Periodic outbreaks of “people power” were not enough to prevent the state being reordered from the top down. The rise of Vladimir Putin to head of the FSB (1998), prime minister (1999), acting president (on 31 December 1999, with the resignation of President Yeltsin), and elected president (2000) was decisive. Putin, a former KGB officer, shared the values of the siloviki. Famously, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.[456] It was not so much the passing of communism that he regretted, but Russia’s loss of empire and world influence. Abroad, he reasserted Russia’s position as a rival of the West. At home he demanded a return to domestic order, rejecting the turmoil (or freedoms) of the 1990s. He set in motion the taking of power back from the regions, from the new wealthy class, and from the electorate. Russia would remain a market economy with a newly wealthy business class, but on Leviathan’s terms and under its authoritarian tutelage.[457]
When thinking about how much modern Russia inherited from the Soviet Union, a sense of proportion is useful. The differences remain immense. The end of communism changed Russians’ everyday lives to an extraordinary extent—far more than they were changed, for example, by the Thaw after Stalin’s death. Most Russians became healthier, wealthier, freer to visit, study, and holiday abroad, and longer-lived than at any time in the past. By global standards they were neither to be pitied nor envied. In the 2000s, Russians’ average incomes remained close to the world average (as they had been more than a century before).[458] If widespread poverty persisted alongside the superrich, that was not unusual for a large middleincome country with an entrenched elite. Perhaps Russian politics did not score well on international measures of democracy and the rule of law, but many other countries in the same income bracket were doing no better. As Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman suggested, Russia was becoming a “normal” country.[459] Unfortunately this does not mean that Russia ceased to be a menace to the international order. What remained abnormal was Russia’s dangerous behavior on the world stage, enabled by the country’s large size and nuclear weapons.
In terms of state capacity, Russia’s basic indicators returned strongly to normal. In 1980 the “socialist sector” contributed close to 100 percent of the Soviet Union’s material production, while tax revenues absorbed almost half of Soviet GDP. In 2016, in the breathing space between the global financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, state-owned enterprises and other government equity contributed around one-third of Russia’s GDP, while tax revenues took back barely 9 percent.[460] In other words, Russia now had the state capacity of a typical middle-income country with a market economy.
For the citizens, a striking aspect of Russia’s normalization was their catch-up in access to information and communication technologies. As discussed in Chapter 1, Soviet times saw the deliberate suppression of advances in information sharing from automated dial-up telephony to photocopying. This was because they threatened the state’s comprehensive controls on the spread of information. When free to do so, Russians adopted these technologies with enthusiasm. By the 2010s there were more cell phone registrations in Russia than there were Russians.[461] And by 2016 sales of household printers and scanners were running at almost half a billion US dollars per year.[462] Thus, Russian citizens showed an entirely normal interest in sharing information.
Did Russia’s transition spell normalization for the regime of secrecy? In fact, the ending of Soviet rule left Secret Leviathan near to death. How near, exactly? Chapter 1 listed four pillars of the Soviet regime of secrecy: (1) the state monopoly of nearly everything, (2) comprehensive censorship based on the state monopoly of the press and broadcast media, (3) the conspirative norms of the ruling party, and (4) the regulation of secrecy by the KGB through the secret departments established in every state-owned enterprise and government agency. With the end of Soviet rule, the first two pillars fell. The third and fourth were weakened—but not fatally.
Almost overnight, the state lost its monopoly of production. That was the fall of the first pillar. Legalizing private enterprise had immediate consequences. Real earnings in private business shot up, while government salaries collapsed. Along with higher salaries in the private sphere came new opportunities for foreign travel and education. There was no longer any privilege in working for the state, even on secret business. At the same time the rise of private enterprise brought independent media companies, which swept away the second pillar—the capacity for comprehensive censorship.
As for the third and fourth pillars, the Communist Party was toppled from power, while a crowd toppled the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police, from its plinth before the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square. But, as the following section will show, the third and fourth pillars did not fall. The culture of conspirative norms subsisted for a while before reemerging. The KGB was reorganized and divided between intelligence and counterintelligence, the latter becoming today’s FSB. The secret departments lost their legal status, but the loss was temporary. The status and rewards for secret work were also eventually restored.
The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 forced open many locked rooms that had previously been sealed from public view. It is true that Gorbachev’s newfound commitment to openness quickly encountered limits. In May, while Gorbachev revealed to the world the scale of the disaster, the KGB brought many aspects of its causes and impacts back under the stamp of secrecy. In June, the Soviet Ministry of Health classified secret all information relating to the health and treatment of those in the contaminated zones and the workers directly involved in managing the damaged plant. In July, the Defense Ministry ordered the records of troops’ service in the Chernobyl zone to be deleted from their personnel files. Any further revelations were forced rather than voluntary. They were driven from below, by the fury of Ukrainian and Belarusian activists and their supporters in the republican party and state hierarchies.[463] Thus, the net effect of Chernobyl was to expose the regime of secrecy and energize its critics. Their new momentum fed into the wider process that eventually pulled apart the entire Soviet Union.
As for secrecy in the new Russia, its full history has not yet been written. An obvious reason is that the calculations and decisions behind its evolution were made in secret and will remain so for the foreseeable future. While the course of Russian secrecy can be surmised from various signals and events, some uncertainty remains intrinsic to the subject.
456
“Putin Deplores Collapse of the USSR,” 25 April 2005, BBC News, http:// news.bbc .co.uk/i/hi/448 0745. stm.
460
For 2016 see Di Bella, Dynnikova, and Slavov, “Russian State’s Size and Footprint,” 12, and statistics of the World Bank, https://data.worl dbank .org/indica- tor/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?locations=RU. For the Soviet Union in 1980, see Tables 2A.1 and 2A.2. For government spending, reported as around 35 percent of GDP in 2016 by Di Bella, Dynnikova, and Slavov, “Russian State’s Size and Footprint,” 10, the contrast with the past would have been less stark.
461
By 2017 the ratio was almost 160 percent. See Our World in Data, https:// ourworldindata.org/grapher/mobile-cellular-subscriptions-per-ioo-people?tab =chart&country= RUS ~OW I D_W R L.
462
Printer, scanner, and multifunction printer market revenue in Russia from 2016 to 2021 (in US dollars), Statista, https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1o8o221/ printer-scanner-revenue-in-russia.