My Russian Politics professor often starts his classes by telling stories about life in Soviet times. He once recalled, “My parents found out that smoked cheese was just being sold at that small store. They told me to run there. There were more than 300 people in front of me in line. I spent the entire day waiting for my smoked cheese, and guess what? When it was finally my turn, there was no smoked cheese left.”
Every day in Saint Petersburg is a new chance to learn more about life in the USSR, and every new story introduces me to this fascinating and mysterious reality. Most of us have already heard about how hard it was to obtain some specific products and how irrational the bureaucracy was in the Soviet Union. However, what we seldom discuss in America is how crazy life was immediately after the USSR fell.
The stories that I hear about the 10-year period following the USSR’s fall (the 1990s) are by far the most interesting ones, but they are the least often heard of in the United States. This is not surprising, since it makes sense that in America we prefer to criticize the former Communist state itself, rather than the chaos that followed its collapse. There are still many vestiges of Cold War culture in our society, even if we don’t recognize them for what they are. However, most Russians agree that life during the decade following the Soviet Union’s collapse was much worse than life during the preceding years of Communist rule.
Russians have a very clear and succinct way to refer to the 1990s: “the crazy 1990s.” They say that if you survived this decade you can survive anything; in fact, surviving the 1990s was an accomplishment. The USSR was by no means luxurious, but a large majority of the population was employed, crime rates were low, and most people had a fairly good quality of life. However, when the Soviet Union fell, life in Russia became complete chaos.
Most Americans think of Gorbachev as the man who brought liberalism to save Russia. However, Russians typically have a different opinion; it became apparent quickly after I arrived here that most Russians could not stand the last Soviet ruler. A reformer who is even less popular with Russians is Yegor Gaidar. Gaidar was responsible for creating the economic plan that would lead Russia to liberalism. Gaidar’s great idea, called “Shock Therapy,” essentially meant liberalizing the Russian economy as fast as he could. Gaidar’s Shock Therapy led to hyperinflation as prices rose by 2,591 percent by the end of 1992. That same year, 50 percent of Russians were below the poverty line. From 1991 to 1996, Russian GDP went down by 40 percent. The sudden privatization and changing prices caused many companies to declare bankruptcy. The unemployment rate was above 10 percent during most of the 1990s, leading to a substantial rise in crime rates.
One day, my Russian politics professor started class talking about one of the measures used to privatize Russia. He described how the government gave two vouchers to each citizen that would allow them to become shareholders in two different companies of their choice. The government’s attempt to create an entrepreneurial society overnight was immediately foiled simply due to the fact that very few people knew how to use these vouchers. I recently heard a story, which is particularly illustrative of how little people knew of the vouchers, where an old man exchanged his vouchers for just two bottles of vodka (about as Russian as you can get). The vouchers failed in yet another respect. The parents of my professor, a lawyer and an engineer, invested in the companies they used to work for—like most people did in Russia—but both their companies soon went bankrupt. Suddenly, they had no vouchers and no job.
It may be hard for us to understand the relationship Russia has today with democracy and its communist past. Rather than creating the prosperity that is generally associated with liberal democracies, Russia’s first experiment with modernization caused high unemployment rates, a rise in crime, hyperinflation, and widespread poverty. In October 1993, only two years after Russian democratization, Russian televisions all around the country suddenly and spontaneously started playing the famous ballet “Swan Lake.” While a few watched oblivious, others saw Boris Yeltsin’s tanks destroy the Russian parliament. More than 1,000 Russians died while the government made a vain attempt to hide the murder of its own citizens on television. I think that Russians today want more political liberalization, as the twenty-first century has shown them the very tangible benefits that come with political and economic integration, especially in the bigger cities. But, at the same time, the democratization process still reminds Russians of the time when “Swan Lake” played on television to deafen the acts of the government, and Russian ballets are not easily forgotten.
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