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1985-1994: the Romanovschina[edit]
The Romanovschina of 1985-1994 has often been referred to as a "golden age" of communist rule. A rough peasant reformer made famous as Party secretary in Leningrad, Grigory Vasilevich Romanov entered Soviet politics as the hardliner’s favourite in the struggle for power under Chernenko. When he gained the secretariat, his restructuring of the military-security complex and massive campaign against corruption gained him support, both within the party and with the common man. His bureaucratic repression methods reminded many (fondly, after Brezhnev) of the Stalinist years, and Romanov similarly embraced Great-Russian nationalism in a bid for popularity. This was profoundly illustrated by the state sanctioned celebrations, in 1988, of the thousand-year anniversary of the Baptism of Kievan Rus, where for the entire summer, government-supported celebrations and festivities occurred, and many churches and monasteries were re-opened. Though the implicit ban on religious propaganda on state television would not be truly lifted until 1996, for the first time, soviet citizens could see religious services on television.
His rule was also made famous for his push towards nuclear energy for the fullfillment of the nation’s energy needs. Narrated with the slogan “The atom works for peace,” Romanov’s nuclear policy also included the mass-production of urban electric cars, which, for the first years of their existence, were plagued by complicated and unreliability. By the mid 1990’s, however, soviet industry was producing far simpler (and therefore cheaper and more reliable) electric autos for both the domestic and export market under the Lada brand. This freed up the USSR’s extensive oil and natural gas reserves for export.
Brezhnev’s stagnant rule had entrenched corruption throughout the party apparatus that spanned the USSR, and inefficiency became the key for personal gain throughout the Union. Romanov’s blend of economic restructuring and police action produced, at the cost of human freedoms, a noticeable (if fairly short lived) revival of the soviet economy, along traditional centrally-planned lines. However, while his war on corruption killed off most high-level corruption in the party, the extensive low-level corruption throughout the millions of bureaucrats at the lower rungs of the communist apparatus was far harder to purge.
By early 1994, the economy had begun to show signs of stagnation, and nine years under Romanov’s party administration had created a similar effect politically. By the end of the year, a fresh-faced reformer from Volgograd had taken the secretariat.
1994-1999: Reform and Collapse[edit]
Fyodor Yurivich Shevchenko became the Party Secretary in October of 1994, and began his rule with openly liberal policies. By 1995, he had already begun new economic reforms based around self-financing and general economic decentralization. Though he had an anti-corruption campaign similar to that of Romanov’s announced, resistance from within both the KGB and MVD restricted the effects of Kremlin policies. A major sign of his liberalization campaign was the renouncement of the Brezhnev doctrine (in 1997) which had guided Warsaw Pact internal affairs since the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Relaxed freedoms lead to a flourishing of soviet art and expression, and the newfound political freedom of citizens both in the USSR and Warsaw pact were applauded by observers in the west (By 1997, the first semi-free elections for local positions were held, with stunningly anti-communist results.) Additionally, a treaty signed in 1998 granted unprecedented autonomy and individual freedoms to the individual republics (in the hope of placating political tensions).
However, his economic policies had largely destructive effects domestically. The centrally planned economy of the USSR was to be changed to a state-owned, self-financed market economy. To allow this, Shevchenko legalized small independent businesses in the hopes of cushioning the transition. However, this allowed the massive soviet black-market, which already made up a huge percentage of the national economy and thrived on theft and corruption, a legal excuse to operate. Directed by an extensive network of low-level party bosses and managers who sold state property on the free black market, the new laws served only to legitimize the informal economy’s bosses, creating a pseudo-legal criminal bureaucracy from the collapsing Communist Party. Chronically pilfered from, the state industries were unable to self-finance and instead were fed endless state resources which were then stolen away. Though a combination of strong Moscow control and European loans revitalized a handful of state industries, the economy continued to decline.
By the late 1990s, the beleaguered Soviet central government was increasingly relying upon the profits from its massive oil exports to survive as the economy collapsed around it. To make matters worse, neither the new democratic leadership operating at lower levels or the newly (economically) independent lower party apparatus would follow Moscow’s lead politically or economically.
