THE DAY AFTER
On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev signed his resignation as President of the USSR. In this premature winter night of Moscow latitudes, the Soviet flag flying over the Kremlin was taken down and replaced by the tricolor one of Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was ratified the next day by the Supreme Soviet. USSR, which was experiencing a final spasm after the abolition by the Congress of Deputies, in the spring of 1990, of Article 6 of the Constitution on the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party, after the putsch of August 1991 and the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), on December 8, 1991, by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his counterparts from Belarus and Ukraine, had it really disappeared?
The question may be asked in the Day After, but the Day Before was mainly the considerable work of Mikhail Gorbachev, who changed the world by breaking down internal mechanisms of the system, breathing in a wind of freedom, regardless of the risks to power in the short and medium term, and setting himself the rule of abolishing the Brezhnev Doctrine on so-called ‘limited sovereignty’ and the peaceful settlement of external disputes. En route to ‘Russia House’
On August 19, 1991, tanks rolled into Moscow while Mikhail Gorbachev, on vacation with his family in the Crimea, saw his resort transformed into a residence under surveillance. I am still in New York, awaiting my departure for Russia, observing from a distance this event of worldwide dimension, a considerable jolt in the evolution of a weakened Soviet Union, which is now confirmed to be in its death throes.
The information in the first hours is fragmentary. The televisions first broadcast images of an empty and gloomy Soviet capital, whose pale lighting, which gives a glimpse of armored means in the darkness, gives an even more sinister aspect.
The emerging coup appears to be a conservative reaction from within the system. The Army, the KGB, the Ministry of the Interior - the so-called ‘force structures’ (siloviki) - seem in the initial confusion to have sided with the coup plotters, who are given a chance to win.
I read the diplomatic correspondence from our post in Moscow, which, I imagine, requires a great deal of composure and even courage in these circumstances when it comes to observing the street right up to the White House, that is to say, the Parliament, which is one of the epicenters of the crisis.
In the disorder of the end of the Soviet Union, in counterpoint to the frozen world it embodied, it is very difficult to know what is really going on, at least in the first days, and on which side the scales will tip. The complexity of the affair is such that, years later, the thesis will circulate that Mikhail Gorbachev himself, noting the failure of his policy of openness and reform, would have been the instigator of the coup, to then carry out a recovery that he would have premeditated.
In the heat of the moment, our chargé d'affaires on the spot in the absence of the ambassador, took the risk of estimating - because there was a need to provide an analysis to Paris as soon as possible‘that basically, the man in the street is no doubt content with what is similar to an imposition…'. This judgment will ultimately prove to be totally erroneous, but, in the meantime, France cannot remain silent and President Mitterrand has decided to speak on television. He would later be reproached for
having implied in the name of necessary state-to-state relations, especially with a country of such importance, that a dialogue was possible with the new selfproclaimed Soviet authorities. Honesty and historical truth require that this criticism be substantially corrected.
The President of the French Republic had at the time of his public intervention only incomplete information, including the analysis of the embassy.
Mikhail Gorbachev, under house arrest in Foros in Crimea, could not communicate with the outside world. It is necessary to review the televised performance of the President of the Republic.
The latter, quite boldly, believes that the movement for freedom, initiated in 1985, will not stop here, whatever happens, and he clearly condemns the putsch. The main concern he expressed was for the security of Mikhail Gorbachev - and at that time also of Boris Yeltsinand this may explain why he
proceeded to read out live on television, for which he was particularly reproached, a letter from the leader of the putschists, Gennadi Ianaev (see State Committee for the State of Emergency), affirming that he would continue with the policy initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. Everyone knows what happened next. The ‘man in the street’ did not accept it and Boris Yeltsin was the incarnation of the resistance, perched on a tank in front of the White House, in a posture reminiscent of Lenin in Petrograd in 1917.
At that time, it was not easy to make sound judgments in the context of a Soviet Union that one felt was about to disappear. This would be replaced a few months later by the bubbling of a new Russia engaged in what was called a 'period of transition’, which is probably not finished.
