Year One

John Lloyd

• Boris Yeltsin by John Morrison
  Penguin, 303 pp, £8.99, November 1991, ISBN 0 14 017062 6
• The August Coup: The Truth and its Lessons by Mikhail Gorbachev
  HarperCollins, 127 pp, £13.99, October 1991, ISBN 0 00 255044 X
• The future belongs to freedom by Eduard Shevardnadze
  Sinclair-Stevenson, 256 pp, £15.00, September 1991, ISBN 1 83619 105 7
• Bear-Hunting with the Politburo by A. Craig Copetas
  Simon and Schuster, 271 pp, £15.99, October 1991, ISBN 0 617 70313 2
• The Accidental Proletariat: Workers, Politics and Crisis in Gorbachev’s Russia by Walter Connor
  Princeton, 374 pp, £25.00, November 1991, ISBN 0 691 07787 8

The Government of Russia has begun the year badly, even ominously. The flailing impotence of Mikhail Gorbachev has been replaced by Boris Yeltsin’s control by stealth. Gorbachev was open about the need for the retention of All-Union institutions: Yeltsin condemned his efforts, helped form the Commonwealth of Independent States – and has since then ensured that Russia controls all of the formerly common mechanisms in its own name. The Central and Foreign Currency Banks (Gosbank and Vnesheconombank) are under the Russian State Bank, which means that it controls how much credit and currency all the republics – including the three Baltic republics – have access to. Russia’s price liberalisation of 2 January forced every other republic to follow suit, or have their shelves stripped by Russian shoppers. Communications and transport, necessarily centrally-controlled, are now under Russian rubrics – which means that Aeroflot in Moscow will not sell a return ticket from another republic, only an outward bound one.