This past
week Russian media devoted a great deal of attention to the thirtieth
anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR under the terms of the Belovezha
Accords signed by the presidents of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus
on 8 December 1991.
A new
documentary film entitled “Thirty Years without the Union” prepared under the
direction of Kremlin insider, journalist Naili Oskar-zade was released by state
television’s Channel One seven days ago.
Then last night, another full-length documentary film entitled “Russia, Its
Most Recent History” (Россия, Новейшая История”) was also prepared within
Channel One and was aired on the news channel Rossiya 24. Contributors to the
production included a number of top journalists – directors who have worked
closely with Putin in the past on other documentaries, in particular, about
Crimea’s “coming home” in 2014. . It is now available on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtUNgEC8XM
Both
documentaries have in common an oral history aspect. They combine not only
archival footage going back to the 1990s but also present new interviews with
surviving participants in the events of that period, including heads of state
like Kazakhstan’s now retired president Nazarbayev, as well as senior Russian
military and statesmen.
In what follows, I will draw on my impressions
from this second film and put them in the broader context of the current
informational atmosphere in Russia which is marked by greater frankness about
the errors committed in the past by Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin and by a
more accusatory tone about the role of the United States and its Western allies
in the destruction of the Russian economy and subversion of its political unity
during the 1990s. We are reminded of the
poorly conceived and implemented economic reforms under Gorbachev that left
store shelves bare. But that was only the first step on the country’s descent
into hell. The newly applied fine touches in the documentary film to the broad
canvas of the impoverishment and destitution of the Russian people that we have
known for years show that even rear admirals and Vladimir Vladimirovich himself
were compelled to sit behind the wheel as gypsy taxi drivers to keep their
heads above water financially at the start of the transition to the market
economy, while the country’s top scientific talent queued before the American embassy
to get migration visas and a new future outside Russia, taking with them much
of the cutting edge proprietary research they had done at government expense.
The film
“Russia, Its Most Recent History” fine tunes the long-existing attacks on
former Soviet President Gorbachev for unforgivable naiveté in his dealings with the United States and its Western allies as the
Cold War wound down. The Red Army was withdrawn from East Germany and from the
Warsaw Pact countries, but Gorbachev did not consider reserving at least one
base in each of these countries to ensure Russian security interests were
respected, nor did he demand appropriate financial compensation for the
withdrawal to provide housing and necessities to the troops arriving back in
Russia. We are told that all of this was achievable had Gorbachev done his job
properly, defended Russia’s legitimate interests and not been content to bask
in the warm reception he enjoyed in Western capitals and media. Nor did
Gorbachev do anything to secure the civil rights of the large Russian minority
populations of the Baltic States as they entered upon withdrawal from the Union
when the West would surely have agreed.
This sober
and accurate critique of decision-making by the widely discredited Gorbachev is
now matched by equally devastating criticism of Yeltsin for negotiating terms
of the break-up of the USSR by which Russia did not use its leverage with the
other Union republics. We are told that Yeltsin was drunk during much of the
Belovezha meeting. If only he had kept a cool head, he could have demanded of Ukrainian
president Kravchuk the cession of Crimea back to the Russian Federation. But
his only interest was to achieve the dissolution as quickly as possible, and so
to take over state power from Gorbachev, who would face a fait accompli and
have to leave office.
The film suggests that it was Yeltsin’s lust
for power that drove the dissolution, which was not necessary for implementation
of the political and economic reforms that he stood for. That judgment is surely
a step too far in this revisionist account.
The interview with Nazarbayev sets out the grievances of the leaders of
the Central Asian republics that they were excluded from Belovezha, that it was
the three Slavic republics who alone decided the fate of the Union. Of course, that was the case: it was common
knowledge that the Central Asian republics would be the strongest foes of any
democratization and market reform of the Union and so their signatures on the
dissolution papers were not sought.
The exposé and open denunciation of Yeltsin from the Kremlin itself is new in
Russian public space. We must remember that loyalty to the man who installed
him as president at the close of 1999 has long been an inviolable postulate of
the Putin administration. It was left to others, like the film director and
television host Nikita Mikhalkov to show the treachery of the Fifth Column
liberals who were brought into government in the 1990s and protected by Boris
Nikolaevich.
The film
“Russia, Its Most Recent History” is Putin-centric. It features a lot of footage of Putin out and
about, speaking to the people when he was head of the FSB, conferring with the
military during the Chechen wars. It
also draws on the latest interviews with Putin to put past and present in
focus. This most recent Putin is assertive and very confident of Russia’s
ability to stand up to all challenges from the West based on its leading
position in weapons systems and the patriotic pride of troops and people. It is
not from nowhere that the Kremlin was quoted today as warning NATO that “there
will be consequences” if it ignores Russia’s demands and continues its eastward
expansion, and that these consequences will weaken Western security.
The film
jumps back and forth in time during the 1990s to make its basic points about
how under Yeltsin Russia’s sovereignty was compromised, how with the
intervention of Western sponsored NGOs the collapse of the Russian Federation
itself was being fomented. I do not deny
that these elements all were present in that decade, but the decade itself was
not uniform in the various parameters of economic performance and pauperization
of the population, on one hand, or loss of an independent foreign policy on the
other hand. There were turning points
that we must not ignore.
