reform, much criticized by many, Yeltsin notably included, were repeating themselves under Yeltsin. The government kept borrowing money abroad to stay afloat. Agriculture was in shambles, with the old structure in disarray and no effective substitute available. Industry declined from year to year, with the entire huge military- industrial complex largely cost ineffective or simply useless. Short of funds, the government fell months behind in paying wages and salaries, and this lack of payments and lack of money spread throughout the economy. Pensioners were among the obvious sufferers. The situation was made worse by the fact that the Soviet Union had never had a strong social secu-
rity system, especially if we exclude the social services of the very enterprises that were collapsing. Because of a drastic shortage of funds, such state institutions as the prison system and the armed forces themselves reached a desparate state. Prisoners' conditions, political persecution and punishment aside, declined compared to the Soviet period. Soldiers and officers were 'advised' by their superiors to fish, hunt, farm, and gather mushrooms in order to survive until the federal government accumulated enough cash to pay military wage arrears. At times uniformed servicemen begged in the streets. As usual, the situation was more complicated than a very brief summary can indicate. Thus the penury of the army resulted partly because the high command and certain other elements were blocking its effective reduction in size. Similarly other, and sometimes the same, interests kept hanging on to the heavy and largely obsolete defense industry. And it proved very difficult to close mines, even when they operated at a loss or became superfluous. Entrenched administrators on top had a common cause with workers who were losing their jobs, often with nothing to replace them. Yet with all the variations and qualifications, the financial catastrophe loomed ever larger.
The central Russian government found it very difficult or impossible to control and sometimes simply to influence the component parts of the huge Russian state even after the fourteen non-Russian republics had separated themselves. Eventually eighty-nine distinct autonomous units, these component parts claimed often far- reaching rights and privileges, stopping in the case of Tatarstan just short of full sovereignty, although so far only Chechnia has fought a major war for independence. As regional interests and electoral democracy gained ground, local officials had all the less reason to obey Moscow. Most of the directives from the center were simply ignored. Characteristically, the central government failed to collect the greater amount of the taxes due to it, one reason for its financial weakness. Corruption and crime grew rapidly, to the point that Russia was listed as the third most corrupt country on the face of the earth by an organization issuing such statistics. Exploiting privatization or exporting oil, gas, metals, and other valuable materials abroad, often with the aid of special permissions or even illegally, as well as profiting in other ways from the unhinged economy, some people quickly became enormously rich. Often compared to the robber barons of the early stage of capitalism in other countries, the Russian barons unfortunately proved to be different in that they took their enormous fortunes abroad rather than use them to develop the economy of their native land. In fact, in the post-Soviet years very much more capital left Russia than came in the form of loans, aid, and investments put together. Mafias, pornography, prostitution, and violent crime experienced an exponential growth as gangs fought for their turf. The victims of violence seemed to be especially bankers, but also people of many other occupations, including mere passers-by. The disastrous ecological condition of much of the country, brought strikingly to the attention of the world when glasnost replaced secrecy, only continued to deteriorate. Still more revealing of the ongoing disaster were the medical and mortality statistics,
with the life span, particularly for men, although already low, taking a precipitous plunge. Solzhenitsyn's jeremiads about the dying out of the Russians and Murray Feshbach's surprising statistical discoveries were gaining general acceptance.
