Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
22
the world and fueled the Cold War arms
race.
Khrushchev's replacement, Leonid Bre-
zhnev, is largely remembered for the era of
stagnation that marked the Soviet Union
in the 1960s and 1970s—but it was also
an era of peace and stability that had been
so elusive for Russians for so long. This era
ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghan-
istan in 1979, leading to an inconclusive,
unpopular 10-year war with U.S.-backed
Islamic guerrillas. Brezhnev's death
brought two quick successors in the early
1980s, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin
Chernenko, who both died in office before
the relatively young Mikhail Gorbachev
took over.
THE SOVIET COLLAPSE &
AFTERMATH
Gorbachev's name became synonymous
with the policies of
glasnost
(openness) and
perestroika
(restructuring) that he tried to
apply to the Soviet system. But he under-
estimated how deeply the country's econ-
omy and political legitimacy had decayed.
The reforms he cautiously introduced
took on a momentum that ultimately
doomed him and the Soviet Union. After
the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the
peaceful revolutions around the Commu-
nist bloc of eastern Europe, Gorbachev
aligned with hard-liners at home to cling
to power and keep the USSR together.
The hard-liners thought he wasn't
doing enough, however, so they tried to
overthrow him in a desperate, poorly exe-
cuted coup attempt in August 1991. They
were defeated by defiant generals and a
buoyant Boris Yeltsin, then president of
the Russian part of the USSR, who was
cheered on by thousands of pro-democ-
racy demonstrators. Three months later,
Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union
splintered into 15 new countries.
When Yeltsin freed the ruble from its
state controls, he wiped out millions of
people's savings, and his popularity plum-
meted. Yeltsin and his administration
couldn't keep up with the economic transi-
tion from a planned economy to the free
market, and crime, corruption, and pov-
erty flourished. The 1990s saw a few Rus-
sians make exorbitant sums by buying up
state property on the cheap, while workers
at thousands of schools, hospitals, and
factories lost their jobs or went months,
even years, without pay. The Asian finan-
cial crisis hit Russia in 1998.
Politically, Yeltsin grew increasingly
intolerant, like so many Russian leaders
before him. He faced a showdown with
opposition parliament deputies in 1993
that he ended by sending in tanks, after his
opponents tried to seize the country's
main television tower. Meanwhile, sepa-
ratist-led violence in the southern province
of Chechnya prompted Yeltsin to send in
troops in 1994. This led to a deeply
unpopular war that exposed the shoddy
state of the Russian army, which withdrew
in defeat 2 years later. Chechnya's status
remained murky, however, and the region
fell to lawlessness and an economy based
on embezzling and kidnapping for ran-
som. A series of apartment bombings in
Moscow and other Russian cities in 1999
was blamed on Chechens, and offered a
pretext for a new war. (See p. 18).
This second war was championed by
Vladimir Putin, who had just been named
prime minister. This time, terrorism-
scarred Russians supported the war, and
the man leading it. Putin's law-and-order
image from his years as a KGB agent
worked in his favor, as did Russians' weari-
ness of the capricious, ailing Yeltsin. On
December 31, 1999, the eve of the new
millennium, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned
and handed power to his protégé Putin.
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