workers were in a mood to struggle with their managers: strikes were small scale and few.11
Chubais and Gaidar had ceded ground because the economic and social forces ranged against the government were too strong. The administrative elite of the Soviet period remained in charge of factories, kolkhozes, shops and offices. In particular, twenty-two per cent of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies had come from the highest echelons of party and governmental agencies of the USSR; thirty-six per cent were officials of a middling level; and twenty-one per cent were drawn from local political and economic management.12 Although about a quarter of deputies in early 1992 were committed to basic reforms, there was a drift into the embrace of the thirteen anti-reformist caucuses in the Russian Supreme Soviet in the course of the year.
Outside the Congress, furthermore, several dozens of parties had recently been formed. Lobbying organizations emerged to increase the pressure on the government. Trade unions of workers had little influence. Only the miners caused trepidation to ministers — and even miners did not bring them to heel. But directors of energy, manufacturing and agricultural companies were more effective in pressurizing Yeltsin. Their lobbyists were men who had walked the corridors of power before the end of the USSR. Most famous of them was Arkadi Volsky, who headed the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Another was Viktor Chernomyrdin, chairman of the vast state-owned gas company known as Gazprom. Even more remarkable was the decision of the Agrarian Union to choose Vasili Starodubtsev as their leader despite his having been imprisoned for belonging to the State Committee of the Emergency Situation in August 1991. Throughout the first six months of 1992 such lobbyists raised the spectre of economic collapse if existing enterprises were allowed to go to the wall.
They proved willing to bargain with Chubais. Their basic demand was that if the government was going to insist on the de-nationalization of companies, this should be done without ending state subsidies and without threatening the immediate interests of the directors or workers. It was only when Chubais gave way on this that the Supreme Soviet ratified his programme of privatization on 11 June. This was the last success of the radical economic reformers for a year.13 They knew that they had made compromises. But their rationale was that they had introduced enough capitalism to ensure that the members of the old Soviet nomenklatura would not permanently be able to shield themselves from the pressures of economic competition.14 Market relationships, they trusted, would eventually entail that the previous cosy relationships within whole sectors of industry, agriculture, finance, transport and trade would break down. Thus a revived Russian capitalism would consign the communist order to oblivion.
Rutskoi and Khasbulatov thought otherwise and aimed to continue stymieing Chubais’s programme. From midsummer 1992, both cast themselves in the semi-open role of opponents of Yeltsin. Usually they took care to criticize him by castigating Gaidar. But it was primarily Yeltsin whom they sought to harm.
Yeltsin gave ground to the preferences of Rutskoi and Khasbulatov. In May he had promoted Chernomyrdin, Gazprom’s chairman, to the post of Energy Minister. In July Yeltsin appointed Viktor Gerashchenko as head of the Central Bank of Russia. Whereas Gaidar wanted to decelerate inflation by restricting the printing of paper roubles, Gerashchenko expanded the credit facilities of the great companies. Inflation accelerated. Yet the public heaped the blame not on Gerashchenko but on Gaidar. In June Yeltsin had made him Acting Prime Minister in order to stress that economic reforms would somehow continue. But vehement hostility to Gaidar remained in the Russian Supreme Soviet, which rejected Yeltsin’s subsequent recommendation that Gaidar should be promoted to the post of Prime Minister. In December, Yeltsin yielded to the Supreme Soviet and instead nominated Chernomyrdin to the premiership. On 5 January 1993 Chernomyrdin introduced a limit on the rates of profit on several goods — and some of these goods also had governmental price controls applied to them. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were delighted.
They had plentiful reason to think that Yeltsin had been given a shock that would permanently deter him. Disenchantment with him was spreading throughout society in 1992. Food production was only nine per cent down on the previous year;15 but the funds of the government were so depleted that most kolkhozes were unpaid for their deliveries to the state purchasing agencies.16 Industrial production continued to fall. Output in the same year was down by eighteen per cent on 1991.17 Inflation was 245 per cent in January.18 Whereas kolkhozniki could survive by means of their private plots and sales of their surplus products at the urban markets, workers and office employees were hard pressed unless they had nearby dachas where they could grow potatoes and vegetables. Some folk simply cut out a patch of land on the outskirts of towns to cultivate produce or keep rabbits, pigs or even cows.
