My respect for Western values was boosted and restored but, for the majority of Russians, things seemed very different. Many had been badly hit by the economic collapse of 1998 and a substantial number of people came to blame the West. Russian government officials who had to cut public spending and imposed economic austerity measures were quick to cite the demands of the International Monetary Fund as the reason for their tough decisions. The result was a growing, generalised antipathy towards ‘Western interference’. When Russian banks failed and people’s savings were lost, the public seized on the explanation that this too was the result of conditions imposed on Russia by the IMF. They believed that the West was implementing a deliberate policy of destroying Russian banks in order to clear the way for Western financial institutions to come and take their place. Things had gone badly wrong and the West – especially its financial institutions – was a convenient scapegoat. A wave of national resentment grew, attaching itself to the ‘traitors’ in the Russian government who had ‘sold Russia out’ to foreign interests. The Yeltsin administration’s commitment to Western-style market democracy was blamed for all the nation’s ills, and the conditions were created for the coming to power of a new breed of politicians – people with a background in the security services, who would restore order with the iron grip of centralised autocracy.
It seems to me that Russia in the late 1990s was suffering from a sort of Weimar syndrome. In the 1930s, the population of the Weimar Republic had become convinced that Germany’s poverty and humiliation were caused by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, imposed on them by the victorious First World War allies. In a similar mood of national discontent, Russians now began to blame Western Europe and the United States.
The Russian people had seen living standards fall and many were plunged into poverty. After decades of artificially maintained price controls, backed by billions of roubles of state subsidies (which even then did not manage to keep the shelves filled), Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys had freed prices for all but the most essential goods. Inflation had rocketed; people’s savings were being spent on just a few days’ worth of food. Hordes of beggars appeared on the streets; people were forced to sell their family possessions to stay afloat. The collapse of the USSR and the Soviet system of central planning had left factories without suppliers and without government orders. Unable to adapt to market conditions, they could no longer pay wages to their workers or taxes to the state. In an attempt to balance the national budget, Yeltsin slashed state spending and raised taxes. When entitlement to free healthcare was sharply reduced, few could afford the paid services that replaced it. Illnesses and infant mortality increased, along with alcoholism and suicide; male life expectancy fell to 57 years. The result was that the nation felt cheated and belittled. And at the same time, Western Europe and North America seemed to be thriving. Many Russians resented the apparent decline of their country from a global superpower to an impoverished third world country. And they knew who to blame. Powerful voices in society accused malevolent foreign powers of trampling on Russia’s national interests and called for the restoration of national pride by the rejection of all cooperation with the West.
By a stroke of ill fortune, the Yugoslav crisis – following reports of Serbian ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians – broke out just at the moment when revanchist demands in Russia were at their height. In 1999, the Kremlin was still actively engaging with the international community, pursuing internationalist policies and in return receiving Western financial support. With Boris Yeltsin incapacitated by a series of heart attacks, the country was effectively being led by the prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov. On 24 March that year, Primakov was due to fly to Washington to ask the International Monetary Fund for an additional $4.2 billion, and he took me with him as a member of the Russian business delegation. As we took off from Moscow, Primakov explained that he was not optimistic that the loan would be granted: the West had already pumped large sums into Russia, with little indication that it was making any difference to the crisis in our economy. In addition, there was growing popular anger in Russia that Yeltsin was perceived as going cap-in-hand to the Western ‘enemy’ who had brought us to our knees. A further flashpoint had emerged: NATO countries announced their intention to intervene in the Yugoslav conflict by bombing Serbian military forces accused of the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Albanians in Kosovo, further inflaming Russian opinion.
We were already in the air when Vice President Al Gore called Primakov to tell him that the bombing campaign was about to begin. Primakov had to decide what to do. Most Russians regard the Serbs as our historical allies, fellow Slavs who fought with us against Muslim forces threatening from the east. After hurried discussions, Primakov ordered the crew to turn the plane around in mid-flight over the Atlantic and return to Moscow, scrapping a long-scheduled round of high-level economic and security talks with the Clinton administration. It was a dramatic protest against Western military action against Serbia, but also a symbolic U-turn in Russia’s whole relationship with the West. Even though I was on that plane, I am not sure that I fully understood at that moment the fateful consequences of what was happening. There was, however, a very real sense of a historic drama being played out before our eyes. At Shannon airport in Ireland, where we landed for refuelling on the way back home, I bought a box of Irish whisky and we all shared it to drown our anxiety about the future. We didn’t know it, but in a little over six months Yeltsin would be gone, and Russia would be under the rule of a very different type of leader.
CHAPTER 5
THE HUMBLING
An enduring memory of my childhood was being allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. From my earliest years, I knew that at a few minutes before midnight – in the moments before national television broadcast the Kremlin chimes, signalling the advent of a new year – the country’s leader would address us, the Russian people. The tradition had begun in 1941, in the darkest days of the war, when the titular head of state Mikhail Kalinin took to the radio to rally Soviet spirits in the face of Hitler’s inhuman onslaught against us. In my early memories, it was Leonid Brezhnev who would slur his way through a summary of what had been achieved and what was expected in the year ahead. In 1985, we watched with especial excitement as the new broom in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev, outlined his vision for change. Then in 1987 and 1988, there was the extraordinary spectacle of Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan swapping roles, so that Reagan spoke to us and Gorbachev addressed the American people on New Year’s Eve, which brought us tangible proof that the Cold War was thawing.
But it was 1999 that produced the biggest surprise. The millions of viewers switching on their TV sets at midnight, expecting to see the familiar red-nosed, puffy-cheeked face of Boris Yeltsin, champagne glass in hand, were in for a shock. In his place, a small, unfamiliar man in an ill-fitting suit was sitting in front of a decorated Christmas tree, trying to look presidential. Breaking with years of tradition, Yeltsin had already made his New Year speech, and instead of the usual, well-worn expressions of national congratulation, he had startled us. ‘I want to apologise,’ Yeltsin said, ‘for failing to make all our dreams come true, for failing to foresee that what at first seemed easy would turn out to be agonisingly hard. I apologise for betraying the hopes of all of us who believed we would be able to jump in a single leap from the grey, retrograde, totalitarian past to the shining, rich and civilised future.’ Yeltsin announced that he was resigning, in order to hand over the presidency to a new man, ‘a strong person who deserves to become President’, who would ensure that Russia never again regressed to its discredited, authoritarian past. For those who did not know who this ‘strong person’ was – possibly the majority of those watching – a helpful caption appeared, naming him as ‘Acting President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’