More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
With figures at hand, he showed that the Soviet economy was heading toward an abyss. In 1988 he wrote an article called “The Foundation Pit,” borrowing the title from the novel by Andrei Platonov, in which socialist workers dig out a giant foundation pit to build a house for the entire proletariat: the deeper they dig, the more futile their work becomes, sucking out their energy and their lives.28 The novel had been written in 1930 but was not published until 1987.
The Soviet Union made twelve times as many combine harvesters as America did but harvested less wheat.
As far as Gaidar was concerned, there was no point in trying to retrace one’s steps, just as there was no point in fantasizing about a painless transformation from a socialist economy to a capitalist one. The situation in which the Soviet Union—a superpower with nuclear arms—found itself in the late 1980s simply had no historical precedents.
This was the opposite of what was happening in China, where economic reforms were happening under authoritarian rule. But in June 1989 the Chinese way led to Tiananmen Square. The Soviet way led to the first democratically elected Congress of People’s Deputies, which proclaimed “all power to the Soviets.” What had long been an empty slogan suddenly became reality. Moscow was letting go of the centralized system and dissolving its own power.
With its cloak of mystery torn into pieces, authority was irreversibly seeping from the Kremlin. As Sakharov wrote at the time, “The congress has cut off all the roads back. Now it is clear to everyone that there is only the road forward or ruin.”33 As it happened, it was both: the road forward led to ruin.
Belonging to the same breed as Nina Andreeva, they were usually known as Homo soveticus and had little in common with Soviet reformers such as Alexander Yakovlev. These were two different species.
The narrative of avenging the humiliation of the 1990s, “imposed on Russia by the West,” would become the centerpiece of the restoration ideology of Vladimir Putin. In fact, this “humiliation” was imposed not by the West but by those who cultivated the idea of Sovok and by Putin himself.
The dissipation of fear was one of the most important results of the perestroika years.
If anyone had a reason to feel fearful in 1990, it was the party and the KGB, which were fast losing control over the situation in the country. Faced with mass rallies outside the Kremlin, the Communist Party was forced to abolish the sixth article of the constitution that guaranteed its monopoly on power. The KGB—the “combat division” of the Communist Party—was also under pressure. By 1990 the liberal media, with Moskovskie novosti in the vanguard, turned its cannons on the KGB. Watching the party surrender its political monopoly, many KGB officers felt disoriented and exposed.
‘Never mind: you will go to these KGB guys, cross one leg over another and look at them with your silly eyes—you will see they will tell you stuff that they would never tell any man.’ It worked.”
He told her how in 1989, in Dresden, he had burned documents, fearing that an angry crowd could storm the KGB headquarters at any moment. When the crowd appeared outside the building where Putin worked, he came out to talk to them: “These people were in an aggressive mood. I called our group of forces and explained the situation. And I was told: ‘We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’”
“Maclean said: ‘People who read Pravda every day are invincible.’ People who are well informed and get their information from different sources inevitably start thinking,” Kalugin explained.
Then, without the slightest pause, Gorbachev switched back to the present. “I think my greatest task is to take the country through perestroika without a civil war. Some casualties are inevitable. Here and there someone gets killed—you can’t get away from this. But to use force, weapons—that is a different matter. I will not do it.”
In May 1990 Yeltsin was elected president of Russia—the largest and most important of the Soviet republics—and a month later, on June 12, 1990, Russia’s Supreme Soviet followed the example of Lithuania and voted for Russia’s sovereignty, even though nobody knew what this really meant. The idea of Russian sovereignty seemed absurd. As Chudakova noted in her diary at the time, “Who is Russia seeking sovereignty from, the polar bears?” But then she added, “Perhaps this is an ugly and strange way of overcoming several decades of nonhistoric life.”9
Faced with mounting pressures—both economic and political—Gorbachev dithered. His attempts to reconcile Yeltsin’s program of economic liberalization with retention of state control predictably yielded nothing but more frustration. Yeltsin, fed up with Gorbachev’s unwillingness to face reality and agree to urgent reforms, threatened a complete secession of Russia from the Soviet Union—effectively a liquidation of the USSR.
