Paving the Path for Collision

Malcolm 18

Susan B. Malcolm

Paving the Path for Collision:

Presidential Rhetoric and Collective Memory in Post Soviet Russia:

Attempting to repair the crumbling societal foundation of the former Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.), Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika and glasnost in 1985 and created an information explosion of epic proportions; the future of Gorbachev and the U.S.S.R. would forever be changed by this rhetorical turn. Responding to dire economic conditions, reformist Russian President Boris Yeltsin, made hasty and sometimes erratic policy decisions; his rhetorical style often previewed his actions. Carving a free market economy from the granite of a decaying communist system, while simultaneously stopping the flow of State resources to the oligarchs, has been the challenge of Russian President Vladimir Putin since the year 2000. Putin’s authoritarian rhetoric attempts to reassure the country, and the world, of the strength of the Russian State; the hopeful Russian youth, disenchanted middle aged, and the destitute pensioners however, struggle with different needs, different horizons, and different memories that sometimes collide with Putin’s rhetoric and action.

Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985[1]. Until that time, the U.S.S.R. operated under a system of totalitarianism, that originated from the imperialism of the late nineteenth century, when the public was willing to “abdicate their civic freedom and responsibility,” (Villa 5, 8).[2] Totalitarianism produced the paradox of whereby total power produced total impotence; “’everything is possible’” but “’everything can be destroyed’” (Villa 29).[3]

The totalitarian terror of Joseph Stalin was interrupted by WWII and the War established Russia as one of the two world superpowers (Cameron, Neal 371)[4]. In 1949, following a series of peace treaties that contained territorial stipulations, the U.S.S.R. established a “straitjacket of leadership” over Eastern Europe (Cameron, Neal 371, 374).[5] The ill-fitting “straitjacket” was designed as a “one size fits all,” that encompassed the Eastern European countries until Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March of 1985 (Brown 7; Tatu 30 – 71).[6]

Gorbachev had played by the rules of the communist game and did not “rock the boat” until his appointment in 1985 when he proclaimed the need for perestroika saying that it [perestroika]:

does not merely apply to economics but to all the other aspects of social life: social relations, political systems, ideology and moral attitudes, to the profile of the Party and all our cadres and their approach to work….I would like to equate the words restructuring and revolution.

In addition to restructuring, Gorbachev introduced the climate of glasnost or a spirit of openness in communication with the people (Tatu 86).[7] At the 19th All-Union Conference of the CPSU, Gorbachev said:

The first three years of perestroika have shown convincingly that glasnost in the activity of the Party, …have enabled the Party, and the people as a whole, to better understand their past and present…(CPSU 152).

He emphasized that the “consistent expansion of glasnost is a necessary condition for the democratization of all spheres of society, and for the renewal of socialism” (CPSU 153). Glasnost made information available to the public that had not been accurately tabulated for 10-20 years and had not published in any detail for at least 10 years (White 80-86).[8]

Perestroika and glasnost represented a rhetorical turn, or information explosion, that extended to print, electronic, and mass media as well as to the population of writers, artists, dissidents and émigré’s. For example, the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the literary journal Novy mir, was written during the 1950’s but not published until 1988; and Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, written in 1968 by Andrei Sakharov, was finally published in December 1989 (White 86-87). Movies, art exhibitions, and mass media including television, were enjoying the new atmosphere of communication freedom that, in some cases, portrayed radically different philosophical orientations from the socialist leadership (White 88 – 89).

Despite Gorbachev’s desires to rid the Soviet Union of the cumulated effects of bureaucratic stagnation and to return to the “‘true principles of Leninism’” within the confines of the socialist system, glasnost and perestroika created turmoil (Sternthal 109)[9]. Gorbachev intended to “breathe new life” into the Soviet system but the unintended consequence was an “implosion” of the Soviet state (Willerton, Beznosov, Carrier 220)[10].

Gorbachev had initiated radical economic and political change in the Soviet Union, through rhetoric and action. The plea for openness in information was made within a socialist system of decay that remembered life under a different system; a collective identity that stood in stark opposition to the one being proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev (Smith 4).

