CONFEDERACY OF THUGS

It is now clear that the collapse of communism did not necessarily mean the emergence of democratic capitalism everywhere. The likelihood of a happy ending, it appears, depended on the duration and intensity of a given nation’s totalitarian rule, as well as its level of development prior to the advent of Marxism-Leninism. So while Estonia and the Czech Republic steadily merge into the European mainstream, Albanians fire looted Kalashnikovs into the air in defiance of their country’s gangster regime.

In the sequel to his authoritative Lenin’s Tomb, David Reinnick of the New Yorker attempts to locate postSoviet Russia on this continuum. That’s a tall order: Now in its sixth year of “transition,” Russia remains a moving target. Reinnick is ultimately unwilling to violate the etiquette of mainstream Russia-watching, and ends the book on an up-note. But it is not a convincing performance. Remnick himself appears to believe that postSoviet Russia has evolved more on the Albanian model than on the Czech.

The book’s strengths are a tribute to Remnick’s writing and reporting. His description of the October 1993 uprising led by thenVice President Alexander Rutskoi reminds us what a close call it was, with Yeltsin and his loyalists having to badger the army into putting down the mutiny. Remnick also realizes that the bombardment of the Russian White House that followed was the last moment democrats could feel certain Boris Yeltsin was in their corner. “The price of October,” Remnick writes, “was a sustained period of reaction, a political struggle in which the Yeltsin government could not hope to claim any easy moral superiority.” Since October 1993, Yeltsin has ruled much more like the provincial party boss he started out as than the democrat he supposedly evolved into.

Nowhere was this reversion to form more apparent than in Yeltsin’s Mexican- style rigging of the 1996 presidential campaign. (No one should charge that Yeltsin rigged the actual vote.) According to Remnick, Yeltsin almost took the advice of Aleksandr Korzhakov, to dissolve the Communist-dominated parliament and cancel the elections. Korzhakov, often described as Yeltsin’s chief “bodyguard,” was actually the head of the presidential security service. He was indeed almost inseparable from the president, but is better thought of as the head of a 10,00020,000 man palace guard that had become virtually his personal instrument. A presidential adviser later told Remnick that Yeltsin would not have handed over power to the Communists, had they won the vote.

It is good the elections were carried out, and that their outcome was the lesser of two evils: Yeltsin’s opponent Gennady Zyuganov espoused a bizarre mix of nationalism, antiSemitism, communism, and the occult. But those who arranged Zyuganov’s defeat were hardly motivated by a commitment to let freedom ring. A group of powerful bankers, greatly enriched by their links to Yeltsin’s privatization architect Anatoly Chubais, had come into conflict with Yeltsin’s bodyguard Korzhakov and the shadowy financial structures close to him. Had Yeltsin cancelled the vote, he would have required some sort of state of emergency as a pretext, and that would have strengthened Korzhakov’s hand. This would have placed the banking group’s financial interests — and even their lives — in danger from Korzhakov’s security service. A Communist victory at the polls would have placed the bankers in similar jeopardy. Thus, their only option was to supplant Korzhakov by giving the Yeltsin campaign astronomical sums and putting television — which they largely own — at the Kremlin’s disposal. The ouster of Korzhakov and his cronies, which took place in between the two rounds of voting last summer, was clear evidence of the tycoons’ clout.

Remnick rightly calls Russia’s robber barons “oligarchs,” and devotes a chapter to one of them — Vladimir Gusinsky, head of MOSTBank and its media empire. But he neither explains how this oligarchy emerged nor adequately describes the new order’s defining characteristic: the symbiosis between corrupt financial-industrial groups and the state.

What is missing is a discussion of privatization — a process reflexively praised in the West and which has been supported by tens of millions in USAID money. Remnick gives only one sentence to how the government, at Chubais’s direction, turned over some of the world’s most valuable assets — state oil companies, metals factories, etc. — to a handful of powerful banks, at knockdown prices, under the guise of “competitive auctions” in late 1995.

Several of the major tenders were won by two banks authorized by the state to organize them. An investigation by the Russian government itself showed that, prior to the auctions, the “winning” banks had been given money from the national budget in an amount equal to what the banks would hand back to the state to “purchase” the shares.

Remnick could have found someone — perhaps economist Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the largest parliamentary bloc of anti-Yeltsin democrats — to present a systematic critique of the new order. The author, however, cites him only a couple of times. Aleksandr Lebed could have done the same, perhaps somewhat less articulately. Lebed, the most popular figure in Russian politics today, gets next to no attention from Remnick, while Mikhail Gorbachev, a non-entity in today’s Russia, is treated extensively. We have a whole chapter devoted to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s life in Vermont but nothing on his disturbing analysis of the new status quo, published in Le Monde last November. (In it, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia is ruled by an oligarchy of ex-Communist apparatchiks and New Russians who “amassed instant fortunes through banditry.” “The merger of criminal capital and state power,” he wrote, has completely blocked the possibility of a free market.)

Remnick’s analysis of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s startling 1993 parliamentary showing does belong in the book. But the most important aspect of Zhirinovsky’s rise is missing from Remnick’s analysis. Zhirinovsky’s parliamentary faction became the most reliable source of votes for Kremlin initiatives — reportedly in exchange for piles of money. A 1995 Interior Ministry report found that the list of legislative candidates from Zhirinovsky’s party included dozens of wealthy former or wanted felons who reportedly bought safe seats from the party in order to receive parliamentary immunity from prosecution. That the new Hitler should turn out to be nothing more than a great actor-businessman is a very Russian twist: Several years ago, ex-finance minister Boris Fedorov referred to Zhirinovsky as the guy the government trots out when it wants IMF money.

Remnick makes too much of the idea that the loss of empire and super-power status creates the preconditions for a Weimar scenario. “The threat of fascism is rooted in national humiliation and economic uncertainty: a nation of prosperous merchants, farmers, and computer programmers — a middle class – – is not likely to vote a fascist into the Kremlin,” he writes.

Among the Russians I know, those who have lost status since the collapse of the old system do not seem fodder for fascists. Only a few have spoken of national humiliation. What they do talk about, along with the struggle to feed their families, is the unchecked power of the mafia and corrupt chinovniki — bureaucrats — who enrich themselves at the citizenry’s expense. They associate these things, quite correctly, with their economic plight.

While it is hard to imagine Russians marching behind someone promising to restore national greatness — most are understandably allergic to political myths — they are likely to gravitate toward an untainted politician who promises law and order, an end to corruption, and a level economic playing field, even by undemocratic means. That would seem to mean Lebed, or someone like him.

In the epilogue to Resurrection, Remnick writes that Russia today “is at once adrift, unpredictable and corrupt,” but adds: “I see no reason that Russia cannot make a break with its absolutist past much in the way that Germany and Japan did after the war.” Remnick is wrong. The reason is that Russia — unlike Germany and Japan, which started from scratch — inherited a bureaucratic Leviathan, which, as former premier Yegor Gaidar wrote several years ago, was severed from its ideological moorings and is now devoted exclusively to self-enrichment and self-perpetuation. It remains unreformed, and loots with abandon, even as the media watch.

Jonas Bernstein is a writer living in Moscow.