Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin
“Andrei Kovalev has drawn on his remarkable career at the highest level of Russian politics from Gorbachev to Putin to give a picture of both successes and disappointments. This is a book written from the heart by a diplomat of acute intelligence. Kovalev rode the steed of Russian public affairs till his conscience told him to dismount, and this exceptional book explains his reasons.”
—Robert Service, emeritus professor of Russian history at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University
“Andrei Kovalev loves Russia, a different Russia, an open and democratic one, where human rights are respected. His book is a must-read for those who want to understand the most recent history of Russia and who share his love and indignation over how the efforts to democratize his country were ruined by a small yet powerful corrupt clique.”
—Robert van Voren, professor of Soviet and post-Soviet studies, Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania
Russia’s Dead End
Russia’s Dead End
An Insider’s Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin
Andrei A. Kovalev
Translated by Steven I. Levine
Foreword by Peter Reddaway
Potomac Books
An imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
English translation © 2017 by Andrei A. Kovalev
Foreword © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
A two-volume Russian-language edition of this book was published under the titles Svidetel’stvo iz-za kulis rossiiskoi politiki I: Mozhno li delat’ dobra iz zla? and Svidetel’stvo iz-za kulis rossiiskoi politiki II: Ugroza dlia sebia i okruzhaiushchikh (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2012).
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover images: hand © iStockphoto.com/logan-00; spiderweb © iStockphoto.com/-strizh-.
Author photo courtesy of the author.
All rights reserved. Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kovalev, A. A. (Andreĭ Anatol’evich), author.
Title: Russia’s dead end: an insider’s testimony from Gorbachev to Putin / Andrei A. Kovalev; translated by Steven I. Levine; foreword by Peter Reddaway.
Other titles: Svidetel’stvo iz-za kulis rossiĭskoĭ politiki. English
Description: Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2017. | “A two-volume Russian-language edition of this book was published under the titles Svidetel’stvo iz-za kulis rossiiskoi politiki I: Mozhno li delat’ dobro iz zla?; and Svidetel’stvo iz-za kulis rossiiskoi politiki II: Ugroza dlia sebia i okruzhaiushchikh (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2012)”—Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016037673
ISBN 9781612348933 (hardback: alkaline paper)
ISBN 9781612349466 (epub)
ISBN 978161234947-3 (mobi)
ISBN 978161234948-0 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union—Politics and government—1985–1991. | Russia (Federation)—Politics and government—1991– | Glasnost. | Perestroĭka. | Kovalev, A. A. (Andreĭ Anatol’evich) | Diplomats—Soviet Union—Biography. | Presidents—Soviet Union—Staff—Biography. | Political culture—Soviet Union—History. | Political culture—Russia (Federation)—History. | Post-communism—Russia (Federation)—History. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.
Classification: LCC DK288 .K6913 2017 | DDC 947—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037673
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
You might not be a poet
But it ought to give you pause
When you see a strip of light
Squeezing out between closed doors.
—Andrei Voznesenskii
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Diplomacy and Democratic Reforms
2. The August 1991 Coup: The Breaking Point
3. Anatomy of a Lost Decade, 1992–2000
4. How the System Really Works
5. Inside the Secret Police State
6. Strangling Democracy
7. The New Russian Imperialism
Conclusion
Cast of Characters
Chronology
Notes
Index
Foreword
Peter Reddaway
Andrei Kovalev’s powerful book argues that Russia’s trajectory since 1985 has been circular. First, Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues carried out an improbable series of revolutionary reforms, taking their country all the way—as baseball fans would say—from home plate to first base and on to second. After a revolution did in fact occur and the Soviet Union fell apart, Boris Yeltsin presided over a Russia that stumbled back and forth on its way to third base, where he handed it over to Vladimir Putin. Then Putin quietly flooded the system with his colleagues from the secret police, thus infusing it with a Committee for State Security (KGB) mentality. In so doing, he took Russia back to a version of home plate, to a rootless, corrupt, authoritarian, de-ideologized version of the Soviet Union.
Regarding the future, Kovalev sees little likelihood of change in the near term. Domestic policy will continue to become gradually more authoritarian, and foreign policy will feature additional unpredictability and hostility toward the West and its allies. Further ahead, he fears, lie greater dangers, including the possibility of territorial fragmentation. But he hopes that eventually Russia will rebuild itself from the bottom up and join the world community. This monumental task will probably take three generations.
In short, Kovalev’s book examines how and why, from 1985 to the present, Russia’s domestic and foreign policies evolved in the ways they did. Only occasionally does it look at Western policy toward Russia. When it does, the author often chides the West for not evincing enough interest or generosity toward his homeland, or for showing a disturbing naïveté in appeasing hard-liners in the administrations of Yeltsin and, especially, Putin.
Although the book’s initial primary audience was educated Russians, Westerners will be perfectly able to understand and benefit from its arguments. Kovalev’s lively prose style and the inner freedom of his attractive personality are additional guarantees of this.
