“The past is a foreign country,” says LP Hartley in the very first line of The Go-Between. ‘They do things differently there.” In Russia’s case, this is both true and untrue. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is in many ways unrecognisable from that of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin: but by the same token Yeltsin’s Russia contained the seeds of what was to come. Putin’s rule can be characterised by a mnemonic of his own name – power, understanding, totalitarianism, imperialism and nepotism – and in each case the foundations were laid by Yeltsin.

POWER

Everything Putin has done as president has been underpinned by the power explicitly vested in his office. Russia’s presidency is not like that of France or the United States, where elected houses of representatives provide checks and balances. In Russia, the president is legally potent to an extent the likes of Donald Trump and even Emmanuel Macron can only dream about: and this has been the case since less than two years into Yeltsin’s rule.

The USSR was dissolved on Christmas Day 1991. (When Mikhail Gorbachev tried to sign the order turning over the USSR’s nuclear arsenal to Russia, his pen didn’t work and he had to borrow one from the CNN cameraman filming him. The Department of Metaphors wasn’t taking Christmas off that year.) Most of 1992 and 1993 saw Yeltsin in conflict with parliament over the pace and direction of reforms: him headstrong, them cautious. The situation came to a head in October 1993, when parliament declared vice-president Alexander Rutskoi as president and Yeltsin sent in the army to shell the White House, the parliamentary building, and crush the resistance. Almost 200 people were killed.

Even by Russian standards it was an extraordinary episode, made more so by the fact that the West steadfastly backed Yeltsin throughout. The rights and wrongs of each side’s cause apart, imagine Trump shelling the Capitol rather than merely giving tacit blessing to the ragtag invasion, and imagine the condemnation such a move would draw across the world. But the West was so committed to Yeltsin as the only hope for democracy in Russia, and so terrified of the country backsliding into a red-brown coalition of communists and nationalists, it ignored all the usual standards. “These are extraordinary times,” US Secretary of State Warren Christopher said, as though no further explanation was needed.

Two months later, stating bluntly that “Russia needs order”, Yeltsin gained approval for a new constitution that, among other things, gave him the right to: appoint government ministers, military leaders and security council members; dismiss the prime minister; and, in some cases, to dissolve parliament itself. Technically the system was still a dual presidential-parliamentary one, but in effect it was a super-presidency, putting an end to the chance of any genuine and equal separation of powers between executive and legislature.

Such powers, of course, are only as effective as the person using them. Yeltsin did so haphazardly: Putin has done so ruthlessly.

UNDERSTANDING

There were two Boris Yeltsins: one dynamic, the other shambolic. The first was the one who climbed onto a tank outside the White House in the summer of 1991 during the coup against Gorbachev and denounced the putschists as having “lost all shame and conscience”, who filled every room he entered with his vigour and charisma, and who was courted by world leaders. The second was the drunkard who left Taoiseach Albert Reynolds waiting on the tarmac at Shannon Airport because he was paralytic inside his jet, who took little interest in the fine details of decision-making, and who hired and fired ministers according to caprice rather than rational assessment of their performance. Perhaps both sides of Yeltsin were reflections of the national soul that resonates so deeply with many Russians: that here is a nation and people who never do things by halves, whose triumphs are the greatest ever but whose disasters are equally so.

Putin’s skill has been to understand all of this – the national soul, the contrasting aspects of Yeltsin – and take for himself the most positive parts while discarding the rest. He has traditionally been at pains to portray himself as a man of action, replete with shirtless poses in the wilderness, judo sparring sessions, and blunt language (“we will ice them in the shithouse” while launching the second Chechen War in 1999.) But there has – at least until recently – been precious little of the erratic decision-making that characterised so much of Yeltsin’s period in office, let alone the sense that his administration could ever be described as rudderless.

And this in turn harks back to the ideal of the vozhd, the strongman needed to rule a nation which spans 12 time-zones and contains more than 200 ethnic groups. The vozhd’s logic is simple: such a nation cannot be ruled through consensus and compromise. An iron fist is needed, and one clad in an iron glove to boot. Putin sees himself in the mould of Stalin, Nicholas I and Peter the Great, and his powers allow him to pull this off.

