The Penguin History of the World

In 1993 a new parliament containing many of his enemies had been elected to add to Yeltsin’s difficulties. Others were posed by relations with non-Russian republics of the CIS (in which there lived 27 million Russians) and by the clans of political interest which had emerged around bureaucratic and industrial foci in the new Russia, as well as by disappointed ex-reformers, of whom Yeltsin had sacked a great many. It was not long before it began to be recognized that Russia’s troubles were not solely attributable to the Soviet legacy, but owed much to the general state of Russia’s historic culture and civilization. In 1992, Russia had itself become a federation and in the following year a presidential, even autocratic constitution completed the country’s constitutional framework. But Yeltsin soon had to face the challenge of opposition from both left and right and, eventually, of insurrection. After he had suspended parliament’s functions by decree ‘on gradual constitutional reform’, over a hundred people were killed in the worst civil bloodshed in Moscow since 1917. Like his earlier dissolution of the Communist Party, this was seen as presidential high-handedness. No doubt the president’s personality made forceful action more congenial to him than patient diplomacy. Nevertheless, considering he had so little to offer Russians in the way of material comfort, as the economy was exploited by corrupt officialdom and entrepreneurs on the make, it was to the credit of his government, and thanks to the Russians’ love of their new-found political freedom, that he managed to fight off the neo-Communist challenge and achieve re-election as president in 1996.

Two years before that a new problem had emerged, a national insurrection in land-locked Chechnya, an autonomous republic in the Russian federation with a predominantly Muslim population. Some Chechens deplored and would avenge, they said, the immorality of their conquest and suppression by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and the genocidal policy carried out by Stalin in the 1940s. Their anger and resistance was stiffened by the brutality with which the Russians, alarmed by the dangerous example that might be given to other Muslims, reduced the Chechen capital to ruins and the countryside to starvation. Thousands were killed, but Russian casualties re-awoke memories of Afghanistan and there were all-too-evident dangers of fighting spilling over into neighbouring republics. Ever since 1992, after all, a Russian garrison had been propping up the government of now-independent Tajikistan against the danger of its overthrow by Islamic radicals supported from Pakistan. Against this doubtful background, not much was left by 1996 of the hopes raised by perestroika and glasnost, and additional gloom was cast over the situation as it became clear that President Yeltsin’s health was poor (and probably made worse by heavy drinking). By then events outside Russia, notably in the former Yugoslavia, prompted gestures and very vocal reminders to western powers that the country still aspired to play the great power role it felt was its due, and evidence of the growing concern Russia felt over the implications of intervention there in the affairs of an independent sovereign state.

By 1998, however, the Russian government could hardly gather taxes and pay its employees. The year 1997 had been the first since 1991 in which GDP had registered a real, if tiny, increase, but the economy was still abandoned to the mercy of special interests as the state sold off more and more of its investments to private business, often on a corrupt and favoured basis. Huge fortunes were rapidly made by some, but millions of ordinary people suffered unpaid wages, the disappearance of daily necessities from the markets, continuing price rises, and the irritations and hostilities that inevitably arose as high levels of consumption for some confronted poverty face-to-face in the streets. Then, in 1998, came a financial crash and the country’s repudiation of foreign debt. Yeltsin had to replace a prime minister he had chosen for his commitment to market economics and to accept one imposed upon him by his opponents. Yet the next parliamentary elections returned a parliament less likely to quarrel with him, and on New Year’s Eve 1999, he felt able to announce his resignation.