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THE LAST DAYS OF BORIS YELTSIN In February 1990, Forbes published an article by Vladimir Kvint predicting that the Soviet empire would fall apart and Russia would go it alone. Most of the experts scoffed: It couldn’t happen. The accepted view was that the KGB, the Communist Party, and the Red Army would hold the empire together. They didn’t. Two years later the USSR expired more or less peacefully into 15 republics. Again putting his neck out, Kvint predicts that the Yeltsin government will soon fall and be replaced by a much more authoritarian regime. Eighty-one years ago this autumn, the October Revolution swept from power a weak and ineffectual democratic government in Russia and replaced it with totalitarian rule. As it turned out, this was a dark day in world history. Today Russia is ripe for another revolution. Weak and utterly rotten , the current government came to power by democratic means but is anything but democratic. It is a little more than a cover under which a gang of kleptocrats impoverish the country. Under communism , people had rubles but nothing to buy. Things are reversed now, with shops full but most people’s wallets empty. If this be capitalism, most Russians aren’t sure they want it. The situation validates for them the old communist joke: Capitalism is man’s exploitation of man, and communism is the other way around. If that weren’t bad enough, tens of millions of Russians are not being paid even their miserable wages. In protest, unpaid coal miners block the Trans-Siberian railroad for weeks at a time. Unpaid soldiers sell weapons, uniforms, even tanks and aircraft to any willing buyer: a pretty frightening situation in a country that still possesses thousands of missiles and a large nuclear stockpile. You can’t judge Russian prosperity by what you see in Moscow. One hundred miles outside the capital, a mere 20 miles from regional centers, there is hunger, and people are wearing rags. Tattered Forbes, September 7, 1998, pp. 145–151. the last days of yeltsin 239 clothes and bread-and-potato diets are more representative of Russia today than the relative prosperity of a few big cities. In Siberia’s frigid Krasnoyarsk region (population: 3 million) the average wage is less than $300 a month, and Krasnoyarsk is a hostile place to stay alive. Not insignificantly, the elected governor of Krasnoyarsk is General Alexander Lebed, the tough and disciplined military man who became a popular hero for ending the war in Chechnya. Whether the Yeltsin government lasts a few more months or somehow staggers into 1999, Alexander Lebed is Yeltsin’s probable successor. Tossed out by the Yeltsin government because he was too popular, Lebed was elected governor of the Krasnoyarsk region, which covers 14% of the Russian territory, by a landslide. He is relatively untouched by corruption and has to his credit brought an end to the fighting in Chechnya. He has been brutally critical of the Yeltsin government and of the kleptocrats. Although he himself is not an extreme nationalist, he could well come to power with their support and in alliance with Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin’s former prime minister, who is close to Russia’s communist-era leaders. What would it take to trigger a coup d’état? Asked that late last year, Gen. Lebed told Forbes: ‘‘Maybe it will be a woman whose child dies from hunger or cold, who will carry him out on the street, and the crowd will explode. It’s an unpredictable situation’’ (Forbes, January 12, 1998). In that sense the situation resembles that of October and November 1917. The democratic Kerensky government was not so much overthrown; it simply crumbled. Describing the Kerensky regime, the writer Alan Moorehead declared: ‘‘It was like a body with no bones in it, like a mind with no will.’’ You could say much the same about the Yeltsin government. ‘‘Bolshevism,’’ Moorehead writes, ‘‘succeded to an empty throne.’’ Less than two years ago (December 30, 1996) Forbes explained how a handful of Russian bureaucrats-turned-businessmen were able to grab control of Russia’s prime assets at a small fraction of their true values. By my calculations, they and their hangers-on have taken over assets worth as much as $150 billion since Yeltsin’s corrupt privatization program started in 1992. The tycoons and their friends and retainers flaunt their new wealth in such places as Cannes and Nice on the French Riviera. [18.191...

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