The Russian Enigma

...In Russia, where political conditions no longer inhibit the development of a true market system, all that has been achieved is a deep recession...

...But the heartland is not ready to embrace the free-for-all market system the West thinks is right for Russia...

...But Russian security officials regularly issue statistics describing its growing power, and therefore its influence on the course of Russian market reforms...

...Indeed, in displaying personal courage if not recklessness, he seemed to symbolize a vigorous, democratic and prosperous post-Communist Russia...

...True, it is not so deeply felt in the few large cities and among the confused younger generations...

...My impression is that although the Russians may want the prosperity of the West?and why not?—they are uncomfortable with what they perceive to be the disciplined, souless lifestyle and legalistic system that produces it...

...Paradoxically, Stalin attempted to impose a Protestant work ethic on the Soviet Union, and especially on the Orthodox Russia that effectively controlled the empire...

...Such is the effect of the current unmanaged change in this country that most Russians feel they have been deprived of a purpose or goal, not to mention the spiritual content of their lives...

...Industrial production, to cite one critical indicator, is down 25 per cent...

...The thousands who gathered at the White House on the second and crucial day of the coup, backing Yeltsin as he stood atop a tank in defiance, were Muscovites...

...They appear to feel instinctively, though, that they do not really want the Western society they had for so long admired from afar...

...These officials say that roughly 40 per cent of Russian commerce and banking, and up to 90 per cent of private businesses, including privatized industries, are mafia-controlled...

...The sense of community—in Russian the word is mir, which translates as "the village," "the world" and "peace"—remains strong in the bulk of Russia...

...They have gained approval by voicing a strong concern about the 25 million Russians now living as ethnic minorities in former Soviet republics previously under their rule...

...THE WEST, meanwhile, with all of its well-dressed consultants occupying $300-a-day Moscow hotel rooms, has grievously failed to understand the depth of Russian nationalist sentiments...

...No one rushed to the barricades to defend the Soviet state or Communism...

...It is too often forgotten, however, or not realized altogether, that what was internationally televised conveyed a mistaken impression of mass Russian rebellion...

...Now all the Russian myths have been destroyed—the faith in Lenin, Stalin, the Bolshevik Revolution, the momumental battle against Nazi Germany that cost 20 million lives...

...The Russian Enigma BY MARK HOPKINS MOSCOW WHEN IS SETTLED IN here three years ago this was the capital of the Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev was President, the Communist Party was unrivaled, and economic planning was the province of a vast bureaucracy called Gosplan...

...It is not the stuff of daily newspapers or network TV news, but the real story in Russia today is about the same as it was 150 years ago...

...Twenty-five per cent of the respondents said the criminal mafia, another 25 per cent said nobody, and 20 per cent said they did not know...

...With the Communist era relegated to history, their heirs at the most common level have yet to resolve the dispute over whether Russia should be "Western," or create some unique, soulful society...

...More profoundly, neither the diplomatic corps nor the foreign journalists in Moscow forecast what happened in the next three days as the coup collapsed, let alone the next months when the Soviet Union and the Communist Party quietly disappeared...

...Even at midnight on August 18, 1991, when Gorbachev's closest advisers had already prepared the orders to the Army and the KGB for the coup that began six hours later, no one predicted the Right-wing putsch was about to be launched...

...The remaining 30 per cent were variously divided among President Yeltsin, the state apparatus, the government, and Parliament...

...Most public opinion surveys show that Russians have almost no faith at all in MARK HOPKINS, a longtime NL contributor, recently completed three years as Voice of America's Moscow bureau chief...

...But it is closely bound with the enigmatic "Russian soul" that the people hold dear, and still operates as a powerful social force...

...Petersburg museum, entitled "Happiness Propaganda...

...WHAT, THEN, do Russians want...

...Now that they have a choice, it is clear the Russians have little taste for the Western work ethic, a Western capitalist structure, or Western-style democracy...

