Description
This film shows Russia teetering on the edge of total chaos. A stalled economy. An ineffectual leader. For millions, life with no pay cheques and growing poverty.
At worst, adversity in Russia could affect not only the Russian economy it could have an impact on co-operation with Russia on nuclear disarmament, on fighting terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Also on peace in the Balkans and the Middle East.
This film looks at the country from the grass-roots right through to the Russian leadership and how Russia’s crisis stems from corruption & greed.
Privatization, the one big idea of young Reformers around President Boris Yeltsin, is at the root of this crisis. The Reformers believe that it would transform and enrich the country and so they pushed it through overnight and at fire sale prices and suddenly old Soviet managers and their cronies became new Russian owners of vast riches; oil and gas, timber and minerals.
But rather than invest they set about stripping the assets abroad putting billions of dollars into numbered accounts. Then they also set up their own banks, fuelled them with western dollar credits and they shipped those profits abroad as well.
In 2000, the loans came due but there was no money. The rouble crashed. Inflation raged. The government took over the banks and told people they’d get their money back in two months.
The history of the ’90s in Russia is the history and the tragedy of Boris Yeltsin. He consciously modelled himself on Peter the Great. He would impose a western constitution and he would impose a western economy on Russia. He quite literally blew away the reluctant Russian parliamentary leadership which stood in his way in 1995.
But the vigorous westernizing czar has degenerated into decrepitude, an aimless absentee president at the head of an absentee state so weak it can’t even collect its taxes.
It’s land that saves Russians today, not the vast forests and the steppe but millions of little garden plots. Collective farm families plant and harvest the food they cannot buy in an economy without money. Land and barter are the means of survival.
Reform is hard to find. Indeed the economy seems to be regressing almost to a pre-industrial state. And the virus of pessimism has spread even to the young who have no dreams.