Russia, 1993 - The Road Taken, Part One

Twenty-five years ago this month something extraordinary happened in Russia.  Nobody knew it at the time, but the road to what is now known as “Putinism” started here.  A little more than two years after an abortive coup failed to topple Mikhail Gorbachev [but had the unintended consequence of hastening the Soviet Union’s demise], another crisis happened that may have rolled Russia back to Soviet times.

In September 1993, the Soviet Union hadn’t been on the ash-heap of history for two years when the Russian Federation faced its first constitutional crisis. The question was this - who was in charge – the country’s president, Boris Yeltsin, or the federation’s parliament?  With American support, Yeltsin had introduced an economic program that would turn the old Soviet command economy into one that is market-based.  The process of privatizing state-owned enterprises saw many of these enterprises concentrated firms in the hands of corrupt, politically-connected oligarchs.  Price and currency controls were lifted which led to hyperinflation [with money becoming virtually worthless], state subsidies disappeared.  This was called “shock therapy”.  There was a lot of shock, but not much therapy.  This was the basis of the disagreement between Yeltsin and the parliament.

In April 1993, Russia held a four-part referendum on the confidence of Yeltsin’s government.  In effect, it was a nationwide vote of confidence on Boris Yeltsin.  The referendum asked four questions:

1.      Do you have confidence in the President of the Russian Federation, B. N. Yeltsin?

2.      Do you support the economic and social policy that has been conducted since 1992 by the President and Government of the Russian Federation?

3.      Should there be early elections for the President of the Russian Federation?

4.      Should there be early elections for the People's Deputies of the Russian Federation?

Parliament liked things the way they were. There had been amendments to the Russian constitution [which had been around since the Brezhnev era] that temporarily allowed Yeltsin to rule by decree.  Those “emergency powers” had a sunset provision, with Yeltsin’s decree powers due to expire at the end of 1992.  The largest bloc of deputies in parliament was a combination of Communists, nationalists, and retired military officers.  They wanted a weaker president and a stronger parliament. Yeltsin had a very simple campaign – he asked for a “Da, Da, Nyet, Da” result, and that is exactly what he got.  Yeltsin saw the results of this referendum as a mandate to change the constitution.  After the referendum, Yeltsin released his vision of what the next Russian constitution should look like.  The Congress of People’s Deputies did the same.  Neither proposal looked like the other.

As Yeltsin and the Congress of People’s Deputies argued over what a new constitution should look like, the Supreme Soviet [a subset of the Congress of People’s Deputies that met more often] took it upon themselves to try to enact its own foreign policy and its own economic policy.  A contemporary Russian commentator noted "The President issues decrees as if there were no Supreme Soviet, and the Supreme Soviet suspends decrees as if there were no President."  In September 1993, Yeltsin tried to suspend his own vice president, Alexander Rutskoi.  Yeltsin cited “accusations of corruption” as the pretext for his action.  The Supreme Soviet refused to recognize this action.  Yeltsin proposed early elections for both president and parliament.  The Supreme Soviet ignored him.  Yeltsin appointed Yegor Gaidar as deputy prime minister.  The Supreme Soviet rejected him.  On September 21, Yeltsin upped the ante by announcing he dissolved the Supreme Soviet.  He didn’t have the authority to do so, but legal niceties didn’t stop Yeltsin.  He felt emboldened because the Russian people gave him a vote of confidence the previous April.  The Constitutional Court affirmed that Yeltsin couldn’t dissolve the parliament.  The Supreme Soviet removed Yeltsin [or so they thought].  Pro-parliament protesters stormed the national television center at Ostankino.   They also attacked the Moscow mayor’s office.  People died, and Yeltsin called in the tanks.

