567 pages
The Oligarchs has just been published in Russian in Moscow. Here is the link to the publisher:
www.inostranka.ru/ru/book/371/
The rise of Russia's new czars
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Limited
Sunday Times (London)
April 7, 2002, Sunday
SECTION: Features
LENGTH: 813 words
HEADLINE: The men who made Boris
BYLINE: Philip Marsden
THE OLIGARCHS: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. By David E Hoffman. Public Affairs. Pounds 21.99. pp575
In the final, rotten years of the Soviet Union there emerged in Russia and the republics a great number of energetic and ambitious people. It was as if they had been waiting years for their chance, which, of course, they had. They began to pursue their enthusiasms - art, money, sex, nationalism - with an impatience born of the tacit belief that, sooner or later, the authorities would try to stop them. A much smaller number began to chip away at the great edifice of Soviet authority itself. It was as surprising to these men as to everyone else that it crumbled so easily, and dropped virtually intact into their by now immaculately suited laps. Standing behind the figure of Boris Yeltsin, counselling him and, finally, to prop him up, they achieved such wealth and power that it now looks like nothing other than a grotesque caricature of corporate culture.
David E Hoffman's masterly account of this period more or less dispels any doubts that these men did call the shots, rather than being some convenient cipher for a more diverse devolving of power. He picks out six of them - there were others, but his cast includes all the main players. Here, for instance, is the master politico Anatoly Chubais, who drove through the privatisation programme of 1992, and was able to say two years later: "I have privatised power. I finished off the Communist system."
In the 1996 elections, about to be proved wrong, the oligarchs briefly forgot their in-fighting and managed to convert an approval rating of under 4% for Yeltsin into a decisive victory over the Communists. Much of this was down to the new-found power of the independent media, pioneered by another of the oligarchs, Vladimir Gusinsky. A one-time taxi-driver, Gusinsky ended up as Russia's first media mogul. As such, he also became the first of President Putin's victims and now lives in enforced exile in Spain.
At the end of the Brezhnev years, Alexander Smolensky was just another Soviet bad boy - in the early 1980s he was sentenced to two years in a penal brigade. Little more than a decade later, he headed his own bank. With assets of $ 5.2 billion, he helped bail out the government in 1995 when it ran short of cash. He has since, in Hoffman's words, "dropped out of sight".
Yuri Luzhkov was never a money man. He accused Chubais of selling Russia "for a song", and refused to allow mass privatisation to take place on his turf. As mayor of Moscow, he has used a combination of patronage, coercion and capital to transform the city into the swaggering metropolis it is today. For a time he looked like a successor to Yeltsin - until the other oligarchs used their media to savage his presidential campaign.
When he was a young Komsomol activist, Mikhail Khodorkovsky discovered the lucrative gap between nalichnye and beznalichnye (cash and non-cash). Still in his thirties, he has a personal wealth of $ 2.4 billion, making him Russia's richest man.
The most intriguing of them all, the arch oligarch, was Boris Berezovsky. Under Gorbachev he had been a mathematician. Hugely ambitious, he had his sights set on the Nobel prize when he spotted a more immediate opportunity - perestroika. More than anyone, asserts Hoffman, Berezovsky "set the stage for Putin to become the next leader of Russia". But last year at a press conference, Putin was asked about the former mathematician. "Boris Berezovsky," he replied, "who's that?" Berezovsky now also lives in exile.
Originally a small band of rebels, the oligarchs risked their lives to take on an apparently omnipotent state. Without their efforts the Russian people would still be languishing under a hopelessly ineffective command economy. That is one view. The other is that these men were self-serving opportunists who carried out the biggest heist in history, robbing Russians of their corporate assets, their savings (twice) and flouting the very principles of democracy and the free market for which they pretended to stand. It is the success of Hoffman's compelling story that we come away convinced of both versions.
In a very short time, Putin has reasserted the power of the Russian state and restored confidence in the economy. He has also stamped hard on the free press and destroyed the oligarchy. He remains popular in Russia. But just as Yeltsin was welcomed at first for solving the catastrophic failures of his predecessor, so Putin's honeymoon is unlikely to last. Russia still faces huge structural problems. A leader who came to power with such ease, through a manipulated media and war in Chechnya, could well become a monster. He certainly has for those who created him.
Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of Pounds 17.59 plus Pounds 1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585
LOAD-DATE: April 8, 2002
Newsweek
March 18, 2002, Atlantic Edition
SECTION: SOCIETY AND THE ARTS; Pg. 79
LENGTH: 822 words
HEADLINE: Books: How the Mighty Fell
BYLINE: By Christian Caryl
HIGHLIGHT:
Tracking the troubles of the Russian oligarchs
Russia's oligarchs were outsiders who became the ultimate insiders. Some of them started off as furtive traders in contraband goods. A few years later they morphed into multimillionaires, emerging from their lavish villas and chauffeured Mercedeses to call the shots at the highest levels of government. Then came the punishment for their hubris. The economy collapsed and their former friends in high places turned against them. These days some of them are back on the outside, tasting the bitter fruits of exile.
In terms of sheer drama, it's an irresistible tale, and David Hoffman's new book, "The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia" (564 pages. PublicAffairs), milks it for all it's worth. He's right to do so. You just can't tell the story of how Russia staggered from the centrally planned command economy to the imperfectly market-driven business world of today without dwelling on the exemplary fate of characters like Alexander Smolensky. As Hoffman (full disclosure: a former colleague and friend of mine) describes him, Smolensky was a "rebel against the system" who ran afoul of the Soviet authorities in the early 1980s for printing black-market Bibles. As Mikhail Gorbachev began edging the Soviet Union away from socialism, Smolensky amassed a fortune by building private houses for the Communist Party elite. By 1997, he had put together Russia's biggest private banking empire--only to see it crumble in the wake of the 1998 crash. But like most of his oligarch colleagues, Smolensky had already moved the money into other, less vulnerable companies, salvaging much of his fortune but leaving his investors--ordinary Russian depositors as well as Western business partners--in the lurch. As Hoffman writes, when Smolensky is interviewed about the mess, the diminished tycoon says unrepentantly that anyone who was stupid enough to put money in his bank deserved "dead donkeys' ears."
The leading characters in this book make Donald Trump look tasteful, unassuming and well-behaved. Soviet mathematics professor Boris Berezovsky survived a gangland assassination attempt to appoint prime ministers and bend Boris Yeltsin's entourage to his will. Finally, at the peak of his power, he ran afoul of his protege, Vladimir Putin, who unleashed a flood of corruption charges that soon drove the magnate into luxurious London exile. Small-time theater director Vladimir Gusinsky built up the new Russia's most formidable media empire, but met a fate similar to Berezovsky's when Putin took offense at the critical reporting of Gusinsky's television station and print media.
To be sure, Hoffman's narrative ranges well beyond the simple rags-to-riches story. Some of the tycoons, like Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, started their careers as well-connected members of the Soviet elite who exploited the chances offered by Russia's shift toward a market economy. And certainly not all of them were ruined by the 1998 financial crisis, when Moscow simultaneously defaulted on its debt and devalued the ruble; after all, the government gave the oligarchs three months to hide their assets before creditors could descend. While Hoffman gives some of the oligarchs points for sheer chutzpah, he also shows how most of their fortunes were built by exploiting state-managed resources rather than creating new businesses. Their triumph was a victory of cronyism rather than competitive capitalism.
Hoffman deserves credit for providing one of the most vivid and well-researched accounts to date of this tumultuous period in recent Russian history. By the end, though, I found myself wishing that he'd gone just a bit further. Western governments and businessmen were clearly complicit in some of the funny business he portrays, but, he writes, "this issue is beyond the scope of this book." A pity. Perhaps more seriously, he's often coy about the oligarchs' complicity with organized crime. Throughout the book, the oligarchs are portrayed as corrupt but still somehow distinct from the "unsavory gangs" who are competing with them. In fact, you could argue that murder was as much a tool of Russian business life in the 1990s as share dilutions and pyramid schemes; Hoffman's book prefers to focus on the latter.