Gorbachev struggled to introduce new government and economic structures while the public struggled to adapt and survive in spite of food supply shortages, organized crime, and conflicting collective memories of Soviet history (Smith 6-7). Smith notes that the communist regimes that collapsed had to redefine “virtually everything, including morality, social relations, and basic meanings” (4). This “reordering of people’s entire meaningful worlds” and was particularly difficult in Russia since it had been the center of socialism in Eastern Europe for over 40 years (Smith 5).

The volatility of the political and economic climate in Russia was seen in the polls conducted by the All-Union Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences as people struggled to integrate the old reality, economic restructuring, and information openness (White 232). For example, Gorbachev was voted Man of the Year in 1988, attained a 52 per cent approval rating in 1989, and was and elected president of the USSR in March of 1990 (White 247; Westlake 24-25)[11]. Later in 1990, his approval rating ranged from 5 to 21 percent and, in August of 1991, Gorbachev was the target of an attempted coup (White 247; Westlake 24-25). Gorbachev resigned as general secretary in August of 1991 and resigned as the President of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, after Boris Yeltsin, and leaders of the Ukraine and Belarus, voted to dissolve the U.S.S.R. and to create the Commonwealth of Independent States (“CIS”) (Westlake 25; Gorbachev 657, 660).[12]

The unconventional transfer of power characterized the rhetoric and action of Boris Yeltsin from 1991 – 1999. From the onset of his leadership in 1992, Yeltsin behaved in a hasty and sometimes erratic manner announcing, for example, economic reforms in “one bold leap” through the formation of a new government and with the assistance of “self-taught economists” Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais (Shevtsova 21, 25).[13] Gaidar actually had “help” from Harvard economists but this “help” further plummeted the country into economic disarray (McClintick 62-90).[14] After one year of economic reform, Yeltsin admitted that the economic “shock therapy” was not effective at solving real human and economic difficulties (Shevtsova 26, 58). Turmoil continued through 1993 when the Eighth Congress of People’s Deputies terminated Yeltsin’s powers but later had to retreat in the face of a majority popular vote of confidence in favor of Yeltsin (Shevtsova 74).

Rhetorical pause, contrasted with rhetorical confusion and conflict, describe Yeltsin during 1994. Rhetorical pause was punctuated by the fact that Yeltsin had virtually silenced parliament, withdrew from public appearance to his country home, and basked in the comfort that “none of the more apocalyptic prophecies—of which there had been many in recent years—had come to pass” (Shevtsova 103-105).

Rhetorical confusion and inconsistencies surfaced in situations such as the conflicting announcements about joining NATO’s Partnership for Peace program and a Yeltsin decree about the opening of a military base in Latvia, unbeknownst to Russian diplomats and military officials, followed by an abrupt statement of retraction (Shevtsova 106). Presidential rhetoric continued to confuse and contradict when Yeltsin addressed the festering wound of Chechnya with a demand to Chechens to “lay down their arms by December 15” then promptly authorized the use of force on December 11, 1994 (Shevtsova 111). The rhetorical inconsistencies also extended to his discussions about the West; “hostility toward the West when he spoke in Russia and a friendly and constructive tone when he dealt with Western Leaders in person” (Shevtsova 141).

Yeltsin essentially accommodated the audience and, in the post-Soviet climate of confusion and chaos, Yeltsin’s rhetoric and action reflected as well as intensified this climate. He could not articulate a collective vision for the various factions of Russian society; one that would incorporate the realities of the various populations, ethnicities, genders, and professions as well as the contradictions of the post-Soviet system (Bodnar 14). Yeltsin was not able to use public memory to engage the citizens in a way that would have been helpful to resurrect the economic and political climate. There was no bridge with the past and nothing to connect with the points from history (Zerubavel 40-47)[15].

Despite Yeltsin’s rhetorical style of pause and confusion, he was reelected in 1996 with the help of oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky; two of the privileged who accumulated power in areas of banking, media, oil, and government during the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union (Goldman 324)[16]. The entire economic system nearly collapsed in 1998, and though there was a unanimous public outcry against Yeltsin’s management of economic affairs, Yeltsin pledged, “I will not go anywhere. I will not resign. I will work as long as the constitution allows” (Shevtsova 257-258).

By 1999, world oil prices rose and the ruble was significantly devalued, but the resulting influx of oil profit to the oligarchs was interpreted as part of an economic recovery (Goldman 325). The oligarchs attributed the economic gains to the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and his “firm hold over the economy” (Goldman 326).

