1989, and now set about conquering the power structures of Russia, as distinct from the Soviet Union: he became in effect president of a ‘sovereign’ Russia in 1990 (though formally only in 1991). Russians were supposed to obey him, and not Gorbachev; there were clashes. However, quite obviously, he knew how to manage powerful Russians, such as Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad, and these powerful Russians were responding to the evidence of collapse. By 1990 the economy was running down, as there was an explosive increase in paper money, translated into a black market that occupied more and more of output. Worse, the various regions had developed their own networks, independently of Moscow, and these were now pushing ‘sovereignty’ — the first, Estonia in September 1988, the pebble announcing the avalanche. Panic-buying emptied the shops; by spring 1991 there were demonstrations of 150,000 people in Moscow, and Yeltsin took the lead. By this time the Party’s sharper men (there were not many women) were preoccupied with their own survival, and took up shadowy contacts with Western banks: thousands of millions went abroad, and the gold reserve disappeared (when the whole system fell apart in August 1991, the two men most obviously in the know as to this, Nikolay Kruchina (the treasurer) and Georgy Pavlov (the finance minister), committed suicide in circumstances that, for Kruchina, might suggest murder).
As nations declared ‘sovereigny’ — i.e. would not obey Soviet laws — and as mass demonstrations caught the attention of the Western media, Gorbachev responded initially by repression. Of course, once nationalism was released in this system, it expressed the frustration and rage that Communism produced; it was doing precisely the same in Yugoslavia, itself a little version of the USSR, complete with its Western subsidies. Troops were used in Lithuania, in January 1991, as had happened in Baku, in the Caucasus; but this time round, they were answered by mass demonstrations in Moscow itself, let alone in Baku. It was Yeltsin who now held the cards, and Gorbachev attempted to sort out a new constitution for the various peoples of the USSR; but this did not solve anything, the more so as there were now quite serious strikes, even in Byelorussia. In August came a mysterious affair: the putsch. Men whom Gorbachev had recently appointed, including the head of the KGB, appeared on 18 August, with tanks, on the streets, while Gorbachev was ostensibly on holiday on the Black Sea. They would take power, and to begin with the world took them seriously. However, this was almost a farce. One of the plotters, at a press conference, had obviously been calming his nerves with drink; fingers rapped nervously on the table. The tanks, on their way to Yeltsin’s headquarters in the Russian parliament, stopped at traffic lights, where old women with shopping bags banged on their sides, shouting at the drivers. Yeltsin was not even tracked to his country house; Sobchak in Leningrad was not touched, and rallied that city at once; the Yekaterinburg KGB came out for Yeltsin. In the event, the putsch disintegrated within three days, and the plotters flew to see Gorbachev, asking what to do. It had all been a clumsy manoeuvre, to make out that Gorbachev must be supported against ‘dark forces’. The whole affair ended within a week, allowing Yeltsin to appear as saviour of his country, as he stood on a tank and denounced the plotters; but the probability is that he had tricked them into thinking he would support them. At the end, Russia became independent, and the Communist Party was banned. But it left a country in many ways ruined, and bright men and women all over now wondered how they could turn it into a normal European country. Quite naively, to begin with, they looked at the Western model.
28. ‘Ending History’
As the Iron Curtain collapsed, there was much interest in the causes and consequences. The Left was mainly taken by surprise, and was (and, again mainly, is) quite unable to account for what had happened: Susan Sontag remarked honestly and pertinently that
In 1991 there was much triumphalism on the Right, the more so as, by a quirk of history, the fall of the Berlin Wall more or less coincided with the fiftieth anniversaries of the Marshall Plan and NATO or, for that matter, of the German Federal Republic itself (celebrants of which could often only mumble a half-remembered and rather soppy version of the old national anthem). It was an Atlantic hour, a triumph of American power, soft, as exemplified by CNN, and hard, as exemplified by the IMF. The Fukuyama thesis, that the West, catchily described as free market and democracy, had won, had captured Japan and South Korea, and would go on turning all countries of the world into versions of Denmark, sounded quite convincing. But which ‘West’? For most of the world, it was Reagan’s United States — and not the European countries that practised the minor virtues, such as thrift, failing to make babies and padding their pensioners.
Efforts were made to parade the European Union (as it was soon to be called) as an alternative model, of ‘Rhenish’ as distinct from ‘Atlantic’ capitalism. On one level, Europe, or at any rate the Europe of the Single European Act, unquestionably did good, in that it could break into stagnant pools of local protectionism, and for a Spain or a Greece, emerging from stupid military dictatorships, joining Europe was important for morale and in a limited degree finance. The same was, on the whole, true for former Iron Curtain countries, which got German investment and remittances from migrants to the West. But, as generally happens with multinational organizations, Europe was good only at dealing with limited and well-defined problems. Her efforts on the world stage were laughable — never more so than when the then presiding officer, a Luxemburger named Jacques Poos, turned up with two other worthies at the start of the Yugoslav civil wars in 1991 to warn against nationalism — in this case, that of the Slovenes, who were ticked off for thinking that their country (an elephant beside his own) was large enough to indulge in independence. At bottom, Europe was itself in any case an Atlantic creation, and French aspirations to make it independent of the United States very speedily broke down. Lacking armed forces, it had only two lines in foreign affairs: ‘Me, too’ to the Americans, and then ‘Oh, dear’ to the Americans.
Even the ‘Swedish model’, long and finger-waggingly upheld as a sort of ‘third way’, broke down. It had thrived, with a small population sitting on raw materials, had thrived further because it had stayed out of both world wars, had done well out of the export of arms, while its political establishment moralized at the rest of the world. Up until the 1970s, Swedish Lapps had been sterilized in tens of thousands on the grounds that they, stunted in growth and drunken in habits, were not worthy to reproduce themselves. In the 1990s, Swedish delegations were appearing in Turkey to reproach Turkey for her handling of the Kurds, a handling that most certainly did not include sterilization. By 1990 Sweden herself had slipped from being second most prosperous country in the world to being seventeenth, and was overtaken by Finland, a former colony, where affairs were less pretentiously managed. In 1990 the only European of any serious interest in the former Communist bloc was Margaret Thatcher, herself, of course, no great respecter of the European Union.
Great numbers of hungry, intelligent Russians (and others from the old bloc) came west, with a view, often dewy-eyed, to learning what the secret had been. Others did not need any such training. Communism had had, in the form of Alain Besancon’s ‘C’ system, its own hidden, brutal and corrupt form of a market, and vicious figures made enormous fortunes out of the Soviet rubble. Russia then went through a very difficult decade, most Russians becoming disillusioned. The end of the Soviet empire was of course the culminating moment of the eighties, but there was an air of anti-climax to it all, as with most such moments, including Victory Day in 1945. Besides, this
