Читать книгу Statecraft - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 23

The system was as much the work of Lenin as of Marx. The wordy, flawed analyses of the German were applied with ruthless violence by the Russian, who already lived and breathed the repressive atmosphere of the tsars.

The Soviets took the traditional tsarist hostility towards alternative sources of authority, towards freedom of thought, towards private property and towards a rule of law much further. While the tsar had demanded that he be treated as God’s representative, the Party actually usurped the place of God Himself. Communism’s war against religion – even one so politically amenable as Russian Orthodoxy – was pursued with the same aim as that against the richer peasants and against all the habits and ties of private life: the state must seize, possess, and ultimately absorb all.

For seventy years this system was imposed on the Russian people. Of course, like all that is human, it had its less bad moments. In time, the frenzied campaign against religion abated, to be replaced under Stalin by an uneasy modus vivendi between Church and state, because the latter found the former’s influence useful. Similarly, after Stalin’s purges a certain stability descended on the Soviet system, which became more bureaucratic, stratified and corrupt – this was the period of the emergence of what Milovan Djilas called the ‘new class’.* The monster of communism mellowed a little as sclerosis set in. Under Khrushchev, the errors of Stalin were admitted. Under Gorbachev, the conduct of Lenin was eventually debatable. In the last few years of the Soviet Union the pressure for free speech and free elections grew and – to his credit – Mr Gorbachev responded.

There was also talk of economic reform. But it never came to anything. This was essentially because, for communists – from Lenin to Gorbachev – ‘reform’ simply meant making the Marxist-Leninist system more efficient, not adopting a different system. Perhaps the last moment at which such an approach could have yielded positive results was under the intelligent Yuri Andropov (1983–84), who at least understood the economic abyss before which the Soviet Union tottered. But he was too sick – and his successor Konstantin Chernenko (1984–85) was both too sick and too dull – to make any impact. By the time that Mikhail Gorbachev took over in 1985 any attempt to reform the system was bound to fail and likely to result sooner or later in its dissolution.

And this, of course, is what happened. Mr Gorbachev’s programmes of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were intended to be complementary, but that is not how they worked out. Openness about the failures of the system and of the people, past and present, who were responsible, was immensely liberating for the Soviet citizenry who had for so long been denied the chance to debate the truth. But restructuring the ramshackle institutions of the state, let alone replacing the mediocrities who battened on them, was really out of the question. In any case, the basis of the Soviet Union was still the Communist Party (which also controlled the military-industrial complex and the security apparatus), and the Party would not meekly yield up the one thing it valued above all – power.

This fact also explains the personal tragedy of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was feted by the West – and justly so – but who was rejected and reviled by his own fellow-countrymen. For all his talk of the need for ‘new thinking’, in the end he just could not practise it. Faced in 1991 with a choice between continuing along the path of fundamental change on the one hand and a return to repressive communism on the other, he dithered. I do not believe, though this has sometimes been said, that he secretly supported those hard-line communists who temporarily seized power in July 1991. But he had himself appointed them to their positions. And even when he returned to Moscow he proclaimed himself a communist. So for all my admiration for his achievements, my sympathy for his predicament, indeed my liking for him as a man, I am sure that his replacement by Boris Yeltsin was right for Russia.

The deep hostility between these two men who between them have done more for their country’s freedom than any other Russians was doubtless partly to be explained simply by political rivalry. But it also, I am convinced, represented something deeper. Mr Yeltsin knew in his heart that the system in which he had risen and then fallen, only to rise again, was fundamentally wrong – and not just because it failed to give people a reasonable standard of living, but also because it was based upon a structure of lies and wickedness. This, I think, is why Mr Yeltsin looked so large as he stood on that tank in central Moscow when he led the heroic battle for Russian democracy. And it is why Mr Gorbachev looked so diminished as he returned three days later from his Black Sea coast retreat in the Crimea. Cameras often lie, but this time they told the truth: not just a tale of two Russians, but also a tale of two Russias.