The seat of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet was the White House.  In 1991, this building was the symbol of resistance against the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev two years earlier.  It was here that Boris Yeltsin mounted a tank to condemn the coup.  And two years after the coup, the army tanks opened fire on that same White House.  Boris Yeltsin was clever to categorize those who disagreed with him as Communists, Fascists, bandits, revanchists and relics from the Soviet era who wanted to turn back the clock to a time before the Soviet Union collapsed.  The “debate” thus framed, Bill Clinton supported Yeltsin’s action.  Yeltsin proved Mao’s axiom that “political power comes from the barrel of a gun”.  Yeltsin had the gun, he used the gun, and got the constitution he wanted.  He got a strong presidency, in which the president could appoint a prime minister and a cabinet and dismiss them at his pleasure.  His candidates for Prime Minister were subject to Duma approval, but if the Duma rejected a candidate for Prime Minister three successive times, the president had the power to dissolve parliament and call new elections.  He also got sweeping powers to issue decrees. 

Yeltsin’s newly-won power to appoint people without the parliament voting themselves out of a job is significant.  After the 1998 financial crisis that cratered the Russian economy, Boris Yeltsin was a very unpopular figure.  Between 1998 and 1999 he went through four Prime Ministers [Sergey Kirienko, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yevgeny Primakov, and Sergei Stepashin] before settling on Vladimir Putin.  Under this new constitution, if a president dies, resigns, or is otherwise incapacitated, the Prime Minister becomes Acting President.  When Yeltsin chose Putin as his last Prime Minister, he also designated Putin as his successor.  At that time Putin was an unknown quantity.  But after his appointment as Prime Minister, the dominos to his ascent to ultimate power began to fall.  Without Putin, there would not have been the apartment bombings in 1999.  Without the apartment bombings and the naming of Chechens as the culprits, there probably would not have been a Second Chechen War.  Without a successful prosecution of the Second Chechen War, Putin’s popularity would not have skyrocketed.  And without this heightened popularity, it’s doubtful that Yeltsin would have felt comfortable enough to give up the presidency in favor of his designated successor. Yeltsin resigned the Russian presidency on December 31, 1999 with Putin becoming Acting President until he was elected president in his own right in 2000.

The new constitution created a bicameral legislature, which included a Duma and a Federation Council.  What has emerged since then is a “managed democracy”.  There is an opposition, but really in name only.  People can run for political office, provided they don’t make too many waves and obtain government approval to do so.  To keep Vladimir Putin in power, the ruling party [United Russia] has engaged in massive vote fraud to include voter intimidation, carousel voting, and blatant ballot box stuffing.  Vladimir Putin enjoys the spoils of this constitutional framework laid out by his predecessor.  

It is ironic that the man who benefits from this system [Vladimir Putin] was put in place by the guy [Boris Yeltsin] who was supported by Bill Clinton, the husband of the 2016 Democratic nominee for president [Hillary Clinton], who got on Vladimir Putin’s bad side and whom Hillary Clinton continues to blame for her electoral loss. 

What I'm Reading - Two Sisters

The challenge for this blog is in finding something unique upon which to comment.  Rather than commenting upon Vladimir Putin and/or Russia yet again, I searched for something completely different [apologies to Monty Python].  Such an opportunity presented itself about a couple of months ago while I was driving to lunch.  I was listening to NPR, and there was a program [the name of which escapes me] where the host was talking about a new book.  The book in question is called Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey Into the Syrian Jihad.  Two Sisters is written by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, a writer who is known for her work as a war correspondent.  She has written other works as well, among them One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway.  One of Us told the story of Anders Breivik, the self-described fascist who committed Norway’s worst act of terrorism in 2011 when he killed 77 people [most of whom were attending a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp].  Guess which book is next on my list? 

As the title implies, Two Sisters is the story of two Somali sisters who decided to leave the comfort of Norwegian society, give up everything and travel to Syria to join ISIS.  The two sisters Ayan [19] and Leila [16] [not their real names, BTW].  Ayan accompanied their parents to Norway in order to escape fighting in Somaliland [she was an infant at the time].  The rest of the Juma children were born in Norway.  Ayan and Leila were two well-adjusted young women who “seemed” to assimilate well into Norwegian society.  They attended good schools in the Oslo suburbs.  Ayan was part of the International Baccalaureate [IB] program [Editor’s Note:  both of my boys did that.  It’s very hard work].  She had fights with her mother about clothes that were ‘too revealing.” Leila played soccer.  There were teenage crushes, intense friendships, bands, football and summer camps are the stuff of any adolescence.  But in a homogenous society like Norway, Ayan and Leila were still “different.”

