Russia, the biggest and most important of the CIS states, elected Boris Yeltsin president of the republic in June 1991 with 57 per cent of the votes cast in the country’s first free election since 1917. In November the Russian Communist Party was dissolved by presidential decree. In January 1992 a programme of radical economic reform was launched, which led to an almost complete liberation of the economy from specific controls, a bold stroke. Perhaps, as was claimed, it staved off hyperinflation but Yeltsin appeared to face a virtual collapse of the economy in the first half of the decade. Energy consumption fell by a third, accompanied by rapidly rising unemployment, falls in national income and real wages, a drop in industrial output by half, huge corruption in government organs and widely ramifying crime. To many Russians, these abstractions were brought home in the savage detail of personal misery. Public health and life expectancy declined (to less than sixty years for males at one point in the decade). Nevertheless, a Russian baby boy in the 1990s still faced better prospects of survival to old age than his equivalent in the 1890s. Not all the ground won by Soviet modernization had been lost.
In 1993 a new parliament containing many of his enemies had been elected to add to Yeltsin’s difficulties. Others were posed by relations with non-Russian republics of the CIS (in which there lived 27 million Russians) and by the clans of political interest which had emerged around bureaucratic and industrial foci in the new Russia, as well as by disappointed ex-reformers, of whom he had sacked a great many. It was not long before it began to be recognized that Russia’s troubles were not solely attributable to the Soviet legacy, but owed much to the general state of Russia’s historic culture and civilization.
In 1992 Russia had itself become a federation and in the following year a presidential and even autocratic constitution completed the country’s constitutional framework. But Boris Yeltsin soon had to face the challenge of opposition from both left and right and, eventually, of insurrection. After he had suspended parliament’s functions by decree ‘on gradual constitutional reform’, over a hundred people were killed in the worst bloodshed in Moscow since 1917. Like his earlier dissolution of the Communist Party this was seen as presidential high-handedness and no doubt the president’s personality and style would always have made forceful action by him more likely than patient diplomacy. Nevertheless, considering he had so little to offer Russians in the way of material comfort, as the economy was exploited by corrupt officialdom and entrepreneurs on the make, it was to the credit of his government that he managed to contain the rising sense of many Russians that Soviet days had been better, and to achieve re-election as president in 1996.
Two years before that a new problem had emerged, a national insurrection in land-locked Chechnya, an autonomous republic in the Russian federation with a predominantly Muslim population. Some Chechens deplored and would avenge, they said, the immorality of their conquest and suppression by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. Their anger and resistance was now stiffened by the brutality with which the Russians, alarmed by the dangerous example that might be set to other Muslims, set about reducing the Chechen capital to ruins and the countryside to starvation. Thousands were killed, but Russian casualties reawoke memories of Afghanistan and there were all-too-evident dangers of fighting spilling over into neighbouring republics. Ever since 1992, after all, a Russian garrison had been propping up the government of Tajikistan against the danger of its overthrow by Islamic radicals supported from Pakistan. Against this doubtful background, not much was left by 1996 of the hopes raised by perestroika and glasnost, and additional gloom was cast over the situation as it became clear that President Yeltsin’s health was poor (and probably made worse by heavy drinking). By then events outside Russia, notably in former Yugoslavia, prompted gestures and very vocal reminders to western powers that the country still aspired to play the great power role it felt was its due, as well as of the growing concern Russia felt over the implications of intervention there in the affairs of an independent sovereign state.
By 1998, however, the Russian government could hardly gather taxes and pay its employees. The year 1997 had been the first year since 1991 in which GDP had registered a real, if tiny, increase, but apparently the economy was still abandoned to the mercy of special interests as the state sold off more and more of its investments to private business, often on a corrupt and favoured basis. Huge fortunes were rapidly made by some, but millions of Russians suffered unpaid wages, the disappearance of daily necessities from the markets, continuing price rises, and the irritations and hostilities that inevitably arose as high levels of consumption for some confronted poverty face-to-face in the streets. Then, in 1998, came a financial crash and a repudiation of foreign debt. Yeltsin had to replace a prime minister he had chosen for his commitment to market economics and to accept one imposed upon him by his opponents. Yet the next parliamentary elections returned a parliament less likely to quarrel with him and on New Year’s Eve 1999, he felt able to announce his resignation.
His successor was already at that moment serving as his prime minister. Boris Yeltsin duly announced that the next president should be Vladimir Putin, and accordingly he took up office after the election of March 2000. A former member of the KGB, Putin by then had to his credit in the eyes of many Russians a success in pacifying Chechnya and the decline of the danger that its turbulence might spread beyond its original borders. It seems likely that outcry abroad over threats to human rights in Chechnya further helped to rally patriotic support behind Vladimir Putin, but he had also made a favourable impression in western capitals. In spite of the misfortunes of a series of accidental disasters in his first months as president, which indicated the rundown state of Russia’s infrastructure, there was a new sense that grave problems were at last going to be surmounted. In a more narrowly personal sense, that was no doubt true also for Yeltsin, who, with his family, was assured by his successor of immunity from prosecution for offences committed during his presidency.