Salutation

Let me first of all thank Professor Donald B. Melrose for the invitation to the University of Sydney both to participate in the scientific activity and to share with you my political experience in taking part in the revolution in , which, hopefully, will be of no practical use for you, since God save us from revolutions. It is only to quench your curiosity. Thank you for coming. I am also thankful to Dr. Phil Dooley for organizing this event, especially for the very lucky choice of the date: the first Thursday after the first Sunday of December, when the elections of the Duma occurred. That was the day, which may mark an end of an era.

Foreword. Where are we?

I used to speak in front of various audiences with sketches about our recent history. I used to say about what I thought was right to call ”Russian revolution of the XX century” referring to very profound and fast transformations that took place in Russia in the ninetieth. Just look around - I would say - we are facing a country, quite different from what it was before Gorbachev. The industry is mostly privately-owned. Democratic institutes are operating, which resemble very much the ones characteristic of every civilized nation. A multi-party system has been created, as well as the new tradition of competitive elections. It is true - I was forced to make the reservation - many people feel themselves disappointed. It is the same na¨ıve people who in every revolution that happened throughout the history always believed that at last all the dreams would come true. Not all is as good as it might be desirable. The country with a heavy inheritance of a half-millennium of despotism, very much Asian in its depth notwithstanding the European appearance, cannot be expected to readily accept democracy. Nevertheless, I used to say, although the victory of the democracy is not total, the country is much better; it no longer is an Empire of evil. As time passed, step by step the course of life forced us to abandon this mild attitude. Now, after the 2nd of December we woke to see that the dream is over. The 64% vote in support of a single party of bureaucracy, ”Yedinaya Rossia” (United Russia), whose electoral list of candidates was recently headed by President Putin himself, signifies that the country is left at the mercy of a single person. The attempts that can be traced back to Yeltsin’s administration to implant ad hoc a system with two competitive political parties, with a president, like a monarch, directly associated with neither of them, failed. Now such attempts are completely denied, although at the beginning of the present Duma cam- paign it might seem that they were renewed by organizing a pro-Putin poppet- oppositional, more left-wing in its appearance, party ”Spravedlivaya Rossia” (”Just Russia”). Nothing of the sort: the role of this party was only to draw

1 off votes from the communists. The one-party rule, confirmed by almost unan- imous public vote, notorious at the Soviet time, has been resurrected in a quite direct, cynic way. During the electoral campaign Mr. Putin used every mean at his disposal to gain maximum for his party, even a complaint was raised against him in the Supreme Court for illegal use of his presidential authority for propaganda. The campaign in mass media was openly unilateral, repressive measures including short-term arrests were taken against the opposition party activists and certainly the vote count was falsified to a certain extent. What, under the sun, was it needed for? The dominating position of United Russia in the Duma has been a priory guaranteed without any additional efforts. It is sufficiently popular. No wonder: he, who commands TV, commands minds. TV made people overestimate the current improvements in economics and mis- attribute them to the credit of the present authorities, although these are due to the structural transformations laid by the previous Yeltsin’s government, and to high oil prices. Evidently, Mr. Putin needed not just a victory, but a total victory. His goal is to preserve his personal position at the top of the authority, despite the constitutional ban of being elected as a president for the third term. With 64% vote he is sure to find one or another way to achieve this goal within the Constitution or beyond it, if he chooses so 1.

How was it that we could win?

What I was saying up to now was only a preface. My talk is not about this. Its subject is intended to cover a fragment of history, namely, its most turbulent revolutionary period, when I happened to take a personal part in it as a member of two Russian parliaments - The Congress of People’s Deputies and The - from 1990 to 1996. I am aware that as far as events are concerned, which occurred after my retirement from the political activity, my witness is no more than the one of an ordinary political analyst. But I could not withstand the temptation to respond to the current situation. The more so that I am undertaking in the present lecture to not only elucidate the question of how it could happen that the Soviet regime that seemed so inviolable faded away so

1Note added in preparation of the written version. The way Mr. Putin has taken a fortnight later is to become the prime minister, with Dmitry Medvedev elected as a president under his auspice. Once the Constitution endows the president with a greater authority than the premier, Mr. Putin’s personal priority in this case may only rest on inertia, the personal loyalty of Mr. D. Medvedev and a position of the head of the party of parliamentary majority, which he yet has to acquire. (Now, formally, this position is occupied by another person, Boris Gryzlov, who will readily make way to Mr. Putin). None of these three whales makes a reliable bearing. The first two are not everlasting, whereas the third one is not sufficient in itself. Hence, during a restricted time after the presidential election in March, when these three factors are expected to be still in effect, the corresponding amendments to the Constitution should be taken. The necessary majority in the Parliament is provided.

