The global correlation of forces was changing rapidly. What was bad for the Soviet Union was good for Western nations. Suddenly, after the agonies of the first and the second oil price crises and the vast transformations they had effected throughout the West – governments falling, new parties emerging, attitudes changing – now it was the time for the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan to turn the tide. Angst was out, hope was in. A tectonic shift in world affairs was beginning to make itself felt that would not only put an end to seven decades of Soviet rule but also bring about a new world order – or, as it turned out, a new world disorder.
A revolution from above – derailed
The story of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, first the Outer Empire and then the Inner one, has been told many times and will be retold again and again, as it contains mysteries and miracles as much as outright failure and incompetence. Not the least complication is that it took most people by surprise, and many, especially in the West, reacted with outright fear at what would happen if the nuclear edifice, so carefully constructed over many decades, suddenly collapsed.
The 1980s were characterized by changes from below and also from above. A controlled revolution was what Andropov had in mind and what Gorbachev was groomed for. Leaders in the commanding heights of the KGB and the army began to understand that the technological race was no longer about vast amounts of steel and coal but about command control and communication, and the electronic means to steer complex processes; they also understood that the system they had inherited was doomed unless agonizing change redefined the worlds of learning, of industry and the military. Top military leaders even went so far as to argue – in secret journals for Russian eyes only – that the Soviet system, in order to accommodate modern information technology, had to undergo thorough change, embracing openness and transparency.
This is what Gorbachev meant when he famously demanded glasnost and perestroika and wanted to ‘revitalize’ socialism, only to discover that it was by now a corpse. If ever there was a masterplan in the mid-1980s, it did not extend much beyond accelerating arms control in both the strategic and the conventional dimension. The rest was soon derailed. The chief reasons were the drop in oil prices and the nuclear burnout in the Chernobyl power plant at about the same time, the latter showing catastrophic weaknesses in the Soviet leadership structure. A rapid deterioration of living conditions did not help. Meanwhile, at the highest levels, in the Politburo Yeltsin wanted to cut Russia free from the oppressive state of the Soviets while Gorbachev wanted to preserve both the fundamentals of socialism and the Soviet empire. Everything came to a showdown when civil protest movements in the Baltic Republics demanded independence (the publication in Estonia in 1989 of the secret annexe to the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty had utterly delegitimized Soviet rule) and military hardliners refused to withdraw the crack OMON troops of the Interior Ministry. The Baltic states declared independence from the Soviet Union, stating that the annexation of 1939 was a flagrant violation of international law. In December 1991 Ukraine, White Russia and Russia came together at Belovezhskaya Pushcha to put an end to more than seventy years of the Soviet system.
Rising from the ashes
Today, one or two revolutions later, you shake the Russian kaleidoscope and an altogether different picture presents itself. The Leningradskaya Chaussee, ringed by supermarkets full of Western consumer goods at top prices and fenced in by billboards advertising the fanciful expressions of wealth, luxury and comfort, brings every visitor back to real life in a city full of nervous energy, bristling with business deals, some shady, some spectacular and many in between. This is a city, also, where journalists live a dangerous life once they dare to venture into that big money or big government does not want to be explored. Some have paid with their lives, like Paval Khlebnikov, the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, who was shot when leaving his home, or Anna Politkovskaya, who was on the trail of some business crooks with links to high places – or, perhaps, some Chechen gangster, as the authorities maintain – when she, too, was gunned down.
If democracy means casting a vote from time to time for one out of several party candidates, Russia would qualify. If, however, democracy is seen, and practised, as a system of governance limited by due process of law, a predictable set of rules, a reliable constitution and a system of checks and balances – then Russia has a long way to go. Putin’s idea that ‘the vertical of power’ should reign supreme, that a government should work like a Swiss clock, and that everybody and everything should live under the ‘dictatorship of the law’ is nothing but a rough sketch. Everything depends on who will fill in the detail. Meanwhile, the big question remains not only for Russia but for all of its neighbours whether the vast Eurasian country will finally follow the technocratic-democratic welfare mix on offer from the West, or the combination of centralized one-party-control, state planning and free-for-all economics that China has to offer. The answer will not only be decided in the upper echelons of power and money, somewhere between the Kremlin and the Gazprom Headquarters, but will depend to a large extent on the cultural foundations of Russia, the hidden fears of its denizens and their unspoken assumptions about prosperity, power and personal life.
6
An army humbled
‘…progress of the Empress Catherine to the Crimea, the façades of villages set up at spaced intervals along the way. The façades made of wood and painted canvas were placed a quarter of a league from the route to make the triumphant sovereign believe that the desert had been peopled under her reign. Russian minds are still presented by similar preoccupations. Everyone hides the bad and presents the good to the eyes of the master.’
The date was 12 August 2000. At 11.28 Central European Time seismographs at Western monitoring posts registered a major explosion in the Barents Sea, off the Murmansk coast, and a mere 135 seconds later another one, ten times stronger. It took the Russian naval staff more than two days to admit that the Kursk, Russia’s most modern submarine – Oscar II class in NATO code, put into service in 1994 and armed with twenty-two nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, the entire structure surrounded by a titanium-plus-rubber skin – had been lost at sea, together with all 118 of her crew.
It took days and weeks to uncover the true story of what had happened. Clumsiness, secretive habits and outright lies surrounded the catastrophe. First the admirals wanted to hide the terrible truth from the Kremlin, then from the families and general public, and finally from the world at large. The reasons given for the Kursk disaster varied, from running upon a Second World War German mine to collision with a NATO spy submarine thus turning it into a public relations breakdown and a serious test for the President. None of this contained any truth, but even a moderate and well-informed Duma member like Alexei Arbatov from Yabloko, member of the defence committee, thundered that Russia had to expect ‘growing tensions with the West’.