Whose Revolution Was It Anyway?

Why is “the man regarded by some as the patriarch of the dissident movement…almost forgotten at home”?

So asks a recent AP profile of the legendary Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalyov.

After all, wouldn’t the very people who campaigned hardest to end Communism have benefited most from its downfall?

Predictably, the author blames the Putin regime: Kovalyov ‘is not seen on major television networks, which are state controlled’, while  liberal journalists are reluctant to give him airtime for fear of ‘the unknown assassins who have shot, beaten or poisoned several of them’.

Tempting as it is in light of the Kremlin’s antics, this explanation is wide of the mark. By blaming “the government structure that Putin built during two terms as president”, it ignores the first decade of post-Soviet rule.

For by the time Putin had even arrived at the scene, the old dissidents were already finished.

Look at Kovalyov’s own biography. The founder of the iconic NGO ‘Memorial’ dedicated to chronicling GULAG prisoners, resisted the 1991 coup to become Yeltin’s chief human rights advisor.

But only 3 years later, he resigned in disgust at the president’s cruel war in Chechnya.

In his self-exile from the new order, Kovalyov joined other prominent Soviet dissidents such as Elena Bonner, Boris Kagalitsky, Vladimir Bougrine and many others who suddenly found themselves witnesses to an Animal Farm scenario.

Their disillusionment should come as no surprise to all but the most credulous consumers of the ‘Democrats vs Communists’ narrative of the USSR’s demise.

After all, according to Andrew Wilson, author of Virtual Politics, ‘the representation of late Soviet politics as a struggle between reformers and die-hards, democrats and authoritarians, good guys and bad, was the greatest illusion of all’.

This is because, unlike the revolutions of 1989 (except, perhaps, in Albania), the Soviet Union never underwent a classical regime change.

“In Poland,” wrote Alexander Yakovlev, a senior architect of Perestroika, “the instrument of change was the opposition….In my country, it was the ‘apparatchiks’: We created an opposition to ourselves”.

Nowhere is this statement more true than in the composition of Yeltsin’s own government, where 75% of the posts were occupied by members of the former Soviet elite (according to political scientists Kotz and Weir). The same pattern repeated itself in the transition to Putinism, which is bolstered by many of the Yeltsin-era elites such as Anatoly Chubais.

That held even more true in the economic sphere, where, according to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ‘90% of the prosperous people in business originated in the old nomenklature structures and those close to them’. Needless to say, Khodorkovsky himself once headed the Communist Youth organisation.

Because Putinism is the culmination and streamlining of a trajectory established by his predecessor in 1991, could it have been possible to envisage anything but the end for such principled fighters as Kovalyov?

In the words of another marginalised dissident, Boris Kagalitsky, post-Communist Russia was from the outset controlled by “a new elite formed on the basis of the old bureaucracy”, not the opposition/dissident movement.