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June 3 - November 12, 2023
The city was awash with twenty-five-year-old men wearing slick suits and black shirts and announcing their occupation as “a little buying, a little selling.”
The first to appear on the scene was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an unabashed neofascist who won six million votes—almost 8 percent of the electorate—in June 1991 when he ran against Yeltsin and four other candidates for the Russian presidency. Just after the coup, I watched Zhirinovsky at a parliamentary session at the Kremlin deliver two hour-long monologues to clumps of fascinated deputies in the corridors. He rambled on, picking up so much speed as he described his imperial ambitions that he showered his listeners, and the television cameras, with little sprays of spit: “I’ll start by squeezing
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“The democrats have failed to use their power. Look at how they struggled for power and how much they promised. There were even statements that the Russian president would lay himself down across the railroad tracks if living standards went down. Well, now they’ve gone down fifty percent! The tracks must be occupied.
A ten-page report drafted by the police and security ministries and submitted to Yeltsin in 1993 described how senior military officers based for years in the former East Germany have been involved in huge embezzlement schemes. The officers set up their own companies to buy food and liquor, had them transported as military supplies, and then sold them on the free market in Poland and Russia. Sales were estimated at a hundred million Deutsche marks—fifty-eight million dollars.
