Model and Social Conflict

Russia in the 1990s not only lost the status of a great power. The changes affected the people’s whole way of life. Millions fell into pauperdom, while the ‘new Russians’ grew rich. The scale of the social inequities in Yeltsin’s Russia was revealed by statistics cited in research performed during 1996 by experts of the Menatep banking group. The country’s inhabitants were divided, on the basis of their levels of consumption, into four categories. ‘New Russians’ made up 1 per cent of the population; the ‘middle class’ accounted for 8 per cent; the ‘working class’ made up 66 per cent; and the remaining 26 per cent were simply ‘the poor’.1 FAILED FORECASTS It is not surprising that the majority of leftists expected a new rise in the class struggle. Radical writers predicted that ‘shock therapy’ would lead to ‘the formulating of an authentic ideology of the working class’, to hired workers and the nascent capitalist class ‘becoming conscious of their new position’, and then to massive working-class protests.2 The grandchildren of the workers who made the October Revolution, however, showed unexpected patience and passivity. Strikes indeed broke out, but they then died away without swelling into a mass movement. The typical form of workers’ protest was the hunger strike, often amounting to a collective suicide attempt. People were driven to despair, but still remained incapable of struggle. Social partnership, about which admirers of social democracy wrote a great deal, also remained on paper. The state established a tripartite commission with the participation of the government, the trade unions and entrepreneurs. This commission sat regularly, but its sessions yielded no perceptible results. Nor were forecasts concerning the social base of the new capitalist order borne out. Liberal sociologists divided the workers into two categories: young, skilled, educated people, supporters of ‘the market’, and older, unskilled, poorly educated ‘opponents of the market’.3 That the market was welcomed in principle by the most dynamic, literate and well-educated workers seemed to the liberals to be so self-evident that they were not even 133

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been willing to discuss it. Sociologists also assumed that in Russia there were clear groups of workers, defined on the basis of qualifications and employment, who had distinct social interests and were capable of recognizing and defending these interests. In practice, the greatest losses from the policies of the ‘free market’ were suffered by skilled workers linked to high-technology production, though the list of those who gained and lost over the years needed to be revised repeatedly. Meanwhile, the workers who were most prone to ill-founded expectations as to their future levels of consumption were the least skilled and least ‘marketized’ groups. These were the people who became enthusiasts for the market utopia. Surveys in the years between 1990 and 1993 showed the confusion that reigned in mass consciousness. The same people ‘called simultaneously for free prices and for their regulation; they supported the opportunity for enrichment, and protested against large differences in incomes’.4 The lower people’s level of education, and the less they knew about the world, the more they depended on the mass media, which were controlled by the ‘reformist’ authorities. Unskilled workers had no prospects of gaining from the development of the capitalist market, but they were not by definition ‘losers’. Under the conditions of a primitive market and a shortage of investment, the cheapness of skilled labour created a sort of ‘primacy of the spade over the computer’. The 1990s were a period of ‘reskilling’, with industrial technicians becoming petty traders, security guards or servants of the newly rich. Thanks to their knowledge and skills, these workers were often notably successful in their new callings, but few of them could have become happier as a result. This interweaving of interests made almost everyone ‘pro-market’ and ‘anti-market’ at the same time. In the course of the ‘market reforms’, almost every group gained something and at the same time lost something. The problem was that the relationship between the ‘pluses’ and ‘minuses’ changed continually. According to the official forecast, the initial stages of the reform should have seen its negative aspects (falling living standards, and tougher demands on workers) make their impact felt. Later, in the second stage, the ‘advantages of the market mechanism’ were to undergo their full flowering. In practice, everything happened the other way round. At first, people noticed some positive changes. Chronic shortages disappeared, and, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg, good-quality foreign goods appeared in the shops. As compensation for the fall in wages, there was the chance to participate in the ‘informal economy’, while not losing one’s ‘official’ job. The following fact shows the extent to which the population was drawn into the ‘shadow’ and ‘informal’ economy: according to data from the Russian State Committee on Statistics, in the first quarter of 1997 alone citizens spent a trillion rubles more than they earned, while their savings did not diminish. This spending was on foodstuffs and clothing; in other words, the consumption was by ordinary toilers, and did not reflect the secret operations of the mafia. The newspaper Vek, which published these

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data, expressed puzzlement at ‘where Russians got hold of this extra trillion’.5 In reality, the answer was perfectly well known both to the journalists and their readers. Without the broad development of the ‘informal sector’, the official economy would simply have collapsed beneath the weight of unsolved problems and social contradictions. The communist newspaper Glasnost once described the mass of small ‘shuttle traders’, making their way between Russia, Poland, China and Turkey (and sometimes between different provinces of Russia as well), as ‘proletarians of business’.6 This paradoxical definition was even more justified because many of these people were still listed as workers or technicians at their enterprises, and in some cases still worked there most of the time. Full employment, free medical care and education, and cheap communal services lasted until 1993. The situation began to change following the state coup of that year. Now there was nothing to stop the government putting its social programme into practice. The result of several years of political stability was that the economic decline deepened, and that the collapse of high-technology production became irreversible. The goods on the stalls no longer sent people into raptures (the ‘familiarity effect’ had set in), while the threat of unemployment had appeared and the social welfare system had begun to collapse. Since the ‘users’ of this system included almost everyone, its disintegration hit at virtually all social layers apart from the narrow group of the ‘new rich’. Even the increased wages paid by successful firms often failed to compensate for the losses. The various services enjoyed by the population in the areas of leisure, health care and education had been established on a social basis, often as part of the structure of enterprises. Commercialization disorganized them and made them unworkable. Throughout the country, the discontent increased, but it was not accompanied by mass popular protests. The dissatisfaction remained passive, expressed mainly through voting for a powerless parliamentary opposition, and through regularly repeated calls for the authorities to obey their own laws and fulfil their own promises. The contradiction between workers and employers (or between proletarians and bourgeois, hired workers and private capital) impressed itself on mass consciousness merely as one among many contradictions, and not as the central one. Dislike for the authorities was combined with a readiness to accept them as a given factor, like bad weather or the harsh northern climate. The notion that workers had clear, straightforward interests on the level of daily life turned out to be illusory as well. The position of a worker in a Soviet productive enterprise had been extremely ambiguous, and hence significant numbers of workers were never able to work out just where their interests lay. As consumers, workers were pulled in one direction, as producers in another, as hired workers in a third, and as participants in a corporatist bloc

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(together with managers, technical staff and even ministers) in a fourth. This fundamental inability of workers to define their own tactical and strategic interests meant that their actions were extremely contradictory and inconsistent, and often harmful to those who carried them out. Practice, it might be said, overturned all predictions, the optimistic and the pessimistic, those of the authorities and those of the opposition. In the early period, leftists and rightists shared a common illusion. They believed that the spread of ‘Western’ forms of private property would automatically bring about a corresponding transformation of all the country’s productive and labour relations along Western lines. What happened was completely different. Although conscientious efforts were made to copy Western models, these imported schemes were spontaneously transformed and adapted to post-Soviet reality, and bore less and less resemblance to their prototypes. THE SOVIET CORPORATIST MODEL The events of the 1990s did not represent a breach with Soviet history, but a continuation of it. The atomization and powerlessness of the workers had deep roots in Soviet experience. Prior to 1989 the production combines in the USSR were not limited to providing the state with planned production. They also ensured the social welfare of their employees. Matters such as housing, child care, summer vacation trips and even the distribution of scarce consumer goods were all handled through the enterprise. In an atomized society, the enterprise and the labour collective were the most effective forms of social organization. The enterprise became a sort of industrial commune. It is not surprising that the behaviour of Russia’s ‘hereditary proletarians’ and the forms their struggles have taken during the years of neo-liberal reforms have been more reminiscent of the peasant revolts of the early years of the century than of the European workers’ movement. The corporatist model began to be established in Russia long before the market reforms. The numerous restrictions that applied not only to movement about the country, but at times to people’s choice of professions as well, have allowed sociologists to speak of the ‘semi-feudal’ character of labour relations. Former deputy minister of labour Pavel Kudyukin has written that, in Soviet times, ‘hired labour existed only in large industrial centres, and then only with limitations’.7 The lack of a genuine labour market had another side to it as well. The American sociologist Donald Filtzer notes that, since the relations between workers and employers were not structured on the basis of a market accord, and because the price of labour power as expressed in wages was far from always reflecting the cost of its reproduction, labour relations took on the features of a sort of ‘exchange of favours’.8 Workers were compelled to work, but they were protected from unemployment. They had low wages, but enjoyed cheap, subsidized housing and had guaranteed access to the elements of the social infrastructure that were important to them, and so

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forth. To the degree that the provision of services depended not on the state as a whole but on the management of the enterprise, these relations became informal and even interpersonal. Each worker could, to a significant degree, determine the way he or she worked, while the managers tolerated this partial ‘workers’ control’, since it represented a guarantee that the labour collective would be predictable and reliable. The system of labour relations included numerous informal ties which functioned successfully. In this way, problems which could not be resolved through command methods were settled. This situation resulted in a preparedness by management to tolerate low labour discipline, while the workers reciprocated with a readiness to put up with constant overtime, ‘storming’, ‘working on enthusiasm’ and substandard work conditions. Alongside the officially declared interests and goals there were numerous ‘unofficial’ interests, often unwritten, and at times not fully recognized by the participants in the productive process, but perfectly real for all that. Kudyukin writes: From the formal point of view, enterprise management was not a free agent in determining the conditions of labour, since it was locked into a rigid command system. But in reality the directors, at least from the mid-1960s (after the Kosygin reforms), had more than a few legal, or more often semilegal, ways of providing workers with additional social benefits. Naturally, these benefits and their distribution were a powerful tool for manipulating workers. Clever and cunning directors had little trouble playing the role of ‘father-commander’ and ‘benevolent tsar’, looking after their subjects. But woe betide any worker who tried to ‘search out the truth’. A local corporatist paternalism arose on the basis of the links between the director and the trade union committee. Purely command-style labour relations were supplemented by ‘administrative-corporatist paternalism’.9 The traditional Soviet trade unions concerned themselves with questions of social insurance, job safety and the organizing of workers’ leisure, while helping to supply workers with consumer goods. The trade union head was an unofficial deputy director for social affairs. Perestroika made virtually no impact on the trade unions. They continued in their accustomed role, distributing subsidized holiday vouchers and hard-to-get goods. It was only in 1990 and 1991 that serious changes began in the trade union movement. After the 1989 miners’ strikes, which were caused mainly by traditional problems in the coal industry and by the productive monoculture in the mining regions, the situation for the trade unions became dramatically more difficult. The famous coal industry strikes of 1989 spontaneously gripped one pit after another, coming as a shock both to management and to trade union officials. In the course of these stoppages, rank and file leaders emerged, and the miners began to feel self-confident. Although many of the people who

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stood in the forefront of the strikers during that ‘hot summer’ did not give good accounts of themselves in later days, the first step had been taken toward the creation of an authentic labour movement. This was why the coal workers’ union later showed no fear of conflict with the authorities, either in 1993 or 1994. Moreover, the miners knew that coal would always be necessary. Even if the government shut particular mines, it could not allow the sector as a whole to close down. TRADE UNIONS BECOME REAL The miners’ strikes of the summer of 1989 showed that the old trade unions were incapable of functioning under the new conditions. As a rule, the work stoppages were not accompanied by a mass exodus of workers from the ‘official’ trade unions or by attempts to create new unions. Workers saw the trade unions as organs of distribution with no connection to labour conflicts. Six months later, however, the leaders of the strike committees acknowledged what the role of the trade unions ought to be. One group of activists in the miners’ movement took up leading posts in the traditional trade unions, while the majority set out to establish a new organization. In 1989 and 1990, workers’ committees arose in all the mining regions of the USSR. As in many other countries, the emergence of this first generation of the independent workers’ movement inspired a multitude of hopes that finished up being cruelly disappointed. In Donetsk, Prokopyevsk and Karaganda, the strikers spoke not only of their problems on the job, but also about the problems of society. However, they strove at all costs to preserve the character of the movement as one solely of miners. ‘Thus from the very first, perhaps unconsciously, the miners took on the role of expressing the interests of the bulk of the population, while at the same time isolating themselves from this population’, writes the historian and trade union activist Vadim Borisov. Later it was found that: the trade union movement, which had taken on itself the function of expressing common interests (and which had overestimated its strength compared with the government), acted as a factor retarding the development of strike activity and the formation of strike committees and independent trade unions in other sectors.10 Even later, when the miners had discovered to their cost what ‘reforms Russian style’ amounted to, they very rarely took part in actions with other workers, and almost never mounted solidarity actions when workers in other sectors were on strike. While taking a suspicious attitude to the intelligentsia, the leaders of the workers’ committees later subordinated themselves readily to government bureaucrats and local populist leaders who used the miners in their political ploys. Within a few years many leaders of the strike committees became prosperous businessmen and state administrators. The

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slogan ‘The workers’ movement out of politics!’ turned into a rejection of independent workers’ politics, and then into the subordination of the workers’ committees to the policies of Yeltsin and his associates. As the social consequences of these policies became evident, the workers’ committees lost their influence. The appearance of ‘alternative’ trade unions presented the traditional organizations with their first serious challenge. ‘Alternative’ trade unions arose in large numbers after 1989, and were joined by worker activists who were dissatisfied with the bureaucratism and inactivity of the old trade unions. For the most part the ‘alternative’ organizations were microscopic, with memberships of a few tens or hundreds of people. For them to unite on the scale of the whole country was extremely difficult. The best-known of the new trade unions was the Independent Union of Miners of Russia (NPG). As an all-Russian organization, the NPG was established in November 1991 at a founding conference in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and initially had 14,300 members. By the end of 1992 this figure had grown to 55,000. The union’s charter allowed only workers, and only those who were employed underground, to be members. Of the total number of such workers in the mines of Russia, a quarter had joined the NPG by 1993. After a fierce internal struggle, lasting from 1989 to 1991, Aleksandr Sergeev became the NPG’s chairperson. Other well-known and politically active federations of new trade unions were the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Russia (KSPR) and SOTSPROF. The KSPR was founded in Moscow in June 1990, and from the outset declared itself to be a rigidly anti-communist and anti-Soviet organization. Hostile to Gorbachev in the same way as other ‘alternative’ trade unions, the KSPR – unlike the pro-Yeltsin majority in the new trade unions – criticized Yeltsin as well. This criticism was directed from the right; the KSPR leaders viewed Yeltsin as insufficiently tough in his anti-communism. By mid-1993 the KSPR’s membership had reached 70,000, after which the federation’s growth ceased. The KSPR managed to consolidate itself mainly in the construction and metallurgical industries, and was able to press the ‘official’ trade unions hard in the Cherepovets Metallurgical Combine, one of the largest such enterprises in Russia. After a brief behind-the-scenes struggle the KSPR’s chairperson, Aleksandr Alekseev, began to decide the federation’s policies. SOTSPROF initially took the form of an all-USSR structure, and went under the official name of the Federation of Socialist Trade Unions of the USSR. Initially, left socialists, social democrats and anarcho-syndicalists played a big role in its functioning. Then SOTSPROF began moving to the right. The word ‘socialist’ in its name was replaced by ‘social’, and later the acronym SOTSPROF ceased to be spelt out entirely. All leftists were purged from the leadership, and from being a social democrat, SOTSPROF leader Sergey Khramov was transmuted into a liberal. In 1992 the SOTSPROF

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leaders claimed to have 200,000 members, but this claim could not be verified; members were not registered, and trade union dues were not collected. Independent experts considered that SOTSPROF’s membership at that time was about 40,000 people. The new trade unions waged a bitter struggle against the traditional organizations, which they viewed as their main adversaries. While criticizing the old trade union bureaucracy for its links to the government, they themselves began appealing to the government, hoping to obtain support in their battle against their much larger ‘official’ rivals. After the disintegration of the USSR, when the government of Russia set its course toward sweeping privatization, the leaders of the ‘alternative’ trade unions spoke out in support of the decisions of the Russian authorities, paying no attention to the discontent among the workers. The government, in turn, provided the ‘alternative’ trade unions with a share of the positions on the Russian Tripartite Commission on Labour Relations that was quite out of proportion to their membership. The leading organs of SOTSPROF were housed in state premises (for example, the building of the Moscow Soviet), and the government mass media provided the ‘alternative’ unions with generous advertising. These unions also received substantial support from the American trade union federation, the AFL-CIO. The new trade unions were not able to attract the majority of workers over to their side. Even where a significant exodus from the old unions took place, people were in no hurry to join the new organizations. A tribute to the reality of glasnost was provided by numerous financial scandals, splits and political purges in the ‘alternative’ trade unions. Reports appeared in the press of money received by the NPG from the Russian government for organizing an anti-Gorbachev strike in the spring of 1991. The NPG organization in Vorkuta, which at that time numbered only 50 people, reportedly received 50 million rubles (it is curious that at that time the leadership of the ‘old’ trade unions was acting as the intermediary between the authorities and the ‘alternative’ unions). The members of the NPG publicly accused their leaders of corruption and of embezzling money. In particular, it was revealed that in 1991 the leaders of the NPG had stolen at least 6 million rubles. Analogous scandals also unfolded in SOTSPROF and other ‘alternative’ trade unions. The ‘traditional’ trade unions maintained their influence in the enterprises, because the labour collectives remained stable. While formal unemployment remained low, the post-Soviet society of the 1990s was marked by a rapid rise in hidden or partial unemployment. Experts noted: Both enterprise managers and the workers themselves have an interest in keeping unemployment concealed. Enterprise directors make wide use of administrative leave, postponing open cuts to staffing levels or the official sacking of workers, since they do not have the money to pay severance entitlements to the laid-off workers as prescribed by labour legislation.

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Statistics show that the number of workers laid off in 1993 was 60 per cent of the figure for 1992. But from the third quarter of 1993 the number of lay-offs again showed a tendency to rise, and in 1994 this figure reached 86 per cent of the 1992 level.11 The growth of hidden unemployment was accompanied by a flow of workers into the ‘informal’ or ‘shadow’ economy. Scholars noted: Practically all enterprise employees who are now on administrative leave or on short time find work for themselves in the so-called informal sector of the economy. Unable to earn money in their enterprises, they are forced to take part in illegal private business, and the vigorous pursuit of this kind of activity, carried out under the conditions of ‘secondary’ employment, suits them very well.12 Hence, instead of creating a classical European-type proletariat and a robust labour market, the reforms have brought about the massive social and professional marginalization of hired workers. The participants in Russia’s informal economy differ radically from Latin American ‘marginals’. They are different not only in their level of education and skills, but also because they retain links to the traditional industrial sector. The contradictory position of workers has brought about a paralysis of the social will. Along with additional income (concealed from official statisticians and tax-gatherers), this has been one of the reasons why the universal discontent has not led to social explosion. While receiving incomes in the informal sector, workers have also had an interest in keeping their main jobs. These jobs have provided guarantees of stability, social status and pensions. In these circumstances, people are not only disinclined to resist the will of the director, but, on the contrary, take every opportunity to unite with management to fight for the survival of their enterprise. As Kudyukin has observed, the ‘corporatist-paternalist’ tendency has even grown stronger since the beginning of the Gaidar reforms. Dependency on the enterprise has grown in line both with the increasing acuteness of the situation in the labour market, and also with the dramatic weakening of the government’s social security provisions. Nor should one lose sight of the importance of the goods obtained by the enterprise through barter, and distributed among workers for less than market prices.13 The practice of paying workers in the products of their own enterprise, something that was widespread in the years from 1993 to 1995, has also strengthened the dependency of workers on their factories. Finally, the mass privatization of enterprises, a process accompanied by the issuing of shares to workers, has done nothing to aid in the creation of free hired labour.

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Workers who do not receive significant dividends, and who cannot in practice take part in decision-making, do not become real co-owners of the means of production. Nevertheless, shareholdings have become an additional means of tying workers to particular enterprises. Neither the press, nor trade union information bulletins, nor researchers have recorded a single case in which workers in an enterprise that has been privatized ‘to the advantage of the workers’ have cited their interests as owners as grounds for rejecting a strike call. But workers have frequently cited the fear of losing their jobs or of suffering repression as reasons for not going on strike. The head of an enterprise has now become simultaneously the head of a collective of owners and a controller administering property held in common. Because managers have incomparably more information than workers about the real state of affairs in an enterprise, this has given the directors additional opportunities to exercise indirect control over the behaviour of the ‘owners’.14 As in the Soviet period, spokespeople for the regime have ascribed all the problems to ‘the difficulties of the transition period’ and to ‘survivals of the past’. What has actually happened has been quite different. The years 1992 and 1993 did not see progress toward the ‘Western model’, but a further distancing from it. In 1990 and 1991, paternalism had often seemed to be outside the bounds of the struggle, since questions of social welfare were resolved in one way or another within the framework of the Soviet system. As in the West, the questions of wages and job safety represented zones of conflict, and, where new trade unions had been established, so too did trade union rights. In sum, Russian labour conflict in 1990 and 1991 did not differ markedly from that in the West. Since 1992 the burdens weighing on the paternalist model have increased rapidly, but at the same time the lack of alternatives has become obvious. The real choice before workers is not between paternalism and freedom, but between the existence of social welfare provisions and their absence. Workers are not able to choose between enterprise housing, municipal housing and private rental housing at affordable prices. Their choice is quite different: either housing, child care and leisure provisions supplied by the enterprise, or no chance of obtaining any of them. It is not surprising that the traditional trade unions, with their close links to management, received a ‘second wind’ in the early 1990s. Amid the chronic shortages of investment and the crisis of non-payments that characterized the Russian economy in the 1990s, securing funds for one’s own particular sector became a common concern of workers and management. To be sure, each side used its own methods: in the case of the trade unions, collective action, and in that of the directors, lobbying. Along with pressure from the ‘alternative’ trade unions, market reform and especially privatization have spurred timid changes in the ‘official’ trade union bodies. At first the labour bureaucrats hoped they could get by with a simple change of nameplates. The All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions

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(VTsSPS) was transformed into the General Confederation of Trade Unions, which, after the collapse of the USSR, became an ‘international federation’. The Russian trade unions were combined in the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), headed by Igor Klochkov. Throughout the period from 1991 to 1996 the FNPR retained the features of a typical Soviet organization, thoroughly bureaucratized, unwieldy, clumsy, conservative, full of sinecures and in no hurry to respond to the rapid changes in society. The events of August 1991, the defeat of the GKChP, the banning of the CPSU and the subsequent collapse of the USSR caught the FNPR leadership by surprise. Fearing that the anti-communist repression would spread to its apparatus and that its property would be confiscated, the leadership of the ‘official’ trade unions under Klochkov repeated endlessly that the trade unions were ‘outside politics’ (this thesis was inserted into the official programmatic documents of the FNPR). In practice, the FNPR in 1991 and 1992 switched to giving ‘critical support’ to the Russian authorities. Meanwhile, the new situation had opened up unexpected opportunities for the trade union bureaucracy. After August 1991, when the structures of the USSR collapsed and the Communist Party was suppressed, the trade unions were the only mass organizations in the country. More than 80 per cent of their members remained faithful to them. Amid the chaos and corruption that prevailed in Russia, the trade union bureaucracy, used to the precise observance of traditional norms, seemed like a model of propriety. But the trade union leaders had neither a clear strategy, nor a full understanding of their own strength. The first attempt by the trade union leadership to exploit the new situation was the discussion, conducted by the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions in 1991 and 1992, of a ‘New Ideology of the Trade Unions’. This ‘new ideology’ envisaged turning the apparatus of the trade unions into an organ that would join with employers in determining the wages and working conditions of hired labour. Trade union officials would draw up a scale establishing the relative prestige of the work performed by technical specialists employed as hired labour; this, naturally, would have a bearing on the pay received by specialists and on the demand for their services. The trade union apparatus would participate in deciding the proportions according to which income was distributed between the state, employers and employees, so that the employees (that is, trade union members) received the lion’s share. Surveillance would be exercised by the trade unions over all export and import operations, as well as over investments in production, science, services, education, social welfare, information technologies, technical re-equipping and so forth. The trade unions would also monitor the distribution of state, social and private funds and the uses to which they were put; the privatization process; and the situation in the labour market. The purpose of this latter function would be to keep unemployment to a minimum, since an army of jobless workers would naturally represent a means for employers to exert

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pressure on hired workers and the trade unions, and hence a weapon for lowering the price of labour power. Implementing this ultra-corporatist scheme would have involved subjecting the country to an absolute dictatorship of the trade union apparatus, something to which neither state bodies nor the employers would ever have consented. As a propaganda idea or a utopia, this plan lent the trade union apparatchiks a new self-confidence. But the majority of trade union leaders rejected the ‘new ideology’, especially since the propaganda campaign by the Moscow trade unions was directed to a significant extent against the leadership of the FNPR. While the Moscow trade unions were waging war on their Russian counterparts, and both together were doing battle with the ‘alternatives’, the workers were left to their own devices. ‘Wildcat’ strikes became a widespread phenomenon; because these had not been properly prepared, they more often than not ended in defeat. The most active groups of workers began quitting the FNPR. The FNPR and MFP (Moscow Federation of Trade Unions) leaders, citing data from their analytical services, argued that no more than 3 or 4 per cent of members had left the ‘official’ trade unions over the previous two or three years, and that the workers were mainly faithful to their union organizations. In fact, the FNPR lost 8 per cent of its members in the first year after the collapse of the USSR, and this per centage kept growing; a persistent trend emerged according to which the FNPR’s membership shrank by about 5.5 million people per year. Many people stayed in the trade union movement from inertia, since this did not demand any effort from them; trade union dues were deducted automatically from their wages through the enterprise pay system, and, in order to leave the trade union, it was necessary to go through a complex procedure involving the making of declarations to the trade union committee and the enterprise’s accounting department. If the trade union committee or the centralized accounting department were remote from the main centres of work (as, for example, in the Siberian oil and gas industry), workers found it hard to take such steps. Even surveys conducted by MFP sociologists showed that 41 per cent of members of trade unions stayed in them ‘out of habit’, and only 6.8 per cent ‘from conviction’. The weakness of the trade unions meant that the decisive role in organizing collective actions came more and more to be played by management. So-called ‘directors’ strikes’ became the largest and most typical form of collective protest in Russia in the 1990s. Arguing the need for collaboration with the directors, the FNPR’s newspaper Solidarnost wrote: ‘The struggle by the trade unions for the rights of particular workers is at the same time a struggle for the whole country, for its future. And here the socalled “red directors” are allies of the trade unions.’15 Even during the 1989 miners’ strike, which was considered highly spontaneous, there were cases of directors taking part in strike committees16 Directors also collaborated with FNPR trade unions in organizing actions in 1992 and 1993. During protests by defence industry workers, the journal Vesti FNPR remarked:

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In most enterprises actions by the trade union organizations have been supported by the directors. The local organs of power have declared their neutrality. An exception has been the administration of Vladimir Province, which has forbidden the sounding of sirens in the enterprises.17 At times the situations became absurd. In Ivanovo, V. Tikhonov, the director of the joint stock company Shuyskie Sittsy and a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, personally headed the strike committee that was demanding wage rises from management. The journal Profsoyuznoe Obozrenie remarked bitingly that ‘the strike leader V. Tikhonov was demanding wage rises from the director V. Tikhonov, a situation that specialists on schizophrenia might have found interesting’.18 In fact, the ‘Tikhonov case’ was only an extreme manifestation of a general principle: the extremely contradictory and ambivalent nature of the relations between workers and management. Often, collective actions begun on the initiative of management or with its approval escaped from its control. But so long as the survival of the sector was in question, this kind of ‘social partnership’ remained extremely solid. The alternative trade unions, despite condemning the FNPR’s links with directors, gradually began to establish similar ties. As related by Profsoyuznoe Obozrenie, the alternative trade union federations in 1994 set themselves an unaccustomed task: to put their people forward for managerial posts in the enterprises, in order to ‘ensure that the free trade unions have broader possibilities for action’.19 But, unlike the ‘old’ trade union committees, the ‘alternative’ trade unions in most cases lacked experience of collaborating with government bodies, and therefore backed new people. Needless to say, this aroused opposition among the managers. The question of who exercised administrative control over production became especially acute because of the lack of a clear legislative basis for labour relations. In the new circumstances, issues that had earlier been settled on the basis of unwritten norms and customs were posed afresh, with the outcome depending on the relationship of forces in particular enterprises.20 The role played by enterprise directors in the conflicts that broke out in various sectors of the economy in the 1990s was also particularly important because, in many cases, the workers involved in collective actions were not demanding improved wages or benefits, but simply the payment of what had been promised to them. They were demanding what had been foreseen in legislation, in government programmes, and in agreements that had been concluded earlier. The FNPR, as a rule, was in solidarity with the directors, directing its demands against the government, while the alternative trade unions argued that the people to blame for the lack of wage payments were the directors themselves. Spokespeople for SOTSPROF declared that as they saw it, the delays and non-payments were ‘a particular form of mutual credit for enterprise directors’.21 This was confirmed during strikes at AvtoVAZ

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and at the Tyazhstankogidropress plant in Novosibirsk, where, on the day after the stoppage began, the management was able to pay the sums owed without any help from the state. Nevertheless, despite all the efforts by directors to manipulate enterprise finances, the ‘crisis of non-payments’ had a structural character and stemmed from the policies of the government, which had adopted this highly original method of restraining inflation. The protests mounted by management and unions in various sectors of the economy had a thoroughly defensive and ‘minimalist’ character. Neither the workers nor the enterprise directors tried to force any serious concessions out of the authorities, or to compel any particular changes to the policies the government had chosen; the insistence was merely that elementary rights should be respected. The constantly repeated appeals for ‘corrections to the course of the reforms’ were so abstract that they provided no more than a general emotional background for mass protests. After every serious action by workers, the authorities handed out funds to patch the holes. The enterprises received certain sums, and the workers were given their pay, but after only a few months the crisis resumed. WINNERS AND LOSERS From 1992, every autumn saw a wave of labour conflicts sweep across Russia. During the period when the FNPR was led by Igor Klochkov, his critics sought to explain these ‘autumn offensives’ on the basis that, after a visit to Japan, the leader of the Russian trade union federation had tried to repeat the experience of the land of the rising sun. But the conflicts between the trade unions and the government continued to sharpen each autumn even after Klochkov had left the post of FNPR chairperson. By this time both the government and the enterprises had run out of money.22 Scholars note: Unlike in many Western countries the seasonal fluctuations of strike activity in Russia are only weakly linked to the negotiating of collective agreements or to other institutionalized developments in the area of labour relations. Above all, they reflect the seasonal dynamic of the Russian economic crisis, the need to prepare for the autumn and winter within the context of the ‘economy of survival’, and growing inflationary expectations.23 Every year a summer lull (the vacation season) and a winter consolidation (the struggle for the survival of the enterprise) have given way to ‘seasons of social struggle’. If the first reaction by Western trade unions to the capitalist rationalization of the 1980s was an attempt to defend every job at every enterprise, the FNPR has always been ready to discuss alternative variants of modernization. The trouble is that, under conditions of investment famine, most sectors

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of the economy have not seen any modernization, and there has been nothing to discuss. With each ‘cycle of decline’, the situation has become increasingly drastic, as more and more sectors have been drawn into the whirlpool of crisis. Problems have gradually accumulated; sectoral crises have expanded into ‘intersectoral knots of contradictions’, and a general conflict between producers and the new owners has loomed. The neo-liberal model of economic reform has presumed that, during industrial decline, certain growth points remain. As well as the new commercial and banking structures, the sectors that are supposed to benefit from the policies that have been implemented include, in the first instance, construction, energy and resource extraction. The resource sectors have found it easier to ‘convert’ their production, redirecting it into exports and the earning of hard currency; their uninterrupted functioning has provided the economy as a whole with a guarantee of socio-economic stability and relative vitality. The list of losers from this process includes, above all, the workers in manufacturing industry, and not only in the military-industrial complex. Textile plants and industries producing consumer goods for the internal market collapsed especially quickly, since they were suffering simultaneously from the narrowing of the internal market (the population grew poorer, savings were eaten up by inflation) and from foreign competition. The exceptions were enterprises temporarily protected from foreign competition (for example, car producers). Some of these even gained from the dissolution of the USSR, especially producers of equipment for extractive industry; these enterprises were able to increase their market share at the expense of producers in Ukraine and Belarus. The decline of manufacturing industry created a ‘geography of protest’. Its elements included the textile producers of Ivanovo and the defence industry workers of the Urals. Strike activity by the coal miners also maintained its traditional high levels. In 1994, the leaders in the number of work days lost due to strikes were Kemerovo, Chelyabinsk and Rostov provinces, Krasnoyarsk District and the Komi Republic. But only in Rostov Province was there mass participation by workers in collective actions. The overall number of strikers was little higher than in regions considered ‘peaceful’.24 In the midst of economic depression, collective labour actions made little impact, especially since the central authorities had earlier planned to make cuts in various areas, and perhaps to liquidate certain sectors completely. Workers in the dying areas of the economy did not strike because they could not, while in some growing sectors the workers were in a position to strike but lacked any particular reason to do so. Until the spring of 1994 there were virtually no collective actions in the area of extractive industry, and miners’ leaders threatened strikes in support of the government – that is, against their dissatisfied fellow workers in other sectors. In the years from 1995 to

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1997, when mass protests gripped the mining regions, other workers looked on without showing any special sympathy. In agriculture, the government of ‘reformers’ put its stake on rapid social stratification and support from prosperous enterprises (both those run by individual farmers, and others established through privatization). But the crisis of the infrastructure, together with the rising prices of fuel and equipment, made the emergence of ‘growth points’ impossible. Instead of stratification taking place, corporate unity was reinforced. Conflict between individual private farmers and the managers of former collective farms was replaced by joint actions aimed at forcing money out of the state. Controlling a resource as important as foodstuffs, the agrarian producers had far greater chances of influencing the authorities than workers in textile factories or defence plants. But once-only injections of money were incapable of stopping the collapse of the rural infrastructure. For the extractive industries, the situation began to change in the early summer of 1994. The collapse of the internal market, following on the crisis of industry, sharply reduced internal demand for the products of the extractive sector at the same time as the opportunities open to these products on the foreign market were exhausted and the former union republics had become mired in debt. This in turn was followed by a deepening crisis of the infrastructure. Starved of government investment, the transport system was falling apart and the pipelines were rupturing. The general shortage of investment in the country also made its effects felt on the ‘winning’ sectors. The effective halt to investment by the state could not be offset either by private investment from Russia and the West, or by self-financing from the enterprises themselves. Nezavisimaya Gazeta said of the coal industry: The decline in state support for the sector has not been made up by the increase in coal prices (by 450 times since 1991), since the cost of mining equipment, all of it produced outside Russia’s borders, has risen by 1400 times. Fifty-five per cent of the mines have been in operation for more than forty years. Productive capacity is being exhausted in the coal industry three times as fast as new capacity is coming into operation. The coal that is being mined fails to meet quality standards, but the government is simply unable to shut down a large mine such as Halmer-Yu, because this would involve costs in the region of 40 to 43 billion rubles. As a minimum, the coal miners are demanding social welfare guarantees and a programme of active change in the sector, while threatening the government with an autumn campaign of strikes.25 Unexpectedly, the transport crisis at times made Russian raw materials excessively expensive even on the internal market. High transport costs brought additional price rises in remote regions; wage levels meanwhile

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lagged far behind. The ‘new losers’ included above all the coal miners and oil workers, who were also hit by the policy of restraining inflation through ‘strict budget economizing’, and by the growth of regional inequalities. Coal workers began mounting protests late in 1993 in the Pechora basin, and in 1994 these actions spread throughout the north. Bitter conflicts also arose in the forest products sector. In February 1994 workers at 700 enterprises stopped loading production for shipment. More than 800,000 people throughout the country took part in this action.26 In the summer of 1994, atomic energy workers also mounted protests, but, because of the peculiarities of this sector, symbolic actions (the ‘assembling of personnel’) took the place of strikes. In the Maritime District in 1997 the crisis of the energy industry led to the complete paralysis of the local economy. The sectoral and regional divisions between workers had the effect of strengthening corporatist solidarity within enterprises and industries. But the limitations and contradictions of this corporatist solidarity were readily apparent. The workers’ movement could not realize its potential because it remained a hostage to paternalism. Strikes, hunger strikes and demonstrations became a part of everyday life – and everything remained as it was. Meanwhile, the enterprise directors gradually lost their unity. An obvious stratification appeared among them. Some of the top managers entered the new ‘bourgeoisified’ nomenklatura, concentrating enormous wealth and power in their hands. By contrast, other managers and even directors were more closely linked to their workers in general opposition to the ‘new order’. For an extended period, the fact that the labour collectives were simultaneously encountering different types of conflicts allowed two types of trade unions to coexist. Often, the same people were members of two trade unions, or switched frequently from one to the other. The miners understood earlier and better than other workers the need for joint actions of the competing trade unions. In Kiselevsk in the summer of 1994, during a strike at Mine no. 12, the workers demanded of both trade unions that they ‘unite the actions of the miners of Kiselevsk and Prokopyevsk, in order to use their combined strength to pressure the government.’ Contacts and consultations between representatives of both miners’ unions became normal practice at the local level, despite the continuing rivalry. It is significant that the management of the coal industry company Rosugol, instead of counterposing the two trade unions to one another and weakening them as a result, preferred to conduct joint work with them within the context of sector-wide corporatist collaboration. The ‘alternative’ trade unions also tended to be weakened by their ‘promarket’ ideology. By orienting them toward ‘Western’ models of market behaviour, this left them absolutely unprepared to cope with the problems of the post-Soviet market as it really was. As the problems increased, the ideological crisis within the ‘alternative’ trade union movement intensified. The strike committees and ‘workers’ committees’ that had arisen in 1990 and 1991 were also unable to build on their success. Many of their activists

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either left the ranks of the labour movement, or came to form the basis of an ‘alternative’ trade union bureaucracy. In 1992 and 1993, large numbers of new strike committees appeared, mainly on the initiative of trade unions affiliated to the FNPR. But these committees could not always be viewed as expressions of ‘base-level’ initiatives either. They were formed by the trade unions in order to avoid direct clashes with the authorities, or repression in the event of strikes. At times, they took on an independent existence, and even entered into conflict with their ‘parent’ trade unions. This was the case during protests by teachers and health workers in 1992. At times, problems arose between ‘independent’ and ‘paper’ strike committees, as in the Union of Oil and Gas Construction Workers in 1994. The Russian Union of Coal Industry Workers was the first FNPR affiliate to reject the use of ‘cover’ strike committees, declaring in 1993 that strikes should be conducted openly by trade unions themselves. DIFFERENT UNIONS, DIFFERENT STRUGGLES During the period from 1991 to 1993 the FNPR showed itself to be capable of conducting tough, effective negotiations on general, regional and sectoral wage agreements, defending jobs and incomes. The federation’s weak point remained its inability to mobilize people in active protest. Realizing this, the authorities worked out their own tactics. They made concessions during negotiations, and then failed to meet the obligations they had accepted. The 1991 law on wage indexation, which the trade unions considered their main achievement, was not implemented. According to trade union figures, the General Agreement of 1992 was put into effect in no more than 50 to 60 per cent of cases. In 1992 the FNPR was powerless to counter this. In the autumn of 1992 the FNPR organized all-Russian collective actions, demanding that the government redirect the course of the reforms. Despite the radical mood of significant numbers of trade union activists, these collective actions ended in failure. The numerous meetings and demonstrations were reminiscent of the propaganda campaigns of earlier years. There were neither clear Russia-wide demands, nor a detailed programme of further actions. The authorities simply did not respond to the FNPR’s protests, and the trade unions were unable to make the shift from demonstrations to more serious measures. The successive failure of spring and autumn labour offensives in 1992 deepened the crisis in the ‘official’ trade unions. The task of developing a united position was made more difficult by the fact that the FNPR was a federation of sectoral and territorial bodies. The relationship of forces between these bodies determined which policies would be chosen. The territorial federations were more radical, and were prepared to put tough demands on the government. The sectoral organizations, whose leaders were based in Moscow, were more inclined to rely on direct talks with the ministries.

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The FNPR scored its first noticeable success in the summer of 1993, when the Russian Assembly of Social Partnership (RASP) was established. This body included the FNPR; the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) under Arkady Volsky (the leader of the Civic Union); the Russian Congress of Business Associations; and other smaller groups. For the most part, the people who went under the name of ‘entrepreneurs’ in these organizations were so-called ‘red directors’, managers of former state enterprises. They hammered out a joint position with the FNPR on the struggle to maintain production. The FNPR received powerful supporters in the Tripartite Commission, where the ‘official’ trade unions were now able to stand up to the bloc consisting of the government, the ‘alternative’ trade unions, and a section of the employers. The government thus lost its tool for exerting ‘civilized’ pressure. At the same time the FNPR, because of its opposition to the government, drew closer to the leaders of the Supreme Soviet and to the local organs of representative power. Here, the traditional trade unions saw their natural allies. The FNPR’s second success was the mass actions held in the summer of 1993. The government itself provoked the conflict with the trade unions, breaking off the implementation of the General Wage Agreement with the FNPR just as it had done in 1992. In response, the FNPR managed to draw 1.5 million people into active protest during the first ten days of its campaign alone. Often, the stoppages were supported by enterprise managements, while the local administration in the Maritime District made use of the conflict to place its own demands on the centre. The success of the traditional trade unions in stirring millions of their members into action came as a complete surprise to the government. In breaching the General Agreement, the authorities had not expected to encounter serious opposition. The mood at the local level was far more radical than in the central apparatus of the FNPR. Where strike action was in the air, the FNPR bodies sought to ensure that the actions stayed within legal bounds. Gathering and summarizing demands, the union officials passed them on to higher FNPR bodies; on the basis of these demands, the officials expected, talks would be held with the government. In practice, the scale and duration of the collective actions generally depended on the state of affairs in each local area, though the FNPR always stressed its coordinating role. Around the beginning of September 1993, the central apparatus began to lose control over the protest actions, but by the end of the month the militancy had petered out. The political crisis during the autumn, and Yeltsin’s coup d’etat of September and October, put a stop to the trade union mobilizations. A new wave of collective actions arose in the spring of 1994, provoked by delays in wage payments. From February 1994, the number of labour conflicts in Russia grew each month by an average of 18 per cent. Miners and atomic power workers picketed the main federal government office building in Moscow. The Far East saw a general strike of drivers, the first

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such stoppage in Russian history. During a general strike in the gas industry centre of Nadym in Western Siberia, the strikers effectively took control of the township. Coal miners put forward political demands; an all-Kuzbass conference of labour collectives passed a motion of no confidence in Yeltsin and began collecting signatures calling for early presidential elections. Because the central apparatus of the FNPR emphatically refused to admit that anything important was happening, the decisive role in these developments was played by the sectoral trade unions, which often cleared their actions in advance with the managements of the enterprises. Meanwhile, the enterprise directors showed no interest whatever in quelling the protest movement, using it instead as a of lobbying tool. On 28 April 1994, the FNPR endorsed an Agreement on Social Accord which bound the signatories to refrain from protest actions. At the same time the Ministry of Labour decided to introduce a new code of labour laws into the Duma; compared with the ‘Soviet’ legislation, this sharply restricted the rights of trade unions. The FNPR, bound by its October deal and by the Agreement on Social Accord, was able to respond only with efforts to lobby the parliamentary fractions and the government. Since conflicts could not be avoided entirely, the FNPR leadership from the autumn of 1993 pursued a policy of trying to shift the centre of gravity of the protest movement from all-Russian collective actions to protests on the local level. The ‘alternative’ trade union federations took a similar approach. In the summer of 1994 it became obvious that the government was again ignoring the General Wage Agreement. The FNPR protested to the Tripartite Commission – and that was all. The Russian Trade Union of Machine Builders went further, withdrawing its signature from the Agreement on Social Accord. Other sectoral trade unions also began repudiating the agreement, but this had no serious consequences. The FNPR leaders were again forced to resort to collective actions. In the autumn of 1994, the FNPR leaders put their main effort into pickets and demonstrations, while trying as far as possible to avoid strikes. Among other reasons, this line was prompted by financial considerations; although pickets were very expensive for the trade unions, they cost less than strikes. The de-centralization of trade union finances in the mid-1980s had made it practically impossible to accumulate large funds for strikes and solidarity campaigns. In calling strikes, the trade unions had either to be sure of a quick victory, or to rely on the enthusiasm of the workers. Pickets, meanwhile, could yield perceptible results only if the authorities saw that they would be followed by strikes. This was obvious with the miners in the summer of 1993 and the early spring of 1994. Trade unions that managed to coordinate their actions with the miners’ protests also scored gains. But when pickets began to be held outside the House of Government almost every day during the spring of 1994, they became completely ineffective. Just as ineffective were the days of protest that the FNPR was calling each year. The press used tones of unconcealed irony in reporting the symbolic gestures by trade union

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leaders who had reduced the struggle for workers’ rights to token one-day actions. Serious confrontations with the authorities had no place in the new strategy of the federation, which was now ‘presenting itself as a stable, respectable organization, prepared at any time to act as an element in state regulation of the economy’.27 Each of the sectoral trade unions withdrew increasingly into its own area of operations, orienting more toward ‘its’directors than toward ‘comrades’ elsewhere in the workers’ movement. For the first time in its existence, the FNPR encountered a financial crisis. Many sectoral trade unions ceased paying their dues. Spending on the federation’s administrative apparatus rose substantially, while the effectiveness of this apparatus declined catastrophically. The mounting expenses were covered by the income from trade union property. By the end of 1995 only 5 per cent of the FNPR’s budget was being covered by membership dues. As a result, the bonds between the trade unions and their members grew dramatically weaker. The contradictions between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ organizations grew stronger; meanwhile, this ‘wealth’ or ‘poverty’ had no direct relationship either to the size of a union or to the well-being of its members. To an increasing degree, the leadership of the trade unions became not simply independent of the rank and file members, but even uninterested in the activity specified in the unions’ founding charters. In place of this activity were all sorts of political intrigues and commercial operations. Against this background, corruption burgeoned in the trade unions. The liberal press stated with satisfaction: ‘The most active trade unions are now developing contacts with bandits.’28 Unfortunately, this was no mere insinuation. Collaboration between corrupt trade union leaders and mafia gangs became quite commonplace in both ‘old’ and ‘new’ organizations. Still more widespread, however, was the simple plundering of trade union funds. Without the chance either to collaborate constructively with the authorities or to struggle against them, the trade unions grew increasingly dependent on favours handed down from above. In the early 1990s Russia’s trade unions received a historic opportunity, which they proceeded to squander irrevocably. The FNPR again became an offical trade union federation, dealing with the problems of workers at the government level. The corporatist solidarity between labour collectives and enterprise directors proved far stronger than the solidarity of the organized working class. But the corporatist protests were contradictory and conservative, and hence doomed. The late 1990s saw the old corporatist solidarity gradually disintegrating, while a new class solidarity failed to take shape because of the atomization of the labour collectives, the heterogeneity of the economy and the surviving corporatist barriers. The psychological state of the masses remained close to depression. ‘The norm of behaviour is becoming extreme individualism and fierce competition for jobs’, left-wing sociologists lamented.

