Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (24 page)

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ruthless determination to uphold the empire, or, even after the situation had ceased to be salvageable, had indulged in malice or lunacy. Much had changed in the world since the 1940s, but the bloodbath of Yugoslavia’s demise in the 1990s certainly gives pause. Historically, such a profoundly submissive capitulation, as took place in the Soviet case, was a rarity.
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Less ‘reform’ than ongoing collapse

The complacency attending the Soviet collapse was matched only by the chutzpah among outsiders, such as officials of the Reagan and (first) Bush administrations, in pirating credit for it. And outsiders’ arrogance only grew in relation to post-Soviet Russia. President Clinton’s Administration awarded itself a prominent role in guiding the Russian ‘transition’. But this characteristically American self-promotion, which involved relentless ‘pro-consul’

visits to Moscow, soon became embarrassing. Eventually, even the White House began to understand that Russia would not become a liberal polity or secure market economy overnight. ‘Blame’ for Russia’s ‘failure’ was craftily shifted to the International Monetary Fund (whose organizational chart had the US Treasury Secretary at the top).

The IMF had much to answer for, of course, but the more important point was that the role of Washington and the outside world—during both the ‘credit’ and the ‘blame’ phases—was absurdly exaggerated. Mostly, the 185

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self-assigned role of the West in ‘promoting’ but not financing with direct investments Russia’s ‘transition’ had the effect of empowering anti-Western sentiment inside Russia, and anti-Russian sentiment in the West.

Russia’s reform conundrum, beyond achieving a difficult macroeconomic stabilization, entailed the need to create altogether new state capacity, including the root-edness of the state in organized social constituencies and individuals’ identities, when a massive and dysfunctional anti-liberal state, alongside a non-market and time-warp economy, was the chief inheritance from the USSR. That is why, at the most basic level, Russia did not undergo sustained liberal reform; it was simply not possible, given the social and institutional landscape inherited from the Soviet period, as well as the loss of the limited constraints that had been in place on state officials. The discourse of ‘neo-liberal reform’, which presupposed near complete extirpation of the Soviet era, did have the effect of moving political battles (and to an extent, socio-economic structures) more quickly to the question of the proper forms, rather than the very existence, of private property and the market. Of course, ‘reform’ also galvanized initially disoriented, and very large, Soviet-era interest groups. Raising expectations wildly proved to be a self-defeating endeavour. Ultimately, it was ‘reform’, rather than the Soviet inheritance, that took the blame for the country’s lingering woes. At the same time, however, the 1990s cannibalization of the Soviet era amounted to a kind of ‘reform’, imparting some severe lessons and painfully 186

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opening the way for new, albeit still circumscribed, possibilities.

To put the matter another way, the Soviet collapse
was
a collapse, rather than an overthrow (as in Poland), and, in post-Soviet Russia, the collapse continued.
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Outside a rich and spectacularly renovated Moscow, and cities in Moscow’s orbit, the slide proceeded apace throughout the 1990s. Long-distance trains and urban mass-transit systems still functioned, but Soviet-era hospitals and schools were decaying or closing, while power grids were ageing and not being replaced. In more remote areas, Soviet-built airports were overgrown with weeds and riv-erboats rusted along once popular routes to dilapidated summer camps. Russia’s Soviet-era prison complexes, bulging with over one million inmates at any given time (more than in the entire Soviet Union during its last decade), had to handle up to five million detainees who passed through the system annually, at least 100,000 of whom suffered from drug-resistant diseases, which spread to the rest of society. Alcoholism, which also did not begin in 1991, affected up to twenty million Russians, one-seventh of the population. Life expectancy at birth was in decline (essentially since the 1970s), and the population was shrinking. Untreated toxic wastes continued to flow into contaminated rivers and water tables.

‘No other great industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, water, and people,’ two analysts wrote of the Soviet Union, adding of Russia that ‘no advanced society faced such a bleak political and 187

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economic reckoning with so few resources to invest toward recovery’.
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Doubtless the most spectacular dimension of the collapse was the disintegration of the world’s largest-ever military—as if the old televised maps depicting Soviet capabilities had been a mirage. The Union’s break-up was one cause of the military’s crumbling: many systems, such as Soviet-era radar and air defence systems, were largely unsalvageable, since they were integrated structures with indispensable parts spread in different republics. Lack of money was equally responsible. In 1989, the USSR built seventy-eight submarines and ships; a decade later, Russia built four, one of which, the Kursk, blew itself up and sank.

