Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin

Boris Kagarlitsky

Description

Russia has undergone more seismic changes over the last 100 years than almost any other country. The 1917 Revolution, the rapid industrialisation of the 1930s, the following devastation of the Second World War, and the present return to Capitalism has seen the deep impoverishment of the entire population.



Kagarlitsky shows how to understand these changes, and how to characterise the complex process of reform, revolution and counter revolution.



Looking in detail at the nature of Russian society and politics since 1990, Kagarlitsky offers an introductory political analysis of the major political and economic developments that have taken place under President Yeltsin, and the legacy he bequeathed so unexpectedly to his successor Putin. He focuses on the role of the media in post-Soviet Russia, corporate structures and their influence on social conflict, the formation of the oligarchy and the role of the left in modern Russia.
Foreword - Introduction

1. The Inevitable Reaction

2. The Russian Intelligentsia between 'Westernism' and 'Patriotism'

3. The Rise of the Yeltsin Regime

4. Word and Deed

5. The Corporatist Model and Social Conflict

6. The Post-Soviet Left

7. The Road to Default

The Twilight of the 'Second Republic'

8. The Drift to the Left (1998-1999)

9. The War of the Kremlin Succession

10. The Putin Regime

Conclusion - Notes - Index

Sujets

• Russie
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• History
• Russia
• 20th century
• International relations
• Modern history
• Histoire
• Modern

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849640657
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Boris Kagarlitsky

Russia Under Yeltsin and Putin

Neo-liberal Autocracy

LONDON • ST P ERLING, VIRGINIA Pluto Press

First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Boris Kagarlitsky 2002

The right of Boris Kagarlitsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1507 0 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1502 X paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kagarlitsky, Boris, 1958- Russia under Yeltsin and Putin : neo-liberal autocracy / Boris Kagarlitsky. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1507–0 (hard) — ISBN 0–7453–1502–X (pbk.) 1. Russia (Federation)—Politics and government—1991– 2. Russia (Federation)—History—1991– I. Title. DK510.763 .K345 2002 947.086—dc21 200100617

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0807 06 05 04 03 02 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, England

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I

The Making of Yeltsin’s Russia

1 The Inevitable Reaction 2 The Russian Intelligentsia between ‘Westernism’ and ‘Patriotism’ 3 The Rise of the Yeltsin Regime

Part II

A Monarchist ‘Republic’

4 Word and Deed 5 The Corporatist Model and Social Conflict 6 The Post-Soviet Left 7 The Road to Default

Part III

The Twilight of the ‘Second Republic’

8The Drift to the Left (199–899) 9 The War of the Kremlin Succession 10 The Putin Regime

Conclusion Notes and References Index

vi

1

13 50 77

105 133 159 188

205 223 251

280 290 299

List of Abbreviations

APR CPSU FEP FNPR GkChP GKOs GRU GUO IMF KGB KPRF KRO KSPR LDPR MFP MRP-PDP

NATO NDR NKVD NPG OVR RAO EES RASP RKRP RSDRP RSPP SOTSPROF SPS SPT USSR VTsSPS

Agrarian Party of Russia Communist Party of the Soviet Union Foundation for Effective Politics Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia State Committee for Extraordinary Situations state bonds military intelligence Directorate of Security International Monetary Fund Committee of State Security, Soviet secret police Communist Party of the Russian Federation Congress of Russian Communities Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Russia Liberal Democratic Party of Russia Moscow Federation of Trade Unions Marxist Workers’ Party–Party of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat North Atlantic Treaty Organization ‘Our Home is Russia’ Stalin’s secret police Independent Union of Miners of Russia Fatherland–All Russia United Energy System of Russia Russian Assembly of Social Partnership Russian Communist Workers’ Party Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Federation of Socialist Trade Unions of Russia Union of Right-Wing Forces Socialist Party of Workers Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Soviet Trade Union Council