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People who not long ago were united by shared corporate interests are becoming increasingly alienated from one another. More and more often one finds that people employed in relatively prosperous enterprises are indifferent to the wretched position of related work collectives. Sometimes the group egoism manifests itself in this fashion: the workers of particular enterprises that have retained their viability show a total lack of interest in improving the situation in other work collectives, seeing these collectives as competitors in the labour market and for the sale of products.29 The market has been breaking down the industrial community in the same way that it broke down the peasant community a hundred years earlier. The unique chance to use corporatist bonds to bring about democratic and collectivist change in the economy, a chance that existed between 1990 and 1993, was let slip. The defeat of the Supreme Soviet, which sought to use the corporatist structures as a counterweight to the central bureaucracy and the ‘compradors’, was also a decisive defeat for the collectivist principle in the economy. The continuation of the neo-liberal course has not meant the destruction of the industrial community, but this community has lost its former stability and organic character. In the most modernized regions, such as Moscow, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, regions that have constituted something like enclaves of the capitalist centre, dissatisfaction has also arisen. The new generation has come to view the existing order as a brake on the country’s development. But there has been no link between the growing discontent of the workers in the modernized sector and the despair in the industrial communities and among the new ‘marginals’. Nor have there been social or political organizations able to coordinate the various forms of protest. The enterprise directors and trade union leaders have managed to solve their problems in one way or another, finding places for themselves in the post-Soviet establishment. Meanwhile, the position of the bulk of the population has continued to deteriorate. As in many countries that have tried to implement the neo-liberal model, a certain improvement in macroeconomic indices (stabilization of the ruble, a slowing in the rate of decline of production and so forth) has been accompanied by a deepening of the social crisis. The number of ‘wildcat’ strikes and hunger strikes has steadily increased. In Siberia and the Far East, desperate people have taken to the streets, have blocked roads and have stopped the movement of trains. Teachers and miners have publicly committed suicide. In May 1997 Nezavisimaya Gazeta described an ‘epidemic of suicides’ in the Kuzbass, a phenomenon occurring in tandem with the ‘restructuring of the coal sector’ according to the programme set out by the World Bank: The main cause behind this tragedy has been the despair of people who have not only failed to receive money for arduous, dangerous and once

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highly esteemed work, but who also find their way forward blocked, and suffer from a total lack of prospects.30 In Kemerovo, the miners began to establish ‘committees of salvation’, which effectively took over certain functions of local administration. This happened despite the opposition of trade union leaders, who argued repeatedly that such organs were not necessary. ‘All the functions which the workers’ committees and committees of salvation are seeking to take on themselves’, the trade union leaders maintained, ‘are clearly set out in the constitution and the laws.’ As a result, the argument ran, these functions should be carried out by the state. All the labour movement needed to do was to acquire ‘influence on these authorities’.31 Again and again, the enterprise managements and trade unions alike lost control over events. Voices resounded in the State Duma, prophesying: ‘Next time the miner won’t pack the dynamite around himself, but around an electricity transmission line’, and ‘when people are faced with a choice of dying of hunger or of dying from a bullet, they’ll choose the bullet’.32 The growing radicalization of the masses, however, did not yet mean that the class struggle was on the rise. The protests by desperate people were more reminiscent of traditional Russian peasant revolts than of the workers’ movement. In Vladivostok, where people did not receive their wages for months at a time, and where electricity and heating were repeatedly cut off, people called for direct presidential rule, hoping that bureaucrats sent from Moscow would be better than the local ones. In other regions protesters put forward confused, contradictory demands and then dispersed to their homes after being given another helping of worthless promises. But the situation was gradually changing. In 1998 mass protests all over Russia were initiated by the miners, demanding Yeltsin’s resignation and the re-nationalization of industry as well as the regular payment of wages. THE GROWING STRUGGLE Neither the left parties seated in the Duma, nor the trade unions, nor the radical leftists (who were preoccupied with academic discussions and with criticizing the opportunism of the parliamentarians) were able to affect the situation. However, the increased radicalism of the masses was creating a demand for radical ideas. The deepening of the social crisis forced the workers themselves to seek a solution. Their reply to the policies of the regime was the ‘rail war’ that broke out in the summer of 1998. Losing their patience, the workers began blocking Russia’s most important rail transport arteries. This form of struggle proved unexpectedly effective. Losses equivalent to millions of dollars borne by the state and by the export sectors of the economy forced the government to make concessions. The position with wage payments in the coal sector improved. From June until October a picket of miners, demanding the

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resignation of President Yeltsin, remained on the hump-backed bridge outside the main government office building in Moscow. The leaders of the Independent Union of Miners, who had earlier supported liberal reforms, began denouncing capitalism and making revolutionary speeches. The trade unions of the Vorkuta coalfields called for the nationalization of the coal industry. In 1991, it had been precisely among the miners that liberal moods had been strongest. By 1998, however, sociologists were united in observing ‘the end of miner liberalism’.33 In the late 1990s, growing oppositional moods were also to be detected among lower-ranking managers, who perceived the retention of the neo-liberal model as a threat to the very existence of the industry. It is significant that disappointment with liberalism gripped not only the miners, but also members of the ‘middle class’. A sign of this was a dramatic rise in trade union membership in the banks and other enterprises making up the ‘new private business’ sector. The business journal Vedomosti wrote of the ‘spectre of trade unions in the banks’ that appeared from 1998: It would hardly have occurred to the bank workers, who receive good wages, to follow the example of the miners if it had not been for the crisis and the cuts to jobs and wages, both those that have already occurred and those that are expected as a result of the restructuring of the banking system.34 The list of those who had won and lost in the course of the reforms needed to be examined afresh; among the inhabitants of the ‘Russian Luxembourg’, leftists were appearing. The sharpening of social conflicts and the financial crash of August 1998 led to the fall of the neo-liberal cabinet of Sergey Kirienko. This was followed by the first attempt at a serious correction of course seen since 1991. Spontaneous protests, however, would not be enough to change the direction of Russia’s development. After a brief interval that followed the coming to power of the government of Yevgeny Primakov in the autumn of 1998, social conflicts resumed their steady increase. Primakov’s resignation in May 1999 was interpreted by a significant part of society as proof that no changes for the better could be expected from the authorities. Meanwhile, as the old administrative elite grew increasingly stratified, the ‘directors’ strikes’ of the early 1990s were replaced by a new form of corporatist mass action, in which one part of the management of a company, or particular claimants to property, used the workers against other management elements. The use of the legally guaranteed right to strike, the right-wing liberal newspaper Vremya-MN exclaimed indignantly, had also become an extremely popular method of fighting for property. The labour collectives are gradually being turned into weapons for the redivision of property – in just the same way as the arbitration courts, plastic

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explosives and gunshots to the head. The method of using the discontented masses in the interests of property owners has been developed in many regions of the country in the course of the past year. In the Vyborg cellulose combine, the workers did not allow the owners to take part in management. At the NASTA chemical plant in Orenburg, workers supporting a director who had been sacked by shareholders from his management post blockaded the administration building, and fought with militia officers who had come to implement the decision of the arbitration court. Some supposed labour conflicts attract little attention, but if this is thought desirable, the anger of the proletariat can be stepped up, and can pour on to the television screens and newspaper pages. This was the case recently with the Achinsk alumina combine, whose workers came out in support of their director, who had been attacked by Aleksandr Lebed.35 In this instance, the liberal journalists were correct; in most such conflicts, the workers were being manipulated. Their acts of protest had nothing to do with the class struggle, and at times ran counter to their own interests as hired labour. Nevertheless, these conflicts had another side. The fact that resolving questions of property came to depend on workers’ actions totally contradicted the ‘normal logic’ of capitalism. When the decision of an arbitration court could be overturned by the actions of a workers’ committee, the very existence of bourgeois law was put in question, and a sort of unforeseen workers’ control over production was introduced, even if this was also in the interests of one of the rival groups of property-owners. The conflicts were accompanied by violence, by clashes with the militia, clashes from which the workers generally emerged victorious. This altered the psychological situation within the labour collectives. Sensing their strength, the workers began using it not in the interests of their ‘protectors’, but in their own interests. The first swallow was the fate of the Lomonosov phosphorus plant. After the shares in the enterprise were bought up by Americans, the labour collective revolted, and won the re-nationalization of the plant. The really crucial struggle, however, was the one at the Vyborg cellulose combine. Here the workers refused to allow representatives of the British company Alcem UK Ltd to enter the plant, fearing that the new owners would carry out mass sackings. For several months, until a final showdown, the workers in effect ran the combine themselves, appointing their own managers. They ran it efficiently; profitability was increased, wages began to be paid regularly and debts were paid off, including debts owed to the tax authorities. The very success of this workers’ self-management, however, intensified the conflict, since the value of the enterprise rose sharply. Once the arbitration court had made its decision, the authorities sent the ‘Typhoon’ special forces unit to the plant, trying to take it by storm. The workers resisted. A fierce hand-tohand battle erupted, and, on getting the worst of it, the special forces opened fire on the crowd. Several people were wounded, but the workers did not

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retreat. As a result, the special forces were forced to barricade themselves in the plant cafeteria, seizing seven hostages. By now, the minions of the law were demanding only one thing: to be allowed to leave the combine alive. After lengthy negotiations, this was granted. According to the newspaper Segodnya, the clash at Vyborg ‘overturned all previous conceptions’ of labour conflict, and the judicial authorities were forced to reconcile themselves to a humiliating defeat, signing an ‘act on the impossibility of carrying out a decision of the court’.36 The business journal Vedomosti was still more categorical: ‘When driven into a corner, or after driving themselves there, workers are not only capable of blocking railways and taking enterprise directors hostage, but also of trying their hands at managing the enterprise. And not just at the Vyborg Cellulose and Paper Combine . . .’37 The ‘rail war’ of 1998 and the battle at Vyborg in 1999 showed that times were changing, and that resistance by workers to the authorities and to property-owners could be effective. But a real turning-point was still far off. A radical transformation of society was impossible without mass self-organization by the workers. On this level, Russian society was still unable to solve its problems.

6

The Post-Soviet Left

For the left in Russia as in many other countries, the early 1990s were a time of great hopes and enormous disappointments. After 1989 socialists believed that the new era that was opening up would give rise to a new left movement, vital, dynamic and free from the vices of the old parties. The events that followed disabused the hopes of both left and right. Despite the permanent crisis of the post-Soviet order in Russia, there was no new rise of the left movement. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of left organizations that had arisen from the milieu of the informal youth movements were active in Russia. Their ideological spectrum was quite broad, ranging from superrevolutionary Marxists to admirers of Swedish social democracy. On their extreme left flank were the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists, which had emerged from the student left club Obshchina (‘Community’), and the Marxist Workers Party–Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (MRPPDP). More moderate socialists, and Marxists who were not attracted by the MRP-PDP’s dogmatic positions, found a place for themselves in the ranks of the Socialist Party. The most right-wing of these groups was the Social Democratic Party of the Russian Federation. This organization was quite heterogeneous, embracing numerous factions and groups which in effect reproduced the whole spectrum of the left. Except for a few months in 1993, however, the party’s leadership remained in the hands of the right wing. The left parties absorbed a large proportion of the active membership of the informal groups of the ‘perestroika epoch’ from 1986 to 1990. It should be remembered that most of the ‘ecological unions’, ‘popular fronts’ and public discussion clubs that preceded the rise of real political organizations were left-wing in character. The key slogan of the informal movement was not the call for a market economy, but the demand for public participation in decision-making. ‘There was a shift from reactive and defensive forms of participation to creative involvement’, scholars later noted, ‘and passive responses gave way to active campaigning.’ The supporters of the environmental groups in those years ‘were motivated primarily by non-economic and moral criteria’.1 Supporters of the environmental movement declared in 159

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a manifesto that for them, ‘turning this work into a fashionable amusement, a political enticement or a means of enrichment’ was intolerable.2 For some of the people who took part in such movements, left-wing positions were simply a mask to be donned during the ‘transition period’. But most of the activists took a thoroughly serious attitude to the ideas they espoused, and it was this that determined the political evolution which these people would later undergo. In October 1993, many of the people who had been involved in the Moscow informal movement met up again, defending the barricades around the parliament. The activists of the 1980s were stunned and appalled to find that, in the changed circumstances of the 1990s, without money, office space or paid staff, and denied access to television and the press, they were transformed in the space of a few months from a real political force into isolated and ineffective grouplets. It was not only the left parties that turned out to be weak. All party-type organizations proved unviable in the ‘new Russia’. This was only to be expected. Contrary to a widespread misconception, political parties were not born along with parliamentarism and democracy. The word ‘party’ was already in use in ancient Rome, but the modern multi-party system arose only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Prior to this parliaments, as in present-day Russia, were made up mainly of ‘independent’ politicians who received their mandates thanks to their wealth or ability to control the situation in their constituencies. The parliamentary fractions were untroubled by their lack of any links to the masses, and even while in opposition they retained their links with the ruling authorities. This ‘pluralism of elites’ allowed capitalism, during its phase of primitive accumulation, to maintain liberal ruling institutions while blocking participation by the masses in politics. The cooperation of harsh, authoritarian structures of executive power with a parliamentary elite provided the ideal recipe for the oligarchic rule that characterized the ‘pure’ nineteenth-century forms of liberal market capitalism. From 1990, the Russian reformers made a conscious, deliberate attempt to resurrect this system. A liberal-authoritarian regime was also ideal for the corrupt Russian bureaucracy that was seeking to appropriate the former ‘property of all the people’, and for the Western elites that wanted a harsh system of rule able to crush any popular opposition to the reforms, but which were reluctant to accept responsibility for the ‘excesses’ of an open, Latin American-style dictatorship. Finally, such a regime was in line with Russian traditions. The germs of liberal institutions have always been present in the Russian authoritarian state, whether in the epoch of tsarism or in the late Soviet period. But these institutions and relationships have never been more than adjuncts to a system which has never been democratic. In Europe, mass parties have played a huge role precisely because they have been able to undermine the principles of the liberal order, forcing restrictions on the freedoms and prerogatives of the ruling groups and strengthening the position of the masses. These parties emerged in an epoch

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when the values of liberal capitalism had been placed in doubt. In most countries, the first modern-style mass parties arose on the basis of workers’ organizations or of petty-bourgeois ‘popular’ movements. Mass parties arise when a significant sector of the population at last realizes that the ‘elite’ politicians in the parliament do not represent the voters, but are their bitterest enemies. To paraphrase Lenin, the parties have to make it possible for ordinary, non-professional people to control the state, taking part in the day-to-day work of political organizing, influencing decision-making, calling politicians to account and, if necessary, removing them. Party politics also differs from the parliamentary variety in this respect: in party politics, the interdependence between the popular base and the parliamentarians is not limited to the once-in-a-blue-moon dropping of voting papers in a ballot-box. For ruling elites, the founding of mass parties has always been a forced response to pressure ‘from the left and from below’. For a pluralism of those at the top, the existence of parliamentary fractions and of various clubs and bureaucratic groupings has always been enough. These people already wield power and, as they see it, the less they have to account for their actions and the less the participation of ‘outsiders’ in decision-making, the better. Hence, despite all the talk about establishing a ‘democratic’ or ‘presidential’ party in Russia, no-one who has held power has set up such a party, or has had any intention of doing so. The parliament could suffice for carrying through privatization and dividing up property, if it obediently adopted laws confirming the ‘sacred rights’ of the new property-owners. But parties were unnecessary. Among the supporters of ‘liberal reforms’, talk of parties was no more than a concession to Western stereotypes. Thus Yegor Gaidar and his group tried to establish a party only in 1994, when they sensed that they were being sidelined from real power. The socialists have been different. For any socialist project, the party as a mechanism linking the politicians with the masses is crucial. All the crises and splits in the history of the socialist movement have been accompanied by changes in the attitude to the party (it was on this question that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks parted ways in 1903, and in the 1960s the same issues played a significant role in determining the divisions between Western communists, social democrats and ‘new leftists’). In Russia, socialists, social democrats and communists who were dissatisfied with the internal regime of the CPSU set out to create separate parties long before such formations were officially permitted. Organizing a party was considered far more important than fighting to secure official posts and deputies’ mandates, the task to which most of the ‘democrats’ devoted themselves. In 1990 most of the leaders and activists of the left did not stand for election as people’s deputies of Russia. Some became deputies in city and regional soviets, hoping that this would help unite their supporters at the local level.

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In the existing circumstances, however, neither the Social Democratic Party nor the Socialist Party could become mass forces. The Social Democrats tried to follow in the wake of the presidential team, and increasingly lost their distinctive identity. When the party’s left wing in 1993 came out against privatization, the disbanding of the Soviets and the hyper-presidential constitution, a split took place; this reproduced in striking detail all the parameters of the ‘classic’ RSDRP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party, from the time of its founding, waged a war on two fronts against the ‘old and new nomenklaturas’. As a result, access for the socialists to any of the mass media was tightly blocked. The radio and television were full of propaganda for privatization, while the newspapers argued either that everything should be divided up, or that it should be left as before; no-one was prepared to give a hearing to people who urged that other variants be discussed. All the gloomy prognoses that had been made by the socialists between 1989 and 1991 were confirmed (the documents issued by the socialists at that time now read like ‘memories of the future’). But the position of the socialists themselves did not improve as a result. The failures of the socialists and social democrats could not, of course, be explained solely as the result of their political mistakes or of the media boycott. In the years from 1989 to 1993, civil society in Russia suffered a defeat. In the late 1980s, the growth of informal groups and the mass participation in ‘grassroots politics’, where the topics of debate were the installing of anti-pollution equipment, the need to stop the felling of trees in parks or the setting aside of land for children’s playgrounds, signified that civil society was coming into being. These groups were purely organic, arising from below without prompting from the television, without propaganda campaigns and without the intervention of an army of paid officials. The history of the period from 1989 to 1991 is usually seen as the history of a fight for power between ‘democrats’ and ‘communists’, but there is another history of these years: that of a struggle by bureaucratic elites to control the mass movements. Victory for any of the rival forces meant the end of civil society. From 1990, as the ‘democrats’ approached real power, the popular initiatives weakened and died out. The attempts to create a broad left party ‘from below’ failed along with them. In this sense, the failure of the socialists stands as a symbol. It signifies the failure of the democratic process in Russia. The irony lies in the fact that throughout the whole period from 1989 to 1994, despite all the talk of a ‘transition to democracy’, the basic conditions for democratic development were not being strengthened, but on the contrary were being destroyed. Where the self-organization of citizens is lacking, parliamentarism turns into farce, elections become contests between corrupt office-seekers and laws reflect the arbitrariness of the law-makers. Amid the collapse of civil society, traditionalist ideas have had a particular attractiveness. Following the liquidation of the CPSU several new communist

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organizations arose, seeking either to ‘return to first principles’ or to develop more up-to-date doctrines. All of them, however, set out primarily to appeal to the old party membership. The Socialist Party of Workers (SPT) occupied a distinctive place. After the dissolution and banning of the Communist Party in 1991, this organization laid claim to the role of its official successor. The SPT’s membership reached a figure of 80,000, most of them former communists. Seizing as an initial weapon a draft CPSU programme that had been drawn up under Gorbachev but not adopted, the party leaders tried to retrace the path of the Eastern European communists who had established social democratic parties on the basis of the old structures. The leadership of the SPT was assumed by Lyudmila Vartazarova, one of the people who came to prominence in the CPSU apparatus during the final years of perestroika, but the ideologues of the party also included the well-known dissident Roy Medvedev. On the ideological level, the party failed to establish a distinctive identity for itself. Nevertheless, the party in its early period enjoyed an important strategic advantage, since it was able to act as a sort of bridge between the moderate wing of the communists and the non-communist left. The SPT also possessed certain material resources. Although the party’s members – unlike the erstwhile ‘informals’ – were not very active, the party had an effective apparatus. The potential thus existed for a broad bloc of left forces to coalesce around the SPT. The first step in this direction was taken in the autumn of 1992, when the Congress of Democratic Left Forces was held. This initiative, however, was not pursued because of attempts by the SPT leadership to establish control over the other participants in the congress. The claims by the SPT to a dominant role in the Russian left were enhanced by the fact that, at that time, no other left organization had a fully functioning party bureaucracy. But this fact also doomed the SPT to failure. Having placed their stake on bureaucratic methods of work, the SPT leaders could not offer their partners any clear strategic perspective. The SPT itself continually vacillated between a readiness to work with ‘moderate forces’ in the government on the one hand, and forming a bloc with nationalists, Cossacks and monarchists from the ‘Union of Rebirth’ on the other. Because other leftists refused categorically to duplicate these political zigzags, the tensions between the SPT and the rest of the left steadily increased, until the SPT was totally isolated. Vartazarova’s party was also having to compete with the Communists. After a decision of the Constitutional Court cleared the way for the Communist Party to be re-established ‘from below’, whole branches of the SPT began transferring their membership. Failing either to declare themselves distinct from the Communists, or to fuse with them, the leaders of the SPT took an ambiguous position: while participating in the restoration of the Communist Party, they refused to join it. This made the collapse of the SPT’s base-level organizations inevitable.

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While making one error after another, the leaders of the SPT constantly insisted that theirs were the only correct and conceivable policies at each stage. Vartazarova and her colleagues refused even to discuss the reasons for the setbacks they suffered. The results were predictable. In the space of two years the party was transformed from a serious political force into a largely inactive group with no influence on the course of events in the country. In 1995 Vartazarova herself joined the leadership of the Congress of Russian Communities, which even in the wildest fantasy could not be termed a left organization. For practical purposes, this marked the end of the SPT as an independent left party. The most serious attempt by Russia’s new left to create a mass political organization has been the Party of Labour project. The idea of a party of the ‘labourist type’ was already being discussed in 1989 and 1990; its supporters drew their inspiration not from the British or Canadian experience, but from the successes of the Workers’ Party in Brazil. For the successful implementation of such a concept, however, one small element was lacking: politically active trade unions. In 1991 the Socialist Party, which had joined with part of the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists and the group Marxism XXI, which had earlier been active within the ranks of the CPSU, transformed itself into the Party of Labour. The new party united several ideological currents, ranging from left social democrats to revolutionary Marxists, but the differences between the ideological platforms within the Party of Labour were less important than the diversity of views on questions of current policy. Unlike the Socialist Party in 1990 and 1991, the Party of Labour was closely interlinked with the traditional trade unions, and sought to become the political expression of their interests. But there was no agreement within the trade unions that such a party was necessary. As the social cost of the reforms grew more and more obvious, the FNPR became radicalized. From a position of ‘critical support’ for the Russian government, the federation gradually became a bitter critic of the authorities. Trying to put an end to the domination of communist ideology in the trade union movement, the FNPR leaders unrelentingly stressed that the trade unions needed to keep their distance from political parties. The sharpened conflict with the government demonstrated, however, that staying out of politics would be impossible. The most radical renewal took place in the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions (MFP), headed at that time by Mikhail Shmakov. The MFP leaders tried to break with the past of the ‘official’ trade unions as quickly as possible. They brought with them a new style and new ideas. Shmakov was the first prominent figure in the Russian trade union movement to enter into dialogue with the young radicals from the informal organizations. Left activists who, only a short time before, had been fiercely attacking the ‘old trade union bureaucracy’, now figured among his consultants. Optimists hoped that the new people and new ideas would transform the old structures,

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while pessimists forecast that these structures would ‘digest’ everything, corrupting and co-opting the leftists. The experience of the next two years showed that both predictions were in a sense borne out. The structures changed, but so did the people. One of the first people to make the shift to working in the trade unions was Andrey Isaev, who earlier had been a key figure among the Moscow anarchists, acting as an ideologue of the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists and helping to organize the first opposition meetings of 1987 and 1988. Exchanging the red and black banner for the armchair of the editor-in-chief of the trade union newspaper Solidarnost, Isaev in the course of several months changed the paper from a dull official news-sheet into a lively and original publication. In the first half of 1992 the young, talented writers – members of the ‘unorthodox left’ – who were drawn into working for Solidarnost transformed the paper from a virtually unknown in-house trade union journal into a noted opposition organ that provided insightful commentaries not only on trade union matters, but also on questions of the economy, politics, culture and international life. The print run increased from 5,000 in August 1991 to 25,000–30,000 in 1993, while the readers came to include not only trade union officials and activists, but also young members of the intelligentsia. Solidarnost became a prestigious place for leftists to have their writings published. Although the MFP subsidized the paper, financial problems caused the print run to fall to around 5,000 after 1993, and to keep publishing going the editor-in-chief was forced to sell part of the publishing equipment and to take out bank loans in his own name. Staffers worked out of ideological commitment, satisfying themselves with miserly wages. Among the writers for Solidarnost, however, were journalists who also worked for Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Pravda and other newspapers. Meanwhile the FNPR, which in formal terms had two national newspapers (Trud and Rabochaya Tribuna) at its disposal, to a large degree lost its control over them. From being trade union publications, these papers were turned into ‘publications for home reading’. Trud, which had held the record in the Soviet Union for the print run of a daily newspaper (in 1989 and 1990 it was produced in editions of 20 million copies), paid virtually no heed to the FNPR and ignored trade union topics. Rabochaya Tribuna (‘Workers’ Tribune’), a joint publication of the trade unions and of Russia’s main organization of enterprise directors, became a mouthpiece for the latter, despite its ‘proletarian’ name. For all the interests shared by the trade unions and the ‘red directors’, the evolution of Rabochaya Tribuna aroused discontent in some sections of trade union officialdom. To justify the position taken by the trade unions, Isaev advanced the thesis that a ‘left conservatism’ was required. Analysing the consequences of neoliberal reform in Russia and Britain, the former ideologue of anarchism came to the conclusion that the left could no longer be a revolutionary force.

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The collapse of the system of ‘state communism’ on the one hand and of the communist movement on the other, together with the victorious progress of neo-liberalism, destroying social guarantees and the principles of social solidarity in the name of effective industrial production, have brought about a situation in which leftists throughout the world (and not only in Russia and Britain) have finished up playing the role of conservatives, defending little islands of socialism that have long since become part of world civilization. For leftists, the role of conservatives is obligatory. It is associated with the defensive position occupied by the left. There is nowhere for them to go on the offensive, since their own social ideals have been discredited. The state has not proven to be particularly effective as a regulator of all the processes of life, while the projects of the anarchists, ‘new leftists’ and greens have remained exotica for the time being. However, ‘left’ values – social security for the population, the existence of a public sector of the economy, and freedom of labour – have not only found embodiment in a multitude of social institutions, but have also become part of world culture. As becomes conservatives, leftists have stood for the defence of cultural values against the technocratic approach of the new ‘progressives’.3 Throughout the 1990s, the desire to combine socialist ideology and conservative values has taken an increasing hold on leftists in the former Soviet Union. Vladimir Shilov wrote in Svobodnaya Mysl’ about ‘a broad spectrum of forces that can be characterized as socialist reformist conservatism’, stressing that conservative values need to have ‘no less strong a presence in society than the liberal values of freedom and self-expression’.4 The leaders of the trade unions have found ‘left conservatism’ thoroughly to their liking, and, to a degree, this ideology has reflected the moods of the masses. However, the champion of ‘left conservatism’ in Russian politics has not been the trade unions, but the resurrected Communist Party. The trade unions have been too closely connected to the state and to the enterprise directors to be able to develop their own ideology. The Communists have been much more honest and consistent in their conservatism. But in the final accounting, the ideology of ‘left conservatism’, reduced to minimalist and defensive demands, has condemned the movement to failure. In the conditions of Russia in the 1990s the task of ‘maintaining existing conquests’ has increasingly given way to that of implementing a new process of radical transformation. The Yeltsin regime has quickly destroyed not only the ‘social conquests of the working people’, but has also undermined the elementary bases of civilized life for the bulk of the population. As a result, everything now has to be created anew. Logically, the concept of ‘left conservatism’ needs to be refashioned into a strategy for a social fight-back by workers.

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The radicalization of the trade unions has simultaneously forced them into the opposition camp and linked their fate closely with that of the Russian left. But the huge inertia of the trade union system has caused it to lag continually behind the development of events. Trying to make up this lag, the FNPR leaders have made tough declarations, but have not been able to back up their threats with mass actions. This is not because the rank and file trade union members have failed to support the concept of labour action. The demands by the trade unions have reflected the mood of the bulk of their members; this is shown not only by the many resolutions coming from factory and workshop meetings, but also by sociological surveys. The problem has been that the inefficient FNPR bureaucracy has been incapable of organizing the masses, let alone of providing leadership for them. FNPR leader Igor Klochkov and his associates first declared their support for the centrist Civic Union, and then became more and more inclined to give their backing to the Party of Labour. But the Party of Labour was weak, and there was no decisive will in the FNPR to address the task of creating a political organization. The trade union of agricultural workers was the only one to take a firm decision and to begin acting independently. As a result, the Agrarian Party of Russia took fourth place in the elections of 1993. Yeltsin’s coup of September–October 1993 not only resulted in a defeat for the opposition forces, but also marked the beginning of an acute crisis for the FNPR. This crisis inevitably affected the Party of Labour, along with other leftists involved in the ‘labourist project’. After the order to the parliament to disperse, Klochkov was faced with a choice. If the trade unions did not threaten strikes in defence of the constitution, no-one would take their declarations seriously. But if the unions were to call for strikes, they would be unable to organize them successfully. As a result, an ambiguous formula was adopted, calling for protests of various forms including strikes. This did not bind anyone to anything, and frightened nobody. Seeing the helplessness of the FNPR, the authorities threatened to dissolve it. After the shelling of the White House, a genuine panic set in among the trade union leaders. Under pressure from people who sought before all else to ‘save the organization’, Klochkov was forced to resign. In October 1993 an extraordinary congress was called, and Shmakov became chairperson of the FNPR. He took over the helm of an organization torn by contradictions, and without clear perspectives or faith in itself. By this time, Shmakov himself was no longer the militant radical he had been in the late 1980s. During the summer and autumn of 1992, when the leaders of the FNPR were shifting slowly to the left, the leadership of the Moscow trade unions moved rightward. After the scandal-ridden Professor Gavriil Popov had quit the post of Moscow mayor and been replaced by the professional administrator Yury Luzhkov, the trade unions increasingly became part of the city’s system of rule. Subsequently, this trend acquired a sort of material embodiment; in 1994 the leadership of the Moscow Federation of Trade

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Unions shifted into the building of the Moscow mayor’s office. This turnabout was made possible by the improving social situation in the capital. The relations between Moscow and other regions of Russia came to correspond to the classical scheme of ‘centre–periphery’. Government bodies were concentrated in Moscow, and the head offices of private banks and other corporations sprang up there like mushrooms; significant numbers of the employees of these entities remained in the trade unions. About 80 per cent of the country’s financial capital was located in Moscow. The gap between the incomes of hired workers in the national capital and in the provinces grew rapidly. The highly paid Moscow workers became increasingly moderate, at the same time as discontent in the provinces was rapidly mounting.5 As the new leaders of the FNPR saw it, the time for strikes and barricades had come to an end. The newspaper Solidarnost began defending the idea of ‘social democracy with Russian characteristics’, and the more radical writers gradually quit the publication. Solidarnost began losing the distinctive style that had once ensured its success. The paper grew dull, and disputes began breaking out among the editors. The crisis came to a head when a group of the paper’s staffers tried to set up an independent trade union. Showing unexpected firmness, the Solidarnost management crushed the revolt. Both sides emerged from this conflict in a poor light, having long since lost their initial idealism and sense of solidarity. The radical ardour of the 1980s had yielded to a desire for respectability. The print run of the newspaper again fell to 5,000, the volunteer distributors gave up their activity, and Solidarnost finally disappeared from the streets and workplaces, to become reading matter only for the trade union bureaucracy. Most of the activists of the Party of Labour no longer hid their disappointment with Shmakov’s policies. This alienation increased when the Second Congress of the Party of Labour elected Oleg Smolin as the party’s chairperson. Smolin, a deputy to the Council of the Federation, was known for his independence and firmness. The FNPR leadership’s turn toward reconciliation with the authorities also repelled the United Social Democrats, who from 1992 had actively collaborated with the Party of Labour. In May 1994, with Shmakov present, Smolin declared to trade union activists in his native city of Omsk that if the policies of the FNPR were not changed, it would be necessary to begin a struggle to replace the union leaders. A conflict that had ripened over several months now burst on to the surface. While the leaders of the traditional trade unions were trying to be respectable and cautious, a dramatic upsurge of the strike movement in the spring of 1994 showed that the masses, despite their fragile capacity for selforganization, were not ready to passively reconcile themselves to their fate. However much the FNPR leaders might appeal for moderation, the lowerlevel trade union bodies, reacting to the demands of their members, were more and more often voicing political demands. The more the leaders of the trade unions sought to pacify their followers, the more they themselves became the targets of the discontent.

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In the elections of December 1993 the FNPR leadership did not present a separate trade union slate, and refused to support any of the lists. In practice, the local and sectoral trade union structures finished up supporting the electoral blocs toward which they had gravitated by virtue of their corporatist links, in the first instance the Civic Union. But the Civic Union suffered a crushing electoral defeat. The Trade Union of Workers of the AgroIndustrial Complex enjoyed more success; supporting the Agrarian Party of Russia (APR), this union had three of its representatives (including the chairperson of its Central Committee, A. Davydov) elected to the State Duma. Deposed FNPR leader Igor Klochkov also won election on the APR’s slate. Because the APR was in essence ‘the rural wing of the KPRF’, the position taken by the Trade Union of Workers of the Agro-Industrial Complex appeared as a show of opposition to the Shmakov leadership of the FNPR. The December 1993 elections symbolized the break between the ‘Shmakov team’ and the Party of Labour. Along with many other opposition organizations, the Party of Labour boycotted the elections. It did not, however, succeed in becoming a serious force in the extra-parliamentary opposition. By the early months of 1994 it had finally disintegrated. A section of the party activists remained grouped around the journal Al’ternativy, and in a support group for Oleg Smolin, who in 1995 was elected to the State Duma. This outcome was bitter, but predictable. The collapse of the informal movement and the dramatic changes to the ‘rules of the game’ that occurred in 1991 and 1992 had left no possibility for the successful founding of political parties. Without its own organizational resources, the radical left was the hostage of the trade union bureaucracy. Moreover, the social base of the new leftists, who sought to express the moods of the most modernized layers of workers in large cities, proved substantially more narrow than that of the traditionalists, who for some time represented the only serious left opposition. The work of the central FNPR structures was paralysed for an extended period by a struggle between followers of Klochkov and those of Shmakov. The staffers in the central apparatus concentrated on fighting for armchairs and offices. The old cadres openly sabotaged orders which Shmakov issued. This struggle went on for more than a year. In the end the ‘Shmakov team’ completely overwhelmed the ‘Klochkov team’, and a large number of the old officials were expelled from the apparatus. In a number of cases this process was accompanied by well-publicized scandals, and even by court suits. The parliamentary and presidential elections of 1995 and 1996 provided the trade union hierarchs with a new chance to make their presence felt. The FNPR leadership could not be accused of failing to prepare for the elections. But, because of its own inconsistency, the FNPR was forced each time to renounce its gains and begin everything afresh. In 1994 talks had been held with social democratic groups on the formation of a Union of Labour, but the FNPR lacked the resolve to make a decision. In 1995, Shmakov urged

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that a new effort be made to create a political bloc around the trade unions. On 17 February 1995 the Executive Committee of the General Council of the FNPR voted to create the movement ‘Trade Unions of Russia – to the Elections’. What was essentially involved was an effort to consolidate the trade union elite. Through drawing up the trade union electoral list, the FNPR leaders were trying to prevent the member organizations from being divided up among various blocs. Maintaining unity, however, proved impossible. The Independent Union of Coal Industry Employees set up its own organization under the name Miners of Russia, which also received backing from coal industry managers. In analogous fashion, the trade unions of road builders and even of communal service workers began drawing up their own lists. The trade union of the agro-industrial complex stayed true to the Agrarian Party of Russia, which is not surprising in view of the fact that the leadership bodies of the party were two-thirds identical to those of the union. A number of regional trade union federations were represented on the list of the Congress of Russian Communities. The Executive Committee of the FNPR was forced to adopt a resolution stating that trade unions at the local level had the right to choose their partners independently. Fear of the growing influence of the Communist Party provided one of the main motives guiding the trade union elite in its subsequent decisionmaking. But, faced with the contradictory policies of the FNPR, the leaders of the affiliated unions did not counterpose to these policies their own positions, more consistent, more competently framed and closer to the mood of the masses. Instead, the union leaders were more concerned with convincing the government of their ‘moderation’. The FNPR formed an electoral bloc with the name ‘Trade Unions and Industrialists of Russia–Union of Labour’. In this, the trade union federation was joined by the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and by the United Industrial Party. Talks were initially held with State Duma speaker Ivan Rybkin, whom Yeltsin had assigned the task of establishing a progovernment ‘left’ bloc. The talks were broken off because of a disagreement over the number of trade union officials on the list. Although the participants in the Union of Labour criticized Rybkin in December 1995 for being insufficiently left-wing and oppositional, a year later Rybkin, the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, and the leaders of the Moscow trade unions joined in supporting Yeltsin’s re-election as president. The election campaign waged by the Union of Labour was a model of incompetence. To raise funds, trade union assets such as holiday camps and sanatoriums were sold off; then no proper check was kept on how the money raised in this way was spent. Trade union sociologists published ‘survey results’ according to which 43.3 per cent of trade union members (who still made up the bulk of Russia’s working population) were firmly resolved to support the Union of Labour; a further 37.9 per cent were wavering, but might in principle vote for the bloc, while only 9.4 per cent intended to vote for other party lists. The actual voting tallies confounded these forecasts. In

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the elections, the ‘Trade Unions and Industrialists of Russia–Union of Labour’ received only 1.55 per cent of the votes. This was a devastating defeat, if one takes into account the fact that the FNPR unions had 46 million members, while only 69 million voters took part in the 1995 elections. Many people expected that the defeat at the polls would mark the beginning of changes in the trade unions, but no-one in the FNPR, despite sharp disagreements within the organization, dared to ‘rock the boat’. The leaders of the federation declared: ‘There was no defeat in December 1995!’6 The election results were assessed as excellent. At the same time, the failure at the polls was used as a pretext for launching a campaign to tighten centralism in the FNPR structures, and, above all, to subordinate all trade union finances to the central apparatus in Moscow. The Executive Committee of the FNPR adopted a resolution on trade union unity which dramatically restricted the rights of member organizations. On 14 March 1996 the General Council of the FNPR backed this resolution by 77 votes to 21. Simultaneously, a decision was made to transform the movement ‘Trade Unions of Russia – to the Elections’ into the political movement ‘Union of Labour’. Shmakov’s place at the head of the movement was taken by the FNPR’s first deputy president, Vyacheslav Goncharov. In the months that followed, the Union of Labour was not particularly active, which was quite understandable; the presidential elections were drawing near and the leaders of the FNPR had not decided either to come out against Yeltsin, or to openly declare an alliance with him. Shmakov had triumphed. Although the internal opposition had not resolved to mount a serious fight, the FNPR leaders warned that any show of dissent would be harshly punished. ‘Anyone who has raised the sword of division must know that their own trade union federation will die by this sword.’7 The Third Congress of the FNPR in December 1996 strengthened the position of the leadership. At the same time, the exodus of workers from the ‘traditional’ trade unions quickened. By this time, the ‘alternative’ trade unions had split into a number of groups. In 1995, several federations declared that they would not take part in the elections. NPG (Independent Union of Miners of Russia) leader Aleksandr Sergeev entered the ‘Ivan Rybkin Bloc’. Considering the NPG’s past, this amounted to a considerable shift to the left by the union. Until that time the NPG had been viewed not just as pro-Yeltsin, but also as a ‘liberal trade union’. SOTSPROF, meanwhile, gave its backing to V. Polevanov’s electoral bloc ‘For the Homeland!’ The elections of 1995 also represented a historic victory for the parties over the trade unions. Despite the difficulties they faced in establishing themselves, the political parties turned out to be far better able to express the moods of society than the trade union organizations that had survived from the past. The elections also revealed that although corporatism remained a social reality of post-Soviet society, it had not become the dominant political factor.

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The failure of the FNPR’s campaign in the parliamentary elections of 1995 guaranteed that the trade unions would have little impact on the presidential elections the following year. The regional FNPR organizations that had supported the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO) in 1995 were demoralized, and did not campaign actively in support of Aleksandr Lebed. Their position was complicated by the fact that the KRO’s trade union wing was oriented more toward Yury Skokov than toward Lebed. After these two split, the trade union officials finished up effectively on the sidelines. Supporters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation did not show a particularly high level of activity, and the party did not display great interest in the trade unions. The only political force to carry out serious work with the trade unions was the Yeltsin administration. As a result, the alternative unions unofficially urged their members to vote for the existing authorities. At the same time, they avoided direct declarations of support; it was too obvious that the authorities could not solve the problems of wage payments and social crisis. The FNPR leadership also preferred not to issue any official declarations, but its sympathies, too, were completely with the regime. The FNPR was bound more and more tightly to the authorities by the mechanism of ‘social partnership’, which had gradually been transformed into a new version of the communist ‘transmission belt’. The Union of Labour called on all its candidates to sign a declaration acknowledging a number of general conditions and requirements. Not one of the candidates got around to signing the undertaking, or even replied formally to the request. Unwilling to give open support to Yeltsin, the leaders of the FNPR expressed their backing for him through the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions. In 1996, for the first time since the Soviet period, the May Day meeting in Moscow was turned from a meeting of protest and solidarity into a meeting in support of the municipal and national rulers. The fate of the official ‘left’ opposition in the State Duma proved similar to that of the traditional trade unions, despite the emergence after the 1995 elections of a ‘left parliamentary majority’. After its defeat in the presidential elections of 1996, the opposition more and more often acted as a prop for the government. Having experienced the delights of reform, ordinary voters now recall with nostalgia their much more prosperous life under the ‘communist regime’. They also recollect that in many countries of the former Soviet bloc, the Communist Parties were still in power when democratic freedoms were introduced. More and more people would like to turn the clock back. Not to Stalin’s times, but to the almost ideal ‘intervening’ (or ‘normal’) period in which censorship and secret police surveillance no longer existed, and privatization and economic collapse had still not begun. To such people, reformed post-communist parties seem like an almost ideal choice. But in fact, these parties have neither a strategy for restoring the system of social guarantees, nor any wish to restore it.

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In Hungary, Lithuania and Poland the post-communist parties did not offer any real alternative, but they were at least able to make use of the changed mood of voters and to return to power on the crest of the ‘left wave’. Inevitably, at least a few left activists who were prepared to raise more radical demands entered the parliament along with them. In Russia, the largest left force has remained the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Unlike other communist parties, the KPRF has not managed either to renovate itself, or to split, or even to preserve its traditions. As the political scientist Pavel Kudyukin justly notes, the party is a ‘political centaur’. In its political essence it is a right-wing nationalist, conservative formation, expressing the interests of the most hidebound layers of bureaucratic capital. But ideologically it claims to be leftist, and it draws genuine support both from the traditionalist left and to some degree even from the democratic left electorate (in the latter case for lack of anything better). While becoming exclusively parliamentarist, the Communist Party has preserved all the traits of a bureaucratic organization; as a result, it has ‘not only failed to take on the guise of a civilized opposition, but has been totally absorbed into the system’.8 These and similar contradictions have been reflected in the zigzags of the ‘party line’. The KPRF’s attitude to Stalin provides an example. On the one hand, the party leaders have remained faithful to the decisions of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and to the resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of 30 June 1956, condemning Stalin’s repressions. But on the other hand they have seen these repressions as stemming from ‘tragic errors and the struggle for power’, while paying homage to Stalin’s role as ‘a great statesman’.9 Seeking to explain the reasons behind the collapse of the communist system in the Soviet Union, they have maintained that within the CPSU, ‘two wings, and in essence two currents, came into being’.10 One, the bad one, was responsible for the bureaucratization and inefficiency of the economy, and for the anti-democratic practices and repressions. The other, the good one, made possible the great successes of the Soviet people (industrialization, victory in the war, and the development of education and social welfare). The KPRF, naturally, represents the continuation of the traditions of the good wing. This ‘two in one’ concept has allowed the KPRF to take its distance from the past while not condemning it. General references to the contradictory nature of the historical process have made it possible to satisfy Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, communist reformers and dogmatists, while at the same time avoiding a serious analysis of history. As a result, the programmatic positions and practice of the KPRF itself have become extremely contradictory. Rhetoric aside, the party embraces two or more currents with quite different ideas as to its perspectives and tasks. Gennady Zyuganov, who was elected leader at the refounding conference, has tried to combine moderate politics in the spirit of his Polish and Hungarian colleagues with nationalist rhetoric. In the process he has

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repelled both radical leftists and moderate voters alarmed by his friendship with Russian chauvinists. The turn by a section of the Communist leadership toward chauvinism is perfectly understandable within the context of the collapse of the world communist movement. As KPRF ideologues openly acknowledge, the Communist Party in Russia can no longer present itself as the core of an international political current. Asked at one point why the slogan ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite!’ had been removed from the party programme, they replied that this slogan no longer reflected ‘a real preparedness on the part of the international workers’ and communist movement for mass solidarity’.11 It has been easier for the KPRF ideologues to draw inspiration from ‘the Russian character’. But the KPRF’s successes have not in fact stemmed from the peculiarities of the ‘mysterious Russian soul’, regarded as inimical to bourgeois progress, but from the failure of the neo-liberal model of capitalism. This model has failed wherever attempts have been made to apply it. The need has thus arisen for joint actions by leftists in different countries, for a new internationalism. This is a need which the leadership of the Communist Party has been unable and unwilling to satisfy. The ideologues of the Communist Party’s right wing have united around the organization Spiritual Inheritance. As the journalist Anatoly Baranov has noted ironically, this grouping ‘has received its inheritance in the form of money, and these funds have their roots not so much in “party gold” as in a group of Moscow banks’.12 Spiritual Inheritance has declared itself the heir of ‘age-old Russian civilization’.13 In the view of the movement’s leader Aleksey Podberezkin, patriotism is ‘a biological defence mechanism – the natural state of any individual’.14 According to Podberezkin’s theory, a consolidation of elites needs to occur on the basis of patriotism, with the left opposition integrating itself with the authorities in order to avoid a ‘spontaneous revolt’ by the hungry population, in the course of which ‘the mob would create its own leaders’. When the economy and society are in a state of collapse, Podberezkin considers, to be a radical is ‘very shortsighted’.15 From Zyuganov’s point of view, the formula for the rebirth of Russia had to be ‘economic freedom plus strong state authority’.16 Slogans and ideas from the traditional lexicon of the right came to occupy a central place in the ideology of the KPRF. The consolidation of elites, as the national-communists would have it, does not by any means necessitate doing away with capitalism. The problem according to this way of thinking is not capitalism, but oppression by foreigners: ‘We defend a private apartment against burglars, and a street stall against racketeers. We defend a Russian commercial bank against the foreign Chase Manhattan Bank or Bavarian Bank.’17 If the alliance between Zyuganov and Podberezkin might have seemed at first to be merely tactical, a new strategic line has gradually begun to appear. The KPRF leadership has stated that under the conditions of globalization ‘the main thing is not the

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contradiction between labour and capital’, but ‘the broader contradiction between the forces of cosmopolitanism and patriotism’.18 Cosmopolitanism has not yet been reduced by the party ideologues to a banal Jewish conspiracy. Zyuganov and his colleagues have begun speaking of ‘worldwide behind-the-scenes forces’; inspired by the ideals of ‘mondialism’, these supposedly have been working for centuries to thwart Russia. The Jewishmasonic conspiracy, Bolshevik ‘extremism’ (incarnate above all in Trotsky) and neo-liberal ‘reforms’ are all no more than different manifestations of the subversive work of ‘world-wide behind-the-scenes forces’. Extolling the Russian Empire as an exceptionally democratic, peaceful and inoffensive state, Zyuganov maintains that in tsarist times ‘access to any social estate was open to members of all nationalities’, and that the government never encroached upon the beliefs and traditions of foreigners.19 The campaigns by the tsarist army were not aimed at conquering foreign territories, but at ‘attaining the country’s natural boundaries; they were dictated by a desire for great-power peace-making’.20 The Russian Revolution of 1917 was on the one hand the consequence of an international conspiracy against Russia, and on the other, it is not hard to work out, a tragedy for the country. The struggle against Russia became a priority for all Western politics. Initially, the most serious hopes in this struggle were placed on a revolutionary explosion, which according to calculations by strategists of the world’s covert agencies would destroy the Russian state.21 In the view of Zyuganov, ‘the preconditions for the Russian Revolution were to an equal degree the result of errors by the Russian government in its domestic policies and of the external, corrupting significance of Western civilization’.22 In sum, the revolution plunged Russia into ‘the chaos and confusion of bitter fratricide’.23 This was ‘a terrible, appalling division of the country’, as a result of which ‘the national-state elite, whose profession was serving the Fatherland, finished up outlawed’.24 It is not hard to see that Zyuganov depicts the revolution, as well as other epochs in Russian history, in practically the same terms as supporters of the monarchy and the White movement. As the well-known trade union activist Oleg Shein notes, ‘Zyuganov can be quoted endlessly, for the reason that, obsessed with the imperial slogans of the Romanov dynasty, he is capable of carrying on about geopolitics for as long as the reader can stand, and longer.’25 Zyuganov’s ideology is not leftnationalist, and not social democratic, but ‘right-conservative’. The party that has assembled beneath such slogans represents the interests of broad layers: from marginalized pensioners, former bosses, chauvinists of all social backgrounds, members of the rural intelligentsia sidelined by events, a section of the nomenklatura who failed