I am sure other critics will argue that Hoffman's book is simply passe. After all, Putin has gone a long way toward cutting the oligarchs down to size. Aside from driving Berezovsky and Gusinsky out of the country, he's essentially told the tycoons who remain that they can keep their ill-gotten gains as long as they stay out of politics. And yet it was the oligarchs who brought Putin to power, and the system that reigns in the country today is the legacy of what they created in collusion with their patron saint, Boris Yeltsin. For that reason, I'm sure that many future readers will find themselves returning to Hoffman's book to find out what, exactly, makes Russia tick.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: DETHRONED: Tycoons Khodorkovsky (top, Gusinsky (left) and Berezovsky made Trump look tasteful
LOAD-DATE: March 15, 2002
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
March 17, 2002, Sunday
SECTION: Pg. 13
LENGTH: 1049 words
HEADLINE: Russia's robber barons Orlando Figes on the entrepreneurs who pushed capitalism to its limits
BYLINE: By Orlando Figes
The Oligarchs:
Wealth and Power in the New Russia by David E. Hoffman
Public Affairs, pounds 19.99, 567 pp pounds 17.99 ( pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222
IF YOU REALLY want to know what has taken place in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet regime, you can do no better than to read The Oligarchs. It is an engrossing tale - a high-speed thriller of fantastic fortunes made and lost in scams and shady deals, of political corruption and conspiracy, high-risk international finance, mafia gangs and murder - whose moral seems to be that Russia had no other way to reach the freedom of the capitalist West. A depressing lesson to be learned.
As the Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post between 1995 and 2001, David Hoffman built up an extraordinary knowledge of the murky business dealings of the four tycoons he features in this book. All four began their rise to wealth and power in the 1980s: the banker Alexander Smolensky who sold black-market copies of the Bible; the young oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky who conjured worthless roubles into millions of dollars as an official of the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League); the industrialist and powerbroker Boris Berezovsky who started with a half-share in a clapped-out Soviet car; and the media supremo Vladimir Gusinsky who moved into business after failing as a theatre director. Hoffman's early chapters are a riveting account of the rise of these tycoons in the Gorbachev era, when an amber light was given to the start-up enterprises called cooperatives. Smolensky formed a construction firm which built dachas from reclaimed materials. Khodorkovsky founded a computer consultancy for Soviet factories. Gusinsky manufactured copper bracelets from tram-line cables. Berezovsky set up a cafe.
Hard work, chutzpah and good connections were the key to the success of these four entrepreneurs, all of them, incidentally, of Jewish origin. They received the protection of the Moscow city council and its dynamic leader Yury Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow since 1992, and the fifth main subject of Hoffman's book.
Luzhkov transformed the drab Soviet capital into a glittering capitalist metropolis by selling run-down city assets to his business friends and then touching them for lavish public projects like the reconstruction of the golden-domed Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Originally built to commemorate the victory against Napoleon, and then blown up by the Soviets to clear space for a swimming-pool, the Cathedral stands today as a symbol of the union between corrupt wealth and power in the New Russia.
The other major patron of the four tycoons was Alexander Chubais, a young and visionary believer in the panacea of the free market who was placed in charge of Yeltsin's privatisation programme after 1991. Chubais was responsible for the notorious voucher scheme through which the old Soviet industries were parcelled out in shares to the populace. Most of the vouchers were bought up by a handful of businessmen and foreign traders, whose agents on the streets were able to buy many people's vouchers for about the price of a bottle of vodka.
But the real scandal was the scheme of "loans for shares" which Chubais introduced in 1995. Strapped for cash to pay its public workers, the government turned in desperation to the richest businessmen, who had established private banks. Through these banks they had amassed huge fortunes by promising the people security and growth for the billions of roubles which had previously been hidden under mattresses; but in the hyper-inflationary conditions of the early 1990s, when the rouble steadily declined against the dollar, they made enormous profits with their cash by changing it to dollars and taking it abroad.
As part of the "loans for shares" scheme Chubais allowed the bankers to purchase a large proportion of the shares in Russia's most valuable industrial assets through rigged auctions which they would organise themselves. Khodorkovsky bought 45 per cent of the shares in Yukos, a company which exports about one-fifth of Russia's oil, at the bargain price of $159 million dollars, just $9 million more than the starting price. Today his 80 per cent share of Yukos stock is worth in the region of $8 billion.
The financial power of the oligarchs secured Yeltsin's victory against the resurgent Communists in the crucial presidential election of 1996. There was wall-to-wall political campaigning on ORT and NTV, the television stations owned by Berezovsky and Gusinsky respectively. The oligarchs were at the height of their power. They started to behave as if they were the government.