As for the attitude of France in the first hours of the removal of the legal president of Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev himself publicly
estimated years later that François Mitterrand probably did not have the right information and that in any case he had always considered him as his friend.
The embassy's chargé d'affaires managed to be on the plane that brought Mikhail Gorbachev and his family back from Foros to Moscow, while Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, Iazov, the Minister of Defense, and Lukyanov, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, were under arrest at the bottom of the plane.
As for the thesis of a pact concluded between the Russian leader and the coup plotters, it developed especially when the affair turned out badly for the frondeurs.
Sixteen years later, in October 2007, I accompanied a French minister to Mikhail Gorbachev's home in the premises of his Foundation, together with the French ambassador. I made the mistake of telling him that I had arrived in his country for the first time a few days after the putsch against him was launched. He blushed, could not say a word, and finally turned on me, proof that his imprisonment in Foros remained a traumatic event. Did his feelings at the time remind him of the tsar and the imperial family in Yekaterinburg?
The paroxysmal moment of the putsch, which was over by August 22, had passed when I arrived in Moscow on September 12. I understood that my task was no longer to observe the Soviet Union as a fairly predictable actor in international relations in the context of an East-West opposition that had its codes and rules.
The reference points became blurred when one had no direct knowledge of the country. Would Erich Honecker's East Germany, where I had been stationed some ten years earlier, provide keys to understanding the great sister country, or would it have been nothing more than a lesson administered by a Germany obsessed above all by the development of inter-German relations in the perspective of reunification?
What did we expect from this huge country that was wobbling on its foundation? Didn't we hope too quickly that it would come closer to our European values? Didn't the fascination that Russian culture and arts had always exerted in Europe, and especially in France, contribute to create the illusion of proximity and of a rapid rapprochement? Were we ready to get out of the mental patterns of the Cold War and to accept, if need be, that there could be a way between the failure of communism, which was obvious in many respects,
and the excesses of capitalism, to which, moreover, all the peoples of the so-called free world did not necessarily adhere? Were we able to abstain from the geopolitical reflection, towards which Russia by its multiple dimensions and its own permanent fundamental questioning on its Eastern or Western destiny - inherited from an old debate opposing since the 19th century slavophiles and Westernists - always leads us? The daily life of a population having to operate an incredible mental revolution, to rebuild most of the economic and social structures and to live simply without the anaesthetizing protection brought by communism, facing new hardships of the existence, largely responsible for the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev, would it not be finally the main emergency of the 90’s?
The classical recipes for approaching and understanding the end of the USSR were inoperative at the time. It was difficult to define a method, without reference points, without contacts while new heads were emerging.
A country of 22 million km2 was undergoing a prolonged earthquake. The physical impression was that the ground was shaking under our steps and was going to restore, at the end of a ‘Brezhnevian glaciation’, decades of buried energies. My first free time in Moscow was used to go and look for bullet holes on the walls of the White House. It would be even worse during the so-called transition period with the battle of the Parliament in October 1993, not to mention the first war in Chechnya, which would also mark a break with Mikhail Gorbachev's policy.
And yet, he had provided us with a compass when our compasses were going haywire. On December 7, 1988, in New York, before a UN General Assembly transformed into a rock star concert, where groupies were sitting on the floor and on the stairs because of lack of space, he announced the reduction of the Soviet armed forces by 500,000 men
in two years, including 50,000 in East Germany alone, the end of the Brezhnev doctrine on limited sovereignty and the end of the leading role of the Communist Party. Some people could not believe their ears and thought they heard Teilhard de Chardin talking about the omega point, but this was the roadmap that the last Soviet leader followed. In the movie theaters of New York, one could see The Russian House with Michelle Pfeiffer and Sean Connery while the Gorbachev concept of a ‘common European house »’ was being developed. Michelle Pfeiffer alone helped to remove the last reluctance. It was time to leave for Moscow.
A dramatic transition before and after the Putsch
The sequence of events during the last two years of the Soviet Union is known. We can briefly remember it.
