1The hard-line coup (1991) and the October crisis (1993)

The coup of August 1991. The Union Treaty (R2) would have given the republics real power from 20 August. Eight senior officials opposed it, among them the vice-president Gennady Yanayev, the KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, the defence minister Dmitry Yazov, the interior minister Boris Pugo and the prime minister Valentin Pavlov. They formed a "State Committee on the State of Emergency" (the "Gang of Eight").

Why it failed. The plotters were hesitant and badly organised: they did not arrest Yeltsin, did not cut off the White House's communications and did not use the army decisively. The army and KGB were divided and many officers would not fire on civilians. Yeltsin and the crowd provided an alternative that voters had elected. The media and the world's governments backed the opposition. And the coup's own aims, to restore the old order, had little support among ordinary Soviet citizens.

Consequences. The coup, aimed at saving the union, ended it: it destroyed the Communist Party's authority, discredited the KGB and the army leadership, and made Yeltsin the real ruler. The republics declared independence at once (R2). Yeltsin celebrated democracy but also moved toward government by decree. The plotters were charged with treason, but their trial dragged on and in February 1994 the Duma granted an amnesty to them and to the leaders of the 1993 revolt.

The October crisis of 1993. The quarrel between President Yeltsin and the Congress and Supreme Soviet (R2) came to a head in September.

• 21 September. Yeltsin signed Decree No. 1400 "On gradual constitutional reform", dissolving the Congress and the Supreme Soviet and calling elections to a new parliament for December. The existing constitution gave him no power to do so. The Constitutional Court ruled the decree unconstitutional that night; the Supreme Soviet voted to remove him and swore in Vice-President Rutskoi as president.
• 22 September to 2 October. The parliamentary leaders, Khasbulatov and Rutskoi, with a few hundred armed supporters, held out in the White House. The government cut its electricity and telephones and surrounded it with police. Talks mediated by the Orthodox Patriarch failed.
• 3 October. Crowds broke through the police lines. Rutskoi called on his followers to storm the mayor's office and the Ostankino television centre, where fighting with interior troops killed dozens. That night the army decided to side with Yeltsin.
• 4 October. Tanks fired on the White House in front of the world's television cameras and special forces stormed it. Rutskoi and Khasbulatov surrendered and were arrested. Official figures spoke of about 150 dead and some 400 wounded; some Russian sources give higher numbers.

Consequences. Yeltsin was left in control of Moscow, and he rewrote the rules in his own favour: the constitution of December 1993 (R2) gave the president the powers the old parliament had denied him. The West, including the American president Bill Clinton, backed him as the defender of reform against hard-liners. Critics in Russia argued that democracy had been shelled along with the parliament; the voters' vote for Zhirinovsky and the Communists in December was a reply. The crisis left a lasting precedent: in a conflict between institutions, force and the president's will decided.

Perspectives. Yeltsin and his supporters: the parliament was dominated by communists and nationalists who blocked reform, had armed an uprising and left him no choice. His opponents: the president broke the law first, shut down a parliament elected by the people and used tanks. Historians weigh the two: most agree both sides had broken the rules and that the struggle came from a constitution that did not say who ruled.

2Economic consequences: shock therapy, strikes and organised crime

Falling output and living standards.

• Prices. After prices were freed (R2), inflation was about 2,500% in 1992, about 840% in 1993, 220% in 1994 and 130% in 1995; it fell to about 22% in 1996. Savings in the state bank were wiped out.
• Output. The economy shrank every year until 1997 (a small gain) and fell again in 1998; officially national output fell by roughly 40% from 1990 to 1998, and industrial production by about half. This was a bigger fall than the United States saw in the Great Depression. Investment collapsed.
• Incomes and poverty. Average real wages fell by about a third in 1992 and by roughly half over 1990–93. Millions of pensioners, state employees and families fell below the poverty line, estimated at about a third of the population in 1992.
• Wage arrears. From the mid-1990s the government and many firms could not or did not pay their workers, and by 1997–98 unpaid wages ran into billions of dollars; people were paid in goods or not at all.
• Health. A man's average life expectancy fell from about 64 in 1989 to under 58 in 1994, because of heart disease, alcohol, accidents, violence and a collapsing health service.
• Unemployment grew to over 10% by the late 1990s, and many more people were in hidden unemployment, on unpaid leave from factories that did not close.
• The other side. Shops were full, a private sector of small businesses, services and trade appeared, and some, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg, got richer.

Labour strikes. Workers who had been told the state was theirs found they were the ones paying for the change.

• The miners, whose strikes in 1989 helped end the old system, struck again in 1993 and especially in the Kuzbass and Vorkuta in 1996–97 over unpaid wages and cuts to subsidies; in May–June 1998 they blocked the Trans-Siberian railway for days.
• Teachers, doctors, factory workers and soldiers' families also struck, protested or blocked roads.
• The Federation of Independent Trade Unions (successor to the Soviet unions) organised national days of protest, but strikes were mostly local and about pay, and they did not unite into a political movement that could change policy. The government's answer was promises, partial payment and loans.

The rise of organised crime.

• Causes. The collapse of the Soviet police and courts, the sudden freedom to trade without clear laws, and privatisation, which transferred huge assets to people who often had links to the old nomenklatura, the KGB or the criminal world. Businesses needed protection, and when the state could not give it, gangs sold it: the protection racket (known as the "roof", krysha).
• What happened. Groups such as the Solntsevo gang in Moscow ran protection rackets and extortion, smuggling, car theft and prostitution, and attacked rivals. Contract killings of bankers, businessmen and journalists were common: the television chief Vladislav Listyev was shot in March 1995 and the reporter Dmitry Kholodov killed by a bomb in 1994. Murders in Russia roughly doubled between 1990 and the mid-1990s to over 30,000 a year.
• Fraud and corruption. Pyramid schemes such as MMM (1994) cost millions of people their savings; officials took bribes, and the line between businessmen, officials and criminals was blurred. Billions of dollars left the country every year.
• The state's reply. In June 1994 Yeltsin signed a decree "On urgent measures to protect the population from gangsterism", but the police were underpaid, corrupt and overstretched and the courts were weak.
• The link to the oligarchs. The rich businessmen who won the loans-for-shares auctions (R2) used private security, bought newspapers and television channels and influenced the government; critics called the system a "bandit capitalism".

