If you are jumping out of a window, it’s a very fast way down

Reality of life after communism

A pro-democracy demonstrator drags a Soviet soldier out of his tank during the abortive coup

A former Moscow correspondent, returns to Russia 20 years after the Soviet collapse

By Leyla Boulton

A coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the secretary-general of the Communist party who attempted the gradual perestroika (restructuring) of the Soviet Union, paved the way for the collapse of the Soviet empire and its state-run economy 20 years ago this weekend. In place of the USSR came 15 separate countries.

Chief of these was Russia, whose democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, had stood atop a tank to defy the hardline coup leaders who held Mr Gorbachev prisoner in his holiday villa on the Crimea.

By the time the coup fizzled out, the scene was set for the Communist party to give up its 84-year monopoly on power.

A team of young reformers headed by Yegor Gaidar liberalised prices and launched mass privatisation through vouchers given to every Russian.

Ensuing economic hardship, aggravated by the reformers’ compromises and missteps under President Yeltsin’s erratic leadership, triggered a backlash against change any other society would have found bewildering. Yeltsin’s replacement, Vladimir Putin, presided over an increasingly authoritarian system of government, and pandered to nostalgia for the past while allowing the economy to stagnate on the back of high oil prices.

For the 61-year-old former spymaster, the Soviet Union’s collapse was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

In contrast, Dmitry Medvedev, 45, the current president, says Russians of his age are probably the “happiest generation” for being able to appreciate how far the country has travelled since the empty shop shelves of the dying Soviet era.

I returned to Russia for the verdict of four friends.

The author was an FT correspondent in Moscow from 1990-94

The civil society activist

Lena Nemirovskaya, an art historian who used to gather foreigners and Russians around her kitchen table, set up a school in 1993 to inculcate democratic values in a new generation of politicians. “It’s like a big kitchen table,” Lena, a youthful 71-year-old, explains over dinner. “We had the illusion that with a change of generation, this Sovietness would go away, but it was not so.”

She draws some comfort however from this month’s protests after clearly-documented fraud in this month’s elections. “This is a civic movement, about giving people dignity as citizens,” she explains.

She and her husband Yuri Senokosov, a philosopher who also teaches at the school, were among the signatories of a declaration urging Russians to work together to reverse the country’s slide into authoritarian rule. “We appeal to all social forces to unite to act in order to avoid a national catastrophe,” says the grandly-named memorandum of the founding conference of the December 12 roundtable.

Her Moscow School of Political Studies has given its short lecture courses to 10,000 people since it opened its doors 18 years ago, supported by western grants and, more recently, donations from Russian business. Speakers have included Peter Mandelson, the British ex-minister, European Commissioner, and spin-doctor.

How much difference has the school made? “Our sessions have changed. People now accept criticism and the opinion of others,” she says, speaking before the latest outburst of civic activism. Her graduates include the mayors of sizable cities like Nizhny-Novgorod, the president’s speechwriter, and a deputy finance minister. But it has been a lonely struggle. “We would like this education to be less unique and for it to be available in schools,” she says, referring to a lack of civic education for young Russians.

The businessman

Misha Berger, now 58, started his conversion from journalist to businessman when he developed a “sushi index” for provincial towns to figure out where media advertising would flourish. “I travelled to many regions and since official data were unreliable or often just wrong, I would ask how many Japanese restaurants a town had. If it had five to six, there had to be an upper middle class.” By that indicator, Perm with six sushi bars was a far more attractive commercial proposition than sushi-free Krasnoyarsk.

After a distinguished career at Izvestia covering the economy from the death throes of communism to the birth of market reforms, he put up a sign saying “Berger for sale” when the paper was taken over by Vladimir Potanin, an oligarch who made clear that coverage should not touch any of the sectors covered by his diversified business empire. “I understood that if you considered all the interests of [Potanin’s] Onexim group, you would have to close down the newspaper’s economic coverage.”

