Free Fall

Averitable cottage industry is emerging of books about the parlous condition of present-day Russia, but few of them match the depth and acumen displayed by Robert V. Daniels’ “Russia’s Transformation” and Anatol Lieven’s “Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power.” What distinguishes these volumes among other things is that their authors had long warned that the country was quickly heading to ruin, and fiercely criticized the misconceived and dogmatic policies urged upon Russia’s leaders by Western economists, political gurus and government officials. Even after Yeltsin devalued the ruble in the summer of 1998, distinguished Western Besserwissers and smart alecks still lauded Yeltsin’s economic policies (dubbed, absurdly, “reforms”) and his resolute march toward “democracy.” Many of those admirers are now ringing the tocsin, yet for years had been misled by Yeltsin’s self-serving “anticommunism,” refusing to acknowledge that he remained au fond a typical party apparatchik for whom the modalities of economic transformation have been subordinated to considerations of political expediency. His penchant for surrounding himself with old cronies from his years as party secretary in Sverdlovsk, his uncanny demagoguery (in 1991 he paid homage to “the commandments of the Gospel” as “the foundation of human morality”), were taken by his many supporters--later to be mutated into critics--as good money.

The same purblind attitude characterized most Western responses to Yeltsin’s brutality in enforcing his power. The carnage unleashed by the Russian troops in Chechnya was morally indistinguishable from Saddam Hussein’s policies vis-a-vis the Kurds and his own people, yet Western powers anxious about the fate of those precious “reforms” continued to prop him up and stuff the leaking coffers of his ministries.

Not, however, Daniels and Lieven. Daniels is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and author of several authoritative studies of the Soviet Union; his “Russia’s Transformation” contains essays written by Daniels over the last 16 years, most of them over the past perestroika and post-perestroika periods. They all deserve to be read or reread.

Unlike so many Sovietologists who kept mumbling “once a Communist always a Communist,” Daniels realized that with Gorbachev’s coming to power a momentous chapter was opening in the Soviet Union. He traces this unfolding of Gorbachev’s reforms, their successes and failures and the burgeoning chaos starting in the summer of 1991, which was cunningly exploited by Yeltsin, and eventually led to Gorbachev’s downfall.

The same good sense and sensibility inform Daniels’ discussion of the Yeltsin period. He refused to praise the new president indiscriminately, recognizing the need for genuine market reforms, yet criticizing the sweeping way they were being implemented. The reforms, writes Daniels, were rooted in “a utopian vision of capitalist society.” They were driven by an ideology that unthinkingly rejected anything connected with the Soviet model, such as planning, and also failed to take into account the Western evolution from the greedy and heartless days of “robber capitalism” to a version, still being refined, of a system that tries to meet the needs of society at large. “Far from being a natural process of ‘transition,’ ” he writes, “as has been so widely represented, the Yeltsinite project of creating capitalism was a deliberate attempt, by state command, to unscramble eggs, ignoring both the modern limitations of the market system and Russia’s unreadiness for it. Yet the West connived in Yeltsin’s pursuit of the free-market chimera, offering promises of aid and investment in return for radical reforms that would open up Russian markets and investment opportunities to Western capital.”

The other book, “Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power,” is a horse of a somewhat different color. Its overarching subject, as the title indicates, is the Chechnyan war. At the same time, the author uses the war as a prism through which to examine issues crucial to the nature and survival of the Russian state--its military strength (or rather weakness), Western policy, especially the politics of NATO, nationalism (both Russian and that of the ethnic minorities in Russia) and the economic and political policies that led to the present crisis.

An historian and journalist, Lieven is the author of an excellent survey of the Baltic states, “The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence.” He covered the Chechnyan war in situ for the Financial Times of London, and he brings to the study some of the strengths displayed in his earlier volume: a formidable grasp of history, an appetite for knowledge, a zestful style and a penchant for gentle humor, all of which makes his excellent book’ not only enlightening but a good read too.

Chechnya, says Lieven in his introduction, is essentially a polemic against three schools of thought that have dominated the field of Soviet-Russian studies. One, mostly associated with Harvard historian Richard Pipes, maintains that Soviet and post-Soviet Russia are the heirs to a “political culture” that arose in Russia in the Middle Ages and still dominates the country today--autocratic, authoritarian, inimical to democracy, rabidly nationalistic.