vi

Introduction

Historians who study the Russia of the 1990s will inevitably face three questions: how to characterize the processes occurring in our country during this time; how to define the periods into which these processes should be divided; and, lastly, what assessment to make of the society that emerged out of these processes. Western journalists, as well as neo-liberal ideologues and the politicians who were running the country from 1991, were united in describing what was happening as ‘reform’. The label stuck, and to avoid all use of it is now impossible. But if we look at the realities of the period, ‘reform’ is almost the last word we should be tempted to use in order to describe what was going on. ‘Reforms’ are normally understood as limited changes, aimed at preserving the state and the social system. In Russia, we have unquestion- ably undergone a change of system. As for the state, the Soviet Union ceased to exist in the first stage of the ‘reforms’. Western leftists of the 1970s also used the term ‘reform’ in a more radical sense, speaking of structural reforms and even of reforms aimed at systemic transformation. It is true that reforms were never implemented in the sense the left theoreticians had in mind. But the most important thing is that the concept of systemic reform, if it does not presuppose a continuous process, at least presumes respect for existing institutions, and a minimization of violence. What took place in Russia was totally different. There was neither respect for institutions (especially during the years 1990–91 and 1992–93), nor a desire to avoid bloodshed. Some writers have characterized what happened as a bourgeois, democratic or even ‘criminal’ revolution. Hence, for example, the politician and researcher Oleg Smolin argues that, during the 1990s, Russia lived by the laws of revolution, and that ‘the political leaders were subordinated to the objective logic of revolutionary development, often finding themselves in the position of the hero of literature who, after releasing the genie from 1 the bottle, was unable to contend with it’. Smolin’s view can only be accepted if, like the writers of the first half of the eighteenth century, we consider any radical political overturn to be a revolution. Russia in recent years has witnessed a series of such overturns – in 1991, in 1993 and in 1998–2000. At first glance, these episodes beg to

1

2 RUSSIA UNDER YELTSIN AND PUTIN be compared with revolutions; in each case, old institutions were destroyed. The leaders of Yeltsin’s Russia, however, avoided making comparisons with the revolutions of the past, and in this they were absolutely correct. Revolution involves more than radical changes. Unlike transformations ‘from above,’ revolutions are made by the masses. The participation of millions of people makes a revolution an elemental process subject to its own laws (the statistical regularities of mass consciousness), a process which cannot in practice be controlled by the usual methods. It is precisely this mass participation that gives rise to the ‘objective’ logic of which Smolin speaks. In Russia in the 1990s (unlike the Soviet Union in 1988–991), the masses either did not participate in the process of change, or actively opposed it . In 1993 they tried to storm the Ostankino television centre; in 1994 they went on strike; and in 1998 they blocked railways by sitting on the tracks. This mass resistance, however, was limited and sporadic, quite unlike the revo- lutionary waves of the past and, no doubt, the future. For all the incompetence and savagery of the rulers, the political process remained totally controlled and, on the whole, predictable (all that was needed was to understand the goals and interests of the contending elites). Historical tradition, of course, includes the concept of ‘revolution from above’, and as Antonio Gramsci described it, ‘passive revolution’. Historical changes whose time has come, and which have not been carried through by the mass movement, are finally implemented by the elites, though in a half- hearted manner. ‘Revolution from above’ is almost always authoritarian. While carrying out the tasks of the revolutionary movement, it simultan- eously acts in the fashion of counter-revolution where this movement and the democratic hopes of the masses are concerned. Even such terms as ‘revolution from above’, however, cannot be applied to Yeltsin’s Russia. Historical tradition, both positivist and Marxist, makes a close association between the concepts of revolution and progress. Liberal and social- democratic critics of revolution have maintained that, in the overall historical perspective, revolutionary movements, by trying to force the pace of progressive changes, have instead slowed them down. Marxists, by contrast, consider revolutions the ‘locomotives of history’. Both, however, see an unbreakable bond between social progress and revolutionary explosions. It is possible, of course, to reject the very idea of ‘social progress’ as ‘outmoded’, as ‘having failed to justify itself’ and so on. But if this is done, then together with the concept of ‘social progress’ the category of ‘revolution’ must also be thrown overboard, along with a large number of the categories which social science has employed over the last two hundred years. Meanwhile, the most important point is that nothing better than the idea of ‘social progress’ has so far been put forward as an alternative. To describe the changes in Russia in the late twentieth century as ‘progress’ is something the tongue simply cannot manage. In the course of ten years the country suffered an unprecedented economic collapse – one of