The book refers on occasion to the well-known Russian thinker Pyotr Chaadaev, who, starting in 1836, wrote a somewhat similar work, a series of “Philosophical Letters.” In them he lamented his country’s chronic backwardness and inability to govern itself. He saw its future as lying in an eventual reunion with European civilization. For his pains, Emperor Nicholas I declared him to be insane. However, after some minor official efforts to treat him for his nonexistent condition, Chaadaev continued to be active in Moscow’s intellectual life. Now, 175 years later, Kovalev’s diagnosis of Russia’s condition evokes Chaadaev’s. So does Kovalev’s prescription for a cure.
As a former state official of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and then Russia, Kovalev bases parts of his book on his personal experiences. This applies especially to the years 1986–91, when he was closely involved in the implementation of high-level foreign policy and then worked briefly for President Gorbachev. He also roots his analysis in his training as a historian with a PhD, in the work of Russia’s most insi
ghtful commentators, and in the experiences of his many friends, including those of his diplomat father, Anatoly Kovalev, who retired as deputy head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1991.
During his thirty-year career, the author worked for the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies and the Diplomatic Academy (1977–85), the Soviet UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) commission (1985–87), the ministry’s Directorate for Humanitarian and Cultural Cooperation (1987–91), the USSR president’s office (1991), the Russian mission to the UN’s Geneva offices (1992–96), the Russian Security Council (1997–2001), the Russian mission to the European Community in Brussels (2001–4), and the Russian ombudsman for human rights (2004–7). Then, finding the Putin administration too politically oppressive, he moved to Belgium and settled in Brussels.
The first part of his book focuses mainly on the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods, the second part on the Putin era. Regarding Gorbachev’s so-called perestroika—that is, “the transition from totalitarianism to democracy” in just a few years—the author rightly calls it “probably one of the most interesting, most confused, and most paradoxical periods in the whole history of humanity.” Therefore, he goes on, “we should admit—as by no means everyone is ready to do—that each participant, and even observer, of those extraordinarily gripping and dramatic events possesses his own genuinely lived experience, which sometimes has nothing in common not only with what is conventionally called the truth, but even with simple plausibility. Yet they are all primary sources.”
The result, Kovalev says, is that a lot of memoirs, journalistic accounts, and academic studies—either deliberately or through ignorance of aspects of what happened—present distorted pictures of events. He himself has tried to avoid this outcome by writing primarily about things that he did or witnessed. Thus, under Gorbachev he was involved in attempts to dismantle totalitarianism, and later, as a diplomat and a Security Council official, he witnessed its regeneration.
As Kovalev emphasizes, the launching of perestroika was far from predetermined. There were elements of sheer chance in Gorbachev’s rising to the top and being able to push perestroika through with the strong support, initially, only of Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, and a rather small group of other officials. Since Shevardnadze was foreign minister, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was put to vigorous use as an instrument of change. Meanwhile, most of the other ministries were much less keen on change, and some, like the Ministry of Health, surreptitiously sided with the reactionaries.
Among Soviet diplomats, Kovalev stresses, there were both progressives and conservatives. Shevardnadze mobilized the former, including Kovalev father and son, and tried—with decreasing success over time—to neutralize the latter.
The liberals had usually spent years living abroad. This made it easy for them to observe how far, contrary to Soviet propaganda, the USSR was lagging behind the advanced countries in many fields, notably human rights. Helpfully, the author presents at this point some insightful portraits of senior MINISTRY progressives such as his father, Shevardnadze, Anatoly Adamishin, Vladimir Petrovsky, and Alexei Glukhov. The author notes that the ministry’s leadership was sometimes referred to as the “Shevardnadze-Kovalev team,” a reflection of his father’s personal authority and closeness to Shevardnadze.
How did it happen that Shevardnadze gave Andrei Kovalev important jobs? The key reason was that Kovalev had been the lead writer for an outstandingly successful speech that Gorbachev gave to the international forum “For a Non-nuclear World, for the Survival of Humankind” in February 1987. In this speech Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to implicitly abandon Marxism and declare that human rights and values were universal. Thus, Kovalev, logically enough, was assigned to the ministry team whose charge was to ensure the massive domestic reforms that the speech effectively promised would be implemented. They involved bringing Soviet legislation into line with the international human rights covenants that the USSR under Brezhnev had signed. This was a major task, given the strong incentive the KGB-aligned leaders of, for example, Soviet psychiatry and the Russian Orthodox Church had to prevent anything more than cosmetic changes from being made to the existing laws.
Kovalev found himself dealing with precisely these people. Their fierce opposition meant that change could only be achieved in stages, over three or four years. Even then, some loopholes remained. It was a strange mission for diplomats to take on, moving domestic legislation in fields where they had no qualifications.
