(Reprinted from Symposium 2003)
Ten Years After
Reflections of a Re-covering Sovietologist
By Nick Hayes
Something was lost when the Soviet Union went south over ten years ago. For some of us, it was our careers. We academics, who belonged to Soviet Studies or “Sovietologists” as we were called, had failed to see either the coming of the end of the Soviet era or the attendant end of our profession. The writing had been on the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yet, Sovietologists for the most part read the Soviet past into the future. We cautioned that homo Soveticus, a peculiar political animal of the Soviet era, would live on indefinitely to shape Russia and its world relations. The better observation would have been to realize that we Sovietologists were ourselves a variety of homo Soveticus. Its survival did not mean its relevance either to policy in Washington or tenure and promotion in our academic careers. For the rest, it was not the loss of the brutal old Soviet system but loss a last chance for politics other than U.S. hegemony among a world of emerging MacNation wanna-be’s. It was the loss of what the Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky in the 1960s called, nostalgia for the future.
In 2001, as Russia reached the ten year mark since the formal dissolution of the USSR, here in the U.S. my academic field, Sovietology had its last hurrah. In the hey day of the Cold War, Sovietology was the elite field of academic International Studies. We had connections. Our professional association’s convention, the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) had drawn not just us academics but big names from the State Department. There were, even cameo appearances by the political and cultural figures of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who were the subjects of our studies. In 1997, at the annual meeting in Boston, I realized the show was over. I found myself seated at a panel besides Gennady Gerasimov. In the 1980s, as a foreign policy advisor for President Mikhail Gorbachev, Gerasimov’s speeches and writings had been the fodder for more than a few papers read at our annual meetings. At this meeting, he gave me a copy of his resume and politely inquired as to whether there might be any openings for him on the faculty at my university. At the time, I had not known that his patron Gorbachev that day had been at nearby Barnes & Noble signing copies of his memoirs. As Chaucer would have said, if gold rusts what will iron do.
For some, the good times had continued into the 1990s. Strobe Talbott, for example, parlayed his friendship with President Clinton into a job as a National Security Advisor and kept Russia at the forefront of Clinton’s foreign policy agenda. For the rest, it was downhill from the glory days of 1989-1991 to the role of cheering or jeering from the sidelines of the post 9/11 era’s war on terrorism. It was probably a hopeless cause but, in any case, the old voices of Sovietology seized the occasion of the ten year anniversary to revive a bit of our Cold War obsession with Russia. The arguments split between “optimists” and “pessimists.” The “optimists,” like Stanford’s Michael McFaul in Russia’s Unfinished Revolution (2001) read the 1990s as a difficult text that nevertheless would end in market economics and western style democracy. The “pessimists,” for the most part, looked into Russia’s future and saw her past of ethnic conflict, anti-western nationalism, and autocracy. The best example came in Princeton Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (2001). Kotkin’s argument was that it could have been worse but was not going to get a lot better. He argued effectively that the apparatchik’s greed and self-interest had prevented Russia from falling into the Yugoslav model of brutal civil war but also preempted the growth of genuine democratic reform. The last word belonged to Stephen F. Cohen. For decades, the most provocative scholar in the Soviet field, Cohen argued in Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (2001) that these debates about “emerging markets” and “democracy” merely covered up a failed U.S. policy and excused our callousness in the face of a nation in pain. U.S. policy toward Russia in the1990s, Cohen argued, represented our worst policy disaster since Vietnam. He was right, of course, but by the fall of 2001 no one listened
Or cared. The Russian journalist Vladimir Posner once told me in an interview in 1987, “You, Americans have a remarkable ability not to see human pain and suffering.” For past decade, Russia has lived through a hell that we tend to gloss over either as the necessary tough love for a healthier relationship with us or as extended payment for the sins of its communist past. Dwell for a moment on a few news items from my notebooks. It was not a good decade for the women of the former Soviet Union. The Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported in February 2002 that from 1991-2001 the sale of women and girls from Russia and the nations of the former Soviet Union had reached to over 10 million. The women and girls were exported to over 30 countries with Germany, Poland, Turkey, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, the Middle East, and Latin America leading the list of recipients. There had to be a connection between that trend and a survey of high school women conducted in June 1997 in St. Petersburg and Moscow. One out of seven of the young high school girls surveyed indicated that prostitution was their first choice of a profession after graduation. Russian men also fared poorly. Male life expectancy declined from 64/63 in 1987 to 57/56 in 1997. At the end of the twentieth century, the average Russian male would die 16 years before his counterpart in the European Union. In 1998, the leading cause of death for Russian men aged 18 to 40 came from such “unnatural causes” as traffic accidents, violence, and suicide. Post-communist labor policies explain part of this trend. In February 2002, the Russian Labor Ministry reported a 15 to 20% rise from 1991 to 2001 in industrial accidents. The total toll of deaths due to industrial accidents for the ten year period 1991-2001 was calculated at no less than 500,000 which translates into a greater number of deaths in the Russian workplace than the combined totals for casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Want to hear more? German authorities in November 1999 exposed the existence of a Russian criminal organization based in St. Petersburg that captures and murders street children, harvests their internal organs, and sells them on the international black market.