Almost all the weapons still produced by the radically downsized military-industrial-complex were for export, since foreign customers paid for deliveries. Much of even the intact equipment Russia inherited from the Soviet period had to be abandoned for want of spare parts and maintenance. Suddenly, Sweden’s navy was estimated to have three times the strength of Russia in the Baltic Sea, and Turkey twice the strength of Russia in the Black Sea.

In the Far East, the Russian navy essentially ceased to exist, rusting in port. In ground forces, Russia inherited 186

Soviet divisions, about two-thirds the number that had existed back in 1985, but by 1996 Russia had just thirty divisions—on paper. At most ten were battle ready. Security issues, like the environmental and health quagmire, were as pressing as political and economic changes.

Meanwhile, police troops of the Interior Ministry had 188

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ballooned to twenty-nine divisions, and the tax police as well as the new Emergency Ministry personnel were militarized, like US SWAT teams, as if Russia were fighting a society-wide domestic war.

While Soviet-era buildings housing the ministry of defence and the General Staff were jammed to capacity by members of the still immense military establishment, army conscripts were fed dog food, and sadistic hazing became so violent that commanding officers stopped going near the barracks; anyway, who had time to supervise troops when shovelling manure on the side to feed one’s family?

Desertions and evasions of call-ups numbered in the tens of thousands. In 2000, President Putin, who had begun a career in the KGB right when it had started secretly warning of the country’s nosedive, and whose subsequent life experience had revolved around the failure to institutionalize market capitalism in St Petersburg, promised to arrest and possibly even reverse Russia’s decline. Perhaps he would succeed—he did manage an important tax overhaul in 2000, creating incentives for business activity and transparency. But that same year, having worked over many months trying to sort out infighting among the top brass over the direction of military ‘reforms’, he announced that troop strength would be cut from 1.2 million to 800,000, even though the mobilization for the second Chechen War (in 1999) had turned up well under 100,000 grunts, so that ‘contract fighters’ had to be hired. Putin’s spokesman then rescinded even the announcement that reductions of non-existent troops had 189

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been agreed to by the generals. Crucial military ‘reform’, in other words, was a lot like 1990s economic ‘reform’: a mixture of breast beating over what needed to be done, all-out resistance to common-sense initiatives, and embezzlement of what allocations were made.

News reports, meanwhile, of interdicted nuclear smuggling (exclusively from civilian sites), missile command posts disrupted by ‘entrepreneurs’ prospecting for the marketable copper contained in cables, and strategic rocket forces staging strikes over wage delays demonstrated over and over that this was no ordinary collapse. It would be better for all concerned if Russia had professional, disciplined armed forces that could guarantee its security and reliable control over its weapon stockpiles, including approximately 1,300 tons of highly enriched uranium as well as between 150–200 tons of plutonium.

(Around eight kilograms are sufficient for a bomb.) Weapons elimination or secure storage was, far-sightedly, being funded by the US, but only partially.
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Russia also had the world’s largest assemblage of chemical weapons, 44,000 metric tons. (A single phial of sarin gas caused terror in the Tokyo subway.) In 1993 Moscow signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the Duma ratified in 1997, agreeing to destroy its arsenal within ten years (with a possible five-year extension), but finances remained a pipe dream.
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Finally, Russia had plenty of experts who knew how to manufacture biological weapons.
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In fact, its tens of thousands of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons scientists and tech-190

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nicians, acting with or without the government’s blessing, could have altered the strategic balance of any world region. ‘Only the intense pride and patriotism of Russian nuclear experts has prevented a proliferation catastrophe’, concluded a team of concerned scientists, who added that, ‘virtually everything else in Russia is for sale’.
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Whither Russia? Eurasia. But whither the world?