INTRODUCTION 3 the most profound peacetime declines in all of modern history, matched or exceeded only by the declines in other fragments of the former Soviet Union. In 1999 it was calculated that in the best circumstances, simply to regain the level of 1990, the last ‘pre-Yeltsin’ year, would take at least a decade. Between 1991 and 1998 overall agricultural and industrial production fell by half. Even in the relatively prosperous oil industry, output was down by 44 per cent. Capital investment in 1996 was a mere 23.8 per cent of the 1990 level, even though the Soviet economy was already suffering from an investment shortage. Technological backwardness intensified. Most tellingly, the population experienced a sharp fall, the result both of increased death rates and of declining numbers of births. During the period of the Civil War, from 1918 to 1920, the Russian population fell by 2.8 million. During the years of Yeltsin’s ‘first presidency’ alone, from 1992 to 1996, the decline was 3.4 million. Economists are united in describing the course of events as 2 ‘regression’. During a revolution, production generally falls and people suffer. The economic shocks, however, open the way to establishing new social rela- tionships, which create new conditions for economic growth and ensure the development of education, providing broader masses of the population with access if not to power (most revolutions, as we know, have ended with dic- tatorship), then at least to modern modes of life. The main sociological significance of revolutions lies in the fact that they dramatically increase the vertical mobility of the population. What happened in Russia was precisely the opposite. Society became more elitist, and in the sense of the social dynamic, less democratic. Education went into decline, while the main economic and social structures that had triumphed in 1992 and 1993 could never have been called progressive, either from the point of view of capitalist criteria or from that of socialist theory. What occurred in Russia between 1990 and 1999 was not ‘reform’, still less ‘revolution’. It was Restoration. This restoration was the natural con- 3 tinuation of the political cycle began by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Yeltsin’s Russia, proclaiming itself the successor to tsarist Russia, reproduced many features of the old society’s backwardness. The restoration regime was in many ways a parody, a farce. Its leaders were comic, almost like characters in an operetta. But millions of people who were subject to their power were not in the least amused. If the French Revolution took twenty-six years to complete its path from the rise of the democratic movement to the restoration of the Bourbons, the analogous process in Russia took far longer. Contrary to accepted opinion, historical processes have not accelerated particularly with the appearance of the mass media, since ‘historical tempi’ are determined not by the speed of transmission of information, but by the dynamic of mass consciousness, which has not changed so much compared with the nineteenth century. In so vast a country as Russia, and with econcomic, social and cultural changes of extraordinary depth, the process could not help but proceed slowly. Most

4 RUSSIA UNDER YELTSIN AND PUTIN importantly, the Stalin regime succeeded in doing something that no other post-revolutionary dictatorship has even managed. Thanks to its totalitarian technologies, Stalinism was able to put Russia in political cold storage for two and a half decades. France, which became the classic country of political struggle, provided us with the terms and ideas that we use to analyse most revolutions. On this level, Russia, despite all its peculiarities, is not an exception. Overall, the historical dynamic of the Russia revolution repeats that of the English and French revolutions. The period from 1917 to 1929 was one of revolutionary dictatorship, when, as Lenin himself defined it, the Bolsheviks acted in the role of ‘Russian Jacobins’. Then, with Stalin’s victory over the ‘old Bolsheviks’, there began the Thermidorean period from 1929 to 1941, as described by Trotsky. From 1941, the Stalin regime’s Bonapartist traits became increasingly pronounced. This was expressed in a reconsideration of the attitude to tsarism in Soviet historiography (especially to such figures as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great), in a reconciliation with the Orthodox Church, and in the partial restoration of old titles, rituals and symbols (for example, epaulettes and the rank of general in the army, ministries instead of ‘people’s commissariats’ and so forth. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the system began an agonized search for new political and economic mechanisms that would ensure it success in its rivalry with the West. From 1959, the Soviet economy began experiencing difficulties, and growth rates declined. Ultimately, however, there were no radical changes. The result was defeat in the Cold War and, as a result, restoration. The events of the 1980s and 1990s can also be readily divided into several periods. ‘Stagnation’ under Leonid Brezhnev was followed by a struggle for power lasting several years, and then by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. After that, the collapse of the Soviet system began. The crisis of 1989–91 was the system’s death agony. The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) still existed, but every republic was already living its own life. Gorbachev was still reckoned to be president of the union, but behind him there now loomed the figure of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s Russia was founded as a state in the course of the months from August to December 1991. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was disbanded, and the place of the party nomenklatura was taken by a motley assemblage of ‘democratic’ politicians, who in 1989 or 1990 had won positions in free elections to the soviets (it is a separate matter that many of the ‘democrats’ had come from the very same nomenklatura). After the agreement on the liquidation of the union signed by Yeltsin at Belovezhskaya Pushcha in December 1991, the new state no longer existedde facto, butde jure. By analogy with Weimar Germany, the state established under Yeltsin can be called Belovezhskaya Russia. The years 1992 and 1993 can be described as the Gaidar–Khasbulatov period. This was the time when the authorities, on the initiative of Yegor Gaidar, implemented the first wave of neo-liberal reforms. Gaidar was

