When the Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago, Russia
looked set to become a free-market democracy. Arkady Ostrovsky explains why
that did not happen, and how much of it is Mr Putin’s fault
ON AUGUST 20th Guzel Semenova, a
25-year-old Muscovite, was strolling through the grounds of Muzeon, one of the
city’s parks, and stopped by a burnt-out, rusty trolleybus. Inside its
shattered interior a small video screen was playing black-and-white footage of
events that unfolded in the year she was born. A volunteer explained that the
trolleybus had been part of an anti-tank barricade during a coup 25 years ago
and symbolised the people’s victory.
Ms Semenova looked confused. The
22-year-old volunteer, herself unsure what exactly had happened during those
three days in August 1991, said it was when “Russia became free.” Ms Semenova
listened politely, then walked on.
A patchy knowledge of those events is
nothing unusual in Russia. A survey by the Levada Centre, the country’s leading
independent pollster, shows that half the overall population and as many as 90%
of young Russians know nothing about the drama that began in the small hours of
August 19th 1991.
That morning the world woke up to news
of a coup. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was detained in Crimea,
“unable, for health reasons, to perform his duties”. Power had been seized by a
group of hard-line Communists, the chief of the KGB and senior army generals,
who declared a state of emergency. Tanks were rumbling through the centre of
Moscow. The television, overrun by the KGB’s special forces, was playing
Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” on a loop. It was a last, desperate attempt to save
the disintegrating empire.
But on the day of the coup not a soul
came out to support the Soviet regime. Instead, tens of thousands of Muscovites
took to the streets to build barricades and defend their new freedoms. Boris
Yeltsin, the first democratically elected president of Russia, then a
subordinate part of the Soviet Union, called for resistance. The KGB’s special
forces were told to attack the Russian parliament, the epicentre of the
opposition, but nobody was prepared to give a written order. Two days later three
young men died under a tank. A few hours after that the troops were withdrawn
and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Jubilant crowds
marched to the KGB’s headquarters and toppled the statue of its founder, Felix
Dzerzhinsky.
Those three days marked the end of the
Soviet Union, but they did not become a foundation myth for a new Russia. The
country was tired of myths. Modern school textbooks barely mention them.
Russian officials used to lay flowers at a small monument to the three young
men killed by the tanks, but even this modest gesture stopped in 2004. This
year liberals were banned from marching to the place of their victory 25 years
ago. The small festival at the Muzeon attracted a few hundred people who
watched a stylised performance of “Swan Lake” and a documentary from those
days. Shot in St Petersburg, the cradle of the Bolshevik revolution, it showed
a vast, peaceful crowd in the main square watching the death throes of the
Soviet empire. The camera also captured a young Vladimir Putin by the side of
his boss, Anatoly Sobchak, then the mayor of St Petersburg, who had defied the
coup. A demonstrator was heard to shout: “When we get rid of the communist
plague, we will again become free and we won’t have to fight [a war] again.”
The revolution of 1991 overturned the
Soviet Union’s political, economic and social order and put 15 countries on the
map where there had previously been only one. But like many revolutions in
history, it was followed by a restoration.
The tsar the Kremlin most admires is Alexander
III, who on taking office in 1881 reversed the liberalisation overseen by his
father, who was assassinated, to impose an official ideology of Orthodoxy,
nationalism and autocracy. His portrait and his famous saying, “Russia has only
two allies: its army and its navy,” greet visitors to a revamped museum of
Russian history at VDNKH, a prime example of Stalinist architecture in Moscow.
Stalin himself has had a makeover too. Gigantic portraits of him line the roads
in Crimea, proclaiming: “It is our victory!”
The two main pillars of the Soviet
state, propaganda and the threat of repression, have been restored. The KGB,
which was humiliated and broken up in the aftermath of the coup, has been
rebuilt as the main vehicle for political and economic power. The secret police
is once again jailing protesters and harassing civil activists. In September
the Kremlin designated the Levada Centre a “foreign agent”, which could be the
end of it. Television has been made into a venomous propaganda machine that
encourages people to fight “national traitors” and “fifth-columnists”. Boris
Nemtsov, a liberal politician who once represented Russia’s hopes of becoming a
“normal” country, was murdered outside the Kremlin last year.
After nearly a decade of economic growth
spurred by the market reforms of the 1990s and by rising oil prices, the
Russian economy has descended into Soviet-era stagnation. Competition has been
stifled and the state’s share in the economy has doubled. The
military-industrial complex—the core of the Soviet economy—is once again seen
as the engine of growth. Alternative power centres have been eliminated.
Post-Soviet federalism has been emasculated, turning Russia into a unitary
state.
Reactionary restoration at home has led
to aggression abroad. Russia has invaded Georgia and Ukraine, two of the most
democratic former Soviet republics. It has intervened in the conflict in Syria,
propping up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. It has attempted to
undermine Euro-Atlantic institutions, backed right-wing parties in Europe and
tried to meddle in America’s presidential election. And it is once again using
the threat of nuclear arms to blackmail the West.
After the defeat of the 1991 coup,
Russia was widely expected to become a Westernised, democratic, free-market
country. This special report will explain why that did not happen, and ask
whether the West has a Putin problem or a much deeper and more enduring Russia
problem.
Mr Putin was originally chosen for the
top job by Yeltsin, Russia’s first president, not least for being on the
“democratic” side in 1991. When he came to power in 2000, he was expected to
consolidate the country. Instead, he has reinstated an archaic model of the
state.
