Russia

As it was, the attempts to decentralize decision-taking, encouraging regional officialdom and managers to take more power into their hands, drove the system towards a precipice. After some initial confusion, managers and officials began to take Gorbachev at his word. In doing so they undermined the authority of the central institutions on which the leadership depended for the execution of its policies. Furthermore Yeltsin’s assault on the Communist Party removed Gorbachev’s most effective lever of government. But, perhaps Gorbachev was the architect of his own failure. As he admitted in retrospect, he had certainly been remiss in failing to keep the money supply in check. As a result, inflation gathered speed, destroying savings and creating increasing distress. Communist Russia was an essentially makeshift contraption. Born of war and revolution, it had been shaped by necessity and hardened by time into a fixed, rigid and ultimately brittle system.

Gorbachev deserves credit for positive achievements. ²⁴ He, more than anyone else, was responsible for changing Russia’s political configuration — albeit in a way he had neither foreseen nor intended. He also did great harm, though without intending to. Unlucky and incautious, he was soon overwhelmed by the rush of events and by successive crises. Having bravely begun the dangerous process of radical reform, he suddenly found the machine careering onward and downward out of his control. In the end, then, the verdict must be death by misadventure.

The rejoicing over the collapse was great. Yet the advent of democracy was to solve no problems, and many who rejoiced at the time were to regret the Soviet Union’s demise. Most of the good things which both the dissidents and Western politicians and ideologues forecast would emerge from the collapse of Communism did not materialize. Indeed, most Russians were to find the first fruits of the freedom they had been promised very sour indeed. It is on this aftermath - the condition of Russia in the post-Communist era — that we must now focus, for that is the soil in which any future expansion will be rooted.

15Reinventing Russia

WHEN THE SOVIET Union collapsed, crowds swarmed out on to the streets of central Moscow and St Petersburg to greet the new order. They were mostly younger people and their expectations matched their excitement. Russia was free. The stern face of authority was fast fading away; political correctness and restrictions were things of the past. Untrammelled now by empire, Russians would no longer be isolated from the world. They would be ruled by democracy instead of tsars and commissars, and join the global economy Western statesmen and economists had forecast that investment would flow in from Wall Street, the London Stock Exchange and all the other bourses of the free world. A vibrant free economy would rise up in place of the moribund, now crumbing, bureaucratic economy People would have opportunity and choice instead of dull predictability.

A handful of Russians were soon to become wealthy beyond dreams, as in a fairy tale, though a few were to perish at the hands of contract killers, and one or two even ended up in jail for fraud. Shops in city centres were filled with an amazing variety of expensive goods. Mercedes limousines, Cardin dresses, blue jeans and Macdonald hamburgers proclaimed the coming of the new age. But for most people the euphoria was momentary, the aftertaste bitter.

More and more old ladies stood patiently in lines outside metro stations hoping to sell a treasured possession, a cigarette or two, or a wilting posy of wild flowers to buy some food. Infants died of malnutrition; young women and children were recruited for the prostitution and pornography industries, and not a few of them exported. The use of drugs increased, forgotten diseases like typhus returned and new ones like AIDS, virtually unknown in the Soviet era, began to spread. The welfare system that had for so long sheltered the population steadily deteriorated. The birth rate rapidly declined; the death rate soared.

As in the Time of Troubles four centuries earlier (See Chapter 6), disaster struck six years out of seven, in the form not of unusual weather and crop failure this time, but of precipitous industrial decline. By 1998 the country’s gross national product was less than half what it had been in 1990. Young scientists emigrated, and capital, desperately needed for investment, flowed out to foreign bank accounts. One of the brighter spots in the new, dark world, was shone by schoolteachers who continued to turn up in their classrooms even though some had not been paid for months.