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to attach themselves to the capitalist reforms, and certain workers, to directors of large joint-stock companies, state bureaucrats, and bosses in the banking industry. The worker component, however, is very small, and did not exceed 20 per cent even at the time of the 1996 presidential elections, when the KPRF was a rising force. In sum, we are confronted with an organization which ‘lacks a clearly expressed orientation’, and amounts to ‘the usual hodge-podge typical of bourgeois parties’.26 For all their precision, Shein’s observations need some correcting; the uniting of diverse ideological and social groups with the help of social-authoritarian and nationalist demagogy is not typical of bourgeois parties but of fascist movements. On the other hand, the KPRF has managed to draw behind itself a loyal mass of the ‘left’ electorate, appropriating traditional symbols of the left while at the same time diverging radically from the left’s policies, ideology and even rhetoric. In this sense, however paradoxical it might seem at first glance, the Zyuganov leadership of the KPRF has affinities with the Western ‘new realism’, and with New Labour in Britain. The policies of Zyuganov and Podberezkin have encountered the same problem as the ‘new realism’ in Western Europe. The left might receive some small morsel of power, but when the system is not working, compromise with the ruling authorities cannot bring any serious social reforms. The resources for this do not exist. The old elites will not make sacrifices, especially if the opposition does not pose a real threat. In sum, the leftists who are in power, or rather in the ante-rooms of power, are forced to follow the course prescribed by the right. The difference between Russian ‘realism’ and the British or French variety, however, lies in the fact that in Russia the ‘realistic’ course followed by the left opposition has not only objectively aided the growth of fascistoid nationalism, but has also been organically linked to it. Zyuganov’s ideological line has not just been in clear contradiction to the tasks of the united left; it has also violated the historic traditions of the Communist Party itself. The KPRF leader recognized this in practice when he named as his theoretical sources the works of ‘the representatives of the so-called conservative-defensist camp N. Ya. Danilevsky and K.N. Leontyev’, as well as V. Solvyev, N. Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov and other turn-of-thecentury religious philosophers.27 As well as listing pre-revolutionary Russian thinkers among the sources of his ideology, Zyuganov also names a number of Western ones. The first of these is Oswald Spengler, but there are others too. ‘In our view, it is necessary to pay close attention to the key positions of Arnold Toynbee’s internationally renowned theory of the historical development of humanity, and also to Francis Fukuyama’s concept of the “end of history”.’28 Among writers from the Soviet era, Zyuganov notes only the ideologue of the new right Lev Gumilev.29 Most of the thinkers listed above have been openly hostile to Marxism and socialism, not to speak of Bolshevism. Meanwhile, it is impossible to find in

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Zyuganov’s published works any trace of familiarity with the writings of Western Marxists, Eastern European revisionists or representatives of the anti-dogmatic tradition in Soviet Marxism. A concern for philosophy, however, was characteristic only of the ‘early’ Zyuganov. Since 1995 his key idea has been the struggle against the ‘world-wide behind-the-scenes forces’ which are supposedly responsible for all the ills of Russia and of humanity. In essence, these forces are a kind of social Satan, elusive but omnipresent. Capitalism as such ceases to be a serious problem, and even the Jewish-masonic conspiracy is perceived as merely a partial manifestation of the universal evil. Only the Russian people are defending goodness and light, and are thus subjected to constant oppressions and taunts. The turn away from the socialist tradition and toward national-conservatism has also required the rejection of the concept of class struggle. In Russia and the other former Soviet republics, Zyuganov considers, the fundamental struggle is not between the main classes and social layers, but: between the ruling regimes, resting on a narrow layer of comprador or nationalist ‘kleptocrats’ who are trying to destroy Eurasian civilization as embodied by Russia, and the rest of the population; between the unifying tendencies of development of Russia and the subjective, voluntarist endeavours of the narrow corporatist group that has seized power in the country.30 For numerous party members, this has been too much. A KPRF activist, hiding his identity behind the pseudonym P. Aleev, wrote in the journal Al’ternativy that Zyuganov should not be criticized for abandoning Marxism, since ‘he has never been a Marxist, and hence has never betrayed Marxism’.31 At the Third Congress of the KPRF the leader of the Moscow Communists, Aleksandr Shabanov, noted that rank and file members were demanding ‘an analysis of the main contradictions of the modern epoch, of the contradictions between labour and capital, of the present-day relationship of class forces’.32 Programmatic documents that were adopted in January 1995 reflect the party’s political and ideological contradictions. On the one hand, the KPRF’s programme borrows heavily from documents of non-orthodox leftists of the years from 1989 to 1992. Society’s socialist future is linked not only with the historic mission of the working class, but also with humanity’s environmental tasks and with the emergence of new productive forces and new layers of workers. On the other hand, we also find here Zyuganov’s accustomed positions on Russia’s special path, on the ‘strong state’ and on the country’s ‘spiritual character’. In criticizing the Yeltsin regime, the KPRF leaders argue that the essential goals must be the restoration of the old autocratic state and the creation of a ‘law-abiding’ parliament.33 But at the same time the KPRF leaders themselves call for the revival of the tradition of the old (pre-October) state system, and predict that ‘democracy’ in its present

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form will ‘inevitably be replaced by a socio-economic and political system corresponding to the national spirit of the people’. The essence of this system will be ‘statehood, the national character, patriotism and internationalism’.34 Concepts such as freedom, self-management and the power of elected representatives find no place in Zyuganov’s lexicon. The KPRF’s practical politics have been just as contradictory, veering from agreeing to pass the budget in 1994 to demanding the resignation of the government in 1995, from calling for a union of left forces to seeking a bloc with the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’. After the conservative-nationalist layer within the Russian establishment finally grouped itself politically around the Congress of Russian Communities, the position of the Communist Party became still more ambiguous. The KRO in effect borrowed a substantial part of the ideology and programme of the KPRF, but gave these borrowings a consistent pro-capitalist slant. The slogan of unity with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ naturally pushed the KPRF into the camp of the KRO, while traditional obligations and the moods of the KPRF’s own activists dictated that the party’s actions should be the precise opposite. The KRO’s top leaders, who understood very well how weak their partner-adversary really was, used the help of the Communist Party in solving their own problems, while giving nothing in return. When the KRO was defeated in the parliamentary elections of 1995, the problem became less acute for a time. The miserable results scored by the champions of ‘patriotic capital’ should have impressed on the party leaders how little their vision of life corresponded to the reality. But the KPRF’s position was too solid for the party leaders to feel the need for self-criticism. The growth in the KPRF’s influence between 1993 and 1996 was accompanied by attempts to revive centrism. One after another, discussions and conferences were held on the need to create a strong social democracy in Russia. Unexpectedly, the speakers included not only the leaders and ideologues of social democratic groups, but also people who earlier had had nothing to do with them: the ideologue of perestroika A.N. Yakovlev, the ‘grey cardinal’of the Yeltsin regime Gennady Burbulis, former Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, and later Mikhail Gorbachev himself. The interest which these people showed in social democratic slogans was no accident. Social democratic formulations had already been used in Russia early in the ‘epoch of reform’ as a cover for the party-state nomenklatura as it sought to free itself peacefully and painlessly from its past and from its ideological commitments. Few people were agitated by the question of whether it was possible to use in Russia the methods of ‘market regulation’ as practised in Sweden or Austria, since no-one intended to use them. The less this experience was fit for practical application the better, since this meant it would be easier to take the next step in the direction of openly capitalist ideology and politics. The revival of interest in social democracy in 1994 was already linked to the failure of reform. Now that dissatisfaction had increased, and the

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bankruptcy of the chosen course had become obvious to every thinking individual, the ruling group sought a way out of the crisis – but again on the level of a change of slogans. In 1991 social democratic rhetoric had been intended to conceal a turn to a neo-liberal course, but now the switch from liberal to social democratic slogans was essential first for creating the illusion of change, and then for avoiding an abrupt re-examination of economic policy, for hoodwinking the population, and at the same time for saving particular politicians and their clients. In both cases, the impossibility in practice of implementing the ideas of social democracy on Russian soil made these ideas especially attractive. The slogan of ‘social democracy with specific Russian features’ is fundamentally utopian. Not only are the conditions that gave rise to Western social democracy absent in Russia (for that matter, in the second half of the 1990s the conditions no longer existed in the West either), but in Russia the conditions that do exist are the direct opposite. The policy of regulating and redistributing incomes is possible only in an efficiently functioning market economy. Social democratic parties arose in countries with stable political systems, and with more or less durable democratic institutions and traditions. Many of these parties have had to survive periods of acute social conflict, but they were always established in epochs of stability. The only social democrats in Russia remained small groups of intellectuals, while the role of a moderate reformist party fell to the KPRF. The party leaders were delighted to acknowledge themselves as the only ‘genuine’ social democrats, provided they remained the only ‘genuine’ communists and patriots. The slogan of modernization and social partnership was mechanically combined in the party programme with calls to struggle for the ‘Russian idea’ and for the defence of the Leninist tradition. The presidential elections of 1996 marked a turning-point. While Zyuganov and the Communist Party ran an extremely tepid, cautious election campaign, seeking to prove their acceptability to the new elites, the Yeltsin administration served notice from the first that a change of presidents would not be allowed. Russia did not yet have an established ruling class that could permit itself an experiment with a change of government. The members of the nomenklatura caste who held sway both in the government and the opposition understood perfectly that a change of regime was fraught with unpredictable consequences even given the opposition’s extreme moderation. ‘In Warsaw a not very distinguished former Communist defeated a former electrician from the Hansa shipyards’, Anatoly Baranov commented ironically, ‘whereas we still haven’t seen either a worker or even an average member of the nomenklatura make it to the top.’35 Unwilling to experiment with power, the ruling groups closed ranks around Yeltsin. All the might of the state propaganda machine was arrayed against Zyuganov. The left wing of the opposition and the rank and file activists of the Communist Party were quite unprepared for such a turn of events. ‘The line of not putting anyone out, of not doing any harm, hurt the

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opposition candidate more than anyone else’, complained an observer for the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, which is close to the KPRF. It is clear that Zyuganov’s status as a candidate of the left was not established well enough either. He quite consciously presented himself not as a narrow party figure, but as one representing the nation as a whole – oriented, unlike Yeltsin, not toward division but toward unifying, centripetal social tendencies. On the whole, this was entirely correct. The problem lay elsewhere – in the question of how such a unifying, allnational idea should be understood in our time. Is this an averaging-out of views and moods that appear on the surface, or is it the particular worldview of quite specific social layers, whose interests most fully reflect the objective needs of the country and of society as a whole?36 Zyuganov and his party could not and did not come up with an answer. KPRF activists complained of ‘the irreducible readiness of people to trust those at the top’, and spoke of half-starved old women voting for Yeltsin. ‘This is almost a paradox; many of the people who have received from the present regime only a worsening of their position, who would not seem to have any basis for being reconciled to the present order, are supporting Yeltsin.’37 Meanwhile, the party did nothing to unite these people by giving them an understanding of their own interests, and made no effort to create new traditions of solidarity, citizenship and mutual aid. The results of the 1995 and 1996 elections overturned both vulgar ‘Marxist’ ideas about the electorate of the left and also liberal myths about the opposed social bases of the ‘communist revanche’ and the ‘party of reform’. The KPRF received more support in the countryside than in urban areas, and more support in small cities than in large ones. At the same time the liberal Moskovskie Novosti stated perplexedly: ‘The people who voted for Boris Yeltsin were those whose life expectancy was lower, while death rates, money incomes and crime rates in their regions were higher.’38 In regions where the social situation was relatively favourable, people were more inclined to vote for the left than in provinces where the ruin was total. The exceptions included the capital cities, Moscow and St Petersburg, where there were big concentrations of state bureaucrats, of ‘new Russians’ and of managerial workers for big firms; these cities were also home to the most modernized sectors of the middle layers, the people who had been alarmed by the propaganda in favour of the ‘national idea’. The Communist candidate was ahead among people aged between thirty and fifty years, and the countryside voted for him as well. Yeltsin led among young people, but not very convincingly – most young citizens did not go to the polls at all, which was entirely natural. But the older generation voted in a way that was quite different from what the KPRF leaders had anticipated. ‘It seems improbable, but it’s true’, the Communist leadership stated in horror. ‘The majority of veterans supported the existing president.’39

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The KPRF, which is at once both a conservative and a left party, has not taken account of the fact that the more conservative various layers of the population are, the more hostile they are to any change (including even a return to the past which is so dear to them), and the readier they are to support the present regime and the existing social order. Surveys conducted in the mid-1990s record a rapidly increasing ‘demand for social patronage’. Sociologists have observed ‘a notable strengthening in mass consciousness of ‘authoritarian’ (derzhavnicheskie) tendencies, of caution with relation to the West, and of nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times’. Of those surveyed in 1996, 65 per cent considered that ‘the attitude which the authorities take to people has become worse’, and only 4 per cent saw changes for the better. Sociologists also note that the most important criterion used for evaluating the authorities has been ‘the intensiveness and effectiveness of state paternalism’.40 Contrary to the expectations of the Communist Party leaders, this nostalgia impelled people not into the camp of the opposition, but into that of the government. Opposition was never among the traditions of Soviet political culture. The more the masses needed support from the state, the more they put their hopes in the existing authorities, which were supposed to recognize their own mistakes, change their nature, turn their faces to the people and so forth. It was in vain for intellectuals to note ironically that if the present authorities were to turn their faces to the people, the sight would be even more chilling. An orientation to paternalism was psychologically imcompatible with a struggle against the authorities, even if most people were dissatisfied with their situation. The more Zyuganov’s Communist Party came to recognize itself as a conservative-traditionalist force, the more it sought accord with the authorities. After their failure in the presidential elections the KPRF chiefs no longer spoke of changing the country’s leadership, but of a ‘consolidation of elites’. The opposition wing of the nomenklatura made a clear choice in favour of an ‘austere peace’ that would be better than a ‘good quarrel’ with the comprador groups. Meanwhile, the party leaders were sincerely convinced that such a policy would benefit their social base; once in power, the former oppositionists would be able to ensure that paternalist measures were implemented. The ideas of Podberezkin became the official party line. The Communist fraction in the Duma voted to express confidence in Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, and later, voted for the neo-liberal budget as well. In elections for governors, candidates from the popular-patriotic bloc headed by the Communists invariably stressed their moderation and professionalism. Other leftists, with neither their own organization nor mass support, could only watch in dismay as Zyuganov and his associates carried out their march to the right. ‘It is difficult to regard the Communist Party as an opposition’, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta stated late in 1996. The party’s policies were

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aimed not at bringing about a change of regime, but at improving the way the existing regime exercised power. A sector of the old bureaucracy, forcibly consigned to so-called opposition, evidently feels that many of its former comrades who are part of the executive power are dispirited at the lack of the prospects for growth to which they were once accustomed, and that they are aggrieved at the quality of the new officials, who are stealing more and more. This is creating the possibility of unifying all the members of what was once a single whole.41 Meanwhile, the hopes of the population for a more effective paternalism were clearly ill-founded. One of the peculiarities of the new capitalism in Russia is that class compromises based upon it are simply impossible. Even if the Russian bourgeoisie did not consist mainly of criminals and scoundrels, it would still be unable to make concessions to the masses, since the resources for this do not exist. Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks wrote of parties that are founded in one epoch, but which are later forced to confront the problems of another. If a party cannot find answers to new questions and organize itself to deal with new tasks, it becomes ‘mummified’. The party bureaucracy turns into: a closed solidary group which has a life of its own and which feels itself to be independent of the mass of party members, while the party itself ultimately becomes an anachronism that in periods of acute crisis loses its content and comes to resemble an empty shell.42 Such a mummified organization, however, can exist for years, and can even retain mass support until its ‘moment of truth’ arrives. In Russia the KPRF, which has neither politics nor strategy, has remained the country’s largest party simply because society has not been able to come up with an alternative to it, while the authorities have been prepared to tolerate it as an ‘intra-systemic opposition’. In essence, the history of the KPRF is not unique. Is it not true that the same has happened with Western social democracy in the 1990s? ‘We need to take a critical look at ourselves,’ one of the members of the Duma has stated. ‘Today we are taking care of the fate of the nation in an imposing hall, in favourable conditions. The opposition is not suffering at all; it is threatened neither by prison nor by police persecution.’ While the position of the bulk of the country’s population is becoming unbearable, ‘the leaders of the opposition are perfectly content with the situation in which they find themselves’.43 Parliamentary practice in Yeltsin’s Russia was distinguished by its extraordinary corruptness, and in this regard the KPRF deputies were no exception. In the State Duma bribe-taking, with the deputies selling their

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votes for money, was quite normal. As former KPRF deputy Vladimir Semago observed in an interview with Novaya Gazeta, opposition deputies would support any government proposal for a few thousand dollars. In the last Duma, the only thing you couldn’t have got by lobbying was the reburial of Lenin, or something in this spirit. Or to have the Communists vote against the red flag, or the anthem and coat of arms of the USSR. This would have meant physical death for the entire Communist fraction. But everything else was imperceptible to the electorate.44 In assessing the naivety of the electorate, it should be said, Semago was guilty of a certain exaggeration. The parliamentary cretinism of the KPRF has aroused growing irritation in society. The newspaper Vek writes: The gap between the radicalizing masses, who are demanding prompt improvements in their lives, and the moderate, ineffective actions of the KPRF leadership points to a profound crisis of the left opposition. So long as the protest by the population has had a passive character, the KPRF’s turn to parliamentarism has seemed perfectly justified. But the situation in the country is now changing dramatically. The strike movement is on the rise, and its demands are becoming more radical. Why then is the KPRF persisting with its conciliationist line? Fear that the State Duma will be dissolved has paralysed the political will of the party leaders, who have reached agreement with the government on all important questions. This has caused a fall in the party’s popularity, and as a result the fear of early elections has become even greater. The truth, Vek continues, is that the party apparatchiks are no longer a corps of professional revolutionaries. They are just as scared of mass protest movements as are the members of today’s ruling elite. In the view of the KPRF’s present-day chiefs, as of their predecessors in the CPSU, ‘columns of workers’ have only one role to play – that of the crowd of extras before the reviewing-stands of the leadership. There is no need for these columns anywhere else.45 The communist movement is also marked by a clear generation gap. The party leadership has been able to trust only its loyal pensioners, who do not ask awkward questions or launch unwanted initiatives. As one of the KPRF’s officials has observed: At the level of its base organizations, the party now has two main methods of work: meetings and demonstrations. But party meetings have grown boring even for the oldest party activists, and you couldn’t drag younger

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people along to them even with a rope. The demonstrations are even worse – often the party members have to be brought to the scene of the struggle on stretchers, and then dosed with validol.46 A decision was taken to draft all members who were younger than 50 into youth sections of the party. In the spring of 1997 this policy led to an open revolt by the Russian Communist Union of Youth, known familiarly as the Komsomol. ‘The party leaders want to have youth, but youth in their own image’, complained Komsomol secretary Igor Malyarov. On the one side we see young people who’ve been brought up in postSoviet times (and have become left-wing precisely because of this), while on the other side there are party functionaries who look on a computer as a dangerous monster, and who regard Coca-Cola as a symbol of bourgeois decadence. How are they going to find a common language?47 Zyuganov’s nationalist politics also aroused the sharp disapproval of Komsomol members. As representatives of the youth organization noted, pensioners might simultaneously be anti-semites and Communists, but if a young person becomes steeped in nationalist ideas, he or she does not head for the Communists but for the fascists. The slogan of a ‘consolidation of elites’ also stirred a hostile response. On the eve of the Fourth Congress of the KPRF, the Komsomol leadership published an open letter to the party chiefs in the newspaper Pravda-5, under the title ‘The time of “transmission belts” has ended’. The letter stated: On the threshold of the conference, the party is faced with a choice: whether to support the real, existing Komsomol, or to continue to have imaginary youth formations in party sections, youth commissions and organizational committees that represent no-one. Will the party have a real ally and youth reserve, or will it be content with fictions? The choice is up to the delegates.48 Malyarov, like other oppositionists, was not even allowed to speak at the congress. The result of the obstruction by the party leadership was that the break between the KPRF and the Komsomol became open. This break allows one to hope that a ‘New Wave’ left will appear in Russia as well. But this depends to a significant degree on our ability to draw political, organizational and moral lessons from the preceding defeats. We have to combine politics that express the needs of the modernist ‘new middle layers’ with active defence of the interests of the ‘corporatist’ and ‘marginal’ masses. The subsequent political course followed by the Komsomol, meanwhile, has not been encouraging. Since breaking with the KPRF apparatus, the communist youth movement has failed to establish its own identity and to organize itself as an independent political force; it has vacillated constantly

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between positions that have been either ultra-left or social democratic, depending on its prospective coalition partners. Trying to explain the reasons for their own failures, the ideologues of the left have referred to the informational terror which the government has unleashed against them. Aleksandr Buzgalin considers the root of the evil to be ‘the conformism of the majority of the country’s population’. This conformism, ‘shaped by decades of stagnation and barely shaken by the years of perestroika’, has changed its form only slightly in the conditions of capitalist restoration. In order to resist it, leftists must act as ‘gardeners’, cultivating new individuals, capable of self-organization, in the ‘garden’ of the mass democratic movement.49 This approach, which is very close to Western postmodernist Marxism, could not fail to achieve currency among leftists demoralized not only by the events of the years from 1989 to 1991, but also by the series of defeats from 1993 to 1996. However paradoxical it might seem, this approach is fully in line with the enlightening traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. However, the ‘conformism’ of post-Soviet society has arisen out of particular social conditions which cannot simply be overcome by education. The problem lies in uniting and organizing people as they are, proceeding from their actual problems and needs. This is a task which the Russian left of the mid-1990s was incapable of carrying out. Nevertheless, the ideological and social crisis of the regime of capitalist restoration is opening up certain prospects for the left. A change of generations is taking place, new political experience is accumulating and, most importantly, new group and class interests are being consolidated. This process is going ahead extremely slowly, creating little islands of new politicization. But however small these islands might be, they represent the only real chance not only for the revival of the left movement, but also for the country’s democratic development. In a certain sense, the mass actions by workers in May and June 1998 constituted a turning-point. The psychological impact of these protests on Russian society has been comparable to that which the French strike of December 1995 had on Western Europe. Blocking major railway lines and highways, rebellious miners forced unexpected concessions out of the government, but the disturbances did not end even after long-delayed wages began to be paid. The protesters were no longer demanding only their money, but also that the president resign. So overwhelming was the hatred for the authorities that even the moderate leaders of the Independent Union of Miners were forced to endorse this call. The 1998 protests were, of course, more like spontaneous peasant revolts than the organized actions of a revolutionary proletariat. As the well known left-wing commentator Vadim Belotserkovsky observed in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, ‘you cannot demand simultaneously that the authorities both resign and pay wages’. The miners’ movement cannot attract ‘genuine solidarity’ from other contingents of workers, since it remains corporatist in nature, and does not recognize that it has responsibilities to working people as a

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whole.50 Nevertheless the miners’ revolts, coinciding with the student unrest, have provoked a wave of solidarity actions – in the defence industry, among vehicle workers and among researchers in the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. Even if the authentic class unity of which leftists dream has been absent, a common mood has arisen among workers. As Belotserkovsky acknowledges, the processes under way among various social groups have set up a broad resonance and have created a new situation. Despite the limited incidence of ‘real solidarity’, the resistance that began during May has nevertheless brought serious changes to the psychological climate in the country, changes which can have far-reaching consequences. Compared to previous waves of protest, the May upsurge reached a significantly higher peak, and was more powerful, more persistent and better organized. It therefore shook the confidence of the authorities and of capital that the impact of the old and new regimes has robbed the Russian people of their ability to rise up and defend themselves, and that, as a result, it is possible to do to them anything that monetarist theory, the IMF, and the forced-draft construction of capitalism might require.51 The masses have learnt to resist. Meanwhile the miners, in coming out on to the rails under red banners, have chased away representatives of the KPRF and of other parties. The students also have driven off representatives of the ‘official’ parties; the only political groups with any influence among their ranks are Igor Malyarov’s Komsomol and the picturesque National Bolsheviks of ‘Eddie’ Limonov. The propaganda of the latter features a strange combination of left- and right-wing radicalism. The official ‘left-wing’ politicians have been discredited, and are no longer perceived by the masses as ‘their own’; at best, they are accepted as allies. The new situation necessitates changes within the camp of the left itself. But the changes are occurring slowly and, in the final accounting, the future of the left depends on the masses themselves, on their capacity for consistent struggle, and on the emergence of new leaders. The crisis of 1989–91 forced many socialists to renounce their earlier ideas and values. A painful search then began, with the aim of finding new reference points for the left movement. In psychological terms, this has been like blundering about in the darkness. But we have been blundering about in a place that we know well. The collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe has not so much created a new world system, as it has restored the old state of affairs that existed before 1917, when capitalism was a unified world system. The capitalism of the 1990s is far more traditional and primitive than the system that existed in the 1960s or 1970s. Nor is the ‘North–South’ conflict anything new for socialists, who are well versed in the discussions during the early years of the century on the ‘colonial and

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Eastern question’. Nor is there anything new for Russia about the situation in which the development of capitalism is combined with the survival of precapitalist forms, and in which the modernized layers are unhappy at the protests of ‘collectivist-minded’ workers. Every situation requires its own distinctive approaches and methods. Where tweezers are needed, a spanner is the wrong tool, and the reverse is true as well. The irony of history is that the people who were waving the spanner throughout the 1970s and 1980s now stubbornly urge the use of tweezers. Meanwhile, brute force has to be answered with brute force, and policies of privatization with policies of expropriation. Is it possible to act otherwise? Perhaps. But anyone who does has to be prepared in advance for an inevitable defeat. The people who now hold power in Russia can be glad that, despite all the regime’s economic failures, an attractive left opposition has not arisen in the country. But this situation can scarcely last for long. Where democratic alternatives do not arise, changes will take place anyway. In the form of enormous convulsions.

7

The Road to Default

The neo-liberal model in Russia, as in other countries, was based on two fundamental principles: privatization and financial stabilization. By the beginning of 1998 it seemed that both tasks had been achieved. The ruble was stable, and the remaining state enterprises could be counted on one’s fingers. Almost all of industry was in the form of joint-stock companies, and the state was selling off the last packets of shares in its possession. Beginning late in the autumn of 1991, together with the collapse of the USSR, the neo-liberal ‘reform’ of the Russian economy passed through two phases. The first, from 1991 to 1994, was the time of privatization by ‘voucher’ or without payment, and of hyper-inflation. The second period, from 1994 to 1998, could be called the epoch of the complete victory of capitalism. Large financial empires and private corporations had come into being. The bulk of the ‘property of the people’ had been divided between them. Inflation had been suppressed and privatization had been completed. The state was distributing the last of its assets, but now for money. Unfortunately, it was at precisely this moment, when it might have seemed that the neo-liberal economists should be celebrating a historic victory, that an unprecedented financial crisis broke out, a crisis that put in question the future of capitalism not just in Russia, but throughout the world. WHERE DID THE OLIGARCHS COME FROM? If the ruble had quickly become devalued during the first period of ‘reform’, in the second period it increased in price. The buying power of the dollar on the Russian market fell. The ruble was too expensive. In formal terms, this might all have seemed a triumph of neo-liberal politics. It was no accident that late in 1997 Russian functionaries promised that economic growth would soon begin, while the Western press was full of predictions of a swift recovery in Russia. In the spring of 1998, however, the optimism was replaced by panic. Share prices started to fall, and capital began fleeing the country. In August came a financial collapse. In reality, this outcome was the natural, inevitable result of the policies that had been followed throughout the previous years. The events of 1992 188

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and 1993, when the highly orthodox liberal cabinet of Yegor Gaidar was in power, had predetermined these later developments. Although neo-liberal economists in Russia spoke endlessly of the struggle against inflation, in the initial stage the devaluing of the ruble was the central element of the reform they were undertaking. After losing power, Gaidar and other liberal figures recalled constantly that Russia had never had a budget without a deficit, and that it was therefore quite wrong to complain about the harsh financial policies they had implemented. On the contrary, they went on to declare, the problem was precisely that the financial policies were not harsh enough, that they were insufficiently monetarist. The need was to cut state spending still further: to put a complete stop to the financing of health care and education, to cease supporting industry and no longer to ensure that northern regions received food supplies. Then everyone would be happy. These ‘unavoidable but unpopular measures’ were not put into effect, and therefore the economy could not be restored to health. This was the source of all the problems. And indeed, it was under Gaidar that the budget deficit reached its record level, of around 30 per cent. It was only later, when less consistent monetarists were in power, that the deficit shrank to 7 per cent. The cuts to state spending under Gaidar were in fact quite monstrous; the only problem was that, along with spending, state revenues began to fall as well. The result was that the more the budget was cut, the greater the deficit became. Meanwhile, the ruling elite were not particularly alarmed by inflation and the devaluation of the ruble. In practically all the countries where neo-liberal measures had been implemented, the first result of the struggle for financial stabilization had been a rise in inflation. Devaluation of the ruble was essential if privatization was to succeed. Falling along with the ruble was the price of the fixed assets that were being redistributed to the benefit of the ‘new Russians’. During the stage of financial stabilization, a new redistribution took place – from the small, chaotically run offices of the ‘new Russians’ to the large empires of the oligarchs. What happened was predicted by one of the heroes of Viktor Pelevin’s novel Generation P: A year or two will go by, and everything will look different. Instead of small change to spend on trifles, people will take millions of bucks. Instead of jeeps that get their headlights busted, there’ll be castles in France and islands in the Pacific Ocean. Instead of hired gunmen, there’ll be serious firms. But underneath it all, what happens in this country will always be the same.1 Real life is barely different from Pelevin’s fantasy. In December 1996 the Moscow weekly Itogi published a triumphant biography of Boris Berezovsky, one of the country’s most powerful business figures, who by that time had become deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council. This article was frighteningly reminiscent of the story of Chichikov, the central character in

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nineteenth-century writer Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. It describes how Berezovsky set up the joint stock company LOGOVAZ, and at first simply dealt in Zhiguli cars. Then he came up with the idea of building his own plant and producing a Russian ‘people’s car’. To this end the All-Russian Automobile Alliance (AVVA) was established, and Berezovsky became its general director. There was no lack of trusting investors. Russians were promised that if they handed over their hard-earned savings, they would receive good dividends and a cheap car into the bargain. Three years passed. The plant, the author of this scheme maintained, was being built in Finland; meanwhile, the AVVA shareholders had received nothing. Unfriendly elements now accused Berezovsky of setting up a commonplace financial pyramid, and of enriching himself at the expense of the population. Berezovsky snapped back that he had not promised the investors quick returns. The interests of the AVVA general director had by this time outgrown the framework of the car business. In 1994 he became first deputy chairperson of the shareholding company Russian Public Television, and for practical purposes the owner of Channel One, the Ostankino television channel.2 Is this not strikingly like Gogol’s story of the church which ‘began to be built, but burnt down’, or of the public building that remained uncompleted, even though mansions belonging to the construction bosses had appeared at the other end of town? This time, however, everything was much more serious. The oligarchs differed from the ‘new Russians’ not just in the size of their fortunes. Far more important were their organic links with the authorities. The oligarchs, wrote an observer for a Moscow business journal, were capitalists who were ‘totally and absolutely dependent on the state’. They were incapable of being strategic investors, since they had ‘neither their own money, nor respectable credit histories’.3 In the first stage of privatization the state had in theory rejected property, but in the second the state amassed property in a novel fashion, not through nationalization, but through the interpenetration of the state bureaucracy and oligarchic capital, neither of which could now live without the other. It is significant that in 1999 Aleksandr Voloshin, Berezovsky’s partner in AVVA, became the head of the presidential administration. Such a course of events is absolutely typical of peripheral capitalism, and is logical for Russia’s political economy. The distribution of property opened up enormous opportunities for bureaucratic arbitrariness. Ultimately, there could be no rational criteria in such a process. The enterprises had been organized from the very first in such a fashion that they could not survive without the state. Economic effectiveness was rejected as a criterion for the success of privatization at the very moment when it was decided not to sell property at its market prices. In this case, the logic of ‘constructing capitalism’ prevailed over the logic of capitalist rationality. It is understandable that when bureaucrats had to manage the process, they managed it in

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their own interests. This led to a rapid growth in the administrative apparatus, at the same time as the role of the state in the economy was shrinking. Under Leonid Brezhnev, in the notorious ‘epoch of stagnation’, the administrative apparatus in the USSR was made up of about 12 million people. After Mikhail Gorbachev launched his struggle against bureaucratism, the apparatus swelled to 18 million. But under President Boris Yeltsin, the number of state functionaries in ‘independent Russia’ alone came to be more than in the entire Soviet Union under Gorbachev. It is not hard to see that the distribution of property on such a scale could not fail to be accompanied by a steep rise in corruption and other forms of crime. Exercising hindsight, liberal economists (and especially Western ones) have complained endlessly that the success of the reforms was impeded by the pervasive criminalization of society, by the growth of the mafia and by total disregard for the law. Meanwhile, they have preferred not to touch the question of where all this came from. The distinctive feature of Russian capitalism, however, has not been the broad spread of corruption but the inefficiency of this corruption from the angle of economic development. Crony capitalism and oligarchy have held sway in many countries of the ‘periphery’. In the societies of East Asia, however, such forms of capitalism have been compatible with industrial growth and technological development, while in Russia everything has been different. Our oligarchy did not arise in the course of modernization, but during the decay of the Soviet system. It accumulated its capital not through building new enterprises, but through the redistribution of property. It has proven to be anti-national. In other words, if oligarchic capitalism in Asia was the expression of a sort of ‘passive revolution’, in Russia it was the social product of restoration. Corruption became the sole rational criterion for decisionmaking. But the old nomenklatura, despite receiving a great deal in the division of property, was nevertheless forced to make room for newcomers. Industrial plants, real estate and mineral resources passed into the hands of smart managers whom the party and state functionaries had initially chosen to play the role of proxies. In practice, it was these managers who appropriated the lion’s share of the property, though the old nomenklatura were not left wanting. This was the process that gave rise to the ‘oligarchs’, the forty or so super-rich individuals who took under their control the bulk of the economy of the former Soviet superpower. Next to the oligarchs at the trough were the ‘new Russians’, smaller entrepreneurs who had also managed to score a piece of the action, but who did not have real power. Businesspolitical clans appeared; these united state bureaucrats, public figures and entrepreneurs. The fight over the division of property between these clans came to represent the main content of political life, the basic form of competition. The same ‘politicized capital’ took control of the bulk of the mass media, both state and private. Amid paeans to freedom of speech, censorship was effectively restored in most of the media organs. This was a censorship

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that in official terms did not exist; a private censorship about which, unlike the situation in Soviet times, there was nowhere to address a complaint. GAMES WITH THE RUBLE Some official mechanism of privatization, along with prices, was of course necessary. This explains the advantages of the devalued ruble. The price of the fixed assets of the privatized enterprises was calculated according to the old Soviet prices, and frozen. Meanwhile the real ruble had fallen in value by a hundred, and by the end of the 1992–93 period, by a thousand times. Russian citizens were given ridiculous pieces of paper – vouchers – which they were supposed to invest somewhere. For ordinary people this was quite impossible. The official price of a voucher was 10,000 rubles, but in practice it sold for a bottle of vodka or for 3,000 rubles, which in 1993 prices was no more than US$3. It is not surprising that vouchers were bought up by investment funds which were set up with official support, and which belonged to future oligarchs. The vouchers were in turn exchanged for shares in privatized enterprises. Most of the enterprises went for 1.5 to 2 per cent of their real value, but there was an interesting paradox: the more important an enterprise was, and the greater its potential profits, the more cheaply it passed over to its future owner. After the first, voucher stage of privatization, a second began, with the enterprises now being sold for money. It was at this stage that the oligarchs effectively replaced the ‘new Russians’ as the decisive force. During the second stage, privatization reached its peak. In the space of three years, from the beginning of 1993 to the end of 1995, 20,000 out of 27,000 state enterprises were privatized, but, according to calculations by Western experts, ‘the proceeds from the privatization of the enterprises concerned came to approximately 10 per cent of the value of their fixed and circulating assets’.4 In reality, the results were probably even worse. Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported: There are no serious strategic investors in the state shareholdings. There are only a small number of individuals with particular interests, who need to control the finances and production of one or another Russian company. These people are only prepared to buy packets of state shares at give-away prices, and when the effectiveness of the deal (measured in terms of the potential profits and income to be gained from controlling production, compared with the cost of acquiring the shares) has been high.5 In 1995, privatization yielded the equivalent of about US$800 million to the Russian budget, a figure which represented less than 2 per cent of revenues. Even in 1996, when privatization was being conducted with new prices and assets were being ‘auctioned’, the sale of property yielded only 1 trillion rubles, less than US$200 million, to the state budget. This represented

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less than 1 per cent of revenues. Often, the money used to acquire state property had earlier been borrowed from the government. Meanwhile, the assets that were sold included the most valuable enterprises of extractive and manufacturing industry, enterprises that had brought the treasury a sizeable income. Defending the policies involved, the liberal press declared openly: ‘In the first place, Russian business simply could not have paid more at that time, and, second, even if business had been able to pay more, this would have been absolutely disadvantageous for it.’6 Meanwhile, none of the official figures involved even dared to suggest publicly that the enterprises be left in state hands. When Vladimir Polivanov, the newly appointed head of the State Property Committee, took the risk in 1995 of publicizing data that showed the economic inefficiency of privatization, he was immediately removed from his post.7 Of course, the ‘open’ outlays by the oligarchs and ‘new Russians’ represented only part of the overall spending on privatization. Massive bribes had also to be paid to the bureaucrats, on all levels, who were involved in this process. Meanwhile, the new owners were not in fact all that rich. They did not have money to invest in developing production, and needed to quickly recoup the sums they had spent on privatization. The enterprises thus became no more than sources of cash. If they could produce something of value, they were made to work until the machinery fell to pieces. If they were incapable of selling their output profitably on the market, they could be used as reservoirs of scrap metal. There was not even any mention of modernizing or restructuring enterprises. A Moscow business weekly observed: In such situations, the oligarchs acted in two ways. Their first consideration was that, even if a plant was not bringing in real profits, it nevertheless brought in a certain revenue so long as it was operating. This money could be hidden somewhere (preferably ‘offshore’ in a foreign financial institution) until better times, for example, until investing in Russian industries suddenly began yielding returns. Until this time came, part of the income was quite naturally used to satisfy the oligarchs’ personal needs. The second consideration was more novel. The only way that remained of turning existing enterprises into ‘Western’ ones was through direct support from the authorities. This was despite all the loans that were advanced and the notorious ‘cheapness’ of the mortgage auctions.8 The state, however, did not have money precisely because all the best enterprises had already been privatized on the cheap. A paradoxical situation arose: the more enterprises were privatized, the more the business entrepreneurs themselves felt the need for state intervention. And the greater the need for state investment and credits, the less money the government had for these purposes.

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In sum, efficiency declined, while energy consumption and other costs of production increased. As profits shrank, the burden on the surroundings grew. Even if this brought little joy to the new owners, they could no longer change anything; such was the logic of the system. Since the redistribution of property – both the primary redistribution between 1991 and 1993, and the secondary one in 1994 and 1995 – did not occur in line with market principles, the price mechanism could not operate fully either. Enterprises that were short of liquidity resorted to barter, to the reciprocal cancellation of debts and to the use of a wide variety of money surrogates. Everyone finished up in debt to everyone else. Meanwhile, vast sums bypassed the market completely. They either circulated in the structures of political corruption, or became concentrated in financial institutions that provided credits to the government and to one another. The economist Andrey Kolganov wrote: Within the framework of this economy, a distinctive mechanism of price formation has come into being, because the prices of goods sold for ‘living’ money are quite different from those for goods sold for debt commitments. The prices of goods sold for debt commitments are determined not by the current market conjuncture, but by the specific relations between particular contractual partners. The level of these prices can fluctuate within completely inconceivable bounds, and establishing these bounds is impossible. What exists here is a multi-layered mechanism for concealing the real content of these relations. Here too, of course, criminal elements play an extremely important role.9 The mechanism described differs little from the ‘grey market’ that operated between enterprises in the final years of the Soviet epoch. The only difference is that, in the late 1980s, liberal economists argued that, with privatization and liberalization, all these phenomena would disappear of their own accord. What happened was the exact opposite – the area encompassed by the ‘grey’ and ‘black’ markets began expanding rapidly, subordinating all other elements of the economy to its laws. Another important outcome of the second stage of privatization was that inefficient private business came to depend totally on state support. The sharply diminished state sector recorded markedly better economic results than the privatized sector. According to calculations by experts, at the end of 1996: 88 per cent of industrial enterprises had been transferred to private ownership; meanwhile, their production amounted to only 22 per cent of the overall figure, and they employed 26 per cent of all industrial workers. Meanwhile, enterprises in which the state retained a share were the largest producers, accounting for 65 per cent of the overall volume of production, and employing 57 per cent of workers. Firms in this category

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made up 6 per cent of the total number of industrial enterprises. Firms owned completely by the state made up only 2.6 per cent of the total, accounting for 4 per cent of production and 2 per cent of employment.10 State and semi-state enterprises were distinguished both by their higher labour productivity and by their greater productive discipline. Mass sackings took place in enterprises with all forms of ownership. It is important, however, to note what happened in the partially state-owned enterprises. Almost the only investments made in them were made by the government, but the profits were distributed in such a way as to favour the private shareholders. In a number of cases, the state renounced its share of the profits completely. In Gazprom, Russia’s largest company, the government not only renounced its share of the dividends (preferring to invest this money in developing the sector), but also handed over its packet of shares, 35 per cent of the total, in trust to the managers of the company (in effect, to private shareholders). THE RAW MATERIALS ECONOMY Because the state sector could not cope with the growing burden, and the appetites of the private sector were constantly growing, the government was forced to increase taxes. Without a progressive tax on high and super-high incomes in Russia, taxes were levied even on the minimum wage, which was insufficient to ensure workers their physical survival. Small business would have been completely stifled by taxes, if it had not simply ceased paying them. The fact that tax evasion became a national sport could not help but aggravate the corruption of the state apparatus. The state grew weak, and the functions of maintaining order and regulating life were increasingly privatized by various organizations (from the mafia and civic associations to local administrations and the very same state employees, acting unofficially). With hindsight, Western experts have heaped blame for the economic decline on incompetent Russian functionaries and the ‘mafia’. There is nothing unique, however, in the Russian experience. In every country that has followed the prescriptions of the IMF, industries oriented toward the internal market have collapsed. By contrast, countries such as China and Belarus that have rejected the neo-liberal nostrums have achieved high economic growth rates during the same periods. By preserving the enterprises that produce for the internal market, they have also managed sharply to increase their industrial exports. The collapse of Russia’s internal market increased the dependency of the country’s new owners on international trade. As early as 1990, before the disintegration of the USSR, the IMF was not concealing its wish to integrate Russia into the world economy above all as a supplier of raw materials and energy sources for Western Europe. Russia’s industries could be competitive only if money were invested in them. But there was no money, and

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throughout the years of neo-liberal reform, the competitiveness of industry steadily declined. At the same time, oil and gas could be exported regardless of how efficiently they were produced. In fact, efficiency declined in these industries as well. Spills increased until millions of tons of oil and gas were going to ‘heat the sky’. But, for some reason, this no longer mattered. There were two ways in which exports could be increased: by raising production, or by cutting demand in the domestic market. The first method required huge capital investments, while the second cost practically nothing. It is not hard to guess which was chosen. During the second period of ‘reform’, from 1994, exports increased at the same time as the ruble was being strengthened. This might at first glance seem contradictory, since a more expensive ruble should have hit exporters. But the world capitalist economy was in a phase of expansion, and prices for oil, gas and non-ferrous metals were rising in any case. Indeed, they were rising more quickly than the prices of manufactured goods. The expensive ruble, however, helped to stifle Russian manufacturing, whose products finished up excessively costly even on the internal market. Manufacturing output fell and, accordingly, raw materials were freed up for export. The money gained was used to import consumer goods. The expensive ruble made imports cheap. The exporters put their money into importing operations and into the services sector, making additional profits. In Moscow and St Petersburg, a new middle class grew and prospered; its members consumed the imports and provided services to the new bosses. The oligarchs needed well-educated managers and good hairdressers, experts in the repair of Mercedes cars and loyal ideologues, reliable bodyguards and uncritical journalists. All of them became the clients of one another. The streets of Moscow were filled with thousands of sumptuous Western automobiles. Boutiques flourished and Mediterranean resorts were packed with Russian tourists. At the same time, as most families in the provinces were forced to forgo subscriptions to national daily newspapers, the market boomed for elite ‘glossy magazines’. Television showed the latest Hollywood movies, paid for with commercials for imported goods. This kind of prosperity, however, could be observed only in a few cities that had become the ‘centre’ of the system. The ‘periphery’ was ruled by desolation and impoverishment. About 80 per cent of financial capital finished up concentrated in Moscow; the share of St Petersburg was about 12 per cent, and only 8 per cent was to be found in all the rest of the country. Predictably, this remaining capital was also distributed very unevenly. According to official figures, 21.7 per cent of the Russian population had incomes beneath the ‘subsistence minimum’ in 1998. Meanwhile, 10 per cent of the population, located mainly in the capital and in other large commercial centres, received about a third of all money incomes. The export of raw materials and the plunder of state property yielded well for the new elites. This capital was clearly inadequate for large investment projects, but it was too much for personal consumption. At the same time as enterprises

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suffered from inadequate investment, the owners were faced with a crisis of over-accumulation of capital. The massive hoards of the oligarchs and the ‘new Russians’ were concentrated in the banks. These were very strange banks, which performed services for their clients only reluctantly, but which bought up real estate and media organs, hired former intelligence agents to staff their ‘intelligence services’ and financed politicians. There were many banks, since every oligarch and even middle-ranking entrepreneur tried to set up his or her own. The primary function of banks was to guard the capital of their owners. But where could this capital be invested? How could the owners make sure it increased? Meanwhile, the government was struggling desperately with a growing financial crisis. With privatization, it lost its main source of budget revenue. Income from state property was now minimal, and tax payments were not coming in. Small businesses simply could not pay their taxes; racketeers had to be paid off, and bribes had to be paid to state officials. Substantial tax payments could be had only from a small number of exporters who could not hide their incomes, but these companies were in no hurry to pay either. They had political influence, and preferred to spend money on propaganda and on bribing bureaucrats. They justified their unwillingness to pay taxes by arguing that they in turn were owed large sums by enterprises operating in the internal market. The government tried to make up for its budget deficit by increasing taxes, with the predictable result that the payments became even less. In short, money was not entering the state coffers. LIVING ON BORROWED TIME IMF experts insisted that solving the problem of the budget deficit through the emission of paper money was unacceptable. The same economists, however, agreed that money could simply be borrowed. In fact, an increase in the state debt merely represents saved-up or postponed inflation, but this was the solution that suited the financial institutions. Paradoxically, the interests of Western stock-market speculators, the Russian government and the banker-oligarchs coincided. From late in 1994, the stability of the ruble was maintained through constantly growing state borrowings. Short-term state bonds (GKOs) were issued in rubles, and provided fabulous rates of interest to those who held them. This was supposed to make the ruble more attractive compared to the dollar, to guarantee the banks a reliable and profitable avenue of investment for their capital, and to ensure a constant flow of money into the treasury. The GKOs did, in fact, enjoy phenomenal success among investors. Millions of dollars in speculative Western capital poured into Russia. The problem was that investments in industry, which had been insignificant in any case, now effectively ceased, and credit became unobtainable not only for small but also for medium-sized businesses. No enterprise could compete with the government on the financial market.