The spring of 1990 was marked by the first death of Soviet communism: Mikhail Gorbachev was paradoxically ‘elected’ president of the USSR by the Supreme Soviet, while a short time earlier Article 6 of the Constitution on the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party had been abolished by the Congress of Deputies on the proposal of the same Gorbachev, endorsed by the plenum of the Central Committee. In perfect keeping with the Soviet tradition of contrition and confession, it is the Communist Party itself that has allowed it to be put aside for good, but it will continue to exist as a dead star.
In the same way, and we are skipping a few steps here, it will be the Supreme Soviet of the USSRwhich had been nothing but a shadow theater for months - that will formally ratify the end of the USSR on December 26, 1991.
In November 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was attacked in the Supreme Soviet by conservatives.
He probably made the mistake of dismissing liberals who supported him in favor of them. In the new Security Council, six of the nine members, including Kryushkov, the head of the KGB, Pugo, the Minister of the Interior, Iazov, the Minister of Defence, and Janaev, the future head of the State Emergency Committee, would be putschists in August 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev was criticized by the West for a conservative turn, while Boris Yeltsin questioned his ‘dictatorial’ power and Shevardnadze, the foreign minister, resigned.
In January 1991, Lithuania was the first republic to want to leave the Union. Gorbachev said of this crisis that it was a ‘provocation behind his back to bind him in blood’. On March 17, he had a referendum on the maintenance of the Union ('renewed Federation of sovereign and equal republics’) adopted - in a way in response. Boris Yeltsin proposed to include in the same consultation the election of the Russian president by universal suffrage and he was actually elected on June 12.
The day after the putsch, the picture was bleak: the party was a defunct constellation; the presidential dyarchy was weakening the state; the state had even been brought down by the August 19 coup; the Union was disintegrating and Mikhail Gorbachev was desperately trying to save it with a new stillborn Treaty on the Union, scheduled for August 20, which would be precisely a major trigger for the putsch; the economy was in ruins and the population was disoriented, plagued by anxiety about the future that had replaced the reign of fear and terror.
Igumnov House at Zamoskvoreche
It was in this context that I arrived in Moscow from New York, but the Soviet ensemble could be another New World, in its own way, in a land of ancient culture and civilization. On that late autumn day, after the outburst of resistance around the White House a few weeks earlier, Gorky Street, since
renamed Tverskaya, led directly to the Kremlin. The dominant tan and ochre color of the season is also that of the walls of its enclosure. The citadel, although on a mound like all the Kremlins in the country, seemed to be buried, contrasting with the verticality of the American cities, as if to hide and resist the repeated flows of barbarians and conquerors who had wanted to dominate it. A cold dampness announced an early winter and a first impression of lethargy emerged. This slowed down time gave to the whole a very oriental tone.
The neighborhood of the French Embassy had various layers and architectures. The street that bordered the Igumnov House, the French residence, and led to the October Square from which Lenin's stature was never removed, was called Dimitrova after the Bulgarian communist leader. It would soon be renamed Yakimanka to recall that the district had been in the 19th century that of rich merchants, including Igumnov.
The latter had built a magnificent residence in the so-called Russian style, of which only a few remains in Moscow. And behind the embassy, adjoining the French Residence, which was an ochre stone building in Brezhnevian style, itself surrounded by the impressive building of the Ministry of the Interior adjacent to October Square, a charming historical district developed.
It was dotted with gardens and crossed by alleys, it housed many churches as well as the Tretiakov Gallery, a cenacle of Russian art with the most famous icons of Andrei Rublev, including the famous Trinity. One could have gotten lost, in the good sense of the word, if it had not also been crossed by straight streets, legacy of an ancient urban planning project. Such was the case with the Bolshaya Polianka or the Bolshaya Ordynka, which was said to have been laid out so that the tsarinas could go directly from the Kremlin to the Novodevichy Monastery,
where the Metropolitan officiates today.
This district, one of the most fascinating in Moscow from the historical point of view, is called Zamoskvoretche, i.e. ‘beyond the Moskva’, from the center which is the Kremlin.
