Washington Post - 12.24.2006

Washington Post Sunday "Outlook" Section

RUSSIA: 15 Years Later

Peter Baker	Which Way Did It Go?
Michael McFaul	After the Fall
Stephen Sestanovich	Is It All Yeltsin's Fault?
statistics:	Russia Then and Now

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Which Way Did It Go?

By Peter Baker

Fifteen years ago tomorrow, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Kremlin was hauled down and the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist, replaced by an independent, theoretically democratic Russia and 14 cousin states. But don't look for parades in Moscow to celebrate the anniversary. There will be no fireworks, no national commemoration of the epochal event of the last half of the 20th century.

By contrast, the 100th birthday of the late Leonid Brezhnev last week touched off a wave of nostalgia for the old apparatchik with the bushy eyebrows. Wreaths and flowers were laid at his tomb in Red Square, conferences were held on his legacy, a street and park were renamed for him. A state television correspondent rhapsodized about how he "was quite a hit with the ladies." A poll showed that more than 60 percent of Russians saw the Brezhnev era in a positive light compared with 17 percent who did not.

What to make of a Russia that today grows misty-eyed over a period of tyranny and stagnation while growling that the breakup of one of the world's most despotic regimes in 1991 was, as President Vladimir Putin put it, "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century"? What to make of a country with all the trappings of a Western-style capitalist democracy but the KGB-style cynicism to seemingly reach out and kill a critic in exile using radioactive polonium?

Russia today defies easy characterization. It is not your father's Soviet Union. Everyday Russians enjoy enormous freedom to live as they choose without worrying that neighbors will rat them out for making a joke about authorities. They can travel abroad, start businesses, watch foreign movies and surf the Internet unfettered.

And yet the Kremlin has nearly completed a seven-year project to reconsolidate power and eliminate any serious opposition. It started by taking over television, then parliament, then business. It manipulated elections and then, when that became inconvenient, eliminated voting altogether for the country's 89 governors and now is considering the same for big-city mayors. It has intimidated human rights groups and assumed control of newspapers one by one.

So Russia in some ways appears a little like China, where the economy flourishes with new freedom but politics remain tightly controlled. Or in other ways, it seems like Hugo Ch?vez's Venezuela. Or Augusto Pinochet's Chile. Or all of the above. There was a reason the old monarch was called the Czar of All Russias.

There are many Russias all coexisting together.

The 15-year path from the demise of Gorbachev to the rise of Putin is instructive at a time when Washington is talking about planting democracy in hard soil around the world. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said this month that "it takes time" to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy. If Russia is any guide, it may take so much time that many of us won't be around to see that day.

"There have been some missed opportunities," Rice, who was a Soviet specialist at the White House as the Soviet Union headed toward collapse, told The Washington Post. "There have been some disappointments. It hasn't gone in a straight line. I think that the linking up of energy and politics is pretty troubling. But it's also not the Soviet Union, and personal freedoms are considerably greater than anything that we would have imagined when I was there."

The optimism of those first weeks after the Soviet collapse was infectious. Gorbachev succumbed to the pressures he himself had unleashed with reforms intended to save socialism. President George H.W. Bush hailed the end of the Soviet Union as "a victory for democracy and freedom" and welcomed "the emergence of a free, independent and democratic Russia."

Under Boris Yeltsin, Russia moved fitfully forward, but every advance seemed to encounter an equally powerful setback. Elections brought in a representative parliament only to trigger a tank battle with Yeltsin. State property was divested to private owners only to be stolen by newly minted oligarchs. The borders opened but the economy collapsed. Regions asserted greater autonomy but war broke out when Chechnya claimed too much. By the time an ailing Yeltsin picked a little-known former KGB colonel to succeed him on New Year's Eve 1999, the country was ready for anything resembling stability.

Putin's tough-fisted rule combined with soaring oil prices have transformed Russia. During my last visit there a few months ago, a massive new shopping mall -- the largest, it was said, in all of Europe -- had risen a block from my old apartment in less than two years. Ikea, which opened its first store in Russia the same week Putin was formally elected in 2000 and found 40,000 ravenous customers on its doorstep the first day, had five furniture stores and eight malls with plans for 11 more, making it the second-largest landlord in Moscow. Russia is swimming in money; its economy has grown fivefold under Putin, from $200 billion to $920 billion, and the once-destitute government has paid off its international debt in full and early.

