Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [15]
Russia’s market reforms were in their third year. Coming to power in 1991 when he engineered the dissolution of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin undertook reforms harshly and decisively: he did away with state price controls, dropped customs barriers, and embarked on a crash privatization program. In four years of “shock therapy” his chief adviser, Anatoly Chubais, the thirty-eight-year-old boy wonder of Russian economics, did the impossible: he auctioned off and privatized tens of thousands of enterprises, moved more than half the workforce into the private sector, and somehow kept the economy from sliding into uncontrolled inflation.
Yet these successes cost ordinary Russians dearly. The lack of purchasing power in the impoverished population and the reduction of state subsidies brought entire branches of the economy to a halt, primarily in the military-industrial complex and also among producers of consumer goods, who could not stand the competition from Western manufacturers who were flooding the country with everything that ordinary Russians had lacked, and craved, for so long. Western clothing, cars, and electronics were in great demand by anyone who could afford them.
Unfortunately, fewer and fewer had the money to buy them. Millions fell below the poverty line. Civil servants—teachers, doctors, officials, police—were not paid for months at a time. Taxes were not collected, since the tax service was still being created (there had been no taxes in the Soviet system). The intelligentsia in the universities and science labs lost faith in democracy. Crime rose. The army grumbled. Capitalism and the market lost their appeal. More and more Russians thought nostalgically about the good old days of the USSR.
On the other hand, freedom flourished. After seventy years of Communist dictatorship, journalists could write what they wanted, there were no more political prisoners, anyone could get a passport to travel abroad, voters could pick among a dozen political parties, and eighty-six regions and ethnic republics of the Russian Federation gained self-rule and could go about their business without interference from the Kremlin.
Yeltsin’s main dilemma throughout his entire administration was just how far he was willing to violate democracy in order to save it. In fall 1993, the Supreme Soviet—the parliament, which was still full of ex-Soviet apparatchiks—had blocked his reforms and called on federal regions to rebel. Yeltsin disbanded the legislature and sent tanks to smoke out the deputies who barricaded themselves inside; 140 died in the melee. It was a tough choice, but the alternative had seemed worse: total economic collapse and political implosion.
The Communists did not quit. As Yeltsin’s presidential term continued, he was opposed once again by a newly elected hostile parliament, the Duma, where the tone was set by Communists as well as the neo-fascist party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who openly advocated an authoritarian model of government. There was every reason to expect the coming presidential election to be a catastrophe: Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist candidate, was polling in the 30 percent range as Yeltsin’s numbers plunged into single digits by the onset of the Chechen War.
Berezovsky had gained entrée into the Kremlin inner circle just a few months previously. He was forty-six years old. The journalist Valentin Yumashev, who had ghost-written the president’s memoirs and subsequently married Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, introduced Berezovsky to two of Yeltsin’s entourage: his chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, a liberal, and Gen. Alexander Korzhakov, the chief of Kremlin security, called the Federal Service of Okhrana (FSO), the agency that supplied bodyguards to federal bureaucrats. Korzhakov’s power, however, reached far beyond security; he was the de facto representative of all the secret services and the intelligence community in the Kremlin.
The pressing concern among all of Yeltsin’s people was the presidential election in 1996. With every passing