Speaking to an audience in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill looked almost too serious for the moment. It was March 5, 1946, six months since Soviet Russia helped secure the Allied victory in the Second World War. Yet here was Churchill, ready to pour cold water on the American public’s postwar exaltation. He brought his left hand to his heart. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he began, raising his hand in the air and bringing it down in a swift chopping motion, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” The Cold War was upon us.
Four decades later in Moscow, in the fall of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev was preparing for an upcoming address to the United Nations General Assembly. “In general,” he told his advisers, “this speech should be anti-Fulton—a Fulton in reverse.” Churchill had introduced the intellectual contours of the Cold War. Gorbachev went to the United Nations to announce his nation’s unilateral withdrawal from it.
Politics has seldom enjoyed more prestigious moments than Gorbachev’s speech and the events that followed over the next three years—the peaceful disintegration of an empire and the bloodless transfer of power from the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the first president of the Russian Federation. That transfer occurred 20 years ago this month.
Moments of glory fade. And this 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s end is proving to be barely an occasion for celebration. There seems to be little appetite for triumphal remembrance in the United States, considering that after a period of democratic ferment and hope, Russia is now under the permanent sway of Vladimir Putin. He has spent 12 years as its undisputed leader—eight as president and four as prime minister—and is now to assume the nation’s presidency again, perhaps for life.
And inside Russia? The very notion of celebrating a political triumph like the supersession of a bloody totalitarian empire by a popular government is anathema. When Russia’s soon-to-be ex-president Dmitry Medvedev went on Russian television in late September to take questions on why he was stepping aside from the presidency so Putin could reclaim it, he was asked about the state of political coverage on TV. “The better our life is, the less attention people will pay to that,” Medvedev responded, “because they are more or less happy with their life.”
The veteran Russian journalist Julia Ioffe couldn’t help but let the cynicism flow. She wrote: “No political interview could really be complete without the invocation of the thoroughly post-Soviet premise that politics are bad and dirty, and that the effective decisions are being made without the mess of politics.” Russians were being offered stuff, rather than the responsibility of self-governance: “You, good citizen, may have no impact on the political process, the thesis goes, but you can buy as many iPhones as you want—thanks to the fact that we’re handling all this for you.”
Two days later the results of a new poll by Russia’s primary state-owned public opinion research firm magically appeared and confirmed Medvedev’s words. The top concerns were housing, inflation, and wages. “Democracy and human rights once again proved to be the least important issue for the Russians,” RIA Novosti dryly noted in its write-up of the poll. The Russian people, Ioffe scoffed, “rattled by their brief, post-Soviet taste of democracy,” can acknowledge “that finally, there are no more politics in Russia.”
The story of how Russian politics plunged from the crest of the antitotalitarian wave to dash itself on the rocks of “Putin’s Army”—a team of scantily clad Russian girls who went around Moscow in the summer of 2011 trying to roust up company for their electioneering efforts on behalf of Russia’s dictator—is complex in its details but despairingly simple in its design.
No, most Russian experts will rush to tell you, Putin is not attempting to reconstruct the Soviet Union. He may be a dictator, he may be looking to expand his influence, and he may be strangling the last vestiges of free breath inside his sphere. But what Russia is not scarcely matters. Rather, we should be asking, what is this Russia? And how, exactly, did it get this way?
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On December 25, 1991, the day his rule ended, an adviser put the front page of a Moscow newspaper in front of Mikhail Gorbachev and gave his boss a much-needed jolt. The headline was a quotation from Russia’s Shakespeare, the 19th-century poet Pushkin. “I shall not wholly die,” it read. In a gripping new book on the last day of the Soviet Union (Moscow, December 25, 1991: The Last Day of the Soviet Union, Public Affairs, 352 pages), the journalist Conor O’Clery writes that Gorbachev finished the stanza by heart, with a gleam in his eye.
Gorbachev was, by that day, powerless and unpopular. Legacy was all he had left. And complicating that legacy was the fact that Gorbachev’s crowning achievements—the instigation of perestroika, which opened up Soviet socialism to reform, and glasnost, which permitted public criticism of the regime by offering some transparency—had actually been intended to save what they ended up destroying.
