Without a Known Destination

...Now, he concludes, "The essential thing [about] the conventional image is to question the assumptions that frame it...

...No one has adequately explained the so-called "nomenklatura revolution...

...Meanwhile the bulk of the population outside of Moscow was driven into a state of poverty they had not known since the 1940s...

...Let me come clean," he confesses in his Introduction...

...The economist Marshall Goldman, playing on a Russian pun, has called it "grabitization...

...Service accepts as axiomatic the claim by Russia's ex-President Boris N. Yeltsin and his followers that the country somehow achieved "an independent future of its own" when the Communist regime came to an end...

...Yeltsin arranged a successor who would quash any investigation of his finances or those of his entourage (the "family," as Russians came to call them...

...Trained in Marxist-Leninist economics, with a bootleg smattering of Anglo-American free-market doctrine, Gaidar reached the position of senior economic writer for the Communist Party daily Pravda when he was still in his 30s...

...The wonder is that there was no new revolution...

...it was only a new incarnation of the old empire run by Russians or their minions...

...Gaidar's radical approach, many observers suggested, was a form of Bolshevism in reverse...

...Yeltsin today scores lower in the polls than the long-serving Communist boss Leonid I. Brezhnev...

...In closing, Service returns to the question of Russia's direction as a nation...

...The term refers to the surge of Soviet-era bureaucrats (mostly youthful) into the private sector after it opened up, in the late Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years...

...Like most foreign observers of the Soviet collapse, "I did not foresee the full scale of the ensuing disappointment, and from a very cautions optimism I moved to an equally cautious pessimism...

...Experiment with a People is more a series of impressions than a systematic policy treatise...

...The most disciplined of societies turned into the most undisciplined overnight...

...While recounting the steps and missteps of policy under Yeltsin and his handpicked successor, Vladimir V Putin, Service spares no sensitivities, not even his own...

...There is no mystery about the source of the movement—everyone with drive and ambition went into the old nomenklatura at one level or another...

...Yeltsin's people probably falsified the turnout in the December 1993 referendum on the new strong-president Constitution to secure the requisite 50 per cent of the vote (a suspicion supported independently by the International Commission on Electoral Systems...

...The nominal revival of the Church masked a resurgence of irrationality in the form of pagan superstitions, even witchcraft...

...A mere administrative fiction until the reforms of Party chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the late 1980s allowed it to elect its own president—Boris Yeltsin, as it turned out—the RSFSR served Yeltsin as the political vehicle for his personal vendetta: Yeltsin was determined to weaken the Union government in order to undermine Gorbachev...

...Service himself notes that Russian nationalism was as assiduously cultivated by Josef Stalin and his successors as it was by the tsars...

...But it is based on an exhaustive bibliography of sources in English and Russian, including memoirs, films, and—a touch of the ultramodern—Web sites, as well as a series of personal visits by the author...

...Typical of the post-Soviet ruling stratum was Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's first prime minister...

...Labels aside, Russian national identity persisted throughout the Communist era—as did habits of arbitrary government...

...Both Yeltsin and Putin were able to safeguard their power by polarizing Russian politics...

...With illustrative asides at every turn, from vignettes of writers to glimpses of Russian hobbyists, the work is a fascinating read, though it assumes some sense of the framework of events...

...As Service acknowledges, "The Russians knew they were the imperial people of the USSR...

...Seventy years of Communism, and then its collapse, did not make the questions go away, nor have they made the answers any easier to come by...

...Following his efforts to define Russianness, Service provides a quick rundown of events under Yeltsin and Putin...

...Choose: us or the Communists...

...What is undeniable is that hope and initiative exist in this country...

...His assessment of the "breadth and depth of Russia's transformation" since the breakup of the Soviet Union tries to define the country's new identity, and to strike a balance about the results of post-Communist reform...

...Now, writes Service, "The elites behaved with the selfishness that had characterized them since the revolutionary period," and "the needs of the vast majority ? f the population were notmerely overlooked: They were trampled in the dust...

