My Life Under Yeltsin
By Chris Monday
Reading the obituaries, I find stark differences in opinions concerning Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin. Did he westernize Russia or plunge it into authoritarianism? If the figures of Peter the Great and Lenin provide any clue, the passage of time will only make history’s judgment more opaque. Even as a trained economist, I have few tools for evaluating Yeltsin’s turbulent revolution because the change was too drastic. Having written a dissertation, married, and raised a family under Yeltsin, I present only my personal, subjective perspective.
When I recall the Yeltsin years, I remember strolling with my fiancee through historic St. Petersburg while all the time dodging pieces of bricks that would periodically fall from dilapidated buildings. The past was literally crumbling on us.
The Yeltsin era was typified by intense, ubiquitous debate? on the trolleybus, in the used bookstores, in the museums. Most of my university lectures consisted of vitriolic harangues against the errors of Yeltsin’s “gang”. It was always difficult for me to study in the library with out being distracting by myriad discussions from Communists, National Socialists, New Pagans, Tatar nationalists, Monarchists, Libertarians, and Eurasionists.
Russia was not only creating new market institutions, but also new mental institutions. Fresh ways of thinking had to be discovered. In a situation similar to A Beautiful Mind, only on a national scale, Soviet citizens woke up from a schizophrenic trance to realize that their collective memories were polluted. In the span of a year, cultural icons, songs, movies, and street names were replaced. I was surprised that I had to vigorously hunt for months for a copy of the once classic Soviet movie Lenin in October.
Yeltsin’s Russia dethroned academia. This meant that the national debate was conducted by TV pundits, rock stars, and showmen, such as bestselling “historian” Edward Radzinsky. The dizzying feeling of the times is described (at least for my wife) by bard Yuri Shevchuk, who sings “the counter revolution lead smashed into us.”
The Yeltsin regime wielded “freedom of speech” as a weapon to bludgeon the opposition. This was especially apparent during Yeltsin’s 1996 campaign against the “communist” Gennady Zuganov. Western “political technologists”, hired hands from Madison Avenue and Washington, unleashed their campaign ploys on an unsuspecting Russia. A whirlwind of ads, concerts, demonstrations, and state television “news reports” attempted to convince us that only Yeltsin could lead Holy Russia to post-modernism. I remember attending a church service that year; this was a popular way for the population to join the fight against “communism”. But nobody, including the priests, knew what to say, where to move, or how to cross themselves.
Yeltsin granted Russians freedom of travel. I was able to visit? almost for free because the trains were cheap in those days─ the “closed city” of Nizhni-Tagil, famous for its tank production and venomous pollution. In St. Petersburg, I often dined for a dollar in an ex-KGB cafeteria, although I don’t recall ever seeing Putin there. I also enjoyed the guided tours catered mainly to Russian citizens. Our guides muddled through their scripts, consisting of a bizarre amalgam of old Soviet sources? “here is where Great Lenin camped”?and New Russian history which highlighted places connected with such murky “heroes” as Russian general Vlasov, who fought on the side of Hitler against the USSR.
Under Yeltsin Russians gained the freedom to sojourn to such exotic locals as Turkey and Thailand. But they were deprived of the right to travel to their relatives in the Baltic States and Ukraine. My grandmother-and-law in St. Petersburg has not seen her sister who resides in Ukraine for 15 years.
It was a time when Russia asked the West for help in reforming the economy. Shamefully, America’s top institutions, such as Harvard, exploited this opportunity to take advantage of a naive president not for any ideological reasons but simply to make a quick buck through shady deals. In the United States, these scandals still linger on in backstage court cases. I saw the effects of these “reforms” when traveling to my wife’s village in the Vologda region. It reminded me more of my Peace Corps experience in a war-torn area of Kenya, then anything I had ever seen in France or Spain.
The open market often only further tortured the Russians. For example, my grandfather-in-law, a survivor of the blockade of Leningrad, could only look helplessly though the store windows at the medicines he so desperately needed. This was at a time when Yeltsin was inviting elite doctors to his “office”, a hospital ward.
The most profound changes under Yeltsin were not economic but demographic. This, for me, was symbolized by my trip to “Starria Russa”, the setting for Dostoevsky’s novel Brothers Karamazov, which prophesized the noble future of the Slavic race. This area is now populated mainly by a hard-working Tazhik community.
The year 1998 brought the spiritual end of the Yeltsin era. The bombing of Yugoslavia united the Russian people in a way hard to explain to those who were not direct witnesses. Academia, the media, government officials and the entertainment industry all agreed in their opposition to the West. I remember being harangued in the classroom, in the streets, and even at home by my wife “for bombing children”. Russia demanded fundamental change, “peremen”. The people wanted an antidote to the lumbering Yeltsin. They received their wish on a symbolic New Year’s Eve in 1999 with the appearance of a judo-trained, young president with German manners.
Putin molded a different Russia based on Unity and Stability. Visiting the universities, I now see the professors occupying a prominent role in society. They present a unified interpretation of economics and national history. Debate in the universities and in the streets has ceased; few Russian students care about politics at all. Under Putin the reconstructed facades no longer endanger pedestrians, but now most doors are locked.
The writer is professor of economics at Dongseo University.