Yet that wealth has not trickled down throughout the entire country, and even where it has, a sense of unease remains, a feeling of something lost. A recent poll by the Levada Center found that 15 years later, 61 percent of Russians regret the fall of the Soviet Union. I saw that repeatedly during my years in Moscow. Once at our own dinner table, a seemingly Westernized, 30-something Russian friend argued that the Soviet days were not so bad and that Stalin would be remembered as a hero.

And Brezhnev, who ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982, has been recast as a father figure instead of the last major figure of the Communist gerontocracy. "In 1982, I could not have imagined in a nightmare that Brezhnev's birth centenary would be marked with such great interest," Vladimir Averin, a host at Moscow's Radio Mayak, said on air recently. "What is happening today is an emotional and sometimes aggressive attempt to counterpose -- everything was good then and it is bad today with this democracy and multiparty system. Here is an unexpected message: We had an ideology at the time and this is why everything was good, but we do not have any ideology today, which means that we cannot live well."

On the Yezhednevnyy Zhurnal Web site, the last vestige of an independent media empire systematically dismantled by Putin early in his presidency, Anton Orekh wrote that Russians were mainly nostalgic for the illusion of stability that Brezhnev provided. "People remember that wonderful feeling of not having to worry about anything because it was all decided for you and you had simply to live peacefully, go to work and pick up your wages," he wrote. "Give the people peace and quiet, immerse them in nirvana and they will celebrate your 100th birthday with pleasure."

As long as they remain peaceful and quiet, the Russian people can live relatively unbothered by the state today. Those who try to influence their country in a significant way, however, risk harassment, prison or violence. The killing of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning in London has captured attention in the West, but he is only the latest person out of favor to fall into harm's way.

In the last year alone, Marina Litvinovich, a former Kremlin adviser who had joined the small remaining political opposition, was attacked on the street in what many regarded as a politically motivated assault; hit on the head from behind, she lost two teeth, her leg and back were injured, and her face bloodied and bruised. Marat Gelman, another ex-adviser to the Kremlin who helped create a faux opposition party to foster the illusion of political competition in 2003, was beaten and his art gallery torn apart by 10 masked men. His offense: hosting a show by a Georgian artist at a time Russia was at odds with Georgia.

The list goes on: Anna Politkovskaya, the most prominent Russian newspaper journalist who had earned an international reputation for crusading coverage of atrocities in Chechnya, was gunned down in her apartment building on Putin's birthday. Opposition leaders such as chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov have been targeted by raids or financial investigation. When Kasparov and Kasyanov helped organize a rally last week, authorities sent 8,500 police officers to keep an eye on 2,000 protesters, some of whom were beaten.

Nor was Litvinenko the first to be targeted outside of Russia. Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned and his face horribly disfigured before he led the Orange Revolution and became president of that former Soviet republic two years ago. And Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed by a bomb attached to his car in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, where he had fled. With U.S. help, the Qataris caught and convicted two Russian intelligence agents in the murder.

Whether Putin orchestrated such incidents remains murky, of course, but they are a standard feature of the Russia he has built. Putin even introduced a law passed in July permitting assassination of terrorists and enemies of the state abroad. Within the complex, factionalized world of Kremlin politics, any number of figures may have decided that such actions were to their advantage. And with Putin facing a constitutional term-limit end to his presidency in 2008, the struggle for power is well underway and seems to be playing out in macabre and indecipherable ways.

One theory of the Litvinenko case circulating in Moscow, for instance, holds that some in the faction of KGB veterans arranged the killing to make Putin look bad in the West, thereby pressuring him to try to remain in power beyond 2008 because he might fear the consequences to himself of stepping down. Twisted as that may sound, the fact that it seems plausible to many in Moscow says a lot.

