The idea of being poor didn't exist in the USSR. Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
The Nineties were a time of American hegemony and British cockiness. The internet was a utopian idea as opposed to a collective psychological disorder. Climate change, terrorism, autocracy and gross inequality were either not-on-the-radar or assumed to be moving in the right direction. From the vantage point of 2022, that period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 seems impossibly sunkissed. What did we have to worry about?
Well, with the gift of hindsight, the collapse of a vast, ideologically-driven nuclear superpower into social, economic and moral anarchy might have concentrated more western minds than it did. “Nyebyezopasnost” is the word Russians (and Ukrainians, Georgians, Kazakhs, etc…) often use to describe their Nineties, usually translated as “insecurity” — though “never-without-danger” is closer to its actual sense. For the ordinary Russians whose voices were collected by the Belarussian writer, Svetlana Alexievich in Second-hand Time (2015), her remarkable oral history of the Soviet collapse, it was a period of chaos, anger and despair. Through her polyphony of voices, Alexievich sounds the void that is left when both security and meaning are removed from a society overnight.
This is pretty much what happened in the Russia of the Boris Yeltsin era, as “Capitalist Shock Therapy” was imposed under the Washington Consensus, criminals flourished, savings evaporated with hyper-inflations, as many as seven million people died what would later be termed “Deaths of Despair“, and the Economics Minister, Yegor Gaidar, appeared on Russian TV, trying to teach a dazed nation how to sell mineral water. Nothing that counted before counted anymore. “For twenty, thirty years, people were on the waiting list for an apartment,” complains Marina, a 63-year-old Belarusian woman, interviewed by Alexievich. “Then, one day, Gaidar comes and laughs in our faces: Go ahead and buy one! With what money?…We spent our whole lives believing that one day, we would all live well. It was a lie! A great big lie!”
Notwithstanding the evils in the Soviet experiment and the cynicism and dysfunction that characterised its Eighties iteration, it is just never a good idea to leave such a void untended. You don’t know what will come to fill it, though in retrospect, Putin’s construction of a “military Disneyland” for children; his Orthodox-Death Star Cathedral of the Armed Forces; his “Eternal Regiment” marching at the annual Victory Parade day parade — all this should really have rung a few alarm bells. In her introduction, Alexievich gives plenty of warning. “Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great idea,” she writes:
“This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else — hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarised. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognise their own slavery — they even liked being slaves.”
Alexievich, born in Ukraine in 1948, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her “documentary novels”, which occupy a contested zone between journalism and artistic endeavour. Her 1985 book The Unwomanly Face of War, which related the Great Patriotic War (as Russians label World War Two) through the voices of women, sold over two million copies in the USSR. She has also written about the Soviet-Afghan war, Chernobyl, and the epidemic of suicide in the former USSR — and, inevitably, incurred the displeasure of the Alexander Lukashenko regime in Belarus, though she remains in Minsk, where she has spoken out against the war. “Those people who were brought up by their Soviet parents, taught by Soviet teachers on Soviet textbooks, are now Soviet people…The romanticism of slavery is still living in the people who do not have anything, who are victims themselves, talk about the pain they are in, but still are confident that ‘we used to be great’. That is what lives in them.” It will take a long time “to squeeze the Soviet slave” from the national character.
Alexievich would know: she is, self-confessedly, a sovok. This is a disparaging term both for the USSR itself (it literally means “dustpan”) and for the individuals shaped by it. Alexievich is interested in how history plays out within this “miniature expense” of the human individual. “It’s where everything really happens,” she writes. Of course, it’s where it happens for presidents and his siloviki too — and Putin (born 1952) would also be a sovok. In fact, you can almost imagine the Nineties Putin among the anonymous chorus of voices in Second-hand Time, complaining that he now has to drive a taxi, his secret service income isn’t enough to live by, muttering darkly about the great betrayal.
Alexievich’s subjects range across the former USSR and across the decades. There are dissidents and true believers, exiles, émigrés, victims of sectarian violence in Azerbaijan, Abkhazia and Tajikistan, and ordinary consumers, too, sincerely delighted at finally being able to get hold of western appliances, as colourful as possible, as everything used to be so grey. (“There’s loads of everything. You want to spoil yourself, indulge. It’s therapeutic. We’re all so sick”.)
