#6532
#9 - JRL 6531
The Sunday Times (UK)
November 3, 2002
Review: Russia: Experimenting with a People
by Robert Service
PHILIP MARSDEN
Philip Marsden’s The Spirit Wrestlers, an account of life in contemporary
Russia, is published by Flamingo.
RUSSIA: Experiment with a People, from 1991 to the Present by Robert Service
(Macmillan £20 pp408)
Last month, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, a group of adoring Russians presented President Putin with a particularly generous gift: a replica of the Cap of Monomakh, valued at $10m. One of the state’s most sacred objects, this was the crown adopted by Russia’s first tsar, Ivan the Terrible. After the whole bloody mess of Russia’s last century, all its sacrifices, its moments of bold and Herculean change, it is depressing to think that what many Russians now appear to want is a tsar. Is it any wonder if he behaves like one?
Since he became president, Putin has been steadily re-centralising power. He has clipped the wings of his regional governors. He has stamped hard on the Chechens, and on dissenting media moguls and journalists. He has raised Russia’s stock internationally with a firm and clever foreign policy. He has encouraged a catholic adoption of Russia’s various pasts, Soviet and pre-Soviet. Even after the callous ending of the Moscow siege last week, and the Kursk before it, Putin’s 34 months in power have succeeded in making the majority of Russians feel a lot better about themselves than they ever did under Yeltsin.
In Russia: Experiment with a People, from 1991 to the Present, Robert Service is conducting his own risky experiment. He is writing the history of an unfinished process. A similar stage in the last great Russian experiment would be 1928, just before the First Five-Year-Plan and collectivisation, just before Stalinism, and possibly the worst moment of all to examine the long-term legacy of the 1917 revolution.
But even with little hindsight, Service manages to produce much that is fresh and convincing. The 1990s come out of his work more sharply than ever as a decade of bitterly unrealised hopes. Gorbachev and Putin have their parts to play, but centre stage in this drama is the tragic figure of Boris Yeltsin.
It would be hard to think of anyone better suited to the task of dealing with the hopelessly sick Soviet Union. Without Yeltsin it probably would have lurched on for some years — by the late 1980s Gorbachev was still committed to the Communist party, albeit reformed, and still wanted to keep the Union together. It was Yeltsin who possessed the Churchillian courage, the popular appeal, the luck and the anger to cut the Gordian knot. He short-circuited the party, employed Yegor Gaidar’s shock economic reform, granted the republics their independence and urged his regional governers to “take all the autonomy you can handle”.
Likewise, nobody could have been less suited to the much trickier task that followed. The Russian people did not, as the British did with Churchill, vote Yeltsin out once his job was done (although if they had, he probably would have been replaced by someone worse). The disasters of Yeltsin’s rule are familiar to most — shelling his own parliament in 1993, his ill-advised invasion of Chechnya in 1994, the rouble crisis of 1998. Familiar, too, are the hoods and cronies who surrounded him. Most familiar of all is the declining health and the drinking that made a mockery of his office.
Towards the end of his book, which is thematic rather than chronological, Service quotes from Yeltsin’s candid resignation announcement: “I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult . . . I am leaving. I have done everything I could. Be happy. You deserve happiness and peace. Happy New Year, Happy New Century, my dear people.”
It is no surprise that what followed the hopes and humiliations of the Yeltsin years should be the steadying power of Putin. But Service’s real achievement is that he goes beyond such easy analysis. He shows rightly that the present mood of the Russian people is infinitely more complex than the apparent seesawing of the presidency.
Russia is busy forming a new sense of collective identity — nostalgic, nationalistic and unreconstructed though it is. And yet paradoxes and dangers still abound. While vast wealth is being generated, 40% of Russians live in poverty. The country’s infrastructure is on the verge of collapse, following years of patching up and under- investment (this is not sufficiently examined by Service). Chronic social problems exist, leading him to express “long-term concern about the stability of Russian state and society”. His assessment is far from optimistic.
Service has succeeded brilliantly in showing how botched Yeltsin’s reforms really were, and how bitter is their legacy. But reform in Russia has never been a happy process. If Yeltsin and Gorbachev were reformers, so were Lenin and Alexander II. The passions they unleashed were invariably too extreme, and brought to the fore the wrong people. But have the intervening periods been any better, the savage tyrannies, the stifling and wasted decades? It is possible that Putin will hold it all together. It is possible that he will be forgiven the gassing of hostages at the Palace of Culture theatre. It is just possible that he will make the Russian state more answerable to its people and achieve the stability and confidence necessary for its vast sources of wealth and talent to be fully realised.
But it is also clear that, with all the swirling currents and counter-currents examined by Service here, Russia has certainly not lost its capacity to surprise us.
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