At stake is not just political power. Putin's top lieutenants generally serve not only as cabinet ministers or Kremlin aides but also as chairmen of various state-controlled companies, giving them access to multibillion-dollar empires ripe for plundering. Lose the Kremlin and lose access to those accounts.

Little wonder, then, that Russian officials bristle when lectured by the West about democracy. As Rice said, it has not been a straight line since that promising moment 15 years ago -- and it doesn't look likely to straighten out soon. In Putin's view, the lamentations over democracy are a Cold War leftover, another way to keep Russia down. "There are devoted Sovietologists who do not understand what is happening in our country, do not understand the changing world," he said earlier this year. "There is no need to argue with them. They deserve a very brief response: 'To hell with you.' "

Peter Baker, The Washington Post's co-bureau chief in Moscow from 2001 to 2004, is co-author of "Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution" (Scribner).

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After the Fall

By Michael McFaul

When a powerful state disintegrates, the result is usually conflict, anarchy or even civil war. So the relatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union -- once the world's largest empire, most brutal regime and most menacing threat to Western civilization -- and the subsequent peaceful end of the Cold War probably ranks as the most remarkable achievement of the 20th century. It was truly a case of "Armageddon Averted" as Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin titled his brilliant and succint book on the Soviet Union's final two decades and the aftermath of its demise.

Of course, destruction of the old regime is always easier than construction of the new one. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia's first post-Soviet leaders faced three enormous challenges.

First, they had to define the borders of the new state. Would the new Russia be confined to the borders of the Russian Republic within the USSR, or would the country include the millions of ethnic Russians living just beyond its borders? Second, they had to rebuild the economy. How does one dismantle a command economy and build markets after 70 years of state domination? Finally, Russia's new leaders had to create a new political system. Was Russia suited for democracy, or would another form of autocracy be more suitable for Russian traditions and expedient for the task of economic reform?

And one more thing: They had to tackle all three challenges at the same time.

Fifteen years later, borders have been defined, some kind of capitalism has taken root, and the project to build democracy is far from finished.

However, the degree of progress in these various arenas -- and who deserves blame or praise for the results so far -- remains a matter of debate, as various outstanding and polemical books and essays show.

Regardless of specific borders, Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to expand Russia's influence throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union -- a task made simpler by his country's status as the largest economy and most powerful military in the region. But the coercive subjugation of states and peoples adjacent to Russia's borders is a thing of the past. With the exception of Chechnya, Russia's borders are now well-defined. Thousands of lives have been lost in conflict throughout the former Soviet Union as a result of the Soviet dissolution but, as Dominic Lieven of the London School of Economics explains in "Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals," Russia's decolonization of the old Soviet republics has been relatively peaceful compared with the collapse of the French, Ottoman or Portuguese empire.

Like the USSR itself, the Soviet command economy is also extinct and will never rise from the dead. And while economist Anders Aslund was derided by some for publishing a book titled "How Russia Became a Market Economy" as early as 1995, few today would question that Russia has indeed made serious strides toward introducing a market system.

It's a system, however, that remains flawed. In their book "Russia's Virtual Economy," economists Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry William Ickes describe firms in Russia even today that fail to create value yet do not go bankrupt, a perverted legacy of the Soviet system. These unprofitable large industrial enterprises never adopted nor were compelled to adapt to market conditions, and therefore continue to impede the emergence of genuine capitalism in Russia.

Journalistic accounts, such as "Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism" by Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times and "The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia" by The Washington Post's David Hoffman, introduced personalities and drama to the abstract economic debates, revealing how a handful of individuals used their connections to the Russian state to amass fortunes. Meanwhile, economist Andrei Shleifer and UCLA political scientist Daniel Treisman saw less virtual and more virtue in the Russian economy, as they explained in their 2004 Foreign Affairs article "A Normal Country." In their view, Russia's economic and political development looked like that of a normal middle-income country, not a gangster or criminal state: more Brazil, less Colombia.

In August 1998, the Russian state went bankrupt and the Russian economy crashed. Journalists and politicians began searching for the answer to John Lloyd's famous New York Times Magazine article in August 1999, "Who Lost Russia?" Yet Russia has hardly disappeared in the new century. Indeed, since 2000, its economy has grown at an average of 6.5 percent a year. Real wages have skyrocketed, consumer spending is exploding, and unemployment and poverty are declining. Russians as a whole, not just the oligarchs, are richer today than ever before in their history.

