John Lloyd

Russian high culture has failed to flourish since the Soviet Union’s collapse. Though there are now signs of recovery, and though its magnificent base has not been destroyed, it is clear that the overwhelming feeling is still one of loss. Nothing can be done in the short term: the great institutions exist in suspended animation, the great figures age, pass from the scene, or get rich; the new names do not so much make great careers as find niches, very often abroad. In the theatre, incomparable acting is confined very largely to productions of the classics – Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Ostrovsky – in studios or rehearsal rooms before restricted audiences. At the opera, the repertoire is (usually) sung well, though the sets were made thirty years ago. In avant-garde art, the main reference point remains Ilya Kabakov, whose pre-eminence was established in the Seventies and who lives in Paris. Serious music – what there is of it – is as hermetic as anything in the West.’

Liberals and democrats are fearful about next month’s elections in Russia. Their expectation since 1990 – when Boris Yeltsin became leader of Russia’s Parliament – had been that elections would bring administrations and personalities committed in the main to liberal and democratic programmes. That expectation lasted until the results of the December 1993 elections showed the winner to be Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ironically named Liberal Democrats, a party of extreme authoritarian nationalism. In this year’s election, there are no expectations of a Liberal Democrat success. On the contrary,the belief is that a revived Communist Party will capture the largest share of a highly fragmented Parliament and construct a stable majority with other left-wing and nationalist groupings. Most democrats and many of the new business class believe that will be bad; some think it will be very bad; a few think it could be murderous.There is serious talk of expropriations, imprisonments, political assassinations and civil war. The belief that the changes of the late Eighties and early Nineties were irreversible is no longer solid. The fear is palpable.

The view that things are getting worse seems to be on the increase in Russia. In June, lzvestia published the results of a poll conducted by the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion – said to be the best organisation of its kind – in which 58 per cent of respondents thought that they were better off before Gorbachev came to power; two years ago only 45 per cent believed this.

What emerges most clearly from these books is that the Russian ‘mafia’ (the Italian name has been taken over into Russian) has so deeply penetrated government, business and the security forces as to have reconstituted the society which lives on one-sixth of the earth’s land surface into a wholly criminal formation. Organised crime, all four writers warm continually, has encircled the globe, has found in Russia a safe laundry for its money and is trafficking in nuclear material drawn from the ex-Soviet arsenal. The picture is one of a vastly rich, closely calibrated series of crime networks which are now able and willing to challenge the Russian Government, among others. Handelman quotes President Yeltsin in January 1993: ‘We have become a mafia state on a world scale. Everyone thinks that political issues could lead to an explosion but crime could as easily blow us asunder.’ Sterling quotes him as saying a month later: ‘Organised crime is destroying the economy, interfering in politics, undermining public morale, threatening individual citizens and the entire Russian nation … our country is already considered a great mafia power.’…

The war which began in early December in Chechnya, the Russian republic in the North Caucasus, was a test of many things, but of Russia’s claim to be an open society in particular. Leaving aside the special case of the assault on the Russian Parliament in Moscow in October 1993, this is the first full-scale military action in which the Russian state has engaged on what it perceives to be its own territory. It justified its intervention – on Sunday, 11 December – by reference to the presence on Chechen territory of large numbers of illegal armed groups apparently loyal to the Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev, whose election in late 1991 is itself seen by the Russian authorities as illegal: these groups, the Russians said, were threatening the civilian population. Even if one accepts that this constitutes grounds for intervention it is still necessary – and here has lain the difficulty for the Russian administration – for journalists to believe that the questions do not end, but only begin, at that point.’