The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting against the Communist Party. If he went ahead with a planned trial of the Party, he risked losing—if not in Constitutional Court then in the court of public opinion. With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past. The eighty-volume case against the Communist Party, and the argument for a permanent ban on its existence, were now shelved. The organizers of the 1991 coup and the leaders of the armed uprising of 1993—three dozen people in all— were pardoned by the Russian parliament in its very first amnesty, in February 1994—not because the two conflicts had melded into one in the minds of Russian parliament members but because both conflicts had to be retired and forgotten.³³ Even Alexander Nikolaevich's quiet and plodding work on the Rehabilitation Commission came to seem too confrontational. In 1997, Alexander Nikolaevich submitted two rehabilitation decrees—one concerning children who had been incarcerated in the Gulag and the other concerning members of non-

Bolshevik socialist parties who had been executed in the terror—and Yeltsin ignored them.³⁴

Yeltsin, who had always had an infallible sense of the public mood, was increasingly distancing himself from the young radical reformers in favor of many of the old guard. He seemed willing to forget and forgive everything, including personal insults and state treason. "He is making himself a laughing stock with the Communists!" said Alexander Nikolaevich. In April 1997, in the spirit of reconciliation, Yeltsin sent greetings to the annual congress of the Russian Communist Party. The hall whistled and booed when the address was read from the stage. Then they laughed.³⁵

nine

OLD SONGS

new year's eve 1994 was depressing. Like most of his acquaintances, Lev Gudkov was feeling shell-shocked—or simply shocked. Russia had gone to war against a part of itself. After months of rumors, threats, and several botched covert operations, Yeltsin had decided to put an end to a forceful separatist movement in Chechnya, a small republic in the North Caucasus, on the border with Turkey and Georgia. He would use the army to dislodge the local government. But the Chechen resistance was well armed and possessed of ten times the resolve of the Russian troops, along with familiarity with the terrain and the support of the local population. What had been planned as a fast attack, essentially a police operation, turned into an all-out military offensive. On December 31—twenty days after the operation began—Moscow staged a series of bombing raids that reduced Grozny, one of the country's own cities, to a smoking ruin. Several of the old dissidents—men who were well past middle age, and who had seen prison but never armed battle—were now down in Chechnya, documenting the atrocities and trying to use their own bodies to draw the world's attention to the war. The entire Moscow press corps, it seemed, was also there. Information was flowing from Chechnya like blood from a broken artery. The effect of the glut of macabre detail was as terrifying and depressing as anything Gudkov had ever experienced.

This effect was exacerbated by the results of a survey the public opinion center had just completed. Five years after the original Homo Sovieticus study, Levada's team decided to check in. It was another difficult survey to design: the country's borders, its name, and its system of government had changed since the first study. Some questions had to be discarded, and some of the others were reworked. A few new ones had to be devised.