In 1991, the neighborhood was even more isolated from the hustle and bustle of the huge capital than it has remained relatively today. Stores or restaurants were rare and the general slump hit them. During my first weekend in Moscow, I experienced a food supply problem. The only bakery on the avenue was delivered on Sunday afternoon and a queue formed immediately. The only choice was between white and black bread and the quantities were quickly exhausted. As soon as this was the case, the curtain of the store was drawn while a queue persisted on the sidewalk.
Such was the daily life at the end of the Soviet Union, made difficult by the uncertainties of economic policy.
This failure was attributed to the country's leadership and contributed greatly to Mikhail Gorbachev's unpopularity and downfall. The ‘they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work’ could no longer find any counterpart in minimal state protection. The situation was serious everywhere. For example, families had to feed their relatives who were hospitalized and, even more, to provide medicines that had become rare and very expensive. Finally, Soviet people did not understand that the dismantling of the communist system did not immediately bring them the supposed benefits of capitalism. This expectation, legitimate after so many years of frustration, even deprivation, fed the political and social tensions of the so-called ‘transition period’ (Переходный период) of which the battle of the Parliament in October 1993 - which also had other causes - was a violent and paroxysmal moment.
My main responsibility at the embassy was to follow the internal changes underway, in tandem with
a colleague who was particularly in charge of what had been called ‘kremlinology’ until then. The latter, a French diplomat of Russian origin, was much more at ease than I was in this environment where his family still had ties. Thanks to his connections, his previous experience in the post and his mastery of the Russian language, he had facilities that colleagues from other embassies did not, which enabled us to attend, inside the Kremlin, sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union or debates in the new Parliament. The new stars of political life, such as Chokhin and Chubais, were performing there and we could approach them without any formality.
The strong impression I had was that I was living in the eye of a cyclone, about to disrupt the world and its international relations, and at the same time evolving in a sidereal void.
The expectation of our analyses coming from our central administration at the Quai d'Orsay was legitimately great, but its counterpart, the MID or Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was traditionally an entry point for foreign diplomats, was of no help to us.
Our Soviet colleagues, in fact, did not escape the turmoil that affected not only their daily life, but also their institution. How could they have helped us to understand what they themselves did not master and which surprised them at every moment? Moreover, they did not have vocation to deal with internal questions. The decay of the MID was felt like that of all the institutions of a regime in the process of collapsing. It was not until the appointment in 1996 of Evgeny Primakov as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that this prestigious administration, which had always been full of first-rate talent, was raised, following the example of the deputy ministers Vitaly Tchourkine, in charge of questions of the former Yugoslavia,
or Sergei Lavrov, at the head of the Department of the United Nations and International Organizations.
I was soon to be put to the test. One morning in October 1991, my ambassador rushed into my office in a state of excitement that was not usual for him. He quickly explained to me that Mikhail Gorbachev, on his way back from the Madrid Conference on Middle East, would be received the same day in Latche in the Landes by President Mitterrand. I had only a few hours to take stock of the country's economic and social situation.
Having arrived in the post a few weeks earlier, in the context described, I had the feeling that I was facing a Himalaya that would be difficult to climb.
I tried at least to be clear, which was not the most difficult thing to do, since my knowledge was limited, and to be educational. The picture I painted was bleak enough for me to advocate emergency aid,
including food aid, through channels that could be those of what was then called the European Community. It seems that our Head of State paid attention to our analysis. Moreover, at the end of the talks, he publicly declared that ‘we had to help the Russians because they were Europeans’. This orientation seemed to me to be correct, in the measure of the difficulties of the Soviet Union at the time; on the other hand, I judged that the European character of Russia, a great question never decided by the Russians themselves, remained open.
If the period was marked by the decomposition of an old system, it was also that of a reconstruction all azimuths of many structures that we were going to discover with the ambassador one after the other. This great transformation took place at first rather calmly.
The putsch was behind us and the passage from the Soviet Union to Russia seemed to be done without apparent clashes. Nevertheless, Boris Yeltsin's leadership would soon become restless.