Who deserves the credit for the end of the Soviet Union? Ronald Reagan’s advocates assign him the greatest share—for facing down an expansionist evil empire, for instigating a period of explosive economic growth that left the Soviet Union in the dust, and for applying exactly the right kind of high-tech pressure with the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Reagan’s critics suggest that he was merely in the right place at the right time, a bystander to events that would have happened regardless of his words or deeds. In order to do this, they must prove one of two things: either that Gorbachev, too, was merely a bystander, or that Gorbachev deserves all the credit and Reagan none.
The notion that Gorbachev was merely the last speed bump on the inevitable road to ruin is clearly mistaken; his reforms were sweeping and without precedent and undeniably hastened an end that might have taken decades otherwise. And Gorbachev took his most significant actions not in isolation but rather in response to moves by Reagan. This was a chess match, and Reagan was masterly at setting the tempo. Take the much-derided Strategic Defense Initiative. It was infeasible, his political opponents said. But that was mostly beside the point. As the historian Martin Malia has written, SDI had a profound psychological effect on Soviet leadership:
SDI posed a technological and economic challenge the Soviets could neither ignore nor match. Hence, the only way to defuse the challenge was through negotiation, and so Gorbachev made winding down the Cold War his first priority.?.?.?.?Former Soviet military personnel and political analysts generally agree that the Soviet Union’s inability to keep up its half of the arms race, in particular with regard to SDI, was a principal factor in triggering perestroika.
The development and implementation of Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika explodes the myth that the Soviet Union was on an irreversible path to its own destruction. The seeds of perestroika (literally, “restructuring”) and glasnost (“opening”) were sown during the brief administration of Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev after his death in 1982. Andropov initiated the intellectual inquiry that produced the Novosibirsk Report, a fact-finding inquisition into the structural weaknesses of Soviet agricultural policy in Siberia. Gorbachev was directly involved in the creation of this self-critical report and the dissemination of its results in 1984.
Andropov died in early 1984 and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who died a year later. Gorbachev ascended and quickly introduced perestroika. The term refers to his domestic economic reforms, but the reforms had immediate global significance because the policy was an acknowledgement that the Soviet Union could not afford to keep spending its fleeting cash reserves on defense unless its economy grew.
Accompanying perestroika was glasnost, the partial liberation of the Soviet tongue and pen. Allowing the public to say aloud what it thought of the state of affairs in the Soviet Union was literally revolutionary. It also accelerated the process of reform, because turning the Soviet citizenry into a congregation of witnesses made it impossible for the Kremlin’s hidebound ideologues to reverse policy. And it soon became clear that the Soviet system could not be fixed. The solution to socialist governance was to expose its fatal flaws and replace it.
Gorbachev’s “Fulton in reverse” speech at the end of 1988 tied a brick to the gas pedal of reform. “In light of present realities,” Gorbachev announced, “genuine progress by infringing upon the rights and liberties of man and peoples, or at the expense of nature, is impossible.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan would later call this address “the most astounding statement of surrender in the history of ideological struggle.”
So all credit is due to Gorbachev, even if he didn’t intend to be the hastener of his revolutionary empire’s destruction. He recently celebrated his 80th birthday, and he has lived long enough to see his good name immortalized. That did not seem likely at the time of the Soviet Union’s disillusion, when a man Gorbachev despised—the charismatic first secretary of Moscow’s Communist Party committee, Boris Yeltsin—was the hero of the hour, the day, the year, the man who saved the world from the reinstallation of hardline Communist rule by turning back the tanks almost single-handedly during a failed coup against Gorbachev in 1991.
That hard-drinking man should have been an embarrassment to the Russian people, in Gorbachev’s mind. Yeltsin had urinated on the tarmac of BWI airport on a visit to Washington, D.C. After he became president, his first official meeting with a foreign head of state was with British Prime Minister John Major, who asked Yeltsin to tell him the state of Russia in one word. “Good,” Yeltsin responded. Major was flabbergasted. Russia was an absolute mess, and everyone knew it. So Major tried again. Tell me the state of Russia in two words, he beseeched Yeltsin. “Not good,” came the reply.
