Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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the impeachment vote, Yeltsin ﬁred Primakov. Yeltsin’s dismissal of the popular

prime minister inched Russia closer to a constitutional crisis. If the Duma had

impeached Yeltsin and also rejected his nominee for prime minister, Sergei

Stepashin, the Russian constitution is silent on what should have happened

next. Push did not come to shove, however, as the Duma did not muster the

necessary two-thirds vote to pass any of the ﬁve impeachment articles. Days

later, Duma deputies overwhelmingly approved Yeltsin’s nominee for prime

minister. In August 1999, Yeltsin ﬁred Stepashin and nominated Vladimir Putin

as his replacement. The Duma approved Yeltsin’s candidate without a fuss.

Invading Chechnya again

Just as the political crisis in Moscow began to subside in the summer of 1999,a

new crisis of even greater proportions ignited again in the Caucasus.

In early

August, a multi-ethnic force headed by Chechen commander Shamil Basaev

invaded the Russian republic of Dagestan, claiming Dagestan’s liberation from

Russian imperialism as their cause. Russian armed forces responded by launch-

ing a major counter-offensive againstthe Chechen-led ‘liberation’movement.

On 1 September, the war came to Moscow, when an explosion in downtown

Moscow wounded forty-one people.

Further terrorist attacks in Moscow

and elsewhere killed more than 300 Russian civilians in one month. Russians

understood the terrorist attacks to be acts of war committed by Chechnya and

its foreign supporters. Society demanded a response, and the Russian govern-

ment responded.

In October Russian troops crossed into Chechen territory

for the second time that decade.

Chechnya was to be liberated from the

bandits and terrorists by any means necessary. Over 100,000 troops were sent

to the theatre to accomplish this objective.

60 For accounts of the second Chechen war, Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will

Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003);

Anne Nivat, Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya

(New York: Public Affairs, 2000); and Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter

in Chechnya (London: Harvill Press, 2001).

61 ITAR-TASS, ‘Operatsiia nachalas’, goriachaia khronika’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 14 Aug. 1999,

p. 3.

62 Vladimir Zainetdinov, Aleksei Siviv, Maria Beloklova, ‘Vchera v shkolakh ot Chukhotki

do Kaliningrada prozvenel pervyi zvonok. A v Okhotnom riadu poslednii zvonok’,

Rossiiskaia Gazeta, 2 Sept. 1999,p.1.

63 David Hoffman, ‘Russian Premier Pins Bombing on Chechens’, Washington Post, 16 Sept.

1999,p.A26.

64 ‘Goriachaia Khronika: Konechnaia tsel’ unichtozhit’ banditov’, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 6 Oct.

1999,p.1.

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Initially, Russian armed forces were more successful in this second war.

More methodical and relying to a greater extent on air power, Russian forces

eventually recaptured Groznyi and most of Chechnya’s cities by the beginning

of 2000, while the Chechen ﬁghters remained in the mountains. The nature

of human rights violations in this second war increased dramatically (or they

were better documented).

Western experts estimate that 400,000 people

have been displaced.

But ﬁnal victory proved elusive. Resistance continued.

In September 2004 Chechens held hundreds of children hostage in a school in

Beslan, North Osetia. Russian troops stormed the school, and over 340 people

died in the assault.

The end of Yeltsin’s Russia and the beginning

of Putin’s Russia

The combination of a massive economic crisis, a new war and an ailing and

unpopular president created real uncertainty about the 1999–2000 electoral

cycle. In the run-upto the 1999 parliamentary elections, a newpolitical coalition

called Fatherland–All Russia seemed poised to compete with the Communist

Party for the highest vote totals. Led by former Prime Minister Primakov,

Fatherland–All Russia looked at the 1999 parliamentary vote as a primary for

the 2000 presidential vote – the real prize in Russia’s political system. In the

summer of 1999, Primakov polled well ahead of all other presidential hopefuls.

A changing of the guard – a ﬁnal test of Russia’s democratic institutions – looked

imminent.

65 Mark Kramer, ‘Civil-Military Relations in Russia and the Chechnya Conﬂict’, Policy

Memo Series 99 (Cambridge, Mass.: Program on New Approaches to Russian Security,

December 1999).