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Meanwhile, the greater the debt and the deeper the decline of industry, the weaker the position of the ruble became. In order to maintain the high ruble rate, the government was forced constantly to raise the interest rate on the GKOs. The state debt increased in line with the pyramid principle. New credits were essential not in order to solve the real problems of the economy, but in order to service the previous debt. By early in 1998, it was evident that as much as a third of the state budget would go to meet this need. In the 1999–2000 period, it was predicted, as much as two-thirds of the budget would have to be spent on debt servicing. The rates of interest paid ranged from 20 to 60 per cent on an annualized basis. After the Asian crisis erupted and investors started becoming nervous, these rates soared even higher. By the spring of 1998, the government was offering annual returns of as much as 200 per cent. During that spring, the Central Bank was paying up to $500 million a day to support the exchange rate of the ruble. Meanwhile, doctors and teachers were not receiving their wages for months on end, and enterprises that were completely without ready cash were forced to survive through barter. As a result, the Central Bank’s reserves of gold and foreign currency began shrinking rapidly. In 1996 they had reached US$40 billion, but by the spring of 1998 they had fallen to US$17–18 billion. Despite the new credits provided by the IMF, the reserves had diminished by the end of the summer to US$13 billion. Western and Russian hard-currency speculators were calculating their profits, but the system was already doomed. The crisis in the spring of 1998 was the last warning. Although fiery letters were already burning on the wall, the revelry of financial capital continued. The catastrophe would not, of course, have hit so soon if world capitalism as a whole had not been entering a phase of crisis. Unlike the situation in times of economic growth, in a period of crisis the prices for raw materials and energy resources fall quicker than those for manufactured goods. The prices commanded by the products of Russian exporters of raw materials and energy in 1997 and 1998 declined so rapidly that the enterprises were unable to adapt to the new situation. The price of oil was down by 34 per cent; that of copper by 34 per cent; and that of nickel by 25 per cent. Gazprom and the oil companies, which earlier had not suffered particularly from the over-expensive ruble, unexpectedly found themselves forced into a corner. Russian entrepreneurs lost out, not only in absolute terms, but also in relative ones. They had less hard currency, while imports had become more expensive. An economic collapse was only a matter of time. While sensing difficulties ahead, the Kremlin leadership carried on in accustomed bureaucratic fashion, trying to solve political and economic problems through reshuffling personnel. In place of the highly experienced bureaucrat Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had close links to Gazprom, the youthful Sergey Kirienko was installed as prime minister. Kirienko did not hide his closeness to the Moscow bankers; the authorities, it followed, were not concealing their determination to support the ruble exchange rate at any

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cost. For this, however, neither the time nor the resources were any longer available. The well-known journalist Oleg Davydov, recalling how the future prime minister had begun his career in the Soviet Komsomol, described him as a ‘virtual Komsomol member’. As was expected of Komsomol officials in the Soviet era, Kirienko combined discipline and loyalty to ‘senior comrades’ with the most complete irresponsibility. Afterwards, he explained at length and in involved fashion what he had wanted and had not managed to do. But he did not explain the main thing – why he had not made any attempt at the prompt implementation of the anti-crisis measures (devaluation and so forth) which he himself maintained had been necessary. He simply kept on asserting that everyone would have suffered terribly from a spring devaluation. As though no-one suffered from the autumn default . . . In any case, analysing the nature of Kirienko’s fleeting premiership – whether it was someone’s attempt to put off the inevitable, or a rescue operation for financial structures dear to the heart of someone or other – is a matter for the law enforcement organs and for economic historians.11 Investigating the premier’s personal motives, in Davydov’s view, is a task better left to psychoanalysts. CATASTROPHE Late in 1997 the Western economic press was full of optimistic forecasts of impending economic growth and even of a boom in Russia. Instead came a catastrophic decline. With hindsight, the liberal economists tried to argue that a financial crisis caused by incorrect political decisions had provoked the fall in production. What really happened was the exact opposite. A collapse of production, occurring as the inescapable result of neo-liberal policies, made the fall of the ruble inevitable. In the first half of 1998, when the Russian government and the IMF were still issuing optimistic prognoses, GDP declined by 2 per cent compared with the same period of the previous year, industrial production by 2.5 per cent and agricultural output by 3 per cent. It should not be forgotten that, long before this, the collapse in Russia had already exceeded the scale of the Great Depression in the USA. By the summer of 1998, half the enterprises in Russia were running at a loss. Total wage debts across the country had risen by 60 per cent. Meanwhile, 11 per cent of the able-bodied population were effectively without work, and most of these people were not receiving welfare benefits. Even those who were officially entitled to benefits (no more than a quarter of the people who were without work) were not being paid on time. The State Employment Fund did not have money, and the benefits were delayed for six months or more. Budget revenues were falling rapidly, since there was nothing and no-one to collect taxes from. The month of August was simply

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catastrophic; the decline of industrial production came to 11.5 per cent compared to the same month in the previous year, while agricultural output was down by 22.9 per cent! The right-wing newspaper Izvestiya was obliged to state that ‘the fall of production in industry and agriculture’ was ‘breaking records’.12 At the same time, production in the oil sector was falling precipitately, with wells being shut down one after the other. The oil company Yukos even urged local authorities to nationalize loss-making wells if they wanted to save jobs. On 17 August 1998, the ruble collapsed. Efforts to stem its decline at a certain level failed. By September, as The Moscow Times noted, the ruble was falling more rapidly than any other national currency in recent years; Indonesia’s currency had lost 84 per cent of its value over twelve months, while the ruble had fallen by two-thirds in three weeks.13 The government of Sergey Kirienko, after only five months in office, did everything it had been supposed to prevent. It recognized the devaluation of the ruble, placed a 90-day moratorium on the payment of debts by Russian firms to their Western partners and halted the servicing of the GKOs. In a single day, multi-million-dollar fortunes were wiped out. Not surprisingly, the fall of the ruble was soon followed by that of Kirienko. To add to the financial crisis, there was now a political one. Most neo-liberal commentators explained the Russian bank crisis as a local phenomenon. Writers who for years had praised the successes of privatization in Russia unexpectedly discovered ‘oligarchic capitalism’, and began to speak of how an authentic private entrepreneurship had failed to appear in Russia. The well-known financial speculator George Soros was more open, recognizing that ‘the Russian meltdown has revealed certain flaws in the international banking system which had been previously disregarded’.14 The more complex the chains of reciprocal obligations, and the greater their freedom from outside control, the higher the risk that the errors of one would lead to the downfall of others, ultimately destroying the whole exceedingly complex and intricate system. The oligarchic nature of the economy that had arisen in Yeltsin’s Russia is not in question. There is, however, a paradox in the fact that the sector that collapsed in 1998 was precisely the most globalized, the most ‘modernized’ (by the standards of neo-liberal ideologues) and the most fully attuned to the market. In this story, the Western financial speculators showed themselves to be no better than the Russian oligarchs. The crash of 1998 was not only a Russian catastrophe. It was a defeat for the international financial institutions as well. Also buried beneath the rubble of comprador capitalism were many Russian companies which had earlier done well out of the ruin of their own country, and international financial speculators who from sheer greed had continued to play the GKO market despite the obvious signs of impending disaster. George Soros alone lost around US$3 billion. Most Russian banks finished up on the verge of bankruptcy. Hard currency accounts were frozen

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and automatic tellers ceased dispensing cash. The question of nationalizing the banks appeared on the agenda. Between 1 August and 14 September, prices rose by 56 per cent. Wages, however, did not rise at all, even if they were paid. The government refused categorically to sanction extra currency emission, since it feared the wrath of the IMF considerably more than it feared hunger in Russia. Keeping the situation under control, however, was by now quite impossible. Yeltsin proposed replacing the failed Kirienko with the tested Chernomyrdin, but most of the population remembered all too well that it was under Chernomyrdin that the GKO pyramid had been created, and that it had been Chernomyrdin who had directed the collapse of the economy. The State Duma found itself between two fires. On one side was the Kremlin, threatening the parliament with dissolution, and on the other was the enraged population. The deputies balked, refusing to endorse Chernomyrdin even though his candidacy had initially been agreed with the heads of the largest fractions. The military could not guarantee Yeltsin the loyalty of its units. The Kremlin tried in short order to reorganize the armed forces and to establish a Federal Guard, consisting of elite units trained in putting down disturbances and mutinies in the army. But time had run out. Regional leaders, sensing that Moscow was paralysed, began taking decisions independently, paying no regard either to the constitution or to the laws. They needed to prevent hunger. In the provinces, controls were placed on prices and local customs services were established to prevent the export of cheap foodstuffs. In early September, the country was on the brink of chaos. In these circumstances, the Kremlin was left with no alternative but to compromise. Instead of Chernomyrdin, who was detested throughout society, Yevgeny Primakov was named prime minister. A new government was formed with the participation of the left and the support of the parliament. A change of course was solemnly proclaimed.

Part III

The Twilight of the ‘Second Republic’

8

The Drift to the Left (1998–99)

In Russia in 1999 a crisis of the elites broke out. Of course, it was not only the elites that were in crisis. The difficulties experienced by the population, however, had little effect on political life, unlike the situation when the problems were faced by the authorities. Meanwhile, it is not quite correct to speak simply of a ‘Russian’ crisis. The crisis was world-wide, and although everything that happens in Russia has specific national features, what unfolded in the country was merely part of a much broader, global process. One of the heroes of the great Russian satirist Sukhovo-Kobylin was marked out by the peculiarity that, when progress was announced, he always contrived to be just a little ahead of it. In a certain sense, this can be said of the whole of Russian history, at least in the twentieth century. Soviet perestroika and the fall of ‘communism’ in the USSR were among the consequences of a general crisis of state-oriented economic models, but it was these very events that ensured the success of neo-liberalism on a world scale. If the IMF had not triumphed in Russia, it would never have achieved its goals in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. By virtue of this, we have once again figured not on the periphery of history, but at its ‘sharp end’. Meanwhile, the triumph of neo-liberalism has turned out to be fleeting. After carrying out its destructive function of dismantling old models of the statized economy, neo-liberalism has proven unable to create anything new. Even where privatization has stimulated economic growth, this growth has been extremely unstable, and has quickly given way to stagnation or decline. Social contradictions have grown more acute, and technological development has slowed. A world-wide crisis was coming. THE ‘PINK PREMIER’ The liberal ideologues are right about one thing: the laws of economics cannot be circumvented. This is precisely the reason why the liberal experiments in Russia have failed so comprehensively, and why the International Monetary Fund, which has instructed half the countries of the world in how to reorganize their economies, cannot make the loose ends join up. In the situation where Russia now finds itself, avoiding inflation has turned 205

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out to be simply impossible, and emission has been the only means of bringing order to monetary circulation. Not a ‘good’ means or a ‘bad’ one, but simply the only one. This is the dead end into which the liberal reformers drove the country, and they themselves, after finishing up in total policy confusion, summoned to power the ‘pink premier’ Yevgeny Primakov. Before becoming prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov headed the foreign ministry. If he did not manage to pursue an independent foreign policy, he at least brought a measure of autonomy with regard to the US State Department. Earlier still, Primakov ran the Foreign Intelligence Service. As a specialist on the Arab world, he was a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. By birth, he belonged rather to the generation of Gorbachev’s advisers than to that of the young Yeltsin careerists. The second figure in the government was the communist Yury Maslyukov, who in Soviet times had headed the State Planning Committee. The paradox was that it had been Kirienko who invited Maslyukov to join the government Maslyukov agreed. But it was alongside Primakov, in a close partnership with him, that Maslyukov could lay claim to a serious leadership role. Viktor Gerashchenko, who had earlier been replaced as Central Bank chief as a result of pressure from Western financial institutions and Russian liberals, now returned to this role, and the bank’s policies changed dramatically. In defiance of the commonly accepted theories, it was monetary emission that stabilized the ruble exchange rate and reduced inflation. The problem had been that the huge stocks of goods that had built up in the hands of importers during the crisis could not be sold either at the old prices or the new ones. The population was simply incapable of buying anything. As the Association of Russian Banks assessed the situation, there was a clear shortage of money in circulation; because of this, 70 per cent of transactions were being carried out with the help of barter and the mutual cancellation of debts. The bankers themselves recognized that monetary emission was indispensable, and that ‘monetarist policy had been discredited’.1 After the printing press was set to work, and part of the wage debt was paid, the market began to recover. The Central Bank acted cautiously, however, and the quantity of money in circulation remained limited. Sellers began lowering their prices, inflation rates fell, and the decline of the ruble began to slow. The brief stabilization that was achieved in October 1998 gave the new government a small breathing-space, but the key problems remained unsolved and the disproportions in the economy remained. The government was too weak to undertake radical measures, but without them it had no prospects. A struggle began for the defining of a new course. The collapse of the neo-liberal model placed the question of an alternative on the order of the day. The Russian crisis was merely part of a global collapse of the neo-liberal economic model. The fall of the ruble was quickly reflected on Wall Street. The instability on world financial markets brought changes to the economic policies of the majority of countries. All of the former ‘star pupils’ of the IMF fell on hard times. Not only was output in decline, and

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unemployment rising, but the much-touted ‘financial stabilization’ had been overturned by the same crisis of the national currency as was to be observed in Russia. In other words, whether ‘reforms’ had been implemented consistently or not, the results were always the same. Russia was followed by Brazil. Argentina was next in line. The weaker Latin American states quickly devalued their currencies. In Russia, the reason the ruble collapsed was not because the GKO pyramid had become unimaginably high. The GKO pyramid proved impossible to support in 1998 because the world crisis led to a fall in oil prices and disorganized the working of the international financial markets. In the years since the Second World War, the West had forgotten what large-scale crises were like. And during the years of Keynesian state regulation, everyone had forgotten that the market solves problems with the help of crises and social catastrophes. Now, after suddenly remembering, everyone was demanding anti-crisis policies. The word ‘nationalization’ returned to the economic lexicon. Even in the Financial Times, the prediction could be found that since the privatization of large enterprises had been carried out by ‘formally’ unlawful means, any post-Yeltsin government would be forced to re-nationalize these enterprises under the pressure of public opinion and good sense.2 Sociological surveys conducted in Russia late in 1998 showed the following: a third of society categorically against private property, a quarter for it, and further two-fifths who, while not calling for its abolition, at the same time wanted priority given to the development of state and public property. In addition, a majority of the population were prepared to support the nationalization of banks and large enterprises, although around twothirds thought it necessary to maintain private ownership of small and medium enterprises, above all the area of services and production for the consumer market.3 The people as a whole could thus be said to have made their choice: after seven years of neo-liberal experiments, a majority of Russia’s citizens were calling for a mixed economy with a dominant public sector. The mood of the masses had not in fact changed dramatically since 1991–92. With certain reservations, it can be said that in the early 1990s the inhabitants of the former Soviet Union wanted capitalism, but there was never majority support for the neo-liberal model. The bulk of the population, while welcoming the introduction of the market, were always hostile to the privatization of large enterprises. Compared with those times, public opinion had simply moved to the left and radicalized still more. The collapse of the neoliberal model in 1998 left the country faced with the need to begin the economic reform process afresh, only in significantly worse conditions. Despite the calls in the mass media for the whole course of shock therapy and liberalization to be repeated in line with the prescriptions of the IMF, it was

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quite obvious that the political forces trying to lead the country in this direction were totally demoralized, and that their social base had been undermined. The crisis of 1998 had ruined the middle layers and placed the oligarchs on the brink of financial ruin. The only real way out was through policies aimed at restoring industry, and the only force capable of implementing these policies was the state. In principle, the devaluing of the ruble improved the prospects for Russian producers. And, indeed, enterprises found that in the space of two or three days their products, which no-one had needed before, had become unexpectely competitive. Imports fell, and Russian industry conquered new markets without a fight. The decline of imports improved the trade balance, which in principle should have helped stabilize the Russian currency. But the enterprises had been bled white by many years of inadequate investment, and by the loss of skilled personnel. The economic ties between regions had been broken. In the countryside, the situation was similar. Stock had long since been slaughtered, the fields were overgrown with weeds and machinery was worn out. As a result, production could not be increased even when goods were in high demand. Only intervention by the state could redeem the situation. Industries required large public investments for modernization and the conquest of markets. The huge technological potential of the militaryindustrial sector could still be used for peaceful purposes, but only if the money gained from the sale of oil and gas began to be directed to conversion. Imposing order would require a ruthless struggle against corruption, along with the precise fulfilment of whatever decisions were adopted. Without control over capital investments, none of this would be possible, and unless the oligarchs were banished from the scene and their property was nationalized, there could be no control over capital investments. The Primakov government, which came to power originally as a compromise between the Communists and the parliamentary centre-right, was quickly transformed into a government of the centre-left. Right-wing politicians either abandoned it, or finished up subordinated to representatives of the left such as Deputy Prime Minister Yury Maslyukov and Central Bank chief Viktor Gerashchenko. At the same time, the government acted increasingly as an independent force with relation to the Communist Party leaders. The leadership of the KPRF, with a parliamentary majority at its disposal, discredited itself through its inconsistency, its collaborationism and its efforts to use nationalist rhetoric to conceal its lack of a principled course. The majority of the population, angered by the results of neo-liberal rule and distrusting the Communists, placed their hopes on the Primakov cabinet. The premier’s rating began rising quickly. Whether the government could justify these hopes was a quite different question. Its official goals were declared to be ‘support of the population, social reorientation of the market, and revival of the real sector, and on this basis, the accelerated restoration of Russia’s competitiveness’.4 The cabinet pledged to strengthen state regulation, while pledging that there would ‘not be any shocks’. Neither

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would there be any re-division of property, ‘either in the form of a general acceleration of bankruptcies, or in that of blanket nationalization’.5 However, any real attempt to improve the economic structure and suppress corruption would have confronted the Primakov government with the need to implement precisely those measures it had ruled out as a matter of principle – nationalizing some financial-industrial groups and recognizing the bankruptcy of others. The oligarchs, in turn, followed an all-but-open course of trying to destabilize the Primakov cabinet. From December 1998, the government was subjected to daily attacks from the media, which, as before, were under the monopoly control of the oligarchy. Primakov’s political adversaries received generous financial support, and with each day conducted themselves more aggressively. Understanding that they could not survive without state support, the financial-industrial groups tried to force the state to pay off their debts, while at the same time defending their sacred right to property. THE PRIMAKOV EFFECT In defiance of all the monetarist theories, the drastic fall in the ruble exchange rate had a beneficial effect on the economy. The Moscow Times aptly described this rise of industrial output as an ‘economic boomlet’.6 The output of Russian producers became competitive on the world and domestic markets. The coal sector, which had been considered to have no prospects, unexpectedly became profitable. Russian-produced steel flooded the world market to such a degree that Western countries that had been fighting for free trade began hurriedly erecting protectionist barriers. This, however, did not halt the rise in production. The Moscow Times wrote: Despite the high drama on both sides of the fence, neither US nor Russian steelmakers appear to be suffering from the alleged dumping and the anti-dumping penalties. While US steel firms are posting healthy profits, no major Russian steel plant has reported any layoffs. Indeed, several plants have been moving to install new equipment worth tens of millions of dollars. The Russian steelmakers have been able to switch toward other markets, with help from the recovery in Asia and strong growth in Europe.7 Western firms that earlier had exported consumer goods to Russia began establishing their own plants on its territory, taking advantage of the extreme cheapness of Russian labour power. Meanwhile, economic recovery in the countries of East Asia brought a new rise in world oil prices. The crisis of 1998 had mainly affected the middle layers. In almost all enterprises, spending on management and marketing had been high; now, the companies tried to overcome their difficulties by trimming these costs.

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‘Yuppies’ in Moscow and St Petersburg were thrown on to the street, also losing their bank savings. The imported goods that typified their consumption rose sharply in price. Nevertheless, the economic growth quickly allowed most of these people to get back on their feet. New jobs appeared in the growing companies. The middle layers now had to live more modestly, but on the whole they kept afloat. The newspaper Vedomosti reported in November 1999: Before the crisis, the average monthly income of the residents of fourteen Russian regions was about $55, and for Moscow residents, about $95. In autumn this year Moscow residents began receiving about $35, and residents of other cities, $20. The proportion of well-off people, with a per capita income from $167 a month, declined from 15 per cent before the crisis to 1 per cent. Nevertheless, the consumer market did not collapse. As the same newspaper reported joyfully, Russian consumers retained ‘all the marks of a civilized European approach to the purchase of goods’.8 The paradox was that, in 1999, the incipient economic growth merely intensified the crisis of the system. The economic structure which the Yeltsin regime had set in place over the previous eight years was found to be ill-adapted to economic growth. The increase in industrial production led to an energy crisis. Since the ‘unprofitable’ coal sector had been systematically run down over a long period, and all producers of raw materials had reoriented themselves toward exports, Russian industry encountered an acute shortage of resources, especially in the field of energy. In the summer of 1999 a petrol crisis broke out. Soon afterwards, problems began with electrical energy. Anatoly Chubais, who by this time was heading the joint stock company United Energy Systems of Russia, declared in September 1999 that the position was ‘unprecedentedly difficult’.9 This crisis, however, like all the preceding crises, was the direct result of the policies that had been followed earlier. Overcoming it would require serious changes, affecting the interests of the oligarchs. A still more serious problem was connected with the shortage of investments. ‘As far as I can see’, the well-known economist Andrey Kolganov wrote in 1999, ‘the only sector that is potentially able to mobilize the resources needed for modernization is the gas sector.’ There was demand for the products of Russian industry, but the funds needed to replace equipment and expand production did not exist. It is quite possible that a small increase in GDP will continue for some time, based on the exploitation of now-idle plant, but for the present, there are no visible mechanisms that would allow the mobilization of investment resources to modernize this plant. Without this, further economic growth will become impossible after a certain point.10

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Industry required capital, and this capital did not exist. As the journal Vlast noted, the oligarchs were incapable of acting as strategic investors, because from August 1998 they had ‘neither their own money, nor respectable credit histories’.11 The state did not have funds either, since all its resources had been handed over to the oligarchs. If a flow of investments into industry was to be ensured, the oligarchs would have to be expropriated. Since the left opposition had been either smashed or corrupted, the sole hope was that some oligarchs would be expropriated by others. If the situation was to be kept under control, a consolidation of elites was essential, but the only way this could be achieved was if the weak were swallowed by the strong. The first victim of the heightened struggle for power was the Primakov government. Russia is a strange country, in which impending coups d’etat are discussed publicly, and their dates are all but officially fixed. In the spring of 1993 Yeltsin promised to mount a coup in the autumn of the same year, and he kept his word. In the spring of 1999 Yeltsin maintained his silence, but from early in May the Moscow press was full of forecasts concerning the forthcoming coup, and influential politicians discussed the date on the pages of the newspapers. The well-known rightwing politician Aleksandr Shokhin even named the day: on 13 May, the government would be sacked. The formal reason for the crisis was the discussion in the State Duma of the impeachment of President Yeltsin. In fact, everyone knew perfectly well that, under the existing constitution, removing the president from office was effectively impossible. By raising the question of impeachment, however, the Communist majority in the Duma had given Yeltsin a pretext for launching a political counter-attack. Primakov called on the deputies to reject a vote on impeachment or to postpone it, something that had been done once already. But this time the deputies, and especially the KPRF fraction, found they could not yield; if they did, they would simply look comical. Moreover, a section of the Communist Party leadership was clearly ready to put the Primakov cabinet ‘on the spot’. The premier’s rapidly growing popularity was irritating not only the Kremlin, but also many leaders of the opposition. Yeltsin’s entourage had long dreamed of ridding themselves of the Primakov cabinet. Strictly speaking, this government was not the Kremlin’s own. Appointing Primakov as premier was a forced measure taken in the conditions of catastrophic crisis that had seized the country in August. None of the liberal politicians had enough support to take power at that time, and more importantly, none of them wanted to. Prospective ministers were regarded as political suicides. Meanwhile, for a few months the Primakov government managed to reduce the severity of the crisis. The promised catastrophe did not occur, hunger was averted, the ruble was stabilized and some minor economic growth even began. Wages began to be paid more promptly. Despite the systematic press attacks on the government, its popularity was steadily increasing, as even enemies of Primakov were forced to admit.

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Precisely because of this, however, the Kremlin’s determination to get rid of the premier began to grow. The popularity of the government not only threatened the Kremlin, which was losing control of the levers of political power, but was creating conditions in which Primakov could take more decisive steps. Discussions began on nationalizing part of the oil industry, with a series of large enterprises themselves seeking readmission to the state sector. At the same time, steps were taken to halt the plunder of the country’s resources by the oligarchs who controlled much of the private sector. Russia’s foreign policy underwent changes. Primakov’s determined gesture in response to the American bombing of Yugoslavia – he cancelled a visit to the USA, having his plane turn round when already over the Atlantic – received massive support. The war in the Balkans revealed the scale of antiAmerican feeling in Russian society, particularly among the younger generation, which Western journalists, from pure inertia, had continued to describe as a support base for liberal reforms. The reason for this antiAmericanism does not lie in solidarity with ‘brother Slavs’, and still less in Orthodox Christianity; most young people in Russia do not even know how to cross themselves properly. The war in Yugoslavia simply gave Russians an opportunity to express what they had long thought. For ten years Russia had been making one-sided concessions in return for promises of acceptance into the ‘civilized world’. In exchange for this we received poverty, humiliation and economic decline. THE DILEMMAS OF THE ‘FAMILY’ Primakov was sacked in May 1999 but the problems for the Kremlin remained. In 1996, when Yeltsin was forced to mount a struggle against Zyuganov to retain his post, and his rating as head of state was no more than 6 per cent, the predictions that the vote would be cancelled seemed very convincing. Former interior minister Anatoly Kulikov, after resigning from his post, admitted that in March 1996 a decision to call off the elections had already been prepared, and that a decree banning the Communist Party had been signed – in short, that a new coup d’etat, this time leaving no question unaddressed, lay ahead. At the last minute, however, the president had second thoughts. The elections took place on time, and instead of tanks, ‘electoral technologies’ were employed. The results were no worse: Yeltsin remained in the Kremlin, and the oligarchs kept their money. In 1999 the Kremlin encountered the same problems as in 1996, but this time amid far less favourable circumstances. The reason why preparations were made to cancel the elections in 1996 was not simply dislike of the voters. Everyone in the Kremlin knew perfectly well that no matter what happened, the presidential team would not surrender power. Their motivation here was not fear of the Communists, but a sober understanding of the fact that a change of power would have catastrophic consequences for them. Both in 1996 and four years later, the

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essence of the question was formulated in completely open fashion: the country was threatened by a ‘re-division of property’. However much liberal economists might have argued about the building of a market economy, property and power in Russia remained intertwined in the closest possible fashion. Entering the capitalist world as a raw materials appendix of the West, our country could not form its own national bourgeoisie. Instead of a united, more or less structured ruling class, there were numerous groups, cliques, gangs and ‘families’. The domestic market was poorly integrated; the most dynamic industries were producing for export, but they could not survive without the rest of the country. The state was concerned with maintaining economic and political stability; it prevented society from falling apart definitively into contending groups. Without the state, not a single business empire would have arisen or survived in Russia in the 1990s. Many new arrivals in the market-place departed quickly from the scene precisely because they had not grasped this simple truth. Relations with the state were not constructed on the basis of formal agreements, but of personal ties, mutual assistance and reciprocal trust between particular groups of entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. This was no longer corruption but a system without which neither business nor the state could exist. Describing the relations between Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, the banker Aleksandr Mamut, the oil magnate Roman Abramovich, the politician Anatoly Chubais and the oligarch Vladimir Potanin, the the business newspaper Vedomosti wrote: What is this, if not a classic British-style old boy network? Everyone studied together, and they all trust one another (this, for example, is why Mamut does not believe in Kremlin corruption, and why Tatyana Dyachenko is described as a great altruist). They all drink coffee together in Paris cafes, and go skiing in Switzerland. This is a continuation of a tradition that was already in place at the end of the Soviet epoch. In each Moscow generation there were ‘golden’ boys and girls with expensive cars and fathers in the Ministry of Foreign Trade or in legal circles. ‘Good families’ always stuck together. Mamut is married to the exwife of Brezhnev’s grandson. Few of the offspring of these families go without, or rise in revolt, especially before the age of forty.12 The group that formed around the president came to be called ‘the family’ not only because its central figure was Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. Far more important was the fact that the relations between the members were thoroughly informal and family-like. It was not that they all loved one another, but that all were bound together indissolubly. The coming to power of a new figure would quickly destroy the system. The events of

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August 1998 showed that the country had too many oligarchs. A concentration of capital was becoming a pressing need, but the only available mechanism remained expropriation. The question was: who would expropriate whom? Moreover, it was rare in Russia for someone to succeed in leaving the scene peacefully. In our country, people who leave big business do so, as a rule, for the graveyard. In such a situation, any change of regime would involve shocks and, in one form or another, violence, even if democratic procedures were observed. In 1996 the largest oligarchs, understanding this, had preferred to reach agreement among themselves. In 2000 this was to prove more difficult; the resources were exhausted, and the rivalry had become more acute. Most importantly, any agreement in 2000 would have to involve preserving the status quo, which did not suit everyone, but was nevertheless better than uncertainty. This time, Yeltsin would have to go, and a new leader would have to emerge. A new agreement would need to be struck, and this was far more difficult. In addition, there were no guarantees that this agreement would be fulfilled. Yeltsin himself did all he could to prevent a successor from appearing. In any politician from his circle who was capable of replacing him, he saw a danger to himself. By 2000, the fruits of this policy had become obvious. The ‘family’ would have been delighted to support ‘Yeltsinism without Yeltsin’, but it was already too late. If events developed ‘normally’, finding a politician acceptable to the ‘family’ and having him or her elected to the post of head of state during the year that remained until the elections would be impossible. The time had been let slip. Permitting the election of an alien figure to the key post would be like death. Meanwhile, the pressures on the position of the ‘family’ were growing. The only lamentable thing was that the people attacking the regime were not the enraged masses, but the regime’s own sometime allies and confederates, who were no better than the existing authorities, and in many respects even worse. This was a struggle within the regime. With the coming to power of Yevgeny Primakov, efforts revived within the law enforcement organs to limit the orgy of corruption, at least to some extent. General Prosecutor Yury Skuratov paid for these attempts with his job (Primakov not only failed to come to Skuratov’s defence, but even took the side of the Kremlin). Since Yeltsin could not openly announce the real causes of the sacking, it was put down to ‘unethical behaviour’ by the prosecutor, who was caught in an assignation with two prostitutes. Proof of the prosecutor’s fall from grace was provided by a video recording, made by a hidden camera. This recording, however, also showed that there had been a provocation, planned in advance. The problem was that according to the constitution, Skuratov could only be dismissed with the approval of the Council of the Federation, and the senator-governors dug in their heels. On 17 March 1999 they refused to endorse the presidential decree replacing the general prosecutor. As reported by Sergey Obukhov, observer for the

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newspaper Kontinent, the Council of the Federation ‘by an overwhelming majority, dealt a slap in the face to the Kremlin clan’.13 In response, the authorities showed the scandalous tape on television. In Russia, unlike the situation in the USA, methods such as these are completely ineffective, arousing mostly sympathy for the victim of the provocation. Meanwhile state television, by showing a pornographic video, placed itself in a very ticklish situation. Criminal proceedings were brought against Skuratov, but these collapsed with a resounding crash. Nevertheless, efforts by the prosecutor to return to his office were thwarted by the building’s security guards. Without the power to appoint or remove the general prosecutor, Yeltsin began appointing and removing acting heads of the prosecutor’s office. The result was that for many months Russia had two general prosecutors at the same time – one of them legal but not acting, and the other acting but not legal. Several changes of government altered nothing in this situation. Primakov was replaced as premier by Sergey Stepashin, and then Stepashin by Vladimir Putin, but the wrangle surrounding the general prosecutorship remained unresolved. LUZHKOV’S DREAM OF THE KREMLIN The rift within the regime was widened by the presidential ambitions of Moscow Mayor Yury M. Luzhkov. If he were to realize his goal, Luzhkov needed to outgrow the political boundaries of his ‘independent princedom’. Any attempt to consolidate regional elites outside the control of the Kremlin, however, would automatically mean destroying the fragile political equilibrium on which Yeltsin’s ‘second republic’ rested. The situation in which the Moscow city boss found himself recalled an old Georgian anecdote. A taxi-driver runs a red light and explains to his terrified passenger, ‘Don’t worry, I’m an expert!’ Then, on seeing a green light, he slams on the brakes – what if there is another expert coming? In these circumstances Luzhkov took a step which, as it seemed to him, was correct and perfectly natural. He decided to form a pact with the ‘strongest’ regional leaders, who were grouped in the ‘All Russia’ bloc. These people were typical Russian ‘caciques’ who, moreover, were real election specialists. In 1996 Luzhkov had been elected to the post of Moscow mayor with 90 per cent of the votes; no other serious politician even decided to go on the ballot. The leading figures in ‘All Russia’ had followed the same path. Mentimer Shaymiev, crudely violating the law on elections, had made himself the sole candidate for the post of President of the Republic of Tatarstan. The people supported him as they had done in Soviet times – giving him 90 per cent of the votes. Also in 1996, a remarkable transcript of a select meeting between Bashkir leader M. Rakhimov and regional bosses went the rounds of the press. The republican chief was revealed as introducing a new election campaign strategy: he vowed to shut off heating and electricity in regions where Yeltsin was not given enough votes. The

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local bosses, naturally, did their best to comply. The elections to the St Petersburg city assembly that were held under mayor Vladimir Yakovlev are also widely remembered. Murder, forgery – you name it, it happened! On the whole, the elections went ahead as planned, and ‘Peter’ received a first-rate legislative assembly, in which a number of bandits notorious throughout the city held seats. St Petersburg confirmed its reputation as Russia’s ‘criminal capital’. Mayor Yakovlev did not hide the fact that he was thoroughly satisfied with his deputies. The fact that all these governors were united in a single team is not surprising. Much more interesting is the question of what united them with Luzhkov. After all, the people who established ‘All Russia’, unlike the Moscow mayor, did not have presidential ambitions. Most of the key figures were already presidents – of autonomous republics. Traditionally, the leaders of these republics had not been noted for their Russian patriotism. Shaymiev had already threatened to take Tatarstan out of the Russian Federation, and maintained that his republic was, in some respects, a ‘subject of international law’. Nor was the leader of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, the most fervent supporter of the ‘single and indivisible’ Russian state. If all these people were to join in supporting one of the contenders for the Russian presidency, this was surely a matter of interest. Meanwhile, Luzhkov was putting his stake on imperial rhetoric; he was being compared with Prince Ivan Kalita, the ‘unifier of the Russian land’. Luzhkov was demanding that Ukraine hand back Sevastopol and, in the Russian capital, had created unbearable conditions for people from the Caucasus – including Aushev’s compatriots. All this, it might have seemed, would repel the leaders of the national autonomous republics. In practice, things developed quite differently. The republican rulers clearly did not believe a word of what the Moscow mayor said, and precisely for this reason, were prepared to give him their support. Nevertheless, Luzhkov’s decision to join Shaymiev’s group bore witness to a profound crisis of the Moscow mayor’s initial political project. His hopes that, on the basis of his Moscow experience and money, he could attract mass support around the country and lay the foundations for a strong regime, were clearly unjustified. As before, the Moscow mayor was unable to influence events beyond the bounds of his fiefdom. Setting up his own ‘Fatherland’ movement, Luzhkov could not turn it into a real, all-Russian political force. Not only outside the capital, but even in Moscow, this organization could not function without the help of the mayor. Instead of becoming a support base for Luzhkov, his party turned into a burden for him; he was forced to maintain a political apparatus that as well as being totally useless, was unbelievably gluttonous and pervasively corrupt. The political base of the governors took the form of a classic Latin American-style ‘clientele’. Personal loyalty to the chief was rewarded with access to public resources and informal influence among one’s peers. This model of relations was quite durable, at least until the money ran out. Nevertheless, it also had its drawbacks, which emerged when the task became one

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of constructing a party. The Fatherland movement contained numerous bosses of various degrees, but no activists. The mobilization of the masses took place using traditional methods – buses were sent, people were let off work, and they were kept under control to make sure they did not wander off en route. Sensing that Luzhkov might become the country’s new leader, careerists of all stripes began flocking towards him. They included bureaucrats from the Kremlin administration whom Yeltsin had slighted, and failed ministers. Hovering about the Moscow mayor was a whole cloud of flatterers and ‘intellectuals’, who hailed the great services he had performed, and who begged incessantly for money. The theatre critic Inna Vishnevskaya describes one of Luzhkov’s meetings with the ‘intelligentsia’. The first to approach the mayor was Natalya Durova, head of the Animal Theatre. Tied to her neck with a bow was a spotted python, which strove continually to reach the mayor’s eye with its stinging tongue. ‘Feed the Animal Theatre!’ said Durova. The mayor immediately agreed, while dodging the gorget-snake. From the rows of seats a large bear was led out; it asked the mayor for an increased pension. Luzhkov could do nothing except write out a cheque. This, however, was only the beginning. Saying by way of farewell that the cockroaches knew her by her voice, Durova, glittering with a luxurious cameo, a musketeer hat and a greenand-brown snake, took her leave. Her place was taken by ‘theoreticians’summarizing our theatrical experience – theatre managers, chief directors and leading actors, under the general name ‘Vidogon’. The champions of culture were asking that the premises of the ‘Aquarium’ theatre be extended, since they themselves were already swimming in this aquarium; that they be built a palace, since as the classics state, a theatre is a temple; and finally, that five 60-candlepower light-bulbs be signed over, since the old ones, screwed in by Lenin himself, had burnt out. Yury Mikhailovich obediently wrote down everything on a pad. Then the entire public rushed into the hall, where there was a table laden with food, as is proper in such circumstances. After the meeting, or the symposium, or the opening night, you will always see the backs of hundreds of people lying with their stomachs on the ‘fourchette’, and rustling polyethylene bags. As in wartime, one of the Vakhtangov actors instructed us, you have to pour off the sunflower oil from the banquet tables. You have to lie on those already lying there, and while balancing a plate, grab a slippery mushroom without a fork . . .14

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PRIMAKOV’S MISTAKE In exchange for the support of the regional leaders, Luzhkov had at least to promise his colleagues so much independence that the post of Kremlin president was at risk of becoming purely nominal. These promises, like any others, could of course be broken later, but doing this would not be easy, since the presidents of the autonomous republics were also tough operators. As the price of such a compromise became clear, the position of president started to lose its attractiveness for Luzhkov. Meanwhile, it was becoming more and more obvious that a suitable political figure, whose influence was not confined to the capital, would have to be sought. This forced Luzhkov to step aside from his original project. The post of leader of the Fatherland–All Russia (OVR) bloc was offered to former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who after some hesitation accepted it. All the opinion polls showed that, after resigning, Primakov remained the most popular politician in the country. Indeed, after he resigned his popularity rating continued to rise. This was due primarily to the fact that Primakov was considered an independent politician, without links to any of the elite groups, and who kept in mind the interests of the country and of ordinary people. On this level, the appearance of Primakov at the head of OVR was a major electoral coup for the bloc. At the same time, however, it represented a serious miscalculation for Primakov, who lost his reputation for independence. Moreover, by allying himself with Luzhkov and Shaymiev the former ‘pink premier’ lost support on the left. The unification of the regional elites, and their effort to bring the lower house under their control, meant that the existing equilibrium was destroyed. In nineteenth-century America, the destruction of the balance between the regional elites led to civil war. In Russia, the political conflict took the initial form of ‘information war’. But to all the participants in these events it was clear from the start that propaganda and violence, or the threat of violence, were inseparable. The regional elites which did not enter the OVR bloc also began to unite, with the Kremlin lending them its support. After some hesitation, most of the governors who were close to the president combined in the inter-regional ‘Unity’ movement (the so-called ‘Bear’ bloc). In Russia between 1994 and 1998, the pluralism of vote-rigging had provided the only real guarantee of electoral freedom. The more the local elites became consolidated, the less this pluralism became, and the less important the will of the citizens. Anticipating problems, the Kremlin in turn took steps to minimize frauds that benefited OVR, while at the same time guaranteeing the impunity of people who took the field on behalf of the ‘Bear’. In Moscow, the personnel of electoral commissions that had distinguished themselves as tools of Luzhkov in 1996 and 1997 were hurriedly replaced. In regions that supported the Kremlin, such purges were not conducted. It was clear that so long as the regional elites were effectively out of control, neither genuine democracy nor real federalism would exist in

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Russia. The struggle for power within the regime itself could not end in anything good. Moreover, the warring elites were less and less interested in national problems, while the people in their eyes were no more than an electorate to be worked upon with propaganda methods, and only to the degree that fraud and direct coercion could not be applied. The problem was that efforts to call the regional autocrats to order did not, in themselves, always strengthen democracy. In Latin America the military dictatorships that took hold of the continent in the 1960s and 1970s were – as if to hide their sins – highly effective weapons in the struggle against this evil. As the only organisations with all-national structures, the Latin American armies had an interest in suppressing ‘caciques’ – regional strongmen, and were capable of doing it. The price exacted was, it is true, the abolition of civil freedoms. The appearance at the head of the Russian government of former state security chief Vladimir Putin was thus an entirely natural response for the Kremlin to make to Luzhkov’s policies. THE FACELESS LEFT The opposition reached the end of the 1995–2000 political cycle in no better condition than the regime. In 1995, the resurrected Communist Party had laid claim to the role of a vehicle for the expression of mass discontent. People saw it as a political force able to bring changes to the country. It would enjoy ample opportunities to do this. The massive vote for the opposition in the Duma elections of 1995 showed that the population was moving to the left, and wanted change. Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution, however, effectively denied the opposition any possibility of coming to power by the parliamentary road. The powerless Duma was able to function as a political platform, but not as an instrument of political and social reform. Integrated into the Duma structures, and accepting the rules of the game, the parliamentary opposition had become more and more corrupt, in the political, moral and even juridical senses. It had quickly lost any taste for struggle, and any links with its supporters at the local level. Bureaucratic bickering had meant that people were thrust into the foreground who were colourless, but loyal to the leadership. The leaders of the the KPRF bore less and less resemblance to leftists. Gennady Zyuganov invariably sympathized with nationalism, and was suspicious of the ‘Westernism’ with which the Russian revolutionary and Marxist tradition was closely associated. In 1995, however, it was still possible to draw a clear distinction between Zyuganov’s conservative, ‘native soil’ outlook and the ideology of the party. In the years between 1995 and 1999 Zyuganov and his circle lost out to the authorities in every conflict that arose. Their only success was in crushing the internal opposition. It could now be said with complete assurance that Zyuganov’s ideology had become that of the party. Socialist ideals were replaced by ‘great-power patriotism’, which was in fact the usual ideology of provincial conservatism.

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Summarizing the five years of the KPRF’s Duma majority, the trade union leader Oleg Shein wrote angrily: It is enough to recall that it was the KPRF fraction that endorsed Chernomyrdin, that the KPRF fraction fouled up the impeachment of Yeltsin, that the KPRF came out with ultra-imperialist positions during the war in Chechnya, that the party proclaimed as its official slogan ‘autocracy, orthodoxy and national character’, and that Zyuganov openly calls the shooting of left radicals in 1993 a good thing. As for the so-called ‘rank and file communists’, once they lend support to their party, they are no more communist than Zyuganov. That is to say, they are not communist at all.15 Such a party was powerless to suggest a programme of modernization for the country. It could not draw over to its side the younger generation, educated people or residents in large cities. In the working-class regions of the ‘red belt’, the popularity of the KPRF fell rapidly. The problem was not that the masses were insufficiently patriotic, but that love for the homeland was incompatible with bungling provincial conservatism. The patriotic slogans became empty rhetoric that concealed inertia, a lack of principles, and opportunism. Following the August financial crash, public opinion in Russia clearly moved to the left. But after four years of working in the Duma, the leadership of the Communist Party had discredited itself, while the leaders of the two other ‘left’ fractions (the Agrarians and the ‘People’s Power’ group), who were totally under the control of the KPRF, had lost any political identity of their own. In 1995, voting for the Communists had been the only way of expressing dissatisfaction with the system, but by 1999 the Communist Party was itself perceived as part of the system, and by no means the best part. Adding to dissatisfaction with the regime, there was hostility to the opposition. Gennady Zyuganov was no longer viewed as the sole alternative to Yeltsin. When the KPRF leadership betrayed the centre-left government of Primakov in May 1999, it undermined its standing with voters even more. Throughout the summer and early autumn of 1999, the popularity of the now-retired Primakov continued to rise, while that of the KPRF fell. The Communists in the Duma could not even bring themselves to completely reject the package of measures proposed by the regime under an agreement with the IMF. Instead of a resounding ‘No!’, the response was equivocal: ‘We shall accept everything that is good for the country, and reject everything bad.’ This was despite the fact that the KPRF leaders themselves had earlier explained that nothing good should be expected from the IMF. Throughout the 1990s, the number of people who abstained from voting or who voted against all the candidates rose steadily. Most citizens, however, continued to show up at the polling booths. In theory, the crisis of the KPRF combined with the leftward shift of society provided a chance for the rebirth

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of the democratic left in Russia. But in fact, everything proved far more complex. The parties and movements of the democratic left, which had been highly active in the period from 1991 to 1993, thereafter went into decline or fell apart, unable to withstand the joint pressure from the Yeltsin regime and Zyuganov’s KPRF. The Party of Labour disintegrated, while the Socialist Party of Workers experienced a dramatic fall in its membership and influence. In the run-up to the elections, a coalition of four small organizations appeared; its members were the Socialist Party of Workers headed by Lyudmila Vartazarova; the Union of Labour and People’s Power under General Andrey Nikolaev; the Party of Workers Self-Government under the leadership of S. Fedorov; and the Union of Realists – Movement for a New Socialism, founded by Yu. Petrov. In a joint declaration, they announced that they intended not just to go to the polls together, but also eventually to found a United Socialist Party. The bloc was to be headed by General Nikolaev, the former commander of the Russian border forces. Despite their almost revolutionary names, all these organizations were exceedingly moderate, seeking to win the confidence of Western social democrats. The political face of the coalition remained obscure, while its slogans were ambiguous, and it had no links with the masses. The united socialists went to the polls as the ‘Bloc of General A. Nikolaev and Academician S. Fedorov’; their propaganda called on citizens to vote for ‘People of steadfast word and honest deeds’. The political and economic programme of these good people thus remained a secret to most of the voters. An effort to create a new left movement in Russia cannot be successful if it is based on moderation. Leftists today are doomed to radicalism, if, of course, they seriously want to play a role in political life. It was conservatism and opportunism that undermined the positions of the KPRF. To occupy a position ‘to the right of the KPRF’ is scarcely possible for anyone; there is no such position. It is something else again that modern-day radicalism cannot be based on yesterday’s ideas. It is necessary to talk of the nationalization of the largest raw materials monopolies – according to surveys, this is what most of the population wants. But one cannot dream of a return to the past. It is possible and necessary to call for increased state intervention in the economy, but one cannot support the Yeltsin–Putin state – corrupt through and through, inefficient and anti-popular in its very essence. This state has to be radically transformed. It is possible and necessary to fight for decentralization, but not through the transfer of power to autocratic governors and greedy local elites. On the contrary, the point of decentralization lies in extending democracy to the local level, that is, in the political and social defeat of the local elites. In 1999 and 2000, no political force was prepared to put forward such a programme. Moreover, throughout the Yeltsin period the masses were so demoralized (and, in part, declassed), that it was difficult to expect a powerful spontaneous pressure ‘from below’. The population had developed a certain understanding of the contradictions between their own interests and those

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of the elites (including the ‘opposition’ and ‘local’ elites), but there were neither popular habits of self-organization, nor confidence on the part of the masses in their own strength. The country was faced with a problem which could, in essence, be solved only by a real revolution. There were, however, no special reasons to hope either for a ‘revolution from above’, or for a revolutionary outburst ‘from below’.