How did this journey begin?  Their mother Sara Juma was worried her daughters were becoming too “Norwegian”.  She and other Somali mothers in Oslo hired a tutor from a local mosque.  His job was to not only teach the children to read the Koran, but also how to be good Muslims in Norway.  At first Sara was pleased with the result.  Both sisters had taken the veil and became devout Muslims.  She saw her daughters were going to the local mosque regularly, and fasted during the observation of Ramadan.  There were little post-it notes with phrases from the Koran sprinkled all over their suburban Oslo apartment.  It was this association with the Koranic tutor that led to the radicalization of Ayan and Leila.  The author also details the story of Dilal, one of Ayan’s original core group of friends.  The least conservative of the four friends who attended those early Islam Net meetings together, even she found herself drawn in, eventually ending up in an abusive and controlling marriage with Ubaydullah Hussain, one of Norway’s most vocal radicals.  Dilal escaped her relationship, but her story is one of how even the most grounded of people can get “sucked in” to radicalism.  The author illustrates how groups such as Islam Net don’t only target the “isolated,” but also actively seek to isolate their targets from family or the local adopted culture.

The girls’ radicalization is unexplained.  But the author goes into detail about how they became involved with a group called Islam Net, a society of young, Salafist Muslims in Oslo.  The sisters voiced increasingly extreme views, broke up classes to pray or skipped school entirely.  The author points out that one doesn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide “today I will be a radical Muslim”.  It was a gradual thing for Ayan and Leila.  Conversely, their brother Ismael became an atheist, going as far to tell his sisters "I believe in Allah about as much as I believe in the spaghetti monster."  Ayan and Leila had been in regular contact with Ismael via text messages, but after Ismael’s expressions of non-belief, the sisters broke off contact.  Afterward, they contacted only their mother, who never pressed too hard on what was really happening lest ISIS be monitoring their communications.

One October morning in 2013 had begun like any other.  Leila was presumed to be at school while Ayan said she was going to be across town to visit a friend.  Little did their parents know that they had been planning for several months to leave Norway to join ISIS in Syria.  Sadiq and Sara received an email from the girls:

“We love you both sooo much and you have given us everything in life. We are eternally grateful for everything ♥.  We ask your forgiveness for all the pain we have caused you. We love you both sooo much, would do anything for you, and would never do anything to purposely hurt you, and is it not then fair and proper that we do everything for ALLAH swt’s sake and are grateful for what he has given us by following his rules, laws, and commands. Muslims are under attack from all quarters, and we need to do something. We want so much to help Muslims, and the only way we can really do that is by being with them in both suffering and joy. Sitting home and sending money is no longer enough. With this in mind we have decided to travel to Syria and help out down there as best we can. We know this sounds absurd but it is haqq and we must go. We fear what ALLAH swt will say to us on the day of judgment.

We have now left and will soon arrive inshallah. Please do not be cross with us, it was sooo hard for us to leave without saying goodbye in the way you both deserve. Forgive us inshallah, when we made this choice we did so with what was best for our ummah in mind, but also what was best for our family, and it might be difficult to understand now, but inshallah this decision will help us all on the day of judgment inshallah. We love you both sooo much and hope you will not break off ties with us, inshallah we will send a message when we arrive at the hotel and then you can call inshallah. We want to tell you again that we love you with all of our hearts and are sorry you had to find out this way, we have already asked too much of you but we have to ask a favor: for both our safety and yours no one outside the family can know we have left, this cannot be stressed enough. Please try to understand our actions inshallah. Praise be to Allah, the lord of the worlds ♥. Ayan & Leila ♥.”

