New Left Review I/192, March-April 1992

Boris Kagarlitsky

Russia on the Brink of New Battles

When, in August 1991, the world heard the news of the failure of the attempted coup d’état, millions of people across the globe rejoiced at the victory of democracy in Russia. The inhabitants of the country, however, were in a rather less euphoric frame of mind. Although the official propaganda of the Russian government spoke of universal love for President Yeltsin and unanimous support for his promised economic reforms, there developed widespread doubt about the sincerity and democratic credentials of the authorities. Events after August only reinforced people’s worst misgivings. The removal from power of Soviet president Gorbachev by the Russian government—de facto in the last days of August and then formally at the end of December—did not provoke any protests, despite the fact that the intention of former Soviet prime minister Pavlov and vice-president Yanaev to edge Gorbachev out (most probably temporarily) and take his place in August qualified as treason. No one felt sorry for Gorbachev, who in the mind of the people was associated with the failures of the previous five years, but the collapse of the president’s power automatically entailed the liquidation of the Union as well. The feudal structure of power that had arisen and consolidated itself unavoidably linked the fate of the state institutions with the future of the ruler. [1] Of course the decay of the statocracy into a variety of regional and bureaucratic fiefdoms has a historical specificity of its own. I have analysed the old Soviet statocracy in The Thinking Reed, London 1988. It is interesting to note that even the learned Marx scholar Eero Loone happily refers to the ‘feudal’ features of the Soviet social formation in Soviet Marxism and Analytic Philosophies of History, London and Moscow 1992, p. 219 et seq. If Russia was to turn into Yeltsin’s ‘domain’, then the centre had become Gorbachev’s personal property, and the triumph of the former over the latter in their personal rivalry could only be accompanied by the dissolution of the centre as such.

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