9

The War of the Kremlin Succession

By the autumn of 1999 it was clear to everyone that the Yeltsin era in Russia was drawing to a close. It was not simply that under the 1993 constitution, the president could not stand for a third term in office. The political and economic model that had come into being as a result of the October 1993 coup had totally exhausted its potential. The single team of oligarchs, at times squabbling among themselves but joining forces to control the country, had fallen apart into hostile groups waging a war to the death.1 The regime had split into two groups. On one side were Yeltsin’s associates, the so-called ‘family’, united around the president’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, the banker Boris Berezovsky, the oil magnate Roman Abramovich, and the apparatus of the presidential administration. On the other side was Luzhkov. The conflict between them was becoming increasingly bitter, and by early autumn it was clear that a fight to the death was under way. The information war that broke out in Russia in the summer of 1999 was by no means the first. But this time, unlike on previous occasions, it was declared quite officially. Even before the newspapers and television stations belonging to the oligarchs Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky had dumped their latest load of filth on the heads of the readers and listeners, journalists of all persuasions had for weeks been relishing the prospective battle, cynically discussing its causes and trying to predict the outcome. THE STRATEGY OF DESTABILIZATION Until the ruble collapsed in 1998, the position of the main oligarchic groups had seemed relatively stable. Most of these groups had had a similar structure, including a company that exported raw materials to the world market, a bank in which profits were accumulated and mass media through which to propagandize the merits of liberal capitalism. Money from the sale of raw materials was allotted for the purchase of politicians, journalists and state functionaries. All these groups represented the symbiosis of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, but the collaboration between these elements took different forms. In some cases, it was the entrepreneurial moneybags who controlled the corrupt functionaries. In others, it was the functionaries who 223

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issued orders to the entrepreneurs. Groups of this latter type were centred on powerful regional leaders. The influence of the governors was defined by their ability to control the resources on their territory and to dictate the will of their citizens at voting time. The more open the practice of falsifying elections, the closer the relations between the local authorities and business. As noted earlier, the most powerful regional groups were those in Moscow and Tatarstan. The regional leaders founded their own banks and financial groups, and brought the local press under their control. An exception was the Gusinsky group, which specialized in developing the mass media and cultivating relations with politicians. With its own financial structure (MOST-Bank), which was traditionally linked to the Moscow city administration, the Gusinsky group had no serious stake in the raw materials business. However, Gusinsky’s MOST-Media group included the television company NTV, the radio station Ekho Moskvy, the daily newspaper Segodnya, the weeklies Sem Dney, Obshchaya Gazeta and Itogi, and the satellite channel NTV+. In 1996, all the media outlets had conducted a powerful campaign in support of Yeltsin. Following the victory over the Communists, the united bloc of oligarchs had fallen apart, since a struggle had broken out over the question of how the remaining state property would be divided up. An information war then erupted between ONEKSIM-Bank and Berezovsky. ONEKSIM-Bank rested on the newspapers Russky Telegraf and Izvestiya (later amalgamated). Berezovsky held large packets of shares in two television channels (ORT and TV-6, of which he owned 16 per cent and 26 per cent respectively). He also sponsored Nezavisimaya Gazeta and the magazine Ogonek, as well as providing credit guarantees to the loss-making Novye Izvestiya. Berezovsky never sought to buy publications outright, or even to acquire a controlling interest. His power rested on his personal relationships with editors and journalists. As one Moscow entrepreneur put it, ‘Gusinsky buys newspapers, while Berezovsky buys people.’ Berezovsky himself stressed constantly that as a shareholder, he never interfered in the work of the mass media. Berezovsky’s struggle with ONEKSIM-Bank ended in a truce, but ONEKSIM-Bank finished up with large shareholdings in former state enterprises. After this failure, Berezovsky started cultivating his relations with the Kremlin. He became increasingly close to Yeltsin’s daughter and adviser Tatyana Dyachenko, and, in 1999, the presidential administration came to be headed by Aleksandr Voloshin, who had earlier been Berezovsky’s business partner. The two had combined to collect money from the population in order to produce a ‘people’s car’. Not a single car was ever produced, but Berezovsky and Voloshin became noticeably richer. Once agreement had been reached on the alliance between Luzhkov and Shaymiev, a powerful information system that included virtually all the Moscow city publications, the channel TV-Centre, the satellite channel Meteor-TV and a number of regional newspapers began serving the interests of this bloc. Another adherent was Moskovskiy Komsomolets; this was not

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only the largest publication at the vulgar and sensational end of the Moscow newspaper market, but also possessed a whole network of ‘daughter’ newspapers in the provinces. Luzhkov even set up his own meteorological service, considering that the weather forecasts issued by the corresponding national service were falsified. MOST-Media, which did not have its own resources, attached itself to Luzhkov. The attack mounted on the Kremlin by the Moscow mayor could not fail to meet with a rebuff from Berezovsky. Preparing for a propaganda war, the latter bought a controlling interest in the newspaper Kommersant, and changed its chief editor. Acting in alliance with Berezovsky were the stateowned media outlets, controlled by the presidential administration. The weapons directed against the enemy included such uncommon measures as an extraordinary tax inspection (under Russian conditions, this is tantamount to a natural disaster). Finally, the newly created Ministry of the Press, Television and Mass Communications Media, headed by Mikhail Lesin, became a sort of strongpoint for information warfare. What could be won with the help of sympathetic bureaucrats was shown by the events of 2 September 1999, when the ministry simply switched off St Petersburg television, which had dared to make fun of the election campaigning of the right wing. The antagonists in the information war did not shrink even from playing the anti-semitic card; publications close to Berezovsky reminded their readers of the Jewish ancestry of former Prime Minister Primakov, who had now joined the Fatherland bloc, while publications affiliated with Luzhkov did not neglect to mention the ethnic origins of Berezovsky himself. The story of the non-existent ‘people’s car’ surfaced once again. The ‘analytical’ shows on television shook even the hardened Russian viewers, displaying scenes of General Prosecutor Yury Skuratov, out of favour with the Kremlin, having sex with two prostitutes; of Chechen fighters beheading a prisoner; and even of a surgical operation similar to the one which Primakov underwent in Switzerland. In the latter case, the sickening footage was clearly shown with the sole objective of destroying the composure of one particular viewer – Primakov himself. This effort was successful; the enraged ex-premier began telephoning live to competing current affairs programmes, and complaining. ‘Nasty media wars waged by politically connected television tycoons acting through their pet anchors have long been part of the mainstream of Russian TV’, wrote Andrey Zolotov in The Moscow Times. ‘So have scenes of violence and explicit sex that would never make it on the air in the United States or Europe.’ But this time, Zolotov continued, ‘supposedly serious television shows sank to a new low’.2 RUSSIA-GATE The greatest outpouring of compromising material occurred not in the Russian but in the Western press. In August 1999 The New York Times,

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Corriere della Sera and other Western newspapers began publishing articles on the vast scale of the corruption in the Kremlin, on the laundering of money through American banks, and so forth. The Russian press began quoting these articles, but for Russian readers they contained almost nothing that was new. Almost all these reports and commentaries had already appeared in Russia in one form or another (it is enough to recall the story of the disappearance without trace of $500 million from the first tranche of the ‘coal’ credit provided to Russia by the World Bank). For many years such information had been readily available to Western journalists and diplomats, who steadfastly ignored it. The unexpected interest shown by Westerners in Kremlin corruption was accompanied by strange leaks of information from the Russian and Swiss prosecutors’ offices, and from the corresponding organs in the USA. In Russia, any information can simply be bought, but analogous leaks in Switzerland seemed rather strange. It is significant that even during the Balkan war in the spring of 1999, New York Times observer Thomas A. Friedman wrote: ‘Even a half-dead, stone-cold drunk Boris Yeltsin is still an enormous asset for the US. No other Russian leader today is as big a bear and as clever a fox as old Boris. We are going to miss this guy.’3 By the summer, the mood in US political circles had begun to change. More and more politicians and state functionaries were starting to ask how relations with Russia might be ordered after Yeltsin. This meant that links had to be established in advance with prospective victors. It was another matter that no-one in Washington could work out who this victor might prove to be. Moreover, since the default of 1998, the West had been almost without effective levers for influencing the situation in Russia. The groups associated with the West had been weakened and compromised, and new contacts were being established only slowly. US politicians and journalists suddenly ‘discovered’ the existence in Russia of massive embezzlement and illegal capital exporting. The Western press, drawing an analogy with the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, began talking of ‘Russia-gate’. It was even recognized that privatization in Russia had amounted in essence to the plunder of national property. An editorial in The Moscow Times asserted that all this was pure hypocrisy: ‘The reality is that the Americans have embraced all privatizations as their own.’4 The Russian public, now thoroughly weary of the torrents of filth in the press and on the television, showed little interest in the US revelations. It was, it is true, somewhat amusing to see how Western journals and the Russian liberal press effectively proved the correctness of the accusations which the Communists had levelled against Yeltsin and his associates in 1995 and 1996 – accusations which the same newspapers in earlier days had indignantly rejected. Overall, the confidence of the population in the press declined; all the participants in the information wars aroused an identical dislike. In the Kremlin, however, the publications that appeared in the West were seen as a political signal. Whatever in fact provoked the articles in The New

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York Times, they were interpreted by the Russian chiefs as a sign that Washington was looking for a replacement for Yeltsin. Yeltsin and his team, however, were not about to go. Berezovsky and the presidential ‘family’ viewed the campaign in the Western press as ‘anti-Russian’. Washington had supported Yeltsin when he had dissolved the Soviet Union, when he had shelled his own parliament and when he had bombed peaceful residents in Chechnya. The change of mood in the West was perceived in the Kremlin as treachery. In this way, the attempts by Western political figures to keep their distance from Russian corruption merely deepened the crisis in Russia. The ‘treachery’ of the Americans had a curious effect on the Kremlin. The prospect that accounts in Western banks would be frozen had become quite real. Bureaucrats and oligarchs from Yeltsin’s circle suddenly discovered that, if anything happened, they had nowhere to run. Until this time, many of the ‘democratic’ features of the Russian regime had been necessary in order to gain the favour of the West. Now it was understood that playing up to the West was not obligatory. By launching a campaign against Yeltsin, the mainstream Western press effectively prompted Yeltsin’s associates to reject the constitution. Describing the war that was breaking out between rival ‘financial-industrial groups’, the journal Vlast observed: The winners will get the chance to turn big debts into big money, while the losers will be confronted with inevitable bankruptcy and departure from the scene. That is at best; more likely, they will be prosecuted. Emigration to any decent country with the remains of their capital is ruled out. Waiting for the losers beyond the cordon is an unenviable fate as the perpetrators of Russia-gate. A scandal as momentous as this cannot finish quietly. Victors, as we know, are not put on trial, especially when they are heading up a nuclear-armed country. Meanwhile, the losers will become the sacrificial victims who will wipe from Russia the stamp of a ‘bandit country’ which the Western mass media have placed on it.5 Everyone knew in advance that a political crisis would break out before the elections, and that this crisis would more than likely result in sharp changes to the rules of the game. All that remained to be discovered was the form the crisis would take. ‘The “family” has few options left,’ stated Moscow Times observer Jonas Bernstein early in August.6 Less than a month later, war broke out in Dagestan, and then explosions began echoing through Moscow. WAR IN DAGESTAN The war in Dagestan was fought out between the same adversaries as the Chechen war in 1994–96, but the nature of the conflict had changed radically. This time the Chechen fighters were attacking, and the Russian Army was on the defensive. In 1994 the Chechens had been led by the Soviet

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General Dzhokhar Dudaev, who had been defending the principles of the Soviet state, and had believed he could build his own model of ‘socialism’ in the republic. At that time, Moscow News had described Shamil Basaev as ‘a spontaneous Chechen socialist’.7 Even under the conditions of occupation, Chechnya tried to retain a more or less disciplined army, and at least the appearance of its own ‘constitutional order’. In 1999 Dagestan was invaded by armed formations from Chechnya which were not subject to anyone apart from their own commanders and the sponsors who had financed the incursion. During the years that had passed since the de facto gaining of independence, the project of founding a Chechen national state had clearly failed. Dudaev’s ideology of secular nationalism had been defeated along with it. Rejecting the last remnants of secular ideology, the radicals had crossed over to positions of Islamic fundamentalism, while the official president, General Maskhadov, had in essence lost control of the country. The republic was divided into zones that were effectively independent. The Chechen elite, which since the end of the war had established informal ties to the elites in the Kremlin, became more and more corrupt. The uncertainty of the republic’s political status, an uncertainty due in the first place to the reluctance of Moscow to recognize Chechen independence, aided the formation of a criminal economy. This suited the Moscow oligarchs, who used Chechnya as a site for conducting their ‘unofficial’ business. The press observed that the Chechen incursion into Dagestan had its roots in a struggle for control over Caspian oil; by seizing Dagestan, the interests behind the invasion would be able to control the flow of oil to the West. All this occurred against the background of a struggle by Arab and Russian producers to increase world oil prices. Even before military actions began, Chechnya had shut off the oil pipeline through which Azerbaijani oil was pumped northward. When the war began, a second route, through Dagestan, was also shut down. This helped bring about an increase in the price for the Siberian oil supplied by Berezovsky, Potanin and other Russian oligarchs. The war in Dagestan also stemmed from a conflict of interests within the Russian oil business itself. On the one hand, Berezovsky’s firm Sibneft had an interest in ensuring that Azerbaijani oil reached Europe as slowly, and at as high a cost as possible. In any circumstances, the cost of extraction would always be far higher in the north than in the south, and a flow of oil from Azerbaijan would depress market prices. Meanwhile the company Transneft, which was concerned with the construction and exploitation of pipelines, had an interest in Azerbaijani oil – an interest conditional, of course, on Transneft winning the relevant contract. It is significant that the military actions in Dagestan coincided with the intensification of a struggle for control over Transneft. Here too, the contending sides made use of force; company president Dmitry Savelyev was replaced, and the firm’s central office was seized by a squad of special forces police. According to testimonies which seeped into the press, Berezovsky financed Basaev’s Dagestan campaign

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together with Saudi sponsors who were also trying to stem the flow of oil from the Caspian. If this is true, it could be said that in Dagestan, Sibneft was fighting against Transneft, the former employing Chechen fighters and the latter Russia’s regular army. Later, in the autumn of 1999, information reached the press about how the Dagestan campaign had been ‘ordered’. It was learned that a meeting had taken place between Shamil Basaev and the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, on the Mediterranean coast of France. The intermediary at this meeting was Anton Surikov, an agent of the military intelligence (GRU) who was well acquainted with the Basaev brothers from the campaign in Abkhazia, where Russian special forces and Chechen militants had fought together against the Georgians. In Abkhazia, Surikov had in essence been Basaev’s chief of staff. On this occasion the two sides had reached agreement on a local conflict which would allow a dramatic change to the internal relationship of forces within Russia, and which in Chechnya would strengthen Basaev’s positions with regard to legally elected President Maskhadov, whose power was dwindling. There was no question of placing bombs in apartment buildings.8 The 1999 war had nothing in common with a liberation struggle. The Chechen field commanders maintained that the Dagestanis themselves had invited them in. Taking account of the corruption and the ethnic and social problems in Dagestan, the Islamists calculated that they would be greeted with massive support. Instead, literally the whole people rose up against them. ‘People in Dagestan have little love for the authorities,’ wrote a correspondent for Obshchaya Gazeta, ‘but they have even less love for strangers with guns.’9 This clear hostility of the masses toward nationalist and fundamentalist propaganda also came as a complete surprise to the authorities in both Moscow and Makhachkala (capital of Dagestan). The Dagestanis’ response to the August 1999 invasion by the Chechen fighters was to arm themselves in a massive way. People sold livestock and cars in order to buy automatic rifles. As one of the members of the Dagestani militia told a Moscow journalist, the people had been forced to take up arms by their ‘Dagestani internationalism’.10 Appeals for the distribution of weapons to the population aroused panic among local leaders. The republican leadership could not resolve either to refuse the pleas, or to grant them. As a correspondent for Obshchaya Gazeta noted, at a sitting of the State Council of Dagestan no-one showed a determination to address the substance of the matter. ‘The impression was that the assembled deputies were deliberately getting bogged down in empty and essentially pointless formulations.’11 The reluctance of the authorities to arm the masses is thoroughly understandable, but the people were starting to lose patience. Conflicts broke out between the authorities and the self-defence detachments. In the Babayurt region, where Chechen fighters had damaged a railway, some 300 local residents blocked the federal line from Makhachkala to Astrakhan,

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demanding weapons. Losses by the army in battle were unbelievably high – some units lost as many as 20 per cent of their troops killed and wounded, even though the Russian army, unlike its foes, was using artillery, aircraft and tanks. Pilots who lacked experience due to the shortage of fuel for training flights missed their bombing targets, while the artillery shelled its own troops. In these circumstances, winning the war without massive support from the local population would have been impossible. Although the generals were unwilling to admit it, the participation in the battles of the Dagestani militias was crucial in ensuring the success of the federal forces. Unlike the soldiers, the militia members knew the locality, and were prepared psychologically for battles in the mountains. Mingling with the local population, they detected the movements of the fighters in places where the army’s reconnaissance was powerless. Commanding the Chechens were Shamil Basaev and the Jordanian Khattab, both of whom had earlier fought successfully against Russian forces. This time, their guerrilla tactics were quite useless, since the population was hostile to them. Things were somewhat different in the villages of Karamakhi and Chabanmakhi, where the Islamists had a base of support among the local inhabitants. Here a powerful army group became bogged down for two weeks, suffering heavy losses. Thanks to an overwhelming superiority in numbers and weaponry, however, the army managed to take both villages. By mid-September, the defeat of the Chechens was complete. THE BLASTS While the conflict in Dagestan was ending, explosions were resounding in Buynaksk, in Moscow, and later in Volgodonsk. The blast in the army town of Buynaksk was seen as an extension of the fighting in Dagestan. Yeltsin scolded his ministers: why were bombs exploding in well-defended military settlements? The terrorists appear to have taken the president’s criticism to heart. First a video game parlour was blown up in the Okhotny Ryad underground complex, literally two steps from the Kremlin. Then followed the demolition of two Moscow apartment buildings full of sleeping residents, and in Volgodonsk, an explosion that left the inhabitants of an entire residential complex homeless. About 1,000 people died as a result of the terrorist acts, and society was shaken. The authorities immediately blamed the Chechens. Not a single one of the accusations was proven, and no-one set out to prove them. A veritable racist hysteria gripped the media. These moods were expressed most openly by the liberal commentator Mikhail Leontyev, who declared that ‘the Chechens want only one kind of independence – from the Criminal Code’.12 To solve the Chechen problem, Leontyev recommended the use of poison gas, napalm and carpet bombing. A former chairperson of the Council of the Federation maintained that ‘the terrorists should be shot down like mad dogs’, while

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not making any particular distinction between the concepts of ‘Chechen’ and ‘terrorist’.13 From the point of view of the propagandists, the entire Chechen people should have been made to pay for the actions of the field commanders Basaev and Khattab, and for the bombs placed in Moscow by unknown people. ‘Something new and terrible happened to us during those years of “democratic and liberal” reforms’, wrote Andrey Piontkovsky in The Moscow Times. Ten years ago, no-one would have dared speak of physical elimination of an entire ethnicity. Hitler’s fascism brought more pain to this country than any Khattab could. And even during the cruelest passages of the Second World War, it never occurred to anybody in Russia to call for the complete extermination of the German people. ‘Hitlers come and go, but the German people remain,’ our propaganda repeated.14 The wave of national hatred spread by the television was unprecedented even for the mass media of ‘democratic’ Russia. From time to time, hypocritical reservations were made, to the effect that by no means all Chechens were terrorists, and that a distinction should be made between Muslim believers and fundamentalists, but these reservations merely provided cover for the racist propaganda, in just the same way as the struggle against Zionism has been used in Russia to provide cover for anti-semitic propaganda. In their emotional heat, the television broadcasts of September 1999 recalled the ‘five minutes’ hate’ in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nor was the press concealing its goals. ‘“If the enemy is to be defeated, he must be hated” – this is the law of a war in the late twentieth century. Such a war is different only in that it is preceded by an informational artillery barrage’, journalists for Moskovskiy Komsomolets argued cynically. Quite without condemnation, they related that ‘the image of the enemy’ had been quickly established. The journalists were given firm guidelines, which had been lacking in 1994 and 1995. ‘Heading this movement is the newly re-established Ministry of the Press, which in practice has imposed a partial censorship on the airwaves.’15 The population were called on to perform guard duty in their stairwells, to stop terrorists getting in. No practical benefit could come of this, since no-one was placing bombs in stairwells; the explosives were either in basements or in parked cars. The guard duty, however, was supposed to get the entire society used to the struggle against terrorism. Journalists, acting in the manner of provocateurs, discussed the possibility of anti-Caucasian pogroms breaking out spontaneously, but no pogroms followed. The psychological working-over of ordinary Russians was failing to yield the expected results. As army and militia patrols appeared on city streets, the possibility of a state of emergency was discussed openly in the press. This was all too reminiscent of the strategy of destabilization applied by ruling circles during the lead-up to military coups in Latin America and Turkey during the 1970s.

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In essence, all the debates which liberal commentators were carrying on among themselves could be reduced to one big discussion: what sort of dictatorship did Russia need? State television accused Luzhkov of allowing the total collapse of the law enforcement organs in Moscow; this, supposedly, had made the terrorist acts possible. Supporters of Luzhkov, by contrast, accused the Kremlin of destroying the state, of weakening the armed forces and security services, and of carrying on unprincipled collaboration with Chechen bandits. Moscow militia chief Nikolay Kulikov, who was close to Luzhkov, was sacked from his post. Immediately after the terrorist acts, official figures in the Kremlin and the federal government apparatus accused Chechen and Arab terrorists of having organized the Moscow explosions, insisting that the perpetrators had directs links to the notorious Arab millionaire Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for numerous acts of terrorism against US citizens. No evidence was cited to show that bin Laden had been involved in organizing the Moscow blasts, but from a propaganda point of view it was extremely advantageous for the Russian leadership to demonstrate such a connection. At the same time as the West was complaining about the corruption of the Russian rulers, these very rulers were heroically defending the ‘free world’ against the intrigues of ‘international Islamic terrorism’. As the newspaper Izvestiya noted, all these developments threw official Grozny into ‘a state close to panic’. The Chechen authorities declared that they had set up their own investigative group, promised to hand over any citizen of the republic whose guilt could be demonstrated, and pledged to ‘render the federal authorities practically any help’.16 President Maskhadov met with the heads of the Russian border regions, and sought a meeting with Yeltsin. The Kremlin, however, did not respond to the urgings from Grozny. In an interview with Novaya Gazeta, Maskhadov later described the incursion into Dagestan as ‘play-acting’, and added: This was a case of direct collusion between the Yeltsin administration, the financial oligarchy, Berezovsky, and the armed forces, who had shamefully lost that war. It did not, of course, happen without the participation of short-sighted, radical-minded people from our side – I do not deny this. I was categorically opposed to the actions they mounted, and I wanted to stop them at any cost. I even went to the Russian leadership, and to the leadership of Dagestan. Unfortunately, I was not successful . . .17 The war began simply because it was needed by the Kremlin, and all of Maskhadov’s efforts to avert a provocation were deliberately condemned to failure. Moscow constantly accused Maskhadov of weakness, of inaction and of inability to enforce order. In Chechnya itself, Maskhadov met with constant criticism for his not especially well concealed pro-Russian sympathies. Maskhadov himself insisted that ‘if the Chechen state were given legal recognition, it would be easier for me to stop the people who are

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muddying the water’. Formerly a regular officer of the Soviet armed forces, General Maskhadov dreamed of an alliance with Russia against NATO, and promised that Chechnya would become ‘a reliable bulwark for Russia on its southern borders’.18 Representatives of the Chechen fighters denied that they were implicated in the bombings or that they were in contact with bin Laden, declaring that ‘Moscow is being blown up by Moscow politicians.’ As well as general remarks about the inadmissability of such methods, the fighters asked the reasonable question: ‘How is it possible to bring around a ton of explosives into so closely guarded a city as Moscow?’19 Newspapers close to the Moscow city authorities asked similar questions. Moskovskiy Komsomolets directly accused the Kremlin and Berezovsky of organizing the explosions. Even if Chechens had carried out the operations, the newspaper charged, the people who had ordered the blasts were from the presidential circle. These same people had urged their Chechen friends to invade Dagestan. Transcripts appeared in the press of intercepted conversations between Berezovsky and Chechen politicians and field commanders. The oligarch himself did not deny that such contacts had taken place, but declared that he had been involved exclusively in trying to free prisoners and hostages held in Chechnya. In reply to this, Novaya Gazeta observed acidly that Berezovsky was a most unlikely altruist. The only thing that could link him with Chechen informal leaders was ‘shared interests’. It was necessary to search not only for terrorists and for the people who ordered the bombings, but also for ‘the people who paid for the order’.20 Publications close to Berezovsky objected that so wonderful a man simply could not be the instigator of terrorist acts. Do you really think Berezovsky is capable of such deeds, asked Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Izvestiya. In response, Moskovskiy Komsomolets conducted a survey of its readers, who affirmed overwhelmingly, yes, that is exactly what we think.21 Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov not only confirmed that the transcripts of conversations between Berezovsky and the fighters were authentic, but added that the Moscow millionaire ‘personally paid the mobile phone bills of the fighters’ leaders’.22 In October Nezavisimaya Gazeta, sponsored by Berezovsky, confirmed that he had been in touch with Chechen field commanders prior to the war; the newspaper then went on to argue that so transparently honest a person as Boris Abramovich could never contemplate anything evil. Nezavisimaya Gazeta was then forced to change its line of argument, and began explaining that although there had evidently been understandings with the fighters, and that people in Moscow had in fact urged them to invade Dagestan, Berezovsky was not to blame; the guilty parties were the Russian security services, which had failed to tell the Moscow oligarch of their intentions.23 Meanwhile, as more testimonies seeped through into the press, suspicion also began to fall increasingly on other members of the Russian elite – above all on Anatoly Chubais and the head of the general staff, General Kvashnin. These two had been close collaborators during the period in

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question. The army’s security services would never have undertaken the ‘game’ with the fighters without Kvashnin’s knowledge. The affair became even more tenebrous when Federal Security Service agents in Ryazan were caught red-handed trying to place explosives in the basement of an apartment building. The agents immediately explained that what was occurring was a training exercise aimed at testing the vigilance of local residents. True, they could not explain why, if they were conducting a training exercise, they needed to use military explosives. The substance contained in their sacks was taken off for testing and was immediately destroyed. The newspaper Versiya asked its readers ironically: ‘Why was the Federal Security Service trying to explode sugar?’ Then, quoting the latest special service press statement to the effect that the ‘sugar’ had been taken off to a firing range, and that testers there had proven experimentally that it would not explode, the newspaper added: It would be interesting to know what idiot would haul off three sacks of ordinary sugar to be blown up on a firing range. The author of this note is not, of course, an expert on explosives, but he can nevertheless state with complete certainty that sugar does not explode. Perhaps the sacks did not contain sugar at all? Or perhaps the Federal Security Service got its lies a little mixed up?24 It is worth noting that in November and December, when Russian aircraft and artillery in Chechnya were wiping whole villages and their inhabitants off the face of the earth, and when the number of victims of the war was already in the thousands, there was not a single explosion in Moscow or St Petersburg. By winter, the authorities had simply ceased looking for terrorists. Numerous suspects were set free (they proved to be well-off people of Caucasus background from whom, journalists reported, the militia had simply been extracting bribes). The ‘Chechen version’ of the explosions had effectively collapsed. Moreover, leaks of information from the Russian security services had reached the press, indicating that both the Federal Security Service and its military counterpart, the GRU, were directly linked to the explosions. To judge from information obtained by Versiya and Novaya Gazeta, people from the Caucasus associated with the younger Basaev, Shirvani, had in fact been involved in organizing the blasts. The planting of the explosives, however, had not been agreed with the Chechen field commanders, and had been set in train directly by the security services. The Basaev brothers themselves were convinced that their Moscow partners had kept them in the dark and crudely deceived them. Surikov had met with Shamil Basaev and tried to make excuses, but the trust between them was gone. The newspaper Versiya even contrived to gain access to the personal GRU files of the Basaev brothers; here, both Chechen terrorists were named as regular agents of the military intelligence organization, with impeccable

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records of service. Soon after these materials were published in Versiya, the newspaper’s editor, Artem Borovik, died in mysterious circumstances. This not only failed to put a stop to talk of the complicity of the security services in the explosions, but made these services the object of even stronger suspicions. For the Russian authorities, this was no longer especially important, since a full-scale war was already underway in the Caucasus. The organizers of the autumn bombing campaign had obviously achieved their goals. By midOctober the stories to the effect that bin Laden and other international Islamic terrorists were in Chechnya had also collapsed, but by this time the Russian army had already invaded Chechnya. ‘Experts’ with links to military circles could declare openly: Whether Osama bin Laden is in Chechnya or not means nothing. Russia is being forced to press ahead with a wide-ranging anti-terrorist operation in order to deny Khattab, Raduev, Basaev and Maskhadov the opportunity to wage a terrorist war in Chechnya and beyond its borders.25 It is typical that, as well as the recognized extremists Khattab and Raduev, and their ally Basaev, the list of ‘terrorists’ here also included Maskhadov, the legitimate president of Chechnya, whom no-one had even accused of organizing terrorist acts. THE FAMILY’S CHECHNYA CAMPAIGN By November 1999, the information war had reached an intensity unseen in Russia since the days of Yeltsin’s reprisals against the parliament in 1993. The sole difference was that in 1993 the mass media had been united around the regime. Now the feuding elite groups, while praising the wise army leadership and the determination shown by the government in the Caucasus, were simultaneously calling for reprisals against one another. All this occurred against a background of constant rumours that Yeltsin was gravely ill or preparing to resign. This time, the people discussing the president’s resignation were not his opponents, but people from his immediate circle. An early, voluntary resignation would guarantee that the Kremlin could control the process through which power was transferred; until the elections, Prime Minister Putin would fill the office of president without having had to face the voters. These rumours were first denied by the Kremlin, then again set in circulation by people close to the ‘family’, throwing everyone into total confusion. Trying to reassure the Kremlin, Luzhkov started to backtrack, reminding people that he had not yet declared his intention of running for president, and that most likely he would not do so, but would support Yevgeny Primakov. Elections for mayor of the Russian capital, meanwhile, had been called for December; the decision to shift the date had been made by Luzhkov (or more precisely, by his tightly controlled

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city Duma) so as to free his hands in advance of the presidential elections due for the summer. In the event, Luzhkov was able to use the city elections as an occasion for publicly denying any presidential ambitions. At election meetings, the mayor explained to Moscow residents that he would never abandon them, and that he had no need of any post other than the one he currently held. Meanwhile, functionaries from his entourage reiterated that collaboration with Primakov was allowable ‘only until December’, that is, until the parliamentary elections. Luzhkov, they maintained, was ‘not in a position’ to win the presidency unaided.26 Among the associates of the Moscow mayor, conflicts intensified. Nevertheless, stopping the information war in this way was already impossible. With clear backing from the Kremlin the head of the presidential administration, Pavel Borodin, put himself forward for the post of mayor, together with former Prime Minister Sergey Kirienko. Borodin had earlier figured in a whole series of scandalous affairs involving dubious monetary transfers worth millions of dollars. Each day, the television extolled the unlikely virtues of this duo. The first television channel, under the control of Berezovsky, also defamed the Moscow mayor on a daily basis, describing him publicly as a ‘thief’, a ‘hypocrite’ and so forth. Even successful court suits by Luzhkov failed to stop the executives of the first channel, among whom Sergey Dorenko, known among journalists as ‘Berezovsky’s samurai’, was especially prominent.27 The Luzhkov camp seemed more and more perplexed as the Kremlin ‘family’ pressed ahead with its attacks. The ‘family’, however, was no longer motivated by passion, or by the arousal of a hunger for victory, or even, as in 1991 and 1993, by a lust for power and wealth. What motivated it now was a quite ordinary fear. The political system that had been built on blood following the October 1993 coup was visibly disintegrating, following closely on the fate of the neo-liberal economic model. The process by now was out of control. Stopping the war of the elites, and achieving peaceful agreement, was already impossible. The Kremlin now required nothing less than victory. Along with its campaign for the political annihilation of the Luzhkov group, the ‘family’ staked its future on a military victory in Chechnya. The calculation, as in 1994, was that a successful military campaign would atone for everything – for the economic catastrophe; for the thievery, which had now reached fantastic dimensions; for the election-rigging; and for the absence of a foreign policy. Chechnya in 1999 was just as ideal a site for a ‘small victorious war’ as it had been five years earlier. On the one hand, the Kremlin had no strategy for developing relations with Chechnya, while on the other, the unresolved conflict in the south of the country could be used in political games within Russia. In addition, the social order that prevailed in Chechnya did not arouse sympathy among the Russian public. As a Communist deputy put it in the pages of the newspaper Vedomosti:

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Whatever might happen if a war were to break out, an earthquake or tsunami to strike, the country to be ravaged by famine or plague, a radioactive cloud to cover it – if this helped to maintain the power of the family, the family would accept it without a murmur, even gratefully, feeling certain that all these calamities would not affect it, and considering that other people did not matter.28 The anti-communist Moskovskiy Komsomolets stated that the regime wanted ‘with the help of airborne assault operations, to sweep absolutely all the pieces from the political chessboard, and to start its own, new game’ in place of the one currently being played out.29 This the Kremlin succeeded in doing. On 28 September, according to press reports, Yeltsin approved the plan that had been drawn up by the military for a new intervention in Chechnya. This time the generals promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1994 and 1995. Doubts as to the ability of the armed forces to learn from their errors evoked protests from the military chiefs themselves. The television showed endless footage of generals who had been routed during the first Chechnya war, and who related to astonished viewers that last time, they had merely been playing; only the inconsistency of the politicians had stopped them from smashing the enemy. Now, the public was promised, there would be no such inconsistency; no-one, for example, would hinder the extermination of peaceful inhabitants or the carpet-bombing of residential districts. From the first day of the fighting, the generals began to lie. They multiplied the losses of the enemy by tens of times, and concealed their own. They maintained that they were keeping Shamil Basaev cooped up in northern Chechnya, at the same time as Basaev was giving a press conference in Grozny. Despite never having won a single battle, and without even having engaged in serious conflict with the enemy, they filled the press and television with announcements of their great victories. They showed completely undamaged Chechen trenches, while discussing the exceptional effectiveness of their artillery fire. ‘We shall not repeat the mistakes of the past’, General Viktor Kazantsev, entrusted with command of the operation, repeated like an incantation. Kazantsev even pledged to take control of Chechnya without occupying population centres, and without storming Grozny. ‘What’s in Grozny that’s so important?’30 To conceal the lies, military censorship was introduced. Behind the bragging of the armed forces lay an insurmountable fear of the enemy. Aleksandr Razumov wrote, in the journal Svobodnaya Mysl’: The fighting in Chechnya has not yet begun in earnest and already the victory fanfares are ringing out and the praises of the wise military commanders are being sung. It is a lie that our soldiers are all but being greeted with flowers, and the optimistic pictures of ‘little blood and a crushing blow’ are being drawn in vain. Somewhere, sometime, we have

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already heard this refrain. Once again, the awkward question arises: who are they lying to? To themselves? To the population? To foreign observers? Who are the lies addressed to? I think, to everyone individually and to all at once. Most importantly, they lie that what is going on is not a war, but exclusively a struggle against terrorism. He goes on to say that references to the corruption and to the orgy of criminality and terrorism in Chechnya do not justify the war crimes carried out by the Russian generals. Corruption cannot be fought with carpet bombing. ‘You will not banish terrorism by killing and maiming and killing the wives, children and other relatives of the fighters, but you can be quite certain of provoking it.’31 Unlike the usual situation, justifying lies and creating favourable conditions for propaganda was in fact the main aim of the war. The military operations, of course, developed according to their own logic, which differed from the logic of a television show. In the initial period, however, this could be concealed. The comparatively easy advance of Russian forces across the plains of northern Chechnya, where the population is mainly pro-Russian, was cited as proof of the increased effectiveness of the army, even though in 1994 Russian troops had crossed the same northern Chechnya not only more quickly, but also with substantially fewer losses. Pavel Felgenhauer, military observer for The Moscow Times, wrote: Russian leaders are fools if they believe that the coming war will be a cakewalk and that the currently insignificant Chechen resistance is a prelude to a collapse of their independence movement. Today the Chechens are retreating in an organized manner, but this is a prelude not to surrender, but to impending fierce and well-planned counter-attacks. Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov – a brilliant military tactician – is, apparently, again taking over coordination of Chechen forces. During the 1994–96 war, Maskhadov planned many a Chechen victory.32 The generals insisted that their sole error during the first Chechnya war had been to fail to make sufficient use of aviation and artillery. This time, aircraft were used more actively. The result was that the Russian side, which during the whole Chechnya war of 1994–96 had lost one aircraft, lost two during the first week of fighting in the second war, plus another in Dagestan. Unfortunately, the main ‘error’ had been the war itself. Not only had the leaders no intention of recognizing or correcting this mistake, but they were preparing to deepen it. Doubling the number of troops in the army group, and driving crowds of half-trained recruits into the front lines, the generals hoped, through a superiority in firepower and through cheap soldiers’ blood, to avoid a repetition of their 1996 humiliation in Chechnya. On 2 October 1999, therefore, the Russian army once again crossed the Chechen border and invaded the republic. The ‘family’ had begun its

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Chechnya campaign. ‘They are treading once more on the same rakes’, Moskovskiy Komsomolets commented gloomily.33 THE MILITARISM OF THE ELITES The main conclusion which the Russian generals had drawn from their shameful defeat in 1996 was that they had been greatly impeded by the press and by vacillating political liberals in their rear. This would not be allowed to happen again. Our military bureaucrats also interpreted the lessons of NATO’s Kosovo campaign in their own peculiar fashion. For practical purposes, the only lesson which they drew from these events amounted to the following: before starting military operations, you need to win unanimous support among the political elites, and to gag any malcontents. Ordinary Russians were deluged with propaganda, and, in the early period, opponents of the war were denied almost all access to the mass media. The second Chechnya war, unlike the first, received almost unanimous support from the Russian ‘political class’. Yegor Gaidar, who in 1994 had been a ‘dove’, abruptly became a convinced ‘hawk’. Now very much a son of the Russian soil, he condemned the West, which, he maintained, was incapable of understanding Russia. Roy Medvedev spoke out in support of the war on the pages of the right-wing press. People who opposed the conflict were reluctant to come out openly against it. State Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev, after reminding people that he was ‘categorically opposed’ to war in Chechnya, immediately added: ‘I support the actions of the government when it is a question of destroying bandit formations, on whichever territory they are located.’34 An indication of what had happened in society was the position taken by the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers. From 1994 to 1996 this was one of the main forces in the anti-war movement. This time, representatives of the committee declared that in principle, of course, they were against the war, but that since the committee had not been able to prevent it, they would mount a struggle to ensure that the soldiers fighting in the mountains were well paid, no less than a thousand bucks a month. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, swapping over to criminal slang, vowed that the Chechen ‘terrorists’ would be ‘wasted in a shithouse’. Among the political elite and the liberal intelligentsia, this aroused a storm of delighted approval. The newspaper Tribuna commented: The terrorist acts in Moscow and Volgodonsk, and the military operations first in Dagestan and then in Chechnya have qualitatively changed the mood of the Russian public, and moreover, in all the regions of Russia. A militarization of mass consciousness has occurred. This is the most important thing that marks off the present day from earlier times. Now everyone, including both politicians and people remote from the secrets of politics, is forced to say what Putin has said, or done, the day before. Any critical word aimed at the premier or relating to the military operation

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he is directing in the Caucasus is perceived as betrayal of the Russian national interest, as a knife in the back of the Russian soldiers fighting in Chechnya for our peace and security. This militarized social consciousness is giving rise to qualitatively different needs in the area of political slogans. In this regard, Putin has an indisputable advantage, since it is impossible to imagine Primakov, Luhkkov, Yavlinsky or Zyuganov recommending that we ‘waste’people, or that we ‘stop being snivelling sentimentalists’.35 The war paralysed the opposition, who continued from inertia to condemn Yeltsin, but who could not bring themselves to say a word against Putin. Meanwhile, it was on Putin that the Kremlin camarilla (clique) had placed their main stake. A provincial journalist close to the anarchists wrote: Although it might seem strange to suspect Boris Abramovich of lacking commercial sense, I nevertheless think that he spent too much on the election campaign. Unwieldy Caucasus pyrotechnics and a labourintensive military excursion require big sums. Putin’s rating could have been increased at minimal cost using total control over the main media outlets. The place of cheerful news from the Caucasus could quite well have been taken by scenes from the life of the ‘head of government’. Something like ‘Putin doles out soup to the needy’, ‘Putin admonishes an errant banker’ or ‘Putin whips an embezzler’. Indeed, something like this can be seen on television: ‘Putin deals a rebuff to the West’, or ‘Putin increases benefits for pensioners’. Of course, all this is too insipid for our lovers of spicy fare. Nevertheless, the experience of the previous Chechnya campaign, when numerous media outlets showed an inexplicable humanity, demonstrates that bloodthirsty instincts are not too deeply implanted in the Russian people.36 In reality, the changes in public consciousness were far less than the political elites had supposed. Opinion surveys were falsified in the most brazen manner in order to show a swift rise in the premier’s popularity rating. Television reports asserted that after the beginning of the war, Putin had the backing of 47 per cent of the population, but previous history had already shown repeatedly just what the television ratings were worth. The same ratings showed support for the government at just 12 per cent. A premier’s personal authority can of course be higher than that of the cabinet which he or she heads, but not four times higher! Mass thinking was not in any way militarized, and the war had failed completely to stir popular enthusiasm. According to various surveys, in November, between 42 and 47 per cent of the population called for a prompt beginning to peace talks with the Chechens. This was at a time when the politicians, with the exception of Grigory Yavlinsky, were demanding a ‘war until final victory’. The people did not support the war, but the ‘opposition’ had once again

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betrayed the people. The ‘political class’, which had totally discredited itself, and the mass media, which had abandoned any and all moral standards, did not have the will to swim against the current. The gap between the ‘political class’ and the masses was continuing to widen, and the war merely strengthened this tendency. When Grigory Yavlinsky took the risk of calling for negotiations with the Chechens, a flood of accusations poured down on him. On the pages of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Vitaly Tretyakov declared that the Yabloko bloc was an ‘anti-state’ and ‘irresponsible’ formation.37 Anatoly Chubais went even further: The Russian army is being reborn in Chechnya. Faith in the army is being firmly established, and any politician who cannot see this cannot be considered a Russian politician. There is only one name for such people: traitors. Any efforts Yavlinsky might make to justify himself do not change the essence of this.38 Meanwhile, Gennady Seleznev recalled that not long before, Yavlinsky himself had called for ‘carrying out acts of vengeance’, and commented: ‘So this is what happens? They blow up our buildings, and this means that we have to blow up buildings there, along with the peaceful residents?’39 In fact, the armed forces were doing precisely this, though they were not placing explosives in the basements of residential buildings, but bombing Chechen towns and villages from the air, and bombarding them from rocket launchers. None of the politicians made so bold as to protest against this. Only Novaya Gazeta published reports from the front relating what was actually happening, while military observer Pavel Felgenhauer ventured to declare on the radio station Ekho Moskvy that ‘the anti-terrorist operation is turning into a terrorist one’.40 The journalist Anna Politkovskaya, after returning from Chechnya, wrote of ‘the slaughter of an exceptionally peaceful population, the death of children, pregnant women and old people’. In the ‘liberated’ villages residents were forbidden, on orders from General Shamanov, from going out on to the streets. The command is simple: the civilian population have the right to leave their cellars only between 1100 and 1300 hours, while holding a white flag in their hands. If they are without a flag, they are fired upon, with obvious results. If they come out between 1300 and 1400 hours, the response is the same . . . In Alkhan-Yurt twenty-three peasants have died. Only three have been victims of the bombing; the rest have perished during the ‘cleansing’ of the village. Things are the same literally everywhere. Even in northern Chechnya, where the population has traditionally been sympathetic to Russia, the grapes of wrath have ripened. In the village of Goragorskoe, a journalist saw a mosque which had been demolished by the soldiers down

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to its foundations. The silent answer of the Goragorskoe residents, who smile politely to all the ‘people of Slavic nationality’ who now call in at the village, was the nocturnal beheading of the statue of the unknown soldier located, as is the custom, in the centre of the village. The head had been cut off accurately, with a flame torch, and had then disappeared. The people of Goragorskoe, hiding within themselves a coiled spring of hatred and revenge, had not been deterred even by the fact that among the villagers were veterans of the Great Patriotic War.41 In Felgenhauer’s view, both the military officers and the political leaders who direct their actions are war criminals. Among the war criminals he named Anatoly Chubais, at that time the head of the Russian electrical energy system, who, even before the outbreak of fighting had cut off electricity supplies to Chechnya. As a result, hospitals, maternity homes, and the various installations that ensure the basic conditions for life in cities were left without power. ‘The cutting off of electricity and gas supplies to Chechnya, as was done in October, was in direct violation of the fourth article of the second Geneva protocol of 1977.’42 While proclaiming the goal of the state to be the ‘struggle against terrorism’ (just like the Latin American generals, the ‘gorillas’ of the 1970s), the Russian authorities have themselves been incapable of employing other methods apart from terrorist ones. On Russian territory, Felgenhauer wrote: refugees are ill-treated in full view of everyone. In Grozny and in southern Chechnya, where the troops have not yet penetrated, Russian citizens are being wiped out in totally indiscriminate fashion using rockets, bombs and shells. Meanwhile, there are no special hopes that these disgraceful actions will even have any particular result.43 Through their unanimous adherence to militarism, the Moscow political elites have driven themselves into a trap. None of them has even tried to consider the options, or to think of what they will do if the army once again is defeated. The strikingly naive faith shown by the politicians in the generals can only be explained on the basis that the elites of Yeltsin’s ‘second republic’ have finally lost all sense of reality. Preoccupied with their intrigues, with dreaming up cunning political scenarios and launching reciprocal attacks, they now have only a dim perception of the world they inhabit. Meanwhile, events in Chechnya have developed in ways quite different from those planned in Moscow. From the outset, the operation was wrongly conceived and ineptly implemented. Pavel Felgenhauer reported: They have now contrived a war while staring at a winter when soldiers by the dozen will be taken off to hospital suffering from pneumonia and nephritis after all but freezing to death. On the threshold of Grozny,

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moreover, the army is being forced to begin the demobilization of those of its soldiers and sergeants who, after two years, are its best trained. Soon, I am certain, the front-line units will have a third of their strength made up of soldiers barely out of school, who have spent six months learning to wage war in training camps. Naturally, all that a force consisting of adolescent soldiers can do is to bombard Chechen towns inaccurately, from a distance. The number of casualties among women, children and old people is already in the thousands. Whether they have managed to ‘waste’ even a single real terrorist is unknown.44 After six months of haphazard training, the infantrymen present a pathetic spectacle. The Moscow city military commissar lamented that the average conscript was totally unfit for battle duty: The bulk of them are obviously sickly and physically underdeveloped. Often, their weight does not correspond to their height. This year the medics have turned up more than 200 men so far below the normal weight that it was decided not just to give them a deferment, but to excuse them from serving altogether.45 This happened in the prosperous Russian capital; in other regions, the situation was even worse. As well-fed youths from ‘respectable families’ bought their way out of army service, bribe-taking had become an everyday norm in the apparatus of the recruiting offices. Members of the ‘gilded youth’ were also dying in their thousands, only not from the bullets of Chechen fighters, but in car crashes or from drug overdoses. With totally inadequate training, the troops acquitted themselves accordingly in battle. The Chechens characterized the battle formations of the Russian army as ‘rabble’. A journalist for Novaya Gazeta who had repeatedly been present at ‘hot spots’ observed with horror that soldiers stood up at their full height in front-line positions, or sprawled on their armoured personnel carriers ‘in such a way that they could not possibly keep watch over the enemy’s territory’.46 Novye Izvestiya correspondent Valery Yakov, on entering a battle zone in November 1999, found there a picture that was well known to him from the first Chechnya war: The troops take up positions along the roads, spreading themselves out for a kilometre or two to the right and left, and in this way, creating the appearance of a general presence. In reality, many kilometres of coppices, fields and hillocks are not really controlled by anyone, and whenever the fighters want, they can move quite calmly in any direction, easily ignoring the ‘sanitary cordon’. Their only need is to avoid being spotted from the air if a reconnaissance aircraft or a helicopter appears in the sky.

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Once cold weather set in, fog settled on the mountains and aerial reconnaissance became totally ineffective. The fighters appeared, then disappeared, striking blows at the federal army’s relatively immobile formations. ‘In the security zone proclaimed by the federal propagandists, they feel themselves to be absolutely free, staging sorties to the rear of the troops and entering villages which for some time have been under army control.’ The army had increasingly been drawn into a prolonged positional war against an ‘invisible’ enemy, a war about which Yakov observed: ‘the enemy is everywhere, and attacking units are compelled to form themselves into circles to defend themselves’.47 There were reports of aircraft bombing their own troops, of chaos in the organizing of the simplest tasks, and of the weariness and confusion of the soldiers. The propaganda carried on weaving fantasies for ordinary people in the rear, but in Chechnya itself the Russian army was fighting a real enemy, not a virtual one. No war has ever been won by propaganda, especially when this propaganda has been directed not at the enemy, but at the home population. The defeats on the battlefield could be hidden, but they could not be avoided. WAR WITHOUT VICTORY General Grachev’s strategy in 1994 was to exploit his superior weaponry, and, in a single powerful thrust, to force his way through to Grozny in the shortest possible time. Capturing the city, he would smash the Chechen military and political structures before the Chechens could make use of them for organizing guerrilla warfare. The only advantage enjoyed by a regular army over guerrillas and militia lies in its ability to conduct rapid manoeuvres with large forces. In initiating military action, Grachev took to heart the experience of Afghanistan. He tried to make the maximum use of his aces before the Chechens gained a grip on the situation. This plan was not in the least reckless or ‘criminal’, as journalists later claimed. Indeed, from the military point of view it was the only sensible way to proceed. But, as always, the way the plan was executed was beneath criticism. The attempt to storm Grozny in the days before New Year ended in failure, and a drawn-out siege of the city began. This allowed President Dudaev to prepare a military-political base in the mountains of southern Chechnya, opening the way for prolonged resistance. General Grachev’s plan failed in the first instance because of the earlier actions of Grachev the politician, who had humiliated and demoralized the army, forcing it to play a role as a weapon in the 1993 coup d’etat. Substantial numbers of officers and rank and file soldiers saw their actions in Chechnya, a year after the bombarding of the parliament, as a continuation of the war against their own people. In turn, a substantial section of Russian society saw in the Chechen resistance not an attempt by the Chechens to create their own state, but also a struggle against the Yeltsin regime.