But almost everyone is bewildered. “The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb,” says one interviewee. The idea of being poor didn’t really exist in the USSR; the common man had status, however theoretical it might have been. An unrepentant communist laments the fact that in the Soviet era, the streets had names like Metallurgists Avenue and Proletariat Street. Now, everything is being renamed Noble Street and Merchants Quarter. “Not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else’s mouth,” she says. She sincerely believed she was striving for freedom.
And yet, those who opposed communism were also at a loss — especially the intelligentsia who gathered in kitchens to discuss banned literature and tell jokes about the party. One describes the pleasure of “external migration of the mind” that was possible under communism. He managed to secure a demotion from engineer to janitor, which meant 30 less roubles a month but who cares? There was nothing to buy anyway and more time to read. One of the first things that happened, post-1991 was that the second hand shops began to fill with books — now utterly useless.
But curiously, it is those who had suffered the cruellest excesses of Soviet ideology who appear the most anguished. The Nineties was the decade of realising that any sacrifices made in the name of the Motherland had been meaningless. If there is anything worse than spending years performing hard labour in Siberia, using your fist for a pillow, feeling your teeth come loose with scurvy, it is discovering that you did all that for nothing. “I spent my life building a great nation. That’s what they told us,” laments Marina the Belarussian, recalling her years working on the Abakan-Taishet railway (singing komsomolsongs all the while). “I don’t want any German biscuits or sweets. Where are my just desserts? The fruits of my labour?” Her neighbour, Sashenka, has recently covered his head in acetate and set himself on fire on the plot that he had defended from the Nazis decades earlier.
Amid the crime, disorder, murder, terrorism, despair, suicide, pornography and paranoia there is a sense, above all, of promise unfulfilled. “What did we want?” says one who had cheered on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. “Gentle socialism, humane socialism.” And what did we get?…Bloodthirsty capitalism.” Time and again, people complain that they weren’t consulted. History was something that was done to them. What they wanted was equality and freedom. Not this.
As a westerner, it is hard to read all this without squirming. Was no one aware what would happen? Where the hell was everyone looking?
There are omissions in Alexievich’s narrative. She has, it becomes clear, her own version of events. I suspect much of this is, in fact, crafted for western ears (there are surprisingly few criticisms of the West) and I can’t help wonder about the voices she omitted or embroidered. More concerning: some of the accounts in Second-hand Time have appeared in earlier books, with certain details migrating from one story to another. However, the same accusations could be levelled at Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago — which is no less forceful for being a bit unscrupulously sourced.
My deeper criticism is that it tends to reinforce the idea of Russia as some great live, literary epic — a stage for tragic, meaningful suffering. This is an idea that is at once sentimental and incredibly dangerous. (All those deaths have to mean something.) But then again, one of Alexievich’s repeated themes, actually, is how you can’t really trust books. “We lived in a world of mirages,” says the anguished dissident whose reading has proved useless. “The Russia of our books and kitchens never existed. It was all in our heads.”
Did our leaders really expect that a functioning civil society could grow out of these ruins? Was Russia left to its fate through naïveté — or cruelty? Was it “just desserts” for what Ronald Regan termed the “evil empire”? But think: after the Second World War, the Allies pumped money into West Germany, and held its hand as it came to terms with its past. No American president went to Russia and declared: “I am a Muscovite!” There was no Nuremberg for those who upheld Stalin’s many Terrors. Only a vast avant-garde neoliberal experiment, which produced accelerated versions of all the rampant inequalities, deaths of despair, and information wars that would soon consume the West.
Ultimately, Second-hand Time leaves an impression of two monsters co-habiting the Kremlin. There was the grey monolith of communism itself — a drab, totalising creature that smothered lives and yet which did, in some important respects, impart meaning and free people from other tyrannies. But there was also the dark monster of Russian autocracy, resident since the days of Ivan the Terrible. Inscrutable. Cruel. Unpredictable. Even as it changes form. “Our country has a Tsarist mentality,” says a former secret-service agent in one of the most telling interviews. “Everyone needs a Tsar. The Czechs can have their Vaclav Havel…we need a Tsar. The Tsar, the Father of the Russian people! Whether it’s a general secretary or a president it has to be a Tsar!”
The mistake was assuming that killing the first monster would smother the former. They killed the wrong monster. Whatever Russia emerges from this nightmare, we can’t make that mistake again.