The second school, deriving to a large extent from the first, sees Russia as immutably aggressive, expansionist, as much a threat to the “free world” under Lenin as under Stalin and, at least potentially, under the present regime. It amounts to, in short, that old familiar bogey of the “evil empire,” beloved by President Reagan and neo-conservative gurus on the order of the Kristols, pere and fils; Norman Podhoretz; George Will, and others.

Lieven cites Pipes’ remark that “nothing so much troubles many Russians today, not even the decline of their living standards or the prevalence of crime. . .as the precipitous loss of great power status” to demonstrate how Pipes’ ideological bias distorts his grasp of contemporary Russian reality. In fact “every single reputable opinion poll in Russia in the years 1994-96,” says Lieven, “showed exactly the opposite of what Pipes is alleging. They all put living standards, job security and crime at the top of ordinary Russians’ concerns, far above questions of foreign policy or great power status.”

The third school might deserve the label “optimistic” for its assumption that Russia has no special characteristics distinguishing it from any other country, and that given the right policies will soon reach the blessed state of “normalcy” (read: “free enterprise”). Yet, by ignoring specific historical and cultural circumstances, this theory, espoused among others by the Swedish economist Anders Aslund, is naive and as misguided as the other two schools.

Lieven, to repeat, uses the Chechnyan war as a prism to examine the nature of the Russian state. He shows, for instance, that the war was not, as some Western scholars maintain, an expression of Russian nationalism and Russian aggrandizement just as the wars against the Chechnyans in the 18th and 19th centuries were not motivated by Russophile ambitions, but rather by a species of supranationalist state building. Not a single Russian soldier Lieven spoke to regarded Chechnya as “Russian land,” and indeed few, if any, thought they had any business being in Chechnya and risking their lives for their corrupt officers and “those thieves and criminals” in Moscow.

Time and again Lieven shows how profoundly unpopular--indeed hateful--was the war to Russian soldiers in Chechnya. This was not merely because the Russians went for days without food, let alone pay; were forced into beggary and into selling their weapons for a piece of sausage; were lied to and abused by their superiors (many of whom would be treated to a bullet in their backs in the time-honored revenge of enlisted men upon their commanders).

There was another reason, too, this one going back to Soviet times. As Western-received wisdom had it, Soviet propaganda was nothing more than ritualistic fraud. Yet, some of the most assiduously promulgated Soviet myths were accepted by the populations, or at least half accepted: among them, that the Soviet Union was, as a voluntary commonwealth of nations, living harmoniously with each other. This notion was treated with well-deserved skepticism by nationalities with historic grievances against Moscow, but the Russians, nationally deracines, were far more likely to assimilate it in their world view.

Lieven also cites Taylor Dark, an American temporary lecturer at Moscow University, who told him, “Russian nationalism didn’t seem to have very deep roots among my students.” He offered episodes from his own experience at the university to show that “the West was far more likely to be viewed as an almost magical source of great treasures and entertainment than as a threat to any unique Russian identity.”

Since these lines were written, a number of deeply disturbing events have taken place in Russia. Not only is the Duma threatening Yeltsin with impeachment, but also anti-Americanism, until fairly recently a fairly negligible phenomenon, has markedly increased, and even more alarming is the rise of open and venomous anti-Semitism, not only in the various paltry sheets that line the kiosks of every metro station in Moscow (side by side with equally paltry porn), but in the Duma, on the radio and TV--a virtual hemorrhage of hateful propaganda that has no equal in the history of the Soviet Union, since the notorious “anti-cosmopolitan campaign” of the late 1940s. (Even then the propaganda was disguised as a species of “anti-Zionism” and affected a number of non-Jews too.)

It is perhaps too early to judge the potential impact of this double-barreled wave of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, but it seems clear that for the time being it reflects the appallingly deteriorating economic conditions in Russia, a sense of despair and anger it is bound to evoke, rather than a species of “ideological” anti-Semitism or indeed fascism. In this sense, Lieven’s general assumption holds true, as do the historical parallels he cites. Thus he amusingly describes the efforts of some (mostly elderly) Cossacks to revive their image as the guardians of Russia’s greatness in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For a time, the anti-Moscow animus of the Balts and the Ukrainians assumed rather ugly anti-Russian forms, but subsequent developments demonstrated that the animus was essentially anti-Soviet, not anti-Russian. In Estonia, for instance, the ethnic Russians, who constitute about one-third of the total population, have not been in a hurry to leave the country, despite the difficulties they face in obtaining Estonian citizenship. Lieven also mentions the attempts of Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, to honor Russian identity by erecting several huge structures in Moscow, most of them, he observes testily, “aesthetically ridiculous,” especially “the giant gonorrheac phallus erected on Poklonny Hill to celebrate the 50th anniversary of 1945.” (“We tried our best,” runs a popular Russian saying, “but as usual we failed . . .”)

