Liberal democrats once thought Russia’s future was in their hands
MOSCOW » Russians watching Washington lurch through President Donald Trump’s first months in office have generally vacillated between morbid fascination at the sight of America in disarray and dismay over what it all portends for Russia. But among a small group of once-influential men in Moscow on Thursday there was a flicker of something resembling envy.
They were supporters of the late Boris Yeltsin, and they had met to recall the August 1991 days when the Russian leader defied a coup attempt by Communist officials who wanted to oust or at least thwart Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and reverse his liberalizing reforms. Inspired by Yeltsin’s call, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Moscow and other major Soviet cities, forcing the plotters to abandon their putsch.
A peaceful revolution had defeated the totalitarian state, and the way was clear for democracy in an independent Russia, led by Yeltsin, the country’s first democratically elected president. Or so they thought in 1991.
Now Russia has a president who has whittled away most independent civil institutions and signed into law ever greater restrictions on freedom of political expression, backed by the so-called “siloviki,” current and past representatives of the defense and state security forces, who control some of the country’s most powerful enterprises.
Long out of power, long bereft of significant popular support, Russia’s old guard of democracy advocates are left to wonder, as Yeltsins’ former chief of administration, Sergei Filatov, put it, “why the victory of the people turned into a defeat.”
By comparison, Washington’s convulsions, to them, look like little more than a blip.
“In democratic countries there is an ability to overcome Trumpization because you have established institutions,” remarked Lev Ponamaryov, a former Russian and Soviet legislator and a representative of a broad prodemocracy movement that once had a healthy presence in parliament, but no longer holds a single seat.
Andrei Nechayev, who served as the economic minister in Yeltsin’s “young reformers” government, which introduced “shock therapy” to the Russian economy in 1992, observed that economic stability has a lot more to do with it. In its final years, the planned economy of the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse; the state-run dis- tribution system was increasingly ineffective at getting goods to people, and the state monopoly on all production and trade quashed incentive for efficiency.
“If not for the economic collapse of the 1980s, I don’t think there would have been huge crowds” on the streets in 1991, he said.
Russians remember the 1980s, but they also remember the turbulence of the early 1990s, when that shock therapy hit home, leaving factories at a standstill, workers unpaid, and even basic goods in short supply. They remember the gangster capitalism of the mid-1990s and the crash of the ruble in 1998 that wiped out savings overnight.
A survey last year by the Levada Center, an independent Russian pollster, found that a majority of Russians still regrets the December 1991 dissolution of the U.S.S.R., even as a generation that doesn’t know what it was like reaches adulthood. In the same survey, only 15 percent of Russians said they had a positive attitude about the Soviet collapse. Among those who don’t would be Gorbachev, who describes the Soviet breakup as Yeltsin’s coup against him, and Putin, who famously said in 2005 that the breakup of the U. S. S.R. was “a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”