Kovalev’s first meeting with the bosses of Soviet psychiatry provoked brazen denials of ethical abuse. Then, after he warned them that reform had been ordered from the top, they collectively walked out. His comment: “We met extraordinary resistance from the Ministry of Health.” When asked to supply copies of existing regulations on the procedures for forcible hospitalization, ministry officials replied: “There are no regulations.” Kovalev then made the same request in a private meeting with the USSR’s chief psychiatrist Alexander Churkin. He got the same answer. However, by this time he had obtained the regulations from a source of his own. He had been shocked by what he read. The documents contained no significant safeguards of citizens’ rights, and that made it easy for a relative or coworker or KGB officer to summon a doctor and have any individual, dissident or otherwise, forcibly interned in a mental hospital without reference to a court. The regulations had been signed by a deputy prime minister of health in 1984; however, in view of its unconstitutional and KGB-friendly provisions, it had been treated as a state secret. When Kovalev revealed this knowledge, Churkin sheepishly admitted the document’s existence. Then he demanded to know: “How did you learn about it?”
To break down such resistance, Kovalev and his team collected evidence of different forms of abuse from dissidents, liberal lawyers, and a couple of secretly helpful psychiatrists; investigated lists of abuse victims that had been provided by Western governments and human rights groups; wrote interministerial documents that quoted from the liberal psychiatric laws of Vladimir Lenin’s government; and offered the top psychiatric officials the carrot of diplomatic help to get the USSR readmitted to the World Psychiatric Association. This was attractive because in 1983 Soviet psychiatry had been pushed out of the association as punishment for using phony diagnoses to intern sane dissidents in mental institutions. Finally, in 1989 after most of these individuals had been released, Shevardnadze and Gorbachev forced a still-resistant Ministry of Health to go along with a lengthy inspection visit to the USSR by a large delegation of American psychiatrists. The group’s charge was to investigate all aspects of the system of abuse. As a member of this delegation, I witnessed firsthand several attempts by ministry officials to disrupt the visit.1
On another topic, Kovalev and his team set about trying to get freedom of religious belief introduced in the USSR and appropriate legislation passed. Predictably, they encountered forms of determined resistance from the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church that closely paralleled the unscrupulous blocking tactics of the psychiatrists. The Orthodox leaders were deeply frightened of freedom being given to, in particular, Roman Catholics, Protestants, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. These leaders would lose not only a significant proportion of their flock but also several thousand physical churches that had been taken from the other denominations as a result of Josef Stalin’s bans and persecutions. Furthermore, their goal of having the Russian Orthodox Church reacquire its tsarist-era status as Russia’s established national church would be seriously jeopardized.
Kovalev describes vividly his meetings with some of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church and other churches. He observed the predictable effects of their long-term collaboration with the KGB and was dismayed by “the complete absence of spirituality in my religious interlocutors.” One of the Orthodox hierarchs, while wining and dining him, disturbed him with his worldliness and his enthusiasm over the murder of the dissident priest Alexander Men.
Gorbachev’s fall from power in 1991 evoked Kovalev’s regret but not surprise. From the spring of that year he had observed up close, from his seat outside Gorbachev’s office, the rise of the conservative and reactionary opposition. He believes, as did Yakovlev, that Gorbachev’s biggest mistake was to steadily emasculate the Communist Party. As its head, he should have maneuvered it into supporting and coleading his reforms until enough of a new system was in place. Then he could have gradually disengaged from it. Instead, by eroding and humiliating it, he provoked strong elements within it that, in alliance with their comrades in the KGB and the military, gradually created a hydra-headed opposition.
This opposition made its first major strike in the August 1991 coup. Although the revolt was overthrown in three days by the political resistance of Yeltsin, the Balts, and others, the hard-liners never went away. As Kovalev persuasively argues, after the USSR’s collapse, they regrouped around the Russian parliament and Yeltsin’s crony and personal security chief, the former KGB officer Alexander Korzhakov. Then, even though in 1993 Yeltsin outlawed the parliament and used military force to kill or arrest those who resisted, and even though in 1996 he fired Korzhakov and two of his allies, after each of these occasions the hard-liners regrouped and once again advanced. Key landmarks for them were their successes in persuading Yeltsin in 1994 to invade Chechnya, in 1998 to appoint Putin as Federal Security Service (FSB) head and Yevgeny Primakov as prime minster, and in 1999 to elevate Putin to the premiership.
Kovalev had had misgivings about Yeltsin ever since his political rise in the late 1980s. He had noticed—along with virtues like Yeltsin’s inclination to support personal freedoms and free media—his authoritarian personality, his excessive hunger for power, his love of anonymous denunciations of individuals, his readiness to lie when convenient, his toleration of slack and incompetent performance by his staff (a gross example being the work of the foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko), and his drinking, which allowed his associates to manipulate his decisions easily when he had drunk too much alcohol. All this gave rise to contradictory behavior. Yeltsin would resist the hard-liners in both domestic and foreign policy but then suddenly give in to them. Moreover, when his popularity slumped, he created the oligarchs, bought their political support, and approved the crude manipulation of the 1996 election in order to get himself reelected as president. Meanwhile, under his rule the Russian intelligentsia felt unprotected. They were besieged from two sides. On the one hand, they were scared of any return to communism. On the other hand, they feared the further impoverishment of themselves and of Russia. Thus, they tended to abdicate their traditional independence and uncritically support the authorities.