But greed took over and they soon began to fight for the assets of the state. There were bombs and killings. And then their fortunes fell in the rouble crash of 1998 (though with the exception of Smolensky they never lost as much as the Western banks which had invested heavily in them).
In the past two years President Putin has begun to reassert the power of the state. In the summer of 2000 he ordered the arrest of Gusinsky, whose NTV had criticised the war in Chechnya, and then forced him to flee abroad. Berezovsky, who had helped to manoeuvre Putin into power, was forced to sell his shares in ORT, and he now lives in New York. Khodorkovsky is the sole remaining oligarch, the richest man in Russia, at the age of 38. Judging from a lavish reception in London in December, he is keen to spend his money on philanthropic projects in Russia and West.
But can there really be a Russian Carnegie? Hoffman, it would seem, admires the tycoons. He sees their energy as a necessary force for the regeneration of Russia. In one sense he is right: capitalism needs successful capitalists. But it also needs institutions for regulating a market economy if it is to benefit society, and if many Russians are disgruntled with the system they now have, it is largely due to the means by which their pioneering capitalists attained their success.
Hoffman does not analyse the political or social legacies of Russia's headlong rush to the free market. But he tells a damn good tale.
Orlando Figes's new book, 'Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of the Russians', will be published by Penguin in the autumn.
LOAD-DATE: March 17, 2002
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Copyright 2002 Washington Monthly Company
Washington Monthly
March 1, 2002
SECTION: No. 3, Vol. 34; Pg. 58; ISSN: 0043-0633
IAC-ACC-NO: 83794470
LENGTH: 1120 words
HEADLINE: The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia; Political booknotes: russian toward capitalism; book review
BYLINE: Chollet, Derek
THE OLIGARCHS: Wealth and Power in the New Russia by David Hoffman Public Affairs, $ 30.00
EXACTLY A DECADE AGO, THE world looked to post-Soviet Russia, then in its infancy, with a great sense of hope and possibility. Freed from the shackles of Communism, embracing democracy and market economics, Russia in the 1990s promised to be an era of rebirth. No one thought that this would be easy, but from the perspective of 1992, it looked as if Russia had all the right ingredients to succeed: a populace eager for political and economic freedom, a vibrant leader in Boris Yeltsin, and a group of young, committed, Western-oriented technocrats ready to embark on bold reforms.
Of course, as is often the case with Russia, history unfolded harshly. Far from becoming a stable democracy and market economy, Russia turned into a sort of Wild West of unbridled capitalism, where corruption reigned supreme and many aspects of life seemed to come straight out of a bad gangster movie. By the turn of the century, Russia's politics, like its economy, seemed bankrupt. Yeltsin, once the world's white knight, had come to personify his country: big, blustery, and not very healthy. Most of his bright reformers had been driven from office in disgrace. And in Washington, those American policymakers and pundits who had once looked toward Russia with optimism were reduced to presumptuous finger-pointing about how and why Russia was "lost." This sad story comes to life in David Hoffman's sprawling new book, The Oligarchs. Hoffman, who spent the decade in Moscow as one of The Washington Post's most respected foreign correspondents, focuses on the so-called "winners" of Russia's nosedive--the six business heavyweights who maneuvered to dominate Russia's politics, economy, and media. In the tradition of other recent American journalist-chroniclers of life in Russia, such as Hedrick Smith and David Remnick, Hoffman provides us with a vivid tableau of these men and their lives, showing how their ambitions shaped society and, in the end, brought Russia to the brink of collapse.
Hoffman's perspective is clearly critical of the oligarchs, but unlike other books about them, his is not a screed. In fact, what makes his work different is that, in a way, he humanizes them. In the finely sketched personality profiles of the six men in the book's opening, Hoffman shows how the roots of
Russia's current condition stretch back to the Soviet era, when men like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were anonymous entrepreneurs who exploited loopholes in the Soviet economy to make fast money. Through them, we see the Soviet collapse from well below the heights of Gorbachev and perestroika as a tale of regular Joes who figured out how to out-crook a crooked system. It may seem like an obvious point now, but the fact that the legacy of Soviet corruption directly shaped Russian corruption is one that often gets lost.
