79 Main indicators are conveniently summarized in Åslund, Building Capitalism ; Shleifer, Normal Country; and Peter T. Leeson and William N. Trumbull, “Comparing Apples: Normalcy, Russia, and the Remaining Post-Socialist World,” Post-Soviet Affairs 22 (July–September 2006), 225–48.
80 The military-industrial complex, currency question, and oil pricing were largely out of Moscow’s hands. Not so the London Club (commercial) and Paris Club (sovereign) debts of the Soviet Union. Moscow assumed these $100 billion worth of obligations in exchange for Russia having the agreed-upon status of legal heir to the USSR. It was forced to restructure the sovereign debt twice in the Yeltsin years, in 1996 and 1999, and retired it in 2006.
81 This point is well made in M. Steven Fish, “Russian Studies Without Studying,” Post-Soviet Affairs 17 (October–December 2001), 332–74, which is a reply to Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia.” See more generally Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
82 As argued in William Tompson, “Was Gaidar Really Necessary? Russian ‘Shock Therapy’ Reconsidered,” Problems of Post-Communism 49 (July–August 2002), 1–10.
83 Andrei Grachëv, Dal’she bez menya: ukhod prezidenta (Go ahead without me: the exit of a president) (Moscow: Progress, 1994), 82.
84 Gorbachev arrived in Beijing for a state visit on May 15, 1989, just as the Tienanmen student protest began. The demonstrators were admirers of his and timed their action to coincide with his arrival, so as to deter the police from reprisal. They displayed banners praising Gorbachev, which he would have seen from his motorcade that day. The government declared martial law on May 20, after his departure, and cracked down on the protesters on June 3–4.
85 An excellent treatment of these variables is Kelly M. McMann, Economic Autonomy and Democracy: Hybrid Regimes in Russia and Kyrgyzstan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
86 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 265 (italics added).
87 See on this general point Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 330–35; and Martin Malia in Desai, Conversations on Russia, 344–46.
88 Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 670.
89 “While many complain about ‘shock therapy’ in Russia, the sad truth is that too little shock was delivered to achieve any therapy, and the actual reforms were far less radical than those in Central Europe.” Åslund, Building Capitalism, xiii. This is an economist’s assessment. A political scientist comes to the same point. Since it scores in about the fortieth percentile among post-communist countries on indices of economic freedom, “gradualism, rather than shock therapy, best characterizes economic policy in post-Soviet Russia.” M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159–60.
90 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 236.
91 Oleg Poptsov, Trevozhnyye sny tsarskoi svity (The uneasy dreams of the tsar’s retinue) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2000), 311.
CHAPTER TEN
1 Valerie Bunce and Maria Csanádi, “Uncertainty in the Transition: Post-Communism in Hungary,” East European Politics and Society 7 (Spring 1993), 269.
2 Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 11. See also Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), 300, and the reference to emergencies “associated with a collective excitement through which masses of people respond to some extraordinary experience and by virtue of which they surrender themselves to a heroic leader.”
3 Leszek Balcerowicz, “Understanding Postcommunist Transitions,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Economic Reform and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 96. Balcerowicz, who coined the term “extraordinary politics,” was the author of economic shock therapy in post-communist Poland from 1989 to 1991.
4 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 170.
5 Bunce and Csanádi, “Uncertainty in the Transition,” 270 (italics added). It is for this reason that another specialist predicts that, although charismatic leaders may well crop up in post-communist countries, they “will be of real, but limited, consequence—that is, they can affect the distribution of power in a larger or smaller area, but are unable to act as the catalyst for a new way of life.” Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 266.
6 Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.
7 Ibid. Another series of polls, using a more simply worded question, traces the decline in Yeltsin’s popularity in starker terms. Eighty-seven percent of Russians “fully supported” him in September 1991 and 4 percent said they did not support him. That ratio had dropped to 69 percent to 5 percent in November 1991 and to 43 percent to 19 percent in January 1992; it was 28 percent to 24 percent in March 1992, and 24 percent to 31 percent in July 1992. Leonty Byzov, “Power and Society in Post-Coup Russia : Attempts at Coexistence,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 1 (Spring 1993), 87.
8 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 168.
9 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 256.
10 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 176.
11 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 258.
12 Ibid., 256.
13 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 190–91; author’s second interview with Yegor Gaidar (January 31, 2002). Yeltsin told Gaidar after the meeting that he had tried unsuccessfully to reach him by phone to tell him of the removal of Lopukhin. Gaidar did not believe it.
14 Yeltsin left Gaidar to sign off on the Gerashchenko appointment on his behalf. Gaidar later called it the worst mistake he made in 1992 and said it would have been much better to go with Gerashchenko’s predecessor, Georgii Matyukhin. Yeltsin also told associates he almost immediately regretted the appointment. Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 195; Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 235.