Yeltsin ended his reign having implemented a system of “simulation instead of substance. If Russia could not be a great power, then it could at least act like one” (Lo 97)[17]. Throughout his tenure, Yeltsin attempted to offset the gravity of the CIS economic chaos by communicating a series of myths, for example, emphasizing the importance of the CIS which maintained Russia as a regional power, or the “foreign policy” which presented “an alternative reality in which nothing was quite as it seemed, and where truths, half-truths and outright falsehoods were conflated in such a way as to make them often impossible to tell apart” (Lo 97). The old and new identities contrasted sharply, and the “foreign policy” was actually “pragmatism by default, based not on a consistent or integrated vision of the world, but shaped by the diverse responses of competing sectional interests” (Lo 156, 159).

At the end of December, 1999, Yeltsin transferred power to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin with a short televised speech to the country noting that Russia needed ‘new people—clever, energetic and strong’, “and able to cope with a new” ‘knot of problems’ (Black 21)[18]. Putin became the Acting President and, in a televised speech of January 2000, he used “old stereotypical visions of a ‘genetic code’ pushing Russians towards a highly centralized state system, and praised the ‘paternalistic roots’ ingrained in Russian society” (Black 23). Putin announced that ‘The public…looks toward the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the State’ (Black 23).

The rhetorical style was also seen prior to the presidential election in March of 2000.[19] He said, for example, ‘we need a strong Russia, not to inspire fear, but to ensure that we are not ignored. Offending us will cost more than it is worth’ (Black 24). This type of rhetoric was intended to convince the international community that Russia would be an aggressive participant in the international community (Black 24). Using authoritarian rhetoric, Putin called upon a collective memory of Soviet strength following WWII (Winter, Sivan 28)[20]. Putin’s rhetoric demonstrates the “significance of power and politics for the construction of collective memory” and supports Foucault’s rationale that says, “our own understanding of ‘history’ is but an understanding shaped by the interests of the dominant groups and classes, by the nexus of power and knowledge” (Roudometof 164)[21].

Putin’s inaugural rhetoric of April 2000 mimicked his prior speeches when he said “that his task was to ‘take care of Russia’ and that his goal was to champion Russia’s dignity. ‘We must know our history…draw lessons from it’ and again make Russia a ‘great, powerful and mighty state’” (Black 51). Putin used the inauguration ceremony as a “rebirth of patriotism in Russia,” facilitated by the annual Victory Day holiday that celebrated victory over the defeat of the Nazis, and succeeded in resurrecting the “glories of Russia’s past” (Black 51). Putin united the nation “through remembrance, through sedimented narratives, and through tradition” (Fine 7)[22]. Putin continued to influence the country from a position of power and corresponding rhetoric.

Despite a few domestic difficulties in 2000, Putin’s popularity grew to over 60 percent by February of 2001 as public opinion about the U.S. declined (Black 117).[23] According to Lo, Putin was particularly strong in his ability to establish a ‘securitization’ that enhanced the role of security in foreign-policy decisions, prioritized the role of politics and the military over economics, and better balanced the roles of security and economics within the foreign policy arena (158). The balanced approach in pursuing “nominal economic objectives” became the impetus for future strategic influence and “Russia’s revival as a ‘great power’” (Lo 159). In 2002, Lo said that Russia was “assuming the guise of a responsible and pragmatic international player with a comprehensive range of interests, with the will and, increasingly, the means to pursue them effectively” (168).

Simultaneous to Putin’s political development, was the continued development of the oligarchs who amassed wealth in various forms beginning in 1987 when the initial Gorbachev reforms were implemented (Goldman 322). Some of the oligarchs had been part of the nomenklatura, the privileged during the Soviet era, but it was the resourcefulness of the non-nomenklatura that placed them in the forefront of power.[24] The oligarchs who remained in 2002 were those who had survived the economic downturn in 1998, had diversified their portfolios to include energy and raw materials, had siphoned profits and invested in new entities, or those who had transferred profits offshore to a separately owned enterprise (Goldman 323, 324). Publicly, Putin engaged in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance with the oligarchs and said these individuals would be treated the same as any other independent businessmen, despite the fact that many were engaged in illegal activities such as siphoning State resources for personal financial gain (Goldman 325-326).