This also helps explain why the course of Russian "reform" took the direction that it did. Much has been made about the fact that, in the early 1990s, Yeltsin and his aides chose to force privatization rather than first establish new regulations and reliable rules of the game, creating a kind of market anarchy that allowed the oligarchs to thrive. Hoffman clearly agrees that in retrospect this was a profound mistake, but he helps us understand the reformers' position better. After seven decades of Soviet central planning, they were determined to destroy the old state system, not recreate one. Freedom came first, rules later. Unfortunately, the reformers forgot that politics abhors a vacuum, and the oligarchs stepped in and set their own rules.
Hoffman's tale of the oligarchs' rise through ehborate Ponzi schemes and backroom machinations is dizzying. The book brims with fascinating anecdotes, all of them well told. As usual, Hoffman has done his reporting admirably, and he takes us behind the scenes to the oligarchs' meetings at the Logovaz club in Moscow's Sparrow Hills (sessions eerily reminiscent of the famous five-family pow-wow in The Godfather), and inside Yeltsin's innermost Kremlin cirdes. We see how the oligarchs first plotted to buy up state assets during privatization, corruptly engineered Yeltsin's reelection as president in 1996, and worked to assert their influence by dominating national media outlets. In all, Hoffman describes a Russia where virtually no line exists between public or private, oligarch or government, criminal or legal.
So, as many Russians now ask, kto vinovat? Who is to blame? Hoffman shies from fingering a single culprit, and the explanation is certainly too complex to find one. By making their fortunes on the backs of common Russians, the oligarchs themselves are a pretty unsympathetic lot. But had they not existed, would things have been any different? At one point, Hoffman resorts to a bit of historical determinism, suggesting that Russia's troubles were inevitable because it lacked a tradition of the rule of law.
Interestingly, Hoffman barely mentions one group of people many accuse of undermining Russian reform: Western policymakers, especially those in the Clinton administration. As someone who served in that administration's State Department, I am, of course, grateful. But the fact is that it did make some mistakes--particularly in not pushing Yeltsin harder to establish institutions and rules to regulate its economy--along with wiser moves, such as funding programs to help develop Russia's civil society and, most important, working to make its nuclear arsenal smaller and safer. Even with this mixed record, the claim that the Clinton administration somehow "lost" Russia is bunk. What's clear in Hoffman's book is that Russia took the path that k did not so much because of outside influence but because of profound pressures and flaws from within.
For those interested in the future of this puzzled and puzzling country, Hoffman's book could not have come at a better time. His story ends with the rise of Vladimir Putin, who has defined his presidency by discrediting the oligarch era. In fact, in late January, just weeks before this book was published, the Kremlin forced TV-6, Russia's last independent national television network, off the air. Owned by Boris Berezovsky, TV-6 had been a constant thorn in Putin's side, and its suppression is considered by many to be the final nail in the oligarchs' coffin. But Russia's problems are far from solved. Tragically, by eliminating the oligarchs through undermining the freedom of the press, Putin has simply replaced one ill with another.
DEREK CHOLLET is a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
LOAD-DATE: March 20, 2002
The Washington Post
February 17, 2002, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. T05
LENGTH: 1213 words
HEADLINE: To Each According to His Greed
BYLINE: Reviewed by Timothy McDaniel
THE OLIGARCHS
Wealth and Power in the New Russia
By David Hoffman
Public Affairs. 512 pp. $ 30
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a reactionary Russian state official under Nicholas II, had an unusually dim view of human nature. Men in general were weak and vain -- unthinking reeds. Russians were even wworse than the common lot, characterized, in his unflinching terms, by "decomposition and weakness and untruth." Russia was "an icy desert and an abode of the Bad Men." In his devastating portrait of the so-called Russian oligarchy, that small group of evildoers who came to power in the time of economic and political chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Hoffman eschews such philosophical conclusions. One is only led to speculate on what his years in Russia did to his perspectives on human nature. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his memoirs that there is a significant divide in human experience between those who know Russia firsthand and those who do not. Certainly it has been one of the curses of that great and sad country to provide cautionary lessons in abundance to the rest of the world. And without exactly telling us what these lessons are, Hoffman's exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) account provides us with more than its share of instruction.
We see, for example, how fragile human societies are, despite superficial appearances of permanence. They can change form or even disappear quite independently of the participants' awareness and intentions. When, after all, did people know that the Roman Empire had fallen? In one sense, the end of the Soviet Union can be dated precisely, with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1991. But even before that landmark event, many people were able to act and think in new ways that undermined the system without their knowing it.