The fact that the fighting occurred over a television tower was a tribute to the power and importance of television as a way of controlling the minds of the people. To prevent the bug from spreading to Russia, the KGB had reinforced its forces with its own information offensive, led by the television paratrooper Alexander Nevzorov.
Not a single Lithuanian was interviewed in the film. For Nevzorov’s purposes, the enemy had to be collective and anonymous: “I was very sincere then. I defended our soldiers not from the position of a Soviet man, but from the position of a Russian patriot. To support savages who rise against your country is not in the tradition of a Russian patriot.”24
Nevzorov set the precedent of the new information offensive that was to be repeated many times over subsequent years, including during Russia’s conflict with Georgia in 2008 and then again, with tenfold vigor, against Ukraine in 2014.
Gorbachev said he was asleep when the attack took place and blamed it on the local authorities.
For the generation of Yegor Yakovlev and Moskovskie novosti, the events in Vilnius were a breaking point that annulled everything they believed in and had worked toward since the beginning of perestroika. It turned out that socialism with a human face was an illusion after all—the only things that could hold the regime together were the violence and lies pouring out from state television screens.
“The energy they used to have was gone, and the world around them was no longer their world. And most important, they did not know how to relate to this world. It was the feeling you see at the traditional gatherings in Russia forty days after someone dies. No one is crying anymore, but no one knows quite what to say. These birthday gatherings had always been such celebrations. Now it was just silence, a complete breakdown.”26
Two days later, at 4:50 p.m., a group of coup leaders arrived in Foros in the Crimea, where Gorbachev was vacationing, to tell him he had a choice—either to resign or to support the self-appointed Committee for Emergency. “Yeltsin’s been arrested. He’ll be arrested,” one of the group told Gorbachev. “Mikhail Sergeevich, we demand nothing from you. You’ll be here. We’ll do all the dirty work for you.” Gorbachev told them to get out.30 Soon his lines of communication, including those by satellite, went dead.
The bells were tolling for the USSR. The television center was put under the control of the KGB. Gorbachev was under house arrest in Foros.
However ridiculous the coup might look in retrospect, the heroism of the forty thousand people who stood by the White House in the rain that night was real, as were the deaths of the three young men who were dragged under the tanks’ treads in a tunnel under the Garden Ring Road across from the American embassy.
For the first time in Soviet history, the state apparatus—armed with tanks, nuclear rockets and the largest military in the world—capitulated before its unarmed citizens. Vasily Rozanov, a nineteenth-century philosopher, wrote after the revolution of 1917 that “Russia faded away in two days—three at the most.”33 So did the Soviet Union.
Ironically, the man who prevented the crowd from attacking the building was Alexander Yakovlev, the man most hated by the KGB. Standing on a makeshift podium and cheered by a jubilant crowd, Yakovlev sensed that “a critical moment was approaching,” he recalled.
The death of the regime was accompanied by a series of suicides. Marshal Akhromeyev, Gorbachev’s military adviser, was found dead with a rope around his neck and a stack of suicide notes on his desk. Pugo, the interior minister, shot himself and his wife minutes before investigators came to arrest him. A man who oversaw the finances of the Central Committee jumped out the window. There were a dozen other suicides in the first postcoup days.
Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin respected the rule, made by Stalin’s heirs after his death, not to use violence against members of the ruling elite.
A decade later Russia would be ruled by a KGB officer who would project his sense of defeat and humiliation in August 1991 onto the rest of the country.
Neither Gorbachev nor even Yeltsin as Russia’s first president had any coherent plan or idea of what kind of a country would succeed the Soviet Union.
How can one be glad of an ending if there is no beginning to follow or if the beginning is too hazy? For now, it is still a funeral.” Kabakov called his article “A Ghost at the Feast.”38
I would not want the righteous anger against totalitarianism to be exploited by those who are entering the stage as an excuse not to follow God’s commandment ‘Honor your father and your mother so that you can live long on this land.’”40 Above all, he argued, do not distort reality. Facing the past was one thing; reinventing it was quite another. “Christ tells people to return from the imagined world to reality and from the imagined self to one’s actual self. A return to God is possible from any real place—however shameful and disgusting, but not from an imagined one—because we are not there.