The girls went to Turkey via Sweden.  The Jumas contacted the authorities in Sweden to try to intercept them, especially since Leila was still a minor.  But the Swedish authorities did nothing.  The system failed the Jumas.

I’m not very sympathetic with Sara, their mother.  She’s the one who wanted Ayan and Leila to not be quite so “Western.” When her actions lead to the introduction of her daughters to radical Muslims, she put it all on her husband to Sadiq to go to Syria, to find them and bring them back.  She wanted Sadiq to clean up the mess she made.  It’s not like Sadiq didn’t have enough on his plate.  He was on disability from his job and was studying to become an engineer.  Like a good husband, he did as Sara asked [or rather, demanded]. He emptied his bank account to make it happen.  Sadiq made the trip to Turkey.  He found when he got as far as Turkey that border smugglers don’t take American Express – they only take cash.  He found his girls in Raqqa, Syria and got to meet them.  He told both their mother wanted them to come home, but they had a surprise for him.  Both had married ISIS fighters and had children.  They didn’t want to go back to Norway.  For Sadiq’s troubles, ISIS arrested him, accused him of being a spy and tortured him for a couple of weeks [on orders from his new son-in-law].  He was released only after he convinced a sharia prosecutor that he was what he said he was – a concerned father who was looking for his daughters.  To add insult to injury, Sara went back to Somaliland after he returned to Norway without the girls.

Before they broke off contact with Ismael, Leila told him “You should know that we are happy and well, we are safe and Allah has provided us with plenty of rizq [gifts].”  There is no update on what happened to the girls after they last saw their father.  Since the book was published, the Islamic State [the so-called Caliphate] has since collapsed.  ISIS fighters have scattered to the fore winds.  Nobody knows whether the girls are alive or dead.  There is no “happily ever after” in this tale.

The Death of Stalin - Banned in Russia

In October last year I heard about a “dark comedy” that was coming out called The Death of Stalin.  Much had been said about the movie during Brian Whitmore's Power Vertical podcasts.  I had been looking for when I could see the movie in theaters, but alas it wasn’t in the cards for residents of Northwest Florida.  The movie never made it here, so I had to wait.  Two weeks ago, my wait finally ended when I saw that it was available on iTunes. Being the Russian/Soviet history wonk that I am, I bought it and downloaded it.  Fortunately for me, the movie lived up to the hype. 

The movie doesn’t pretend to be historically accurate. However, when I saw the movie I couldn’t help but be reminded of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Some details captured in the movie were documented in Montefiore’s book, some of which include:

-        Stalin’s love of Mozart’s Piano Concerto N^o. 23;

-        The color of Stalin’s dacha in Kuntsevo [dark green];

-        The giving of a bouquet of flowers to Beria’s rape victims after the deed is done;

-        Stalin’s love of Western movies and his Politburo having to endure late-night showings of them;

-        The late-night drinking and general buffoonery of Stalin’s Politburo for Stalin’s amusement [including the tomato Beria put in Khrushchev’s pocket];

As the movie begins, the NKVD is doing what it does best – the knocks on the door in the middle of the night when people were being taken away for crimes, real or imagined.  While people were being arrested in the middle of the night, there was a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto N^o. 23, to which Stalin listened.  When the performance was over, Stalin wanted a recording of the performance.  This was where the fun in the movie began.  When told the performance wasn’t recorded, the station manager had a fit.  He had to keep whatever audience was left from leaving the building, and he dispatched his assistant to round up people from the streets to fill the auditorium, so the acoustics would be the same as what Stalin heard on the radio.  When the pianist [Olga Kurylenko] refused to play again [her family was executed by Stalin], the conductor fainted and couldn’t be revived.  The radio people had to find another conductor.  When they found one, they woke him up in the middle of the night.  Since this sort of thing was happening to his neighbors, he assumed he too was being arrested.  But they made their apologies and brought him to the radio station.  He didn’t have time to change – he conducted the orchestra while still wearing his pajamas.  As the station master handed the recording to an awaiting NKVD goon, Kurylenko’s character slipped a note into the record jacket.  The note said:

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin –

You have betrayed our nation and destroyed its people.