Enough. The point is Russia is dying. This is literally true in a demographic sense. Birth rates plummeted. Rates of infectious disease soared. In 1997, UN AIDS ranked Russia as second only to South Africa in terms of the world’s highest rates on new HIV infections. It has been small comfort that Ukraine subsequently surpassed Russia in the rates of increased HIV infections or that UN AIDS predicts similar trends among other nations of the former Soviet Union. Increasingly over-crowded prisons in the 1990s provided a haven for the spread of tuberculosis that by 1999 reached epidemic proportions throughout Russia. For the past five years, Russia has experienced an absolute population loss of approximately 900,000 per year. The loss has occurred even though an annual influx of about 400,000 immigrants a year enters Russia from the other states of the former Soviet Union. If the current trends continue, today’s Russian population of 146 million will have fallen to an estimated 80 to 100 million by 2050. In the words of an old Russian friend and long time figure in the 1980s underground, Misha Koutcherenko, The situation could not be worse.
The decade of misery that gave ordinary Russians a third world standard of living also gave the country third world government. Russians had long tolerated corruption or, blat as a standard mode of operation in Soviet public life. Launched by the “marketization” reforms in 1992, the sudden and massive influx of foreign money combined with the looting of state assets by government insiders made Soviet era blat look like small change and left Russia with a record of corruption that would make Nigerian state officials blush. In October 1992, backed by the advice of Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs, the President Boris Yeltsin’s government introduced its form of “shock therapy.” Designed to stabilize the ruble and bring commodity prices to world market levels, the reforms brought on a wave of hyperinflation that left an estimated 80% of the Russian population below the poverty level and enriched a small circle of insiders as the new “oligarchs.” History may well come to regard Russia’s privatization program as the twentieth century’s most brazen and lucrative example of insider trading. The standard practice lay in the acquisition and privatization of state assets. The standard means of capitalization stemmed from taking advantage of a tip on a coming devaluation of the ruble and a quick profit on the change in the exchange rates against the U.S. dollar. The oligarchs also ignored Sachs’s guidelines for the formation of domestic capital markets. Since 1992, there has been a hemorrhaging of Russian capital abroad. Cyprus serves as the off-shore safe haven of choice where the Russian oligarchs bank their money. In this respect, the Russian private sector only emulates the model of its state sector. In 1997, for example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) sheepishly admitted that possibly as high as 4 billion U.S. dollars from its first loan to the Central State Bank of Russia had been traced to an account in an offshore bank in the Guernsey Islands. The ruble crisis of August 1998 ended this fiction of Russia’s “emerging market.” This time not just ordinary Russians but western investors were stung with losses estimated in the range of 80 to 100 billion U.S. dollars. Thereafter, as Strobe Talbott concluded, there was no point in further aid or investment when virtually all capital in Russia public and private was fleeing the country.