TOTALITARIANISM

Russia may not be fully totalitarian yet, certainly not by comparison to the USSR or modern-day North Korea. But it is at the very least hovering on the cusp between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the kind of linguistic sophistry that sees the word “war” banned in favour of “special military operation” is only going to help tip the balance towards further repression. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who dared oppose Putin and received a decade in prison for his temerity, thinks that the shift has already happened: “Russia today has moved from an authoritarian regime to a totalitarian one.”

Wherever the line is drawn, the seeds were again sown in Yeltsin’s era. Any kind of authoritarian structure relies on several things – control of the media, relentless state propaganda, removal of political alternatives – but perhaps most of all it needs the rule of law to be a political rather than an impartial tool. Yeltsin’s 1993 constitutional reform may have altered the balance between executive and legislature, but the import of that was greatly magnified by the fact that the third part of the national regulatory framework, the judiciary, was so weak to begin with.

After the USSR fell, Yeltsin had a choice. He could have introduced gradual economic reform in tandem with establishing a functioning legislative system, or he could have gone for shock therapy as advocated by the Chicago school of economists, opening everything up as far and fast as possible and trusting that the markets would sort themselves out, that the pain would be sharp but short, and that freedom would bring fairness rather than vice versa.

He went for the second option and it turned out to be in many ways a disaster: hyperinflation, spiralling unemployment, millions of people finding their savings wiped out, crippling tax rises and slashed government spending. Rutskoi called it “economic genocide.” All this took place against a background of almost no legal recourse whatsoever. Business disputes were settled not in court but down the barrel of a gun. Those early years were in some parts almost totally lawless and every Westerner who worked there at the time has hair-raising tales of the Wild East. The Russians even had a word for it: bespredel, half anarchic freedom and half unaccountable authority.

The ramifications of that time die hard. Not only did the legal system’s inadequacies allow Putin to bend it to his own ends – the muzzling of free press; Khodorkovsky’s arrest, trial and imprisonment – but the memory of that chaos has made many Russians more likely to accept totalitarianism if they perceive the alternative to be anarchy. One of the slogans in Putin’s first presidential campaign in 2000 was “the dictatorship of law”, but the phrase should have been reversed. The only real law in Russia now is the law of dictatorship.

IMPERIALISM

Russia’s paths from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to flawed democracy weren’t the only transformations the country underwent after the fall of the USSR. It also lost both its superpower status and its empire. The latter of these – fifteen countries down to one, a 300 million-strong population halved – is both the least appreciated and the most enduring. Contiguous empires are always harder to let go of than overseas ones, especially when the once-powerful motherland can only watch as her children strike out for pastures new: the alluring stepmothers named EU and NATO. Even before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia had suffered 30 years of phantom-limb syndrome: an itch where the Baltics used to be, shooting pains in a Caucasus no longer theirs.

For Putin and his ilk in the KGB, this was the most painful change of all. The KGB’s emblem was a sword and shield emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, and that was how its officers saw themselves: warriors for and defenders of the revolution. They, and many others, blamed two men above all for the loss of empire: Gorbachev, whose reforms in the name of perestroika and glasnost had opened the door; and Yeltsin, whose establishment of a rival power centre in the form of the Russian republic had kicked that door off its hinges.

Putin did at least start his tenure in office by making overtures to the West: he mused publicly about the possibility of joining NATO and offered the US help after 9/11. But, perhaps realising that Russia would never be treated as a true equal in such circumstances, he soon reverted to talk of restoring empire, and the hell with what the West thinks. There is more than a hint of Caligula about this. Oderint dum metuant, the emperor said: let them hate, so long as they fear.

Yeltsin’s example influenced Putin not merely ideologically but logistically too. The first Chechen War between 1994 and 1996 was a disaster, with poorly-trained Russian conscripts little match for the warlike Chechens. Putin, who was working for St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak at the time, watched and learned: when you go in, he realised, you have to go in hard or not at all. It was Putin, as Prime Minister, who was responsible for beginning the second Chechen War in 1999, and he prosecuted it ruthlessly. Every time he has ordered military intervention since then – Georgia, Syria, the Crimea, Donbas – he has done so in reasonable expectation of success. Whether this still holds true for Ukraine now remains to be seen.

NEPOTISM

They were called “the Family”, with all the mafia overtones that word brings. The name was given to the group around Yeltsin who helped him make decisions (and in some cases basically made the decisions themselves), though the only actual blood relative was his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. Relatives, friends, cronies; call it what you like, the end result was the same, a close circle helping themselves to vast gains.