So it must satisfy Gorbachev to know that his name has survived the initial judgment of history, while Yeltsin’s disastrous tenure as Russia’s president has seemingly caused his to fade; he died in 2007 with the knowledge that he had failed to bring freedom to his countrymen. But Gorbachev would not be viewed as benign if he had not had Yeltsin serving as the demotic force working to implode the Soviet Union from within. Incautious, brave to the point of foolhardiness, Yeltsin was a true revolutionary. Every time Gorbachev got cold feet and tried to slow the gears of political change, Yeltsin was there to make an impassioned speech—often at great personal and professional risk—that moved the Soviet Union one step further toward the ash heap.
Yeltsin won his popularity fair and square. But a revolutionary insurgent with popular support has only one goal: to tear down the establishment. He had no plan for moving forward after that. Yeltsin settled into the presidency of a country on the verge of total economic collapse, and he managed to bungle the transition to such an extent that he made almost inevitable the current Russian distaste not only for politics but for Western market solutions altogether.
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When the Soviet Union collapsed and divided into 15 republics, Yeltsin was alone at the top of the original Russia, responsible for Russia’s transition to democracy and a market economy. He was hopelessly out of his depth. The decision was made to privatize most of the economy. Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais were Yeltsin’s main advisers on economic matters, and they were tasked with designing the “shock therapy” of privatizing the government’s holdings and freeing prices from state control. Part of the plan was to give every Russian citizen a 10,000-ruble voucher for shares in the newly privatized companies.
The Russian populace had no experience managing any kind of investment portfolio, of course. Many Russians simply sold the vouchers for money or goods. They were snapped up by savvy businessmen, who ended up owning large portions of the companies while many Russians had nothing to show for the privatization of their economy. A few got very, very, very rich—these men became known as the “Oligarchs”—but inflation ravaged the currency, and the resulting capital flight made it difficult to keep the economy flowing. That is when the second act of what the economist Marshall Goldman calls the “piratization of Russia” begins: Loans for Shares.
The Russian government proved uniquely unable to enforce its tax laws. By 2000, the state was collecting taxes from slightly more than 4 percent of those who actually owed them. To raise the money it needed to fund the state budget, the government borrowed money from banks controlled by oligarchs and used shares in still-nationalized energy companies as collateral. Those shares ended up in the hands of the same business superclass. Russia’s government had simply transferred the national wealth into a few private hands to pay the bills. The country had ceased to operate under any known system of economics or politics or law.
But that was all to change when Yeltsin’s trusted deputy, the former KGB director Vladimir Putin, succeeded Russia’s first president over the course of 1999. The new rules became clear almost immediately, and they applied equally to the rich and the poor: Free speech and free enterprise were solely the domain of the state. And that state, by the way, would no longer be pushed around and patronized by the West.
Putin’s various machinations were designed to create a body politic of one—himself—and remove political control from the rest of the population. Putin made no secret of his vision of the proper Russian future before he took the reins of power. While serving under Yeltsin, he was responsible for managing the government’s relations with the outlying regions of the Russian Federation. He told journalists later that the work convinced him that the “power vertical,” in which all political authority was concentrated at the top, had to be “restored.”
After Yeltsin designated Putin as his successor, he ran for president on an explicitly “anti-political” platform. Politics had created the mess and was a cover for thievery and national impoverishment; only a strong hand untainted by political corruption could clean things up and guide the nation with honesty and with an eye toward what was best for the greatest number of people. The clear danger, in the words of Putin’s biographer Richard Sakwa, was that this message could easily lead to a situation in which “the single will of society is represented by the charismatic leader without the necessity of mediating political institutions.” But to Putin that was a feature, not a bug.
The first real test of the new Putin doctrine came in the summer of 1999, when he was Yeltsin’s prime minister. After Islamist radicals in Chechnya invaded neighboring Dagestan, Russia ordered troops back into the restive North Caucasus in what became known as the Second Chechen War. The military response initially had broad public support, inspired at least in part by a series of apartment bombings the government blamed on Chechen militants.