Historians and the economy. The view that shock therapy was a necessary shock and the cost would have been higher without it (Gaidar, Åslund) is set against the view that the collapse of output and the surge in crime came from reform without institutions (Stiglitz, Goldman) and from the speed of privatisation. Stephen Cohen and others argued that the West's advice made things worse. Some economists point out that output was already falling in the 1980s and that the collapse of the Soviet trade network was behind much of the fall. The evidence is that all three played a part. A student should also note that statistics from the 1990s are uncertain: the shadow economy was large and official figures do not capture it.

3The First Chechen War (1994–1996)

Background. The Chechens, a mainly Muslim people of the Caucasus, had been conquered by Russia in the nineteenth century, deported by Stalin in 1944, and allowed back in 1957. After the failed coup, a former Soviet air force general, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was elected president of Chechnya in October 1991 and declared independence in November. Yeltsin sent troops, but the Russian parliament overruled him, and the troops withdrew. Chechnya did not sign the Federation Treaty of 1992 and was in practice independent for three years, with a weak government, arms left by the Soviet army and a lot of crime. Moscow could not accept that other republics, such as Tatarstan, might follow.

The decision to invade. In 1994 Moscow first tried a covert operation: Russian-backed Chechen opposition forces, with Russian tanks and unmarked soldiers, tried to take Grozny on 26 November and were defeated, and Russian soldiers were captured. Yeltsin then issued an ultimatum and, on 11 December 1994, ordered troops into Chechnya "to restore constitutional order". His security council, defence minister Pavel Grachev (who was reported to have said that a single airborne regiment could take Grozny in two hours) and some of his entourage hoped for a quick victory that would raise Yeltsin's standing before the elections of 1995–96.

The war.

• Grozny, December 1994 to March 1995. The attack on the capital on 31 December was a disaster: poorly trained conscripts and tanks in narrow streets were destroyed by Chechen fighters, and a whole brigade was lost. The Russians then flattened the city with air and artillery attacks, killing many civilians, and took it by March 1995.
• A guerrilla war. By summer 1995 Russia held the towns but not the mountains. In June 1995 Shamil Basayev's raiders seized a hospital at Budyonnovsk in Russia, took well over a thousand hostages (estimates run to about 2,000) and, with the failed rescue attempts, more than 100 people died, and Moscow's attempt to storm it failed; the government agreed a ceasefire. In January 1996 another Chechen raid took hostages at Kizlyar.
• Turning points in 1996. Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile in April; Yeltsin, in the middle of his election campaign, announced a ceasefire in May; but in August 1996 Chechen fighters retook Grozny with about 1,500 men against several times as many Russian troops in the city.
• Khasavyurt, 31 August 1996. General Aleksandr Lebed, Yeltsin's security chief, and the Chechen commander Aslan Maskhadov signed an agreement ending the fighting and withdrawing Russian forces, leaving the question of Chechnya's status to be decided by 31 December 2001. In 1997 Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a peace treaty.

The costs. Russia lost about 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers by official count; estimates of Chechen civilian deaths run from about 30,000 upwards. Hundreds of thousands became refugees, and Grozny was destroyed. The army's weakness, with underpaid, poorly trained and equipped soldiers, was exposed.

Society's reaction.

• A new openness. The war was the first fought in the light of glasnost's heir, a free press: independent television, especially NTV, and newspapers showed the dead and the destroyed city, and opinion polls showed that most Russians opposed the war.
• Protest. The Committee of Soldiers' Mothers campaigned against conscripts being sent to Chechnya; human rights figures such as Sergei Kovalev, Yeltsin's own human rights commissioner, criticised the conduct of the war and left the president's human rights commission in January 1996; liberal parties and some generals opposed it.
• Politics. Yeltsin's approval fell to very low levels, and he fought the 1996 election as the man who would end it.
• Foreign view. Western governments criticised human rights abuses but largely accepted that Chechnya was an internal matter; President Clinton compared it to the American Civil War.

Perspectives. The Russian government called it a defence of territorial integrity and the constitution against bandits and separatists. Chechen leaders called it a war of national liberation against colonial rule. Russian liberals and the press called it a disastrous, undemocratic adventure launched without parliament's agreement. Historians such as Anatol Lieven (Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power, 1998) and Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal (Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, 1998) stress the Russian army's failures and the destruction. Significance: the war showed the weakness of the state, tested the freedom of the press and left a legacy: the Second Chechen War began in 1999.

4After 1996: the end of the decade

Yeltsin won re-election in July 1996, but his health was poor and he was often absent from the Kremlin. Growth briefly returned in 1997. In August 1998, after the Asian crisis and the fall in oil prices, the government could not pay its debts: on 17 August it devalued the rouble, defaulted on its rouble debt and declared a moratorium on some private foreign debts. The rouble lost about two-thirds of its value, banks failed and many people lost their savings for a second time. Yeltsin sacked the government and appointed a succession of prime ministers: Primakov (September 1998), Stepashin (May 1999) and Vladimir Putin (August 1999). On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned and named Putin acting president. The crisis showed that the economy of the 1990s, based on oil, borrowing and a weak state, had not been stable.