...Village life suffered the most...

...This takes him back to the 19th-century novelist Nikolai Gogol's image of Russia as a troika drawn by three wild horses, "hurtling through history without a known destination...

...Nevertheless, Robert Service, professor of history at Oxford University and an authority on Vladimir I. Lenin, now tackles the conundrums head-on...

...Yet Service sees positive signs in the Russians' new enjoyment of privacy and personal pursuits, and in the resilience of traditional culture based on folklore and family ties...

...There is vibrancy in the Russia of the people...

...At that point Yeltsin tapped him as his chief economic adviser, and then made him head of the new Russian Cabinet...

...But contradiction is the essence of Russia—in its past, in its present, and assuredly in its future...

...In a parody of free-market capitalism, national wealth was sucked up by these "oligarchs" to be stashed away abroad...

...Upward of 20 million Russians who had spread into the outlying regions of the Empire over the generations suddenly found themselves stranded as second-class citizens in the other Soviet republics when the Union was liquidated...

...This confusion of form and substance makes the task of defining Russianness even harder than it needs to be...

...Some institutional verisimilitude was conferred on the Yeltsinite claim of "independence" by that curious entity the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (RSFSR), the original appellation of the Communist regime until Ukraine and other national minorities that had temporarily claimed independence during the Revolution were forcibly reincorporated by Moscow in the guise of the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...

...His judgment of this recent experiment is stark: "Democratization and marketization have spectacularly failed the Russians...

...In the end, he waved the other Soviet republics off into independence to liquidate the job of the man who nominally sat above him...

...This may sound contradictory...

...author, "The End of the Communist Revolution,' "Russia's Transformation" What is Russia, and where is it going...

...Service's subtitle Experiment with a People, refers not to the Communist Revolution, as many commentators have conceived it, but to the ventures in political and economic reform undertaken in the Russian Federation since the end of the Soviet regime...

...Fractious representatives of real democratic reform were rendered impotent...

...What really happened in 1991 was simply the belated decolonization of the Russian Empire, as Moscow finally shed possessions the tsars had conquered during the two centuries before the Revolution...

...This was the political setup that oversaw the disaster of Russian economic reform, when public assets by the billions were virtually given away to a handful of greedy and amoral adventurers...

...Nevertheless, Service again tries to extract anote of optimism: "The hope must be that the drivers start to consult the passengers about the route to be taken...

...The transfer of power to Putin in 1999 was equally manipulative...

...What was difficult for the Russians to accept after 1991 was the loss of their status as an imperial nation, and as the core of a superpower on the world stage...

...They seized the opportunities and the public assets that became available in the name of privatization...

...The succession of political and economic disappointments under Yeltsin's aegis had a depressing effect on every aspect of Russian life, as if the demoralizing residue of the Soviet experience had not been enough...

...Oppressive as it was, the Soviet regime was no outside imposition on the Russians...

...His theme—centered on the crisis of 1993, when "Yeltsin behaved with extreme recklessness" and shelled the Russian Parliament—is the increasingly authoritarian and manipulative character of the post-Communist regime...

...much of rural Russia has been practically depopulated...

...As the main architect of Yeltsin's program to dismantle the Communist economic system through privatization and deregulation, he justified the consequent disruption and inflation as the price that had to be paid for creating a new propertied class with a stake in resisting any return to Communism...

...The old Russian scourge of alcoholism worsened along with all the other indicators of social pathology, while health and welfare services went to pieces...

...apathetic resentment and cynical suspiciousness prevailed instead, registered by the pathetically low turnout in elections at all levels...

...That was a bitter pill for the Russians to swallow, though as Service observes, hardly anyone has since attempted to rectify the problem by force...

...Those questions have tormented Russian writers and philosophers forthree centuries...

...Things need not have turned out as badly as they did...

...Life expectancy dropped to Third World levels, the birthrate fell below the replacement rate (as in Western Europe, but for very different reasons), and Russia's population went into actual decline (even after allowing for the immigration of Russians fleeing the other Soviet republics...