The rise of Vladimir Putin out of the ashes of the Yeltsin government did for Russia’s “emerging democracy” what the ruble crisis had done for her “emerging market.” Throughout the 1990s, Washington had put all its political eggs in Yeltsin’s basket and relied on him to carry out the cause democratization. We should have noticed that Yeltsin’s democratic strategy was rather oblique while his more immediate political ambition was quite transparent. In October 1993, he turned the tanks against an elected Parliament. Two months later, he engineered a referendum to change the constitution in his favor. In 1996, he barely won re-election even though he controlled the media’s coverage of the campaign, violated election financing laws, and leaned heavily on American support. Throughout the 1990s, he so routinely and arbitrarily cashiered his Prime Ministers and shuffled cabinets that his power to do so remained the only consistent aspect of his administration. By the time he resigned the presidency in 1999, Yeltsin had completed the transformation of Russia’s post-Soviet government from the parliamentary system that had first brought him to power to a presidential regime that he passed on to his successor and heir designate the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. By the time of Putin’s appointment as Prime Minister in 1999 and then his shoe-in election as President in 2000, Washington had distanced itself from Moscow and did not have to explain how Russia’s experiment with building democracy had ended with power in the hands of an ex-KGB operative.
For the most part, Washington remained satisfied that Moscow was, if not on track, then straying in ways we could handle. From Clinton to Bush, Washington raises concerns in regard to Russia’s exports of nuclear and other weapons technologies to Iran and Iraq. The press periodically unearths evidence that criminal organizations based in Russia or her neighboring post-Soviet states have a hand in the bringing to the black market the weapons we most fear might slip into the hands of our enemies in the post 9/11 era. In early 2002, the U.S. and Belgian authorities put out a search for a former Russian Army officer Viktor Bout for having supplied arms to Al-Qaeda, Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Things are a bit worse in the new neighborhood immediately outside the Russian Federation. Intelligence reports in October 2001 identified Belarus as the leading arms exporter to Islamic terrorist organizations. In the spring 2002, intelligence reports also traced the Iraqi purchase of the Kolchuga radar system to a deal cut by Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma with Saddam Hussein. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan remain primary suspects in any reports alleging the illicit sale of biological weapon agents to hostile countries. All of this is nasty stuff but nothing that serious as long as Moscow yields on the National Missile Defense (NMD), backs down on NATO’s eastward expansion, and, above all else, gets on board for the war on terrorism. In short, the new Russian figures in the American mind as at worse unsavory and unreliable partners like the Russian mafia characters working with Tony Soprano or Russian Alla Kliouka, his mistress and former prostitute.
Had we stared hard into the mirror of the new Russian politics we would have seen the darker side of ourselves. The real story of electoral politics in the 1990s lay in the revival of the Communist Party from near death in 1991 to a plurality by the mid-1990s. In the Gorbachev era, the quasi-legitimate elections of 1989 were rigged to assure representation in the new Soviet by the Communist Party. In the 1991 elections of the European republics of the Soviet Union, virtually all Communists had to jump ship from the Party to the opposition popular fronts to win a seat in the new representative bodies. From 1992 to 1995, three years of “market” reforms under Yeltsin gave communism a new lease on life. In January 1996, the head of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zuganov lead Yeltsin five to one in public opinion polls. Although Yeltsin squeaked through to victory in the presidential elections latter in June, the Communists retained the largest block of votes in the Parliament. After 1999, Putin’s success lay in part to a political sleight of hand that stole the nationalist and hard line thunder from his Communist opponents.
The Russian Communist Party served as the messenger of a more serious message. For those of us who traveled frequently in the old Soviet Union, anti-Americanism belonged to the empty rhetoric of the Soviet state and not to the popular culture. If anything, the ordinary Russians’ adulation of virtually anything American struck me as naïve and embarrassing. I first learned of the change of mood by accident. In August 1993, while in Moscow on an assignment for public television, I noticed a rally of the Russian Communist Party on the fringes of Red Square. With a beta-cam in hand, I moved from the periphery to the center of the crowd politely saying, Excuse, American television. The phrase had charmed and opened up countless welcoming Russian crowds in the old Soviet days. Within moments in this case, an angry and threatening crowd surrounded me as a speaker led them to chant in heavily accented English, Yankee, Go Home! Yankee, Go Home! On a more intellectual level, one by one my contacts from the counter-culture of the 1980s politely but consistently let me know that their politics were taking a walk on the anti-American side. The talented underground rock artist, Dmitri Zharikov in 1993 proudly told me in Moscow that he was the closest minister of culture for a future government by Russia’s clown fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Sergei Kurekhin, my nominee for the most brilliant counter-culture rock and jazz artists of the 1980s, had lined up with the radical red/brown National Bolshevik Party before his sudden death in the summer 1995. In the summer 1999, while on assignment for The Star Tribune Newspaper of Minneapolis/St. Paul, I looked up the head of the National Bolshevik Party, Edvard (“Eddy”) Limonov. A popular underground writer of the 1970s and 1980s, Limonov’s poems, memoirs and stories translated into French and English had made him into a cult figure in post-punk circles in Moscow, Paris, and New York. The fifty-something poet turned political acitivist had this to say about us:
After the bombing of Serbia, we have excluded the West from Civilization. It’s cannibalism. You are like the body snatchers in the old science fiction film. You think that you can just kill any nonconformist country. We want nothing to do with you. In America, you were free to do only two things – business management and sex. But now since the AIDS epidemic, you don’t even have sex. Your only choice is to be in business. You in America have lost your freedom.
