Can Russia Change?

David Remnick

From Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 4,938 words total.

Summary:  Russia's era of romantic democracy is over. Boris Yeltsin's victory in the 1996 elections marked the rise of a new class of oligarchs who have profited from post-Cold War chaos. But Westerners who predict a return to authoritarianism and cultural stagnation overlook how far Russia has come since the late 1980s, and how it has opened to the world. It is not the Soviet Union, nor the land of the czars. In the short term, most Russians cannot hope for much, especially from their leaders. But with its political reforms, 98 percent privatized economy, and educated, urban population, Russia has a great deal going for it-maybe more than China.

David Remnick is a Staff Writer at The New Yorker and was the Moscow Correspondent for The Washington Post from 1988 to 1991.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE PRESENT

There was celebration in the State Department when Boris Yeltsin won re-election last July, but polls show that in Moscow and other Russian cities and towns there was no joy, only relief, a sense of having dodged a return to the past and the Communist Party. Political celebration, after all, usually welcomes a beginning, and the Yeltsin regime, everyone understood, was no beginning at all. Yeltsin had accomplished a great deal both as an outsider and as a president, but now, in his senescence, he represented the exhaustion of promise.

To prevail, Yeltsin had been willing to do anything, countenance anything, promise anything. Without regard for his collapsed budget, he doled out subsidies and election-year favors worth billions of dollars; he gave power to men he did not trust, like the maverick general Aleksandr Lebed; he was willing to hide from, and lie to, the press in the last weeks of the campaign, the better to obscure his serious illness.

Power in Russia is now adrift, unpredictable, and corrupt. Just three months after appointing Lebed head of the security council, Yeltsin fired him for repeated insubordination, instantly securing the general's position as martyr, peacemaker, and pretender to the presidency. On the night of his dismissal, Lebed giddily traipsed off to see a production of Aleksei Tolstoy's Ivan the Terrible. "I want to learn how to rule," he said.

In the new Russia, freedom has led to disappointment. If the triumph of 1991 seemed the triumph of liberal democrats unabashedly celebrating a market economy, human rights, and Western values, Yeltsin's victory in 1996 was distinguished by the rise of a new class of oligarchs. After the election, the bankers, media barons, and industrialists who had financed and in large measure run the campaign got the rewards they wanted: positions in the Kremlin, broadcasting and commercial licenses, and access to the national resource pile. Before 1991, these oligarchs had been involved mainly in fledgling small businesses -- some legitimate, some not -- and then, under the chaotic conditions of the post-Soviet world, they made their fortunes. Anatoly Chubais, who led Yeltsin's privatization and presidential campaigns, suddenly forgot his vow never to re-join the government and became chief of staff in the new administration, a position Yeltsin's bad health made all the mightier. Perhaps personifying the Kremlin's shamelessness, Chubais led the push to appoint one of the leading oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky, as deputy minister of security. The few Muscovites with enough patience left to care about Kremlin politics wondered what qualifications Berezovsky, who had made his fortune in the automobile business, brought to his new job.

The new oligarchs, both within and outside the Kremlin, see themselves as undeniably lucky, but worthy as well. They righteously insist that their fortunes will spawn a middle class, property rights, and democratic values. No matter that the Kremlin lets them acquire an industrial giant like the Norilsk Nickel Works for a thief's price; they claim to be building a new ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,938 words total.