I lived through the old Soviet days. You have to understand how many sour, nasty, self-righteous officials I met here in the ’60s, ’70s and even the ’80s who would never admit to even the slightest mistake.
So to see leader after leader, and official after official, get up before an international assemblage of nearly 800 newspaper editors and admit candidly that Russia has hit rock-bottom and desperately needs to change is astonishing.
The most important session of the 47th annual meeting of the International Press Institute, with media leaders from 93 countries, opened with Russian editor Lev Guschin capturing the Russia that the visitors have found themselves experiencing.
“Today you’re in Moscow at a normal time,” Guschin said with feigned good-naturedness. “The miners are on strike, the railways are being blocked, in several places in the Caucasus the situation is extremely volatile, and the stock market situation is acute.
“This is every day.”
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Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party, concurred, saying, “You have come here at the height of our national catastrophe. . . . Today we have a president with more power than a Russian czar or Egyptian pharaoh . . . yet the man on the street knows that this road leads to destruction.”
Zyuganov, a husky, well-spoken and well-dressed man, then posed four alternatives he sees for the future of Russia: 1) The disintegration of the Russian federation, which would lead to “global catastrophe,” 2) a possible dictatorship of the “party of power,” or Boris Yeltsin’s government, 3) a change in the political course, which would mean increasing the power of the state, and 4) the coming to power of a “junta,” but one “not of the Latin American type but of a criminal type.” (He is for the third, with an obvious candidate as president.)
When the new prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, a slim, bespectacled man in his 30s, addressed the group, he said essentially that he would carry through the same programs as before, only more assertively. (Some of the editors wondered, then, why President Yeltsin had changed the whole government, but no matter.)
He also told the media leaders, with a touch of irony, “I wish you success. As to us in government, I’d like you to wish us empathy.”
And when Yuri Luzhkov spoke to the group one night in the elegant Hall of Columns in the mayor’s office, the bullet-headed, effective mayor of Moscow went so far as to throw away old communist norms in stating, “It is my conviction that we must promote real Christian values.”
Vladimir Ryzhkov, the liberal “wunderkind” who is one of the rising stars of the Duma, or parliament, spoke brilliantly about all the “dreams” his group of ardent young hopefuls have harbored: an “open system with a strong parliament, with small businesses, with everyone paying taxes, with a dignified existence for everyone . . .
“Ten years have passed since we had those dreams,” he went on. “Let’s face it–what is the Russian political system today? Four hundred parties, but the communists are the only real party. . . . Regional bodies have little power. . . . The common idea in the world is that this is a reform government, but it has large limitations–not a single parliamentary body took part in its formation.
“A modern economy? I don’t think so, when one-third of every ruble is used to pay inner and outer debts. Finally, civil society: The mass media are controlled by the big financial groups . . . Our ministers’ average lifetime as ministers is six months.”
He concluded by saying, “It’s a question of the culture of the society and of the morals of the people.”
What are we to make of such candor and of such confessions in this land of the sealed lip, closed mind and arrogant posturing about the clear superiority of one’s country? Even since communism was officially dismantled in 1991, the world has not heard such disavowals of success from so many in positions of importance (and there are many more).
These statements confirm, on the one hand, that the “new Russia,” despite all the thoughtless Pollyannish stuff being put out in Washington by the administration, is not even a sloppy democracy. It has clearly evolved into a kind of “corporate state” run by corporate bodies bloated through looting the country. Russia is at present an atomized society with few connections between people and groups and with no formative ideas directing the state. Criminal organizations naturally gain in such a vacuum of power and of ideas.
On the other hand, this extraordinary frankness can be regarded as a budding maturity of a society that has known nothing but command and autocracy.
Another Russian speaker at the conference, for instance, summed up by saying, “For us to gain a mature political system, we will have to wait another five years for the young politicians now in their 30s to grow up. I’m optimistic. I invite you to come over here in five years’ time. I assure you it will be a different country.”