Moscow, December 25, 1991

In the postcommunist chaos few escape the rapacious demands of the ascendant Russian mafiya. A financial report prepared for Yeltsin in his first year finds that four out of five of the banks and large private enterprises in Russian cities are paying more than 10 percent of their revenues to organized crime. Even smalltime street hawkers are victims. “For some time in 1992 we hang out at Arbat selling stuff,” recalls Olga Perova. “Local gangsters protect us so that we won’t get robbed, and we pay them kickbacks.”¹⁴ Contract killings became common. In 1993, 123 bank employees are gunned down or blown up. Privatization of state apartments results in a particularly ugly type of crime: Pensioners are persuaded to sell their living space and stay on rent free, and then are pushed under a bus.

To Gorbachev all this is confirmation that he was correct to oppose Yeltsin in breaking up the old order so brutally. He complains that the bloody shoot-outs in Moscow are worse than those in Chicago during the prohibition era and that the outflow of billions of dollars deposited in foreign banks to await the arrival of their gangster owners is made possible with the connivance, or inertia, of Yeltsin’s government. “Having beaten his way to power,” Gorbachev jibes in his 1995 memoir, “Yeltsin instantly forgot his wrathful speeches against abuses and allowed his associates to indulge in corruption and privileges such as the communist nomenklatura had never dreamed of.”

As living standards plummet, deputies in the Russian Supreme Soviet seethe with discontent. The shock therapy is increasingly seen as a Western imposition. Much anger is directed at the American and European experts who commute to Moscow to peddle their advice to the new government. The speaker, Ruslan Khasbulatov, attacks the “vile” monetarist policy imposed by the Americans. The demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky courts populist support by calling the United States “an empire of evil, the nucleus of hell” that conspires to rule the world.

Yeltsin resists the domestic clamor to restore subsidies and fix prices, but in December 1992 he is obliged to dismiss Gaidar from his government and replace him with Viktor Chernomyrdin, a politician more sympathetic to the plight of state industry, though Chernomyrdin soon finds that Gaidar’s reforms have gone too far for the reintroduction of price controls on food items. In a few months Gaidar has managed to smash the state planning system and establish a market economy in a country where civil society hardly existed and initiative had been crushed for the best part of a century.

The volatile Russian president becomes so depressed at the setbacks that he contemplates suicide. On December 9, 1992, he locks himself inside the overheated bathhouse at Barvikha-4 and is only saved from suffocation by Korzhakov, who breaks down the door and pulls him out. On another occasion in his Kremlin office, he produces a pistol given him by his security minister, Viktor Barannikov—before Yeltsin sacked him for corruption—and threatens to shoot himself. Aides persuade him not to be foolish. He doesn’t pull the trigger. The weapon, however, is not lethal: Korzhakov has taken the precaution of boiling the bullets in water to make them harmless.¹⁵

In the Supreme Soviet the Russian president’s enemies proliferate, and the communists make up lost ground. Nevertheless, a motion to impeach Yeltsin fails by a narrow margin. “This means that the Russian people do not after all want to go back to the bright communist future,” observes Gaidar. But the parliament continues to pass antireform measures and mobilize against Yeltsin. It decks itself out in red flags and anarchist and fascist banners and stockpiles arms. It elects Rutskoy as provisional Russian president, and he names a new government. Russia once again faces a showdown between the White House and the Kremlin. The crisis comes to a head on September 21, 1993, when Yeltsin issues a decree dissolving the parliament. Armed White House “defenders,” many of them neo-Stalinists and protofascists, begin roaming the streets to show their defiance of the order, some in Cossack high hats and belts. In the following days they attack the television station and other key buildings in the city. On October 4 pro-Yeltsin army units fire several shells into the upper floors of the barricaded White House, forcing the communists and nationalists to surrender. The brief civil war results in the deaths of more than 150 people. The outcome is a more authoritarian style of presidential government.

Gorbachev blames Yeltsin for the crisis and calls the storming of the White House an act of madness. “The army was ordered to shoot at the people! It was unforgivable!” He charges Yeltsin with laying the groundwork for an absolute monarchy under the guise of a presidential republic.