But the war was also poorly planned and managed, and the reports of human-rights abuses by Russian soldiers mounted. Since Putin was largely viewed by then as the main driver of Russian policy, the negative media from Vladimir Gusinsky’s NTV television channel was aimed at Putin. In his time, Yeltsin had not interfered with hostile coverage from NTV. Putin would not have it. One month after being sworn in as Russia’s president, Putin had Gusinsky jailed. After his release, Gusinsky tried again. This time Putin seized Gusinsky’s media company.
Another oligarchical media magnate, Boris Berezovsky, came at Putin with negative coverage and he, too, had his assets seized. Both Berezovsky and Gusinsky fled Russia and now live in exile.
In 2006, a journalist named Anna Politkovskaya came into possession of a video of Chechen security personnel torturing a prisoner. In the video, one of the offenders turns to the other and says: “Putin said it. ‘View it from every angle,’ he said.” She had become the bane of the Putin government, and on October 7 of that year—Putin’s 54th birthday—she was gunned down. More than 100 journalists were killed under Putin’s leadership between 2000 and the end of his presidential term in 2008.
With his ongoing attack on free speech and the press, Putin was making it clear he was trying to force the genie of glasnost back into the bottle. And he proved rather successful at it.
Putin’s restrictions on free speech don’t apply only to journalism. Less than a year after Politkovskaya’s death, the Russia offices of Hermitage Capital Management, a firm that had been critical of the Russian government, were raided. Investigators leveled charges of tax evasion at the company, but Hermitage’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, claimed he had found evidence of police and government corruption. Magnitsky was promptly arrested and held without charge—which is allowed under Russian law for up to one year. A week before Magnitsky was to be released, he died. The cause of death was most likely pancreatitis, an illness he developed in his squalid prison and of which the Russian authorities were well aware. He was simply left to die painfully in his cell.
Putin’s willingness to suppress his Russian critics, like that of the Stalinists who had once been in charge of the Kremlin, did not end at the border. Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB man who accused Putin of orchestrating both Politikovskaya’s murder and the 1999 apartment bombings that provided a casus belli against Chechnya (an accusation that carried weight coming from a KGB officer). He fled to London and was murdered rather sensationally by radioactive poison on British soil six weeks after Politkovskaya was gunned down.
The figure of whom Putin made the most notorious example is Mikhail Khodorkovsky. An oligarch who wrested control of the oil company Yukos from the government in 1996 when its shares were deposited as collateral in his bank, Khodorkovsky is the rare Russian who has challenged Putin’s authority on free speech, free enterprise, and even foreign policy—going so far as to tell Putin to his face, on national TV, “Your bureaucracy is made up of bribe-takers and thieves.” He was arrested in October 2003 on trumped-up charges of tax evasion, fraud, and money laundering. He was convicted in 2005 and then again on additional charges in 2010 in a move so brazen it could not but conjure up memories of the 1930s. His release date is now set for 2017.
It wasn’t enough to merely imprison Khodorkovsky, either. Putin had to seize the means of production. So the government appraised Yukos’s value and then declared that the company owed back taxes in an amount that exceeded that value. It was promptly declared bankrupt, and the government set up an almost exact replica of Loans for Shares in reverse. It organized an auction to pay the taxes it claimed it was owed and rigged the auction so a state-owned company would win.
Yukos stood atop the list of companies Putin set out to reclaim for Russia. Another was Sibneft. Another oil giant, Sibneft was owned by Putin’s old media nemesis Berezovsky. When Berezovsky fled, he was forced to turn whatever assets the state didn’t take directly over to his junior business partner, Roman Abramovich, who was happy to play by Putin’s rules. The state regained Sibneft, and Abramovich remains in Putin’s inner circle to this day.
Other energy companies, such as Lukoil (whose gas stations dot the Eastern seaboard of the United States), promptly and prudently began behaving as though they were owned by the government. Their decisions aren’t made without Putin, and for their obedience they are allowed to remain technically private companies.