INTRODUCTION 5 initially vice-premier in charge of economic policy, and later acting prime minister. In December 1992 he left the government, but remained the chief ideologue of the ruling group. Meanwhile, the opposition was concentrated in the same soviets which in 1989 and 1990 had provided Yeltsin with his power base in his struggle with the CPSU and the ‘union centre’. The Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, was thus as natural a leader for the opposition during these years as Gaidar was for the neo-liberals. The opposition to the regime was chaotic and unstructured. At this point only a minority of the population was opposed to the authorities, but it was an active minority. Correspondingly, the opposition scene was dominated by radical, activist parties, large and small. The largest and most influential of them was the Russian Communist Workers’ Party (RKRP), headed by Viktor Anpilov. This was a left-traditionalist, Stalinist grouping, but it had a culture of direct action; its members were ready to fight the militia on the streets, building barricades. At the same time, the young left intelligentsia was trying to unite around the Party of Labour. In the autumn of 1993 members of both parties, despite sharp theoretical differences, joined forces on the barricades around the White House. On the social level, this period saw the ascendancy of mindless ‘new Russians’, rapidly enriching themselves through the plunder of state property, and just as rapidly killing one another off. Might this be called a period of primitive accumulation? For the entrepreneurs, yes, but not for the economy. What was occurring was not the strengthening and consolidat- ing of capital and enterprises. On the contrary, powerful productive structures were disintegrating, in order to allow the flourishing of primitive brokering operations and of banks that at times still operated on the level of medieval usury. There are no grounds whatever for maintaining that the money and property accumulated by the ‘New Russians’ during this period became capital in the full sense. The distinguishing feature of capital is its ability to grow, and of the capitalist enterprise, its capacity for expanded reproduction (which distinguishes it from a feudal undertaking). Nothing of the sort was to be observed in Belovezhskaya Russia. Private property had triumphed, but not all private property is capitalist. As opposition to the regime grew dramatically stronger in the autumn of 1992, a drawn-out political crisis began. Gaidar soon left the government, to be replaced by Viktor Chernomyrdin, but, despite some waverings in January and February 1993, the regime’s course did not change; this was confirmed by the return of Gaidar to the government on the eve of the coup d’état of autumn 1993. This coup, however, marked the political end not only for Khasbulatov as the loser, but also for Gaidar as the victor. Decree no. 1400, with which Yeltsin put an end to representative authority in Russia, was the culmination of the regime’s struggle against the institutionalized opposition. After the shelling of the parliament, the active resistance was broken. The period of

6 RUSSIA UNDER YELTSIN AND PUTIN the destruction of institutions and of the chaotic division of property drew to a close. In December a new constitution was put into force, establishing new rules of the game. The Yeltsin regime took on the more or less stable form of the ‘second republic’. In these conditions, Gaidar’s ‘cavalry charge’ was no longer needed. The cautious economic manager Viktor Chernomyrdin moved to the forefront, and acquired real power. ‘We’ve always stolen, and we always will steal’, Chernomyrdin 4 proclaimed. Now, however, the thievery would be different. Not confused, disorderly and slapdash, but deliberate and according to definite rules. As Brecht once observed, there is no comparison between robbing a bank and setting up a bank. The years from 1994 to 1998can be characterized as the Cher- nomyrdin–Zyuganov period. If Chernomyrdin was the face of the authorities, Gennady Zyuganov was the face of the opposition. The ‘new Russians’ were still getting drunk in restaurants and killing one another, but they were no longer the people controlling the economy. In Russia, oligarchic capitalism was being established. Financial flows, the mass information media, raw materials resources and political influence were becoming concentrated in the hands of a few dozen ‘families’, of which the most influential was the Kremlin ‘family’ taking shape around Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. Against the background of a continuing decline in production there was a certain stabilization of the system, a sign of which became the ‘strong national currency’, maintained at the level of 5–6 rubles to the US dollar. In the larger political picture, there was only one opposition party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). All the rest were either gradually shrinking into insignificance, or turning into KPRF satellites. This was an opposition that played by the rules, that was part of the system, that was pseudo-parliamentary (since parliament, in the shape of the new Duma, had no power). Unlike the situation in 1992 and 1993, when a minority was campaigning actively against the neo-liberal course, the discontent was now passive, despite being almost universal. The outcome of political struggles was no longer decided on the streets, and neither, in the final analysis, was it decided in elections either; the elections merely reinforced the relationship of forces that was being established. Political struggle was taking on an abstract, virtual character. Ivan Zasursky, perhaps the outstanding student of the post-Soviet press, 5 termed this the ‘mediation of politics’. Events took place mainly in government offices, while the population was assigned the role of observers, and of objects of information manipulation. This period of the ‘second republic’, a happy enough time for many, came to an end in 1998 and 1999. The crisis of the existing order began with the weakening of the ruble in the spring of 1998 under the impact of the Asian economic collapse. At that time the ruble was successfully propped up, but the fiery letters on the wall were now easily discernible. The departure from the scene of the highly experienced Chernomyrdin and the advent of the new,