13. Yeltsin interrupts Gorbachev at the podium, August 1991

This was the decisive moment. Uncertain which authority was legitimate, the army commanders declined to fire on civilians. Without their support, the Emergency Committee could not get a grip on the situation. Their coup collapsed, and within a few days, Yeltsin had outlawed the CPSU. Ukraine declared its independence, and its example was soon followed by most other republics.

The Soviet Union could not survive these blows. In December 1991, Yeltsin met with his Ukrainian and Belorussian counterparts and issued a declaration that ‘the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, has ceased to exist’. They announced they were setting up a Commonwealth of Independent States and invited the other Soviet republics to join them.

On the Kremlin roof, the hammer and sickle was taken down and replaced by the red‑ white‑ blue tricolour, which had been the flag of Russia’s merchant navy before 1917. There was no double‑ headed eagle on it, which implied that Russia was renouncing its claim to empire. But what was to take its place? What was Russia now? The clash of symbols and narratives continued. The post‑ Soviet regime took a long time to decide what should be the new national flag, what should be the words of its national anthem, whether Lenin should remain in his Red Square mausoleum (he did), what its principal cities should be named (Leningrad became St Petersburg again, but the surrounding province remained Leningradskaia oblast ), whether Nicholas II should be buried with full national honours (he was, in July 1998, but Yeltsin decided to attend only at the last moment, and the Patriarch stayed away). Even the country’s official post‑ Soviet name, the Russian Federation (Russia), betrayed ambivalence over its status. In the new era of free speech and civil freedom, these issues were passionately debated in public.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was greeted by most of its nationalities as liberation. For Russians, it was more like deprivation – the loss of much of what they regarded as their homeland. Besides, the disappearance of the CPSU removed the cement that had enabled the state to function. Without it, the President and parliament were left facing one another without a mediator, and with no way of getting a grip on the regional strongmen or the new financial magnates. Yeltsin failed to persuade parliament to agree to a new constitution, and instead dissolved it in September 1993. Many of the deputies refused to accept his decision, declared his decree illegal, and deposed him as president. Paramilitary organizations came out to support them, and Yeltsin suddenly faced an armed rebellion in his capital city. He responded by summoning tanks to storm the White House. This time, Pavel Grachev, the Defence Minister, agreed, but insisted that Yeltsin sign a written statement taking responsibility for the bloodshed.

This confrontation finally ended the Soviet era, but it also exposed the continuing weakness of the Russian state, its failure even to ensure its own monopoly of violence. That failure continued to be in evidence in the following two decades. Without the CPSU, the component cells of a state were left floundering, looking for a new legal and symbolic framework which would impart structure and purpose.

In this vacuum of legitimate authority, a full‑ scale economic reform finally took place. Launched by a bright and arrogant group of young economists, devotees of the radical free‑ market ‘Washington consensus’, it soon provided yet another example of a Western panacea which proved disastrous when applied to Russia. They launched a mass programme of privatization and freeing of prices, which provoked hyper‑ inflation and transferred most productive resources into the hands of enterprising and ruthless businessmen – the ‘oligarchs’. The state, meanwhile, was left impoverished and without a reliable method of levying taxes: it could not even pay schoolteachers and pensioners on time. Unable to rely on the police to keep order, firms employed their own private security firms or paid money to protection gangs.

There was now little to prevent non‑ Russian autonomous republics within Russia declaring their own secession. In the event, only one did so, Chechnia, but the consequences were destructive and far‑ reaching. After negotiating for three years, Yeltsin decided in 1994 to restore authority by sending in the Russian army. It suffered a series of humiliating reverses and eventually had to withdraw. In 1999, it invaded again, and after a long and indecisive campaign, left Chechnia in the hands of a local warlord under uncertain Kremlin control. The Chechen experience revealed brutally Russia’s weakness and deepened the corruption and violence prevalent in both military and civilian leadership.

Under Yeltsin in the 1990s, then, oligarchs, provincial governors, and ethnic separatists each built their own sub‑ state networks, controlling access to capital and coercive resources. Ordinary people became more dependent than ever before on their bosses and other local magnates for the routine facilities of life: housing, food, transport, health care, recreation, and the education of their children, even sometimes for their physical safety. Most Western commentators on the early post‑ Soviet years wrote as if the choice for Russia was between authoritarianism and democracy. In actual fact, the real issue was whether Russia was going to have an effective state at all. If not, its population would have to place its trust in such lower‑ level leaders and institutions as could protect them and provide them with life’s necessities.

After he became President in 2000, Vladimir Putin in some respects strengthened the state, which he referred to as the ‘power vertical’. In ruthless manner, he brought Chechnia back under nominal Russian control. He simplified taxes, to make them easier to understand and harder to evade; they were also centralized, to facilitate redistribution and alleviate the glaring disparity between richer and poorer regions. Rising oil and gas prices enabled the government to pay schoolteachers and pensioners on time.

Like earlier Russian rulers, however, Putin strengthened the state largely through the manipulation of personalized networks. He ended the election of provincial governors and tightened Kremlin control over them. He made the Duma, the post‑ 1993 parliament, more compliant, and sponsored the largest party, United Russia, as a permanent government majority inside it. In the interests of what he called ‘information security’, he brought most of the media, especially television, under tight supervision. He came to an understanding with the oligarchs, under which the dubious sources of their wealth would not be investigated, provided they kept out of politics. When one of them, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, stepped out of line by financing Duma deputies, he was arrested and charged with fraud, tax evasion, and embezzlement. This was not only an economic move: as well as an oligarch, Khodorkovsky was also a potential presidential candidate. He had proposed strengthening the rule of law, adopting a more open and pluralist style of politics, and a more transparent system of corporate governance, compatible with international standards of financial probity. After his arrest, his successful oil firm, Yukos, passed into the hands of senior government officials, who thus became oligarchs themselves. Robber barons had moved into the highest echelons of the state.

Putin, and his rather shadowy successor, Dmitry Medvedev, have fallen well short of consolidating the state by grounding it in popular trust or stable institutions. Without the rule of law or strong political parties, authoritarian rule means in practice that the wealth of society is the object of competition between powerful patron–client cliques, who are able to operate unchallenged and in the obscurity provided by media deference and censorship. Russian government is still at the mercy of the same cliques, now at the very heart of the state; it has become more corrupt under Putin. Meanwhile, popular unrest is expressed in spontaneous demonstrations and strikes, protesting against local abuses of power but unable to affect the political system as a whole.