It is somewhat provocative to say, at least for an outside observer, that the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the transition were an exceptional and euphoric moment. Fear had disappeared with the gradual disappearance of the repressive apparatus and real contacts became possible. The climate would change with the ‘wild’ capitalism of the Yeltsin years, heralded by the ‘shock therapy’ of the Minister of Finance and then Prime Minister, Egor Gaïdar, and above all the policy of privatization, which in reality led to the private appropriation of most of the national wealth by a few, later called ‘oligarchs’.
The homo sovieticus revealed good sides: a form of carefree attitude guaranteed until then by the society, a taste for culture, indifference to money, authenticity in human relations. As mentioned, Moscow was quiet with its disproportionately large Stalinist avenues, which were almost empty of traffic.
An underground society was beginning to reveal itself cautiously. I remember taking part in a dinner organized in a communal apartment by a Russian woman who was fond of contemporary art. She had collected the best of the country's pictorial production all her life. In the room where we were, thousands of works of art were piled up and she began to exhibit them with caution. We were thinking that she was probably allowed to do so.
In any case, she later opened a gallery in New York that has since become very famous. Some social ascensions, for the most audacious and the most skillful, were thus lightning.
Seeds for change
In the political sphere, new faces would also quickly appear and impose themselves. I remember a dinner at the embassy in early October 1991, only two weeks after my arrival.
The people around me were complete strangers, but the host of the evening, the Deputy head of the embassy, had done a good job and had more than a flair for it. To my left was a young man, both shy and fiery, who was working in an economic institute at the time. His. name was Egor Gaïdar.
Opposite me sat a man, also very young in appearance, who was also active in an economic and social research center. His name was Lopoukhine and he was to become head of the Ministry of Energy, a considerable responsibility, while Gaïdar would become Minister of Economy before being chosen at less than forty years old, in the land of gerontocracy, to become the head of Boris Yeltsin's government.
Two other more mature people were also our guests: Vladimir Lukin, who would become a member of Parliament in the Duma, Russian ambassador to Washington and rapporteur for human rights in Russia (ombudsman); Evgeny Saburov, who was already part of the shortlived post-putsch ‘government structure’ (NB: Committee for the Operational Management of the Soviet Economy headed by Ivan
Silaev) and would later be the de facto prime minister of Crimea even before its return to the Russian fold. All of them stood up, just after dinner, citing ‘work’ to be completed, but without indicating that they would be called to high office a few days later. The new Russia seemed to be made of both improvisation and a certain romanticism that would not last.
Boris Yeltsin must be credited not only with the courage to have resisted the putschists in Moscowas did Mikhail Gorbachev, who refused to submit in the isolation of Foros - but also with the audacity of having chosen a Russian government whose average age was no more than forty years. The new ministers sometimes had the reverse side of their qualities by appearing somewhat disconnected from the deep realities of the country. Egor Gaïdar, for example, was an intellectual, the son of a great historian, who spoke in technocratic Russian to an often dazed audience of members of Parliament, as if he had used Harvard or Princeton English,
which he mastered also very well. He would have got a great success in American universities, but this provoked a particularly marked culture shock in this Duma.
This bet on Russian youth was well founded. From the beginning I was impressed by the adaptability of the Russian youth and by the multitude of talents in a country with a high level of school and university education. This was an achievement of Soviet communism that must be recognized and facilitated the adaptation to a brutal transition. I was fascinated, for example, by the emergence of the banking system where young professionals were operating with the help of disciplines that were new to them, including a massive use of computers that seemed to me to be even ahead of those of practices in our societies. The steps were taken and skipped cheerfully.
This positive development was not free of serious obstacles inherited from the burdens of the previous system and the conditions of transition. In the end, Yeltsin faced the same obstacles as Gorbachev, but he approached them differently. His liberals were more focused on economic policy than on philosophical convictions; the conservatives were the same, but even more radicalized, understandably so, because of the shock therapy. Relations with the opposition gradually degenerated into direct confrontation.
In December 1992, the Parliament finally refused to grant confidence to Prime Minister Egor Gaïdar, whom Boris Yeltsin was unable to maintain; the President's second choice was the Secretary of the Security Council, Yuri Skokov, also without success.
