DATE=1/7/2000
TYPE=ON THE LINE
TITLE=ON THE LINE: THE END OF THE YELTSIN ERA
NUMBER=1-00811
EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY - 619-0037
CONTENT=
THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE
Anncr: On the Line - a discussion of United
States policy and contemporary issues. This week,
"The End of the Yeltsin Era." Here is your host,
Robert Reilly.
Host: Hello and welcome to On the Line. After
eight years in power, Russian President Boris
Yeltsin shocked Russians by announcing his
resignation on New Year's Eve. Prime Minister
Valdimir Putin immediately became acting
president. Presidential elections are scheduled
for March, leaving Mr. Putin a strong favorite.
Mr. Yeltsin's bold stroke was typical of his
tumultuous presidency. He defied a Communist coup
attempt in 1991, and sent tanks to attack a
rebellious Russian parliament in 1993. In 1996, he
won a second term as president against great odds.
His legacy includes the dismantlement of
Communism, but Russia's transition to democracy
has been plagued by massive corruption and a
failure to follow through on needed reforms.
Joining me today to discuss the end of the Yeltsin
era are three experts. Anders Aslund is senior
associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and a former adviser to the
Russian government. Vladimir Brovkin is project
director at the Center for the Study of
Transnational Crime and Corruption at American
University. And David Satter is a senior fellow at
the Hudson Institute and author of the book, Age
of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet
Union. Welcome to the program.
Anders Aslund, with the intimate contact you had
with the Russian government, and even an
acquaintance with Boris Yeltsin, how do you size
up the last eight years?
Aslund: I would say that Boris Yeltsin will come
out as one of the great heroes of the 20th
century. Without him, the dissolution of the
Soviet Union would not have been peaceful. Without
him, Russia would not have easily have become a
democracy. And thanks to Boris Yeltsin, Russia is
bound to stay a market economy.
Host: Vladimir Brovkin, do you agree with that
assessment?
Brovkin: I am sorry to say I do not. I think that
Yeltsin will go down in history as probably the
worst Russian ruler of the 20th century, except
for Stalin. And the reason for that is that this
was ten years of missed opportunities. Russia has
not become a democracy. Russian has not built a
market economy. Russian has become a criminalized
network of former party officials and parvenu
Mafiosi who run the show and call it a democracy.
Host: And you lay that at Yeltsin's feet?
Brovkin: I can not say he is the author of this.
But it happened while he was president and,
ultimately, he is responsible. I would not say
that he personally meant it that way. I do not
think so. In 1991, and when Mr. Aslund worked with
him, they meant well. I know they meant well. They
meant to build a market economy and a democracy.
But it did not come out that way.
Host: David Satter, you have long been a student
of the Soviet Union and now Russia. Could it have
come out another way? And did it not because of
Boris Yeltsin's failure, or do you incline more
toward Anders Aslund's assessment?
Satter: I think it could have happened
differently. The problem with the Soviet Union,
and it's a mistake that many people make, is that
it was based on a system that destroyed human
morality. And it destroyed respect for the
individual. The essential difference between the
Soviet Union and the West was that, in the West,
the individual is an end in himself. In the Soviet
Union, the individual was simply a means toward
the achievement of a utopian political and
economic system, which could not exist in fact, in
reality. Under these circumstances, the first
priority had to be to restore the dignity of the
individual. And that did not happen after the fall
of the Soviet Union. There was an attempt to
transform economic structures. But the
transformation of the economic structures meant
very little if the status of the individual was
not protected.
Host: But a moral and spiritual problem of that
magnitude, after more than a half century of
devastation, can that be addressed politically?
Satter: In a sense, it was addressed politically
because, during the perestroika period, it was a
moral revolution that put an end to Communism and
put an end to the Soviet Union. People did not
throw off the burden of Communism for economic
reasons. It was a genuine rebellion against
totalitarian lies and oppression. And it was that
movement that lost all power and all force in the
Russia that Yeltsin created. And he deserves a
generous share of the blame for that.
