And yet while it is a great sadness that he is now remembered by many for his drunken foolery rather than his statesmanship, he was no more capable of imposing order on the country than his predecessor had been. Like Gorbachev, he made mistake after mistake and, like Gorbachev, it seemed that neither he nor the men around him were willing, or able, to learn any lessons. As his time in office dragged on, it became clear that events were constantly outpacing the ability of this sick and bewildered man, who had once been so full of energy and vitality, to react to them. After he won the manipulated presidential election of 1996, we watched the footage of his inauguration and saw how he seemed barely able to walk or talk: it was a grim symbol of the country’s own feeble condition.
We had all been excited by the removal of the restrictions that had pinched so many lives during the Soviet Union. There was something intoxicating about the possibilities offered by free elections, a free press and free markets, but at the same time, much of what was described as modernisation consisted simply of repudiating everything that had gone before, and nothing of substance was created to take its place. Nowadays, everyone remembers the queues outside the first branch of McDonald’s to be opened in Russia. The restaurant was supposed to be a tangible emblem of change. We were told it was an exemplar of a new world in which you did not need to make friends with the butcher if you wanted a decent cut of meat; the end of the doomed attempt to regulate lives from the centre. Their food smelled and tasted good, it was cheap, the restaurants were colourful and clean, but, ultimately, what they served possessed very little nutritional value. You could say the same about the whole of the country’s nascent consumer economy. While luxury goods did flow into the country, very few people could afford them, and the trinkets that were affordable were also low in quality.
People soon began to realise that if you had broken your leg, it mattered little if you owned a pair of Levi’s; what was important was that hospitals were so short of funds that they could no longer treat you properly.
And while there had been grumbles about the way that the nomenklatura had led gilded existences in the Soviet Union, we soon learned what corruption really meant. I was once told that the difference between business and theft is that thieves steal the investment and split it among themselves, whereas businessmen wait until they have earned a profit before they take any money; thieves do nothing, businessmen finish a project. As I watched, aghast, while Boris Yeltsin and his government oversaw the mass transfer of state assets into the hands of a small number of already wealthy businessmen, I realised that perhaps the distinction between theft and business was not as clear as I had previously thought. In theory, this was all in the name of liberalising the economy and introducing the principles of private ownership, but, like millions of other Russians, I knew a crime when I saw it.
To begin with the people themselves had not known what to make of the huge privatisations that took place during the early ’90s. The process itself was foggy and obscure, its vocabulary was full of abstruse technical terms, most of which they had never heard before. It is perhaps telling that the country’s first Prime Minister, Yegor Gaidar, was dismissive of the population’s ability to understand the changes his government was introducing. He was a youthful economist who was so disdainful of his fellow countrymen’s intellectual gifts that he barely made any effort to explain reforms that promised to change their lives completely. This helped contribute to one of the biggest failures of the whole privatisation process – certainly the most emblematic: the vouchers that were intended to give every citizen a stake in the state’s assets.
Each voucher corresponded to a portion of the nation’s wealth, and it was hoped that they would help encourage the formation of a broad-based middle class who would be the foundation for a democratic Russia. It was unfortunate that these vouchers, issued with a great fanfare to the population in 1992, were undermined from the very start by a profound misjudgement: their value was based on an assessment made in 1984. Back then, 10,000 roubles – the nominal price emblazoned on each voucher – equated to around $16,000 dollars. By 1992, 10,000 roubles was equivalent to just $25. We were told that the voucher would be worth the same as a Volga car, but that misjudgement – combined with hyperinflation on the cost of everyday goods – meant that they were worthless to most people who just needed ready cash to survive.
In theory, distributing these vouchers rather than disposing of the state’s assets on the open market was supposed to keep them out of the hands of the mafia and the existing managers – the ‘red directors’ whose grip on the former state enterprises it was thought essential to break. But the vast majority were easily tempted (or sometimes coerced) into selling, or ‘investing’, their vouchers by an informed minority who were aware of their true value. It is no surprise, really, they were desperately poor and did not trust these alien, baffling pieces of paper – none of them had read the small print and they did not understand what they actually held in their hands.
Even the process of transforming your voucher into shares was complex, and was often made more so by a number of unscrupulous practices. For instance, although Gazprom’s shares were supposedly being issued openly, the majority of them were only made available at a small number of far-flung locations near their centres of operations. It was perfect for insiders, completely inaccessible to anyone else.
I myself managed to get some shares in Gazprom when they were issued in St Petersburg. But even then your ten or fifteen shares counted for nothing in those huge enterprises when the owners of the company could perform a series of what might as well have been conjuring tricks and you had to watch, impotently, as everything you had put in disappeared into somebody else’s bulging pockets.
In this time of hucksters, advertising corrupt pyramid schemes and barrels of ‘magic’ water on television, many just sold their vouchers for instant cash rather than holding out for the dubious prospect of a dividend at some unspecified point in the future. The government’s good intentions had been compromised by its fatally flawed implementation, and the state’s holdings ended up under the sway of precisely the people that the voucher scheme had been designed to prevent from gaining control of them.
As time went by, the majority of the Russian population came to hate the ‘reforms’ and everyone connected with them, even more so because they saw others making money off the back of the soaring hyperinflation that had completely eroded their life savings. What did they care about the dogma of free-market economy? All they saw was robbery on the state level. A tiny handful got very rich during this time while millions of ordinary Russians sank further into poverty. It was as if they were saying: ‘Rules are for the little people, they do not apply to men like us.’
For my part, I continued for a while to serve in the KGB and then the organisation formed to take its place, the FSB. The security services in Russia were not involved in the tumultuous events of 1991, such as the attempted coup that saw disaffected generals drive their tanks onto the Russian White House lawn. We made no attempts to stop the progress of democracy elsewhere; it was after all the political path that the party had decreed the country should follow. But we still occasionally found ourselves caught up in the rage and tensions that infused every layer of society.
Many of my countrymen were gripped by a feverish iconoclasm in the months after the end of the Soviet Union. It was as if they desperately needed to find some way of transmitting the inchoate feelings of bewilderment and rage this tectonic change had left them with. Across the country, statues commemorating the heroes of communism were hauled to the ground. Outside the Lubyanka[6] in Moscow, a monument to the Cheka’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled and not long after there was an attempt to do the same to another monument to him in Leningrad. But there was a difference between the two cities. When a group of civilians massed near the statue, ready to smash it to pieces, they were confronted by a handful of officers who braced themselves in front of the stone figure. They were not armed, but made it clear that anybody who tried to do any damage would receive a bloody nose for their efforts. If they wanted to tear a statue down, the officers suggested, it would be better for them to look elsewhere. As it turned out, very few if any of the socialist monuments in Leningrad met the same fate as their counterparts in Moscow – perhaps appropriate, in this traditionally revolutionary city.