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The failure of the initial plan doomed the Russian army to fighting a drawn-out war in the mountains. The numerous shameful episodes of 1995 and 1996 were merely among the consequences of this strategic failure. Meanwhile, in the strategic sense the decisions taken in 1999 were even worse than those of 1994. The army advanced toward Grozny slowly, without getting caught up in large-scale fighting. Artillery and air strikes were used to ‘squeeze’ the fighters out of the positions they held. After each such strike (and in many cases before it), the fighters retreated from the points they had occupied. The federal forces reported their success, and advanced a few more kilometres until they encountered the next knot of resistance. The artillery strikes would have had a certain effect if the Chechens had tried seriously to hold a front according to the laws of the first and second world wars, but they were conducting a guerrilla struggle, and their sole aim was to make the advance of the Russian forces slow. The generals argued that they were preserving their personnel. The huge and pointless losses which the army began suffering in December 1999 showed what these declarations were worth. In fact the tactics of the Russian commanders in Chechnya must be explained not by military calculation or by some subtle strategic design, but by a profound fear of the enemy. The Russian generals had begun the war in autumn without thinking either of the technical problems of supplying their forces, or of the difficulties their aviation was encountering, or of the fact that the troops would suffer losses simply from the cold. The sergeants and soldiers who had undergone two years’ training had completed their term of service. Raw, untrained recruits, referred to solemnly in reports as ‘fresh troops’, would have to be flung into the front line. Near Argun, Urus-Martan and Grozny in November and December 1999 the army began to meet with stubborn resistance and to take catastrophic losses, which the military censorship at first managed to hide from the Russian public. Pointless frontal attacks were replaced with ineptly planned flanking manoeuvres, as a result of which the Russian forward columns were cut off from their own units and annihilated. As usual, the artillery and aircraft hit their own side, there was nothing with which to feed the troops, and in the market-places of the districts ‘liberated’ by the federal forces, soldiers carried on a lively trade with the rebels. The fighters obtained weapons, ammunition and fuel in exchange for food and vodka. Looting and desertion became commonplace phenomena. The army was visibly disintegrating. For some reason, the generals thought it would be hard for the Chechens to spend the winter in the mountains, even though Dudaev’s fighters, who had been far less well prepared for guerrilla warfare than Maskhadov’s detachments, had survived the winters of 1994–95 and 1995–96 without great difficulty. Meanwhile, no-one had considered how the Russian units would fare during a winter in Chechnya. Communications were in an appalling state, far worse than in 1994, and the devastated Grozny was not able to provide winter quarters for a huge army. Maskhadov’s idea was

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simple, and understandable to anyone who had undergone basic military training. The guerrillas, acting in small groups and avoiding engagements with large army units, would disorganize the supply system. Completing the picture was the corruption for which Yeltsin’s army had long been famed. It is not hard to believe that three years of ‘independent Ichkeria’ had left the population deeply disillusioned. Dudaev had promised people that Chechnya would be a democratic, secular, prosperous, socialist state. By 1999 the Chechens had received poverty, disorder, the rule of uncontrolled and corrupt field commanders, and the onset of religious extremism, to which Maskhadov had made one concession after another. Compared to all this, the assumption in the Kremlin seems to have been, the Russian authorities would seem more attractive. Nevertheless, the chaos which the Russian military succeeded in creating at the checkpoints between Chechnya and Ingushetia, together with the corruption and racism of our civil and military authorities, alienated from our army even those Chechens who had been sympathetic to Russia. In any case, people in Chechnya remembered not only the outrages of the three preceding years of ‘independence’, but also the nightmare of the Russian invasion that had come before it. The excesses committed by the army served to revive these memories all the more strongly. The fighters, as they went into clandestinity, again appeared like heroes. The Russian authorities could neither restore Chechnya to prosperity, nor create jobs there. They simply continued the destruction. This meant that for young people, even in traditionally pro-Russian northern Chechnya, there was nothing else to do apart from shooting at moving targets dressed in the uniform of the Russian army. The war of 1994–96 saw Dudaev’s Sovietized military elite replaced in Chechnya by field commanders such as Basaev, who had not undergone Soviet training and who did not subscribe to the military ethics of Dudaev and Maskhadov. The new war was also bound to see the appearance of new field commanders who did not bear responsibility for the arbitrary rule carried on by their predecessors. Despite the protestations that the campaign had been carefully prepared, the behaviour of the armed forces testified to the complete absence of any distinct plan. Moskovskiy Komsomolets asked: Why are the commanders now protecting the lives of service personnel, when in the Botlikh and Novolak regions of Dagestan they were totally unconcerned about this? Then, in September, agreement was reached on a reliable defence of the Chechen border, but no-one was planning to make deep incursions into Chechen territory. The name of a future operation by the federal forces, ‘the creation of a sanitary cordon’, began to be heard. Why were the plans changed? Why was it decided to establish a ‘sanitary cordon’ in the northern districts of Chechnya, instead of outside its boundaries? Why was the ‘sanitary zone’ not enough, and why were Russian forces moved into the interior of Chechnya? Why is there now

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talk of an assault on Grozny, though only a month ago there was no mention of this? One gets the impression that the military operations are directed by some brazen individual who himself has no idea what he wants. Or, on the contrary, who knows this very well, but whose desires are remote from the goals declared publicly by the regime.48 The journalists of Moskovskiy Komsomolets were convinced that behind the war in Chechnya there in fact lay concealed a struggle for control over the transporting of Caspian oil. Effective control over Chechnya was required in order to guarantee the ‘northern transit route’ through Russia (using either the old Soviet pipeline through Chechen territory, or a new pipeline through Dagestan). Changes in the behaviour of the Russian armed forces in the Caucasus coincided strangely with changes in the situation surrounding the ‘Caspian project’. Ultimately, however, Russia lost out to its competitors. Through the mediation of the USA, Azerbaijan, during the European Summit in Istanbul on 18–19 November signed an agreement with Georgia and Turkey on the construction of a pipeline by the ‘southern route’. As a result of this, the war in Chechnya was lost irrespective of the outcome on the battlefield. From this time, the continuing of military actions ceased to make any sense from the point of view of the struggle for Caspian oil. The war, however, had its own inertia and logic, especially for the generals, journalists and politicians who had gambled on a ‘victorious campaign’. The bloodshed had to continue simply because no-one was now prepared to recognize their mistakes, and to pay for this with their career. Moreover, the Russian elites had begun to be poisoned by their own propaganda. It is curious that, even without any collusion, all the people extolling the Chechnya war not only waxed enthusiastic over one and the same thing, but even expressed their delight in the same words. Chubais had only to speak of the ‘rebirth’ of the army, and Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which traditionally had criticized him, wrote that the army was being ‘reborn before our eyes’.49 Significantly, these ecstatic reports were all written in Moscow, thousands of kilometres from the line of fire. The moods prevailing among the troops were quite different. But if the rank and file soldiers and junior officers were again asking themselves why they were being sent off to die, the generals already felt themselves victorious – if not in the war against the Chechen fighters, then at least in the struggle with ‘unreliable’ journalists. The press and television competed with one another to flatter the military leadership, praising the ‘skilful preparation’ of the campaign, something of which ‘even the most active proponents of an armed operation would have feared to speak six months ago’.50 Only a few journalists were determined to tell the truth about what they had seen on the battlefield. Worst of all, after a few months the generals seemingly began to believe their own lies. This was a guarantee of a new round of crude errors.

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THE MAKING OF PUTIN In Chechnya in 2000, the Russian leadership had no need of peace. Military victory was not absolutely necessary either. What was required was reports of victories. References to these victories were used to explain Putin’s fantastic ratings, which in turn were used to provide cover for the questionable results of the elections. The only trouble was that the events in the Caucasus developed according to their own logic, independently of the plans of the Kremlin propagandists. By virtue of having fired the first shot, Russia had already suffered a severe defeat on the geopolitical level. To begin with, the war in Chechnya, judging from opinion surveys, acted as the main factor dissuading Belarussians from union with Russia. People in the fraternal republic did not want to receive zinc coffins from the Caucasus. The same war poisoned Russia’s relations with Islamic states, and aroused hatred towards Russia in Third World countries. Finally, Russia helped Western politicians to justify themselves after Kosova. Reports had just begun appearing of the scale of NATO lying, and the public in Europe had only just noticed that after the ‘victory’ in Kosovo ethnic cleansing was continuing, when a new and much more striking theme emerged: the war in Chechnya. By December 1999 it had become clear that if the war did not end with a real rather than a virtual victory within the next two or three months, A political defeat would be added to the diplomatic and moral ones. The oligarchy, which had backed Putin, would need to quickly consolidate its political regime, so that military defeats could no longer endanger its power. The war in Chechnya had become a testing ground on which ways of installing a military dictatorship in Russia itself were manifestly, and almost openly, being perfected. The command centre in Mozdok monitored television broadcasts and assessed the actions of politicians, while categorically forbidding anyone to assess the effectiveness (or more precisely, ineffectiveness) of its own operations. Valery Yakov wrote: The power of the armed forces is as limitless here as in any banana republic where a military coup has taken place and a dictatorship of colonels has been installed. The army controls the flow of refugees, distributes pensions, opens schools and sets up administrative posts. The law is silent, the constitution is taking a breather, and even within the framework of the santiary cordon nothing is heard about the introduction of a state of emergency. Meanwhile, the generals dictate their will not only to the refugees, milling about submissively in a circle, but also to society. Every evening Kazantsev, Shamanov and other commanders appear on the television screens, even more often than the prime minister, and with their categorical tones, intimidate their frightened fellow citizens. ‘If they stop us . . . ,’ ‘If we do not finish them off again . . . ’, ‘If they think of opening negotiations . . . ’ The perplexed fellow citizens become lost in guesswork as to who now wields power in the country: Moscow or Mozdok?51

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The democratic façade of the ‘second republic’ has collapsed before our eyes. So too has the liberal economic model. In practice, the West has reconciled itself to this. ‘Economic and political reforms have a window of opportunity’, wrote Newsweek. Russia’s came in the early 1990s when the new system was being formed, when dedicated liberal reformers were in power, when Boris Yeltsin was alive in body and spirit and when being pro-Western was not an ugly idea. The United States had enormous leverage over Russia as it made its new way in the world. But we blew it. Now we are left to damage control. The West should accept that the attempt to transform Russia into a liberal democracy is over. The United States now has one overriding interest in Russia’s future – the safety of the former Soviet Union’s stillvast nuclear arsenal.52 The American journalist is not being entirely honest. In the first place, it was the ‘dedicated liberal reformers’ who, with the full support and approval of the West, cooked up the porridge which the Western leaders are now so reluctant to swallow. Second, and much more importantly, the interests of the West in Russia are not restricted to the safeguarding of the nuclear arsenal. No less important (and in fact, more so) is keeping Russia on the periphery of the world system as a raw materials appendage and market for the products of the ‘centre’. Nevertheless, the key fact was admitted openly: even on the level of political rhetoric, the ruling circles in the US are prepared to ignore democratic principles where Russia is concerned. If a nationalist or even terrorist dictatorship will protect Western interests in Russia, there is nothing in this to be worried about. Even if Putin is liable to upset the Western public with his methods, the ‘hard-nosed politicians’ in Washington understand that, in present circumstances, they cannot have a better ally in Moscow in any case. Democratic institutions can exist in Yeltsin’s ‘second republic’ only so long as their ineffectiveness is guaranteed. In conditions where the population has no opportunity to exercise its rights, where the people have no choice, the appearance of political freedom can be maintained. As soon as such a choice appears, maintaining the legal structures of constitutional democracy becomes impossible. It is not important that the choice offered to the people is in fact between different oligarchic groups whose interests are equally remote from those of the masses. Even such a choice undermines the bases of the Yeltsin system, which is founded on a balance of forces between contending groups supported by the Kremlin. This was all taking place against a background of the creeping militarization of society, with the state increasingly losing its monopoly on violence. Alongside the armed formations that are formally subordinate to the authorities, numerous security organizations were operating in the country, not to speak of bandit gangs and the broad distribution of weapons among

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‘peaceful citizens’. The main thing, however, was that the state itself stated losing its unity, and the armed detachments that answer to bureaucratic groups on various levels were no longer in the full sense elements of a single system. This ‘pluralism’ had nothing in common either with democracy, or with the ‘universal arming of the people’ of which early socialists and anarchists dreamed. It was more reminiscent of the appearance, under feudalism, of bands of armed retainers. In order to guarantee the minimally peaceful development of society, the state needed to restore its monopoly on violence, but the very efforts of the state to impose at least a certain order here could result in an escalation of the conflicts. Most importantly, the effective ‘demilitarization’ of the country could be accompanied by the imposing of a dictatorship under the slogan of the ‘defence of peaceful citizens’. In these conditions dictatorship was indispensable, above all in order to preserve that status quo and thus to defend the thieves from the honest people. Of course, any policy has a certain momentum, and a clamp-down by the authorities could have unexpected consequences for the people who ordered and prepared it. In this regard, no-one’s future was guaranteed, and no-one’s interests were reliably defended. Soon after Putin was elected president, the effects of this situation were felt not only by the media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, who in the autumn of 1999 made the mistake of putting backing on Luzhkov, but also one of the people initially responsible for the ‘Putin effect’, Boris Berezovsky. What was involved, however, was not a conflict between the regime and the oligarchs, but efforts by the Kremlin group to replace some oligarchs with others, to force out the Yeltsin ‘family’ and to strengthen the positions of the ‘St Petersburg group’ that was close to Putin and Chubais. The economic situation made changes inevitable, but in the given situation, any changes were fraught with shocks. Maintaining a fragile political equilibrium, the foundation on which the semblance of democracy and legality in Russia was based, was becoming impossible. The ‘second republic’ was in its death agony. Beneath the sound of explosions and gunshots in Dagestan and Chechnya, and also beneath the volleys of the information war, the epoch of ‘liberal reforms’ was vanishing into the past. The national conservatism of Vladimir Putin was the logical and inevitable culmination of the Yeltsin era of liberal reforms.

10

The Putin Regime

The new-old team that gathered in the Kremlin in the autumn of 1999 was supposed to transform its obvious tactical superiority into consolidated power. Although this was not a difficult task in technical terms, all sorts of problems and breakdowns arose from the very beginning. Nevertheless, progress was more or less satisfactory up to a certain point; the Kremlin’s advantages over its opponents were so great that it got away with everything – incompetence, forgery and war crimes. CHECHNYA: THE CONTINUING CATASTROPHE After resounding propaganda declarations to the effect that the army would not storm Grozny, the troops were thrown into the assault. The scene was a replay of what had happened in 1994–95; again there were mounds of soldiers’ corpses on the streets, abandoned and burnt-out armoured vehicles, and stubborn battles for each building. The only difference was that, this time, the army acted with a savagery that was astonishing even against the background of the events of the first Chechnya war. Residential districts where Russian women, old people and children were hiding were bombarded using rocket-propelled flamethrowers and Grad and Uragan rocketlaunchers, as well as strategic bomber aircraft. In laying siege to Grozny, the generals were faced with a choice – either to launch an assault, as the Chechens were expecting, or, after blockading the city, to throw their main forces into the mountainous regions of southern Chechnya, where Maskhadov’s main bases were located. The second variant would have made more sense from a military point of view, since the Chechens were not expecting an offensive in the south. However, the army did something which no-one had anticipated; in December 1999, splitting up its forces, it went on the attack simultaneously in both directions. This was a real new year’s gift to the enemy. Because there were few battle-ready troops, achieving a breakthrough in either direction was impossible. Even worse, the huge masses of poorly trained soldiers and the accumulations of armoured vehicles merely created additional problems for the attackers. The troops had to be fed and supplied, and it was clear that no provision had been 251

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made for this. The ill-trained conscripts simply prevented the more experienced units from fighting. This time, the army made a forced error. Since the war was being fought above all for the sake of propaganda, the Russian leadership compelled the generals to land troops during December in the southern mountains near the Georgian village of Shatili, ostensibly in order to block a strategic road to Georgia. In fact, there was no road to Shatili; it had begun to be built in 1997, but then had been abandoned. As the elections neared, however, the Moscow politicians needed a victory to point to, especially since reports had begun to seep out of losses in Grozny. The pointlessly landed airborne troops were immediately surrounded. They had landed in a graveyard with the symbolic name ‘City of the Dead’; there, they sat beneath a mortar barrage, blockaded and short both of food and ammunition. Because of poor flying weather, evacuating them or supplying them was extremely difficult. To come to their rescue, the army would have to fight its way through mountain gorges to the south, leaving the battles in Grozny unfinished. The assault on the city began to get bogged down. Late in December Chechen units met attacking columns at the entrance to the Argun gorge, where a veritable slaughter began. Having supported the war in the name of the rebirth of the army and of Russian statehood, the Russian elites, including the ‘intellectuals’ and ‘oppositionists’, took responsibility for a policy that was leading inevitably to the collapse of the army and the further disintegration of the state. The elites had acted as accomplices of the provocateurs who had blown up apartment buildings; they had become the ideologues and propagandists of a dictatorship. They had gambled on Putin out of despair. The political resources of Putin’s rule were too meagre to allow the construction of long-term policies using the regime as a basis. Trying to resolve objective historical contradictions with the help of propaganda and falsified ratings, the regime drove itself and the whole country into another catastrophe. Worse still, the state’s financial crisis had again become acute. After issuing triumphant reports to the effect that budget revenues were substantially above plan, the authorities early in 2000 were again encountering a familiar problem: the expected income had not materialized. All the funds which could have been used for investment programmes were being eaten up by the war and by measures aimed at securing victory in the elections. In addition, the Soviet ‘inheritance’ had practically been consumed. Because of the dearth of investment over many years, shortages now began to be felt not just in financial but in material resources, including resources of labour. There was no longer anyone to expand production; skilled workers and competent administrators were lacking. The numerous management training courses that had been opened in Russia during ten years of liberal reforms turned out to be useless to society, since they did not train managers capable of developing production.

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What kept the Russian economy afloat were world oil prices which went up in 1999 and remained high throughout the period of 2000–1. That allowed the Russian government to pretend that things were improving. This unexpected flow of petrodollars fuelled the economy, which kept growing. However, this didn’t resolve any of the structural problrms. On the contrary, capital flight increased and the investment crisis continued while consumption stagnated. The enterprises were encountering shortages of electrical energy, gas and other fuels. By the winter of 2000, not only non-payers, but all customers were being cut off in some regions of Russia, because there simply was no electricity. The conflict in Chechnya bore all the marks of a ‘small’ war. But for the weak Russian economy even such a war was a fatal blow. The more troops were sent to the Caucasus, the more difficult it was to maintain them, the worse they were trained and fed, and the more money was embezzled, the worse the decay of the army became. Though on a smaller scale, the trenches of the Chechnya war saw a repetition of what had already happened once to a Russian army – in 1916, in the trenches of the First World War. And as we know, the year 1916 was logically and inevitably followed by 1917. Russian revolutions and reforms have always begun with lost wars, and in this sense the Chechen campaign of 1999–2000 has been no exception. It has helped set off new shocks in Russia. The semblance of ‘unanimous’ support for the army on the part of the population and the political class is making a profound political crisis inevitable when defeat finally becomes a political fact. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ‘BEAR’ The 1999 election campaign was marked by the exceptional dullness of all the participants. This time, sponsors who earlier had spent heavily on promoting their political allies were far more sparing, since everyone was certain that the deputies would not be granted any real power. From time to time the television showed tedious clips which left it quite unclear what this or that group was calling for. It was not simply that candidates were reluctant to explain their views to the masses. Even where politicians had their own positions, they did their utmost to conceal them. The reasons were perfectly understandable: if the 1999-model ‘political class’ had spoken openly of its ideas and objectives, the population would have been infuriated. In 1999, the ‘party of power’ campaigned beneath two banners. In 1995 the Kremlin had also tried to create two pro-government blocs simultaneously; one of these blocs was to be ‘left wing’, and the other right wing. Nothing came of Ivan Rybkin’s ‘left’ bloc, and the right-wing bloc, after it made its way into the parliament, proved completely unviable. In 1999 it was decided to try forming two right-wing blocs at once. The differences between them were not ideological but cultural; differences, that is, of ‘style’. Functionaries of the older generation united in the ‘Unity’ bloc, known as

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the ‘Bear’, while younger careerists formed the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS). This ‘two-pronged attack’ was also advantageous for the ruling group because it was essential to undermine the positions of Fatherland–All Russia, while avoiding strengthening Yabloko or the KPRF. An aggressive campaign against Fatherland and the KPRF was waged by state television, and especially by journalists close to the SPS. At this very time representatives of the Bear were conducting a ‘positive’ campaign, avoiding entering into polemics with their opponents. Cultural differences were also taken into account. The Bear was supposed to draw voters away from Fatherland, while the SPS, with an image more appealing to the intelligentsia, would attract them away from Yabloko. The television belaboured voters with reports of the growing rating of the Bear, which scarcely campaigned at all in the first two weeks. The reports heightened fears that preparations were under way for extensive vote-rigging in favour of this bloc. The master-work of the Bear’s election propaganda was a cartoon clip in which a bear came to repair a fairy-tale house, in the process throwing out a wolf who had sworn to privatize the dwelling. It is true that, in the Russian folk-tale on which the clip was modelled, the house collapses immediately after the bear moves in . . . If Russia obviously represented the house, the consequences of a victory for the Bear would not be hard to predict. Meanwhile the SPS, which was relatively well funded, ran quite an energetic campaign. The SPS was headed by former Prime Minister Sergey Kirienko, former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former minister Irina Hakamada. These people resembled one another so closely, and were so devoid of any independent political identity, that journalist Oleg Davydov even suggested they be regarded as a single individual, whom he named ‘Kirnemhaka’.1 A photo-montage of this being was published on the pages of Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Against the generally dreary background, the SPS stood out for its energetic campaign waged beneath the slogan ‘Young people are needed!’ Throughout the campaign not a word was said about liberalism, private property or the ‘open society’. Overall, a characteristic feature of the 1999 elections was the reluctance of virtually all the electoral blocs to talk about politics. No-one was willing to reveal their programme to the electors. The party programmes, which to one degree or another reflected the interests of the corrupt political and financial elites, could only have repelled the population. Instead of this, the campaign was dominated by boasting on the part of the politicians and by mutual accusations of corruption. Here Kirnemhaka surpassed all others, since this political personage could find nothing to boast of except its youth. Even the ‘youth’ of these politicians was only relative, since all of them were around 40 years old. The SPS organizers, meanwhile, succeeded in making voters forget what the bloc’s key figures had done in the past. Not only was the programme of the SPS effectively concealed from the population (although Kirienko from time to time waved a thick book before the television cameras), but the bloc’s membership was

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also hidden; the leaders preferred not to reveal the presence of Gaidar and Chubais any sooner than necessary. Through the power of the imagemakers, failed bosses who had been sacked from their posts were thus transformed into ‘young’ radicals fighting for a renewal of the regime. The elections of 1999 did not see a contest of programmes. It is significant that if the programmes of all the parties were more or less right-wing, their electoral rhetoric and propaganda style were invariably leftist, including in the case of the SPS. In essence, all the politicians regarded their propaganda solely as the art of deception, or as a means of concealing their true intentions. Worst of all were the Communists. In the Duma that was elected in 1995, the KPRF received 99 positions on the basis of the electoral lists alone; together with deputies from single-mandate constituencies and allies, the party was able to command as many as 220 votes. This result, however, was not achieved thanks to massive popular support for the party, but resulted from the paradoxes of the Russian electoral legislation. ‘In December 1995 half of the places distributed according to the party lists went to small parties which did not reach the cut-off point, with the result that their mandates were divided up among the four victors’, noted the journal Ekspert. ‘The bonus for the KPRF amounted to around fifty mandates.’ This provided the party with exceptionally favourable political opportunities, which it leadership failed to exploit. The Communists were unable to convert their strategic advantage in the Duma into anything tangible because of their ideological ossification and inability to manoeuvre. Several members of the KPRF even joined Primakov’s ‘pink’ cabinet (something that happens once in a blue moon!). Not only were they unable to safeguard Primakov’s government, but they hastened its end by insisting stubbornly on the impeachment of the president. Out of sheer arrogance, these people rejected both versions of a political agreement between the branches of power (in the autumn of 1998 and the winter of 1999); this agreement could have been the first step toward amending the Constitution in ways that were desirable for the Communists.2 In reality, the Communist leadership’s problem was not ‘ossification’ or ‘arrogance’, but the lack of a political strategy and a reluctance to confront the authorities, combined with a total inability to reform them. On the eve of the elections, Gennady Zyuganov promised pompously to Nezavisimaya Gazeta that his party would gain as many as 40 per cent of the votes, and that, together with its allies, it would win two-thirds of the Duma seats, ‘a so-called constitutional majority’.3 In the event, the KPRF not only failed to strengthen its position in the parliament, but lost ground. The 1999 elections were neither honest nor free. Parties which did not enjoy the blessing of the Kremlin were denied access to the national television channels ORT and RTR, while Luzhkov and the Fatherland–All Russia bloc

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were smeared with mud on a daily basis. This time the Communists were left untouched, but they were not given access to the media. In the course of the post-Soviet years local administrators in Russia had amassed a whole arsenal of methods for election-rigging. Before the opening of the polling stations, ballot boxes already partly full of ballot papers favouring ‘approved’ parties and candidates might be put in place. In this case, it is true, the lists of voters might not coincide with the number of ballot papers in the boxes; the opposition in Moscow complained of this in 1997. A certain number of ballot papers might be thrown in at the last moment; instances of this have often been reported from the Russian provinces. The voter lists have always contained considerable numbers of ‘dead souls’. In the elections for the president of Karachaevo-Cherkessia, the voters included a certain Laypanov, who had died in an air crash a few months earlier. In the autumn of 1999, the Russian security services allege, the same Laypanov had been blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow. It is not impossible that he also voted in the 1999 State Duma elections, when Boris Berezovsky was elected from Karachaevo-Cherkessia. Finally, voting tallies can simply be altered or forged (this practice has been noted in the North Caucasus, in Moscow Province and in remote regions of the Far North). Directly falsifying the results of voting was only one of the means of managing elections in Yeltsin’s Russia, and not the main one. A far more widespread and effective practice was to place pressure on electors. This reached the point of direct threats that electricity and heating would be turned off if the wrong result were recorded. In distant garrisons and small villages, people voted beneath the gaze of their superiors. Enterprise managers explained to workers in ‘closed cities’ who they should vote for in order to be paid their wages. Only the Communists were able to organize proper election scrutineering on the scale of the country as a whole, with the result that they did not, as a rule, have votes stolen from them. The totals for the Kremlin’s favourites, however, could be touched up by drawing on nonvoters or at the expense of small blocs which could not monitor the voting. It should be noted that the central authorities did not themselves juggle election results, leaving this to local administrators. The latter were simply given to understand what result was expected of them, and the means used to achieve it were up to the regional bosses themselves. Any method might be resorted to, from crude falsification to ‘delicate’ media manipulation, or several approaches might be combined. Outright ballot-rigging was obviously more rare in urbanized regions of European Russia than in ‘bear’s dens’ in the north and east, where election observers could often make their way only by helicopter. In addition, local administrators in these regions were more dependent on budget subsidies from the centre, and were correspondingly zealous. To judge from the voting tallies, the population everywhere showed a striking solidarity with its governors. Since the provincial leaderships were split, the election results differed strikingly from region to region. In Samara

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Province 40 per cent of the votes went to the Union of Right-Wing Forces, of which local governor Konstantin Titov was a member. Here rural districts populated mainly by pensioners were especially assiduous in voting for the rightists, who projected themselves as expressing the hopes of the ‘new urban generation’. In Bashkiria, where Murtaza Rakhimov supported the Fatherland–All Russia bloc, as many as 73 per cent of the population voted for this formation, again showing particular zeal in rural districts. In Moscow Province, where incumbent governor Tyazhlov found himself near the bottom in the elections for head of administration that were being held in parallel with the Duma elections, voting tallies disappeared entirely. It was declared that all the tallies that had already been filled out were invalid, and the preparation of new tallies was begun. As the newspaper Moskovskiy Komsomolets noted, something inexplicable had happened in the electoral commission: While representatives of the provincial electoral commission wandered from building to building, closely guarded tallies from the local commisions were spoiled irreparably. Instructions were immediately given that the data from the forms that had been under guard should be transferred on to photocopied sheets. This should not have mattered, but observers were struck by the fact that in the course of the ‘rewriting’, per centages of votes for some candidates vanished somewhere, while the per centages for the candidate Tyazhlov suddenly shot upward. The result was that the incumbent governor gained a solid second place.4 Representatives of the Communist Party who rushed to the scene raised a scandal, and the results of the election were challenged. Such a ‘happy end’, however, was possible only in Moscow Province, with its developed infrastructure and closeness to the press. Moreover, Tyazhlov was part of the opposition to the Kremlin, and no-one therefore would protect him. The more remote the region, the stronger was the position of the ‘Bear’. In the ‘bears’ dens’ of north-eastern Russia the ‘party of the authorities’ took first place, polling more than 28 per cent. The figures for the SPS were also curiously high, in regions where the bloc clearly lacked a mass base. In the west of the country the ‘Bear’ lost a certain amount of weight, but the positions of the SPS were stronger. Ultimately, the KPRF took first place, but the results of the elections were totally unlike the Communist triumph that Zyuganov had promised. The KPRF won 24.2 per cent of the votes, the ‘Bear’ 23.4 per cent, Fatherland–All Russia 12.6 per cent, the SPS 8.7 per cent, Yabloko 6.1 per cent, and the Zhirinovsky Bloc (LDPR) 6 per cent. The remaining blocs did not win places in the Duma. In the West, the election results were greeted with immediate expressions of satisfaction. In Washington these expressions were conspicuously hasty, something that amounted to a propaganda error, since the Kremlin and the US White House had earlier been making a show of conflict. It was unex-

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pectedly revealed that, behind the rhetoric of opposing corruption, and supporting human rights and the national interest of Russia, there lay precisely nothing, on one side or the other. The Western elites welcomed Putin’s victory, and gave him their blessing in the role of Yeltsin’s successor. Despite constant talk in the press of a growing nationalist mood in the country, almost all of the best-known spokespeople for Russian nationalism were defeated in the Duma elections. Deputy speaker Sergey Baburin, known for his enthusiasm for the war in Chechnya, failed to win a seat. So too did Aleksandr Nevzorov, who had participated in the 1991 reprisals against customs officials in the Baltics, and was noted for singing the praises of the special forces troops. Yet another nationalist to meet with defeat was Konstantin Zatulin, who had made his hobby-horse appeals for an uncompromising struggle against Ukraine. Zatulin lost not only to an official KPRF candidate, but also to Komsomol representative Darya Mitina. Of the prominent nationalists who had earlier been elected to the Duma from singlemember constituencies, the only one to keep the support of voters in 1999 was Dmitry Rogozin. The nationalist organizations suffered an equally heavy defeat in the voting for the party lists. Aleksey Podberezkin’s ‘Spiritual Heritage’, which claimed to unite the communist and monarchist traditions, was virtually annihilated, failing to win even a tenth of a percentage point. The big losers included Fatherland–All Russia and Yabloko. The former received significantly fewer votes than its leaders had counted on, while the latter lost votes primarily to the SPS. In 1995, Yabloko had gained from the failure of Yegor Gaidar’s neo-liberal party Russia’s Democratic Choice. The return of the Gaidarites to the Duma under the banner of the SPS brought a sharp fall in Yabloko’s influence. Nevertheless, the greatest losers of all in the 1999 elections were, as expected, the Communists. The paradox was that this time, the KPRF received even more votes than in 1995. Losing all its allies, however, and crushing all the other left parties, the KPRF finished up in isolation. The result was that the Communists, who together with groups close to them had controlled between 205 and 220 seats in the 1995 Duma, this time received no more than 111 seats. The defeat for the Communists was accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of independent deputies who made their way into the Duma; of these deputies, a certain number were on the left. In all, the independents numbered 105. It was a different matter entirely that these people included the oil magnates Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, along with Yury Maslyukov, the former ‘red’ vice-premier in Primakov’s government. A number of non-party people entered parliament on the KPRF list, including Sergey Glazyev, an economist close to Primakov. Immediately after the elections, disagreements broke out in the ranks of Fatherland–All Russia, and the bloc’s Duma deputies split into two groups. The governors from All Russia, sensing who was boss in the country, began drifting steadily on to the side of the Kremlin. Primakov was left with the Fatherland banner, but there were no longer any warriors beneath it.

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THE END OF A TERRIBLE EPOCH The party of the authorities, as usual, celebrated victory. Only one thing overshadowed the celebrations: the Chechnya war, which had been the regime’s main propaganda ace, was now hopelessly lost. While the votes were being counted in Moscow, the airborne troops were being butchered in the mountains near Shatili. On the streets and squares of Grozny lay the corpses of hundreds of soldiers who had died during an assault which lasted many days, and the very fact of which had been hidden from the Russian public. Meanwhile, outside Serzhen-Yurt stood the smoking remains of columns of armoured vehicles. The propaganda machine could no longer cope, and even Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which at the beginning of the conflict had held to an ultra-militarist position, stated that the army was ‘hiding the truth about the fighting in Grozny’.5 The newspaper thus effectively admitted that it had systematically misinformed its readers, since throughout the preceding months, it had conscientiously reprinted any absurd lie furnished to it by the military propagandists. The cup of the editors’ patience had clearly overflowed, however, when the army reported that it had closed off the border between Chechnya and Azerbaijan. A simple glance at the map was enough for people to satisfy themselves that there was no common border between Chechnya and Azerbaijan . . . The Putin government was in a trap. It could neither stop the war, nor win it. Most importantly, it could not conceal its own bankruptcy indefinitely. Its only alternative was to dig its heels in, to ‘tighten the screws’, and to try to make its censorship more watertight, while insisting to an increasingly irritated population that the people loved the authorities to distraction. The generals, who had hoped that the politicians would once again summon them home from Chechnya and accept responsibility for the defeat, had obviously miscalculated. No-one was about to withdraw the troops. The army was doomed to be sacrificed so that electoral manipulation could triumph. Successful ballot-rigging required a propaganda cover. The soldiers were to pay for the false ratings with their blood. Defeat in the war meant that the election victory of the ‘party of the authorities’ became pointless. The regime would have to answer for the lies and crimes, for the blood spilt in Chechnya, for the devastated villages and dead soldiers. It would have to answer not only to the Chechens and to world opinion, but also to its own people. The situation did not provide any bases for optimism. The socio-economic position, like the position on the Chechen front, was deteriorating. There were doubts whether the Kremlin would succeed in maintaining the illusion of prosperity until the summer presidential elections, when, according to the original scenario, Putin would replace Yeltsin. The only factor that inspired any hope was the steady rise since autumn in the world price for Russia’s main export – oil. But how long this rise would last, and at what level it would come to a halt, no-one knew.

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On 30 December 1999 Yeltsin made his last public address in the Kremlin. He awarded the stars of Heroes of Russia to Generals Kazantsev and Shamanov – a fitting reward for the failure of a military operation and mass reprisals against a peaceful population. He praised the officers, and declared that they had conducted themselves irreproachably in Chechnya. The objects of the celebration looked quite gloomy. The following day Yeltsin resigned ahead of time. His parting gift to the people was to spoil their new year’s festivities. Instead of swearing off politics for at least one day in the year, and forgetting about the catastrophe besetting the country, millions of people gathered at their new year’s tables were forced to discuss with trepidation what would come next . . . In his last appearance as president, Yeltsin seemed completely broken. He almost burst into tears, and even asked forgiveness of the people, though not explaining for what precisely. It was as though he were giving a speech at his own funeral. For this man, saying goodbye to power was more terrible than saying goodbye to life. The triumph of the ‘party of the authorities’ in the 1999 elections did not mark the beginning of a new period in the history of post-Soviet Russia. The ‘Putin era’ was merely the next stage in its death agony. For the incompetence, irresponsibility and treachery of the elites, Russian society was doomed to pay in blood. Restoration, which had begun in Russia as farce, was ending as tragedy. THE TRIUMPH OF THE KREMLIN There was nothing unexpected about the official results of the presidential election held on 24 March 2000. Putin won in the first round, as had been envisaged in the Kremlin’s scenario. Nevertheless, the election passed off unfavourably for almost everyone who took part in it. The main thing that was new about the election was not the outcome, but the discussion that surrounded the polling. For the first time since 1993 the rigging of voting figures was discussed openly, on the very night when the results were tallied. In this respect, the 2000 election was not in fact any ‘dirtier’ than the constitutional referendum of 1993 or the presidential election of 1996. At that time, however, none of the opposition politicians had the resolve to declare openly that the results had been falsified. Indeed, when independent experts in 1993 began talking about fraud, the politicians sought to distance themselves from these allegations. In 2000, election night was quite different. Not only were analysts, going direct to air on the channel NTV, speaking shamefacedly of ‘administrative resources’ (they could not bring themselves to utter the word ‘fraud’), but the candidates themselves began relating what had in fact happened, citing facts – the contradictory data on the number of electors, the obvious ‘correcting’ of voting figures as they were received, and so forth. All three ‘serious’ opposition candidates, Zyuganov, Yavlinsky and even Zhirinovsky, spoke of fraud (it is true that

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Zhirinovsky, characteristically, insisted that he held no grudge against the authorities on this account). These revelations should not be put down to the unexpectedly awakened civic courage of the candidates so much as to the success of the popular campaign against the elections, a campaign waged in significant areas of the country. In this situation the politicians, or at least those who claimed to be part of the opposition, could not ignore the pressure coming from below. In essence, all the politicians lost. Putin scored a Pyrrhic victory at best; if we take into account the circumstances in which the election was held, and the number of votes that were simply given to him by the stroke of a pen, it could be said that the officially declared 52 per cent was a complete failure. The effort to turn the election into a referendum on unlimited presidential powers came to nothing. Both to supporters and opponents of the regime it was obvious that popular support for the Kremlin was an order of magnitude lower than had been claimed (it was enough to recall the ‘sociological surveys’ that had been popularized by the state television, and which had put support for the acting president at 60 to 70 per cent). MIRACLE OR FRAUD? The election results announced by the Central Electoral Commission (TsIK) were so dubious that avoiding talk of fraud was impossible. Despite the war in Chechnya, Putin had received especially strong support in the Muslim autonomous regions, including in Chechnya itself, where according to official figures 80 per cent of the population voted (this was despite the fact that no fewer than a third of the republic’s residents had fled from its territory). To judge from the TsIK data, a near-majority (49.4 per cent) of the Chechens were for Putin. Someone remarked bitingly that, to all appearances, the fighters had come down from the mountains, gone to the polling stations, voted for Putin, and then gone back into the mountains to fight against him. As indicated by the TsIK, around 24 million electors voted literally in the last hour, even though the voting stations were physically incapable of fitting in such a mass of people at one time. ‘The only possible explanation for all these electoral miracles is purported massive vote-rigging’, wrote Pavel Felgenhauer. ‘The Communist party had tens of thousands of observers at polling stations last Saturday, and it has announced that Putin did come first with 45 per cent, but did not really get enough votes to win in the first round.’ Nevertheless, Putin’s retinue made haste and declared a victory for its candidate in the first vote. In so doing, it not only made a fatal error, but also turned victory into potential defeat. ‘Putin would most likely have won in the second round of a run-off election. But, if proved, charges that Putin and his supporters rigged a first ballot victory would in effect jeopardize the legitimacy of the new president.’6 In the autumn of 2000, journalists for The Moscow Times published details of how voting figures had been rigged in Dagestan, Saratov, Tatarstan,

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Ingushetia, Bashkiria, Novosibirsk, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, KabardinoBalkaria, Mordovia, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok and Chechnya. Everywhere the picture was the same. Even though gross violations of the law had been noted throughout the country, judges simply refused to accept cases dealing with electoral fraud. The leaders of local KPRF organizations had assembled a huge volume of facts, but received no political support from the leaders of their own Duma fraction, and were left to their own resources. As The Moscow Times noted, however, the Communists, supporters of Yabloko, and independent observers had ‘documented enough falsification in the 26 March presidential election to question the legitimacy of the vote’. As usual, the chief method employed was to add ‘dead souls’ to the lists of voters. As the journalist Yevgenia Borizova noted, at least 1.3 million voters were ‘simply made up and added to the election rolls’.7 The fraud was decentralized, so that, as in 1993 and 1996, directly accusing the Kremlin of having organized the vote-rigging was formally impossible. It was not hard, however, to guess who stood behind the deception. It is possible that all of this immense pressure to skew the vote was brought to bear on secret orders that could be traced back to the Kremlin itself. Certainly the artificial enthusiasm with which so many governors embraced Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov’s Fatherland–All Russia vehicle and then, when Luzhkov’s star was fading, leapt to join Putin’s Unity, suggests a willingness to curry favour with the new boss, whoever he may be. And certainly the enthusiasm with which ORT and RTR television stations smeared Kremlin opponents and glorified candidate Putin suggests a lack of respect in the Kremlin for the spirit of democratic rule.8 After the Moscow Times had published material such as this, the Western press was forced to react. The information gathered by the journalists would arouse a ‘sense of unease’ in Western governments, noted the radio station Deutsche Welle, since Western politicians: despite all the manipulations in the course of the election campaign in Russia, quickly testified that the elections in Russia had been honest. It can be said with almost complete certainty that after Chechnya and the false declarations connected with the sinking of the submarine, the facts pointing to falsification of the election results will not make any particular impression on the West. As before, the West will pretend that Putin is a supporter of reforms.9 If Putin’s victory was at best Pyrrhic, Zyuganov was unable to point to any success at all. The Communist leader’s bankruptcy as a presidential candidate was all too obvious. In 1996 he might have won, had he been prepared to fight. In 2000 he had no chance, from the very beginning. In the event, he received even fewer votes than in the first round of the 1996

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election. This could not be the result of fraud, since the earlier vote was also rigged, on approximately the same scale. The relatively high vote for Kuzbass governor Aman Tuleev was also a sign of crisis for the KPRF. Tuleev himself was not an alternative to Zyuganov, and his result in the Kuzbass was obtained with the help of the familiar ‘administrative resource’. Many electors, however, voted for Tuleev as a mark of dissatisfaction with the politics of the KPRF leadership. Still more catastrophic was the defeat suffered by Yavlinsky. If Zyuganov could lament that he had once again been robbed, the leader of the Yabloko party had no-one to blame but himself. Yavlinsky had clearly been robbed as well, but without the effect of the ‘administrative resource’ his result would still have been dismal. The reason was the fundamentally mistaken strategic course which the leader of the ‘democratic opposition’ had chosen. Throughout the whole election campaign period, Yavlinsky constinued to repeat stubbornly that he could not see any difference between the Communists and the party of the authorities. He, the leader of Yabloko, was the only real democrat in Russia. On the basis of this logic, the vote of 5 per cent which he obtained should have been considered catastrophic both for Yavlinsky and for democracy. In reality, the situation was quite different. Even according to the falsified official data, the Communists and the liberal opposition represented by Yabloko together obtained about 45 per cent of the votes, and this was an indisputable success. It was clear that the KPRF leaders had come to an understanding with the authorities, had been corrupted and had sold out their own supporters. After the massive fraud, the party elite had made no effort to force a review of the election results, ignoring the appeals of its own lower-level organizations and the vast quantity of factual material which they had gathered. It was significant that the evidence of electoral fraud detected by the Communists was published not by the party press, but by the Moscow Times and Novaya Gazeta. Meanwhile, massive numbers of electors voted for The KPRF in order to voice their protest against the system; that is, they voted for the Communists in spite of everything that Zyuganov had said and done in recent years. Yavlinsky was not only insultingly unjust where the mass of Communist voters and KPRF supporters was concerned; he was also wrong in the way he characterized the social essence of the Putin regime. Here, an electionnight speech by Union of Rightist Forces leader Sergey Kirienko is particularly instructive. While acknowledging that there might of course be problems with democracy under Putin, Kirienko stressed that the main thing was that economic policy would be liberal. This was absolutely correct; it was precisely in order to press ahead with liberal economic policies that an authoritarian regime was being introduced in Russia. Authoritarianism, moreover, was exactly suited to such a policy course. On the rhetorical level, economic liberalism signifies the defence of the ‘free market’ from the meddling of bureaucrats. Translated from the language of slogans to the language of real life, this means defending the

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oligarchy from control by society. The references to the experience of the West confirm this historical tendency. The epoch of classic, unrestricted liberalism was a time when democracy in the modern sense of the word did not exist. As soon as universal suffrage was introduced, and the innumerable bans and limitations on political activity were abolished, the ‘freedom’ of the market began to be increasingly restricted. Democracy is necessary so that society can intervene in economic life. Meanwhile, the triumph of neoliberalism in the West in the 1980s and 1990s was everywhere accompanied by an erosion of democracy. If the regime that has become established in Russia has a distinct tendency to cannibalism, this is not because it consists of professional cannibals, but because the economic programme of neo-liberalism is cannibalistic in its social essence. Under the conditions in which the right-wing authoritarian regime in Russia took shape, an effective democratic opposition could only be left-wing. But Yavlinsky himself was no leftist; to the contrary, he had a deadly fear of any thought of ‘corrupting ties’ with the left. As a result, he continually sought mutual understanding with politically impotent rightwing ‘democrats’. Sometimes he even found it. The result was instructive; the representative of the ‘independent right’ Yevgeny Savostyanov withdrew his candidature in favour of Yavlinsky, and to judge from the result, brought him no votes whatever. It is quite possible that such ‘support’ even cost Yavlinsky votes! Another candidate to go down in defeat was ‘Mr Against All of Them’. The voting figures showed that he acted as a sort of electoral understudy to Yavlinsky. Wherever the Yabloko leader gained more votes, ‘Against All of Them’ also polled more strongly. The only difference was that, unlike Yabloko, the movement ‘against all of them’ did not seek to take its distance from the left; on the contrary, it was based to a significant degree on left activists. It might be said that the only real victor in the 2000 election was ‘Comrade Boycott’. According to official figures, around 35 per cent of potential voters simply ignored the election. Unofficial estimates put this at more than 50 per cent. There was nothing new about this, since the results in previous elections had been similar. The only difference was that this time the non-voters, so to speak, acquired a voice. THE FINAL ACT? In the Russian drama, a new act was beginning. Since the financial crash of 1998, the oligarchs had realized that the system they had established could not survive unchanged, but they firmly intended to keep its bases intact. The more acute the social crisis, the fewer funds remained for buying off the middle layers and the workers in the export sector, and the greater the need for outright dictatorship if the existing order were to be retained. The ideologues of the new administration were especially open about their goals. As the opposition-minded Novaya Gazeta observed, all the broadcasts on state

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television came down ultimately to a single summons: ‘To restore the state system at any price apart from doing away with the bases of capitalism, private property and the market.’ This was accompanied by a deluge of nationalist and racist propaganda that could only recall Germany in the early 1930s. It was another matter that the oligarchy ‘for fully understandable reasons’, was ‘calling to power not a Russian Hitler or Mussolini, but a purely Russian Pinochet’.10 Following on the numerous failures of neo-liberalism, and with the Westernizing ideology of the Russian elites in the 1990s thoroughly discredited, pressing ahead on this course demanded a change of rhetoric. Instead of verbiage about a ‘common European home’ and a ‘return to world civilization’, the population were told of patriotism and the ‘rebirth of the state power’. In practice, however, all the regime’s slogans were no more than a cover for the continuing plunder of the country by local oligarchs and transnational companies. The Putin regime showed a complete insensitivity to criticism from Western human rights organizations, and this was the only important difference between Putin’s foreign policy and that of Yeltsin. This steadfast ignoring of international norms for the defence of human rights was the real expression of the Putin-style ‘defence of sovereignty’. Meanwhile Western leaders, after lightly rebuking the Russian leader for his genocide in Chechnya, joined in declaring their support for the new authorities in the Kremlin. The reason was simple: the Russian authorities were continuing to pursue economic policies in the interests of Western capital. Moreover, the Russian authorities had effectively abandoned their claims on the West with regard to the expansion of NATO to the east. Where the foreign debt and international trade were concerned, the Putin government proved to be even more accommodating than the administration that had preceded it, and this complaisance was appreciated by Clinton and Blair. For the Kremlin’s political fixers, speculation on what Putin would do after he had been officially installed as president (instead of merely being acting president) was one of the main methods of election campaign propaganda. Newspapers close to the oligarchs argued that the future national leader would put the oligarchy in its place. Television reports related that numerous ‘brilliant minds’ were preparing a programme for the coming ten years. This programme was drawn up in a very curious fashion. The economic sections were prepared by right-wingers, while a number of ‘leftists’ were called in to devise the social provisions. There was no contradiction here; in Russia, writing programmes is also a form of propaganda. No-one intends to fulfil their social promises anyway, so the promises have to sound convincing. After winning the elections, Putin was finally installed in the Kremlin, but the rest of the country went on living as it had done before. The new leadership’s lack of a real programme was not a trick, and did not reflect a wish to avoid criticism or conceal its intentions. The point was simply that the new bosses had been placed in power in order not to change anything funda-