The collapse of the August 1991 coup provided the opportunity for a triumphant Boris Yeltsin to order the banning of the Communist Party and to oversee the orderly dissolution of the Soviet Union. In recent years it has become the fashion to scorn Mr Yeltsin’s weaknesses, which were doubtless real enough. But they were more than matched by astonishing courage and large reserves of political wiliness. And had bravery and cunning not also been accompanied by a typically Russian ruthless streak he could never have scored victory after victory against the communists who wanted to drag Russia back to its Soviet past.

Boris Yeltsin’s shoulders were broad. But history’s burden was still too heavy for them. The habits, instincts and attitudes developed by Soviet communism made the transformation of Russia into a ‘normal’ country immensely difficult. This has been glaringly apparent in the growth of lawlessness.

Long before the end of the Soviet era, Russians had come to regard the state itself as their enemy. For those who chose to proclaim their individuality it was an oppressor. But for many more the state was essentially a thief.

There was, of course, no law in a Western sense in communist society. Indeed, though there were rules and regulations at every turn there was no concept of equity, according to which a single set of obligations based on what each was due as a human being was applied to all equally. As the writer and dissident Alexandr Zinoviev strikingly put it: ‘In Communist society a system of values prevails which is founded on the principle that there should be no general principles of evaluation.’*

In fact, the only dominant principle was that of predatory egotism. Such habits die hard, or not at all. It is important to stress that although the scale and violence of Russian crime have snowballed since the end of the USSR, its psychological and systemic roots were planted under communism. In the last years of Leonid Brezhnev’s presidency corruption in high places became notorious. But from the mid-1980s, crime became fully institutionalised, not least through the activities of the KGB which, according to a senior CIA source,

sold cheaply acquired Soviet commodities abroad at world prices, putting the proceeds into disguised foreign accounts and front companies … [Its] lines of business came to include money laundering, arms and drug trafficking and other plainly criminal activities.*

There was, understandably, little confidence that this disordered state of affairs would change under the new dispensation: most Russians had grown so accustomed to it that criminality appeared the ordinary way in which things were done. How could it be otherwise when so many of the same people who had held high positions under communism re-emerged under capitalism as the new masters?

Russia has accordingly become a notoriously criminal society. It is thought that between three thousand and four thousand criminal gangs operate there. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs says that organised crime controls 40 per cent of the turnover of goods and services; some estimates are higher. Half of Russia’s banks are thought to be controlled by criminal syndicates. Not surprisingly, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) considers Russia the most corrupt major economy in the world. Public opinion polls have suggested that Russians despair of honest effort as the means to advance. Instead, 88 per cent listed ‘connections’ and 76 per cent dishonesty as the best ways to get ahead.†

Estimates of the size of the black economy – always difficult to gauge – put it at between a quarter and a half of Russia’s national income. Much of this is, of course, a matter of unpaid or badly paid Russian workers trying to earn a decent income; much of the rest reflects the chaotic circumstances in which all enterprises have to operate. But it is still a recipe for extortion and gangsterism.

In such circumstances violence has become a tempting method of settling scores, instilling fear, and deterring both competition and criticism. Russia’s murder rate is now probably the highest in the world. Those who speak out against abuses in high places must expect to be targeted.

Such, for example, was the fate of that brave and principled lady, Galina Starovoitova. I first met her in London during the 1991 attempted coup, when she and I discussed how to help rally support for Boris Yeltsin. Mrs Starovoitova was a leading figure in the biggest political party at that time, ‘Democratic Russia’. She became a personal adviser to President Yeltsin on inter-ethnic issues – a position she relinquished because of her opposition to the Chechen War. She was later elected as a member of the Duma representing St Petersburg, where she denounced the anti-Semitism and corruption which had become unpleasant facets of the life of that great city. She also proposed a draft Law of Lustration intended to prevent high-level former Communist Party and KGB members from occupying high state positions. This, though, was rejected by the communist majority in the Duma.

Galina Starovoitova was murdered on the night of 20 November 1998 as she climbed the stairs to her apartment. It was a well-prepared assassination with what her family later told me had all the marks of the old KGB style. I was horrified by this and wrote to President Yeltsin. But her murderers have never been brought to trial. She is a martyr to the ideal of the Russia most Russians long to see. It is impossible to have much confidence in the Russian authorities’ promises to stamp out crime while her, probably well-connected, murderers remain at large.