It was naive to expect that after 74
years of Soviet rule, and several centuries of paternalism before that, Russia
would rapidly emerge as a functioning Western-style democracy. But this report
will show that Russia’s relapse into an authoritarian corporate state was not
inevitable. It was the result of the choices made by the country’s elite at
each new fork in the road. And although those choices cannot be unmade, they do
not predetermine the future.
Not the Soviet Union
The collapse of the Soviet Union brought
a massive change to Russia. The creation of private ownership launched
industries that did not exist before, such as private banks, restaurants and
mobile-phone networks. People are free to make money, consume and travel on a
scale never seen before in Russia’s history. They consume not just more goods
and services but more culture and information. The state no longer dominates
people’s lives. Although it controls television, the internet remains largely
unconstrained everywhere, and radio and print still have some freedom. Even
Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician, admits that “despite the curtailing
of political and civil freedoms, the past 25 years have been the freest in
Russian history.”
People are becoming increasingly
alienated from politics, as demonstrated by the low turnout in the
parliamentary elections in September, but they are finding other ways of
expressing their views. Although few Russians remember quite how the Soviet
regime ended, many enjoy the results. Russia has a vibrant urban middle class
which, until recently, was richer than its equivalents in eastern Europe.
Russia’s cities, with their cafés, cycle lanes and shopping streets, don’t look
very different from their European counterparts.
A new generation of Westernised Russians
born since the end of the Soviet Union has come of age. The children of the
Soviet intelligentsia—a vast educated professional class that supported
Gorbachev—dress, eat and behave differently from their parents’ generation.
They have a spring in their step.
Many of these young, educated Russians
owe their comfortable lives to a decade of economic growth that began in 1998
and ended with the economic crisis in 2008-09. The impact of that crisis
exposed the limits of Mr Putin’s model of governance. And although economic
growth recovered fairly quickly, trust in Mr Putin’s model of governance
declined sharply, from 35% at the end of 2008 to 20% in early 2012, whereas
support for Western-style democracy shot up from 15% to 30%.
Those who felt that Russia needed both economic and
political modernisation pinned their hopes on Dmitry Medvedev, who served as
president from 2008 to 2012. The Russian elite wanted him to stay for a second
term, but in September 2011 he announced that Mr Putin, who was then prime
minister, would resume the presidency, while Mr Medvedev would become prime
minister. He indicated that this job swap had been planned right from the start
of his presidency. Many people felt they had been duped.
When three months
later the Kremlin blatantly rigged the parliamentary elections, they took to
the streets, demanding the same sort of respect from the state as citizens as
they were enjoying as private customers at home and abroad. They wanted Russia
to become a European-style nation state, an idea formulated by Alexey Navalny,
an anti-corruption blogger who had galvanised the protests through social
media. His definition of the governing United Russia as a party of “crooks and
thieves”, and the mood of protest, spread across the country.
Mr Putin was rattled and angry, but having witnessed
the failure of the 1991 coup he knew that tanks were not the answer. Instead he
trumped civic nationalism with the centuries-old idea of imperial or state
nationalism, offering the idea of Russia as a besieged fortress. In 2014 he
annexed Crimea.
The tactic worked. The protests stopped and Mr Putin’s personal
approval ratings shot up from 60% to 80%. By attacking Ukraine after its own
revolution in 2014, Mr Putin persuaded his country and its neighbours that any
revolt against the regime would be followed by bloodshed and chaos.
Smoke and mirrors
The Soviet Union had many faults, but postmodernism
was not one of them. Mr Putin’s Russia is a more slippery construct in which
simulation and bluff play a big part. Nothing is what it seems. Elections are
held not to change power but to retain it; licensed “opposition” parties are
manufactured by the Kremlin; Mr Medvedev’s modernisation was an illusion;
doctorates awarded to scores of Russian officials, governors and even to Mr
Putin himself were based on plagiarism or cheating, according to Dissernet, a grassroots
organisation.
In 2014 Russia put on a remarkable show with the
costliest winter Olympics ever staged, in Sochi on the Black Sea. The host
country’s athletes got the largest number of gold medals, not least thanks to a
massive doping operation in which the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s
successor and Russia’s main security organisation, swapped urine samples
through a hole in the wall between an official laboratory and a secret one next
door. (That caused many Russian athletes to be banned from this year’s Rio
Olympics.) In the same way that Russia has been doping its athletes, its state
media have been doping the population with military triumphs and anti-American
propaganda, conveying an artificial sense of strength. But unlike those sport
victories, Russian violence in Ukraine and Syria is real enough.
Mr Putin’s restoration project is working because the
disintegration of the Soviet Union was not complete. The remains of the Soviet
and even pre-Soviet system, its institutions, economic structure and social
practices, which lay dormant during the first post-Soviet decade, have been
revived and strengthened by the current regime.
But just as the Soviet and pre-Soviet legacies cannot
be erased, nor can the quarter-century since the USSR ceased to exist. The
fundamental conflict between a modern lifestyle and the political restoration
under Mr Putin, exposed by the protests of 2011-12, has been suppressed, not
resolved. No restoration has ever ended in a return to the past, and none has
been permanent.
Russia, perhaps more than other countries, advances
through generational shifts. The current reactionary phase may turn out to be
no more than a detour on the path towards a modern, federalist nation state. Or
it could lead to further decline, interspersed with outbursts of aggression. Which
is it to be?
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