The humiliating Russian defeat in Chechnya was not only symbolic of the weakness of Russian nationalism but of the Russian state in general. Lieven examines in great detail the condition of the Russian armed forces: the near-total breakdown of morale; the fearsome brutality indulged in by older servicemen over new conscripts, leading to literally hundreds of deaths (murders and suicides) every year; the appalling lack of training and equipment; the disintegration of discipline. It makes the hoopla created over NATO as the guarantee against Russian expansionism (not to speak of the guarantee extended to Poland against possible Ukrainian militarism) a rather dubious proposition.

The military is not the only victim of these debilitations. The exhaustion evinced by large groups of the population, the loss of esprit and of a belief in the future, apathy with regard to politics, ideological alternatives, intellectual and artistic pursuits--all this testifies to a deep malaise that has afflicted Russian society in toto. The Yeltsin regime may have survived precisely because of this political apathy, as well as thanks to the huge amounts of money proffered to the Yeltsin regime by the most powerful tycoons in the country (all in exchange for certain taxation and other economic favors granted them by the regime). But it is an extortionate, indeed a deeply deceptive, survival.

Had the Russian magnates spent their money not to prop up Yeltsin but to “spread it through society and outside Moscow,” writes Lieven, the crisis now bedeviling the country might have been averted or seriously ameliorated. But the kind of rapacious capitalism that took hold in Russia under Yeltsin’s aegis was by definition inimical to the very idea of a just distribution of wealth. And so poverty kept growing, malnutrition increased and the birth rate kept plunging (“from 13.4 live births per thousand of population in 1990 to 9.3 in 1994, among the lowest in the world”).

Lieven, like Robert Daniels, is adept at describing how this new capitalism was introduced and implemented, how politicians such as Anatoly Chubais and Victor Chernomyrdin became rich from their fraudulent privatization schemes. Lieven provides a thorough description of how these schemes worked, and how they facilitated the growth of a class of compradors on the one hand, and an impoverished population on the other--largely by a fraudulent voucher system that left ordinary citizens holding worthless shares in dysfunctional enterprises while enabling a small number of well-connected financiers to line their pockets. Likewise, he vividly describes how the criminal underground profited from the Chechen war and cites an American expert on Russian law, Louise Shelley, on “the domination of organized crime as a terrible obstacle to the growth of a civil society and a true and open democratic system.” To get rid of it after all these years, she observes, will be an exceptionally difficult task. Not surprisingly, her assessment of Russia’s future is bleak indeed.

It would be unfair to conclude a review of Lieven’s book without at least mentioning one of its major components--the roots of the Chechen-Russian struggle in the 18th and 19th centuries, the nature of the 1994-96 war and the author’s personal experiences and observations during that turbulent era. It is no exaggeration to say that in a way, Anatol Lieven, descendant of Baltic barons and Irish nobility, fell rather in love with his subject, that is, the Chechens. Not, some of his critics have charged, in a lachrymose or ingenuous way. He is not blind to their less-endearing traits, such as the propensity for banditry and merciless treatment of their enemies. He is far from admiring some of their leaders, such as Dzhokar Dudayev, to whom he devotes a few acidulous pages.

What has won Lieven’s heart, rather, is their internal democracy and egalitarianism, their self-discipline, remarkable courage, solidarity and, perhaps above all, their unwavering refusal to accept foreign domination. For a nation of a little less than 1.5 million to resist Russian efforts to subdue them, from the last century until the present--200 years of wars and deportations (in the 20th century by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and Stalin in 1944)--is a feat of incomparable proportions. Lieven’s panorama of Russian-Chechen relations and also depictions of his own travels and lengthy conversations with Chechen soldiers, of officers, politicians of all stripes, as well as with their Russian adversaries, all help to make “Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power” one of the truly brilliant books of contemporary history.