The Apocalyptic Collapse Of Russian Democracy and Communism (1985-99)

If the story wasn't true, you'd say it was too strange to be believable

Back in late November, my fellow Substack partner-in-crime, Stacey Eskelin, wrote a fascinating post about the collapse of communism in Russia between 1985-99. Having always been something of a Russophile, I was captivated by her source, a seven-part, almost seven-hour BBC series called Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like To Live Through The Collapse Of Communism And Democracy.

Admittedly, for most “normal” people, plowing through seven hours of BBC video focused on the collapse of the USSR and the even more spectacular collapse of what came after would be sheer drudgery. However, having never been “normal,” I was captivated- if a bit overwhelmed- by it all.

I kept thinking about the poor souls who waded through thousands of hours of raw video footage to cull it down to seven one-hour videos. It must’ve been a mind-boggling task for those sorting through Russian reality from a Western point of view. So after completing my perusal of all seven hours (not all in one sitting, thankfully), my first thought was, “I need a drink.”

And I don’t drink much.

I’ve always dreamed of going to Russia. I had an opportunity when I was living in Cyprus that fell through, and then Erin and I were planning a trip that included Russia just as COVID-19 was winding up. So you can imagine where those plans ended up.

Now, with the war in Ukraine leading to Russia’s worldwide pariah status, I’ve accepted the virtual certainly that I’ll never have the opportunity to go to Russia. I’ve had to come to grips with the truth that it’s not a friendly or safe place for anyone with an American passport. If my travels have taught me anything, it’s that not being stupid is often the best defense.

Not that I haven’t been tempted on numerous occasions, like Beirut during the civil war in the mid-’80s. Or Bosnia during the Yugoslav civil war in the early ‘90s.

Ah, but I digress yet again….

There’s no way to do justice to the decline and fall of communism and democracy in post-Soviet Russia in roughly 2500 words. This would read like a comic book. The history, villainy, and sheer criminality of the 1985-99 period is so dense and all-consuming that even trying to grasp it defies rational understanding.

Try telling that story. It’s a monumentally intimidating task that would be tough to fully describe in a three volume series. Nevertheless, I’m going to do my best to give it a shot here.

Let’s start with the scale of the problem. The best way to understand it is to begin with a sense of how immense Russia is. The country spans 12 time zones from east to west, from eastern Europe to the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean.

If you were to travel from Kaliningrad in the far west of Russia to Vladivostok in the far east, you’d travel a linear distance of just shy of 6500 miles. By comparison, the distance from Blaine, WA, and Key West, FL, is just short of 2900 miles.

Russia covers 6,601,670 square miles and 1/8 of the Earth’s inhabitable land mass.

And yet, for years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets believed they could control every aspect of their economy. So if you, as the manager of the Donetsk Broom Collective, were told that your production target was 500,000 brooms, you found a way to manufacture 500,000 brooms. If you didn’t, there were consequences to be paid. Likewise, if you manufactured more than 500,000 brooms, that was also a problem. “The Plan,” as it was known, wasn’t designed to incorporate overages or shortfalls. Everything had to be hit on the number, or the system fell apart.

And the system fell apart with distressing regularity.

Of course, little worked as intended; numbers were fudged, palms were greased, and everyone more or less carried on as great patriotic heroes of the Soviet workers. Shortages of various goods were a fact of life in the USSR. But at least they could console themselves with the knowledge that they didn’t live in an immoral and corrupt capitalist hellhole like America.

When Mikhail Gorbachev first instituted Perestroika (“openness), Russians recognized it for what it was- code for “this is eventually going to all go to shit, but we’re going to try to keep it together as long as we possibly can.” The only problem was that Gorbachev didn’t understand that. He legitimately thought he could shepherd Russia from under the yoke of “The Plan,” which had ruled every aspect of Russian economic life for generations, to a quasi-market economy.

The Soviet leader was up against two immovable forces- reality and the cynicism and distrust that had been bred into Russians for hundreds of years. They understood that Perestroika was almost certainly doomed to fail, and they knew they would bear the consequences of that failure.

Gorbachev thought he could do this under the calm leadership of the Communist Party, which, though he was too blind to see, was corrupt from top to bottom and primarily committed to its self-perpetuation. He believed he could shepherd Russia from the darkness and into the light without more than a minimum disruption and upheaval.

There’s optimism, and there’s…well, Russians don’t do optimism.