The one unfinished transformation in Russia lies in the political realm. The autocratic institutions of the Soviet regime are long gone, but democratic ones have not filled the vacuum.

Some have argued that democracy will never succeed in Russia, because Russians are genetically predisposed to worship the czar. "The Agony of the Russian Idea," by UC-San Diego sociologist Tim McDaniel, makes this argument most convincingly, but cruder versions float around in Washington think tanks and in some Kremlin-friendly circles in Moscow as an excuse for Putin's authoritarian ways. In "The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms," Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski blame former Russian president Boris Yeltsin for the nation's autocratic drift, highlighting his October 1993 shelling of parliament, his changes to the constitution granting the president extraordinary powers, and the Chechen wars. Others (myself included) argue that the concentration of political power in the Kremlin today also results from the autocratic policies of Putin. During his time in office, all independent media with national reach have been eliminated, the parliament has become a Kremlin rubber stamp, governors have grown subservient to Moscow and opposition leaders have been pushed to the margins of political life. Putin can pursue such measures all the more vigorously because of the money pouring into his pockets from soaring oil and gas prices. Berkeley's M. Steven Fish does a thorough job of sorting through these competing arguments in "Democracy Derailed in Russia."

Some contend that growing autocracy in Russia may not be the cause of Russia's economic growth but rather a consequence of the nation's energy profits. Three promising young Russian economists, Georgy Egorov, Sergei Guriev and Konstantin Sonin, make this case convincingly in a paper titled "Media Freedom, Bureaucratic Incentives, and the Resource Curse."

Ultimately, if there is any relationship between autocracy and economic growth in Russia, it's probably negative. There are growing signs that the Russian state does not offer an invisible hand guiding the market, but rather acts as a "grabbing hand" seizing property from the oligarchs and redistributing it to Putin's KGB cronies. That concept was first made famous by economists Andrei Shleifer and Timothy Frye in their 1997 American Economic Review article "The Invisible Hand and the Grabbing Hand."

The real story of today's Russia is how a loose network of former KGB officials, tied to an obscure mid-level KGB officer-turned-accidental president, has managed in just seven years to seize control of every state institution worth controlling and the dozens of major companies worth owning. In "Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution," The Washington Post's Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser capture the beginning of this narrative, but the definitive account has yet to be written -- because the story is still unfolding.

In the meantime, to follow the story day to day, there is no better English-language source than Johnson's Russia List, an online mailing compiled by David Johnson of the World Security Institute that can come to your inbox daily. Just write to davidjohnson@erols.com to sign up.

Michael McFaul, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is co-author of "Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Post- Communist Political Reform" (Carnegie Endowment).

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Is It All Yeltsin's Fault? 

15 Years Later, the Legacy of a Russian Reformer

By Stephen Sestanovich 

"Great historical transformations are always bought dearly, often after one has already thought that one got them at a bargain price," wrote the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt. Tomorrow marks the 15th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the occasion will surely revive debate about how high the price really was.

Many commentators will say this event and the hardships that followed permanently colored the ordinary Russian's view of democracy and gave Vladimir Putin his chance to build an authoritarian alternative. A few will even argue that the whole effort was a mistake -- that "reform communism" would have been better than the mess we've ended up with.

Was Boris Yeltsin the gravedigger of Russian democracy? The indictment against him looks strong. If you give people reason to link democracy with economic privation, political corruption and the trauma of national dismemberment, lots of them will miss the stability of the old order. (Some will miss Joseph Stalin!) And it isn't much of a response to say that this wasn't what you intended.

Yet, before we throw Yeltsin to the historical wolves, it's important to remember that the terrible conditions Russians associate with him were not just the result of his policies but also their cause. The Soviet Union collapsed because ethnic separatism, economic decline and political paralysis were severe problems before Yeltsin came to power. Moderate Communist reformers -- even as they eased repression and censorship -- couldn't do a thing about them.