...more
Unlike Yegor’s generation of reformers who grew up in the “fireglow” cast by the revolution, their children had no reverence for their fathers’ generation. They did not suffer from Hamlet’s urge to redeem their fathers or to carry on their deeds. First, their fathers were still alive; second, they were bankrupt, both intellectually and financially.
Yegor sensed the generational shift personally and acutely because it occurred within his own family. His son Vladimir Yakovlev was the founding editor of Kommersant, the first and most formative newspaper of the nascent capitalist era, which became the manifesto of the “sons’” generation. A true journalist, fond of an effective ending, Yegor marked the signing-off of his last issue of Moskovskie novosti in 1991 by interviewing his own son.
For all the openness of the Soviet print media, factual information was the privilege of the powerful. Telephone directories were classified. To get a telephone number for a government office, an embassy, or a cooperative, one had to have connections in the right places.
People flocked to Vladimir’s office, which had been set up in an accordion store, and paid him one ruble for information on anything from restaurants to plumbing, or ten times that much to offer their own services to cooperatives that were on Fakt’s database.
“What we did was antijournalism, from the point of view of my father’s circle. Theirs was journalism of opinion. Ours was journalism of facts,” Vladimir told me.5
Post-Communist Russia lacked its own serious language to describe the biggest transformation of the century. Words such as truth, duty and heroism had been completely devalued.
The fact that Sokolov’s articles were for the most part impenetrable for Kommersant’s main audience—the nascent class of businessmen more versed in prison slang than obscure Latinisms—was actually a selling point. It created a sense of exclusivity and belonging among the new rich.
A week later, in the Markets & Exchanges section, Kommersant editorialized, “An attempt to stage a coup by a group of people on August 19 was so short-lived that it has not had an impact on the prices of goods that were defined by orders placed beforehand.”13
The fact that this new life was a pure invention did not bother him. “The common reproach that Kommersant lies a lot is irrelevant,” he wrote. “It does not matter. What matters is that it lies confidently and beautifully.”
“Moscow in December 1991 is one of my most painful memories. Grim food lines, without their usual squabble and scenes. Pristinely empty shops. Women rushing about in search of food to buy. Dollar prices in a deserted Tishinsky market. An average salary of seven dollars a month. Expectations of disaster were in the air.”15
On January 2, 1992, Gaidar removed the state regulation of prices for most products, which led to a threefold increase in the price of food, revealing an inflation previously hidden by shortages that now wiped out people’s nominal savings. Destroying worthless ruble savings was the only way to make money work again. A few weeks later Gaidar lifted restrictions on trade, allowing people to sell anything anywhere.
The people who sold bread and butter on the street did so not because they were broke but because they were allowed to trade.
“The most important quality in a newspaper is not its information or emotions but a sense of social belonging. You pick up a newspaper, and you feel part of a certain class,” Vladimir Yakovlev explained.16 The paper appeared first; the class came later.
The early 1990s was a wild and entrepreneurial time, when anything seemed possible. The state was weak and private initiative strong. It was, perhaps, the freest time in Russian history. As Vladimir Yakovlev said, “We were like kids in a kindergarten with real machine guns.”18
In the early 1990s, though, nobody asked questions about the ethics of doing business. “There were no rules,” said Nusinova. “A businessman was driven or stopped only by what was inside him. Some people thought it was okay to steal, but not okay to kill. Some people thought it was okay to kill, but not to touch family members.”
In some ways they were victims of Soviet propaganda that portrayed capitalism as a cutthroat, cynical system where craftiness and ruthlessness were more important than integrity, where everyone screws each other and money is the only arbiter of success.
The turmoil in 1991 brought to the surface not the hardest working but the most impertinent. “Men with a ruble” were the biggest winners of the Soviet transition to capitalism and the main beneficiaries of the mass privatization.
“We were perfectly aware that we were creating a new class of owners,” Chubais explained, “and we did not have a choice between an ‘honest’ privatization and a ‘dishonest’ one. Our choice was between ‘bandit Communism’ or ‘bandit capitalism.’”25
