The Penguin History of Modern Russia

system’s dependence on the USA’s sanction for the IMF to go on lending to Russia meant that Yeltsin could never easily refuse an American diplomatic demand. Kozyrev’s ‘Atlanticist’ orientation was put under assault in the Duma and the press.

Yeltsin responded in characteristic fashion by publicly rebuking Kozyrev as if he himself had not had a hand in setting the orientation. He spoke about the need to protect the singular interests of the Russian state, and both he and Kozyrev warned that the government could not stay indifferent when other states of the former USSR discriminated against their ethnic Russians. The stringent linguistic and cultural qualifications for Estonian citizenship became a bone of contention. Within the CIS, moreover, Russia increasingly used its supply of oil and gas to neighbouring countries as an instrument to keep them within the Russian zone of political influence.

Hardening the line of foreign policy, Yeltsin sacked Kozyrev in December 1995. Yet he could do little about the series of encroachments by Western powers. Finland had joined the European Union earlier in the year and schemes were made for the eventual accession of many countries in Eastern Europe in the twentieth-first century. This was embarrassing enough. Worse for the Russian government was the NATO’s refusal to disband itself after the Cold War’s end and the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution. Quite the contrary: NATO set about territorial expansion. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became members in 1999. NATO forces were sent into action in Bosnia in 1993–1995 and Kosovo in 1999 as inter-ethnic violence intensified. In both cases the Russian government protested that insufficient effort had been invested in diplomacy. Yeltsin sent Chernomyrdin as his personal envoy to Belgrade to plead with Serbia’s President Slobodan Milosevic to come to terms with the Americans and avoid the bombing of his capital. But to no avail. Having lost its position as a global power, Russia was ceasing to carry much weight even in Eastern Europe.

The Russian Foreign Ministry and various Moscow think-tanks recognized that policy should be formulated on the basis of a realistic appreciation of Russia’s reduced capabilities. They recommended that Russia should seek other partners in world diplomacy without alienating the USA. The benefits of ‘multipolarity’ in global politics and economics were touted. The European Union, China and India were courted by Russian diplomats with a revitalized enthusiasm.

Nothing about this steady endeavour was going to capture the imagination of a public unaccustomed to seeing its government treated casually by the USA. It was Yeltsin’s good fortune that few public bodies took him to task. The Russian Orthodox Church supported his invasion of Chechnya and his diplomatic stand on the Kosovo question. Its hierarchy had little interest in the routine of politics. At times of national emergency, especially in late 1993, Patriarch Alexi II offered himself as an intermediary between Yeltsin and his enemies; but generally the Church, needing the government’s assistance in defending itself against the resurgence of other Christian denominations, was quiescent. So too was the Russian Army. Yeltsin never had to face the overt criticism by serving officers that Gorbachev endured. Military critics no longer held seats in representative public institutions. The platform of criticism had been sawn from under them. The armed forces performed poorly in Chechnya. Although their finances had been savagely reduced, there was no excuse for their incompetence and brutality in the taking of Grozny. Even the media were easy on Yeltsin’s regime. They exposed corruption in his family; the NTV puppet show Kukly (‘Dolls’) satirized him as a bumbling idiot. But his policies rarely suffered assaults of a fundamental nature.

The reason was that Church, high command and media had more to lose than gain by the regime’s removal. A communist restoration would have disturbed their comforts at the very least. Yeltsin had prevented any such disturbance. He had also not needed to resort to violence again in Moscow. The order of Russian state and society was beginning to settle into a durable mould.

At the central level of politics it had proved not unduly difficult for former members of the Soviet nomenklatura to establish themselves in the new Russian elite. Typically, they were persons who had been in the early stage of a career when the USSR fell. In business circles too there were many entrepreneurs with a solid background in the communist party or the Komsomol before 1991. Newcomers were not excluded. Most of the ‘oligarchs’, for example, had worked in posts outside any nomenklatura.¹³ This mixture of old and new in the post-communist establishment was also observable in the localities. Mintimer Shaimiev had moved smoothly from being communist party first secretary of the Tatar Provincial Party Committee to installing himself as President of Tatarstan.¹⁴ So blatant a transition was in fact unusual in the Russian Federation. (It was much more common in ex-Soviet Central Asia.) But whoever emerged to lead a republic or a province was likely to bring along an entourage with administrative experience from the Soviet period. Patronage remained an important feature of local public life, and traditions of ‘tails’ and ‘nests’ were little affected by recurrent elections. The ruling group in nearly every locality used whatever trickery — or even illegality — was needed to hold on to power.¹⁵

