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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Inside Yeltsin’s Russia
John Kampfner
Cassell £17.99
John Kampfner is diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph, so this book is based on the view that what happens at the top of society determines what will happen to that society. The lives of the vast mass of Russians are seen as incidental, a backdrop painted in to add some local colour to the main events. Despite that, his portrait of the machinations, criminality and greed of those ruling Russia is intense.
The opening section describes the rise of ‘General Dima’ Yakubovsky, ‘a metaphor of modern Russia at its sleaziest’. He made his fortune by acting as a middle man in the business of selling off USSR real estate in East Germany, assets that ‘were never accounted for’. His career is linked to other such entrepreneurs, the new super rich with their connections to each other and to politicians.
Everyone who is anyone (particularly in parliament) has been on the make, and government is seen to be more about revealing the corruption of your opponents and preserving your own position than about the health of the country.
Throughout the book there are indications of the weakness of Kampfner’s viewpoint. He comments in the preface that ‘anyone who did well under Communism had all the prerequisites for doing well under capitalism’. Later he refers to Solzhenitsyn’s comments on the ‘two different systems, but one relationship between the rulers and the ruled’, and he gives explicit figures showing that the old bosses are running things again.
At the same time he notes that in 1991, 100,000–250,000 people went on the streets to support Yeltsin during his battle with parliament over the proposal for elections, but they ignored his calls for a strike during the coup against Gorbachev in August. Similarly in 1993, 100,000 people demonstrated for Yeltsin during his battle with parliament over proposals for elections but they turned their backs on his party, Russia’s Choice, in December. By March 1994 the local elections attracted as few as one voter in four in St Petersburg, despite an illegal extension of polling to a second day.
Lastly he quotes the security chief under Nicholas I (‘law is for the underlings’), Rutskoy (‘laws, laws and laws again – then society will be stable’), and towards the end remarks that ‘for the previous two years [1992–93] the law had been a political instrument’.
These three elements speak volumes: the same corrupt people in power, the same chasm between rulers and ruled, bridged by the same vain reliance on law. The conclusion becomes irresistible, that Kampfner’s view of Russia moving to ‘long term stability’ is impossible, and that instead only the name of the system has changed and further upheaval must be brewing.
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