Host: Anders Aslund, let us get your reaction to
that.
Aslund: Sorry, you have to remember a few simple
things. First, it was [former Soviet leader
Mikhail] Gorbachev who ran the economy down
totally. It was Gorbachev who refused to go for
democracy. Mikhail Gorbachev was never
democratically elected to anything. He was elected
president of the Soviet Union by an undemocratic,
partly appointed, partly elected parliament in
uncontested elections. And Mikhail Gorbachev
defended the Soviet Union until the very end. I
remember very well one day in December 1991 when
Yeltsin came, in a splendid mood, to a meeting we
had. He had convinced the Soviet general command
to go for Russia, and not for the Soviet Union. If
the Soviet general command had followed Gorbachev,
who had met with them the day before, we would
have seen a Yugoslav situation. Don't you
understand what a great hero Yeltsin is? These
were the real choices. And you both know very well
what an awful place the Soviet Union was. And to
think that you can transform an awful kleptocracy,
where everybody has to steal at a certain level,
into a lawful democracy with the rule of law and a
fully-fledged market economy is totally
unrealistic. Say that the standard of living in
Russia has fallen by thirty percent with the
collapse of Communism. Frankly, I think that is
cheaper than we could have anticipated. When there
were no people with a Western education in
economics or social sciences, of course, they had
to make mistakes. We must look upon the Russian
reality as it was and see what was possible. And
we also have to remember that, in the first year
when Yeltsin was in power, the West did not do a
single thing to support him.
Host: Let us get a reaction to that.
Brovkin: There are many reactions. With all the
faults of Gorbachev, he did not use force. He
didn't, whereas Yeltsin did. He shot at the
parliament. He shot at Chechnya. And the moral
question is very important here. Because,
symbolically, in 1989 to 1990, when the tremendous
opportunity of moral revival and hope for the
better future existed, you all remember that the
Russian intelligentsia and the Russian people were
chanting these words: "For your freedom and ours."
And now, they are supporting the total physical
destruction of a people. And it is supposedly the
reformers who are doing this, your friends,
[former deputy prime minister Anatoly] Chubais and
[acting Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the
so-called democrats and reformers who are engaged
in systematic murder. And the Russian people are
supporting it. Isn't that a symbolic
transformation that is not a democracy?
Aslund: To start with Gorbachev, he was in charge
of a massacre in Tblisi in April 1989, a massacre
in Baku in 1990, instigated by Moscow, and two
minor massacres in Lithuania and Riga in January
of 1991. And the course he pursued in the military
would have led to massive killing that did not
take place thanks to Yeltsin. I am not defending
the war in Chechnya. I agree that this is the
major drawback. There are other drawbacks against
him. One is that he did not go for the building of
democratic institutions soon enough, so that it
came to a showdown with the parliament. The
alternative would have been to dissolve the
parliament earlier. And generally, heroes are not
for everyday life. Yeltsin is, in many ways, a
parallel character to Churchill, a great but in
may ways flawed character.
Satter: I agree with Anders in his criticism of
Gorbachev. And it was no small massacre in
Vilnius. The number of people killed was actually
greater than the number of people killed in
Tblisi. But nonetheless, I cannot accept the idea
that Yeltsin is significantly better because, in a
very fundamental way, both of them are products of
the Soviet nomenklatura. And they think and act in
exactly the same way. Their objectives were
different, but those objectives were defined by
their personal ambitions, not by any kind of moral
goals, and certainly not by any broader
understanding of what was necessary for their
country. The problem that we had with Yeltsin when
he took over is that the moral revolution, which
put an end to Communism, was betrayed.
Host: By whom?