Russian politics could not be separated from Russian economics, the two constantly interacting and usually damaging each other. Yeltsin's greatest collision with his legislature, at the time the Supreme Soviet, occurred in October, 1993. Several factors led to a catastrophe. There was a fundamental hostility between the President and many members of the legislature, who looked back to the Soviet world and opposed reform. Numerous nationalists were particularly incensed by the breakup of the Soviet Union. And in the novel political arrangement, where Yeltsin had great power and was intent on acquiring more of it, legislators were very conscious of their own governing role as well as of their perquisites. The ongoing transformation of the country increased tensions and deepened problems. The legislators, therefore, had some reason to believe that in a showdown with Yeltsin they would be supported by the army and the people. A very mixed group or, perhaps better, combination of groups, their leaders included the Vice President, Alexander Rutskoi, whom Yeltsin had hastily appointed to that position probably because of his military record and impressive appearance, and the leader of the legislature Ruslan Khasbulatov. By the end of 1992, under pressure, Yeltsin had to let Gaidar go, and the more generally acceptable Viktor Chernomyrdin became prime minister. The President survived efforts to impeach him or to limit drastically his powers by law, although on one occasion by a very narrow margin. In April 1993 he succeeded in obtaining from the legislature a popular referendum on several key issues (although not on that of private property). The results were gratifying for Yeltsin: 59 per cent supporting the President, 53 per cent supporting the social and political policies of the government, 49.5 per cent favoring an early election for President, but 67.2 per cent favoring an early election for parliament.
Early in September Yeltsin began to prepare his coup against the parliament. The plan was to disband the legislature on the grounds of its obstructionism and of the popular approval of the President and his policies in the April referendum, and to call for the election of a new legislature in December. The dissolution of the parliament was to come suddenly on the nineteenth of September, a Sunday, when its members would not be in their building, 'the White House,' and would thus lack the advantages of a central position, unity, and considerable armed security and protection. But, perhaps inevitably, the news leaked out and spread. Instead of abandoning the building, the legislators dug in. For ten days or so large supplies of armaments and a great variety of rebellious individuals and groups flocked into 'the White House,' where Rutskoi and others tried to organize them into an effective military force. Witnesses remember the standard of the Romanov family flying next to the red flag of communism; the cossacks and even the neo-Nazis were also prominent. Yeltsin's broadcast on the twenty-first
of September made the conflict and the deadlock explicit. Neither side was organized or prepared for what had happened. The inhabitants of 'the White House' represented a fantastically mixed and undisciplined lot living from hour to hour on rumors of the impending government attack and wild stories of what else was happening in Moscow, the rest of the country, and the world. But the authorities also did not know what to do, as they disagreed, could not tell what military forces would effectively support them, and wished to avoid a massacre. Mediation under the auspices of the Patriarch failed, because the rebels were in an upbeat mood at that point in time and would not seriously consider a compromise settlement. To be sure, Yeltsin can be blamed for setting off the entire collision by his coup against the legislature and for acting, to put it mildly, in an unconstitutional manner. But it was the legislature that first brought violence into play. Already on the twenty-fourth of September a woman was killed when an extremist military leader in the parliament staged an attack on a military communications office. More important, on the third of October, having gained more followers and some crowd support, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov endorsed attacks on the Ostankino television center and the headquarters of the mayor of the city, i.e., tactics of a classical military rebellion and takeover. It was on the fourth that troops, with tanks, finally arrived to bombard 'the White House' rebels into submission and to arrest them. More than a hundred people were killed, many of them bystanders; the building itself presented a picture of utter devastation. Although the capture of 'the White House' did not prove to be a difficult military operation, Yeltsin and his assistants might have been lucky to survive as well as they did. Their fortunes depended on such factors as a general telling his friend, Rutskoi, that he was not going to obey his orders, and, of course, on the seriously delayed arrival of military support. On the twenty-ninth of February, 1994, the Duma declared an amnesty for the participants in the events of October, 1993, as well as for those who attempted the coup in August, 1991, and for other prisoners.
The parliamentary catastrophe of 1993 was followed in 1994 by a still greater disaster, the Chechen war. One of the 89 units of the new Russian Federation, the Chechens constituted less than 1 per cent of its population and were located on a far Caucasian periphery, important perhaps only for oil and gas transport. A warlike people, they had fought under Shamil until 1859, when they finally became reluctant subjects of the Russian empire. Stalin considered them disloyal in the Second World War and had them transported, under atrocious conditions, to Central Asia, from which they were allowed to return to their native land only after the supreme dictator's death. There was no love lost between them and the Russians as well as certain other Caucasian peoples. Still, Yeltsin would have