He then went to set up a new daily newspaper for Vladimir Gusinsky, a media magnate who ended up fleeing abroad to escape Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on oligarchs.

Misha stayed and thrived to become director-general of United Media, a media group owned by one of the other oligarchs still standing after the crackdown. In business, Misha steers clear of political coverage to focus on business and entertainment. Yet during this month’s protests, he was working round the clock – to oversee the news coverage of the protests. And he is not afraid to voice his views.

“I have a great deal of respect for Gorbachev,” says Misha, who attended the ex-Soviet leader’s 80th birthday celebrations in London - a reminder of how the man who presided over the Soviet system’s demise is reviled, or at best forgotten, at home. “It’s a shame we have to export this feeling of pride. Here we behave as if he does not exist.”

The policewoman

A career policewoman, Galya Lebedeva-Yegorova, 56, was one of Russia’s first entrepreneurs – in the days when private businesses were not allowed.

In 1990 she used her time off duty to paint my flat. Having retired two years ago with a clutch of Veteran of Labour medals, she is contemplating a return to work as an office “menedzher” [manager]. Yet she remains a steadfast supporter of the Communist party, which feeds on resentment of the country’s conspicuous inequalities and the authorities’ failure to provide as they once did in an increasingly idealised Soviet past.

Galya shrugs off charges of widespread corruption in the police force, saying “there is nothing to steal”. She regrets the forced departure earlier this year of old-style operator Yuri Luzhkov as Moscow mayor. In his time, she says, the roads were properly cleared of snow and police enjoyed free travel on all public transport. How Elena Baturina, his property-developer wife, became Russia’s richest woman during his time in office is of little interest to her.

Since the collapse of communism paved the way for Russians to travel abroad freely, Galya has been on police exchange trips to Bulgaria, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece and Israel.

She is unimpressed by the other big change since Soviet times – the abundance of goods in the shops. “There is a lot in the shops but everything is expensive,” she says, speaking in a flat that still has no washing machine.

She reminds me that in the old days, I gave her daughter and son-in-law trainers from abroad as wedding presents. “We traced their feet on pieces of paper for you because they were difficult to find here.”

Galya hints she might have been open to voting differently, had squabbling democrats such as Grigory Yavlinsky got their act together to win popular appeal. “I don’t necessarily agree with you,” she tells her husband as he declares the couple’s allegiance to the Communist party. “I might be a radical.”

The politician

At 59, Grigory Yavlinsky, an economist and founder of the opposition Yabloko (Apple) party, has been confined to the role of a latter-day Cassandra since walking out of the first democratically-elected Russian government of Boris Yeltsin in November 1990.

A charismatic and highly-intelligent figure, he has consistently warned that disaster would follow the policies implemented by others. After years in a marginalised opposition, he gets his latest chance of a “voice” – a chance to put his views to the public on state-controlled broadcast media – with his bid to run for president against Vladimir Putin in elections next March.

“If you are jumping out of a window, it’s a very fast way down,” is how he describes the price liberalisation and privatisation pursued by a team of young reformers led by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais after Russia became fully independent in December 1991. “I was proposing we take the stairs. The problem is that Chubais and Gaidar were asking other people to jump out the window, while they stayed in the room.”

As a result, in the Putin era, “we have an economy without property rights, without the rule of law and where there is an enormous gap between rich and poor – three per cent who have a very high standard of living, 20 per cent who have a a western standard of living and 75 per cent of people who have no future, no prospects of a decent job, education or medical care.”

Other economists like Yevgeny Yasin, a former economics minister, argue there was no scope for the gradual approach advocated by Yavlinsky, who retorts:. “The major problem of this period is the disappointment of the people, and that’s why people are leaving.” This includes his two sons, both of whom are living in London but who would like to return to Russia when they see signs of progress.

What keeps him going? “I love my country, I love my people. I love my children. I have pessimistic thinking, but an optimistic will.”