For the
economy, the free fall collapse of GDP, unpaid salaries and pensions, total
destitution and runaway inflation lasted until 1995-1996, when a certain
stabilization took effect. In fact during the 1990s the middle classes rose and
fell several times, when bank failures and state default wiped out savings, but
the decade ended on a high note set during the brief but effective premiership
of Yevgeny Primakov. Similarly, Russian foreign policy rose from the total
disarray and submission to Washington under Andrei Kozyrev, to resumption of the
pursuit of national interests under the same Primakov two years previous when
he replaced Kozyrev as foreign minister in 1996. Russia and the West parted
ways during the NATO assault on Yugoslavia and there was no looking back. All of these distinctions are ignored in the
latest Russian documentaries that have a propagandistic rather than historical
interest guiding them, even if they make valid points about Russia’s
exploitation by cunning Western statesmen in the 1990s.
Finally, in
closing I draw attention to a couple of recent noteworthy public positions
taken by President Putin with respect to the Fifth Column operating in the
country, even if was not named as such.
First there was the remarkable public exchange this past week with film
maker Alexander Sokurov during the on-line session of the Human Rights Council.
Sokurov had been arguing in favor of letting go those republics of the Russian
Federation which want out. Putin at
length denounced such positions as ignorant, founded on a misreading of the
popular will in such places as Dagestan and Chechnya, and having as a practical
consequence to turn the Russian Federation into Yugoslavia during its descent
into civil war. It is worth noting that Sokurov has long been promoted among
the liberal intelligentsia of Petersburg by Hermitage Museum director Mikhail
Piotrovsky. It will be interesting to see whether the public belittlement of
Sokurov will move his patron and friend any closer to the exit door.
In the past
week Vladimir Putin also leveled an oblique criticism at Russia’s liberal
protesters against the Foreign Agent registration law. Their cause has been
openly led by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Dmitry Muratov,
editor in chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Muratov was in Oslo delivering
his acceptance speech and so was getting a lot of attention in Moscow.
Putin chose
to make the point that the country must be vigilant against those receiving
funds from abroad who are wittingly or otherwise serving foreign interests to
the detriment of Russia. In this spirit,
he remarked that in the 1990s the government was filled with foreigners working
for the CIA, and he made reference to one egregious case: two Americans who
were close assistants of Anatoly Chubais in his work at the head of the
privatization program. Said Putin, they were on the CIA payroll and were later
found by U.S. authorities to have violated their contract and enriched
themselves during their stay in Russia, causing damages of $34 million to the
U.S. government. Putin went on to say that their time in Russia was so
personally profitable that they could pay an enormous fine without difficulty.
The telling
of this story is quite extraordinary considering President Putin’s attachment
to the word “аккуратно” – cautious, prudent – to describe the proper conduct of
state affairs. The allegations about Chubais’s assistants being on the CIA
payroll were first made by Vladimir Vladimirovich in 2013. They were unfounded then and are unfounded
today. This is not to say that the USAID
contractors involved, Harvard economist Andrei Schleifer and legal expert
Jonathan Hay, were not guilty of violating the conflict of interests terms of
the overarching USAID contract with the university. After all, Schleifer did
pay $2 million in fines to settle his case with the U.S. Government, while
Harvard itself paid $32 million to end prosecution. I mention this case in
passing in my recently published Memoirs
of a Russianist, Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s to make the point
that our Western notions of corrupt Russia get only half the story right: alongside my narrative about Russian
scoundrels whom I met and dealt with on my employers’ behalf, there were so
many deeply corrupt Americans, Swiss and others who came to Russia in the 1990s
and with whom I met socially in Moscow. Read the book!
Back in 2013 when Putin first mentioned the Schleifer case without
naming him, and now again, knowledgeable commentators say they have no reason
to believe that the CIA was in any way involved. And I say that circumstantial
evidence rules conclusively against any CIA involvement: had that been the
case, the charges against Schleifer, Hay and Harvard would have been quietly
dropped, just as finally happened in the U.S. prosecution of businessman James
Giffen, in his “Kazakhgate” trial over bribes to Nazarbayev in 2010 when the
CIA refused to divulge its relationship with him. James Giffen also figures in my Memoirs from the 1990s as a buccaneer
and for a time exceptionally powerful figure in East-West trade.
With this
cavil, I cede the point that Russia in the 1990s was overrun by CIA employees
and other foreign agents. On the back cover of my Memoirs, Volume II, you will find my remark that in 1998 I quit as
acting director of the Moscow office of a leading American NGO because I was
persuaded that staff in the Washington headquarters were getting second
paychecks from the Agency. Inside the
book I explain that the office had become a nest for CIA personnel: there were
simply too many strange “visitors” passing through on their way to the Caucasus
and other peripheral Russian territories where trouble was brewing. That particular NGO was the long time
administrator of US-Soviet academic exchanges. During my brief tenure as office
director it was also responsible for a number of USAID funded assistance
programs. On close inspection as an insider, I concluded that many of these
programs in support of civil society or a free press seemed inappropriate for
sponsorship by outsiders, least of all by the U.S. Government given the decades
long adversarial if not hostile relations with Russia.
In general,
the recent attention to the 1990s in Russian media breaks a long period of
relative silence. The 1990s were for the vast majority of Russians a very
painful experience which they would rather forget. That obviously is changing. In February I will be interviewed on local radio
in St Petersburg by the host of a weekly broadcast entitled “The History
Club.” He tells me that there is growing
interest now in the ‘90s. We shall see.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021