Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

When Vladimir Putin, speaking many years after the event, described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a geo-political catastrophe, he was murdered in the Western media. They treated him as if he was some kind of revanchist, desperate to restart the cold war and cover the country with gulags. But it was how we all felt; it was not an act of blind nostalgia to say this, just a pragmatic assessment of its profound political impact. The collapse of such a huge, complex system, with its enormous gravitational pull, created consequences of a scale that can only be comfortably compared to an earthquake, with shockwaves sent across the globe in its aftermath.

For decades there was a familiar balance of power in the world, underwritten by a nuclear deterrent, which to a large extent ensured stability in areas defined by histories that might as well have been written in blood. Look at what happened during the break-up of Yugoslavia, look at what is happening in Ukraine, think of the lopsided way in which the United States now exerts its force, almost unimpeded, in any country it wishes. The Soviet Union was an enormous presence, involved in ways large and small on every continent, and then over the course of a handful of months it withdrew completely, taking with it its money, men, weapons, scientists, teachers. How could this change not be experienced as a fundamental shift in the lives of billions of people?

I believe that in truth we have still not taken full measure of the consequences; as Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said about the after-effects of the French Revolution: ‘It is too early to judge.’ Many people who lived through this era will have their own stories about what they saw – these are mine.

My family returned to St Petersburg on 7 February 1991, in time to see the denouement of the catastrophe that Gorbachev had set in motion years earlier. It was a personal tragedy for me; my country was being dissolved. A whole way of life, extirpated. Everything I had been trained to do had been rendered meaningless by a few flicks of Gorbachev’s pen. At that moment I did not care about history or global politics – I cared that my homeland was being wrecked. For my sons’ generation it was harder still. The last years of the Soviet Union were perplexing and harsh for them; the story that they had been told about the world and the place they occupied in it was belied by what they actually saw with their own eyes. And yet communism was all the lost generation – as they soon came to be called – had ever known. Their fractured, dislocated experiences were summed up by a saying that proved immediately popular in St Petersburg: we were born in a city and country that no longer exist.

Our family went from a steady, predictable existence, where we always knew when the next pay cheque was coming, and that the shops would always be full of food, to queuing anxiously for hours, hoping that there would still be a loaf of bread left on the shelves for which we could exchange the worthless coupons we had been given. We tried as hard as we could to recreate the normal existence we had enjoyed before, but it was rarely possible. If my son had a friend round for dinner, then Natalia would have to forgo her own meal to make sure there was enough to eat. For those who had lived through the starvation winters of ’42 and ’43, and who now saw food shortages and ration cards being issued again, it was as if the clock had been turned back fifty years.

When I was born, Russia was at the centre of the Soviet Union, one of the earth’s two superpowers. I was a Soviet citizen, raised in Estonia, and all my life I had mixed freely with the USSR’s different ethnicities, with Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Latvians and Georgians. We did not care what country our friend’s father’s father had been born in; we did not even notice.

Almost every element of my identity had been formed by experiences of existing, and participating, in the Soviet system. I sometimes think we were a little like fish in the ocean – we could not imagine how one might establish a different kind of life outside it. Along with my contemporaries, I had been brought up on the examples of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War and I still remember now how proud I was when, at the age of nine, I heard the news that the first Soviet Sputnik was launched. I was living with my grandparents at the time, and the entire population of their town of Nyandoma poured into the streets to celebrate (just as they did in settlements across the length and breadth of the nation). I had been an ardent member of the Komsomol and under its auspices had volunteered in the country’s furthest corners. I had volunteered to build pipelines in Kazakhstan (the people there were strange and isolated; to them we might as well have been creatures brought back from space by Gagarin) and I also played my part in the druzhina , a kind of neighbourhood watch created by the Komsomol to make city streets safe by helping to clear them of their drunks, tramps and prostitutes – those people whom our society had deemed undesirable. As a diplomat, a scientist and intelligence officer I served my nation and my people loyally for decades. I knew its faults as well as anyone else: my closest friend now (I did not meet him until 1997) was prosecuted during the 1960s and at the age of eighteen was sent to Siberia for eight years. I had seen with my own eyes the subterfuges into which those who wished to adhere to even the most basic tenets of the Orthodox Church had been forced, and I had watched the tanks roll into Prague with the same moral queasiness as many thousands of others. But I also knew, and had benefited from, its many virtues. And yet now we were supposed to repudiate it, to abandon its precepts and move undauntedly into this disorienting new landscape.

In the early months of 1991, the state was completely unable to continue the way it had before. So many people – including my family – saw their savings obliterated by the collapse of the rouble and the complete disintegration of the country’s financial system. Government enterprises, companies within the defence industry, they lost all of their orders overnight, and their employees were left on their own. My brother- and sister-in-law were members of what was commonly referred to as the ‘Soviet technical intelligentsia’: well educated, cultured, with prestigious jobs at one of the leading defence industry research facilities. The family led a lifestyle that would have been the envy of millions across the country, with an apartment that had a separate room for their children, and even a private Lada car. But in the months after the collapse of the USSR, I saw their salaries cut so fiercely that it was as if they were not being paid at all. Their jobs became meaningless and their life savings evaporated. They lost their sense of direction and purpose overnight; they did not know what place they were supposed to occupy or what destination they should be working towards. What use were their skills now? Why continue to go into the office when there was no longer anything for them to do? What could the future offer them? There was no place for them in the new Russia. When I was a young man, they were probably the harshest critics of the ‘Soviet way’ I knew, but as the ’90s drew on, it was little wonder that they began to develop a naïve nostalgia for the old regime, and a corresponding resentment for the new system that had replaced it, which evolved into a vicious suspicion of any attempts to reform the country.

Nobody had explained to them how they might go about building a new existence, and they were far from alone. St Petersburg was a city built on industry and research facilities, many of which had strong links to the military and navy. No other part of the country had as many inhabitants with university degrees or doctorates; it was the source of the vast majority of naval innovation, and a home for the brains behind the ill-fated Soviet space shuttle. And then suddenly this incredible accumulation of mental and technical resources was rendered worthless. A million people were effectively thrown onto the street with no means of fending for themselves. A further 500,000 simply left, while those who stayed were faced with a series of ugly choices. If you wanted to feed your family, could you afford to leave those valuable books to rest unprofitably on your shelves? If you wanted to clothe your children, could you justify holding your antique furniture back from the market round the corner? The people who knew how to work with their hands could always find something to do; if you had a practical skill then you could exchange your expertise for money, food or even a bottle of vodka. It was far harder to find anyone willing to swap a loaf of bread for a lecture on particle physics. For the doctors, scientists and teachers, tragedy, more often than not, arrived in cruelly measured portions of humiliation and stupefaction. We could barely believe it; the nation that had been the first to send a man into outer space could no longer even feed its own people.