The sand in the gears of Perestroika was that Russia has no history of market economics nor anything remotely resembling a democratic tradition. What it did have was a rich history of citizens getting what they could while they could because they never knew when it would come around again.

With that background, it wasn’t exactly a surprise when the “new” Russia turned into a ruthless, unprincipled kleptocracy in which human life meant far less than economic prosperity. An opportunity had to be seized when it came along because if you didn’t, someone else would, and you’d almost certainly be poor and miserable for the rest of your life.

The one thing that jumped out at me over the seven hours of Trauma Zone was that no matter where or when the raw video was shot, it rarely showed anything new. Russia is a country that’s uniformly run-down, poorly maintained, and on the verge of physical collapse. Except for (shoddy) new construction funded by oligarchs in Moscow and other large cities, there’s virtually nothing shiny and new to be found anywhere in Russia.

If you go outside the cities, you quickly understand that Russia is the world’s largest Third World country. Though the West has feared the Russian military and nuclear arsenal since the dawn of the Cold War, even that’s of shoddy quality. The war in Ukraine has exposed the Russian military as a paper tiger. Its troops are poorly trained and equipped, morale is low, and the quality of its tanks, personnel carriers, and other armor is vastly inferior to that of the West.

We don’t know much about the quality of their nuclear forces. But, if their conventional forces are any indication, Russia is a Third World “power” with a shoddy nuclear arsenal, which makes it very dangerous.

The truth is that Russia was never the “Russian Bear” the West feared it was. But it was belligerent and unpredictable, which is how it masked its myriad shortcomings for many years. Propaganda, good camera angles, and bluster made the West believe that Russia was far more of a military threat than it turned out to be.

In the late ‘90s, the biggest threat to world stability wasn’t the Russian military but a Russian economy gone off the rails. Thanks to Yegor Gaidar’s “Shock Therapy” (for which he became the most hated man in Russia), Russians would see their lives turned upside down. Gaidar promised he could turn Russia into a capitalist economy within 18 months. It looked good one paper, at least.

It wouldn’t work, but it would succeed in turning everyday Russians into paupers.

“Shock Therapy” began with all Soviet-era price controls being removed at once- hence the “shock.” Unfortunately, there was no “therapy.” Prices soared overnight, and the savings of most Russians were quickly wiped out by hyperinflation.

Gaidar’s philosophy was simple: “Everything that is economically efficient is morally justified.” Of course, he suffered few of the consequences everyday Russians faced- like prices rising by 2520% in one year.

People across Russia were reduced to selling their personal belongings to survive. Makeshift flea markets popped up everywhere. Desperation was the rule, not the exception.

Even as the Soviet Union began to break apart and civil war broke out in several republics, Gaidar and the Russian government still believed “Shock Therapy” to be the surest and fastest way to democracy and capitalism. They truly believed it would trade short-term pain for long-term gain, a belief that would never bear fruit. “Shock Therapy” was destined to fail, perhaps because they never truly understood their country, its history, or its people.

The American government was firmly behind “Shock Therapy.” President George H.W. Bush believed it would lead to democracy being spread around the world. But, in the end, it would only lead to panic, chaos, and poverty spreading across Russia.

Before long, factories could no longer pay their workers and were forced to pay them in the goods they produced. Workers then had to try to sell those goods to survive. Unfortunately, money of any sort was virtually impossible to come by.

One of the most poignant parts of the seven hours of video was the husband and wife making a porn film in their flat in hopes of making money. It would be an understatement to say that they had no idea what they were doing or how to do it (It looked more like two moose rutting). It’s difficult to imagine they made any money off their shoddy and poorly-acted production. But it’s Russia, so who knows?

By this time, Russia resembled less a country than an insane asylum covering 12 time zones. Except the Russian people were the sane ones; the system was insane, and there was no escape possible for anyone except the oligarchs who were bleeding Russia.

I could take you on a journey through the privatization of state enterprises and the oligarchs stripping the state of anything of value. It was notable that Russians knew what was happening, but they were so benumbed by all that had transpired that they could no longer find the energy to care. An entire country had been emotionally defeated and rendered psychologically hors de combat. They were utterly unable to mount a response to their country being stolen from underneath them. And before they knew what had happened, the oligarchs had stripped the Russian state of all its wealth. It was a strategy as evil and ruthless as it was ingenious. For it to work, the oligarchs had to be thoroughly selfish and self-interested, but they were Russian, which meant they had those qualities in abundance.