The prime beneficiaries of the ‘new Russia’ were politicians, businessmen and gangsters. In some cases the individual might be all three things at once. Wealth was celebrated in public life. Successful sportsmen such as Yevgeni Kafelnikov or entertainers like Alla Pugacheva led an extremely luxurious life. Sumptuous dachas were built. Apartment blocks were bought up and renovated to the highest standards of opulence. Children were sent to English private schools. Domestic servants, chauffeurs and personal hairdressers were employed. Foreign limousines, clothing and holidays were treated as nothing out of the ordinary by families who had suddenly got rich as capitalism flooded all over Russia. The ultra-rich were seldom eager to keep their wealth a secret and were determined to keep their gains exclusively for themselves. They bought yachts and villas on the Mediterranean — the Black Sea had become too vulgar for them. Forsaking the Russian countryside, they purchased mansions in Hampstead and estates in the English home counties. They dressed in Versace or Prada outfits. Their limousines were Mercedes. Not since 1914 had the excesses of Russian material abundance been shown off so excessively.

Magazines sprang up to cater for such tastes. Most people who bought them were not wealthy; but they had to have an above-average income to afford a copy and ogle at how the ‘new Russians’ expected to live. As fortunes were made the competition grew to show them off. Birthday parties were celebrated by paying American or British rock stars to give private performances. Sons and daughters of the oligarchs were treated as celebrities.

At the same time there remained a possibility that wealth won so quickly and often so illicitly might one day soon be confiscated or stolen. Big businessmen protected themselves with personal bodyguards and financial sweeteners to influential politicians and police. They surrounded their dachas with hi-tech surveillance equipment. The poodle was for indoor companionship; in the grounds, the Rottweilers were the patrol dogs of choice. The danger usually came from fellow businessmen. Courts were only for the ‘little people’. Defence of funds and property effectively depended on firepower if bribery of officials failed, and company owners remained vulnerable unless they could assemble adequate means of defence. At restaurants and night-clubs no one was surprised to see guards with Kalashnikovs in the foyers. The atmosphere at the stratospheric level of Russian business was frantic. This in turn induced its practitioners to enjoy their earnings to the full in case they suffered a financial or personal disaster. Most oligarchs felt notoriously little inclination to share their wealth with charities. With a few exceptions their civic commitment was negligible.

A disproportionate number of them were non-Russians, especially Jews, which provided parties on the political far right with the pretext to make anti-Semitic propaganda. Russians ignored the fascists even while detesting the oligarchs. More congenial to Russian popular opinion were measures directed against people from the north and south Caucasus. Yeltsin, in a breach of multinational tolerance, backed Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s attempts to eject Azeris, Armenians and others from the capital. Demagogic tactics of this kind reflected an awareness of the widening resentment of the new street vendors and entrepreneurs — and people from the south of the former Soviet Union were prominent among the capital’s stallholders.

A long ladder separated the families at its top from the vast impoverished majority of citizens at its base. Russia — like other societies — had its wealthy, middling and poor strata. But the poor were a disturbingly large section of society. By the end of the twentieth century about two-fifths of the population lived below the poverty level as defined by the UN.¹⁶ The data were geographically diverse. Moscow and, to a lesser extent, St Petersburg had an economic buoyancy denied to the rest of the country. Inhabitants of big cities, moreover, did better materially than the rest of society. The Russian north and most parts of Siberia suffered especially badly as the state subsidies for salaries and accommodation in places of harsh climatic conditions were phased out. The standard of living also plummeted even in central cities whose economy depended on an industrial specialization which was beaten down by superior foreign imports. Machine tool production slumped in the Urals and the mid- Volga region with appalling consequences for the employees and their families. Large industrial firms in the USSR