Attempted Reforms and Re-emerging Patterns in Post-Soviet Russia

Post-Soviet Russia, as Robert Service has said, "has been given an unenviable legacy" (554). That legacy, inherited in the wake of the USSR's collapse only sixteen years ago, has left Russia with a myriad of political, economic, and social hardships, many of which embody continually reemerging patterns throughout Russian history, and others which at least appear to be the earliest signs of possibility for a new Russian way of life struggling to take root. Even after the fall of Soviet government in Russia, many of the same trends of Russian life under Soviet - and, for that matter, Tsarist - regimes have endured, including authoritarian rule by a single, strong individual, the overwhelming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an elite few, a lack of any effective legal system or civic consciousness, and poor standards of living for the majority of the populace.

At the same time, however, Russia has developed at least the shaky foundations of a modern market economy, it seems the public at large is at least somewhat freer in social thought and expression, and presidential and parliamentary elections are held and multiple political parties tolerated. Fundamentally, however, while Russia has undergone some noticeable political, economic, and social changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the larger trend of events since then, the same familiar, age-old historical patterns seem mostly to be reasserting themselves at the expense of any comprehensive national reform.

One of the most striking - and frighteningly familiar - examples of authoritarian government reasserting itself in post-Soviet Russia came in 1999, when Yeltsin "anointed" Putin as his Presidential successor (Service 543). Like his predecessors, Putin had risen through the ranks of the State Security apparatus, and thus "had been put in control of all the instruments needed to ensure victory," so when elections were held in March 2000, "the result was a foregone conclusion" (Service 542-543). And, like Soviet leaders before him, Putin sought to strengthen state power and command obedience.

Among his early acts as President were an assault on 'oligarchs' critical of the State - a move to intimidate Television press - a reorganization of the Duma to secure the parliamentary power of his party, Yedinstvo, and the division of Russia into seven super-regions, to which he appointed his own loyal plenipotentiary from the ranks of the FSB, the army, and the Interior Ministry (Service 543-544). As Meier notes, "the borders of the new federal regions closely resembled the military districts Peter the Great had devised in 1708," and Putin was said to greatly admire the Tsar (412). Yet unlike previous Russian leaders, both Tsarist and Soviet, Putin was able to strike a balance in his policies that could maintain order without resorting to outright totalitarianism (Meier 416).

The decline of the Soviet Union, much like its rise, did allow for a redistribution of Russian wealth, but only from the hands of one small group of privileged elites to another. This took place in the form of what Meier calls the "Great Grab," when self-proclaimed 'oligarchs,' moguls, and so-called "New Russians...had managed to grab a slice of the spoils and grown preposterously rich overnight" (12, 25). By the time Putin came to power, "Eighty-eight percent of the state's old enterprises" had become privately owned (Meier 300).
But these, like nearly every other commodity in post-Soviet Russia, were largely ill-gotten, and as Meier comes to realize in his discussions with business reporter Yuliya Latynina and historian Dmitri Likhachev, "the new lords of the market, the oligarchs, did resemble the boyars," and "even the primary growth industries of the new market - exploiting natural resources and reaping rent from protection - had advanced little from the economics of the Middle Ages" (327). Indeed, the oligarchs had come to dominate nearly every major sector of private industry not completely controlled by the state - from the banks to the media to rare metals and fuel (Meier 534). Or, as Service summarizes, "the beneficiaries of the 'new Russia' were politicians, businessmen and gangsters, and in some cases the individual might be all three things at once" (539).

In this volatile and competitive atmosphere, violence and corruption flourished, particularly in the cities, and with the absence of a stable or efficient legal system, the audacities of criminality in places like Moscow and Petersburg seemed limitless. Meier describes the savage assassination of Mikhail Suslov's grandnephew by uniformed police moonlighting as hit men for hire on behalf of a rival, and a whole string of other murders of prominent businessmen and politicians in Petersburg during the summer of 2000 (25-27, 330). The wealthy few who remained among the living continued to lavish the opulent trappings of foreign luxury on themselves in the way of cars, clothing, jewelry and all manner of indulgences, even as their greedy rivalries scared off foreign investors, and drove many Russian entrepreneurs to expropriate their capital elsewhere (Service 534). The vast majority of the people were still poor, of course, and "the poverty line after all still cut through a third of Russia's households" (Meier 434).

Russia's people certainly gained some small personal freedoms after the fall of the USSR, as "the agencies of the police invade[d] the privacy of citizens to a lesser extent than at any time in recent Russian history;" some of the Russians Meier encounters, like Marat Krichevsky, even express a kind of optimism as a result: "We now live in a completely different country!...We can travel. We can say what we want. We can meet foreigners - a reporter even! - in our own apartment. We can shop in stores that are full of goods and open twenty-four hours every day!" (Service 547). Some improvements in living standards could be seen emerging from the excesses leading up to and following the end of the Soviet order, as Meier's friend Andrei admits: "Life was fine, 'in the details.' You could go to a restaurant, drink Bordeaux, and eat foie gras. You could work hard, or steal well, and buy your own apartment and travel the world" (440). In much of the country, however, especially further out from the cities, quality of life remained poor, at best, as many struggled bitterly against poverty and harsh environments in their day to day lives, and "for millions, the winters were still cold and dark, with electricity and gas scarce as ever" (Meier 436).

For them, and millions of other Russians still struggling under the yoke of centuries-old political inequities, more links in a seemingly-endless chain of historical suffering, it undoubtedly matters little that the US Department of Commerce declared Russia's economy a free market in 2002, or that historical precedents have been set with the staging of parliamentary and Presidential elections (Meier 434). For many Russians, their national history, insofar as they care to study it, is a constant reminder to be wary of such promises for change and improvement. Most of the major themes in Russia's history, from the Tsars to the Soviets, have become continually reemerging patterns, and while some things have certainly changed in the country since the end of the Soviet Union, it would be difficult even to imagine the degree of change required to break those patterns any time in the near future.

Works Cited

Meier, Andrew. Black Earth. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, inc., 2003.

Service, Robert. A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.