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mentally. More precisely, the bureaucratic activism of the new administration was strikingly intensive, but completely without content. Putin held meetings at which no important decisions were taken; he travelled about the country, and was shown the latest Potemkin villages; he made speeches consisting of generalities interspersed with criminal slang and threats against Chechen terrorists and political opponents. The president’s trips abroad became so intensive that he simply did not have time for work in his own country. In parallel with the transformation of meaningless shows into the main variety of political activity, and with bureaucratic bustle in the Kremlin and the Moscow White House, behind the scenes a fierce struggle for power and influence was unfolding among the oligarchs and the entourage of the new president. Meanwhile, the situation could not stay unchanged forever. At first, the Putin team functioned on state purchases left behind by the Yeltsin regime. The trouble was that everything had to be paid for, and that Putin had still to confront the long-term consequences of the very decisions that had brought him to power. Putin himself had not taken any of these decisions, at any rate personally. But the war in Chechnya, the early elections and the turning of Orthodox nationalism into a sort of substitute for a state ideology – these were all his work, devised for his sake and under his authority. It was Putin, therefore, who had to answer for their consequences. In departing from the scene, Yeltsin had left his successor with a war that could not be won, an economy which could not be restored to health without a ruthless redivision of property, and a state which could not be governed without resort to lies, provocations and manipulations. An impressive outcome, for an ‘epoch of reforms’. THE GRAPES OF WRATH The war in Chechnya was Putin’s main ace. Even in the familiar sense, it was the main method used in his election campaigning, and it was the sole means found by the regime for consolidating society. An effective consolidation, however, would have required one of two things: either a clear victory, or for the enemy to be at the gates. Neither came to pass. The Russian armed forces did not manage to smash the Chechens, and neither were Basaev and Maskhadov at the gates of the Kremlin. Anti-war feelings were growing increasingly strong in society, and anti-Putin sentiments were gradually taking root in the army, including in the front-line forces. In other words, by the autumn of 2000 it had become clear that the situation was moving out of control, and that anything at all might be expected – from mass desertion to mutinies in military units sent to the front. The Putin team had managed to suppress opposition in the electronic media, but now people had less faith in the television. Yeltsin had been able to turn even massive discontent with the war to his advantage, when the press, which had strengthened its authority by campaigning against the war,

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then set about boosting the president’s popularity rating. Putin risked having everything turn out exactly the opposite. By gagging his opponents, he had deprived himself of any possibility of directing public opinion, in circumstances where propagandist lies would always be shown up. During the years from 1994 to 1997, the workers’ movement was in a profound decline. What point was there in striking, if the enterprises were idle in any case? In 1998 we saw massive protests followed by another decline of the movement when Primakov came to power: people expected change to come from above. After two years of economic recovery, however, the strike movement had begun growing again. Moreover, its effectiveness had increased sharply. Sociological theory states that workers’ protest actions grow in periods when the market conjuncture is improving, and diminish during periods of decline, but that the class struggle reaches its greatest heat at the moment of transition from rise to fall. At such moments the movement still has its ‘attacking’ momentum, while simultaneously meeting with new sources of exasperation. It is one thing when people are used to going unpaid for six months at a time, but it is something quite different when they have got used to being paid on time, and the payments once again stop. In the course of the election campaign it became clear that there could be two oppositions to the Putin regime: a liberal one, resting on an ideology of human rights and the rule of law, and a radical democratic one, raising the banner of social rights and anti-oligarchic revolution. In theory, Yavlinsky should have headed the first and Zyuganov’s KPRF the second. In fact, neither Yavlinsky nor the KPRF was able to cope with such a task, since Russian liberalism was bankrupt and the KPRF had ceased to be a left party. Fear and careerism had totally paralysed the official Communist elite. With the appearance of Putin in the Kremlin it finally became clear to everyone who was capable of thinking that the KPRF, at least as represented by its Zyuganov leadership, was neither a left party nor even an opposition, but simply a client of the bureaucracy, connected intimately with the Kremlin establishment. Zyuganovism was not simply a scarecrow with which to frighten philistines and intellectuals, but an obstacle on the road to building a modern socialist movement in Russia. It was a quite different matter that Zyuganov’s leadership of the Communist Party came into question after the failures of 1999–2000, and that the KPRF’s influence was waning. Paradoxically, however, the erosion of the KPRF will not bring about a weakening of the left in Russian society, but a strengthening. The members of the left will be able to show that under the conditions of right-wing authoritarian rule, they are the most consistent democrats. As an example, one can cite the situation in Saratov, where the Communists have traditionally received about 30 per cent of the votes. In February–March 2000, the number of activists leaving the party became so massive that the local KPRF organization was simply unable to collect the number of signatures it needed in order to nominate its candidate for governor. Eventually, it had to turn to

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a commercial firm that earlier had been paid to collect signatures for the Union of Right-Wing Forces. The money was handed over, but the signatures turned out to be forgeries. As a result, the KPRF candidate missed being on the ballot. The intra-party opposition, however, nominated its own candidate, Igor Karaulov, beneath the banner of the movement ‘For a Renewed Socialism’. In the view of supporters of this movement, the ‘collaborationist and demagogic policies of Gennady Zyuganov’ had ‘turned the Communist opposition into a “pocket party” of the Kremlin’.11 More radical leftists joined forces in the Movement for the Founding of a Workers’ Party (DSRP), headed by the State Duma deputy and trade union leader Oleg Shein. In the 2000 elections, the DSRP called for a vote against all the candidates. Other leftists organized under the banner of Union-2000 called for a boycott. Despite their tactical disagreements, the two groups managed to work closely together. The campaign for a boycott, conducted mainly by members and supporters of these two groups, proved so successful that the state television was forced to devote significant attention to it. Meetings were held in Moscow, Saratov, St Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don. The authorities reacted not just with accusations against those who attended the meetings, but also with direct acts of repression. In Moscow, activists of Union-2000 were several times arrested and fined, and posters were ripped down. In Kirov, a DSRP activist who had pasted up anti-Putin posters was brought to court, and a deputy of the local legislative assemply, a member of the same organization, who came to his defence was threatened with loss of his deputy’s immunity. Despite isolated tactical successes, however, the left groups in Russia remained in a state of profound decline. The paradox was that this occurred in a context marked by a clear shift to the left on the part of the intelligentsia and society as a whole. A particular expression of this tendency was the evolution of the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which gradually moved from a politically correct liberalism to the side of social radicalism. This evolution was accompanied by a growing print-run and an expanding readership. Analogous tendencies to the left could be detected on the Internet as well. In some educational institutions, courses in Marxism were restored in response to student demand. Ultimately, however, the future of the left depended not on the print-run of progressive newspapers, but on the prospects for the labour movement and on the ability of the socialist forces to organize themselves. The left’s crisis of the 1990s still had not been overcome, and this was one of the main reasons why the authorities, despite their scandalous incompetence and mediocrity, retained a certain stability. A TRAP The political spin-doctors who were ‘boosting’ Putin promised the people changes, knowing perfectly well that no changes – or at any rate, no changes

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for the better – would take place. A certain proportion of the population believed this, but for the last time. Betrayed hopes, however, can act as a trigger for mass protests. Putin could neither restore the Soviet order nor bring order to the country, lacking the essential political and economic tools to do so. To imagine that the president could strengthen the state by ‘putting pressure’ on the oligarchs was absurd, since in modern Russia the state and the oligarchs are one and the same. The state apparatus was constructed in such a way as to serve the oligarchy, and the oligarchy has become closely intertwined with the bureaucracy. Consequently, a strengthening of regulation can only result in an intensification of the theft of state funds, to the benefit of the people who are supposed to be regulated. It is not true that under Yeltsin the state in Russia was weak. Yeltsin at times put on a guise of weakness, playing the idiot, and this ploy saved him more than once. The president’s ‘weakness’ merely served as a cover for his complete civic irresponsibility. Whenever the question of power presented itself, whenever the interests of the ruling group needed to be defended, the Kremlin leader proved unexpectedly strong. The deputies of the Supreme Soviet felt the impact of this in 1993. Yeltsin understood perfectly that he would not prevail unless the regional elites supported him. The centralized government had collapsed and, in the regions, local interest groups had coalesced; Yeltsin therefore made continual, demonstrative concessions to the regional elites. But, once again, when the question of power arose, the regional elites (even those that had considered themselves to belong to the opposition) lined up beneath his banner, since they recognized that to confront the Kremlin directly was too dangerous. The Communists felt the effect of this in 1996. The numerous oligarchs feuded with one another, and Yeltsin supported this struggle of each against all, skilfully setting some against others and then acting as the highest judge, the neutral arbiter. He changed his mind, failed to keep his word, but always did this in such a way that the consequences were suffered by others. He was a real ‘prince’, acting according to the letter of Machiavelli. It was only toward the end of Yeltsin’s reign that this method of rule began to break down, since he now came to be surrounded by the presidential ‘family’. At least formally, the ‘prince’ was supposed to be above the fray, but Yeltsin began showing too obvious a preference for the clan headed by his own daughter. This destroyed the whole system of checks and balances that he had painstakingly constructed during eight years in power. Putin had to restore the balance without distabilizing the system. As The Moscow Times noted in the summer of 2000, the government initially raised a scandal over the outrages being committed by the owners of the country, and promised to deal with the situation, if necessary by putting people on trial. But the campaign quickly fizzled out as charges were dropped or thrown out in court. What began as a cavalry charge against business empires

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developed into quiet bargaining between the state and the private sector over taxes. This may suit the Kremlin just fine.12 In July, after assembling the oligarchs in the Kremlin, Putin pronounced the vital words that had been expected of him, and for the sake of which, in essence, he had been made president: there would be no review of the results of privatization. The stability guaranteed by Putin was only relative. He could not reform the economy, but neither could he prevent a settling of accounts between the oligarchs. The clash between the Chubais clan and the Berezovsky group that began almost immediately after the election was the inevitable result of this situation. The division of property was already complete by the autumn of 2000, when a real war began around the aluminium industry. The contending groups seized industrial plants with the help of armed detachments. At the same time, the Kremlin, which had backed Chubais, began removing Berezovsky from access to the levers of power. Berezovsky did not leave this unanswered, organizing a campaign of criticism of the presidential team in the media outlets he controlled. Simultaneously, Berezovsky quit the walls of the State Duma and began organizing a fronde among the governors. The results of this effort were very modest; the governors had no wish to quarrel openly with the Kremlin. On the scale of the country as a whole, however, the falling-out between Putin and Berezovsky changed nothing. What was needed in order to wage a struggle against the oligarchy was not to reinforce the present Russian state, but, on the contrary, to smash it. The coming to power of Putin, like any change of leader in an authoritarian system, meant the decline of some oligarchs and the elevation of others. People with their origins in the party elite had to give way to representatives of the security forces, and Muscovites were forced out in order to provide scope for St Petersburg people close to the new leader. Hence, for example, Roman Abramovich could no longer act as court banker to the Kremlin; his place was taken by Vladimir Kogan, an old Leningrad acquaintance of Putin’s. As compensation Abramovich got a new position. With the help of the Kremlin he becaame the governor of Chukotka. Time spent working in the security services became a trump card for obtaining jobs with the government and influence in the private sector. The power of the oligarchy remained unshaken, but hard times might well have befallen particular oligarchs. ‘Replacing some parasites with others is not a method of treatment’, wrote the well-known journalist Mikhail Krugov: The security forces of their very nature are incapable of ruling society, and as a result they will not be able to solve a single one of its problems. Indeed, they will not set about doing this; the interests of criminal formations never coincide with the interests of the society whose body they parasitize.

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Therefore, they will merely fight one another for spheres of influence and territory on which to feed.13 The oligarches had to be disciplined in order to preserve the oligarchic system. They could continue to control the economy but the political leadership from now on had to belong to the people from the security apparatus. Those who, like Abramovich, understood the new rules could feel safe. Those who didn’t had to be punished. When Berezovsky went to war on the Kremlin, he acted to a considerable degree on his own initiative, but another well-known oligarch, Vladimir Gusinsky, was the victim of grudges borne by his rivals. The owner of the holding company Media-MOST was unexpectedly arrested and sent to Butyrskaya prison. Here he was forced to sign an agreement to sell his shares in the quasi-state concern Gazprom, after which he was let go in peace. Fleeing to Gibraltar, Gusinsky tried to undo what had been done, but it was already too late. The new bosses were fully determined to take over his television channel, not least for the reason that, as well as paying political dividends, this also promised large-scale profits. There is no particular basis for depicting Gusinsky as a fighter for free speech. His media outlets played a decisive role in installing neo-liberal authoritarianism in Russia. But in 1999, Gusinsky had made the error of backing Luzhkov, and for that he paid the price. MR PUTIN AT WORK Despite a total lack of strategy, the bureaucratic team that was established in the Kremlin during 2000 had no intention of sitting with its arms folded. Trying to consolidate their power over the regions, Putin and his associates carried out an administrative reform. This reform, however, like all those undertaken by the Kremlin in this period, was so contradictory, confused and inconsistent that while the old, Yeltsin-era mechanisms of rule were undermined, new ones were not set in place. Putin tried to weaken the influence of the regional elites and at the same time to win their support. The real choice for the authorities was between retaining something like the existing administrative boundaries while abolishing elections for governors (centralism, the French model of the state), or consolidating the administrative territories into twenty or thirty ‘states’ with a degree of economic self-sufficiency and the capacity to develop a fully fledged democratic life (federalism on the model of the USA or India). The Putin administration decided to combine both approaches and, as a result, ended up with all their drawbacks without their advantages. The regional elites were interested in retaining the existing boundaries, however arbitrary, since within these boundaries they were assured of power and of something like sovereignty. In the event, the provinces with their governors remained, but seven federal regions were created, and all the ‘subjects of the federation’ were distributed among them. These regions were

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to be headed by functionaries appointed by Putin, and the elected governors were supposed to be subordinate to these officials. The latter were people personally devoted to the president, but totally inexperienced in administrative matters. If the provinces had been too small, the federal regions were too big. The old province divisions were retained, and with them, the old bureaucratic elites; it was simply that, above them, an extra link had been inserted into the chain of administration. The local bosses, having lost part of their power, became even more irresponsible but no less corrupt. Trying to place the governors under his control, Putin reorganized the Council of the Federation. From then on, the governors would cease to be members of the Council and, as a result, would lose their deputies’ immunity from prosecution. The people who replaced the governors in the senate were not elected representatives of the people, but officials appointed by the provincial bosses. The abolition of the immunity of deputies was a strong move for the Kremlin. From now on, governors could be jailed. Since, however, consistent application of the law would see all or almost all of the governors in jail, the law would obviously have to extend only to politicians disloyal to the president. In October 2000, therefore, Kursk governor Aleksandr Rutskoy was banned from participating in elections. Loyal regional leaders, by contrast, could sleep easy. To the general public, the creation of seven federal regions appeared as an attempt, albeit a muddle-headed one, to strengthen the system of administration. From the point of view of business, however, the situation appeared somewhat different. People who held key positions in the capital were trying to seize the resources of the regions, to squeeze the regional elites, and to redistribute property to their own advantage. ‘Instead of the imposing of presidential control over the situation in the regions’, wrote Novaya Gazeta, ‘we are seeing the imposing of total control over their resources first of all by our oligarchs, and then additionally by foreign financial and political elites, above all by the American transnational companies with whom all our oligarchs are friends’.14 The oligarchs in any case did not have enough investment funds to ‘appropriate’ the Russian provinces on their own, and ‘partnerships’ with transnational capital were therefore indispensable. But if the governors were inclined to retreat in the case of conflicts, the masses were more ready to protest. ‘In that case’, the newspaper predicted, ‘the task of the presidential representative will be to join with the Centre in suppressing any possible popular actions. From the level of “governor-president”, the contradiction will pass over to the harsher form of a confrontation between the regional population and the president.’15 As its economic programme, the Kremlin adopted a plan drawn up by German Gref, another St Petersburg liberal close to Putin and Chubais. This plan foresaw the abolition of the progressive income tax and a general lowering of taxes on private business, the commercialization once and for all of municipal services, health care and education, the raising of the pension age by five years, and a review of the labour legislation so as to finally

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deprive the trade unions of any rights on worksites. The draft for a new Code of Labour Laws brought in by the government in the spring of 2000 proposed a gradual shift from an eight-hour to a twelve-hour working day and the reintroduction of child labour. Russia under Putin, as it entered the twentyfirst century, was preparing to become the first European country to return officially to the nineteenth century on the level of labour relations. The economist Mikhail Bocharov, analysing the Gref plan, wrote: The first conclusion to suggest itself is that this is a document oriented toward the West, a work created for Western readers, for the heads of international financial structures, not for ‘internal consumption’. This is indicated by such delicately phrased provisions as the introduction of private property in land; the abolition of the most diverse types of benefits; the raising of the pension age; the defence of property rights; the lowering of import-export tariffs; the de-monopolization of natural monopolies, above all in the electricity, gas and railway sectors; the lowering of the ‘entry barrier’ to the market; and so forth. The main theme of the project was ‘ensuring a high level of economic freedom’, even if the price that had to be paid for this was the creation of a police state. The only concession to public opinion was some general statements on struggling against ‘illegal’ exports of capital, but the paradox, as Bocharov notes, was that ‘in recent years the export of fixed capital has been perfectly legal’.16 Under Yeltsin, massive privatization was combined with the retention of some form of state control over natural monopolies, but the Gref plan represented a sharp break with this approach. The privatization of the railways would be augmented by the dividing up of the unified energy system, as urged by Anatoly Chubais. Under Chubais’s proposal, the most modern and profitable electrical generating stations would be taken out of the united administrative-technical system and sold to foreign investors, leaving the obsolete and loss-making stations within the framework of the partly state-owned Unified Energy System of Russia (RAO EES). Implementing this approach would have meant subjecting the country to an immediate energy and environmental catastrophe, but foreign shareholders who had put money into RAO EES, and who did not want to be ruined along with the Russian state, unexpectedly came out with criticisms of Chubais. Under pressure from the foreigners, Chubais was forced to retreat, but he did not renounce his plans. Although the Gref plan was the most radical scheme for neo-liberal reform since the time of Yegor Gaidar, within the administration it was subjected to unremitting criticism from the right. One of Putin’s advisers, the economist Andrey Illarionov, saw in the Gref plan something close to a continuation of socialism, and demanded that everything be privatized immediately, making no concessions to common sense. Illarionov even proposed that the

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Russian nuclear arsenal be sold off, since the USA had an interest in its liquidation, and might invest money accordingly. The implementation of the Gref plan was held up not by Illarionov’s criticisms, but by the uncertainty of the bureaucracy. The events of 1993 and the ‘rail war’ of 1998 were still fresh in everyone’s memory. Consequently the government, despite its radical statements, went forward slowly. The regime’s main ace in 1999 and 2000 was not its own successes, but a steady rise in world oil prices, which toward the end of this period had reached US$32–34 per barrel. The result was that the Russian treasury, without having lifted a finger, unexpectedly gained additional revenues, while private business received investment resources. However, in 2001 the oil prices stabilized at US$22–24 per barrel, and at the same time the prospect of a global economic crisis became real. THE MOMENT OF TRUTH August 2000 proved to be a fateful month for the Russian authorities. First there was a terrorist explosion in Pushkin Square. Then came the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk, and finally, on 27 August, the Ostankino television tower caught fire. The explosion on Pushkin Square turned out to be an ordinary case of criminals settling their accounts, but at first the authorities, naturally enough, began searching for a ‘Chechen angle’. For once, paradoxically, this worked against the Kremlin, since it bore witness to the complete failure of the regime’s ‘anti-terrorist operations’. Society had not yet regained its composure after the Moscow explosion when the submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea, taking with it the lives of its 118 crew members. According to the Russian press, the reputation of President Putin sank along with the Kursk. Novaya Gazeta commented: The structure suffered a collapse, a catastrophic one. Nor could it have failed to collapse, since a form of insurance which is absolutely indispensable in politics – an elementary sense of morality (which, we should note, is alone in preventing human beings from turning into beasts) – was simply not present. The structure collapsed, burying beneath itself not only 118 lives – when have such trifles bothered the Kremlin? – but also the country’s prestige. A blow was struck at the individual for whose sake this whole structure was assembled – at President Vladimir Putin.17 Putin’s refusal to travel to the site of the Kursk tragedy, his open unwillingness to interrupt his holiday on the Black Sea, was his first completely independent act as president. Everything else had been prepared and calculated in advance – by Yeltsin and the Kremlin ‘family’ when they named Putin as the heir apparent; by the image-makers, when they sat their client in a fighter plane or a submarine, or put him on skis; by the state functionaries, when they devised all sorts of scenarios for bureaucratic

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reshufflings; or by the General Staff, when, at the beginning of autumn the previous year, they presented Yeltsin with their half-baked plan for a Chechnya campaign. But when an ‘irregular situation’ arose with a submarine, Putin for the first time was forced to take a decision independently. He did the only thing he was capable of, trying to avoid participating in events, to dodge his responsibility before the people. At first, the president did not show himself at all. Then, when the bewilderment among the population and even the bureaucrats themselves began turning into open outrage, Putin interrupted his holiday and made a public appearance – halfscreened behind a crowd of Orthodox hierarchs, in a hall thick with gold leaf. Gazing into the television camera with his dry bureaucrat’s eyes, the president recounted impassively how he had shed tears as he observed the events from his Kremlin chambers. For the people who have been playing political games, a moment of truth has arrived. Once again, we have seen the struggle of a corrupt elite to hold on to power, along with senseless efforts by the military chiefs to save the dignity of their uniform. The struggle has been swathed in patriotic rhetoric, but this rhetoric has suffered the same collapse as ‘democratic’ rhetoric suffered in 1993, and ‘communist’ rhetoric in 1991. Until recently, the Kremlin bosses thought they could carry on lying indefinitely. That the country would endure anything and reconcile itself to anything. They failed to notice that a sort of ‘critical mass’ of lies had been reached. Russians’ astounding tolerance of lying and other foul behaviour has its limits too. This might have been sensed earlier, but our country accepted each new step by the authorities so meekly and amiably that it seemed no limit existed. Even so, the actions of the political and military chiefs in the case of the Kursk were monstrous even against the background of what has gone on in modern Russia. The longer the rescue operation continued, the greater became the feeling that no-one would be saved, and that the authorities had no intention of saving them. It was not just that British and Norwegian help was at first refused. Even when Norwegian teams arrived on the spot, what followed was consultations instead of real action. More than seven hours went by before the foreign rescuers were allowed to get to work. Then, when the hope appeared that it would be possible after all to reach the Kursk and connect the British submarine to it, and when the call had already gone out among the Norwegian divers for volunteers ready to risk their lives by entering the damaged craft, our military officers continued to argue that the hatch was irremediably damaged. Norwegian experts had to disprove this through the Reuters news agency. When the Norwegians had opened the hatch, the Kremlin’s official spokespeople, barely concealing their satisfaction, announced that it would not be possible to use the British rescue equipment. Although the scandal over official lying had by now taken on an international character, an attempt was made to remove journalists from the scene of the accident. There is only one way to explain this behaviour: the

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military chiefs did not need rescued sailors, prepared to speak the truth. They needed dead heroes. This time, however, the authorities were out of luck. Every successive lie was laid bare. By the autumn it was necessary to acknowledge that the official version, to the effect that the vessel had sunk because of a collision with an American or British submarine, was untrue. When the bodies of the victims were being recovered, a letter written by one of the officers was found, testifying to the fact that after the explosions which sent the submarine to the bottom, at least twenty-three men remained alive and could have been saved. The Kursk proved to be the new moral burden which mass consciousness was unable to bear. A turning-point had been reached. Now, the regime no longer evokes discontent, or even protest, but simply revulsion. If the sinking of the Kursk was a tragedy, the fire in the Ostankino television tower a few days later was more like farce. In its own way, what happened with the television tower reflects the overall situation in Russia. The tower was built in 1967, and at the time, exemplified the highest achievements of Soviet technology. Most of the industrial equipment now in use in Russia was produced in the 1960s, a period of very successful development, when the USSR seriously rivalled the USA on the technological plane, and when its growth rates outstripped those of the West. From the 1970s, Soviet growth rates went into an uninterrupted decline, and throughout the 1980s the pace of technological renewal slowed. Then, with the beginning of neo-liberal reforms, investment in replacing worn-out equipment virtually ceased. Lacking funds for modernization, the new owners simply ran machines into the ground, working them until they fell to pieces. Each year, the fall in the value of Russia’s basic productive assets has been around 8 per cent. This trend has not changed even with the economic growth that began in 1999. In the first place, most of the rise in GDP simply reflected the increase in world oil prices and was not in any way linked to increases in production. Second, even where new equipment was put into operation, it was simply hooked up to old equipment which remained in use. This is what happened with the Ostankino television tower, where new electronic apparatus was continually fastened on to more and more decrepit equipment. The result was that a wire simply could not carry the excessive current. As the well-known economist Grigory Hanin has noted, if this situation continues then within ten years ‘almost nothing will remain’ of Russia’s economy.18 As Komsomolskaya Pravda observer Yevgeniya Anisimova put it, ‘We have come too close to the threshold beyond which ungovernable processes begin. Complex technology is about to start going berserk on a massive scale. If, that is, the process has not already begun . . . ’19 Although the problem was quite obvious, the authorities proved totally unprepared. The disaster with the Kursk revealed that the means of saving people at great depths did not exist. The fire at Ostankino showed that the means of extinguishing a blaze at a great height did not exist either. The ‘power’ ministries and the fire

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service, after conferring for many hours, proved incapable of putting out the fire, which died out when the highest television tower in Europe was completely burnt out inside. Numerous pager companies could no longer operate. Residents of Moscow and Moscow Province were left without television. Back-up systems that had been prepared in Soviet times against the possibility of a major war all turned out to be in non-operational condition. The television companies have lost sums equivalent to millions of dollars due to the cancellation of advertising contracts. That is not to speak of the equipment that was destroyed. The destruction by fire of the Ostankino television tower is symbolic. For the bureaucrats in the Kremlin, it was the fire at Ostankino, not the sinking of the submarine Kursk, that was the real catastrophe. From the Soviet past, new Russian authorities inherited not just an army, but also a powerful propaganda system which they strengthened still further, combining the old Soviet ‘brain-washing’ methods with the newest American advertising techniques. Privatizing the mass media did not so much make the media free as it subjected them to the control of a handful of oligarchs, most of them linked to the Kremlin. Putin has become the propaganda symbol of the bureaucracy, the figurehead of the supporters of the police state. The experience had shown, however, that in Russia the president could not be merely a symbol and a figurehead. The difference between Russian image-makers and Western ones lies in the fundamentally different understanding they have of their task and role in society. Image-makers in the West do not determine policies, and do not even formulate political slogans. Their task is to explain to the public the essence of one or another strategy or ideology, and to do it in better, more popular fashion. They are supposed to stress whatever attractive traits the candidate actually possesses, while at the same time trying to divert attention from his or her shortcomings (or to attempt to transform these shortcomings into virtues). Image-makers in the West stay in the background not because they act as ‘grey cardinals’, but because this really is their place; their role is secondary. Throughout the world, virtual pseudo-politics is of course crowding out serious political discussion. In the USA and Western Europe, this is perceived as a sign that democracy is being degraded. In Russia, it is welcomed as evidence that democracy has triumphed. In this country, ‘political technologists’ have become part of the elite, and they try to mould the image of politicians literally out of nothing. The purpose behind Putin’s propaganda campaign has not been to reveal his true identity, but to conceal it, creating an image that is not just at odds with reality, but which, to an important degree is its polar opposite. Putin has been depicted as a ‘strong leader’, a ‘resolute politician’, but he was and remains a middle-ranking bureaucrat, an eternal factotum, completely lacking in his own will and in political initiative. If Putin had a strong will and political ambitions, he would never have become president. In the first place, Yeltsin never tolerated politicians with presidential ambitions anywhere in

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his vicinity; as soon as he noticed that someone had such ambitions, he immediately started grooming some rival figure as a potential heir. Yeltsin’s nose for such things was always acute, like that of an animal. Second, a serious politician, a person of strong will, would have had to answer ‘no’ if Yeltsin in mid-1999 had proposed that he or she become the next president – especially since this proposition would have been made in a fashion humiliating for the candidate and the country. Yeltsin simply entrusted Putin with the job of president, in the way subordinates are entrusted with bureaucratic tasks. Putin’s weakness as a politician has had to be covered over with arguments about his supposed strength; his lack of self-confidence, with a propaganda lie about his steadfastness; and his fear of the future, with a demonstration of courage before the television cameras. It is all very much as in Freud – to compensate for an inferiority complex, the subject practices self-glorification. When the Kremlin team and the oligarchs allied with them replaced Yeltsin with Putin, they thought they had replaced an ageing, increasingly feeble autocrat with a young and energetic leader. At the same time, they wanted this leader to be devoid of initiative in everything that might affect their interests or disturb the existing equilibrium. But you cannot demand that one and the same person show diametrically opposed qualities. In sum, the Russian elite acquired a leader who was not only too weak to accept responsibility for his actions, but who also took all his cues from his entourage. This did not put an end to the struggle for power and property within the ruling layer. On the contrary, the struggle intensified, since the feeling arose that the person who controlled Putin controlled the country. This too proved to be an illusion. In order to rule a country, it is not enough to provide the president with his cue cards and write the scenarios for his television clips. Especially since, as the events of August 2000 showed, nothing in Russia is guaranteed, even the ability of the government to lie to the whole country over the television. The fire in the television tower merely served to complete what the sinking of the Kursk had begun. What the supporters of the Supreme Soviet who laid siege to Ostankino in October 1993 could not achieve, somehow happened spontaneously under Putin. The television fell silent, even the second channel, which in 1993 broadcast from the famous ‘reserve studio’. The physical and moral resources have been exhausted, and the time is coming when accounts will have to be paid. Putin does not have Yeltsin’s skill, or his experience, or his instinct. He tries to solve problems mechanically, while his associates, drunk with bureaucratic intrigues, have forgotten that, as well as virtual reality and the bureaucratic division of spoils, there is also the country. In substituting Putin for Yeltsin, the Russian elite has acquired a leader too weak to become a full-blown dictator, but also too feeble and inexperienced to play at democracy. The elite are unable either to respect civil liberties or to impose a dictatorship. With each day that passes, the impotence of the regime becomes more obvious.

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Russian history teaches us that in our country, rulers are forgiven a great deal. The only thing that is not forgiven in Russia is weakness. Everyone, in his or her own fashion, is discontented – the military, who are made to pay for the disastrous decisions of the politicians; the governors who have demonstrated their loyalty to the Kremlin, but who still harbour grudges; the workers who have been driven to despair by poverty; and the intelligentsia, who feel a threat to their freedom. This discontent has turned into exasperation and bitterness. First Yeltsin, and then Putin and his associates, have created a situation in which a change of regime by democratic methods has proven impossible. Power, however, is not eternal, even in Russia. To the accompaniment of cries about the strengthening of the central authorities, writes Novaya Gazeta, a ‘nutrient medium for an unconstitutional change of regime’ is being created. Sooner or later a knock will come at the president’s door, and the question: ‘Did you order a coup?’20 The hopes of democracy had turned out to be fraudulent. The Yeltsin epoch ended on a note of profound unease. The elites were afraid of being punished, the intelligentsia feared repression and the masses feared hunger. Meanwhile, for hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, the great fraud had already ended in bloodshed. After an unsuccessful battle near the village of Alkhan-Yurt, soldiers of General Shamanov drove people from the cellars where they had hidden themselves. Some of the people were holding 4- or 5-year-old children by the hand. They were lined up and told to run 6 kilometres across the fields to the next village. They were promised that anyone who made the run would remain alive. Then they were mown down by tank fire. The village of Alkhan-Yurt was the home of the pro-Russian Chechen politician Malik Saydullaev. Unlike dozens of other villages that were bombed and shelled in exactly the same fashion, Alkhan-Yurt was considered to be worth a few lines in the Russian press. For anyone whose conscience is not yet atrophied, Alkhan-Yurt symbolizes the Chechnya war just as the village of My Lai symbolizes the war in Vietnam. And does the symbolism apply only to the war in Chechnya? Political commentator Andrey Piontkovsky concluded a report in Novaya Gazeta on the Alkhan-Yurt reprisal with the words: We can no longer doubt that there is a hell on earth. Every day, we create it with our super-accurate Grad and Uragan rocket launchers. If there is a hell up in the sky, then in one of its secluded corners there must surely be a 6-kilometre field torn up by shells. Doomed to run across it forever will be Gaidar and Chubais with their charming wives, Khakamada and her handsome husband with his long hair flying. They will be condemned to this, but not the Hero of Russia, General Shamanov. There is no hell for single-celled animals. The Shamanovs are innocent, for they know not what they do.21

Conclusion

What the Russian authorities are best able to manage is the catastrophes they themselves provoke. This is no longer crisis management, but disaster management, and on the whole, the Russian elites are neither able nor inclined to do anything else. The death agony of the restoration regime may prove to be drawn-out, not so much because the regime is strong as because society is weak. Sooner or later, however, the regime’s approach will result in collapse. A crisis cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Giving birth to catastrophes large and small, the regime is at risk sooner or later of itself becoming their victim. If, despite all the efforts of the authorities, society and the economy nevertheless become stabilized, this will lend a powerful impulse to the development of new forces and interests that will find no place for themselves in the framework of the Yeltsin or post-Yeltsin order. Once again, as at the end of the last century, Russia will find itself at the parting of two unknown roads. We have not matured sufficiently for socialism, but we cannot live under capitalism. We are incapable of catching up with the West, but neither can we allow ourselves to remain in backwardness. We are not ready for democracy, but we do not want dictatorship. Foreign experience is quite inapplicable to us, but without it development is inconceivable. Finally, our society is politicized through and through, but genuine political life is impossible due to the decay of society. This decay is aggravated in turn by the bankruptcy of politics. The political life of modern-day Russia recalls a drama (a tragedy?) without a positive hero. It remains only to hope that this hero will appear in the course of the action. The historic task, ultimately a question of survival, is becoming a search for new forms of social being, without which both politics and economics are quite impossible. This social being cannot be bourgeois, because of the lack of a bourgeoisie, and the perspectives for the development of the economy cannot be capitalist because of the ineffectiveness of the model that has come into being. The ideology of the left can become an important factor in the organizing of society precisely because of its collectivism. In its time, the myth of the 280

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proletariat played a huge role in the formation of the working class. The task of the left in Russia is not only to express already existing interests, but also to help interests to come into being. And at the same time, to establish itself as a political force. The restoration of social being is not the same thing as the triumph of democracy, but it represents the sole chance for democratic development. Collectivism does not always guarantee freedom, but without it there is no way our freedom can be defended. Left-wing radicalism, which ripens naturally in a country of failed capitalism, might not become the ideology of progress either, but without it progress is impossible. Lenin’s book What is to be Done? could have been written only by a socialist from Russia. It would never have entered the head of a European social democrat that it was necessary to establish a party of workers, in practice before the rise of a mass working class, and then to ‘import’ proletarian consciousness into the ranks of the proletariat. This ‘theoretical absurdity’, however, sprang from the absurdity of Russia’s actual history. People need to organize themselves to carry out joint action, or else to reconcile themselves to their fate. But even passivity and submissiveness on the part of the masses will not lead to stability, because the source of the destabilization is the people at the top. We can now see the historical drawbacks of this course. But we can also see the real contradictions of the new period, a striking repetition of the past, a repetition to which triumphant reaction has doomed us. This means that, as in the past, the ideological factor will play a huge role. We need to assimilate the lessons of the Russian Revolution, while trying to avoid repeating its errors and crimes. The alternative takes the form of a mixed economy that includes elements of democratic capitalism, state management and democratic socialism. This model, however, can only arise out of political and social shocks. Furthermore, it is impossible without radical changes to the structures of the state and to the ideology prevailing in society. Ultimately, what is involved is not a rejection of market mechanisms, but a radical rejection of market ideology in the economy; there is a need for quite different reference-points, criteria and tasks of development, for a change of elites and values. The restoration regime has led the country into a dead end from which we can extract ourselves only through a new revolution. Petr Akopov, writing in Nezavisimaya Gazeta in September 1999 said: The crisis of the regime and of the state is nearing its logical culmination, and if Russia has a future, the restoring (and salvation) of the state itself is possible only through a change of elites. Is there any need to spell out what is involved in a decisive, virtually complete renewal of the ruling layer? Revolution, that was so little to our taste in the previous decade, is approaching imperceptibly but unavoidably. The efforts to stop it may be various, the possibilities including ‘black colonels’ from the security forces

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and the organizing of pseudo-popular movements in support of one or another of the people who hunger for power. But the absence of a leader cannot be solved by finding some imitation. Unless some state figure appears in the country with abilities that match the challenges, then instead of politicians answering the demands of the time, the people will do so. The spontaneous force of the population will thrust forward new leaders. Will these leaders be able to protect the country? Even if they cannot, this will scarcely be their fault.1 The spectre that is haunting Russia is not yet the spectre of communism, but that of a re-division of property. The liberal press frightens its readers with the rivers of blood that will supposedly flow if anyone encroaches on the wealth stolen by the oligarchs. Meanwhile, a re-division of property was already beginning in the years from 1998 to 2000, and blood has not ceased to run – on the streets of Moscow and Vyborg, and in the mountains of Chechnya. Despite the lamentations of liberal ideologues, the population of Russia has called more and more decisively for a review of the outcome of the ‘liberal reforms’. ‘Privatization has not struck a chord in the hearts of Russians’, complained a journalist for the right-wing weekly Argumenty i Fakty. ‘According to the results of sociological surveys, 65 per cent of Russians consider that the results of privatization should be reviewed. Only 11 per cent do not want such a review.’2 The more time passes since the ‘liberal reforms’ began, the greater the dissatisfaction with their consequences. The main factor in this case is not the mood of the country’s inhabitants (no-one ever takes them into account anyway), but the objective situation in the economy, the dynamic of its development. Russia’s economic prospects depend on whether revolutionary changes can be made to the existing structures. Of all the countries of Eastern Europe, it is Russia, Ukraine and Moldova that have finished up in the worst position since the ‘overthrow of communism’. Not even the more successfully developing societies, however, have managed to overcome their backwardness and solve the problems characteristic of peripheral capitalism. It was only in Poland that Gross Domestic Product in 1999 exceeded that of 1989, and it is worth remembering that in Poland the decline began long before 1989. Hungary in 1999 was approaching the level of output that existed under the Communist regime, but the number of poor had doubled, and unemployment and homelessness had appeared. In Russia the situation is far worse. Even according to the most optimistic scenario, notes Andrey Kolganov: We are doomed to a dramatic worsening of our backwardness. Whether we have 1 per cent GDP growth per year or perhaps even 3 per cent for a time, this alters nothing in principle. After a certain time, development of this type will exhaust the possibility of exploiting our decrepit and idle productive plant, and our economy will be in a dead end. Will the country

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be able to accumulate the resources needed for modernization if GDP growth is in the range of 1–3 per cent? No, it will not. This is quite obvious. Such growth rates are altogether inadequate to change the financial position of our economy fundamentally. This aim cannot be achieved without a revolutionary change in the nature of our domestic economic policies.3 Even the influx of oil dollars which stimulated economic growth in 2000–1 did not solve the problem. In itself, the rapid rise in oil prices on the world market was no more than a pre-crisis convulsion. The world economy was clearly moving toward recession, and in such circumstances it is impossible to speak of the prospect of steady growth in one country taken in isolation. Russia’s industrial plant had been becoming increasingly worn out; not only did this process fail to come to a halt during the economic growth of 2000–1, it even accelerated, while the shortage of investment became more acute. As the economy grew, capital flight increased in proportion. The drain of funds out of Russia was no less in ‘successful’ 2000 than in ‘pre-crisis’ 1997. The problem of the foreign debt intensified as well; after Russia had recorded good economic results for two years, Western creditors categorically rejected all requests for payments to be postponed. Moreover, the growth recorded between 1999 and 2001 was almost entirely unaccompanied by technological renewal, especially renewal on the basis of achievements of Russian science, which continued to eke out a wretched existence. The combination of growing technological backwardness with the country’s dependency on investments by transnational corporations has brought about a situation in which, as the prominent journalist Anatoly Baranov has noted, the rise in industrial output ‘is being achieved through developing the mass production in our factories of Western goods for our domestic market, allowing the Western firms to lower their overheads’.4 Wide-ranging technological modernization does not occur in the course of this. Economic growth has not solved a single structural problem. In the words of Yury Maslyukov, it has only created ‘an illusion of prosperity’. The massive writing-off of worn-out equipment means that a new fall in output, along with a sharpening of the systemic crisis, will be inevitable in the period 1999 to 2001. Russia, in short, is doomed to live according to the same logic as the other countries on the ‘periphery of world development’.5 Of course, even minor economic growth is bound to have a beneficial impact on society. Not because it will reconcile the population to oligarchic capitalism but, on the contrary, because it will create more favourable conditions for struggle. It is precisely under the conditions of economic growth that the labour movement gains strength, and that its demands, from being defensive in nature, move on to the offensive. People become more conscious of their interests, and start fighting for them. They do not forget their past sufferings and humiliations, but instead of thinking about how to survive, they start thinking about how to change their social position. In this

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sense, economic growth is not only incapable of stabilizing the system but, on the contrary, exposes its structural contradictions and deepens its crisis, as had become fully evident by the summer of 1999. The transition to the market, combined with annexation to the capitalist world system, was begun in the Soviet Union under the slogan of modernization. The result, however, turned out to be the very opposite of what had been promised. As in the nineteenth century, capitalism was being implanted in Russia by the authorities despite the opposition of society and even of a section of the elites. The paradox was that the policy of implanting capitalism ‘from above’ made it impossible, as a matter of principle, to create a democratic capitalism ‘from below’. These elements of democratic capitalism could coexist in certain forms with democratic socialism, but not with the oligarchic-corporatist structures and economic dictatorship of international finance capital. Under the banner of ‘eradicating communism’, Tamas Krausz wrote in the late 1990s, the Yeltsin regime ‘also wipes out the accumulated values of traditional humanistic culture and the green shoots of collectivist, socialist thought, while doing this in the name of an aggressive, antihuman individualism’.6 This is not quite correct. The characteristic feature of post-Soviet Russia has been its combining of irresponsible individualism with authoritarian bureaucratic collectivism. These two elements mutually reinforce one another, making the formation of civil society fundamentally impossible. What the restoration in Russia destroyed was not only and not so much the bureaucratic structures that had characterized Stalinism, as the elements of socialism that had existed in Soviet society. Naturally enough, the restoration was accompanied by the de-modernization of the country. Yet another paradox that appeared in the course of Yeltsin’s rule was that Soviet ‘communism’, despite all its authoritarianism and hostility to Western values (and perhaps precisely because of this), represents the most effective ideology of modernization that Russian history has had to offer. We experienced neither feudalism, with its traditions of the ‘liberties’ of estates and of personal responsibility, nor the Reformation with its famous Protestant ethic. We have never had a Confucian tradition, as in the East. Communist ideology, with its cult of duty and discipline, and with its fatalistic belief in the ‘shining future’, became a sort of substitute for the Protestant ethic. Protestantism implanted a faith in predestination, while Soviet ideology proclaimed the inevitability of the victory of communism. This similarity between Protestantism and orthodox Marxism was noted by G.V. Plekhanov, but it was the Stalinist system that transformed ‘MarxismLeninism’ into a secular religion which reproduced in striking fashion the moral dogmas of sixteenth-century Calvinism. If the turn to capitalism in China rested on a combination of Confucian tradition with communist morality, in Russia the ‘victory over communism’ simultaneously undermined the minimal moral and psychological conditions without which a market economy is quite impossible. There are other, more fundamental

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reasons behind the failure of Russia and the success of China. A centrist and to some degree, left critique of the liberal reforms during the 1990s constantly urged a ‘Chinese model’ as an alternative to privatization and the ‘free market’. And indeed, while Russia spent the 1990s in uninterrupted decline, China prospered. Of all the countries that had ‘communist’ regimes in the late 1980s, it was ‘red’ China that succeeded not only on the level of economic growth and technological modernization, but also on that of implanting private entrepreneurship. Similar results were achieved in ‘communist’ Vietnam. The problem, however, was that the ‘Chinese model’ represented not only a set of decisions in the field of administration and property, decisions which in principle were quite applicable to Russia, but also a definite strategy for integration into the capitalist world economy. Here we come upon fundamental differences between the two countries. China in the early 1980s, when the reforms began there in earnest, had limited natural resources, an industrial plant with a modest technical level, and a huge population. It was this workforce that attracted foreign capital. Employing it effectively required that industry be developed. Although the technological level of Chinese industry has never become particularly high, it has risen compared to what it was in the late 1970s. The levels of education and general well-being have risen along with it. Although China’s economic growth has created certain problems for the centres of world capitalism, at least during the 1980s and 1990s it did not pose a strategic challenge to them. With its industries at a middling technological level, China, despite all its successes, has been unable to change radically the relationship of forces in the world system. Meanwhile, despite all the problems, China’s integration into the world economy has been accompanied by an increase in industrial capacity, by real modernization and by improved living standards. In this case, the priorities of international capital have coincided to a significant degree with China’s national interests. In Russia everything has been different. While possessing a vast territory and huge natural resources, Russia has quite a small population for its size. The workforce at the end of the Soviet epoch was highly educated but not very disciplined, and was ‘spoiled’ by social welfare. The country’s technological capacity was very high, though it was used in a thoroughly inefficient manner. Moreover, the sectors that were most developed technologically were linked to the military-industrial complex, and so ‘duplicated’ the same sectors (aircraft, machine-building, etc.) in the countries of the West. As a result, Russia was of real interest to the ‘centres’ of the capitalist world system only as a supplier of natural resources and as a market for ‘first world’ products. In any other capacity, Russia was not only unnecessary to the West, but even dangerous. Russia’s ‘excess’ resources could either be swallowed by the countries of the ‘centre’, or else used for the economic, political and military expansion of Russia itself. In other words, within the framework of the capitalist ‘rules of the game’ our country could either be a superpower or a semi-colony;

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there was no third option. Of course, the logic of capitalism is not the only logic possible, but so quickly did the Russian elites integrate themselves into the process of globalization and set about acting in line with its requirements, that they had no alternative. A reform that increased the efficiency of Russian industry, and allowed the technological capacity accumulated in Soviet times to be used successfully for market ends, would have led to a conflict with the West no less acute than in the time of the Cold War. A permanent ‘trade war’ would have been completely inevitable and, in certain situations, local wars could have broken out as well. The people of Russia and the country’s elites were not prepared for such a conflict either politicially or psychologically. In the situation that had arisen, the course chosen by the Russian elites – a course that involved wiping out their own industry, impoverishing the population (lowering the price of labour power), destroying science and turning the national economy into a semi-colonial appendage – represented a quite logical and in its own way ‘correct’ answer to the challenge of globalization. In any case, the Russian elites simply had no other way of painlessly inserting themselves into ‘the open society’ and ‘world civilization’. It was another matter that the West, when it integrated Russia into the capitalist world system as a semi-colony, might have created the preconditions for new global shocks in the future. The triumph over ‘Russian communism’ may well turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory for Western capitalism. As a result of what happened in the country during the 1990s, noted Tamas Krausz, Russia after ‘not lending itself to integration’ was liable once again to become a ‘weak link’, the ‘invalid’ of the world capitalist system at the end of the twentieth century just as it had been when the century began.7 Russia has to experiment or die. It not only has to defend its autonomy in relation to the capitalist world system but, having transformed itself, it needs also to change the world economic order. The outstanding Soviet mathematician Academician Nikita Moiseev stated near the end of his life that almost everything that had been achieved in the field of science during the years of Soviet power had been destroyed or undermined in the period of ‘liberal reforms’. The country’s modernization, paid for with the blood of millions of victims of the Stalinist terror, had in practice been turned back. The damage done to science by an incompetent leadership of Soviet party bureaucrats was not in the same league with that for which the people who for some strange reason are called democrats are responsible. The Bolsheviks managed to keep the scientific schools intact even in the most terrible years of the Patriotic War, and to train masses of young people to whom the baton of the knowledge and culture of scientific and engineering work was passed on. Thanks to this, by the early 1960s our country had come to occupy a solid second place in the field of science and education.8

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By 1999–2000 the picture was the exact opposite. The scientific schools are rapidly falling apart; the government is making no serious efforts to create a layer of young people able and anxious to take the baton in the relay-race of knowledge and culture. If this course of events continues, Russia will never be able to restore what has been lost, and will have to content itself with the role of a store-room of the mineral resources needed by the countries of the golden billion; that is, it will finish up at the gateway of our common planetary home. Only with an active, deliberate state policy of restoring the country’s intellectual capacity can Russia hope for a prosperous future.9 The difference with the early twentieth century is that Russia, for all its backwardness, was then a growing country with a young population. Russia reached the start of the twenty-first century with an ageing and demoralized population, and with an economy experiencing a profound and lasting decline. All this gives cause to doubt the prospects for a new revolutionary upturn. At the same time, the experience of the twentieth century could not fail to leave its trace on the country, whose past sacrifices and achievements could not be completely without meaning. As a society, we are no longer so young, but we are more experienced and better educated. Anatoly Baranov complained in Pravda-5 that despite their appalling privations, ‘poor people in our country are not revolutionary’. In large cities, the ideas of the left are becoming increasingly popular, but the bulk of the population dream of improving their situation ‘without any fundamental rupture, without risk’.10 From Baranov’s point of view, this situation is tragic. According to Roy Medvedev, on the other hand, such a state of affairs is ‘not a cause for despair, but a basis for hope’.11 No-one disputes that with other factors equal, peaceful reforms (from the point of view of the interests of the ordinary citizen) are preferable to revolutionary upheavals, especially if these latter transformations are accompanied by violence. The trouble is that history is not made to order, and there is little about it that is comfortable, particularly in the case of the history of Russia. The tragedy of the situation noted by Baranov is that the majority of people are still counting on revolutionary changes or moderate reforms in a situation where there is absolutely no chance that any of this will occur. Baranov, however, wrote above all of the poorest layers of the population, and these strata have never been the main bearers of the revolutionary impulse. Since August 1998, there has been more reason to expect a serious radicalization from the deceived and plundered middle layers, from the technological elite, and from skilled workers in the most competitive enterprises, above all those in the export sector. The well-known liberal sociologist Yury Levada reassures his readers by arguing that Russian society is too weakly organized to be capable of a revolution. The discontent is almost universal, and, as Levada observes, even

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efforts to unite the people around the authorities during the second Chechnya war met with defeat. As before, however, the population is letting itself be manipulated. Neither social upheavals, nor the passions and intrigues that have surrounded politics in the past few years have led to the formation of firm political demarcations, independent of the power hierarchy of the elite structures and reflecting the sovereignty of the individual in relation to the authorities. In itself, this is hardly an achievement, but, to Levada, viewing the situation from a different angle, it is obvious that the passive tolerance of the masses is incomparably better than revolution, and that the demonstrations, strikes and even uprisings that occur from time to time merely serve to allow society to let off steam. ‘No social protest can be effective unless it is articulated, unless it rests on a particular structure of developed interests, groups and institutions. Until this situation undergoes a fundamental change, social protest will strengthen the resources of social patience.’12 In this sense, the economic growth of 1999–2001, however feeble it might have been, played a definite positive role, accelerating the processes through which society was becoming structured. The strengthening of the trade union movement from below, as observed in Russia from the final years of the last century, showed that the masses were coming to understand their interests better, and were acquiring certain habits of self-organization. These processes affected only a minority of the population, but history shows that the revolutionary potential that arises on such a basis can be unexpectedly powerful, especially if the conscious protest of a minority comes to resonate with the elemental discontent of the majority. Russia can tear itself loose from its condition of backwardness only if it breaks with the logic of peripheral capitalism – and in the present circumstances, there can be no other capitalism in the country. The investment crisis, together with the crisis of the state system and of culture, can only be overcome on the basis of a new mobilizational model. The danger is that, until now, the mobilizational model in Russia has been associated with the Stalinist experience, which to our enormous relief cannot be repeated under modern conditions. Nevertheless, a new variant of the mobilizational model has to be found, or else our country will vegetate for decades on the periphery of the world system. The task, once we have rejected imitation models of ‘catch-up development’, will be to invest in precisely those technologies and structures that will come to occupy a leading position in the twenty-first century. The economist Aleksandr Buzgalin calls this ‘outstripping development’. The mobilization of financial resources has to set in operation the main potential – that is, the human one. Instead of economizing on science, it is essential to turn it into the leading sector of the economy. The new economic model

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requires the expropriation of the oligarchs combined with the reform of the state and a sharp increase in vertical mobility for the lower strata through access to education, health care and prestigious jobs. It is perfectly possible to combine the restoring of a powerful state sector, oriented toward advanced technologies, with the growth of free entrepreneurship ‘from below’. Finally, the orientation toward the West has to give way to a strengthening of economic, political and cultural links with the majority of humanity – the Third World. The problem is that any model of economic development rests ultimately on the question of the social nature of the state. What class, and what social groups, will become the bulwarks of the regime? In whose interests will policies be implemented, and whose hands will guide the process? How will democracy – in the original sense of the word, the power of the people – be guaranteed? The main lesson we need to draw from the events of the 1990s is quite simple: there is no capitalist solution to Russia’s problems. This does not yet mean, however, that any successful attempt at overcoming the crisis will lead unfailingly to socialism (especially since socialism in general is possible only as a new world system replacing the present one). This simply means that the economic and social policies required to lead the country out of crisis must be subject to different principles, different social interests and a different logic than under capitalism. Whatever might be said about a ‘mixed economy’, ‘regulation’ and the ‘priority of national interests’, none of this will yield anything until the core of the economy becomes the socialized sector, operating according to its own non-capitalist rules. In exactly the same way, an effective economic policy is impossible in Russia unless it is based on expropriation of the oligarchy and on the return to the people of the property stolen from them. The tragedy of Russia is continuing, turning at times into vaudeville and at other times into bloody farce. Viktor Chernomyrdin was perhaps right when he said, ‘When it’s all over, the survivors will laugh.’13 Nevertheless, the historical cycle of the Russian Revolution is not yet complete. The history of Western Europe teaches us that restorations were followed by ‘glorious revolutions’, and sometimes, by a whole series of revolutionary shocks. If the hopes that Russia will be able to break out of its catastrophic state in a single powerful burst seem naive, in the longer-term perspective there are still grounds for optimism. On this level, the restoration carried out by Yeltsin in Russia not only failed to end revolutions for good, but created the preconditions for a new revolutionary cycle.