Limonov’s politics landed him in jail. Russian authorities arrested him in April 2001 and placed him on trial for allegedly planning a military uprising in neighboring Kazakhstan. Military adventurism, not anti-Americanism, got him in trouble
The politics of a post-punk provocateur are less important than the more pervasive sense of disillusionment and a loss of national direction. You know, we Russians don’t want or need any help America, the film director and actor Nikita Mikalkov said in an interview in December 2001, because we Russian know that the only free cheese is in a mouse trap. Besides, he argued they would rather work through their own models for politics, culture, and religion. We distrust all politics, although ours a little less so than yours, he concluded, and somehow trust our own Russian sense of God and his law to guide us back to our own way.
What in the end has ailed Russia this past decade has not been the painful transition from communism to western democracy but a terminal sickness of her political heart. The symptoms were already present across the communist world even as the opening of the Berlin Wall cast every erstwhile communist from Berlin to Moscow in the unlikely guise of an optimist. Writing for Granta in the Winter 1990, the East German Marxist Jurek Becker dared to dream not about a socialist future but about the possibilities for the future that socialism in Eastern Europe had kept alive:
The West has won—and there’s the rub. . . In the West, we live in societies that have no particular goal or objective. If there’s a guiding principle, it’s consumerism. . . The most important thing about socialist states isn’t any tangible achievements, but the fact that they gave us a chance. . . Eastern Europe looks to me like one last attempt. And when it’s over, it’ll be time to withdraw our money from the bank, and start hitting the bottle in earnest.
That last attempt is over. There’s no money left in the bank. Perhaps that is why alcoholism, always the curse of Russian society, in the 1990s raged as a pandemic killer. As my oldest and closest Russian friend, once a well known voice of the counter-culture of Leningrad in the 1980s and now a producer for the Russian Service of the BBC in London, always jokes on a morning after too many rounds of vodka, There must have been a reason.
A Note on Sources
The references to policies and relationship between Washington and Moscow drew heavily from the three works referred to above: Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2001), Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). Additional background came from Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002).
Nezavisimaya gazeta (18 February 2002) provided the information on prostitution, the trafficking of women and girls, and the survey of high school girls. The report on Viktor Bout and the Labor Ministry Report on industrial accidents can be found in translation in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ( 20 February 2002). The same publication contains the reports on arms sales from Belarus (31 October 2001). On the Russian connection to the black market for internal organs, see the same publication (2 December 1999). Information and data on life expectancy rates and infectious diseases in Russia is widely available. The data of HIV/AIDS is published annually by UN AIDS and easily accessed on the web at: www.unaids.org. This article drew heavily from a special report to the Japan Times (24 October 1999). The Winter 1990 issue of Granta published a series of reflections from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on the end of communism including the quoted work by Jurek Becker.
The interviews with Mikhail (Misha or “Big Mike”) Koutcherenko and Edvard (Yedochka or “Eddy”) Limonov were conducted in Moscow in August 1999 for a special report published in The Star Tribune Newspaper of Minneapolis/St. Paul. The interview with Nikita Mikhalkov was taken outside of Moscow in Nikolskii Gory in conjunction with a report later broadcast on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The last quote belongs to Alexander (“Alex”) Kan with the Russian Service of the BBC who reserves the right to take back anything he said.
Nick Hayes is a Professor of History and holds the University Chair in Critical thinking at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.