Satter: By Yeltsin and the people around him. And
Yeltsin put his faith and wagered the future of
the country on the old Communist nomenklatura,
which simply divided up the property of the former
Soviet Union and drove the country to an
exceptional and unjustified level of poverty. What
I have seen in Russia, in post-Communist Russia,
and this is in no way an apology for Communist
Russia, is a level of disregard for the fate of
individuals that can only be explained by the
moral destruction of the individual in Russia that
has been going on since the beginning of the 20th
century. When people are starving, when people are
unable to get medical care, when children faint in
school from hunger, when people are so defeated
that they do not even bother to treat themselves
because they know they cannot afford medicines, it
is somehow more than criminal for members of the
former nomenklatura to steal on the scale on which
they are stealing and to export money illegally
from the country.
Host: Let me ask you this, if I may, just to
slightly shift the focus of the discussion,
because I think you would all agree that the
Soviet Union itself was a kleptocracy of a sort,
oraganized along different ways. . .
Satter: It had its keptocratic elements, but it
wasn't a kleptocracy. It was a country based on an
ideology, and that was what was the principal
animating element of the Soviet Union.
Host: Right. A number of people who still
believed in that ideology happened to have
dominated the Russian parliament for the entire
period of Boris Yeltsin's presidency. And to what
extent did they prevent a moral revolution from
happening?
Satter: I do not agree with that either. I think
that there is an artificial distinction drawn in
the West, in my view, between the so-called
democrats and the so-called hard-line Communists,
democrats supposedly being in the executive
branch, the Communists finding a place for
themselves in the legislative branch. In fact,
they are all Communists. The Communists never lost
power in Russia. In terms of the Communist
mentality, it is just as present on the side of
the democrats as it is on the side of the
Communists. And as far as greed is concerned, the
Communists are just as greedy and just as anxious
to get their turn at the trough as the democrats
are.
Host: But you cannot blame Boris Yeltsin for
that. That is the legacy of the Soviet Union, is
it not?
Brovkin: I would also agree with Anders that there
are certain things that governments can do. That
is what he has been saying for years. That there
are certain things that you have got to do now
with shock therapy, with markets and so forth.
What Yeltsin decided to do in 1994, especially in
1995-96, is to rule with the use of corruption as
a mechanism of preserving power. It was a
decision. You let them steal so that they will not
rebel, so that they do not overthrow me. He let
the Russian army steal as much as it wanted as
long as it presented no coup attempts against
Yeltsin. And they did, starting with Germany, the
troop removal from Germany and then the Baltics,
and so forth. It is the same thing now with
aluminum and oil, and so forth. And let me tell
you one more thing. The Russian people have a hard
time comprehending that somebody can own oil, just
as much as Russian peasants had a hard time
believing that somebody can own the land. There is
tremendous resentment against people like [oil
magnate] Abramovich and [Boris] Berezovsky and
[former prime minister Viktor] Chernomyrdin, and
[Anatoly] Chubais, the friend of Aslund, who all
of a sudden became billionaires. Out of what? It
is just incomprehensible. And I think we will see
the result of that resentment. In some form, it
will be felt later on down the road.
Host: Anders Aslund, has the massive corruption
fatally compromised the transition to democracy in
Russia?
Aslund: First, I do not think so. But let us go
to the background here. If I do not remember
wrongly, you were both against radical reforms in
the early 1990s. At least you, Vladimir, were. And
what you are saying now is that there was not
enough of this continuity. That is exactly what I
was saying then, and it was exactly what Yeltsin
was pushing for. What you are accusing Yeltsin of
is that he lost to people like you, who said, you
cannot rush so fast; you have to go more slowly.
If you go more slowly, you are eaten up by the
Communists, yes, the old nomenklatura, the old
thieves. The system Gorbachev left behind was the
most kleptocratic system that ever existed because
it was really reformed so that the state
enterprise managers could freely steal from their
enterprises. That was the rationale, though, of
course, no one said it. We know it now,
afterwards. And Yeltsin tried to do as much as he
could to break it. We all think that he should
have done more. We do not really know how much was
possible. But at the time, I was pushing for a
more radical break. And at least you, Voloyda,
were pushing for less of a break. That's really
what we are discussing now. And then to your
question about corruption. I think that the
fundamental thing is that the monopoly of power,
economic and political power, is broken. Russia
today is not really a liberal democracy, but it is
a democracy of sorts. It is a highly pluralist
society. And what we are seeing today is that we
know a lot about what is going on in Russia
because the nasty people are attacking one
another, and they are using all media in order to
do so. And they are also fighting over the money.