66 Human Rights Watch, ‘Now Happiness Remains: Civilian Killings, Pillage, and Rape

in Alkhan-Yurt’, Chechnya, Russia/Chechnya 12, 5 (D) (Apr. 2000): 1–33; Human Rights

Watch, ‘February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldi’, Russia/Chechnya 12, 9 (D) ( June

2000): 1–43; Human Rights Watch, ‘The “Dirty War” in Chechnya: Forced Disappear-

ances, Torture, and Summary Executions’, Russia 13, 1 (D) (Mar. 2001): 1–42; and Human

Rights Watch, ‘Burying the Evidence: The Botched Investigation into a Mass Grave in

Chechnya’, Russia/Chechnya 13, 3 (D) (May 2001): 1–26.TheChechnya Weekly, published

by the Jamestown Foundation, also has provided comprehensive coverage of events

related to the war, including extensive reporting on human rights violations. Amnesty

International, Physicians for Human Rights, Doctors of the World, and Doctors without

Borders have also contributed to the documentation of human rights abuses. In Russia,

Memorial has provided the most comprehensive coverage of human rights abuses inside

Chechnya.

67 This ﬁgure is cited in Sarah Mendelson, ‘Russia, Chechnya, and International Norms:

The Power and Paucity of Human Rights? NCEEER Working Paper, 17 July 2001,p.11.

68 See Michael McFaul, Andrei Ryabov and Nikolai Petrov (eds.), Rossiia v izbiratel’nom

tsikle: 1999–2000 godov (Moscow: Moscow Carnegie Center, 2000).

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For Yeltsin, allowing Primakov to replace him would have signalled defeat

for reform. So he anointed an alternative, Vladimir Putin. By selecting Putin

to become his new prime minister in August 1999, Yeltsin made it clear that

he considered this former KGB agent his heir apparent.

Few others believed

that Putin had a chance. He displayed little charisma, had no political party

or other interest groups behind him and had never run for ofﬁce. In his ﬁrst

month in ofﬁce, his approval rating hovered in the single digits. By the end

of the year, however, his popularity had soared to well above 70 per cent.

the 1999 parliamentary election, a new pro-Kremlin electoral bloc, Unity, rode

Putin’s coat-tails to a surprisingsecond-placeﬁnish,just behind the Communist

Party.

As the result of a major negative campaign launched by media outlets

friendly to the Kremlin, Fatherland–All Russia suffered a devastating defeat

in the 1999 vote, winning only 13 per cent of the popular vote. Primakov

subsequently decided not to compete against Putin in the presidential election

the following year, guaranteeing a Putin landslide in the ﬁrst round of the 2000

vote.

Putin’s popularity exploded in the autumn of 1999 due ﬁrst and foremost

to his handling of the Chechen war. It was an odd formula for gaining pop-

ularity. After all, Yeltsin’s ﬁrst war with Chechnya was extremely unpopular

and had to be ended before he could win re-election in 1996. In this second

intervention, the Russian people believed that the rationale for this war was

self-defence. Second, relying more on air power, the Russian military appeared

to be more successful in the second war. Consequently, this second Chechen

war was initially very popular. During the 2000 presidential campaign, public

support remained steady at roughly 60 per cent; it did not waver, as many had

predicted, when Russian casualties increased. Opinion polls conducted in the

autumn of 1999 demonstrated that people were grateful to Putin for accepting

responsibility for the security of the Russian people. He looked like a leader

who had taken charge during an uncertain, insecure time and had delivered

on his promise to provide stability and security.

In addition to Chechnya, Putin beneﬁted from several other factors. He

was young, energetic and new while his competitors were the opposite. Putin

69 Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries,p.337.

70 Agentstvo regional’nykh politcheskikh issledovanii (ARPI), Regional’nyi Sotsiologicheskii

Monitoring 49 (10–12 Dec. 1999): 39. Sample size: 3,000 respondents in 52 Federation

subjects.

71 On how, see Timothy Colton and Michael McFaul, ‘Reinventing Russia’s Party of Power:

Unity and the 1999 Duma Election’, Post-Soviet Affairs 16, 3 (Summer 2000): 201–24.

72 For details on the campaign, see Timothy Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice

and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections in 1 999 and 2000 (Washington: Brookings

Institution Press, 2003).

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also positioned himself as a candidate different from Yeltsin. Putin’s youth and

energy provided a striking contrast to his old and sick predecessor. He was

also unknown, allowing people to project into his candidacy all sorts of images

and orientations. With the exception of his policy towards Chechnya, he was

a tabula rasa on which voters could write what they wanted. In addition the

economy had begun to turn around as devaluation from the August 1998 crisis

and rising oil prices had helped to make 1999 Russia’s ﬁrst year of economic

growth in a decade. Finally, Putin beneﬁted from extensive positive coverage in

the Russian media, most of which was still owned by the state or was friendly

to the Kremlin (see Plate 25).