Only Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had spent part of his career with the state-owned Gazprom and was looking like a Soviet apparatchik, was finally acceptable to the Duma. Chernomyrdin, who was only a third choice, remained Prime Minister from 1992 to 1998, i.e., for almost the entirety of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. The first transition was thus embodied by a man who had responsibilities in the country's immobility.
Patrick Pascal
Former Ambassador, in Moscow for Russia,Ukraine and Belarus
The opposition, even confrontation, of the executive and legislative branches was exacerbated by a serious constitutional crisis. Strangely enough, the constitution still in force in the new Russia was the Soviet constitution of 1977. It allowed the Duma to systematically challenge presidential decrees by legislating differently on the same issues.
I remember accompanying the President of the French Constitutional Council to the house of the President of the Parliament, the Chechen Ruslan Khasbulatov. Robert Badinter gave his interlocutor, himself a graduate of the Moscow Law Faculty, a masterly lecture on constitutional law. The debate was no longer legal, but political. Yeltsin's own vice-president, the very popular Alexander Rutskoi, a former hero of Afghanistan as a fighter pilot,
sided with the opposition to the executive of which he was a leading figure.
This was probably too much for the president, who, in October 1993, after an interminable and paralyzing crisis, solved the problem by calling in the tanks of the Department of the Interior's Special Forces. For a whole day, under my windows, the tanks poured their shells on the White House, causing gaping holes. The insurgents surrendered at the end of the day, but all night the building burned. The building was quickly wrapped - as Christo could have done - and several hundred Turkish workers were urgently called in to remove all traces of the confrontation within a few weeks.
How many victims were there? We will probably never know, but probably more in Moscow than during the civil war in the early years of communism.
The embassy doctor, a remarkable woman who had experienced Chernobyl, offered the authorities blood donations. She could not see any injured people as if there were none. The West practically turned a blind eye to this episode, which in the end was a form of acquiescence, if not encouragement, to the use of violence. It is not forbidden to think that the first war in Chechnya was part of this spiral.
The ‘Near Abroad’
Serious tensions arose beyond this part of Russian territory, in what was called the ‘near abroad'. The Abkhazian conflict in Georgia degenerated under Yeltsin's presidency. There were at least three identified decision-making centers in Moscow: the MID had appointed an ad hoc ambassador who was at the same time the president's special envoy; the army
had its own interests in the Black Sea area where high-ranking officers had holiday homes (NB: there are sometimes petty reasons for big stories). The arbitrations of the presidency, despite Ambassador Kazimirov’s efforts, with whom we were in regular contact, were never clear. Ukraine became a major problem as soon as the CIS was established on 8 December 1991. It seems that Ukrainian President Kravchuk was then willing to return Crimea to Russia, a possibility that Boris Yeltsin would not have seized in the euphoria of his rival Gorbachev's ouster. But there was almost more important than that in the relationship with Ukraine. The difficult dialogue with Kiev included the question of sharing the Black Sea fleet and the issue of millions of mixed families.
As Moscow was the heir to the Kievan Rus, the internal rift was considerable and would never be overcome. The vice-president Rutskoy had an article published one day on the front page of the daily press with a huge title: ‘I, Russian officer, of Ukrainian mother’. Everything had been said.
Not even Central Asia, which Mikhail Gorbachev had tried at all costs to keep in the bosom of the Soviet Union, supported in particular by President Akaev of Kyrgyzstan and even more so until the last days of his power by President Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan, has moved away from the center of empire. Since 1991, the French ambassador tried to meet, as much as he could, political leaders of the Central Asian republics when they were in Moscow. In addition to domestic politics, I was supposed to cover evolution of these republics and the ambassador introduced me in the
autumn of 1991 to President Islam
Karimov of Uzbekistan, underlining all the interest we had in his country which was to become independent. President Karimov (NB: at that time still president of the Supreme Soviet of his republic) pointed an almost vengeful finger at me, but he was actually talking to Russia, saying: ‘Come to Tashkent, you will see the real Uzbek realities and not the turpitudes that are described in the Soviet press!’. The tea towel was already burning.