In 1998, the soviet government was rocked by the collapse of first the Polish government, then the East German government. With soviet control on the wane, the Baltic republics of the USSR began to furiously push for independence (with Lithuania actually declaring independence in 1999), aggravating the besieged central government and prompting the Soviet military to occupy the Baltic capitals. In 1999, Yuri Vadimovich Lebed, a protégé of Shevchenko, rose to prominence within the Congress of Soviets through harsh criticism of Shevchenko’s slow pace of reform. After winning a majority in the elections for Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, Lebed lead the elected chairmen of the other Republics to pressure the politburo for full political freedom and autonomy, and free elections for the council of ministers.
In response, the conservative soviet leadership sent the military into Moscow to dissolve the Congress of Soviets. They were met by massive crowds of unarmed protesters, and after several days of tension in Moscow and unrest in the capitals of the larger republics, the military command of the occupying force swore allegiance to Lebed and the congress of Soviets. Over the next month, the party leadership gave up power and Shevchenko resigned as president of the Soviet Union. This prompted fully democratic elections for the Council of ministers, which became a conference of Republic leaders. At the first session of the democratic council of ministers, the council redefined the relationship between the republics and the place of the central government. The Soviet Union became, no longer just in theory, a voluntary union of republics, based on the soviet system, who shared the cost of maintaining a federal armed forces and border guard service and would be engaged in fully free trade. The KGB would be replaced by the Interrepublican Security Service, and local organizations would take on the role of internal security. The federal armed forces would consist of regional formations from every republic, under central government (ie Russian) officers that could be called to action in case of emergency or war. However, economic and political decisions within a country would be fully independent of federal meddling. The Supreme Soviet, the all-republic ruling chamber of the USSR, would still exist, but after the decentralization of political power would function as little more than a symbol of unity among the post-communist nations of the USSR. Under the new leadership, the Soviet Union as a federal entity still existed. The vast soviet army, albeit far weaker and less disciplined, was still to be maintained. The military units were now homogeneous to the regions they were based in while remaining (nominally) under federal command. Many of these units in central Asia were also supported by all-Russian units loyal to Moscow, with the aim of “maintaining stability” (Critics saw this as another way that Russia could continue to dominate the USSR, an observation that was largely true). From there, with the absence of the Soviet Central government, hopes for peaceful independence and co-existence flourished. The turn of the century, and the new millennium, had grand promise for the peoples of the Soviet Union.
2000-2016: War, Reform, and the Rise of the Criminal State[edit]
However, republic-level agitation was not the limit on feelings of national self-determination. In the north Caucasus, the Abkhazian and South Ossetian provisional governments began wars of secession against the government of Georgia. Weak central control lead to the de facto independence of sub-republican governments throughout the Caucasus and other ethnically diverse areas of Russia (see Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Kalmyk ASSR, Republic of Tatarstan) , and the Confederation of the Peoples of the Caucasus, a movement beginning in the late 1990s, burst into prominence in the region as an informal military force independent of the majority republic governments. In Azerbaijan, the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, populated by ethnic Armenians, became the place of a formal war between the Azerbaijani and Armenian governments. Tajikistan became a site of war between the secular democratic government, the Islamic Renaissance movement, and ethnic minority militants. All throughout central Asia and the Caucasus, low-level conflict bloomed. The Russian Federated Republic, still the most powerful of the republics, began to deploy troops in Central Asia to protect the ethnic Russian populations, whom were being targeted, in these conflicts, for reprisals. In Tajikistan, with only sixty percent of the population native to the republic, the secular Tajik government soon became co-opted by Russian and Uzbek military interests.
Throughout the soviet sphere, while democracy was in place theoretically, the reduction and collapse of the vast central ideological-bureaucratic support structure made ideology and politics secondary to survival. Though personal freedoms as they were enjoyed in the west were at an all-time high, the life-spans and birthrates of most of the European soviet nations continued the steady decline which begun in the reform period.
