health care; the pollution and lack of industrial safety standards; and the fall in average family income. Even those people who had jobs were not always paid. Salary and wages arrears became a national scandal.
In other ways, too, life was precarious. As the criminal and governmental organizations got closer, the use of direct violence became commonplace. Several politicians and investigative journalists were assassinated. Entrepreneurs organized the ‘contract killings’ of their entrepreneurial rivals; and elderly tenants of apartments in central city locations were beaten up if they refused to move out when property companies wished to buy up their blocks. Criminality was pervasive in the development of the Russian market economy. Governmental officials at the centre and in the localities were routinely bribed. The police were utterly venal. Russian generals sold their equipment to the highest bidder, sometimes even to anti-Russian Chechen terrorists. Illicit exports of nuclear fuels and precious metals were made; the sea-ports of Estonia were especially useful for this purpose. Half the capital invested abroad by Russians had been transferred in contravention of Russian law. The new large-scale capitalists were not demonstrably keen to invest their profits in their own country.
And so Russia did not build up its economic strength as quickly as neighbouring Poland and Czechoslovakia; and its legal order was a shambles. Sergei Kovalev, the Russian government’s human rights commissioner, was increasingly isolated from ministers. The Constitutional Court retained a degree of independence from the President, but generally the goal of a law-based state proved elusive. Everywhere there was uncertainty. Arbitrary rule was ubiquitous, both centrally and locally. Justice was unenforceable. The rouble depreciated on a daily basis. It appeared to Russian citizens that their entire way of existence was in flux. On the streets they were bargaining with American dollars. At their kiosks they were buying German cooking-oil, French chocolate and British alcohol. In their homes they were watching Mexican soap-operas and American religious evangelists. A world of experience was being turned upside-down.
Nor were the problems of Russians confined to the Russian Federation. Twenty-five million people of Russian ethnic background lived in other states of the former Soviet Union. In Tajikestan (as its government now spelled its name), the outbreak of armed inter-clan struggle amongst the Tajik majority induced practically all Russian families to flee for their lives back to Russia. In Uzbekistan the local thugs stole their cars and pushed them out of prominent jobs. In Estonia there was discussion of a citizenship law which would have deprived resident Russians of political rights. Large pockets of Russians lived in areas where such intimidation was not quite so dramatic: north-western Kazakhstan and eastern Ukraine were prime examples. But Russians indeed had a difficult time in several successor states in the former Soviet Union.
Yeltsin hinted that he might wish to expand Russia at the expense of the other former Soviet republics, but foreign criticism led him to withdraw the remark. Other politicians were not so restrained. Vladimir Zhirinovski, who had contested the 1991 Russian presidential elections against Yeltsin, regarded the land mass south to the Indian Ocean as the Russian sphere of influence. Widely suspected of being sheltered by the KGB, Zhirinovski’s Liberal- Democratic Party had been the first officially-registered non-communist political party under Gorbachev; and Zhirinovski had supported the State Committee of the Emergency Situation in August 1991. His regret at the USSR’s collapse was shared by communist conservatives who obtained a decision from the Constitutional Court in November 1992 allowing them to re-found themselves under the name of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Its new leader Gennadi Zyuganov and his colleagues cut back its ideology of internationalism and atheism while maintaining a commitment to the memory of Lenin and even Stalin.
The threat to Yeltsin came from such self-styled patriots. Unequivocal advocacy of liberal political principles became rarer. Several prominent critics of authoritarianism fell into disrepute: the most notable example was Gavriil Popov, mayor of Moscow, who resigned in 1992 after accusations were made of financial fraud. Sergei Stankevich, who had seemed the embodiment of liberalism, became gloomier about the applicability of Western democratic traditions to Russia — and he too was charged with being engaged in fraudulent deals. The few leading surviving liberals such as Galina Starovoitova and Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner were voices crying in the wilderness.