Richard Godwin is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics and technology
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SubscribeIt has to be remembered that the West did not fight the USSR and win. The USSR collapsed in on itself. The West did not conquor nor occupy Russia so how was it supposed to rule it? In West Germany in 1945 the main administration became American (with a little help from the British and French and more than a little discouragement from the USSR) and therefore rebuilding monies were still in the hands of American administartors to spend. We could not, did not and should not have tried to rule Russia and just giving the Russian government money would have led to exactly what there is now – but they’d have all been much richer than they are now (if that is possible).
Excellent comment!
Little mention that it was the US who aided and abetted the looting of the ex-Soviet state in the 1990s. They won the Cold War, and to the victors the spoils. Of course the man who put a stop to that, Putin, has been vilified ever since.
Also I note that Alexievich states people just want to “live” and not serve some grander plan. As a counter to that I’d point out the rates of depression and other mental health issues which are proliferating in the non-grand plan having West. Russians may not understand it, but their lives are aided when the state has an actual long-term ideology to guide it.
The looting of Russia never ceased. All that changed was who’s doing it.
You seem to imply that the Russians were passive victims here. They had not been conquered by the Americans and the Yeltsin government asked for western advice as they saw fit.
The main looters were the ex-Communist industry directors etc, and Putin ‘put a stop to it’ only of course by becoming the biggest looter of the lot!
The reforms largely worked in Eastern Europe, but the West was hubristic and probably naïve in thinking that the introduction of a market economy could bring rapid improvements after 70 years of Communism.
The Yeltsin government was little more than a comprador regime that was willing to allow American transnational corporations to take over large swathes of the Russian economy (those parts that did not end up in the hands of Yeltsin’s mates at home). He stole both elections that he supposedly won and maintained power through brute force (e.g. the shelling of the Russian parliament in October 1993).
Sure, if by ‘working’ you meaning causing a surge in poverty, plummeting life expectancies, rapid deterioration in the general health of the population and the profileration of anti-social behaviour and the problematic use of narcotics of all kinds. In that case, the IMF-led neoliberal restructuring worked spledidly.
Well the eastern Europeans are free to go back to communism if they choose. And this time it could be on their own terms, not enforced at gunpoint. I don’t seem to be hearing about a huge clamor for that, though. Is it just being kept quiet?
1) They never had communism.
2) Any effort to establish an actually communist society in Eastern Europe or anywhere else would entail a protracted struggle on the part of the masses. It isn’t something that could simply be freely chosen.
I’m not sure if it was really the transition to capitalism that was painful, or rather just the aftereffects of the Soviet state.
I’m not sure that you can disentangle the two; the Soviet state falling apart was part and parcel of the capitalist system coming into being.
This is just a lame attempt to blame ‘TEH COMMUNISMZ’ for the ruinous effects of neoliberal restructuring on Russia. It won’t wash.
Of course it will “wash”. There is no version of Communism in which its subjects are free and prosperous, and just because there are versions of free market capitalism which don’t work as well as it can, that in no way allows you to draw some sort of equivalence here.
Communism has never existed, unless you want to count some hunter-gather tribes.
Free markets have never really existed anywhere. As for freedom and prosperity within actually existing capitalism, I’d argue that, to the extent that anyone who is not at least comfortably well off in ‘Western’ societies enjoys any degree of freedom and prosperity at all, it is to a large extent a legacy of generations of struggle from below (i.e. despite the capitalist system and the state which created it and sustains it, not because of either of those things).
I’m not trying to draw any kind of equivalence.
Silly straw man arguments, and yes, of course you were trying to draw an equivalence.
What straw men? How have I misrepresented anything you’ve said?
That, right there, is a straw man.
So the Soviet Union was doing great from the ’20s through the ’80s? Seems odd they would collapse in that case rather that the countries that had already been doing capitalism that whole time. Or why they would be buying grain when they controlled two of what are today the world’s top 4 grain-producing countries. Or why they relied on arms sales, in particular tanks, for such a ridiculous percentage of their hard currency. Or why the countries in their sphere had to ban people from leaving rather than put restrictions on immigration.
It depends on what you mean by ‘doing great’. In strict material terms, the lot of the average Soviet worker was indubitably immeasurably better in 1991 than the lot of the average peasant in the Romanov empire in 1917. You can’t reasonably blame the legacy of the old sytem and regime for the calamitous consequences of neoliberal re-structuring in the former USSR and former Soviet bloc more generally (at least not entirely), not when neoliberal economics have consistently been socially ruinous wherever they’ve been applied.
The USSR was capitalist. It was state-capitalist.