By 2010, Russia was both powered by the atom and desperately poor, with an economy booming with oil revenues while suffocating under mafia rule. It was a bizarre post-utopian paradox of acceleration and decline. AIDS, growing in strength since the 1990s, loomed with epidemic proportions on the horizon. Alcoholism, poverty and desperation drove the average life span to levels equal to those in the developing world. The new era of criminality pushed murder rates to all-time highs. And the soviet legacy of abortions gave Russia the lowest birth rate in the USSR. To put it simply, the long-term trends of Russian decline continued despite the introduction of democracy. To make matters worse, the criminal bureaucracy, which had existed parallel to the democratic movement at first, began to co-opt and dominate the elected government. Instead of rapid “shock” reforms, Lebed and his government, already with greatly diminished political control, were unwilling to facilitate full reform and modernization in the state industry, creating situations where state industries could not deliver production or wages and forcing the Russian economy into the hands of far more flexible informal economic structures. The unwieldy communist economy remained in place without ideological support or justification, and while political reform had fully arisen, Lebed was content to keep the status quo set during the Communist reform period. In effect, it would appear that the moral vacuum that had been left in the wake of communism would not be replaced but in fact would simply become more pronounced.
However, following eight years under Lebed’s nominally reformist capitalist leadership, and the steep drop in quality of life, the leadership that would be elected to follow in his footsteps would not reform, but destroy. The next two administrations (lead respectively by Chairmen Aleksander Makashov and Oleg Glazyev) to rule the Congress of Soviets would come into power on promises of full, prosperous economic reform, but would end up rapidly privatizing many and repairing few industries, finding themselves either unable or actively unwilling to combat the criminalization of the state. Thusly the structures of the Soviet reform era (the “Leninist Economic Market”) persisted long past their expiration date, all the while decaying and corrupting. Self-financing in state industry was eventually achieved, but it left millions unemployed and state industries running as virtually privatized organizations (alongside actually privatized organizations) under the criminal/bureaucratic elite. By the controversial 2012 elections, privatization had further concentrated economic power beyond the common man.
The Russian people had emerged from the communist era expecting freedom, but instead found themselves subjugated by the same hard-eyed Party elite. As the Russian population fell, the leadership turned increasingly to the ever expanding surplus Moslem populations of the central Asian USSR, importing workers to fill out Russian factories. They saw the problems of population loss, but neglected to foresee the obvious societal problems arising from ethnically foreign workers combined with eighty-three years of ethnically chauvinist authoritarianism. This free-trade in labour would not only increase ethnic tensions within Russia, but play an important part in the governments to come.
By 2015, dissatisfaction with democracy, “reforms”, and the past few governments’ sheer ineffectiveness in regards to corruption (in fact, because of its symbiosis with the criminal/economic structures) had the masses incensed. As the 2016 elections rolled nearer, public opinion was becoming increasingly left-wing economically and nationalistic socially. Neo-fascist youth organizations were stronger than ever, and became a constant threat to the central Asian workers throughout Russian urban centers. The perception of the Russian public was that not only had democracy failed them, but so had capitalism as a system. To add to the woes of the Russian democratic leadership, the perception of a culture under attack was aggravated not only by the influx of soviet Moslems but the demographic rise of Moslems within Russia itself. The positive, westward-looking governments had been a tough sale, and they were now failing to live up their end of the bargain.
An opponent to both the reigning government and business interests, but allied with important conservative figures, was Sergei Nikolayevich Bakatin, the 52-year-old leader of the emerging Russian All-peoples’ Union, or ROS. Though he lacked the former communist party ties of the old school of politicians, Bakatin, a veteran of the Russian Volunteer brigades in Yugoslavia, had forged many important bonds with the new group of post-democratic populist and ethnic leaders coming into power at the local levels in Russia. He had first come to notoriety for hiring Cossacks as a police force while chairman of the Novosibirsk City Soviet. Supported for the Chairmanship by major parties like the All-Russian Social-Christian Union, a law-and-order party strong in Siberia and South Russia (Cossacks!) and the Communist and Agrarian Parties, the ROS was a centre-right party with the slogan of “Nationalism, Patriotism, and Governmentalism”. The strongest part of the ROS party line was the policy of nationalization of all industry essential to the economy and the goal of full employment, soviet style. The other parties supporting Bakatin as Chairman were strongly socialist, traditionalist, or both (Party of National Revival).
2016-Present Day: Russian Revival[edit]
In the 2016 elections, Bakatin was elected with a slim majority of votes against the liberal-democratic reigning party. The next four years would see a period of nationalization of industry, a strengthening of the military-industrial complex, and a new intolerance to corruption. It would not be until the victory of the 2020 elections that the full isolationist-traditionalist process would begin.