Far from the imperial overreach and hegemonic tendencies that Russia and China kept warning about, the United States retreated instead. By 1998, Clinton’s personal credibility was also diminishing rapidly. The Monica Lewinsky scandal exploded in the headlines in January. The media circus, trial, and impeachment became a huge distraction for the government and the American people. Later in the year, Clinton had his wag-the-dog moment when he ordered a cruise missile strike on what turned out to be a benign pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
As convenient as it would be to put all the blame for the collapse of Russian democracy on Putin, the truth is more complicated. Russia’s return to dictatorship was not a sudden fall. Many small, quick steps in the same direction resemble a smooth slide. Just as when analyzing a completed chess game, what we call the postmortem, talking as if everything was going just fine until this or that event is usually absurd and harmful to the process of honest analysis. Of course huge isolated blunders in otherwise good positions do occur, but they are even rarer in diplomacy than in world championship chess.
This is a point of disagreement I often have with my more diplomatically minded friends today. They look back over twenty years of Russia-US relations and it doesn’t look so bad, so the complete catastrophe of 2014 is viewed as a sudden shock. But as I have been warning frequently for at least fifteen of those years, Putin’s latest eruption of repression and violence has been steadily building all the time and was only intensified by years of Western compromises and pretending that everything was fine. There was no big shift by Obama that provoked Putin, or any dramatic changes in Putin’s attitudes or Russia’s fortunes that necessitated the invasion of Ukraine. It was always moving in this direction, and the only question was whether or not Western leaders would change their ways to prevent such an eruption from taking place. Unfortunately, as we now know, the answer was no.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the streetlights. As I admitted earlier, I supported Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection despite his increasingly undemocratic attitude toward Russia’s institutions and the independence of our elections. Yeltsin abused the power of the state to fight off the challenge of the Communist Party that still had the power to terrify the reformers. It also had taken control of the Russian Duma in the 1995 parliamentary elections, so it was no imagined threat. Yeltsin was deeply unpopular, polling under 10 percent at the start of the year with only six months until the June election.
The Yeltsin administration’s trope of accusing every critic and opposition figure of trying to drag Russia back to the dark past became less and less effective as the economy struggled. The outside world didn’t think much of Yeltsin’s chances either. In February, Communist Party leader Zyuganov was treated like a rock star at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places, the belly of the capitalist beast. Of course Zyuganov was completely clueless about what to do and would have been an unmitigated catastrophe as president, but it certainly looked likely to happen. It wasn’t simply a case of people in hard times voting with their pocketbooks. There was a real sense of confusion and betrayal in Russia, and the natural target was the president.
Here is where we come to one of the most difficult concepts to explain to outsiders about the Russian rejection of democracy. When Soviets pondered the collapse of our country and the future ahead, democracy was not a very well-defined or well-understood concept to most of us. Yes, we desired freedom, rights, and all the things that come with an open society, but for most people these are abstractions. What we really envied about the West was opportunity; specifically the opportunity to improve our lot economically. The free world had elections and it had money and we had neither, so these things obviously went together: a package deal.
So when we happily mobbed the polls in 1991 to vote for Yeltsin the first time it was as if many Russians expected the ballot boxes to operate like ATMs: put your ballot in and money will come out! This conceptual misunderstanding later made it easier for an authoritarian like Putin to roll back civil rights by claiming that democracy had failed, that it had all been a Western scam to exploit Russia, and so on. The economic situation didn’t help much either. If there is anything worse than empty store shelves it is shelves full of expensive new products you cannot afford to buy.
We had sobered up quite a bit by the time special parliamentary elections were called in 1993 after the constitutional crisis that nearly toppled the entire government. Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the Supreme Soviet in September, something he did not have the authority to do according to the constitution. In retaliation, the parliament impeached Yeltsin, who of course refused to recognize their act of defiance. After weeks of dueling protests and street violence, Yeltsin called in the special police and the parliament building was sealed off. It was quite uncertain what would happen. Pitched battles were taking place in the streets outside the government building and nearly two hundred people would be killed and hundreds more wounded.
Along with the rest of the world, I was watching all of this unfold on CNN from afar. My 1993 world championship title defense against Nigel Short began in London on September 7 and lasted, as matches did in those days, for six weeks. As it had been in 1990, it was difficult to focus on chess when my country was again facing revolution. Fortunately, I jumped out to a big lead in the match and could play with less psychological pressure. I felt comfortable enough to give a few interviews on the situation in Moscow, where I said Yeltsin was fighting for the free future of Russia.
After days of violence and frantic negotiations on all sides, the allegiance of the Russian army to Yeltsin was the decisive factor. In an unbelievable scene, on October 4 a row of tanks fired on the White House (as we call the parliament building) and the top floors of it caught fire. Special forces stormed the building and clamped down on the street protesters. Back in control, Yeltsin wasted no time in pushing through constitutional reform, demoting the parliament and creating the very strong presidency that haunts us today. The Supreme Soviet was obsolete, of course, but in a country with such a fragile civil society it is important to have power spread as thinly as possible.
In 1996, Yeltsin had little popular support but he could count on many of the oligarchs whose fortunes he had enabled and the financial backing of the West. Despite a campaign spending limit of $3 million, still out of reach of most parties, the Yeltsin campaign spent somewhere in the range of one to two billion dollars according to later investigations. Even more important was a huge loan from the International Monetary Fund in February. The $10.2 billion allowed the Yeltsin government to pay long overdue wages and pensions.
If that had been all, dubious financing and pork-barrel politics on steroids, it might not have done damage lasting beyond Yeltsin’s term in office. But there was also the media influence and outright electoral fraud, weapons that are very hard to put back in the closet after being used. It was all enough to earn Yeltsin a narrow lead over Zyuganov in the first round, 35 percent to 32 percent. Yeltsin had a serious heart attack between the June 16 election and the July 3 run-off against Zyuganov, a potentially dangerous situation that was successfully hidden from the public thanks to government and media complicity. Yeltsin won the runoff 54 percent to 40 percent, with even more evidence of widespread voter fraud later coming to light.