In Europe

Krikalev, remained suspended in space for five months longer than planned. Later some people claimed that he had stayed in space so long because there was no money to bring him back, that his prolonged orbit was due to the fact that the country that had sent him into it no longer existed. ‘Nonsense. Journalistic claptrap,’ Artsybarski growls. ‘There were simply a few technical problems.’ The only thing he really wants to talk about, however, is his ‘people's collection’ to save the
Mir
space station, about the ‘revitalisation of the prestige of the Russian cosmonauts’, about the ‘stimulation of prizes, diplomas and medals’, about pride lost.
    In early 1998,
The Economist
published the results of an opinion poll held among a significant cross-section of the Russian population: underwhich leader, in their view, had life in Russia been at its best? The president at the time, Yeltsin, received fourteen per cent; Stalin and Czar Nicholas II both received six per cent; Gorbachev took three per cent; Lenin – the great leader and model for more than seventy years – received one per cent. A massive preference was expressed for one of the last, dyed in the wool communist leaders, Brezhnev, with forty-two per cent.
    I ask the beggars around St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square about their pasts. A young man in uniform tells me he lost his leg in Afghanistan, most of the women once worked in factories, one had been widowed at a young age – her pension had been melted away by inflation – and the last one I spoke to had worked all her life in a clothing store. No, they had never thought they would end up here, in this shivering line-up, clutching a plastic cup.
    Russia was living in the final weeks of the Yeltsin era, the post-communist period that had started so propitiously just seven years before. A liberal democracy! A market economy! A constitutional state! Local self-government! Individual freedom! Western prosperity! In late 1991, all of that was still to arrive.
    In practice, though, democratisation and the introduction of a market economy in the former Soviet Union was a spectacular failure. From the ranks of the former communist
nomenklatura
there arose a new elite that absconded with the key national industries and resources, including the banks, the energy sector and the media. These oligarchs elaborated on the time-worn mechanisms of the old Soviet hierarchy: a combination of brute force and extreme servility, patronage between senior and junior managers, a system of nepotism,
blat
and bribery.
    In 1992, Yeltsin began with the head-over-heels introduction of the market economy. Shares in the state-owned companies were distributed among the population in the form of coupons. Most of those coupons were then bought up for a pittance by a handful of businessmen. Car dealer Boris Berezovski, for example, secured a major interest in Siberian Oil (Sibneft), Aeroflot, the state broadcasting company and several newspapers. Viktor Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin's prime minister between 1992–8, used his status as former managing director of the Soviet gas company to set up a firm of his own, Gazprom. Itwas the world's largest energy company, with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars.
    During that same period, as part of the ‘shock therapy’ propagated by Western economists, Yeltsin's reformers lifted all government price control. The results were disastrous. In the howling inflation which followed, most of the pensions held by the elderly and the disabled became almost worthless within the month. Thanks to the influx of foreign investments, Moscow, St Petersburg and several other large cities witnessed a new prosperity, but in the rest of the country the shock therapy resulted in a national tragedy.
    This was clearly not the ‘transitional period’ spoken of so widely in the West, but a decline in almost everything essential to daily life: salaries, benefits, food supplies, health care, education, government services and public safety. Between January 1993 and January 1996, Russia's industrial production decreased by a third. More than half of all Russian families ended up below the poverty level. Symptomatic of the malaise was the collapse of the country's air traffic: the number of passengers tumbled from 135 million in 1989 to 20 million in 1999, and more than half the country's airports were closed during this same period.
    Statistics on Russia's population following this shock therapy