I did visit Uzbekistan several times in the following months, but in a private capacity. Almost twentyfive years later, President Karimov, a few months before his death, came on an official visit to the Central Asian country where I was ambassador. In accordance with protocol, I had to greet him and could then exchange a few words.
I reminded him of the meeting at the embassy in Moscow so many
years earlier without mentioning the quoted phrase in full, and told him that I had visited his country several times as he had urged me to do. In the evening, after the state dinner, he broke with protocol and came towards me to thank me effusively for my visits, proof if it were still needed of the strength of an exacerbated Uzbek national feeling. In the case of Uzbekistan, it was necessary to take into account the fact that the main demographic weight and focus of Islam in Central Asia had been suppressed under Soviet communism.
New Russia and Far West/East
The Day Before probably did not end with the departure of Mikhail Gorbachev, but rather during Boris Yeltsin’s first years of the transition period. Faced with the same problems as his predecessor, but with a different temperament and different principles, the president of Russia enjoyed greater support
from the Western world. Mikhail Gorbachev, desperate because of the failure of his economic policy (see ‘500 Days Program’), was bitter when he realized at the G7 meeting in London, where he was invited in June 1991, that it was easier for President Bush Sr. to finance his Gulf War than to help Russia. Margareth Thatcher, who had always supported Mikhail Gorbachev since 1984, as well as President Mitterrand, had tried to weigh in on his behalf, but largely unsuccessfully.
There had been Western economic advisers in the Russian ministries. They had encouraged a policy of free trade and thus a lifting of customs protection. Such a policy turned out to be disastrous, as Russia, lagging behind in many technological developments, was not able to face international competition. This contributed to the collapse of its industrial production.
This was the view of French experts, including a former CEO of Renault, who had been a consultant in connection with the privatization of the ZIL factories (Завод имени Ленина or Lenin factories) known for their trucks and huge black official limousines. The latter had told me: ‘The Russians did not listen to us a year ago, but now they have understood’. It was late, but it is true that Boris Yeltsin had been able to draw short-term benefits from his opening to the West. He was immune to criticism from outside and benefited from billions of dollars from the IMF and other Western aid, without which his reelection in 1996, against the communist Gennady Zyuganov, would probably not have been possible.
Even more seriously, during the campaign for his re-election in 1996, Boris Yeltsin was led to conclude a ‘Faustian’ pact
with those who began to be systematically called ‘oligarchs’. Privatization, in the sense of the appropriation of national wealth by a few, was then completed. From then on, there was effectively no more Soviet Union, but no more state capitalism, which would have been preferable for the community. There was almost nothing left of the Gorbachev years, a parenthesis between two systems.
The Day After began and it is not over yet. Russia will one day have to question itself in depth, ‘rehabilitate’ in a way Mikhail Gorbachev and beyond that continue its duty to take stock. The banning of the NGO Memorial inquiring on
crimes of Stalinism era at the end of 2021 is a worrying signal in this respect. Albert Camus wrote in L'Homme révolté that the end does not justify the means you resort to. On the contrary, the nature of the means often determines the end.
As for us, don't we have our responsibilities in what Russia has become? Have we not been too complacent about internal political violence that can never lead to democracy? To have relativized a war, like the one in Chechnya, could only facilitate another one, and even others.
Mikhail Gorbachev was uncompromising on principles, and this is above all what makes him great. Criticism of the state, which is paradoxically sometimes weak compared to forces superior to it, is not enough. Who actually governs Russia? After ten years spent in the country, in one capacity or another, I personally could not answer with certainty.
Isn't the problem of Russia first and foremost that of a Republic to be built - in the sense of a more balanced distribution of wealthbefore thinking of a full democracy? Depending on
the answer that is given, the nagging question of Russian history about the Western or Eastern nature of the country will be resolved by itself. These are the stakes of The Day After.
The third disappearance of Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Gorbachev died politically in Russia the first time for not having succeeded in transforming the Soviet system, which under Boris Yeltsin became a predatory oligarchy replacing the communist state. The recent Putin years, characterized by a marked opposition to the West, which culminates today with the war in Ukraine, are at the antipodes of Gorbachev's conception of international relations. Mikhail Gorbachev was also struck down by these events, and the day of his death, which affects us deeply, was not the day of his rehabilitation in his home country.
