مقدمه

PREFACE

Long before anyone had a reason to predict the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, Nadezhda Mandelstam filled her notebooks with the accents of hope. She was neither sentimental nor naive. She had seen her husband, the great poet Osip Mandelstam, swept off to the camps during the terror of the 1930s; she described in ruthlessly clear terms how the regime left its subjects in a permanent state of fear. The people of the Soviet Union had been made, as she put it, “slightly unbalanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either.” But Mandelstam, unlike so many scholars and politicians, saw the signs of the Soviet system’s inherent weakness and believed in the resiliency of the people.

On August 20, 1991, a rainy, miserable afternoon, I walked among the crowds protecting the Russian parliament from a potential invasion by the leaders of a military coup. We all saw that day what so few could have predicted: Soviet citizens—workers, teachers, hustlers, children, mothers, grandparents, even soldiers—all standing up to a group of ignorant men who believed themselves yet another improved version of the Bolshevik regime and possessed of a power to freeze, even turn back, time. In their hurried calculations, the conspirators assumed “the masses” were too exhausted and indifferent to fight back. But tens of thousands of ordinary Muscovites were ready to die for democratic principles. It was said then and is said even now that the Russians know little or nothing of civil society. How strange, then, that so many were willing to give up their lives to defend it.

I do not usually have a great memory for the things I have read, but that afternoon of the coup, hours before it came clear that there would be no attack and the putsch would fail, I thought of a short passage, bracketed in black, in my paperback copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope: “This terror could return, but it would mean sending several million people to the camps. If this were to happen now, they would all scream—and so would their families, friends and neighbors. This is something to be reckoned with.” The leaders of the August coup had not reckoned with the development of their own people. They understood nothing. They were jailed for the miscalculation, and the struts of the old regime collapsed.

As I write, the euphoria of those August days is past and Russian democracy is a delicate thing. There are days when it seems that little has changed, that the fate of Russia hinges, once more, on the skills, inclinations, and heartbeat of one man. This time it is Boris Yeltsin: heroic during the coup, flexible, clever, but also, at times, reckless with language, careless with the bottle. No one knows what would happen should Yeltsin fall from power, the result of a stroke or an uprising of the hardline nationalists, neofacists, and nostalgic Communists who dominate parliament. As this book goes to press in April 1993, the power struggle between Yeltsin and parliament is unresolved and has underscored the lack of a clear and workable constitution, legal system, and system of authority. The institutions of this new society are embryonic, infinitely fragile.

In January 1993, Yeltsin’s program of economic shock therapy has resulted in only fitful progress, much pain, and, everywhere, anxiety. Food and other supplies are in some places more plentiful, but prices are out of control. The inflation rate is beginning to look Latin American. The heads of the vast military plants show little interest in converting to a peacetime economy, and the absurd subsidies they receive make a mess of Russia’s finances. A brash new class of young hustlers and even some honest businesspeople are thriving, but the old, the weak, and the poor are despondent. The crime rate is out of control. And everywhere there is a new demagogue—Communist, nationalist, or simply mad—ready to exploit the failures, vanities, and misfortunes of the elected government. The danger of the authoritarian temptation still lurks in Russia. So far, nearly all the potential successors to Yeltsin promise to be less inclined to radical economic reform and more likely to carry out an aggressive anti-Western foreign policy.

Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, the situation is at least as worrisome. There are unlovely little wars in the Caucasus, coups d’état in Central Asia. Moldova, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania charge Russia with imperialism for leaving behind its troops. The Russians, for their part, complain that the leaders of the Baltic governments treat non-Balts as second-class citizens. Armenia is broke and on the edge of breakdown, Georgia is consumed in civil war. Despite a series of historic treaties with the United States, the unresolved conflicts over arms stockpiles between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan trouble our sleep with dreams of what James Baker once called “Yugoslavia with nukes.” Despite it all, I am partial to Mandelstam’s brand of hardheaded optimism. This book, after all, chronicles the last days of one of the cruelest regimes in human history. And having lived through those final days, having lived in Moscow and traveled throughout the republics of the last empire, I am convinced that for all the difficulties ahead, there will be no return to the past. In the West, we cannot afford to look away from this process. To refuse help will endanger Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the security of the globe.

It will take many books and records to understand the history of the Soviet Union and its final collapse. We are, after all, still debating the events of 1917. To write history takes time. When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai said, “It’s too soon to tell.” To understand the Gorbachev period will require a new library covering an immense range of subjects: U.S.-Soviet relations, economic history, the uprisings in the Baltic states, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Central Asia, the “prehistory” of perestroika, the psychological and sociological effects of a long-standing totalitarian regime.

I went to Moscow in January 1988 as a reporter for The Washington Post and saw the revolution from that peculiar angle. Like a lot of reporters in Moscow, I was filing three and four hundred stories a year to editors who would certainly have taken more. Even then, in the midst of that feverish work, it seemed that the multiple events of the Gorbachev-Sakharov-Yeltsin era followed a certain logic, a pattern: once the regime eased up enough to permit a full-scale examination of the Soviet past, radical change was inevitable. Once the System showed itself for what it was and had been, it was doomed. I begin in Part I with that essential moment—the return of history in the Soviet Union—and then move on in Part II to the beginnings of democracy and in Part III to the confrontation between the old regime and the new political forces. Part IV is an attempt to describe, from multiple points of view, the August putsch—that most bizarre and climactic of episodes—and its aftermath. In Part V, we see the final attempt of the Communist Party to justify itself while, all around, a new country is being born. Throughout, I tell the story largely through the eyes of a few representative men and women, some well known, others not.

I am sure if Nadezhda Mandelstam were alive today she would not dwell long on celebration. She would be ruthlessly critical of the inequities and absurdities of politics in post-totalitarian Russia. She would warn of the problem of expecting an injured and isolated people to make a rapid transfer to a way of life that no longer promises cradle-to-grave paternalism. She would, despite her own love of Agatha Christie novels, warn against the new tide of junk culture—the sudden infatuation with Mexican soap operas and American sneakers. She would not ignore the difficulties, even disasters, ahead. But she would, I think, remain optimistic. Optimism is a belief in a gradual and painful rise from the wreckage of Communism, a confidence that the former subjects of the Soviet experiment are too historically experienced to return to dictatorship and isolation. Already there are signs all over Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union of new generations of artists, teachers, businesspeople, even politicians on the rise. People “free of the old complexes,” as Russians say. A day may even come soon when getting from one day to the next in Russia will no longer require the sort of miracles we witnessed in the last several years of the old regime. Perhaps one day Russia might even become somehow ordinary, a country of problems rather than catastrophes, a place that develops rather than explodes. That would be something to see.