‘THE REVOLUTION,” Karl Marx wrote of France in 1848, “advances under the whip of the counter-revolution.” And 20 years ago this week in Russia it was the whip of counter-revolution, a hamfisted attempted coup by the Communist Party old guard, that would indeed seal the fate of the once all-powerful party and then of the mighty Soviet Union a few months later in December. The brutal history of the 20th century remade, overturned.
The plot, and its collapse within days, exposed to ambitious Russian president Boris Yeltsin a new balance of forces, stripping away illusions of power and solidity: a decrepit, drunken old party leadership, led by vice-president Gennady Yanayev, KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and prime minister Valentin Pavlov, and its crumbling authority over the state apparatus; a weak Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of perestroika and glasnost, formally in charge, but whose power base had evaporated; and, on the streets, crowds willing to take a stand for what they saw as democracy. All Yeltsin needed to do, as his tank-top speech demonstrated, was push and the edifice would crumble.
Gorbachev resigned within three days as general secretary of the party, which was banned in November by Yeltsin. With the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, the latter founded the Commonwealth of Independent States on December 8th, scrapping the 1922 treaty that established the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned as its president two weeks later and it officially ceased to exist the next day.
Two decades on, Russia is clearly no longer a communist dictatorship and has embraced the capitalist market, albeit one in which a culture of semi-legality and corruption prevail. Living standards for most have risen substantially. Communist bosses have been replaced by billionaire oligarchs (often in the same person).
But the authoritarian tradition of communist and tsarist days lingers on. The democratic opposition is just about tolerated, and political succession, though legitimised by quasi-democratic elections, remains in the gift of court intrigue and “strong” leaders. Yeltsin passed the baton to Vladimir Putin, who passed it on to Dmitri Mevedev, both of whom will decide which should contest next year’s election. The result is beyond doubt.
The zeal and engagement which saw Muscovites rush to the barricades is long gone, and a weary resignation is now more typical. A poll last month by Russia’s Levada Centre found 49 per cent believe the country has taken the wrong direction since 1991, and just 27 per cent believe the opposite. Affection for the old CP is not the reason and yet just 10 per cent consider 1991 a democratic victory over Soviet communist rule. To curry favour, Putin and Medvedev both conjure up nationalism and Russia’s “glorious” past, and give out about international ostracism. Gorbachev complains about the monopolisation of power and warns the country is “going backwards”.
1991 remains, as Isaac Deutscher characterised 1917, Russia’s latest “unfinished revolution”.