Disillusioned democrats weigh pains, gains of putsch fallout

Many are angry at what they see as the betrayal of the democratic ideals they believe Boris Yeltsin was defending when he defied the coup plotters in those heady August days and by the widening gulf between rich and poor that resulted from his economic policies.

Alexander Lavot, a veteran grass-roots Soviet dissident and later a militant opponent of the wars in Chechnya, was briskly dismissive of the claim that the Yeltsin era marked a breakthrough for democracy.

"The new rights obtained after the Soviet Union collapsed were not properly used for progress," he said.

The defeat of the putsch "enabled democratic forces to come together and consolidate. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the regime established by Boris Yeltsin cannot be considered as democratic."

Yury Afanasyev, the historian and former president of the human rights group Memorial, was even more downbeat.

The only people who had benefited from the turmoil of the past decade, he told a press conference this week, were the middle-ranking members of the nomenklatura, or state bureaucracy, who had held sway during the Soviet era.

The same bureaucrats who backed Yeltsin to allow them to satisfy their appetite for wealth through private enterprise in 1991 were now backing his successor Vladimir Putin, he said.

Even former close colleagues of the Russian president who fought alongside him at Moscow's White House to defend the Russian parliament from the encircling tanks have long since turned against him.

"There is only one definition for the past 10 years: it is a gradual transition from political menopause (from the last years of the Soviet Union) to political egoism and cynicism," Alexander Rutskoi, Yeltsin's vice-president, told the same press conference.

Rutskoi was in the White House again two years later when, in an armed standoff between the presidency and the parliament, Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the building he had previously defended.

He said his disaffection had grown only when, during a four-year term as governor of the Kursk region from 1996 to 2000, he had witnessed the widespread poverty and entrenched economic problems facing the regions.

Popular reaction to the anniversary of the 1991 putsch attempt has been muted as Russians survey the events of the intervening decade, in which the turmoil of wars, devaluations and financial crashes appears to many to outweigh the less tangible benefits provided by periodic elections and the right to buy goods priced beyond their reach.

The Russian economy has shrunk by around a half since Yeltsin gave the go-ahead for Western-approved shock therapy measures, and a population accustomed to full employment, low housing costs and easy access to health and social provision found itself exposed to the tooth-and-claw rigours of the free market.

As a result, substantial majorities of Russians regularly tell opinion pollsters that they regret the passing of the Soviet Union.

Reasoned critics of the Yeltsin era point to time wasted when the pressing need was for Russia to resolve the land ownership issue, create a civil society and secure the transition to democracy.

The one gain for which the Yeltsin years can be credited, in the view of Sergei Avdeyenko, a political analyst who supported the perestroika reforms, is that the passing of time "has made it impossible for anyone to take us back to communism."

But the dissident movement is "well and truly dead," he noted.

And the dreams inspired by the defeat of the August coup have long been replaced by a dour "realism", exemplified by former White House defender Andrei Rakhmelovich, now a lawyer.

"It certainly hasn't turned out how we would have liked, and the civil society we hoped we were building is still a long way off. ... The romanticism is over, and the danger now, in reaction, is that our enforced realism shades into cynicism," Rakhmelovich said.