Conclusion

In leaving ofﬁce on 31 December 1999, Yeltsin bequeathed to his successors

several serious political and economic conundrums. Russian democratic insti-

tutions were weak, the economy was growing but still in need of further

reforms and corruption and crime remained rampant. Most tragically, the

war in Chechnya continued with little prospect for genuine resolution. Yeltsin

already has earned his place in history as one of Russia’s most important lead-

ers. What kind of adjectives will modify his legacy, however, will only become

clear after the resolution of these lingering issues. He could be remembered as

the father of Russian democracy and the initiator of Russia’s market economy

and sustained economic growth. Or he could be remembered as the ﬁrst post-

Communist leader who squandered Russia’s ﬁrst chance of becoming a liberal

democracy and a capitalist economy. Yeltsin’s last important decision – his

appointment of Vladimir Putin as prime minister and then as acting president –

will have a profound effect on how the Yeltsin legacy is ﬁnally judged. To date,

Putin has pressed forward with furthering economic reforms, but at the same

time has undermined Russia’s already fragile democratic institutions.

Yet, Yeltsin also created the foundation for his successors to succeed and

secure for him the more positive modiﬁers to his legacy. The revolution is not

over, but it also has not reversed. The Soviet Union is gone and will never

be resurrected. Communism also will never return to Russia. Russia has not

gone to war with Ukraine, Latvia or Kazakhstan to defend Russians living there

and is less likely to do so today than when Yeltsin ﬁrst took ofﬁce. Though

73 See the articles on political and economic developmentsunder Putin in Herspring, Putin’s

Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, as well as the more negative assessment of Putin

in Lilia Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace, 2003).

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they threatened with periodic electoral splashes, neither neo-fascists nor neo-

Communists ever succeeded in coming to power in the 1990s and do not seem

poised to do so in the near future. Even the Russian Communist Party has

lagged behind its counterparts in Eastern Europe in not being able to recapture

the Kremlin. Individual freedoms in Russia have never been greater.

Finally, by avoiding the temptation of dictatorship, Yeltsin also established an

important precedent of democratic behaviour that will raise the costs for future

authoritarian aspirants. In deﬁance of his critics, he did not cancel elections in

1996, he did not suspend the constitution after the August 1998 ﬁnancial crisis,

and he did not stay in power by any means necessary. On the contrary, he won

re-election in 1996, abided by the constitution and even invited Communists

into his government in the autumn of 1998, and then stepped down willingly,

peacefully and constitutionally. Although Putin has shown little proclivity

for deepening democratisation in Russia, his cautious approach to decision-

making will make it very difﬁcult for him to break this precedent. If dissolving

the Soviet Union was Yeltsin’s most important destructive act, his seizure and

surrender of power through democratic means may be his most important

constructive act.

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part two

RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET

UNION: THEMES AND

TRENDS

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Economic and demographic change:

Russia’s age of economic extremes

peter gatrell

The enduring fascination with Russia’s twentieth-century economic history

has its roots in the politics of revolution. For the Bolshevik leadership, the

events of 1917–18 presaged the foundation of a more equitable, humane and

modern economic and social order, one that would hold out hope to millions

of oppressed and impoverished people within and beyond Russia’s borders. For

the Bolsheviks’ opponents, the revolution was destructive and barbaric, revers-

ing a half-century of prior economic progress under the tsarist regime, for the

sake of what seemed to many of them to be dubious social and economic

goals. These sharply polarised opinions have, to a greater or lesser extent,

coloured the way in which later generations have assessed the aspirations

and the performance of the Russian economy during the twentieth century.

When Stalin launched an extraordinarily ambitious programme of economic

modernisation and social change upon the Soviet Union after 1928, jettisoning

traditional forms of agricultural organisation and cementing a system of cen-

tral economic planning, the controversy between enthusiasts and sceptics only

deepened. The enthusiasts pointed to rapid economic growth and dramatic

technological change during the 1930s, contrasting this with the prolonged

depression in the capitalist West. Victory in the war against Nazism seemed

to them to have validated the Stalinist industrial revolution. For their part,

the sceptics questioned the magnitude of economic growth, drew attention

to systemic deﬁciencies and highlighted the widespread terror and population

losses. After Stalin’s death, attempts at economic reform – sometimes hesitant,

sometimes more purposeful – did nothing to lessen a divergence of opinion

between those who saw reform as a dead end and those who regarded it as

a worthwhile attempt to redesign the socialist system, in order to respond to

fresh challenges from the Soviet Union’s rivals, beneﬁciaries of the post-war

I am grateful to NickBaron, PaulGregory, Mark Harrison and Nat Moser fortheir comments

on an earlier version of this chapter.

