Resurrection
Remnick, David
Resurrection: The Struggle fora New Russia David Remnick Random House 1398 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY Adrian Karatnycky R ussia is a kingdom of bespridel: a place without rules, without limits;...
...Remnick finds this Russian style of capitalism, with its subtexts of corruption and violence, repulsive...
...Yet if the Russia that Resurrection depicts has much that should worry us, Remnick also reminds us of how much better it is that we have Russia —and not the Soviet Union...
...77 identity...
...Such a merger—even if achieved by peaceful means—would cause unease in other post-Soviet republics, most of which believe Russia would like to abolish their sovereignty...
...How long will Russia wait before we can say such things without complexes...
...Russianness is a matter of belonging to an empire...
...But, as lvanov puts it, "We have not agreed upon a national narrative...
...a state without an established boundary between the legal and the illegal...
...Vive La France...
...And while its political leaders and intellectuals still flirt with the dream of empire, "its citizens show every indication of refusing a return to the maximalism of communism or the xenophobia of hard-line nationalism...
...Belonging to a post-Soviet empire means re-creating that empire out of increasingly sovereign new states: Ukraine, the Baltic republics, Georgia, and Azerbaijan...
...Having emerged out of empire, Russians are confused about who and what they are and what their country ought to be...
...Is Russia to be a nation-state within the vast and resource-rich territory of the Russian Federation...
...It was never a nation-state...
...Typical of this new elite was Vladimir Gusinsky, who grew rich by buying "newly privatized properties—office buildings, apartment houses—at absurdly low prices, fix[ing] them up, and reselling] them at prices that are now beginning to surpass those of Tokyo and New York," Gusinsky's MOST Bank controls an influential empire of news media, and Remnick describes seeing "something unnatural or unnerving about MOST headquarters"— a warren of offices in the Moscow Mayoralty building...
...Surely Russia's deep systemic and structural problems have inhibited the country's transition from statism and totalitarianism toward a market democracy...
...Eastern Europe, is the Russian nation's sense of'C Even this perverse variation of the free market has within it some seeds of pluralism...
...As the prominent literary historian Andrei Zorin tells Remnick, "The essential national drama is the search for identity, and in this we liberal intellectuals have failed....There is no sense of what this new country, Russia, really is...
...That war, as Remnick makes clear, was a moral and political-disaster that-nearly led to President Boris Yeltsin's defeat at the hands of the Communists...
...There, "dozens of young men in fatigues, rifles slung over their shoulders...slouched in armchairs and couches" and "watched cartoons on television...
...Gusinsky's fortune, for example, has allowed him to play an important role in Russian life through his NTV television company and newspaper holdings—both of which courageously opposed Russia's war against breakaway Chechnya...
...The roots of this illegality can be found in the first days of the collapse of the SoviADRIAN KARATNYCKY is president of Freedom House...
...Agreeing with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he concludes: "From the ashes of totalitarian Communism had risen an oligarchic system in which politics were played according to the economic interests of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and mafiosi...
...They were, he notes, better prepared than the politicians for the "economic free-for-all" that "ensued after the USSR collapsed...
...Combined with the former nomenklatura — the ex-Communist officials who moved rapidly to take possession of what Withered Russia 70 July 1997 • The American Spectator had been state property—the result has been what Remnick calls "nomenklatura capitalism...
...Inflation...has dropped from 2,5oo percent in 1992 to 130 percent in 1995...
...Such a shift in public sentiments, confirmed by the evidence of numerous polls, is the best reason to hope, with Remnick, that an "entirely new era has begun...
...The lack of national identity means that Russians are susceptible to looking covetously at neighboring countries with large Russian populations, with the aim of absorbing them into their already gigantic state...
...Or is it once again to become the core of a revived union of former Soviet republics, as Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov would like...
...In the time of little more than a Five Year Plan, Remnick writes, Russia has become "an increasingly urban nation with a literacy rate of 99 percent...
...Nearly 8o percent of the Russian economy is in private hands...
...The French can say, Vive la Republique...
...And it will further confuse Russia's sense of its own identity...
...Is it to be the core of a new state made up of the former Slavic Republics...
...But perhaps the key factor in determining Russia's role in the world, as well as its -staitritrttre peace and security of Central and...
...The dangerous symbiosis of the two groups sustains inefficient monopolies and threatens the project of transforming Russia into a normal democracy and market economy...
...et Union...
...Russia has entered the world, and everything, even freedom, even happiness, is now possible...
...Russia's leaders are now in the middle of a bitter debate about a merger with Belarus...
...And that can only lead to tension and instability...
...Since that meeting, those mafia figures have left behind them a trail of mayhem, assassinations, and blackmail that has thwarted the emergence of an economy based on competitive market forces...
...yet even this perverse variation of the free market has within it some seeds of pluralism...
...This identity is the leitmotif of Remnick's book...
...The American Spectator • July 1 9 97 71 Recent events have made it clear that Russia's failure to redefine its identity can be terribly destabilizing for its neighbors and for Russia itself...
...Russia's leaders and thinkers should thus begin to redefine Russia's identity within its current borders...
...Remnick documents how Moscow officials sold valuable properties to-a narrow group of favored businessmen that commands great power in today's Russia...
...In December 1991, as David Remnick tells us in Resurrection, his insightful and elegantly written account of Russia's first years after Communism, leading gangsters gathered outside Moscow to prepare for the brave new post-Soviet world...
...As another scholar, Sergei Ivanov, observes: "One has to admit that Russia has always been an empire...
...Such an agenda necessarily breeds militarism and intolerance at home and instability abroad...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