...Hence its surprise and dismay last December upon learning that the newly freed electorate had chosen a Parliament that would be dominated by Communists, their Agrarian allies, and Vladimir V Zhirinovsky's deceptively named Liberal Democratic Party...

...GRANTED ALL THAT, it is reasonable to wonder why there has not been a more purposeful effort to break away from the Soviet centrally planned economic structure and elitist political system...

...Most Russians nationwide passively accepted the coup and most regional governments supported it, a Kremlin study later documented...

...Unlike Italy after the War, Russia still has an essentially state agricultural system, even though most collective and state farms are now legally described as cooperatives or joint stock businesses...

...You could glean the reason for some of these emotions at a recent popular exhibit in a St...

...Even the Orthodox Church, a survivor and moral guide throughout the worst periods of Communist repression, is tainted by allegations that priests colluded with the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB...

...The conservative factions have not merely capitalized on nostalgia for the old Soviet Union and the authority and respect Moscow once commanded at international negotiations...

...The system constructed during the Stalinist years and believed by Western experts to be deeply rooted, possibly impregnable, simply dissolved?and with it, of course, went the USSR, built on the foundation of last century's Russian Empire...

...While it is easy to dismiss the enormous Soviet propaganda society as just that, no less than two generations of Russians carry the Stalinist propaganda genes...

...So Russians are left with no national legends or immediate history they can believe in, and there is nothing at present to fill the spiritual void other than a resurrection of Russian nationalist sentiment...

...There is considerable anecdotal evidence as well of Western and Russian businessmen routinely being threatened by the mafia and taken hostage for huge ransoms...

...A century and a half ago, Russia's intelligentsia divided into two contentious factions—the Westerners and the Slavophiles...

...His tragedy is that he came to power in a period when those qualities are vital...

...A similar decline in output in the West would be regarded as a catastrophe...

...But having been schooled in the vicious politics of the Communist Party (as was Mikhail Gorbachev, another tragic figure), he cannot rise above his provincial past and limited knowledge of world affairs to forge a consensus based on Russian national interests and popular feelings...

...That, in fact, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's sermon when he returned to Russia last May after 20 years in exile...

...But they got it wrong again...

...their government or their Parliament, and don't care much about what they do...

...The exceptions are, of course, the mafiosi and related entrepreneurs and bureaucrats who are enriching themselves at the expense of the Russian worker and peasant...

...Not a shot was fired...

...Thus, it may well dictate Russia's future, whatever the attempts to fashion a Western capitalist society...

...They were immersed in a fabricated society where harmony, prosperity and happiness were the official norms...

...He has tried to revive Russia's superpower status by repeatedly remonstrating that Moscow will not be relegated to the sidelines politically and economically...

...Now that it is close at hand, it does not seem very appealing...

...Consequently, the economic picture in liberated Russia is not strikingly different from the one that existed under the Soviet apparatus everyone thought was overthrown three years ago—when Moscow crowds, in an outpouring of anti-Communist euphoria, pulled down statues of Lenin and of the infamous Soviet secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky...

...His personal bravery notwithstanding, he lacks the intellectual depth and political skill to bring Russia out of its morass...

...Part of the answer is that President Yeltsin has provided desultory leadership...

...NOT LEAST among the factors contributing to the negative atmosphere here is the Russians' initial encounter with capitalism...

...In China, where I reported for four years, private entrepreneurs are thriving under an authoritarian regime and driving an economy that may one day dominate Asia...

...To be sure, Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and President Yeltsin are advocates of a properly functioning market system, but the mafia has assumed control of major sections of Russia's banking, commercial and export businesses...

...It is not only that he has a weak understanding of economic and financial policy, now taken over by the lackluster but efficient Prime Minister Chernomyrdin...

...Russian intellectuals continue to debate endlesjly—as they always have—what it means to be Russian and where Russia lies along the spectrum of West-East social systems and cultures...