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peter gatrell

economic miracle. Finally, the disintegration of the Soviet system after 1991

enabled the sceptics to claim that the planned economy had been built on

shallow foundations all along. The enthusiasts, bruised by the sudden collapse

of Soviet socialism, bemoaned the high costs of ‘transition’. By the end of

the twentieth century, they had become the sceptics, whilst those who hith-

erto pinpointed the shortcomings of the Soviet economic experiment now

enthusiastically endorsed Russia’s attempt to create a functioning capitalist

economy.

For these reasons, it is not difﬁcult to understand why the eminent Ameri-

can sovietologist and economist, Alexander Gerschenkron, wrote of Russia’s

twentieth century that ‘it always was a political economic history’. It was

bound up with a vision of an economic future that could be deliberately

engineered by administrative means, in order to fashion a developed yet egal-

itarian society. That vision was compelling far beyond Russia. Differences of

history and culture notwithstanding, the Soviet economic project inspired

politicians, economists and engineers in countries as far apart as Romania,

China, Cuba and Tanzania, not to mention in those non-socialist societies

where the exchange of ideas operated freely. The ‘second world’ of socialism

enjoyed enormous prestige in the ‘third world’. It affected no less the course

of intellectual debate and political practice in developed parts of the globe.

The political and ideological context of economic decision-making did not

remain stable throughout the twentieth century. The tsarist regime was deeply

unsettled by the Revolution of 1905, to which it responded by embarking upon

a major reform of property rights in the countryside. Nor did the installation

of the Soviet regime bring about greater stability: on the contrary, the civil war

unleashed a period of political uncertainty and economic collapse. Following

the relatively stable era of the New Economic Policy (1921–8), the Stalinist ‘rev-

olution from above’ ushered in a fresh period of turmoil. For many peasants,

collectivisation had echoes of the wartime exactions that they had rejected in

1920 and carried connotations of the serfdom that had been abolished in 1861.

For enterprise managers, the dictates of central planning created a climate of

uncertainty rather than security; there was little refuge from arbitrary inter-

vention by the party in economic affairs. The post-war era brought about a

more prolonged degree of political stability, but the collapse of Soviet authority

in the late 1980s engendered fresh turmoil, from which the post-Communist

successor states have not been immune.

Notwithstanding this recurrent political turbulence, Russia’s twentieth cen-

tury displays certain continuities in the style of governance. At a macro level,

economic policy was governed by a pronounced sense of the imperial, Soviet

384

Economic and demographic change: Russia’s age of economic extremes

and post-Soviet mission of economic modernisation. At stake was the need

to tame reckless nature, to improve (and transcend) human capabilities, to

arrange population ‘rationally’ and above all to overcome economic back-

wardness. The economic history of Russia can thus be read as a kind of Niet-

zschean struggle that rationalised overt political intervention in the affairs of

subordinate institutions and their agents. Tsarist ofﬁcials prescribed in micro-

scopic detail the conduct of corporate bodies, whether joint-stock enterprises

or trade unions. The Communist Party established formal political depart-

ments in economic commissariats (ministries) and in collective farms. To be

sure, both regimes might periodically laud the ‘heroic’ and decisive individual,

whether the entrepreneur (before the revolution) or the Soviet factory director

who exceeded plan targets. But the imperatives of modernisation – the subju-

gation of space and the transcendence of time – ascribed particular signiﬁcance

to the state and limited the formal autonomy of agents, whether managers,

workers or farmers. These ambitions introduced a campaign style to Russia’s

economic history. The tsarist programme of land reform, the war on nouveaux

riches during the 1920s, the Stakhanovite movement in 1935–6, Khrushchev’s

Virgin Lands campaign, Gorbachev’s project for economic ‘acceleration’ – all

these are characteristic of a belief that the state had a duty to intervene in order

to circumvent potential obstacles to the tasks of economic modernisation.

As already implied, these imperatives had profound implications for

Russia’s demographic history. The emphasis upon the transformation of space

imparted particular signiﬁcance to population migration. At one level this

meant the use of political instruments to promote the settlement of regions

earmarked for economic development and expansion. At another it meant

that some regions were ‘cleared’ of ‘alien elements’ and others were set aside

for the incarceration and deployment of forced labour. In the tsarist and Soviet

eras alike, defence considerations as well as colonising impulses were at work.

As recent work has made clear, this population politics was closely bound up

with the global pursuit of ‘modernity’.

These preliminary remarks serve to suggest a framework for understanding

the mixed fortunes of the Soviet economy during the twentieth century. No

attempt is made here to survey all aspects of Russian economic history or

to provide a full picture of economic growth and development.

Instead, this

1 David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics,Knowledge,Practices

(London: Macmillan, 2000).

2 The most important works are listed in the Bibliography. No detail is provided here on the

economy during the two world wars, for which see Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War:

A Social and Economic History (Harlow: Longman, 2005); and Mark Harrison, Accounting

385