I pray for your end and ask the Lord to forgive you.

Tyrant!

Stalin broke out laughing.  But as he was laughing, he coughed, uttered an expletive and crashed to the floor with a ‘thud’ that his door guards heard.  They knew Stalin’s habits.  They didn’t want to go to prison for disturbing Stalin.  But there he was, lying on the floor, having been felled by a stroke.

My feeling is that Iannucci must have assumed the people who would watch this film were Russian/Soviet history buffs like me.  When Stalin had his stroke and there is a need for a doctor to treat him, Beria quipped that it was too bad all the competent doctors were locked up [a reference to Stalin’s ‘Doctor’s Plot’]. Iannucci got this point right as well – Stalin pissed himself when he stroked out.  There was a point toward the end of the movie as Beria is being arrested and taken to “trial”, Malenkov insisted that Beria get a fair trial.  Khrushchev reminded him of Marshal Tukhachevsky and how he met his own fate unfairly in 1937.  If you weren’t well read in Russian/Soviet history, you wouldn’t get the reference, hence my conclusion about Iannucci’s target audience.  These events took place 65 years ago.  It seems to me that many people can’t remember things that happened last year.

What is accurately depicted is the mediocrity with which Stalin surrounded himself.  Any potential successor with any brains could possibly replace Stalin while Stalin was still breathing, so Stalin would eliminate him.  The likes of Malenkov, Bulganin, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich weren’t exactly what one would call “the best and the brightest”.  But at least they knew how to stay alive.  In the movie, Khrushchev would do this by having his wife write down every night what did and didn’t make Stalin laugh. Malenkov was so scared shitless he couldn’t remember who was alive and still in Stalin’s good graces and who was dead and discredited. The period between Stalin’s death and that of Beria [nine months] is compressed into a single week. Armando Iannucci doesn’t bother with making his actors adopt phony Russian accents. The only “Russian” accent one hears in the movie comes from Olga Kurylenko [I know, she’s Ukrainian]. 

Three characters stand out as having a clue – Simon Russell Beale’s Beria, Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev, and Jeremy Isaac’s Zhukov.  Beale’s Beria is ruthless.  He relishes his role as Stalin’s most-willing executioner.  He gives his henchmen tips on how to kill the detainees. He makes no bones or apologies for having sex with wives willing to “do anything” to save their husbands [he was a serial rapist and pedophile]. He’s the first one to seize on Stalin’s incapacitation [and eventual death] as his opportunity to grab power. When he finds an unconscious Stalin laying in a pool of his own piss, he wastes no time in going through Stalin’s pockets to find the keys to the places where Stalin kept the execution lists. Buscemi’s Khrushchev isn’t quite as quick as Beale’s Beria to make a grab for the brass ring, but it doesn’t take him long to realize his survival depends on outmaneuvering Beria.  Once Khrushchev has this epiphany, he moves quickly to gain the support of Kaganovich [who asked him “how can you plot and run at the same time?”], Bulganin and Mikoyan [both after he lied about having Malenkov’s support against Beria], and Zhukov.  Isaac’s Zhukov isn’t afraid of anybody, most especially Beria [“I fooked Germany. I think I can take a flesh lump in a fookin’ waistcoat”.]  Both Beria and Khrushchev try to curry favor with Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.  Vasily Stalin is an Air Force general who owed his position to his last name, and was also a drunken fool whom nobody takes seriously.