The oligarchs got what they could while they could because who knew when the opportunity would come back around?

Russia, with a population of not quite 150 million people, was utterly broke, the world’s largest economic basket case. The country was bankrupt and, just as happens with businesses, was considered “too big to fail” by the international community, who were still convinced the long-since-dead horse could be revived.

Then, as happens with vacuums, in rushed every scum-sucking lowlife (many of them American) with a get-rich-quick scheme.

It was as if the Wild West had found a new frontier, as foreign governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) continued to pump billions into Russia to keep it from defaulting on its debts. Western governments continued to believe they could build a capitalist system in Russia. They’d thrown so much money into Russia that they had to continue believing to minimize the risk of losing their investments altogether. So, more good money followed bad into the Russian maw, never to be seen again. If the West was offering, the oligarchs were taking. They were the ones who, in most cases, ended up with the money. We’re talking about BILLIONS of dollars that simply vanished into thin air.

Meanwhile, thousands were surviving in Siberia only because they received humanitarian aid from the International Red Cross, and the need was spreading rapidly to other parts of the country.

Russia had become so financially corrupt that the oligarchs were effectively controlling the political system- and even stealing from Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s campaign fund.

When it came time for Yeltsin to run for re-election, the oligarchs put up a token candidate whose only job was to be Yeltsin’s faux opposition. Although virtually every Russian recognized it as corrupt, Yeltsin managed to win re-election. Russians were too exhausted to care who was President; what little energy they had was focused on trying to survive. And Yeltsin was now the puppet of the oligarchs.

Following Yeltsin’s re-election, Moscow re-established itself as a significant international financial center. The capitol was awash in vast, gaudy riches- and people too nouveau riche to grasp how to act. And conspicuous consumption became CONSPICUOUS. And garishly overdone. Cars, women, the finest alcohol, drugs, clothing- you name it. It was all available.

But it was a vulgar and ostentatious chimera.

Outside Moscow, Russia was collapsing, and Russians were in dire straits. The government was powerless as oligarchs continued to strip the country of anything of value. Loans made to the government were quickly moved out of the country to foreign banks, from which they disappeared to places no one could identify.

Finally, when things seemed most dire, the IMF agreed to wire $4.8 billion to Russia. That money was almost immediately dispersed to small banks on the Isle of Jersey, from whence it disappeared altogether. No one but the oligarchs knew where the money had gone, and they weren’t saying. It was the easiest $4.8 billion they’d ever made.

Russian society completely fell apart. There were the vastly wealthy who existed in their private world in Moscow highrises…and the rest of Russia, desperately trying to do anything to find money to buy food with. The wealth gap was as tawdry and it was obscene.

In Yaroslavl, hundreds queued up to donate their blood for money. Unfortunately, most of the blood collected was useless because those who donated were malnourished.

Finally, even those who’d fervently believed Russia could be turned into a capitalist democracy were forced to admit that the experiment had failed. Russia had become a corrupt kleptocracy, and its people were starving.

Not that this concerned the oligarchs, who were first and foremost concerned with their continued survival- and the continued survival of their business interests. As Boris Yeltsin’s health began to fail, they began to worry about who would become the next President.

They had to find someone who, in exchange for power, would agree not to prosecute them for corruption. Finally, after much consideration, they settled on a faceless, anonymous bureaucrat they were convinced they could control.

The bureaucrat’s name? Vladimir Putin.

What would happen next is a story in and of itself.

_____

P.S.- There’s far more to this story than I could do justice to in the space allotted here. However, I hope I’ve provided at least a sense of the chaos, greed, and clusterf**k/FUBAR nature of Russia from 1985-99. The pariah space the country inhabits now has much to do with those years. In many ways, Russia has yet to recover from those traumatic 15 years.

Russia- aka Vladimir Putin- still thinks it’s a great power. It demands to be thought of and treated as a great power. In reality, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s the world’s largest Third World country, unique in that it also happens to possess a substantial nuclear arsenal. That makes it dangerous and unpredictable, but there’s nothing “great” or “powerful” about Russia. “Unstable” and “thuggish” seem far more accurate descriptors. Russia respects only one thing- its own interests.

The West will never succeed in its dealings with Russia until it recognizes that Russia is an unpredictable paper tiger devoid of decency and respect for human life.