Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (22 page)

Critics of ‘reform’ were right: Russia possessed its own 165

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traditions. But their refrain that, by following the West’s prescriptions Russia had ruined itself, mistook reformist rhetoric for institutional realities.
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The critics, insisting that Russia should follow its own ‘path’, seem not to have noticed that, for the most part, Russia
did just that
. Critics also failed to make plain that, in an unsentimental world consisting of powerful countries with liberal systems, their ‘defence’ of Russia’s institutional traditions condemned Russia’s people to fall well short of their aspirations for prosperity. All cultures, not just Russia, are unique.

Institutions differ markedly just within the G-7. But either a country has some form of an effective regulatory civil service, or it does not. Either a country has some version of a strong judiciary to enforce the rule of law, property rights, and the accountability of officials, or it does not.

Either a country has a reliable banking system to make affordable credit available, or it does not. Russia did not.

And the international power hierarchy (known as the world economy), making no allowances for culture, punished Russia for lacking efficacious variants of such institutions. Russia’s entire economy ($350 billion) was valued at little more than total US health care fraud.

Russia’s institutional landscape defied simple characterization. Democratic but not liberal, it had a constitutionally all-powerful president with limited effective power.

Indeed Russia had more than twenty presidents. It had a boisterous parliament that often rhetorically pined for the days of Communism even though the Communist-era parliament had been a neutered lap dog. It had a federation 166

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without federal buildings in its regions and with regional executives sitting in the upper house of its Federal legislature (until they were kicked out in 2000 by Putin and the lower house). It had a grossly oversized KGB and a grossly undersized judicial system. It had a maze of laws that were not enforced and lacked some of the most elementary laws necessary for its new conditions. Its elites were under constant, illegal surveillance and only became more and more brazen. Its university law faculties became some of the most sought after in admissions, requiring—for those not gifted enough to pass on merit—among the highest illegal under-the-table payments. Its most corrupt politicians were among the loudest campaigners against corruption, while the constant decrying of corruption helped encourage the phenomenon, convincing officials that bribe taking was so ubiquitous there was no point in resisting.

Nowhere were the paradoxes of post-Soviet Russia more evident than in its media. Russia boasted very lively, professional media. Yet much of what appeared as ‘news’ in Russian media was paid for outright, infomercials camouflaged as reporting. Such cosiness might bring to mind American media dedicated to the entertainment industry, but, in Russia, commercial and political interests were able to purchase news column inches or news airtime to promote themselves and attack their enemies, with no acknowledgement of their sponsorship, in the same media that deftly and courageously exposed lies in government reports on the Chechen War, and financial scams tied to the politically powerful. Equally striking, the main 167

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‘private’ television station, NTV, one of the country’s foremost champions of a liberal, market order, took out loans for hundreds of millions of dollars and simply did not pay them back. When a complex combination of the gas monopoly and Putin’s Kremlin forcibly pressed to have the loans paid, they seemed to be trying to eliminate one of their chief critics, rather than upholding the sanctity of contracts, but in fact the two pursuits could not be separated. Freedom of the press, like any other right, can be sustained only when it is adequately and properly financed.

Putin and much of the political establishment around him appeared much more receptive to problems of upholding shareholders’ rights than human rights. That even Russia’s best newspapers and TV stations yielded their integrity for cash and political expediency was widely known, but the country’s media were still valued as indispensable to public life, and they were often the only source of reliable information available in the other former Soviet republics. Similarly, elections took place regularly, and, though subject to financial and political pressures, they were not rigged as in Belarus, Ukraine, Transcaucasia, or Central Asia. In Russia, the advent of democracy without liberalism had done much to reinforce the anti-liberal attributes and chaos of the state, but it also provided important political tools for reconstruction.

Such was the contradictory, yet relatively less discouraging outcome of having to create new institutions when the main ingredients were Soviet institutions, and the country 168

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was not compelled to transform itself to qualify for entrance into the European Union. Ultimately, it was the Russian ambition to compete successfully against the liberal great powers that kept the issue of continued institutional change on the agenda.

Despite a multitude of changes, the post-Soviet social and political environment was littered by giant shards of old elites—a populous factory-director class with extensive interregional connections developed during the planned economy whose weight outweighed the over-hyped oligarchs affixed to the oil sector; a huge KGB and security establishment whose operatives often remained in close contact even if they moved to private ‘security’; and an elephantine Moscow bureaucratic caste mirrored in regional executive bodies. As both the driving force and the debris of a debilitating imperial collapse, these elites lacked the old cohesion provided by ideology, an overarching organization, and an external threat, or new cohesion provided by strong, well-defined political parties or a clear-headed dialogue on the national interest, to say nothing of a sense of civic responsibility. A parade of patchwork ‘anti-Communist’ electoral coalitions, defined each time merely as the ‘party of power’, indicated the absence of effective organization. Entrenched in patronage groups, elites were only tenuously connected to the rest of society, which was itself disorganized.

The country was no longer a dictatorship, and had developed multiple and openly competitive sources of power. But too little of that infighting and contestation 169

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was regulated by the rule of law, and functionaries remained some distance from becoming a civil service.

Uncertain and ongoing, Russia’s predicament demonstrated a number of what should be self-evident truths.

That civil society and a liberal state were not opposites but aspects of the same phenomenon. That government was not the enemy of liberty but its sine qua non. That private property without good government was not worth what it otherwise would have been. In short, that good government was the most precious thing a people could have.

Russia’s challenge was not cultural or economic but institutional, a problem of governability, especially of its governing institutions. This was the same challenge, in countless variations, across much of the contemporary world.

