Russia after Yeltsin: A Duel of Oligarchs

In the aftermath of the election of a new president of Russia on 26 March 2000, Russians, people in the former Soviet republics, and other people abroad continue to ask: What will the Russia of Vladimir Putin be like? It would, of course, have been more reasonable to obtain an answer before the election and from the candidate himself, but in Russia the tendency is to vote with the heart, not with the mind. Russians elect those whom they like, and they don't like people who, in the "Western style," talk too much about themselves and their plans. Russians expect miracles from heroes. And when everything, or almost everything, is known about a politician, what kind of miracle can he perform? No one believes that Communist Party leader Zyuganov, the democrat Yavlinsky, or the rowdy troublemaker Zhirinovsky can work miracles. But it's possible to expect anything, including miracles, from someone new.

Putin--or rather, the experienced puppeteers behind him--kept that trait of the Russian character in mind. Before the election, voters learned nothing essential about their candidate, aside from the fact that he had worked for the KGB until the age of thirty-nine and that he is still comparatively young (forty-seven years old), athletic, and smiling and likes to say what his listeners want to hear. He is, in general and as the Russians say, a person pleasant in all respects. His handlers' calculations were on the mark. Russians voted with their hearts and Putin has become the second president of Russia, replacing Boris Yeltsin. Now everyone expects the promised miracle, just as they expected miracles from Yeltsin in 1991 and 1992. Later, they didn't expect anything and only lived in the hope that sooner or later the hated Boris would go away.

Concerning Putin--aside from what's listed above, there's nothing more to say. Most probably because, just like Yeltsin, he simply has no clear economic and political strategy. Russia, as before, will restructure itself according to the materials that happen to be at hand. The basic contours of the changes will probably appear somewhere toward the end of 2000. Meanwhile, instead of guessing and making predictions based on quicksand, it would be more useful to think about why Putin appeared on the Kremlin stage, and from where. At a minimum, this appraisal will help us understand what kind of Russia Yeltsin's innermost circle wanted to see after Yeltsin and why they needed Putin.

It has now become commonplace to talk about how the criminal world dominates Russia, about the corruption and the oligarchs who control the government structures from top to bottom. I have written previously about the causes that led to the criminalization of all Russian society and the emergence of a parasitical "gambling" instead of productive capitalism. ¹ To understand what is happening in Russia in this election year, you have to look back.

By the beginning of 1998, any hope for the physical preservation of Yeltsin in the Kremlin after the expiration of his presidential term--whether by means of the unification of Russia and Belorussia or of a coup d'état--was completely gone. Yeltsin had become a total wreck, unable to move independently, think independently, or express himself intelligently. The fallback plan became the main one: to put a weak and dependent politician in power, someone who, after being crowned in the Kremlin, would remain under the control of the close Kremlin circle, which the press, in Italian style, had christened the "family," the mafia.

In this light it was logical to remove the fairly independent Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister on 23 March 1998 and replace him with the smiling, insignificant provincial banker and former local Komsomol secretary Sergei Kiriyenko. Chernomyrdin wrote his own political death sentence when, in the United States for a meeting with Vice President Al Gore in February of that year, he announced firmly that he intended to become the...