Not really a fair comparison. The USSR and its satellites started from a far, far lower base than most ‘Western’ countries.
“As a westerner, it is hard to read all this without squirming.”
No it isn’t. Why are we in the West implicitly asked to take some sort of responsibility here? The West beat Communism without the slaughter of yet more millions and in particular without the horror of nuclear war, and we’re entitled to regard that as enough on its own. Why is it somehow our fault that Russia evolved in the way it did?
We did not, after all, decide that our job was to go into Russia and implement regime change did we? And this is something we have learned, through other mistakes, generally doesn’t work, so I am going to insist here and declare that the West’s non-intervention in post-Communist Russia was the correct position to adopt and in no way becomes questionable as a result of Russia’s failure to take proper advantage of the opportunities presented by liberty from the tyranny of Soviet Communism.
This point becomes particularly obvious when we recall that the USSR was not just Russia, it was Russia, the European hinterland and the Eastern bloc, a grouping of nations which are now pretty much unanimous apart from Russia itself in asserting that it’s better to be part of the West. So no, try peddling your unwanted guilt somewhere else, quite frankly.
I would invite you to tell that to the (at minimum) 1 million people slaughtered by Suharto during his rise to power, when the CIA supplied the names of suspected communists for his troops to massacre, or the 4 million slaughtered by the US in Indochina when it bombed the shit out of that part of the world during the Vietnam war, or the countless others slaughtered by the various dictatorships that the US supported around the world (and in some cases, installed) in the upholding of its commercial and geopolitical interests, but … well, those people are all dead.
The USA was in the Vietnam War for the right reason – it was trying to prevent the spread of Communism unopposed throughout Asia. There are many places in the region where the USA either failed or did not act in this respect, and the death toll from that failure or lack of action entirely falsifies your attempt to draw some sort of moral equivalence here.
I was of course in any case referring to the collapse of the USSR, and I maintain that it was bloodless on the part of the West and its allies not least because a great many of those allies were Russians themselves.
Engaging in apologia for the US’ barbarism against Vietnam on the basis of ‘MUH ANTI-COMMUNISM’ now, are we? The ethical bankruptcy of the defender of US imperialism and its atrocities and outrages at its finest!
Well, Pol Pot was actually helped into power by the CIA if that’s what you’re referring to, but you’re right that there is no moral equivalence – US imperialism was far more baleful for southeast Asia (and, for that matter, the world more generally) than the USSR ever was. The USSR certainly had blood on its hands, but nothing compared to the oceans of blood spilled by the US in pursuit of its commercial and geopolitical interests during that period.
Vietnam was a defensive war. The Republic of Vietnam was being invaded. We never invaded its invader, just held them off while we were there. And then the ARVN managed on their own for several years, even fending off the largest invasion to date which included some shocking surprises such as the NVA suddenly having 600 main battle tanks that the ARVN was neither equipped nor trained to deal with (they ended up destroying 2/3rds of them, yet no one was trying to claim then that this meant tanks are obsolete the way some are now after the much-less-severe beating Russian armored forces are taking in Ukraine at the hands of well-equipped soldiers).
The Republic of Vietnam was certainly never an ideal democracy, not even close, but democracy always struggles in wartime, and that country never knew a day of peace in its existence. Even the Republic of Korea, today a much better functioning democracy than much of western Europe, took quite a while to turn into a true one. But it found itself at war very soon after it was born as well, a war which has never officially ended, and where skirmishes continued for decades after the armistice. In fact just within the past few years the North has launched artillery against the ROK, and not too long before that they even sank one of its ships. But getting away from true active combat gave them a chance to build a functioning country, an opportunity the Republic of Vietnam never had. Compare how little time it survived with how long it took France, or England (or even the UK, to narrow the timeline a bit), or any other western country to turn into one. And unlike say, England, Vietnam didn’t have a history as a country. Treating that as one nation was a French colonial invention, which of course was yet another obstacle to turning it into a functioning modern country. The North took the easy route: use force and Stalinist purges. It worked in Russia, it worked in China, and it worked there. But it’s also horrible.
There was nothing defensive about the US’ involvement in Vietnam, unless you’re talking about as the US coming to the defence of its puppet regime in Saigon, which had a tenuous grip on power. There was an armed uprising within South Vietnam against the regime in Saigon, which the North supported. The US bombing the shit out of Vietnam was essentially about propping up a discredited regime that had been friendly towards its commercial interests in the region.