In the summer of 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was at the end of his rope trying to manage the Soviet Union's contentious ethnic politics. To suppress movements seeking independence for the Baltic states, he had ordered tanks into the streets. There had been ethnic pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan, and a lunatic nationalist professor of literature had become president of Georgia. Gorbachev had patched together a new "union treaty" to redistribute power between Moscow and the non-Russian republics, but the most important of them, Ukraine, was having none of it. In December Ukrainians voted to leave the Soviet Union. The Chechen parliament had already done the same thing.

Gorbachev's efforts at economic reform were also failing. Long before the curtain came down on the Soviet Union, the ruble had begun a steady slide toward worthlessness, selling at several times the official exchange rate on the black market. Food disappeared from the shops and foreign exchange from the treasury. Gorbachev's own policies tacitly authorized theft of state property; enterprises were told to balance their books even if it meant selling off their assets at a discount. The first "millionaires" appeared at this time: They took advantage of "gradual economic reform" by setting up "exchanges" to trade in stolen goods.

There was no political consensus on how to handle any of this. Some of the Communist old guard still believed in ideas that Yuri Andropov had espoused early in the 1980s as he rose from running the KGB to running the Kremlin. Discipline, he insisted, would solve everything. But in the course of the decade, the elite lost confidence in this answer, and many joined the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators calling for an end to the Communist Party's monopoly on political power. Gorbachev became an increasingly lonely figure and "reform communism" an irrelevant idea.

At the end of 1991, Yeltsin was the only Soviet politician with a popular mandate to act. He was the democratically elected president of Russia. No one else was in a position to deal with the three crises that had broken his predecessor -- ethnic division, economic chaos and a failed political system. But did his response end up weakening Russia's democratic prospects?

His first and most dramatic step -- agreeing with the president of Ukraine and leaders of other Soviet republics to dissolve the Union -- still gives Russians nostalgic pangs. Even so, history's verdict is likely to be that it was Yeltsin's most important achievement and a piece of simple good fortune for his country. By disbanding the empire, Russia freed itself from a gigantic burden on its national energies. It shed responsibility for countless problems that it could not possibly have managed well, and it reduced the risk that popular politics would turn into a Milosevic-style dictatorship.

By not trying to prevent Baltic or Ukrainian independence, by not being the arbiter of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, by staying on the sidelines of other conflicts, Yeltsin greatly reduced Russia's involvement in post-Soviet violence. His success can be measured in part by looking at those cases in which Russia did not fully turn its back on empire. It propped up separatist enclaves inside Georgia and Moldova and sought to crush radical separatism in Chechnya. The results were predictable: quasi-criminal satrapies, military brutality, deeper ethnic hostility. Had the Soviet Union been kept intact, we'd have seen this pattern everywhere.

Yeltsin's second step -- the economic program known as "shock therapy" -- will be judged less favorably. But the verdict may say little about his own responsibility for the fate of Russian democracy. The elements of Yeltsin's program that look most unwise today -- above all the privatization policies that left a large part of the state's most valuable industrial assets in the hands of a very small number of owners -- were not the main source of popular unhappiness with him or with Russian democracy. What embittered people was the squeeze on their living standards and the acute anxiety created by years of high inflation. Given the situation Yeltsin and his team faced when they took over, there may have been no way to make the transition to a modern economy anything but painful.

History's harshest judgment about how Yeltsin handled the Soviet collapse may be reserved for the way he dealt with the question of political power. At a moment when he was still the towering figure of Russian politics, he was not bold enough to insist on creating new democratic institutions. He left the Soviet-era constitution in place as well as the Soviet-era parliament, while he handled other problems. The KGB was renamed but barely reformed.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these choices. By 1993 Yeltsin was back to fighting with parliamentary leaders about changing the constitution and holding new elections, not to speak of salvaging something of his economic reforms. He was, ironically, almost completely in the right, but by then his victory had to be purchased by force.

As for the KGB and the other coercive institutions of the Soviet state, reforming them was a project to which Yeltsin never returned. The consequences are with us still.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University. He was U.S. ambassador at large for the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001.

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