As the Politburo stood vigil over Stalin’s corpse in the Hall of Columns, Molotov asked “who invited the bishops?”  Since Molotov was portrayed by Michael Palin, I had flashbacks to a couple of Monty Python sketches [“The Bishop” and the “Dead Bishop/Church Police”].  Palin portrayed Molotov as the “true believer” in Stalinist orthodoxy.  When told by Khrushchev that he was on Stalin’s “list”, he thought he must have done something to deserve it.  Khrushchev tried to curry favor with Molotov, each agreeing with the other that Molotov’s Jewish wife was a traitor, right up until the very moment they saw Beria bring her into Molotov’s apartment.  Khrushchev immediately turned on a dime and proclaimed Molinka Molotova’s innocence.  I thought the act of releasing his wife from prison swayed Molotov to support Beria. But between that moment and Stalin’s funeral, Molotov had an epiphany [off-camera] and threw in his lot with Khrushchev.  Georgi Malenkov [Jeffrey Tambor] is portrayed as an indecisive weakling in way over his head.  History tells us Malenkov was one of Stalin’s favorites and was hip-deep in carrying out Stalin’s purges, and in life [as it was in the movie] he was close to Beria.

After Beria met his fate, Khrushchev emerged immediately as the guy in charge.  He told Svetlana she was going to Vienna whether she liked it or not.  When informed of this, she told Khrushchev “I never thought it would be you.”  Given his place in the pecking immediately after Stalin’s death, nobody else knew either.  Right before the credits rolled, Khrushchev and Kaganovich had the following exchange –

Khrushchev: I’m worried about Malenkov, though.  Can we trust him?

Kaganovich:  Can you ever trust a weak man?

The film was banned in Russia.  Moscow police raided the one cinema that dared show it.  Why was it banned?  Author Anna Aratunyan [The Putin Mystique] has a few ideas.  She spoke with quite a few Russians on the topic as relates to a Russian-produced movie called Matilda, which depicted Tsar Nicholas II as having an affair, and thus showed this canonized saint of the Russian Orthodox Church to be “human”. Her research told her that people objected to that film because it skewered a Russian “sacred cow”. In her talks with Orthodox groups about that particular film, their view is that “power is sacred”, no matter who wields it. And this kind of power that Stalin had was not institutional but personal, the only kind of power that Russia has only known. 

Additionally, she attributes opposition to The Death of Stalin to the Russian people’s inability to internalize that such a thing as how Stalin’s murderous reign could somehow happen in Russia. People can joke about their own political leaders in private, but to do so in such a public way crossed a line.  And there is one more thing to consider.  It’s ok for Russians to joke about their own leader among friends, but when a Scottish filmmaker [a foreigner] ridicules a Russian or Soviet leader in such a public way, that's not ok.  It’s REALLY not ok if that same Scottish filmmaker commits the sin of attacking a Russian “sacred cow” and getting it right.  How can one “mock” the "winner” of the Great Patriotic War?

She doesn't think the Kremlin has a strategy to ban certain things from the public as that would only to draw more attention to the thing being banned.  She posits there was some kind of massive social insecurity that fueled a backlash against The Death of Stalin.  She isn’t sure what the Russian “Deep State’s” motives were in banning the movie.  She does say the current regime has embraced the rehabilitation of Stalin, has mobilized patriotism and nationalism, so once that was let out of that Pandora's Box in the case of The Death of Stalin, the current regime feared a backlash.

The Death of Stalin mocks a part of the Soviet past, one that deserves mockery.  The movie is about succession and how one replaces a politically dominant figure.  In Stalin's time, there was no clear successor.  The same can be said about the entire Soviet experience.  But in this particular time the only political institution that mattered was one man - Stalin.  Today's political climate in Russia is similar.  Vladimir Putin dominates Russian politics like no other since...Stalin!  Sure, Dmitri Medvedev served a single term as Russian president, but the power behind that particular throne was still Vladimir Putin as Medvedev’s Prime Minister.  Once he was free from the constitutional shackles of term limits, Putin re-asserted himself at the top of the Russian political food chain.  As he enters what he himself calls his last term as president, there is no clear succession plan for Putin as there wasn't one for Stalin.  Given what has transpired during Putin's eighteen years in power [the longest since Stalin], one thing is certain that Putin will leave the Kremlin in the only way the Russians have experienced - “feet first”.  Perhaps the regime is insecure about parallels between Stalin’s rule and that of Putin.