Nowhere was this more clearly seen than in the sell-off of state assets in 1995: auctions that were so rigged that men like Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Potanin picked up multi-billion dollar companies such as Norilsk Nickel, Yukos and Lukoil for a fraction of their real value. In return, these oligarchs more or less bought the 1996 election for Yeltsin. Six months before polling day, Yeltsin’s approval rating was in single figures and the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov was the clear favourite. A group of seven, christened semibankirschina (seven bankers) as a takeoff of semiboyarschina (the seven boyars who deposed Tsar Vasily Shuisky in 1610), funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars into Yeltsin’s campaign, way more than Zyuganov had access to (and indeed way more than was permitted under electoral law.)

One of the reasons Yeltsin chose Putin as his successor was that Putin could be trusted not to rock the boat in terms of digging deep into the Family’s finances: indeed, one of Putin’s first acts as President was to grant Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. And as leader Putin has followed the same nepotistic pattern, even if he has changed the personnel.

Much is made of his connection to the oligarchs, but he keeps them very much at arm’s length. Putin’s inner circle are the siloviki, the enforcers, men he’s known and trusted for a long time. The three men to whom he is closest are national security adviser Nikolai Patrushev, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov and SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin, all of whom worked with him as KGB officers in what was then Leningrad from the 1970s onwards.

And, as the Ukraine war is demonstrating now (and as Yeltsin found many times in his chaotic eight years) the essential truth about keeping your decision-making circle tight is that sooner or later the quality of those decisions decreases. You’re not getting enough information in, the information that you are getting in is biased, you’re being told what you want to hear, and the mistakes you make become greater and harder to recover from.

So, this is Russia as it is, and it comes from Russia as it was. For there to have been another Russia – a Russia not led by Putin, not invading Ukraine, not imprisoning citizens merely for expressing their opinions, not assassinating opponents of the regime both at home and abroad – then it is the past that would have had to change, not merely the present.

The tragedy is that it could have done so. There was, during the Yeltsin years, one man who might in time have been the leader to install some sort of proper democracy in Russia and bring the country fully into the international fold. He believed in a strong presidency but also in a functioning parliament. He was tall, handsome, dynamic, witty, irreverent, popular and smart, a brilliant university physicist who became governor of Nizhny Novgorod and transformed a gloomy Soviet city into something brighter and more appealing. Yeltsin even told Bill Clinton that here might be his possible successor. In the Putin years, this man ended up as economic adviser to Ukraine’s then pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko, and after the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 Ukraine he began work on a report detailing the human and economic cost of the war.

His name was Boris Nemtsov, and seven years ago he was gunned down on a bridge crossing the Moscow river just south of the Kremlin. He was still only 55 when he died. Perhaps like all those who perish at least partly untested and unfulfilled, the myth is so seductive precisely because it never had the chance to become tarnished. Perhaps a President Nemtsov would have found himself unable or unwilling to resist the trappings and corruption of absolute power. Even if he hadn’t, he could have found himself on the wrong side of the Russian politics’ endless pendulum swing, where leaders who effect thaws (Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin) tend to be judged more harshly than those whose instinct is to freeze (Stalin, Brezhnev, Putin).

But, for Nemtsov, read all the others too – every potential leader who has found him or herself unable to make a dent in the monolith of Putin’s power these past two decades. In his farewell speech on Millennium Eve, Yeltsin said: “I want to ask your forgiveness for the fact that our dreams didn’t come true. Forgive me for the fact that I did not live up to the hopes of many, that we could move forward in one fell swoop from a grey, totalitarian, and stagnant past to a bright, rich and civilized future.”

He had tried, and failed, to be Russian’s own go-between, linking past to future. The 20th century may have ended eight years ahead of time for Russia, but in the rubble of those years are the foundation for everything that the country is, and isn’t, in the 21st. 

Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. His latest novel, “The Law Of The Heart”, is out now

More Like This

Get a free copy of our print edition

Current Affairs, Main Features

1 Comment. Leave new

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.
You need to agree with the terms to proceed

Your email address will not be published. The views expressed in the comments below are not those of Perspective. We encourage healthy debate, but racist, misogynistic, homophobic and other types of hateful comments will not be published.