He turned out to be right (if too optimistic about the fate of democracy). By December, the balance of power shifted to the republics, and the ussr disintegrated into fifteen separate states. Gorbachev shuffled off into retirement, handing over authority to Russia’s recently elected president, Yeltsin. Any semblance of socialism was junked by the acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, whose now infamous “shock therapy” campaign consisted mainly of liberating prices. Hence, one of the first post-Soviet experiences fixed in Russians’ memories is a hurricane of hyperinflation that wiped out savings and jacked the price of all but a few regulated goods (e.g., energy, housing, and bread) out of reach. I held an account in the Sberbank state bank with 1,000 rubles, which would have purchased a two-week Black Sea vacation in the summer of 1991 but a year later was barely enough to purchase a Snickers bar.
Disillusionment with Yeltsin, who’d rashly promised to improve popular living standards within a year, came swiftly among ordinary Russians (though he retained the support of the liberal intelligentsia and the new business class). I recall the savage political jokes that proliferated in that dreadful winter of 1992. “You know, everything our old Soviet leaders told us about communism was false,” says one friend to another. “But everything they told us about capitalism was true.” Or another: What has Boris Yeltsin accomplished in one year that the Communists couldn’t do in seventy years? He’s made communism look good.
But the democratic system created by Gorbachev staggered on. Russia’s Congress of People’s Deputies continued to meet in the Kremlin Palace, and in late ‘92 it forced the removal of Gaidar and required Yeltsin to appear regularly before the Supreme Soviet to explain Kremlin policies. The relationship between the president and parliament, in particular its vain and ambitious chairman, Ruslan Khasbulatov, quickly soured. I remember running into Yeltsin in a Kremlin corridor after he’d given a darkly threatening address, warning “extreme measures” if parliament didn’t start co-operating with him. His bodyguards pushed me and several other reporters out of the way, but the burly leader weaved toward us and embraced a startled Swede of his acquaintance, whom he dragged away for what we later heard was “a few drinks” in one of the ornate anterooms.
The main thing Yeltsin and the parliament fought over was the shape of constitutional reform. The system set up by Gorbachev was highly unstable, with no clear division of powers between the grafted-on presidency and the soviet-style legislature, and a parliamentary committee chaired by Yeltsin was tasked with drafting a new basic charter for the country. Its main author was the committee’s executive secretary, a brilliant, bespectacled legal scholar named Oleg Rumyantsev. When first elected to the Supreme Soviet, Rumyantsev was described in a glowing article by then Washington Post correspondent David Remnick as “the James Madison of Russia.” But as the confrontation deepened and the Bill Clinton administration in the US unambiguously took Yeltsin’s side, Russia’s parliamentarians morphed into “hard-liners” and “communist holdovers” in most Western press coverage. Yeltsin’s domestic supporters, unfortunately parroted at the time by many of my Western journalistic colleagues in Moscow, claimed that the parliament’s constitutional reform project aimed to reduce Yeltsin to a mere symbol, like the Queen of England. Yeltsin, who broke with the parliamentary reform committee and published his own super-presidential constitutional draft in April 1993, argued that Russians needed a single strong leader. “Two bears can’t share the same cave,” he famously remarked.
When the final showdown came in October, Rumyantsev was dragged from the White House by troops and handed over to the police, who beat him badly, much like the treatment Boris Kagarlitsky was receiving on the other side of town. His opposition knocked out, Yeltsin wasted no time in redesigning the country’s institutions, and its basic charter, into the neoczarist shape they’ve held ever since.
As became clear amid the muted eulogies and angry street commentary at the time of Yeltsin’s funeral in 2007, most Russians now blame the old leader for a decade they associate with economic decline, social decay, political drift, and national disgrace. Few, at least in Russia, praised him as any sort of democrat. It seems odd to me, then, that the man Yeltsin hand-picked to succeed him in 1999, ex–kgb agent Vladimir Putin, has been singled out by Western pundits as the main culprit in Russia’s regression into an authoritarian state. Putin, an able man with a genuine, often-expressed passion for modernizing Russia’s economy and military forces, inherited an office with full power to effectively renationalize key segments of the economy, take over media outlets, end popular elections for regional leaders, and make war.
If Russians have been quiescent — even dutifully marching to the polls to endorse Putin’s own hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, last March, and then standing by late in the year as Medvedev pushed through constitutional changes that could see Putin re-elected in 2012 — it’s because the Kremlin’s decisive leadership has been undeniably popular. Relatively good governance, combined with windfall oil and gas revenues in recent years, prompted an economic boom that brought prosperity to millions of Russians and is only lately beginning to peter out. My own family just moved into a house we constructed on the site of our Soviet-era dacha in Razdori, a small village near Moscow, and life has generally become far more comfortable. Among other delights, Boris Kagarlitsky, who now heads an institute that studies global social movements, sometimes meets me for an American-style lunch and leftish political conversation at the Starlite Diner, near the giant Lenin statue where he was arrested fifteen years ago. But most of my friends smile bitterly at official rhetoric that describes the political system as “democracy with Russian specifics.”
The constitution written by Oleg Rumyantsev, which would have given Russia a modern government with effective checks and balances, went up in flames with the White House in 1993. The last time I met the scholar, about five years ago, he was standing alone at a sumptuous buffet in the posh downtown Moscow apartment of the black Russian TV presenter Yelena Khanga, granddaughter of American Communists who came to the ussr in the 1930s. As soon as he saw me, Rumyantsev, still tall, gaunt, and intense, held up his hand. “I don’t discuss politics anymore,” he barked. “It’s a dead end. I’m a corporate executive now, and that’s how I make my contribution.”