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7

Idealism and treason

Despite oppression, despotism . . . and the privileges of the ruling echelons, some of the people—and especially the Communists—retain the illusions contained in their slogans.

(Milovan Djilas,
The New Class
, 1957) . . . the threat from Soviet forces, conventional and strategic, from the Soviet drive for domination, from the increase in espionage and state terror remains great. This is reality. Closing our eyes will not make reality disappear.

(US President Ronald Reagan,
Soviet Military
Power
, 1987)

For most of its history, the Russian empire was a highly vulnerable great power striving for more than it could achieve, ambitions that were a source of pride but also of great misery. Under the stress of the First World War, the empire disintegrated, yet most of its territory and its great-power mission were revived in a new form, the USSR. The 171

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Second World War brought the USSR deeper into Europe and Asia than Russia had ever been. But the system-against-system competition with the US and its allies strained the Soviet bloc—and its increasingly antiquated interwar physical plant—to the breaking point, a circumstance acknowledged by Andropov and then Gorbachev, and cited by apologists for Ronald Reagan’s military spending spree. Because the follow-on George Bush administration supposedly showed ‘restraint’ as the con-querors of Berlin initiated a humiliating retreat—and the Americans immediately began expanding NATO

eastwards—those officials, too, awarded themselves high honours. The kudos was misappropriated. Gorbachev served up the severed head of his superpower on a silver platter and still had to employ all his artifice to cajole two US administrations to the banquet.
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Soviet socialism lost the competition with the world’s most advanced countries, and could not have won even if it had spent far less on missiles and tanks. The crucial reasons for defeat were not the costly (for US taxpayers) fantasy of Star Wars (the KGB had sounded the alarm well before Reagan came along), but the crucial bipartisan resolve of containment, and, behind that, the Second World War victory over fascism and the post-war capitalist economic boom, consumer revolution, massive investments in social welfare, and decolonization. These momentous shifts meant that Soviet socialism could not provide a better standard of living, a more substantial safety net and just society, or a superior political order to 172

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that of the capitalist, welfare-state democracies. Of course, it was the USSR that lost more than twenty million lives to defeat Nazism. And it was the Soviet example that helped inspire, or frighten, groups in the West to push for the expansion of job programmes, unemployment benefits, pensions, medical subsidies, home mortgages, and public school lunches. And it was American cold-war hotheads who not only opposed the social welfare, but under the cover of ‘national security’ damaged the ultimate weapon of strength: open, accountable, democratic government.
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Just because it could not sustain the multidimensional global rivalry did not mean that the world’s largest-ever police state—with a frightening track record of extreme violence—would suddenly liquidate itself, and, even more unexpectedly, do so with barely a whimper. In the 1980s, Soviet society was fully employed and the regime stable.

The country had low foreign debt and an excellent credit rating. It suffered no serious civil disorders until it began to reform and even then retained the loyalty of its shrinking but still formidable Armed Forces, Ministry of Interior, and KGB. It was falling behind, but it could have attempted a retrenchment without the upheaval of perestroika. If unbearable competition with the US were the foremost concern that guided Soviet actions, why would the Soviet leader have exhausted himself trying to democratize the Communist Party? Why, having achieved deep disarmament, did he widen the political transformation and attempt to revive the radical-democratic system of soviets? Why, once it was clear that the survival of a 173

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centuries-old state was at stake, did the Soviet leader not employ the awesome force at his command and deliver a knock-out blow to the republican drives for independence? Because perestroika was not simply about global rivalry, but also about reclaiming the ideals of the October revolution.

Only in hindsight does the Soviet collapse appear predictable. The
simultaneous
demise of socialism and the USSR could have been foreseen only by someone who knew that socialism was born as non-capitalism and commanded allegiance, dependent on the image and realities of capitalism; that capitalism, and world geopolitics, had changed fundamentally from the interwar to the post-Second World War period to the detriment of socialism; and that lifting censorship would make this evident.

One also needed to know that the Soviet administrative structure, rather than being ‘mono-organizational’, was bifurcated into party and state; that the USSR was both a unitary state and a federation of national states that Moscow had helped foster; and that, although the Communist Party was redundant to state institutions, it was indispensable to the integrity of the Union. Above all, one needed to know that the October revolution was accompanied by deeply felt ideals, which endured all the nightmares, and that a quest to recapture those ideals would not only arise from within the system but, given the above-mentioned institutional arrangements, destroy it.

Astonishingly, perestroika accomplished what even the fantasists in the US national security establishment never 174

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dared to dream, and in the process made a dangerous early 1980s American brinksmanship look good.
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What would the ‘victorious’ Americans have done, or would they even have been around, if the Soviet leadership had decided to utilize its immense war machine to hold power at all costs or to bring the world down with itself ? And after 1991, what would subsequent US administrations have done if post-Soviet Russia had decided to profit, or wreak havoc, by transforming, say, Iran into a nuclear power on a par with France? Expand NATO into Romania? Both the causes behind the peaceful, surprise end of the cold war, and the geopolitics of the post-cold war, were poorly understood in Washington, whether under Republicans or Democrats.

Dissolved by its own ideals and elite

At Moscow University in the early 1950s, Gorbachev’s Czech roommate, Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ, recalled of young Mikhail that, ‘like everyone else at the time, he was a Stalinist’, adding, shrewdly, that, ‘in order to be a true reforming Communist, you have to have been a true Stalinist’. Mlynáršhould know: a former Stalinist, he went on to help draft, beginning in 1966, the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s reformist ‘Action Programme’, which was published in April 1968. By then, Mlynárˇ had become the chief ideologue of the Prague Spring, whose ‘Action Programme’