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All of this—the restrictions on freedom, the destruction of personal property, the arrogation of centralized power—is a depressing tale of crushed hope, but Russia is in global terms a mere shadow of what the Soviet Union once was. Putin is a tinpot dictator, and they are a dime a dozen. Why does this matter?
It matters for the same reason it matters that Putin worked so hard and so effectively to control the energy companies. By the time he nationalized Yukos and Sibneft, Russia was already supplying half of Europe’s natural-gas imports and nearly a third of the Continent’s oil. By taking charge of the nation’s oil, Putin put himself in a position to reassert a major role for Russia among the world’s powers even though its relative poverty and its panoply of economic, spiritual, and health-related problems should have been enough to isolate it in the second tier.
The major pipeline that sends Russian gas to Europe goes through Ukraine. In 2005, after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution sent Putin’s ally Viktor Yanukovych packing, Putin doubled the price of gas to Ukraine. Ukraine refused to pay, so Putin reduced the supply. Ukraine responded by seizing gas that was on its way to Germany through the pipeline.
Looking for a way out of this mess, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder agreed to a deal with Russia to build a new pipeline bypassing Ukraine. While in office, Schroeder approved a significant loan guarantee for the pipeline, whose shareholders’ consortium formed under the name Nord Stream AG. After leaving office, Schroeder became its chairman. Putin proved to be a master of a new form of crony state capitalism, and in playing his cards so well, he gave himself a strong hand to play in the increasingly complex dynamic of Europe.
In 2008, Russia fought its first war since its Chechen conflict nearly a decade prior, when it invaded Georgia to boost pro-Russian breakaway provinces within Georgia. Russia won the military conflict without too much trouble, but it was clear the Russian military was in need of modernization and equipment and training upgrades. In February, Germany’s main defense company signed a deal to do just that for Moscow by agreeing to build a combat-training center for the Russian military. The project will help Russia close the gap between its military and those of the West.
Russia’s status as a major energy exporter is most troubling with regard to nuclear technology. The country has, since the Yeltsin administration, been aiding Iran’s nuclear development. Cooperation on the nuclear front has only increased under Putin’s leadership, as Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons has increased. Russia helped Iran build its reactor at Bushehr, which became operational this year. Russia also attempted to forestall a report by the UN’s nuclear watchdog that details the military aspect of the Iranian program.
Russia has no interest in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, but has every interest in exacerbating the looming threat posed by Iran’s quest for the bomb. Russia has finagled a place as a major interlocutor between the West and Iran, and therefore Putin’s “cooperation” on the issue must be continually purchased with concessions in other areas.
The Obama administration has helped Russia with what may have been the most disastrous foreign-policy decision of Obama’s tenure: the so-called reset. In return for Russian help with Iran, Obama has discarded plans for a missile shield in Russia’s near-abroad, specifically the Czech Republic and Poland. It has also looked the other way on Russia’s harassment of Georgia and its refusal to abide by the cease-fire agreement that ended hostilities in 2008.
The reset conveniently ignored what the United States had ruefully learned over the previous decade about Putin: He was and will remain an antagonist. He has consistently and without pretense set himself foursquare against the interests of the United States. He opposed the Iraq War, hoping to protect Russian oil deals with Saddam Hussein, and he even continued selling Iraq weapons that were then used against coalition forces. As the West geared up to green-light NATO’s involvement in deposing Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, Putin compared the venture to the Crusades. As Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad continued massacring Syrian civilians protesting his regime, Russia blocked a tepid UN Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s behavior and threatening sanctions.
With Putin thus having solidified his power at home and his influence abroad, his “power vertical” has cast a pall not only over Russia and its neighbors but also on this anniversary of the Soviet Union’s death. Surely Putin would prefer to dim the national recollection of December 25, 1991, and the events that led to it, given his own hunger to restore some semblance of the Soviet Union’s might to his own shrunken domain. And yet we cannot allow the two decades of disappointment that followed to overshadow this one central fact: Christmas Day 1991 was the culminating moment of triumph over a murderous, tyrannous evil that reigned without precedent for more than seven decades, whose leaders killed tens of millions, and whose doctrine enslaved hundreds of millions. This was the greatest liberation in modern history, and it is something for which we should all remain thankful.
