In Russia, by far the largest of the former Soviet republics,
a new power struggle soon ensued. Yeltsin, a onetime engineer
who had been dismissed from the Politburo in
1987 for his radicalism, was committed to introducing a
free market economy as quickly as possible. In December
1991, the Congress of People’s Deputies granted Yeltsin
temporary power to rule by decree. But former Communist
Party members and their allies in the Congress were
opposed to many of Yeltsin’s economic reforms and tried
to place new limits on his powers. Yeltsin fought back.
After winning a vote of confidence on April 25, 1993,
Yeltsin pushed ahead with plans for a new Russian constitution
that would abolish the Congress of People’s
Deputies, create a two-chamber parliament, and establish
a strong presidency. A hard-line parliamentary minority
resisted and in early October took the offensive, urging
supporters to take over government offices and the central
television station. Yeltsin responded by ordering military
forces to storm the parliament building and arrest hardline
opponents. Yeltsin used his victory to consolidate his
power in parliamentary elections held in December.
During the mid-1990s, Yeltsin was able to maintain a
precarious grip on power while seeking to implement reforms
that would place Russia on a firm course toward a
pluralistic political system and a market economy. But
the new post-Communist Russia remained as fragile as
ever. Burgeoning economic inequality and rampant corruption
aroused widespread criticism and shook the confidence
of the Russian people in the superiority of the
capitalist system over the one that existed under Communist
rule. A nagging war in the Caucasus—where the
Muslim people of Chechnya sought national independence
from Russia—drained the government budget and
exposed the decrepit state of the once vaunted Red Army.
In presidential elections held in 1996, Yeltsin was reelected,
but the rising popularity of a revived Communist
Party and the growing strength of nationalist elements,
combined with Yeltsin’s precarious health, raised serious
questions about the future of the country.
At the end of 1999, Yeltsin suddenly resigned his office
and was replaced by Vladimir Putin (b. 1952), a former
member of the KGB. Putin vowed to bring an end to
the rampant corruption and inexperience that permeated
Russian political culture and to strengthen the role of the
central government in managing the affairs of state. During
succeeding months, his proposal to centralize power
in the hands of the federal government in Moscow was
given approval by the parliament; in early 2001, he presented
a new plan to regulate political parties, which had
risen in number to more than fifty. Parties at both extremes
of the political spectrum, the Yabloko (apple) faction
representing Western-style liberal policies and Gennadi
Zyuganov’s revived Communist Party, opposed the
legislation, without success. Putin has not used his enhanced
powers, however, to introduce market reforms
and rein in the powerful forces that have impeded Russia’s
transition to an advanced capitalist society.
Putin also vowed to bring the breakaway state of
Chechnya back under Russian authority and to adopt a
more assertive role in international affairs. The new president
took advantage of growing public anger at Western
plans to expand the NATO alliance into Eastern Europe,
as well as aggressive actions by NATO countries against
Serbia in the Balkans (see Chapter 10) to restore Russia’s
position as an influential force in the world. To undercut
U.S. dominance on the political scene, Moscow has improved
relations with neighboring China and simultaneously
sought to cooperate with European nations on issues
of common concern. To assuage national pride,
Putin has entered negotiations with such former republics
of the old Soviet Union as Belarus and Ukraine to
tighten forms of mutual political economic cooperation.
What had happened to derail Yeltsin’s plan to transform
Soviet society? To some critics, Yeltsin and his advisers
tried to achieve too much too fast. Between 1991
and 1995, state firms that had previously provided about
80 percent of all industrial production and employment
had been privatized, and the price of goods (previously
subject to government regulation) was opened up to market
forces. Only agriculture—where the decision to privatize
collective farms had little impact in rural areas—
was left substantially untouched. The immediate results
were disastrous: industrial output dropped by more than
one-third, and unemployment levels and prices rose dramatically.
Many Russian workers and soldiers were not
paid their salaries for months on end, and many social services
came to an abrupt halt.
With the harsh official and ideological constraints of
the Soviet system suddenly removed, corruption—labeled
by one observer “criminal gang capitalism”—became
rampant, and the government often appeared inept
in coping with complexities of a market economy. Few
Russians appeared to grasp the realities of modern capitalism
and understandably reacted to the inevitable transition
pains from the old system by heaping all the blame
on the new one. The fact is that Yeltsin had attempted to
change the structure of the Soviet system without due regard
to the necessity of changing the mentality of the
people as well. The result was a high level of disenchantment.
A new joke circulated among the Russian people:
“We know now that everything they told us about communism
was false. And everything they told us about capitalism
was true.”
World History