Russian politics were gradually becoming more authoritarian; and Yeltsin’s shifting policy towards Russia’s internal republics reflected this general development despite the amicable signature of a Federal Treaty in March 1992. Chechnya had been a sore point since its president, Dzhokar Dudaev, had declared its independence in November 1991. Tatarstan, too, toyed with such a project. Several other republics — Bashkortostan, Buryatiya, Karelia, Komi, Sakha (which had previously been known as Yakutia) and Tuva — insisted that their local legislation should take precedence over laws and decrees introduced by Yeltsin. North Osetiya discussed the possibility of unification with South Osetiya despite the fact that South Osetiya belonged to already independent Georgia. Yeltsin also had to contend with regionalist assertiveness in the areas inhabited predominantly by Russians. In summer 1993 his own native region, Sverdlovsk, briefly declared itself the centre of a so-called Urals Republic.20
Yeltsin, the man who had urged the republics to assert their prerogatives against Gorbachev, asserted the prerogatives of ‘the centre’. Taxes would be exacted. No separatist tendencies would be tolerated: the frontiers of ‘Russia’ were non-infringible. National, ethnic and regional aspirations were to be met exclusively within the framework of subordination to the Kremlin’s demands. A firm central authority needed to be reimposed if the disintegration of the Russian state was to be avoided during the implementation of economic reforms.
Furthermore, Yeltsin did not intend to go on giving way to the demands of Rutskoi, Khasbulatov and the Russian Supreme Soviet. He tried to shunt Vice-President Rutskoi out of harm’s way by assigning him agriculture as his legislative responsibility just as Gorbachev had got rid of Ligachevin 1989. There was less that could be done about Khasbulatov, the Supreme Soviet Speaker, who gave plenty of parliamentary time to deputies who opposed Gaidar’s monetarist economic objectives.21 But at least Yeltsin prevented Chernomyrdin, the Prime Minister since December 1992, from adopting policies still closer to those advocated by Khasbulatov. Yeltsin insisted that Chernomyrdin should accept Gaidar’s associate Boris Fedorov as Minister of Finances; and the cabinet was compelled, at Yeltsin’s command, to adhere to Chubais’s programme of privatization. Yeltsin was biding his time until he could reinforce the campaign for a full market economy.
To outward appearances he was in trouble. His personal style of politics came in for persistent criticism from the newspapers and from the large number of political parties which had sprung up. For example, it was claimed that Russia was governed by a ‘Sverdlovsk Mafia’. Certainly Yeltsin was operating like a communist party boss appointing his clientele to high office; and he steadily awarded himself the very perks and privileges he had castigated before 1991. He was chauffeured around in a limousine and his wife no longer queued in the shops. He founded his own select tennis club: he seemed ever more secluded from other politicians in the country.22
Yet Yeltsin made a virtue of this by stressing that he would always ignore the brouhaha of party politics. Like Nicholas II and Lenin, he habitually denounced politicking. Yeltsin had backed Gaidar in 1991-2, but not to the point of forming a party with him. He was a politician apart and intended to remain so. Moreover, the great blocks of economic and social interests in Russia had not yet coalesced into a small number of political parties. The problem was no longer the existence of a single party but of too many parties. The distinctions between one party and another were not very clear; their programmes were wordy and obscure and the parties tended to be dominated by single leaders. The far-right Liberal-Democratic Party was described in its official handouts as ‘the Party of Zhirinovski’.23 Russia had not yet acquired a stable multi-party system, and this circumstance increased Yeltsin’s freedom of manoeuvre.
In March 1993 the Russian Supreme Soviet provided him with the kind of emergency in which he thrived by starting proceedings for his impeachment. Yeltsin struck back immediately, and held a referendum on his policies on 25 April 1993. Fifty-nine per cent of the popular turn-out expressed confidence in Yeltsin as president. Slightly less but still a majority — fifty-three per cent — approved of his economic policies.24 Yeltsin drew comfort from the result, but not without reservations; for fifty per cent of those who voted were in favour of early presidential elections: not an unambiguous pat on the back for the existing president. Yet in general terms he had gained a victory: his policies were supported despite the unpleasantness they were causing to so many people. Undoubtedly Yeltsin had outflanked the Supreme Soviet; he could now, with reinforced confidence, claim to be governing with the consent of voters.
The trouble was that he would still need to rule by decree in pursuit of a fuller programme of economic reform leading to a market economy. Furthermore, Rutskoi and Khasbulatov were undaunted by the referendum. They still had strong support in a Supreme Soviet which could thwart the introduction of any such programme; they could also use the Supreme Soviet to prevent Yeltsin from calling early political elections. The result was a stalemate. Both sides agreed that Russia needed a period of firm rule; but there was irreconcilable disagreement