In 1983, one perceptive scholar, surveying the hollowing of Communist ideology, predicted that Russian nationalism ‘could become the ruling ideology of state’.
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A decade later, warnings about nationalism became highly fashionable. But such warnings went unfulfilled. To be sure, Boris Yeltsin had sought to rally liberal nationalists with his campaign for Russia’s rebirth, which, however, turned out to be more collapse. Hardline nationalists drifted toward the re-established, ageing Communist Party, whose cynical leader, Gennady Zyuganov, had conveniently been away ‘on vacation’ when the president bombed the parliament in October 1993, and returned to fill the void in the ‘opposition’. A chauvinistic grouping, led by the media clown Vladimir Zhrinovsky, also gar-nered a limited protest vote, for a time, while a handful of avowedly fascist associations, some affiliated with the re-constituted Communists, engaged in sporadic acts of violence, most of which went unpunished. But the pundits, 191

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mesmerized by rhetoric and confusing the existence of chaos with the possible onset of powerful dictatorship, were wrong: the much-feared red–brown (Communist– fascist) coalition failed to materialize. Chauvinistic nationalism, as well as a potentially helpful liberal nationalism, remained weak, disorganized political forces in Russia. When Leninism committed suicide, essentially nothing took its place. Except ‘transition’ and ‘reform’.

Palpable regret over the dissolution of the Union did not signify a desire, generally understood to be futile, to bring the past back. But because the ‘greatness of Russia’

had been fused with Communist ideology, a colossal void opened. In 2000, Russia was still without words to its post-Soviet national anthem. President Putin agreed to bring back the Soviet-era anthem, for which new words were written. The music had first been introduced in 1943, and provided inspiration in the war against Nazi Germany.

Putin also brought back the red Soviet flag—but only for the Russian army, and without the hammer and sickle.

The red flag had flown over the captured Nazi Reichstag in 1945. That defining episode in Russia’s climactic history, in many ways the pivot of the twentieth century, was emotionally what endured from the Communist epoch.

For fascism to come to power in Russia, it had much to overcome psychologically, never mind that millions of stormtroopers or squadristi were nowhere on the horizon, and that the populace, still though generally unburdened of Soviet ways of speaking, wanted what it had desired before perestroika began: a mixed economy, political 192

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liberalization with limits, and a state that ensured public order and some measure of social justice.

Only five countries, which were already better off and which were close to and willingly emulated Germany/

Austria or Scandinavia—Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Estonia—managed a first rush of liberal reform, and were poised for a second push (greatly aided by European Union accession and its requirement of institutional ‘harmonization’).
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Even the touted cases of Latvia and Lithuania resembled the disasters of Ukraine and Belarus (both partially subsidized by Russia), though the Caucasus and Central Asia were still worse in their economic and political involution. The one exception of comparative well-being in the East was the city of Moscow and its surrounding region, whose population and wealth exceeded that of all the (relatively) successful countries except Poland. Thus, Russia was struggling, but it had a megalopolis whose extraordinary concentration of talent and material resources helped partly compensate for institutional shortcomings. And, relative to its immediate neighbours, Russia was in far better shape, a very sad commentary on the others. Indeed, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the collapse, the cheering for the end of the Union had given way in a majority of former Soviet republics to sober reflection. But circumstances had dictated that the Union, minus the three Baltic states, could not have been saved, in order to be transformed, without substantial bloodshed.

The modern world is not a democracy of nations but a 193

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hierarchy, as anyone whose country is not among the richest and most powerful could readily attest. Only breathtaking naïvety allowed both Gorbachev and Yeltsin to assume that Moscow would be admitted to the elite club of nations out of sympathy, or on its own terms. Putin seems more sanguine, harbouring no illusions about ‘partnership’ with the US and identifying Russia’s interests, properly, with Europe, though not at the expense of its interests (and former markets) in Asia, from Iraq and Iran to India, China, and the Korean peninsula. The problem is that Russia is generally outside processes of world integration. Of the world’s three main blocs, two of which partially overlap security systems, and all three of which have the US as a centrepiece—NAFTA; Pacific Rim/US–Japan Alliance; European Union/NATO— Russia has no prospect of joining any. But, even though it is geographically farther from the heart of Europe than at any time since the eighteenth century—with the exception of its Kaliningrad enclave—Russia’s best hope, as a great power and a dignified country, is probably to try to join the euro.