But let’s hope that Russia is not only violence, autocratic power, servile submission and even political crime in the tradition of a ‘classical’ mode of devolution of power. The personality and work of Mikhail Gorbachev alone are enough to show this. The last president of the USSR was accused of weakness in relation to the West in his own country, and the turn that he took in favor of the persistent conservative currentwhich provoked the resignation of his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze - and of personalities who were to be found among the coup plotters of August 1991, also fueled criticism of his supposed naiveté.
the president of the United States the ‘Washington playbook’ leading inevitably to external interventions. He rejected a ‘Moscow playbook’ of rules for the systematic use of internal repression and the control of centrifugal forces outside. If any Nobel Prize has been deserved, it is the one awarded to Mikhail Gorbachev.
François Furet, the great historian of the French Revolution, wrote Le Passé d'une illusion (The Past of an Illusion), a major work on the communist movement in the 20th century. The years of Mikhail Gorbachev's power could be characterized as the ‘Past of a Normality’.
Mikhail Gorbachev in fact came up against the resistance of the system, he had to face drastic transformations but he freed himself from what Barack Obama, years later, had called for
Indeed, during the very last phase of the Soviet Union - and this was undoubtedly the major fact of the Gorbachev ‘era' - fear had disappeared in society. Many of those who benefited from it blame him
for the fact that it also gradually disappeared for Russia's external partners as a result of a peaceful coexistence that was no longer a matter of mere ‘declaratory’ diplomacy, as in the good old days of the USSR.
Mikhail Gorbachev was never a czar in his politics, and he retained the almost dull appearance of a Politburo member, right down to his provincial accent from the grain-growing region of Stavropol. But the relapse came quickly and abruptly, and Boris Yeltsin did not cease to mention, during his presidency, his country's aspiration for ‘normality, which was probably again cruelly lacking.
Mikhail Gorbachev thus demonstrated that another Russia than the one with the hideous face of revenge, hatred and aggression is possible. Yes, Russia, which is the largest country in the world in terms of size, from the immense plains of the continent to the
shores of the Pacific, can have a European destiny. In fact, it has no other if it wants to be a significant player on the international scene, or even a power, an aspiration from which it has never detached itself in its history. But Russia will have to make choices, an introspection on its identity that has been postponed for too long, from imperial autocracy to the anachronistic one of Putin's power, without forgetting to proceed to a real ‘de-Stalinization’, of which the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 had only been a camouflage.
Like the communism analyzed by François Furet, Gorbachev's policy also consisted of an ‘illusion’ of the transformation of the Soviet system. As for the ‘normality’ - and this is a contradiction in terms - so rare in the world of autocracy, it will have been a reality, even if it was an ephemeral parenthesis.
«
have been
builder, will have opened a door, even if it is a thin gap, not only in the imposing wall of the Kremlin, but also in the minds of people who will finally escape amnesia ». PP
The question is whether this forgotten mark will become a reference again, whether Mikhail Gorbachev will
a bridge-
PATRICK PASCAL
Former Ambassador, Former President of ALSTOM Group in Moscow, Founder and President of "Perspectives Europe-Monde" Knight of the National Order of Merit. ALSTOM President in Moscow for Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. PASCAL’S diplomatic career has focused on strategic issues, East-West and NorthSouth, the UN, the Arab world, Europe, and Central Asia, during his postings in Berlin, Rome, New York, Moscow, Riyadh, Damascus, London, and Ashgabat.
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Political Affairs Division, United Nations and International Organizations.
• Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations, New York.
Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paris.
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Political Affairs Division, United Nations and International Organizations.
• Embassy of France to the GDR, East Berlin.
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate of Political Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Disarmament.
Publications :
- Journal d’Ukraine et de Russie, les crises and l’évolution du système international, VA Éditions, 2022.
Academic background:
- Sciences Po Paris, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Sorbonne, Universität des Saarlandes, Rheinische
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.
TECHNOLOGY IN THE MAKING
Linda Restrepo | Publisher - Editor
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