And this is how a society becomes honest, because
there is too much competition between the crooks.
That was really what the end of feudalism and
mercantilism in Europe was about.
Host: We certainly have a dispute about the
nature of Yeltsin's legacy. Let us go on and see
how this disagreement affects the issue of his
attempt, it appears, through his resignation, to
secure the legacy by basically choosing the next
president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Is that
indeed why he resigned, or, as some suggest, that
there was a palace coup, and he was told, go now
with immunity or things will get rough?
Brovkin: I can tell you what I think about the
situation. I think that, in the long term, Putin,
as a symbol of unity between the family, meaning
Yeltsin's entourage, and the K-G-B people and the
general staff people are irreconcilable. It is an
unnatural marriage of convenience. This alliance
will have to break.
Host: Why?
Brovkin: Because they hate each other. The people
who are behind the war in Chechnya, all these
Russian generals who hate the U.S and NATO and
Kosovo and so forth, who hated Yeltsin for giving
in too much to Western pressure - they certainly
are not admirers of [Boris] Berezovsky and [Boris
Yeltsin's daughter, Tatyana] Dyachenko, and all
this entourage of people. Putin was playing the
right political game of doing all the right
things, going through the hoop to please Yeltsin.
And indeed he may deliver personal security to the
family, but that would be the bottom line. In the
end, he would have to chose. He is either going to
be the guardian of the family and the elite around
it, or he will be with those who really back him,
and that is the army, the general staff and the K-
G-B. I am calling it the K-G-B in a sort of a
semantic way. It is the F-S-B [Federal Security
Bureau] now, of course.
Host: David Satter, what do you think about
that?
Satter: I agree, but only up to a point. There is
one possibility that I think Valdimir is not
taking into account. Their marriage is indeed
unnatural, although we should not overlook the
extent to which the F-S-B and the military are
thoroughly corrupted. In Russia today, businesses
that want protection can get protection not only
from gangsters, they can get it from the F-S-B. So
in effect, the F-S-B has become a protection
agency, which can be hired out by business people
to protect them from gangsters and to deal with
the gangsters. This, needless to say, has a very
corrupting influence. So, it is not wise to
exaggerate the extent to which the F-S-B, as it
exists today, is the defender of traditional
Russian values or anything of the kind. But there
is another factor in all this that we really have
to keep in mind that is terribly important. The
people around Yeltsin were not and are not fools.
If they chose Putin to succeed Yeltsin, and I am
sure that it was a collegial decision -- the
influence of Yeltsin's entourage over a man who is
now very sick and frequently inattentive is
considerable -- it is because they have confidence
that he will not betray him and them. And that may
well be because he is involved in some of their
crimes.
Host: Anders Aslund, Putin is possibly going to
become the new president. He also is going to have
a parliament which is far more favorable toward
prospective reforms. Do you think he will follow
through on what Yeltsin was unable to do?
Aslund: I think that Putin is much more likely to
undertake systematic reforms. He is a pragmatic
person and indeed is likely to have the
parliamentary majority behind him. For the first
time, the parliament is really clearly anti-
Communist. I think that Russia is moving ahead.
Host: I'm afraid that's all the time we have
this week. I would like to thank our guests --
Anders Aslund from the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace; Vladimir Brovkin from the
Center for the Study of Transnational Crime and
Corruption at American University and David Satter
from the Hudson Institute -- for joining me to
discuss the end of the Yeltsin era. This is Robert
Reilly for On the Line.
Anncr: You've been listening to "On the Line" - a
discussion of United States policies and
contemporary issues. This is --------.
07-Jan-2000 11:27 AM EDT (07-Jan-2000 1627 UTC)
NNNN
Source: Voice of America
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