The West, first and foremost the US Government, supported proactively and unconditionally all these key stages of the reforms which resulted in the establishment of a Russian authoritarian nationalist system. To some extent, this was due to their inability to understand what was happening. At the same time, however, Western politicians did not strive that hard to understand. They focused their attention on personalities, on the persona of President Yeltsin, and not on the dangerous system and not on the people who were on the receiving end of this system. Western international institutes – the IMF and the World Bank with the support of the US Government – contributed significantly to the creation, design, financing and consolidation of this very system. It goes without saying that Russia’s leadership, the political elite and the Russian people must take full responsibility. However, it must also be acknowledged that the system would not have appeared without the West’s support.
It is worth noting here that ever since 1992 the West had shifted its focus from supporting Russia democracy and modernization to personal support for Yeltsin considered friendly to the West, as if modernization had already happened or was guaranteed by the retention of an individual viewed by the West as their ally.
Naturally, the West’s errors about post-Soviet modernization did not concern only Russia. In 2019-2020 a book was published “The Light That Failed: A Reckoning” by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, considering in detail and assessing the influence of the West on reforms in Eastern Europe[1]. However, now we are talking about Russia.
Meanwhile by the end of the 1990s one could observe the creation of a political and economic system in Russia which has nothing in common with modern democracy and capitalism based on the institution of private property. It was already clear back then: the reforms had been conducted in such a way that Russia would become a criminal, oligarchic and corporate state – which is very dangerous both for its people and its neighbors. Some of the first results of the decade of post-Soviet reforms were summarized in my article entitled “Russia’s Phony Capitalism”, published in Foreign Affairs almost 25 years ago in May 1998[2]. The article started with a warning which is today unfortunately comprehensible to everybody, something that was not the case when the article was published: “Russia faces a watershed decision. The vital question for Russia is whether it will become a quasi-democratic oligarchy with corporatist, criminal characteristics or take the more difficult, painful road to becoming a normal, Western-style democracy with a market economy… Russians will make this fateful choice and be its principal victims or beneficiaries. But its consequences to Americans, Europeans, and others who share this shrinking globe should not be underestimated”.
This was their last chance. They did not use it. A few months later, in August 1998, the Russian economy collapsed, and Vladimir Putin appeared within a year.
Creation and support of Putin
The appearance of such an individual as Putin at the summit of the Russian regime was no accident or error. This was an inevitable choice predetermined by the logic and the requirements of the political and economic system created in Russia in the 1990s. Organically, this system was looking for someone who would defend unconditionally the results of the criminal privatization, its participants and beneficiaries (oligarchs and criminal billionaires), and as a whole the order of things that had been established in the country. It was only natural that a former officer of the KGB Vladimir Putin would be selected for this role. That is it in a nutshell. It should come as no surprise that Putin promised Yeltsin that he would preserve the system that had been created and would keep his promise.
They selected, incidentally, an individual capable of demonstrating his readiness to go to war. In September 1999, after Putin became Russia’s Prime Minister, a so-called counter-terrorism operation was declared, in other words, the second Chechen war was unleashed. The war was triggered with the assistance of terrorist incidents that remain inexplicable even today: they consisted of nocturnal explosions of residential blocks of flats with sleeping residents in Russian cities and the escalation of a state of panic. This is how the regime substantiated the need to launch once more large-scale military operations in the Caucasus. It was on the basis of this war that the distillation of Putin’s popularity was built on the “meme” invented specially for Putin: “wipe them out in the outhouse”. By the time Yeltsin had appointed Putin as his successor, the bloody war in Chechnya under the direct leadership of Prime Minister Putin had already been going on for several months. So there is no need to talk about some error of judgment or mistaken choice. In the presidential elections held shortly afterwards in March 2000, Putin was fervently supported by people referred to as reformers, individuals in whom the West had invested its brightest hopes – Yegor Gaidar, Anatoly Chubais, Garry Kasparov and others (incidentally, today Kasparov has once again become in the West the personification of a “new democratic Russia”, but now the former world chess champion is a vociferous opponent of Putin). At the time all these “liberals” and “democrats” went on and on about the “rebirth of the Russian army in Chechnya”, while calls to stop the war were called a “stab in the back of the Russian army”. Incidentally, at the time the peace-loving West had no scruples about such developments. In this way Russia continued on its journey to today’s war.
Meanwhile, two objectives were being resolved in Russia’s oligarchic-corporate state political system – how to create the absolute power of one individual and how to secure the immutability of this regime. Ever since 1996 it had been crystal clear that there were no fair and honest and transparent elections in Russia. The West saw and understood everything, that there was virtually no free press in Russia, that everything would be falsified and everything would be misrepresented. However, this elicited virtually no reaction either from Europe or the USA. It is highly likely that the West welcomed the immutability of the regime in Russia: they believed that it would be more peaceful and reliable. Step by step the Russian criminal oligarchic system took hold and was recognized internationally – from 2000 to 2014 Putin as the head of this system was a fully-fledged member of the G8. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s participation in G8 summits was suspended. However, in 2020 the US President Donald Trump advocated the resumption of the G8 format and was backed by the President of France Emmanuel Macron.
The West proactively supported Putin for many years at a personal level as Yeltsin’s heir: Tony Blair came to Russia to offer his support in the 2000 presidential elections, George Bush Junior confessed after meeting Putin in 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Putin has been praised by Berlusconi, Prodi, Sarcozy, Fillon, Kurz, Tsipras, Macron … Moreover, the G8 summit was held in Saint Petersburg in 2006.
About the author:
Grigory Yavlinsky (born 1952) is a Russian economist and politician. He is
the author of the 500 Days program, a plan for the transition of the Soviet regime
to a free market economy, and is the leader of the Democratic Party Yabloko. The
party was founded in 1993 and won the seats in the Russian Parliament until 2003.
Yavlinsky ran for President of Russia three times. In 2000 Yavlinsky ran against
Vladimir Putin, taking third place out of eleven candidates according to official
results. He also opposed Putin in the 2018 presidential election
Yavlinsky is a Doctor of Economics, Professor at the National Research University
Higher School of Economics. His economic and political books have been
published at Princeton University (2000), Yale University (2011), Columbia
University (2018).
Yavlinsky and his party are the only official political force that since 1995 have
consistently criticized the economic and political structure of the Russian state,
created as the result of the 1990’s erroneous reforms and have called it as the
corporate-criminal oligarchic system, which has been very dangerous both
internally and externally. Yavlinsky is the only politician who has been publicly
warning about the approaching war against Ukraine since 2014. Currently,
‘Yabloko’ is the only remaining political party in Russia that categorically opposes
Russia’s war with Ukraine and demands an immediate ceasefire.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022,
Yavlinsky in his public speeches and articles published both in the Russian
opposition press and in the Western media has constantly condemned the actions of
the Russian authorities in Ukraine and called the ongoing events as the gravest
crime.