Kovalev A. A. - Russias dead end: an insiders testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

Peter Reddaway

Andrei Kovalevs powerful book argues that Russias trajectory since 1985 has been circular. First, Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues carried out an improbable series of revolutionary reforms, taking their country all the wayas baseball fans would sayfrom home plate to first base and on to second. After a revolution did in fact occur and the Soviet Union fell apart, Boris Yeltsin presided over a Russia that stumbled back and forth on its way to third base, where he handed it over to Vladimir Putin. Then Putin quietly flooded the system with his colleagues from the secret police, thus infusing it with a Committee for State Security ( KGB ) mentality. In so doing, he took Russia back to a version of home plate, to a rootless, corrupt, authoritarian, de-ideologized version of the Soviet Union.

Regarding the future, Kovalev sees little likelihood of change in the near term. Domestic policy will continue to become gradually more authoritarian, and foreign policy will feature additional unpredictability and hostility toward the West and its allies. Further ahead, he fears, lie greater dangers, including the possibility of territorial fragmentation. But he hopes that eventually Russia will rebuild itself from the bottom up and join the world community. This monumental task will probably take three generations.

In short, Kovalevs book examines how and why, from 1985 to the present, Russias domestic and foreign policies evolved in the ways they did. Only occasionally does it look at Western policy toward Russia. When it does, the author often chides the West for not evincing enough interest or generosity toward his homeland, or for showing a disturbing navet in appeasing hard-liners in the administrations of Yeltsin and, especially, Putin.

Although the books initial primary audience was educated Russians, Westerners will be perfectly able to understand and benefit from its arguments. Kovalevs lively prose style and the inner freedom of his attractive personality are additional guarantees of this.

The book refers on occasion to the well-known Russian thinker Pyotr Chaadaev, who, starting in 1836, wrote a somewhat similar work, a series of Philosophical Letters. In them he lamented his countrys chronic backwardness and inability to govern itself. He saw its future as lying in an eventual reunion with European civilization. For his pains, Emperor Nicholas I declared him to be insane. However, after some minor official efforts to treat him for his nonexistent condition, Chaadaev continued to be active in Moscows intellectual life. Now, 175 years later, Kovalevs diagnosis of Russias condition evokes Chaadaevs. So does Kovalevs prescription for a cure.

As a former state official of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and then Russia, Kovalev bases parts of his book on his personal experiences. This applies especially to the years 198691, when he was closely involved in the implementation of high-level foreign policy and then worked briefly for President Gorbachev. He also roots his analysis in his training as a historian with a PhD, in the work of Russias most insightful commentators, and in the experiences of his many friends, including those of his diplomat father, Anatoly Kovalev, who retired as deputy head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1991.

During his thirty-year career, the author worked for the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies and the Diplomatic Academy (197785), the Soviet UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) commission (198587), the ministrys Directorate for Humanitarian and Cultural Cooperation (198791), the USSR presidents office (1991), the Russian mission to the UN s Geneva offices (199296), the Russian Security Council (19972001), the Russian mission to the European Community in Brussels (20014), and the Russian ombudsman for human rights (20047). Then, finding the Putin administration too politically oppressive, he moved to Belgium and settled in Brussels.