Others moonlighted from their jobs, selling cigarettes at Metro stations. Factories, mines and offices no longer asserted work-discipline: like the kolkhozes, they frequently lacked funds to pay their workers; and, being unable to maintain regular production, they no longer needed everyone to be on site in working hours. Pensioners eked out a living similarly. Many of them queued for hours in shops to buy basic products and to sell them on the pavement at double the price to busy passers-by.
The economy was reverting to ancient techniques of barter. Foreigners were astounded by the adaptiveness of ordinary Russians; but this was because they had taken too much account of official Soviet propaganda. Petty thefts from enterprises had been an established way of life in the USSR: grocery-shop counter staff kept back the best sausages; bookshop salespeople secreted the most sensational books; factory workers went home with spanners and screwdrivers. Such prized acquisitions could be traded among friends. Capitalism had not existed in the Soviet Union since the 1920s; but personal commerce had never been eliminated. Under Yeltsin, the attempt was no longer made to harass those who tried, legally or even illegally, to gain a few little luxuries in an economy where such luxuries were in constant deficit. The militia might occasionally clear the streets of pedlars, but this was usually in order to receive the bribes that were their method of surviving on inadequate wages.
Such trading was one thing; it was much harder to kick-start a market economy into motion on a larger scale. For most people, the replacement of communism with capitalism was most obviously manifested in the tin kiosks erected in all towns and cities. The goods they sold were a curious assortment: soft-drinks, alcohol, bracelets, watches, Bibles, pens and pornographic magazines. The kiosks also got hold of goods of domestic provenance which were in chronic under-supply such as razors, flowers and apples. At first there was a flood of imports, but Russian enterprises became active in production, often presenting their goods in fictitious foreign packaging (including allegedly non-Russian vodka). Prices were high, profits large.
And so popular disgruntlement grew even though the kiosks’ operations were helping to end the perennial shortage of products. Poverty of the most dreadful kind was widespread. Tent-settlements of the homeless sprang up even in Moscow. Beggars held out their hands in the rain and snow. Most of them were frail pensioners, orphans and military invalids. Without charitable donations from passers-by they faced starvation. The incidence of homelessness increased. Meanwhile everyone — not only the poor — suffered from the continuing degradation of the environment. In areas of heavy industry such as Chelyabinsk, the rise in respiratory and dermatological illnesses was alarming. Spent nuclear fuel was casually emitted into the White Sea. Not since the Second World War had so many citizens of Russia felt so lacking in care by the authorities. The old, the poor and the sick were the victims of the governmental economic programme.
Virtually everyone who had a job, however, kept it. The exceptions were the soldiers of the Soviet Army who were being brought back from the garrisons of Eastern Europe since 1990, and many were compelled to retire from service. Conditions were often dire for those who remained in the armed forces. The state construction of housing blocks had more or less ceased, and in the worst cases, public lavatories were requisitioned as military residences. Through 1992, too, contingents of the Soviet Army were divided among the newly-independent states of the CIS and a Russian Army was formed.
Russian Army contingents, however, were located not only in Russia but across the entire former Soviet Union, and uncertainty persisted as to what should be done with them. In Moscow, crowds gathered daily outside the Lenin Museum off Red Square protesting at the USSR’s dismemberment. Stalinists, Russian nationalists and monarchists mingled. There was even a man with a huge billboard offering all and sundry a cheap cure for AIDs. This congregation was menacing, but also a little ridiculous: its dottiness outdid its activism. But its members were nostalgic for the Soviet Union, for orderliness and for Russian pride and power that was echoed amidst the population of the Russian Federation. Naturally this feeling was strongest among ethnic Russians. They constituted eighty-two per cent of the Russian Federation,19 and many of them worried about the potential fate of relatives and friends now living in what were formally foreign countries.
They worried, too, about the situation in Russia. Not since the Second World War had life been so precarious. By the mid-1990s the life expectancy of Russian males had fallen to fifty-nine years and was still falling. Alcohol abuse was widespread. But most problems faced by most citizens were beyond their control: declining