Notes and References

INTRODUCTION 1. O.N. Smolin, Obrazovanie, Revolyutsiya, Zakon (Education, Revolution, Law), Moscow, 1999, p. 5. Another book that uses the term ‘revolution’ in relation to the events in Russia is D. Kotz with F. Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System, London and New York, 1997. It should be noted, however, that Kotz and Weir use the Gramscian term ‘revolution from above’, presupposing that the possibility exists of uniting revolutionary methods with a reactionary content. 2. See N. Malyshev, Rossiya: ot nastoyashchego k budushchemu (Russia: From the Present to the Future), Moscow, 1994, p. 55; O.N. Smolin, op. cit., pp. 95–8; and I.A. Gundarov, Paradoksy rossiyskikh reform (Paradoxes of the Russian Reforms), Moscow, 1997, p. 18. 3. In his time, the outstanding Russian economist and statistician V. Kondratyev discovered ‘long waves’ in the development of capitalism. It could be said that political processes are also subject to ‘long waves’. It is indisputable that the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution of the twentieth century all underwent such cycles. Until now, no-one has researched this on the theoretical level. 4. Izvestiya, 16 Oct. 1999, p. 2. 5. I. Zasursky, Mass-media vtoroy respubliki (The Mass Media of the Second Republic), Moscow, 1999, p. 81. 6. G. Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, New York, 1998, p. 155. 7. Konets el’tsinshchini (The End of the Yeltsin Era), edited by T. Krausz, Budapest, 1999, p. 40.

CHAPTER 1 1. See also: G. Chiesa, Proshchaiy, Rossiya!, Moscow, 1997. 2. J.R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989–1999, London, 1998, p. 183. 3. Chto takoe SSSR i kuda on idet? (Betrayed Revolution) Paris, 1988, p. 127. 4. V. Pastukhov, Tri vremeni Rossii, Moscow, 1994, p. 155. 5. Discussion of the possibility of re-nationalization has appeared on the pages of such politically diverse publications as the left-centrist Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the centrist Vek and Ekspert, and the right-wing Segodnya and Kommersant. At a forum of provincial entrepreneurs in Yekaterinburg in May 1995, Finance Minister Aleksandr Livshits received an enthusiastic response when he declared that Russia needed a ‘law on nationalization’ (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 21 May 1995). 6. See Moskovskie Novosti, 1989, no. 41. 290

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7. The Bolshevik historian M. Pokrovskiy considered that serfdom in Russia reflected the power of merchant capital. What later Soviet historians interpreted as the transition from the feudal-landholder system to bourgeois rule, Pokrovskiy characterized as the struggle of merchant capital with industrial capital (see M. Pokrovskiy, Ocherki po istorii revolyutsionnogo dvizheniya v Rossii XIX i XX veka, Moscow, 1924). If one regards Russia simply as part of the world system, this approach might seem valid. But the point is that the life and development of a society can never be reduced to this alone. Even if a society is part of the world system, it remains a distinct organism with its own internal logic, structures and relationships. 8. Izvestiya, 21 Sept. 1994. 9. Glasnost, 11 Oct. 1996. 10. During the 1995 election campaign there was probably not a single commentator who failed to remark ironically on the mass endorsement, by literally all parties and blocs, of generals and show-business personalities. While some observers chuckled at this, others ruminated on the growing influence of the army. It would have been far more appropriate, however, for them to have noted the declining faith in politicians. 11. Pro et Contra, Autumn 1996, 1, no. 1, pp. 9, 11. 12. Ibid., p. 111. 13. See Polis, 1996, no. 4. 14. Itogi, 3 Dec. 1996, p. 24. 15. R. Medvedev, ‘Zdorov’e i Vlast’ v Rossii’, ‘Noviy klass rossiyskogo obshchestva, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: tri goda v novoy Rossii’, chapters from his Puti Rossii, Moscow, 1997, p. 44. 16. Pastukhov, op. cit., p. 158. 17. Vek, 1995, no. 42. 18. Rossiia v kontse XX veka: itogi i perspektivi modernizatsii, Moscow, 1999, p. 176. 19. V. Pelevin, Generation P, Moscow, 1999, p. 31. 20. Pravda-5, 1997, no. 47. 21. Vek, 1997, no. 15. 22. Ibid. 23. Vek, 1995, no. 39. 24. Manifest vozrozhdeniya Rossii, Mezhdunarodnyy Kongress Russkikh Obshchin, Moscow, 1995, p. 8. 25. Ibid., p. 9. 26. Ibid., p. 10. 27. Ibid., p. 15. 28. Ibid., p. 59. 29. Opasnost’ i bezopasnost’, Sept. 1995, p. 15. 30. Nikto, krome nas s vami!, Kongress Russkikh Obshchin, Moscow, p. 15. 31. Interfaks-AiF, 1995, no. 19. 32. Ibid., p. 3. 33. Opasnost’ i bezopasnost’, Sept. 1995, p. 15. 34. Ibid. 35. For the alternative models of development in ‘post-Yeltsin Russia’, see the articles by Dmitry L’vov and Aleksandr Galkin both in Svobodnaya Mysl’, 1998, no. 6.

CHAPTER 2 1. Svobodnaya mysl’, 1999, no. 7, p. 42. 2. V. Pastukhov, Tri vremeni Rossii, Moscow, 1994, p. 127. 3. Yigor Gaidar’s grandfather was a writer who praised Stalinist ‘ideals’; Burbulis worked in the ideological department of the Sverdlovsk party committee in the 1980s. 4. V. Sogrin, Politicheskaya istoriya sovremennoy Rossii, Moscow, 1994, p. 131.

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5. Sverdlov was the Bolshevik leader who took the decision to execute the royal family in 1918. Mikhail Shatrov’s play, The Bolsheviks, was a tragedy portraying Sverdlov as a hero. 6. T. Cherednichenko, Tipologiya sovetskoy massovoy kul’tury: Mezhdu ‘Brezhnevym’ i ‘Pugachevoy’, Moscow, 1994, pp. 20–1. 7. Svobodnaya mysl’, 1999, no. 7, p. 43. 8. Praha was one of the districts of Warsaw stormed by Russian troops during the suppression of the Polish national rebellion. 9. Griboedov was a great nineteenth-century dramatist. 10. Trudovye otnosheniya i kollektivnye deystviya v sovremennoy Rossii, edited by A.M. Katsva et al., Moscow, 1999, p. 68. 11. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 3, p. 23.

CHAPTER 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

B.N. El’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu, Moscow, 1990, p. 30. Ibid., pp. 26, 23. Ibid., p. 24. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 3 April 1997. ‘Figury i litsa’, Appendix to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 1997, no. 14, p. 1. Ibid. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 3 April 1997. The State Committee for Extraordinary Situations. This was a junta formed by a group of conservative Soviet bureaucrats in August 1991 with the aim of saving the Soviet Union. This was regarded as an attempted coup d’etat. The term ‘second republic’ was put in circulation independently by two writers as different from one another as Ivan Zasursky and Aleksandr Tarasov. See A. Tarasov, Provokatsiya: Postskriptum iz 1994-go, Moscow, 1994. Tarasov, op. cit., p. 60. E.T. Gayidar, Gosudarstvo i evolyutsiya, Moscow, 1995, pp. 153–4. V. Pelevin, Generation P, Moscow, 1999, pp. 17–18. O.N. Smolin, Obrazovanie, Revolyutsiya, Zakon (Education, Revolution, Law), Moscow, 1999, p. 156. Al’ternativy, 1992, no. 2, pp. 55–6. Vedomosti, 21 Oct. 1999, p. 1. Ibid. The Moscow Times, 1 Sept. 1999.

CHAPTER 4 1. 2. 3. 4.

V. Pastukhov, Tri vremeni Rossi, Moscow, 1994, p. 143. Konets el’tsinshchini (The End of the Yeltsin Era), Budapest, 1999, pp. 154, 155. Vlast’, 17 Aug. 1999, no. 32, p. 29. The most influential and fully formed interest groups in the years from 1994 to 1999 included the financial-comprador bourgeoisie, the military-industrial complex, the agrarian bureaucracy and the fuel and energy complex. To these can be added the information-propaganda complex (see below), regional interest groups (those of Moscow, St Petersburg, Tatarstan and others), and also specific clienteles that had formed around political parties. 5. Svobodnaya mysl’, 1998, no. 7, p. 31. 6. I. Zasursky, Mass-media vtoroy respubliki (The Mass Media of the Second Republic), Moscow, 1999, pp. 92–3. 7. The Moscow Times, 23 Sept. 1999, p. 9.

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8. International Socialism, Spring 2000, no. 86, pp. 51–2. For accounts of the first Chechen war in English, see C. Gall and T. de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War, London, 1997; A. Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, New Haven and London, 1999. 9. Pravda, 23 June 1995. 10. Zasursky, op. cit., p. 156. On the fate of Nezavisimaya Gazeta and other publications, see ibid., pp. 71–9. 11. Ibid., p. 148. 12. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 30 Sept. 1999. 13. V. Pelevin, Generation P, Moscow, 1999, p. 139. 14. Soobshchenie, 1999, no. 2, p. 15. 15. Pelevin, op. cit., p. 119. 16. Zasursky, op. cit., pp. 118–19. 17. Soobshchenie, 1999, no. 2, p. 15. 18. Pelevin, op. cit., p. 105. 19. Ibid., pp. 112, 113. 20. O. Smolin, Obrazovanie, Revolyutsiya, Zakon (Education, Revolution, Law), Moscow, 1999, p. 173. 21. Zasursky, op. cit., p. 109. 22. Cited in ibid., p. 100. 23. Moskovskie Novosti, 16 June 1996. 24. Kontinent, March 1999, no. 12, p. 4. 25. See M. Kramer, ‘Rescuing Boris’, Time International, 15 July 1996. 26. Trudovye otnosheniya I kollektivnye deystviya v sovremennoy Rossii, edited by A.M. Katsva et al., Moscow, 1999, p. 254. 27. Ibid., p. 257. 28. Zasursky, op. cit., pp. 106, 108. 29. Ibid., p. 111.

CHAPTER 5 1. Ekspert, 25 Nov. 1996, no. 45, p. 24. 2. G. Ya. Rakitskaya, Na puti k sobstvennoy ideologii, Moscow, 1993, p. 11. The authors of a work of left-wing sociology, published in Britain at about the same time, argued in very similar fashion. They considered that once privatization in Russia had gone through, a ‘natural’ basis would finally exist for the labour movement, and that this new situation would be reflected in a heightening of workers’ struggle ‘within the enterprises’. While proceeding from this premise, the authors, who were not supporters of blanket privatization, simultaneously insisted that privatization should not be seen either as a victory or as a defeat for workers. See S. Clarke, P. Fairbrother, M. Burawoy and P. Krotov, What About the Workers? Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia, London, 1993, p. 241. 3. ‘Na puti k sotsial’nomu partnerstvu’, edited by L.A. Gordon, special appendix to the bulletin Konstitutsionnyy Vestnik, Moscow, 1993, pp. 76–8. 4. Sotsial’naya i sotsial’no-politicheskaya situatsiya v Rossii: sostoyanie i prognoz (1992), edited by G.V. Osipova, Moscow, 1993, p. 43. 5. Vek, 1997, no. 13. 6. Glasnost, 11 Oct. 1996. 7. Voprosy Ekonomiki, 1994, no. 5, p. 74. 8. D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization, London, 1986, p. 260. 9. Voprosy Ekonomiki, 1994, no. 5, p. 74. 10. Rabochaya Politika, 1996, no. 4, pp. 8, 9. 11. Klub ‘Realisty’. Informatsionno-analiticheskiy byulleten’. Problemy regulirovaniya rynka truda. Zony sotsial’nogo bedstviya, Moscow, 1995, p. 97.

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12. Ibid., p. 98. 13. Voprosy Ekonomiki, 1994, no. 5, p. 74. See also S.V. Pronin, Usloviya formirovaniya rossiyskogo rabochego i profsoyuznogo dvizheniya 90-kh godov i ego zadachi. Moscow, Doklady i soobshcheniya ISPRAN, 1994. 14. The authors of the book What About the Workers? also note that instead of making the trade unions independent at the level of the enterprises, the collapse of the CPSU in 1991 deprived them of their earlier ability to manoeuvre between party and economic organs, so making them more dependent on management (Clarke et al., op. cit., p. 191). 15. Solidarnost, 1994, no. 16, p. 13. 16. See Sotsialisticheskiy Donbass, 8 Aug. 1989. For a survey of instances of participation by managements in miners’ actions, see the following article: T. Friedgutl and L. Siegelbaum, ‘Perestroika from Below: The Soviet Miners’ Strike and its Aftermath’, New Left Review, May/June 1990, no. 181, p. 13. 17. Vesti FNPR, 1994, no. 7, p. 34. 18. Profsoyuznoe Obozrenie, 1994, no. 9, p. 13. 19. Profsoyuznoe Obozrenie, 1994, no. 7, p. 1. 20. See S. Pronin and B. Stolpovskiy, Problemy khozyaystvennoy demokratii: Profsoyuzy i reformy v Rossii (90-e gody), Moscow, 1994, pp. 82–101, 111–30, 139–43; Sotsial’nye konflikty v sovremennom obshchestve, Moscow, 1995, pp. 66–109, 122–30. 21. Profsoyuznoe Obozrenie, 1994, no. 7, p. 6. 22. An analysis of mass protest actions during the Soviet period, conducted by V. Ponomarev, notes similar tendencies; a large proportion of the social disturbances that were recorded and studied took place during the ‘autumn period’ (from midAugust to mid-November) or the ‘spring period’ (from March to the end of June). The same trend emerges if we focus not on the number of protest actions but on the number of participants (V. Ponomarev, Obshchestvennye volneniya v SSSR: ot XX S’ezda KPSS do smerti Brezhneva, Moscow, 1990). 23. A.M. Katsva and S.V. Patrushev, ‘Trudovye konflikty i zabastovki (oktyabr’ 1993–sentyabr’ 1994)’, in Rabochee dvizhenie i politika reform, no. 5–6; Sotsial’nye problemy, trudovye konflikty i rabochie organizatsii v SNG, Moscow, 1994, p. 20. 24. See Rabochee dvizhenie i politika reform, no. 5–6, p. 23. 25. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1 Sept. 1994. 26. See Pronin and Stolpovskiy, op. cit., p. 132. 27. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 March 1996. 28. Vremya-MN, 11 Oct. 1999, p. 3. 29. Rabochaya politika, 1996, no. 5, p. 16. 30. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 17 May 1997. 31. Moment Istiny, 1996, no. 2, p. 3. 32. Ibid., p. 1. 33. Trudovye otnosheniya i kollektivnye derystviya v sovremennory Rossii, edited by A.M. Katsva et al., Moscow, 1999, p. 262. 34. Vedomosti, 11 Oct. 1999, p. B6. 35. Vremya-MN, 11 Oct. 1999, p. 3. 36. Segodnya, 15 Oct. 1999. 37. Vedomosti, 21 Oct. 1999.

CHAPTER 6 1. Cities of Europe, Moscow, 1990, p. 371. 2. ‘Manifest dvizheniya druzhin po okhrane prirody’, published in a special issue of the bulletin Okhrana Dikoy Prirody, Dec. 1996, no. 11, p. 13. 3. A. Isaev and A. Shubin, Demokraticheskiy sotsializm – budushchee Rossii, Moscow, 1995, p. 57.

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295

4. Svobodnaya Mysl’, 1995, no. 3, pp. 74, 77. 5. See Nedelya, 1997, no. 19. According to data from Yury Luzhkov, of US$4.8 billion of foreign investment in 1996, US$4.29 billion came to Moscow. Of 89 regions of Russia there were only 12, including Moscow, which did not receive subsidies from the federal budget. In reality, Moscow was able to finance the federal budget only because it was itself sucking financial resources out of all Russia. 6. Rabochaya Politika, 1996, no. 4, p. 42. 7. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 March 1996. 8. Paninter, Jan. 1997, no. 2, p. 3. 9. 60 Voprosov k Kompartii Rossiyskoy Federatsii, Voronezh, 1995, pp. 25, 26. 10. III S’ezd KPRF 21–22 yanvarya 1995 g (materialy i dokumenty), Moscow, 1995, p. 106. 11. 60 Voprosov k Kompartii Rossiyskoy Federatsii, p. 56. 12. Ekonomika i Zhizn’, Feb. 1996, no. 5, p. 5. 13. Dukhovnoe Nasledie, 1996, no. 5, p. 3. 14. Dukhovnoe Nasledie, 1996, no. 4, p. 1. 15. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 28 Dec. 1996. 16. Dukhovnoe Nasledie, 1996, no. 5, p. 4. 17. G.A. Zyuganov, Drama vlasti, Moscow, 1993, p. 64. 18. Vek, 1997, no. 4, p. 4. 19. NG-Stsenarii, 1997, no. 3. 20. Quoted in O. Shein, KPRF na zapasnom puti rossiiyskogo kapitalizma, Astrakhan’, 1998, p. 64. 21. Ibid., p. 66. 22. Ibid., p. 67. 23. Zyuganov, op. cit., p. 73. 24. Ibid., p. 89. 25. Shein, op. cit., p. 58. 26. Ibid., p. 168. 27. G.A. Zyuganov, Rossiya i sovremennyy mir, Moscow, 1995, p. 16. 28. Ibid., p. 18. 29. For a discussion of the views of Lev Gumilev and their links with the racist theories of fascism, see B. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, London, 1988. 30. Zyuganov, op. cit., Rossiya . . . p. 23. 31. Al’ternativy, 1994, no. 1, p. 79. 32. III S’ezd KPRF 21–22 yanvarya 1995 g (materialy i dokumenty), Moscow, 1995, p. 47. 33. Ibid., p. 49. 34. Ibid., p. 54. 35. Ekonomika i Zhizn’, Feb. 1996, no. 5, p. 5. 36. Paninter, Jan. 1997, no. 2, p. 3. 37. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1 July 1996. 38. Moskovskie Novosti, 1997, no. 7, p. 6. 39. Dialog, 1996, no. 10, p. 34. 40. Polis, 1996, no. 4, p. 68. 41. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 21 Dec. 1996. 42. A. Gramsci, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, vol. 3, Moscow, 1959, p. 176. Prison Notebooks remarks on several aspects of the structure of political parties in periods of organic crisis. 43. Moment Istiny, 1996, no. 2, p. 1. 44. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 30, p. 5. 45. Vek, 1997, no. 11. 46. Pravda-5, 1997, no. 15, p. 2. 47. Green Left Weekly, 23 April 1997, p. 19. 48. Pravda-5, 1997, no. 15, p. 6.

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49. A. Buzgalin, Belaya vorona, Moscow, 1993, pp. 174, 204. 50. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 26 June 1998. 51. Ibid.

CHAPTER 7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

V. Pelevin, Generation P, Moscow, 1999, p. 22. Itogi, 3 Dec. 1996, p. 24. Vlast, 17 Aug. 1999, no. 32, p. 29. Konets el’tsinshini (The End of the Yeltsin Era), Budapest, 1999, p. 50. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12 Nov. 1996. Kommersant-Vlast, 1998, no. 46, p. 31. See V. Polevanov, ‘Razrushenie rossiyskoy gosudarstvennosti’, Svobodnaya Mysl’, 1995, no. 6. Kommersant-Vlast, no. 46, p. 32. Rossiya v kontse XX veka: itogi i perspektivi modernizatsii, Moscow, 1999, p. 180. Konets el’tsinshchini, p. 51. ‘Figury i Litsa’ (appendix to Nezavisimaya Gazeta), 18 Nov. 1999, no. 18, p. 2. Finansovye Izvestiya, 22 Sept. 1998. The Moscow Times, 8 Sept. 1998. George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, New York, 1998, p. xiii.

CHAPTER 8 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Vek, 17 Sept. 1998. Financial Times, 15 Sept. 1998. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, NG-Stsenarii, no. 12, Dec. 1998, p. 7. Vek, 1998, no. 46, p. 7. Ibid. The Moscow Times, 14 Aug. 1999. The Moscow Times, 10 Nov. 1999, p. 11. Vedomosti, 10 Nov. 1999. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 Sept. 1999. Rossiya v konce XX veka: itogi i perspektivi modernizatsii, Moscow, 1999, pp. 183, 182. Vlast, 17 Aug. 1999, no. 32, p. 29. Vedomosti, 11 Oct. 1999. Kontinent, March 1999, no. 12, p. 3. Dom Aktera, 1999, December–January, p. 14. O. Shein, KPRF na zapasnom puti rossiiyskogo kapitalizma, Astrakhan’, 1998, p. 172.

CHAPTER 9 1. ‘Since 17 August 1998, the authorities and big business have no longer trusted one another, and no longer collaborate. The epoch of oligarchic capitalism in Russia has come to an end’, stated the newspaper Vlast. Unfortunately, this statement was clearly premature. Despite the collapse of the financial system, the oligarchs retained control of the country’s largest raw materials enterprises, as Vlast itself acknowledged. ‘So long as there is oil in the Khanti-Mansiysk region, and a magnetic anomaly in Kursk Province, there will be oligarchs’ (Vlast, 17 Aug. 1999, no. 32, p. 29). 2. The Moscow Times, 26 Oct. 1999. 3. The New York Times, 15 April 1999, p. A25. 4. The Moscow Times, 7 Sept. 1999. 5. Vlast, 21 Sept. 1999, no. 37, p. 19.

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297

6. The Moscow Times, 6 Aug. 1999. 7. Moskovskie Novosti, 1996, no. 47, p. 8. 8. See Versiya, 2000, nos. 6 and 7; also my article in Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 3. Subsequently, President Maskhadov also spoke of a plot involving the Russian security services and Chechen field commanders, ending with the blowing up of apartment buildings. Maskhadov stressed, however, that even according to the official Russian version ‘there is no proof that even a single Chechen took part’ (Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 16D, p. 3). 9. Obshchaya Gazeta, 12–18 August 1999, no. 32, p. 3. 10. Vlast, 17 Aug. 1999, no. 32, p. 21. 11. Obshchaya Gazeta, 12–18 August 1999, no. 32, p. 3. 12. Vlast, 21 Sept. 1999, no. 37, p. 2. 13. See ibid. 14. The Moscow Times, 23 Sept. 1999, p. 8. 15. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 30 Sept. 1999. 16. Izvestiya, 15 Sept. 1999. 17. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 16D, p. 3. 18. Vlast, 21 Sept. 1999, no. 37, p. 16. 19. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 Sept. 1999. 20. Novaya Gazeta, 1999, no. 35, pp. 3, 1. 21. See Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 17 Sept. 1999, Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 21 Sept. 1999. 22. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 21 Sept. 1999. 23. See Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 15 Oct. 1999, The Moscow Times, 22 Oct. 1999. 24. Versiya, 2000, no. 7, p. 9. 25. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 21 Oct. 1999, p. 3. 26. Vlast, 21 Sept. 1999, no. 37, p. 22. 27. For the relations between Dorenko and Berezovsky see I. Zasursky, Mass-media vtoroy respubliki (The Mass Media of the Second Republic), Moscow, 1999, p. 149. 28. Vedomosti, 11 Oct. 1999, p. A2. 29. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 1 Sept. 1999. 30. Izvestiya, 16 Oct. 1999. 31. Svobodnaya Mysl’, 1999, no. 11, p. 19. 32. The Moscow Times, 7 Oct. 1999. 33. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 1 Sept. 1999. 34. Paninter, Nov. 1999, p. 1. 35. Mir za Nedelyu, 20–27 Nov. 1999, no. 13, p. 3. 36. Vestnik ‘Solidarnosti’, Nov. 1999, no. 11, p. 1. 37. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 10 Nov. 1999. 38. Izvestiya, 13 Nov. 1999, p. 1. 39. Paninter, Nov. 1999, p. 1. 40. Text posted on 1 Dec. 1999 on the website of radio Ekho Moskvy at the address www.echo.msk.ru, on 1–2 December on the website of Kavkaz-Tsentr at the address: www.kavkaz.org, and elsewhere. 41. Novaya Gazeta, 1999, no. 47, p. 11. 42. Websites ibid. 43. Interfaks-Vremya, 11–17 Nov. 1999, no. 46, p. 4. 44. Ibid. 45. Metro, 15 Dec. 1999, no. 226, p. 3. 46. Novaya Gazeta, 1999, no. 47, p. 11. 47. Novye Izvestiya, 10 Nov. 1999, p. 4. 48. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 15 Nov. 1999. 49. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 10 Nov. 1999. 50. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 Nov. 1999. 51. Novya Izvestiya, 10 Nov. 1999, p. 4. 52. Newsweek, 27 Sept. 1999, p. 6.

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CHAPTER 10 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

See ‘Figury i Litsa’, Appendix to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 Nov. 1999, no. 18, p. 1. Mir za Nedelyu, 20–27 Nov. 1999, no. 13, p. 1. NG-Stsenarii, 10 Nov. 1999, no. 10, p. 1. Moskovskiy Komsomolets, 21 Dec. 1999. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 21 Dec. 1999. The Moscow Times, 30 Mar. 2000. The Moscow Times, 9 Sept. 2000, Fraud Special. Ibid. Cited Kavkaz-Center, 15 Sept. 2000, www.kavkaz.org. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 11D. Saratovskie Vesti, 22 Mar. 2000. The Moscow Times, 8 Aug. 2000. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 12, p. 4. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 21D, p. 5. Ibid. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 19, p. 5. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 40, p. 1. Novye Izvestiya, 25 Sept. 1999. Komsomolskaya Pravda, 29 Aug. 2000, p. 7. Novaya Gazeta, 2000, no. 21D, p. 5. Novaya Gazeta, 1999, no. 49, p. 17.

CONCLUSION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 15 Sept. 1999. Argumenty i Fakty, 1999, no. 49, p. 10. Rossiya v kontse XX veka, p. 183. A. Baranov, Aromat gnieniya, Moscow, 1999, p. 95. Promyshlennye Vedomosti, 2001, no. 1. Konets el’tsinshchiny, Budapest, 1999, p. 150. Ibid. Shkol’noe Obozrenie, 2000, no. 2, p. 2. Ibid., p. 3. Pravda-5, 9–16 Jan. 1998. R. Medvedev, Kapitalizm v Rossii?, Moscow, 1998, p. 300. Yu. Levada, Ot mneniy k ponimaniyu, Moscow, 2000, p. 507. Izvestiya, 16 Oct. 1999, p. 2.

Index

Brecht, Bertolt, 73 Brezhnev, Leonid, 4, 21, 25, 26, 60, 6, 78, 79, 81, 115, 191, 213, 292, 294 Britain, 8, 9, 32, 51, 61, 176, 293 Bulgakov, Sergey, 176 Bunimovich, Yevgeny, 75 Burbulis, Gennady, 51, 178 Buzgalin, Aleksandr, 185, 288, 295

Abramovich, Roman, 213, 258, 270–1 AFL-CIO, 140 Agrarian Party of Russia, 167, 169–70 Akopov, Petr, 281 Alekseev, Aleksandr, 139 Amin, Samir, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 65 Anpilov, Viktor, 5, 67–8, 112, 114 Argentina, 51 Asian crisis, 198 Aushev, Ruslan, 216 Austria, 44, 47, 178 Azerbaijan, 247, 259 Baburin, Sergey, 258 Baranov, Anatoly, 119–20, 283, 287, 298 Basaev, Shamil, 119, 228–31, 234, 235, 237, 246, 266 Basaev, Shirvani, 234 Bashkiria, 215, 257 Belarus, 88, 91, 106–7, 147, 195, 248 Belotserkovsky, Vadim, 185–6 Belov, V.P., 70 Berdyaev, Nikolay, 176 Berezovsky, Boris, 36–7, 39, 122–3, 131, 189–90, 223–5, 227–8, 232–3, 236, 250, 256, 258, 270, 271, 297 Bernstein, Jonas, 227 bin Laden, Osama, 232, 235 Bolsheviks, 3–4, 8, 14, 16, 28, 47, 54, 62, 67, 68, 161, 162, 175, 286, 291; see also Soviet Union, Russian Revolution of 1917 Bocharov, Mikhail, 273 Borisov, Vadim, 138 Borodin, Pavel, 236 Borovik, Artem, 235 Boyko, Oleg, 116 Brazil, 164

Capek, Karel, 41 Capitalism, 72–3, 186, 188, 198, 207, 223, 286, 289, 290; in Russia, 7–8, 31, 42, 94, 182, 187, 191, 200, 265, 280–1, 283–4, 288, 296; in Eastern Europe, 61, and democracy, 281; centre and periphery, 61–3, 190–1, 282, 285, 288; see also Globalization Centrism, 31, 146–7, 178 Chechnya, 34, 55, 64, 75, 77, 85, 91, 105, 107, 219, 227–9, 232, 233, 235, 262, 279, 282, 292, 293; First Chechen war, 112–0, 122, 127, 220; Second Chechen War, 234–48, 251–3, 258–61, 265, 266, 275, 279, 288 Cherednichenko, Tatyana, 55 Chernomyrdin, Viktor, 5–7, 86, 93, 100, 107, 110–12, 181, 198, 201, 289 Chiesa, Giulietto, 13 China, 62, 135, 196, 284–5 Chubais, Anatoly, 39, 40, 95, 98, 116, 131, 210, 213, 233, 241, 242, 247, 250, 255, 270, 272, 273, 279 Civic Union, 167 Cold War, 20 Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 6, 60, 66–67, 90, 111–12, 114, 145, 169, 172, 173–84, 254, 255, 257, 258, 262, 263, 267–68, 295, 296

299

300

RUSSIA UNDER YELTSIN AND PUTIN

Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 4, 13, 21, 26, 46, 78, 88, 92, 96, 129, 143, 173, 183, 294; Programme of, 59; and the post-Soviet left, 161–4 Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Russia (KSPR), 139 Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists, 159, 165 Dagestan, 228–9, 227, 232, 233, 238, 239, 246, 247, 250, 261; war in Dagestan, 228–30 Danilevsky, N.Ya., 176 Davydov, A., 169 Davydov, Oleg, 78, 85, 87, 199, 254 Dorenko, Sergey, 123, 236, 297 Dudaev, Dzhokhar, 91, 113–14, 117, 228, 244–6 Durova, Natalya, 217 Dyachenko, Tatyana, 213, 223, 224 Eastern Europe, 13, 14–15, 20, 23, 25, 26–7, 31, 58–9, 61–3, 93, 94, 99–100, 110, 163, 177, 186, 205, 282, 290 Egypt, 58 Eurocommunism, 63 European Union, 61 Fatherland, All Russia Bloc, 215–18, 225, 254, 255, 257, 257, 258, 262 Federation of independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), 45, 114, 143–6, 150–3, 164–5, 167–72 Fedorov, Boris, 116 Fedorov, Svyatoslav, 221 First World War, 14–15, 17, 67, 245 Federalism, 271–2 Felgenhauer, Pavel, 117, 238, 241, 242, 261 Ferguson, Robert, 118 Filtzer, Donald, 136 France, 4, 9, 27, 66, 72, 106 Freud, Sigmund, 278 Friedman, Thomas, 226 Fukuyama, Francis, 176 Gagua, Aleksandr, 121 Gaidar, Yegor, 4–6, 13, 30, 33, 51, 54, 67, 86, 92, 98, 100, 110–12, 114–16, 121, 141, 161, 189, 239, 255, 258, 273, 279, 291 Georgia, 107 Gerashchenko, Viktor, 206, 208

Germany, 4, 8, 50, 62, 93, 265 Gibraltar, 271 Globalization, 32, 62, 286 Gogol, Nikolay, 36–7, 190 Goncharov, Vyacheslav, 171 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 4, 26, 54, 78, 81, 82, 87, 91, 92, 139, 140, 163, 178, 191, 206 Gorky, Maxim, 86 Grachev, Pavel, 244 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 71, 182, 290, 295 Great Depression, 199 Gref, German, 272–4 Gromov, Boris, 119 Griboedov, Aleksandr, 64 Gumilev, Lev, 176 Gusinsky, Vladimir, 123, 131, 223–4, 250, 271 Hakamada, Irina, 245, 279 Hegel, G. W. F., 58 Hitler, Adolf, 265 Hungary, 173 Illarionov, Andrey, 273–4 India, 108, 271 Independent Union of Miners (NPG), 139–40, 171 Ingushetia, 91, 216, 246, 262 Intelligentsia, 5, 23, 50–76, 122, 138, 165, 175, 185, 217 International Monetary Fund, 61, 66, 84, 99, 107, 186, 195, 197–9, 201, 205–7, 220 Isaev, Andrey, 165, 294 Ivan the Terrible, 4 Jung, Carl, 87 Karachaevo-Cherkessia, 256 Karaulov, Igor, 268 Kazakhstan, 106–7 Kazantsev, Viktor, 237, 248, 260 Keynesianism, 206–7 KGB, 70, 112 Kirienko, Sergey, 7, 86, 156, 198–201, 206, 236, 254, 263 Kirov, Sergey, 34 Kiselev, Oleg, 38 Khasbulatov, Ruslan, 4–5, 88, 89 Khattab, 230, 231, 235 Khramov, Sergey, 139 Khrushchev, Nikita, 20 Klochkov, Igor, 143, 146, 167, 169

INDEX Kogan, Vladimir, 270 Kolganov, Andrey, 194, 210, 282 Komsomol, 96, 124, 199; Russian Komsomol, 184, 186, 258 Kovalev, Sergey, 115 Korzhakov, Aleksandr, 86, 130 Kosovo, 239, 248, see also Yugoslavia Kozyrev, Andrey, 116 Krausz, Tamas, 106, 284, 286 KRO, 44–6, 122, 172, 178 Krugov, Mikhail, 270 Kudyukin, Pavel, 136–7, 141, 173 Kulikov, Anatoly, 130, 212 Kulikov, Nikolay, 232 Kvashnin, Anatoly, 233–4 LDPR, 110–12, 257; see also Zhirinovsky. Lebed, Aleksandr, 44–6, 111, 129, 157, 172 Left, in Post-Soviet Russia, 5, 13, 48, 159–87, 258, 264, 267, 268, 280–1, 287 Lenin, Vladimir, 4, 8, 32, 49, 60, 67, 161, 179, 183, 217, 281 Leontyev, Konstantin, 176 Leontyev, Mikhail, 230 Lesin, Mikhail, 225 Levada, Yury, 287–8 Limonov, Eduard, 186 Lisovsky, Sergey, 129 Lithuania, 173 Luis XIV, 72 Lukashenko, Aleksandr, 91, 107 Luxemburg, Rosa, 8, 32, 95 Luzhkov, Yury, 44, 54, 55, 167, 215–17, 218–19, 223–5, 232, 235–6, 250, 255, 262, 271, 295 Macchiavelli, Niccolo, 269 Makashov, Albert, 67 Malashenko, Igor, 127 Malyarov, Igor, 184, 186 Mamut, Aleksandr, 213 Marcuse, Herbert, 73 Marx, Karl, 73 Marxism, 2, 8, 14, 27, 47, 68, 133–4, 159, 164, 176–7, 180, 185, 268, 284 Marxist Workers Party, 159 Maskhadov, Aslan, 120, 228, 229, 232–3, 235, 238, 245, 246, 251, 266, 297 Maslyukov, Yury, 206, 208, 258, 283 McCarthy, senator, 73

301

Medvedev, Roy, 37, 163, 239, 287, 291, 298 Mensheviks, 62, 161, 162 Mercury, Freddy, 57 Mexico, 44, 51 Mitina, Darya, 258 Modernization, 31, 179, 191, 208, 210, 220, 284, 286, technological, 276, 283, 285 Moiseev, Nikita, 286 Moscow Federation of Trade Unions (MFP), 144, 164–5, 167, 172 Mussolini, Benito, 265 Napoleon, 15, 27 Nationalization, 30, 130, 155–7, 190, 207, 209, 221, 290 NATO, 233, 239, 248, 265 Natural monopolies, 40, 195–8 Nemtsov, Boris, 131, 254 Neo-liberalism, 4–5, 8, 13, 27, 51, 52, 61, 69, 73, 93, 110, 166, 188–9, 196, 205, 264, 265 Nevzorov, Aleksandr, 258 New Economic Policy (NEP), 18 Nikolaev, Andrey, 221 NKVD, 19 Northern Osetia, 91 Obukhov, Sergey, 214 Okudzhava, Bulat, 57 Orwell, George, 231 Osipov, Yury, 98 Ostapchuk, Anna, 36 Our Home is Russia (NDR) bloc, 110 Party of Labour, 5, 114, 164, 167–9, 221 Pastukhov, Vladimir, 23, 35, 37, 51, 106, 290, 291, 292 Patarkatsishvili, Badri, 123 Pavlovsky, Gleb, 126, 128 Pelevin, Viktor, 39, 92, 124–7, 189, 291, 292, 293, 296 Perestroika, 4, 13–14, 26–8, 30, 35, 54, 59, 87, 137, 159, 163, 178, 185, 205 Peru, 44 Peter the Great, 4 Petrov, Yury, 221 Pinochet, Augusto, 265 Piontkovsky, Andrey, 231, 279 Piyasheva, Larisa, 13 Plekhanov, G.V., 284 Podberezkin, Aleksey, 174, 176, 181, 258 Podkolzin, Yevgeny, 119

302

RUSSIA UNDER YELTSIN AND PUTIN

Poland, 135, 173 Polevanov, Vladimir, 171, 193, 296 Popov, Gavriil, 31, 167 Poptsov, Oleg, 31 Potanin, Vladimir, 123, 131, 213, 228 Prague Spring, 13, 21 Primakov, Yevgeny, 7, 88, 122, 156, 201, 206, 208–9, 211–12, 214–15, 218, 220, 225, 235, 236, 240, 255, 258, 267 Privatization, 14, 26, 28–30, 45, 75, 92–6, 97, 98, 122–3, 130, 140–2, 148, 161–2, 187, 188–90, 192–4, 197, 205, 207, 226, 270, 273, 282, 285, 293 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 52, 57, 66 Putin, Vladimir, 7, 9, 44, 55, 64, 86, 215, 219, 221, 235, 239–40, 248–250, 251–79 Raduev, Salman, 235 Rakhimov, Murtaza, 215, 257 Rakovsky, Mark, 58 Razumov, Aleksandr, 237 Reagan, Ronald, 106 Rogozin, Dmitry, 258 Romanov, Anatoly, 34 Roosevelt, F.D., 44 Russian Communist Workers Party, 5 Russian Orthodox Church, 4 Russian Revolution of 1917, 3, 4, 15, 17, 22, 23, 175, 281 Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, 162, see also Bolsheviks, Mensheviks Russia’s Choice bloc, 84 Rutskoy, Aleksandr, 88, 89, 272 Rybkin, Ivan, 110, 253 Ryzhkov, Nikolay, 26, 33 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 73 Savelyev, Dmitry, 228 Saydullaev, Malik, 279 Second World War, 13, 18, 20, 70, 99, 207, 231, 245 Seleznev, Gennady, 239, 241 Semago, Vladimir, 183 Sergeev, Aleksandr, 139, 171 Shabanov, Aleksandr, 177 Shamanov, Vladimir, 241, 248, 260, 279 Shaymiev, Mentimer, 215, 216, 218, 224 Shein, Oleg, 175, 176, 220, 268, 295, 296 Shmakov, Mikhail, 164, 167–9, 171 Shokhin, Aleksandr, 211

Skokov, Yury, 44–6, 111, 172 Skuratov, Yury, 214–15, 225 Smolin, Oleg, 1–2, 93, 127, 168–9, 290, 292, 293 Sobyanin, Aleksandr, 89 Social Democratic Party of the Russian Federation, 159, 162 Socialist Party, 159, 162 Socialist Party of Workers, 163–4, 221 Solovyev, Vladimir, 176 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 54, 291 SOTSPROF, 139–40, 171 Soviet Union (USSR), 1–5, 14–15, 17–19, 21, 23, 28, 32, 42, 62, 77, 81, 88, 90, 93, 106, 107, 136, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 147, 159, 166, 173, 183, 188, 191, 196, 205, 207, 227, 249, 276, 284, 292 Soros, George, 8, 200, 290, 296 South Korea, 62 Spengler, Oswald, 176 Stalin, Joseph, 4–5, 13–14, 18–20, 38, 53, 67, 72, 86, 98, 99, 172, 173 Stalinism, 4–5, 16–18, 24, 53, 54, 58, 67, 130, 173, 284, 286, 288, 291 Stepashin, Sergey, 7, 86, 215 Stolypin, Piotr, 17, 67 Surikov, Anton, 229, 234 Sverdlov, Yakov, 54 Sweden, 178 Switzerland, 213, 225, 226 Tarasov, Aleksandr, 50, 57, 89, 95, 129, 292 Tatarstan, 91, 215, 216, 224, 261, 292 Terror, 17–19, 286, see also Stalinism Thatcher, Margaret, 106 Third World, 42, 61, 109, 248, 289 Tikhonov, V., 145 Titov, Konstantin, 257 Toynbee, Arnold, 176 Tretyakov, Vitaly, 122, 241 Trifonov, Yury, 57 Trotsky, Leon, 4, 14–15, 67, 175 Trotskism, 175 Tuleev, Aman, 263 Turkey, 135, 231, 247 Tyazhlov, Anatoly, 257 Union of Labour, 169, 170–2, 221 Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS), 254–5, 257–8, 263, 268 Unity bloc (the ‘Bear’), 253–4, 256–7, 262

INDEX Ukraine, 30, 88, 147, 106, 147, 216, 258, 282 USA, 9, 20, 47, 61, 66, 69, 71, 78, 106–7, 125, 136, 138, 199, 209, 212, 215, 225, 226, 247, 249, 271, 274, 276, 277 USSR, see Soviet Union Uvarov, count, 67 Uzbekistan, 107 Vartazarova, Lyudmila, 163, 164, 221 Vietnam, 285 Vishnevskaya, Inna, 217 Visotsky, Vladimir, 57 Voloshin, Aleksandr, 224, 229 Volsky, Arkady, 151 Voltaire, F.M., 64 Vorobyev, Eduard, 119 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 8 Weber, Max, 31 Women of Russia bloc, 111 Workers’ Party in Brazil, 164 World Bank, 154, 226 Yabloko party, 31, 111, 241, 254, 257, 258, 262–4

303

Yakov, Valery, 248 Yakovlev, Aleksandr, 178 Yakovlev, Vladimir, 216 Yavlinsky, Grigory, 31, 111, 114, 240, 241, 260, 263, 264, 267 Yeltsin, Boris, 4–6, 9, 31, 44, 54, 72, 77–7, 88–92, 98, 105, 105–7, 114–15, 118, 120, 127–8, 130–1, 139, 151, 156, 180, 206, 211, 213–15, 221, 226–7, 233, 237, 260, 269, 273–5, 277–9, 284 Yugoslavia, 212 Yushenkov, Sergey, 115 Zasursky, Ivan, 6, 116, 122–4, 125, 128, 130, 131, 290, 292, 293, 297 Zatulin, Konstantin, 258 Zimbabwe, 51 Zinoviyev, Aleksandr, 54 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 35, 44, 90, 110, 112, 114, 129, 257, 260, 261 Zolotov, Andrey, 225 Zyuganov, Gennady, 6, 66–7, 90, 111, 114, 128–9, 173–81, 184, 212, 219–21, 240, 255, 257, 260, 262, 263, 267, 268, 295