I scanned this article looking for mention of Jeffrey “Wrong about everything” Sachs. There was none, therefore this article lacks substance.
Oh dear it’s somehow the West’s fault-again. What an evil bunch of countries that everyone wants to emigrate to. They must be delusional.
‘The West’, and more specifically, the IMF, absolutely do have a hand in this.
“If there is anything worse than spending years performing hard labour in Siberia, using your fist for a pillow, feeling your teeth come loose with scurvy, it is discovering that you did all that for nothing.”
Sounds a bit like Stockholm Syndrome this – the mistake of imagining that what was done to you was for your own benefit and not, in truth, an atrocity inflicted upon you by a regime that cared nothing whatsoever about you except that you be less of an inconvenience to itself.
A very good analysis. The West was undoubtedly arrogant and made a lot of missteps. I suppose though one difference from the German case is that Germany had been utterly militarily defeated and occupied by the Allies.
This was not the case with the Soviet Union, which actually unravelled to a significant extent on its own accord and because of Gorbachev’s would be reforms. It was the Yeltsin government which for both political and social economic reasons tried to bring about a (probably too) rapid transition to full capitalism, and asked for western advice as they saw fit.
An excellent article. I was one of the management consultants who swanned about Russia and the FSU rubbing salt into the wound rubbishing the way everything had been done. I felt uneasy at the time, and I am ashamed now. I and my colleagues didn’t even speak Russian. But I am also reminded of what a missed opportunity the Clinton presidency was: it turns out that there was a big task to be done, and (arguably) he had the ability to do it; instead, the need wasn’t recognised and one of the most able presidents in recent years frittered his time away.
Making the wrong choices does have consequences–as the French discovered in 1815, and the Germans in 1945.
It could only have been different if the West has occupied Russia after 1991. Germany progressed because of 45 years of Allied occupation.
Left to their own devices, however, Muscovite Russians reverted to a model that originated some 500 years ago.
Now, Ukraine is teaching them an important lesson: that model is wrong.
East Germany could also be characterised as having progressed, certainly economically, despite the USSR exacting reparations from it instead of supporting it financially.
The West wanted capitalism in Russia. Not democracy. Same as with China. It appears we are heading the same way.
This is the ‘US runs the world’ school of thought. The US is a democracy, so it’s rather odd to say they don’t want democracies elsewhere despite the rather overwhelmingly evidence that they do. They have in fact being naïve and self defeating in this in some societies without any democratic, liberal or even national traditions. Open elections WERE held under the aegis of the Americans in Iraq, for example, when they need not have been. Became of the big Shia majority population, this has ended up strengthening the position of Iran to the strategic cost of the US.
The Americans did collude to overthrow some Left wing governments, but this was largely in the context of a Cold War with a totalitarian and murderous adversary. I for one am very pleased the West won. At its worst, someone like Pinochet killed a few thousands, utterly appallingly, but the other side countless millions.
The US has been, for some decades, the hegemon within the capitalist world order, and the world’s foremost imperial power.
The democratic credentials of the US compare unfavourably even to other so-called ‘liberal democracies’ (which, to someone like me, is saying something).
Sure, they do. That’s why they continue to bankroll and arm to the teeth every Persian Gulf autocrat. That’s totally the behaviour of a state that is interested in seeing democracy thrive everywhere!
… whose threat to the world beyond its borders was grossly exaggerated by ‘Western’ governments and media outlets for self-serving reasons.
Pinochet is far from the most egregious instance of the implication on the part of the US and its allies in atrocities around the world during the Cold War. A succession of US-backed governments in Guatemala (mostly military dictatorships) slaughtered perhaps as many as 200,000 people between 1960 and ’96, which included a genocidal campaign against the Maya population in Guatemala. There’s Suharto, to whom the CIA supplied lists of suspected communists for his troops to murder during Suharto’s ascension to power, which they did – at least a million ‘communists’ were massacred between 1965 and ’67. Then there’s Pol Pot, who, yes, was helped into power in Cambodia by the CIA, and who may have been responsible for the slaughter of as many as 2.5 million people during his reign of terror. Those are just a few examples off the top of my head. Additionally, the US has plenty of blood directly on its hands from that time period too (e.g. when it slaughtered possibly as many as 4 million people in Indochina during the Vietnam war). The US and its allies’ role in the world during the Cold War was utterly abominable, and there’s no excusing it.