Through the device of collective biography, tracing the lives of six people who shaped the new Russia from the last years of communism through the rise of Putin, Hoffman brilliantly shows how seemingly halting and insignificant acts finally culminated in changes in a whole society: Minor party boss Yuri Luzhkov, later to be potentate of post-communist Moscow, tells workers in vegetable storage warehouses that they can sell half of what they save from spoilage for their own private profit; obscure young students of economics like Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar read Hayek and come to worship the price mechanism; street-smart kids like Vladimir Gusinsky, later to be a major banking and media mogul, learn how to produce and sell on the black market, using connections in the Communist Party who were willing to betray official proscriptions.
In normal times, such small steps could have been absorbed. But with the uncertainties of the transitional period, new patterns of action gave rise to unexpected consequences that reinforced the search for new horizons. In Hoffman's often understated chronicle, we follow the careers of four oligarchs -- Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovvsky, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky -- who constantly tested the limits of what was possible, and to their surprise almost always received a green light.
As they were emboldened, their arrogance, greed and ambition became limitless, and the violent, unsavory tactics they employed would have made John D. Rockefeller cringe. In the context of a collapsing economy and desperate need, all too visible in the streets of Moscow, where pensioners were selling their household possessions in order to survive, Khodorkovsky and a colleague announced a credo shared by all of the oligarchs: "ourselves for ourselves." The representatives of the faltering Russian state, themselves no strangers to ruthlessness, had their own motives for encouraging the oligarchs' rapacious manuevers, whether personal greed or the desire to destroy the remnants of communism (always a useful phantom) no matter what the cost.
In this "embrace of wealth and power," as Hoffman calls it, one outrage followed another. For example, in the notorious "loans for shares" scheme, the Russian government received cash loans from the oligarchs in exchange for shares in resource-rich state enterprises -- both sides fully aware that when the loans were not repaid these "crown jewels" of the Russian economy would fall into the oligarchs' hands for what was in effect a pittance. There are no heroes in this tale.
Yegor Gaidar, for some inexplicable reason named by Hoffman as "the best and brightest" of his generation, was, as theorist and early initiator of the economic reforms, politically inept and morally obtuse. Observing, for example, the masses of people selling their often pathetic possessions on the winter streets of Moscow -- he himself called them "desperate sellers" -- he exulted in this proof that people, even Russians, will respond to incentives. Disdaining politics, he and his team worked in secrecy, unwilling either to receive or transmit information from the public at large. It was all a matter of technical economics.
Chubais, the handmaiden of the "reforms," comes off even worse in this account. Unwittingly taking his cue from revolutionary Bolshevism, he had a slash-and-burn vision of social change: Destroy first, and then create.
Under the leadership of these men, Russia entered the world of modern capitalism, producing almost nothing but raw materials and relying on private, governmental and foreign speculation. Hoffman repeatedly draws the lesson, obvious now (and obvious then to all but the legion of ideological Western economists who flocked to Russia to give their toxic free-market advice): Economies and the societies in which they are embedded need rules and laws, which in turn require state authority.
Which brings us to perhaps the grimmest figure of all in this cavalcade of scoundrels: Boris Yeltsin himself. Hoffman gives us no sustained portrait of this figurehead president, but the elements are all there. Vain, jealous and paranoid, concerned above all else with his own personal power and survival, he knew nothing of democracy except the word. Shaped by his communist experience, Yeltsin rose from the world of palace intrigues, manipulation and revenge, and so proved impatient (to put things mildly) with social movements, political parties or open communication with an organized public. Even though the emergence of this parasitic economic oligarchy contradicted all the hopes of the democratic movement that brought Yeltsin to power, he was ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of his own narrow electoral prospects. Under his leadership, Russia indeed turned into something like an "icy desert."
Hoffman's grueling chronicle ends with the elevation of Vladimir Putin, whose commitment to democracy is uncertain at best. The lesson here is the same as that taught by the tragic history of Soviet communism: Means and ends are interconnected. To separate them is to create contrary forces that threaten the ends themselves. Is it too much to hope that Vladimir Putin will have more wisdom than the impetuous men who preceded him? *
Timothy McDaniel is a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego and the author of "The Agony of the Russian Idea."
LOAD-DATE: February 17, 2002