...The reason, it appears, is their once more misreading Russia—how steeped it is in its own Slavic history, how it has been affected by 70-odd years of authoritarian rule...

...When it ultimately did not shore him up, he was forced to retreat to accomodate an unyielding Russian nationalism...

...Curiously, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the American and Western European financial institutions and governments that have pledged billions of dollars to Russia—without as yet delivering very many—have never publicly acknowledged the steadily expanding role of the mafia...

...The economy has been substantially taken over by huge and disparate organized criminal groups—referred to collectively as the mafia—in league with the old Communist Party bureaucracy—the nomenklatura—and corrupt government officials at the highest levels...

...Together with its associated government and former KGB and Communist Party officials, it has profited in the billions of dollars while plundering the country...

...One can argue that the Russian people have been so beaten down by seven decades of Communism, they regard politics as a dull, irrelevant sideshow to their central drama of daily survival...

...Rather, it is that Yeltsin has been unable to fulfill his major responsibility: to inspire the people to create a new Russia...

...They are uncertain themselves...

...Since then the Western governments have sought to nurture what they thought would be a new, vibrant democratic Russia yearning for a capitalist system...

...A recent public opinion survey asked, "Who has power in Russia...

...Many who are 45 or older cannot quite forget that there seemingly was, as they were constantly told, an orderly universe in which all shared equally—in relative poverty, but equally...

...An increasingly sophisticated criminal community will move into legitimate businesses in complicity with government and legislative officials, and this enormously profitable arrangement of theirs will slowly, but only slowly, benefit the average Russian citizen...

...And they express a widespread Russian desire for order and equality in a country beset by crime, disorder and inequality...

...The analogy is not meant to suggest parallel conditions in the two countries...

...There is no capitalist infrastructure yet in Russia, as there was in Italy, and there is no significant middle class...

...Russia is a generation or two away from operating by rule of law, with an educated, independent judiciary overseeing the machinery of a free political and market society...

...It is worth recollecting those incredible times because they demonstrate that, despite the huge reservoir of American Sovietologists and CIA and State Department analysts, and the legions of Western European experts, everyone got it wrong in the summer of '91...

...In fact, there are not enough lawyers, accountants, financiers, and experienced industrial managers here to make a market work...

...In short, judging from his performance to date, Yeltsin will not go down in history as a leader on a par, say, with Mao, Churchill or Roosevelt—as someone who had the vision to form a new order at one of his country's fundamental turning points in this century...

...Russians I have talked with over the past three years, as their country has undergone a social trauma third only to the 1917 Revolution and World War II, have become leery of the American or Western European model...

...Today, as I prepare to depart, this is the capital of Russia, Boris N. Yeltsin is President, a dozen combative political parties are vying with each other, and the mafia is pretty much running the economy...

...Nonetheless, Western expectations of a flourishing democracy in Russia once the yoke of Communism was thrown off were wrong...

...If the statistics and accounts are at all accurate, we can expect Russia to become something like Italy after World War II...

...The grand paintings (30 by 20 feet) glorifying Stalin and the Soviet Socialist system illuminated the isolated political milieu Russians endured for years...

...An impetuous politician given to the dramatic and unexpected, he was the right man three years ago when he rallied his fellow citizens against the anti-Gorbachev coup...

...Hence the virtual absence of public criticism, although all citizens are free to openly criticize their government and organize against it without fear of KGB retribution...

...That would mean abandoning the traditionally close Russian family bonds and the deep Russian sense of community...

...Yet after his kowtowing to the West—as the Russians saw it—in that first year or so following the '91 coup, his voice sounds weak and ineffectual at home and abroad...

...And when it came time this spring to choose local city and regional councils, so few people went to the polls that in some instances the elections were invalid...

...Barely more than 50 per cent of the eligible voters bothered to cast ballots last December for the country's first democratically elected Parliament...

...Yeltsin cast his lot too early and too openly with the West...