2 readily and without a mass bloodshed, but also why the regime that substitutes for it is of the same nature. I will not discuss the economical background behind the whole thing. The reason is that the economical circumstances though understood as most im- portant, work in an indirect way behind the scene and are not the subject of a sensual observation. My main concern will be psycho-social aspects. Only one remark of economical character is in order. Yegor Gaidar, the head of the reformist government in 1992 (under as a president), and later the leader of the political party to which I belonged, once remarked that the Soviet regime would have fallen much earlier if not for the vast oil resources discov- ered in the seventieth in the West Siberia. It fell when the oil prices stood at their minimum. Now that they are the highest, the like regime is resurrecting. The natural riches became a disaster for Russia. When we are surprised to see how easily the Russian people has changed its political religion, it is worthwhile recalling the proverb of Canadian fishermen: In cod we trust!

My personal political history. I am educated as a theoretical physicist from Moscow University. I was working in quantum field theory in Lebedev Physics Institute of the Science Academy in Moscow, and never openly opposed to the Soviet regime. In exams in the University, during the brainwashing interviews associated with trips abroad and on other official occasions, I complied with the rules of game that followed from the communist philosophical system and used to be saying what anyone was expected to. The Soviet regime looked unbreakable; I could not imagine that I can live to see its end.2 I was one of the many who, according to a popular Soviet

2 Josef Stalin succeeded to create an unbelievably strong fusion between devotion and fear, laid by him into the foundation of stability. On the top of all, there was an ideologue that consisted, on one hand, of the Marxist theory, believed to have scientifically proven the statement that the public ownership of means of production sooner or later will dominate in the whole world, and, on the other hand, on a social utopia, called ”communist society”, a future kingdom of good and justice with the possibility for everyone to quench all one’s living needs, with only those limitations that one deliberately establishes for oneself. The author of this utopia remains unknown to me. At least it was not any of ”the Marxist-Leninist classics”. To the best of my knowledge, even Stalin was cautious not to merge his name with this nonsense. Nevertheless, ”the great Soviet people was constructing communism!” This philosophy was studied at all levels of public education starting with children in kindergartens and up to postgraduate students, irrespective of their professional profile. Like any other sophisticated religion, that philosophy admitted many levels of understanding, so that a person of any educational basis, even if he or she did not know how to read and write, might be satisfied by achieving an illusion of understanding. Simultaneously he or she believed - that is very important - that there were other, cleverer people, who understood the whole philosophy in a final way. I never met such a clever person. And I never believed that for a mere human being it is possible to have read all the volumes of ”The capital” by Karl Marx from the beginning to the end. Anyway, Nikita Khrushchev did not. As the leader of the he was not an expert in the ideological system. So after his public speeches teachers of Marxist-Leninist philosophy clutched at their heads. Everyone was obliged to be a staunch supporter of this credo. As every other credo, it was meant to be deliberate and based on understanding and

3 saying, ”were boldly demonstrating a fig inside the pocket”. The authorities did not have an idea of how many such figs there were. And, I am afraid, they did not realize that the whole generation of Soviet people born in the sixties or later, in contrast to the previous generation to which the party leaders themselves belonged, was absolutely intact by the communist philosophy, felt indifference to it and did not take it seriously. When Mikhail Gorbachev started his ”perestroika”, I thought that the time had come, such that an action against the regime might be efficient, but not just a self-sacrifice - a long-awaited moment. I decided that I must at last pay trib- ute to my convictions. I plunged into political turmoil following Academician Andrey Sakharov, ”father” of Soviet hydrogen bomb and a prominent dissident, who worked in the same I.E.Tamm Department of Theoretical Physics as I and was my next-door neighbour in the office. In 1989 the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences rejected to nominate him for being elected for the Congress of Peo- ple’s Deputies of the USSR as a member, representing the Academy - according to an unusual representational electoral system invented by Mr. Gorbachev for that first (and last) Soviet Parliament elected on a competitive basis. This decision caused a storm of protest among the scientists of the Academy, who succeeded to elect Ac. Sakharov to office despite the resistance of the Presid- ium. The storm wave lifted me to the top. I became Ac. Sakharov’s campaign manager and, subsequently, one of leaders of the all-Russia public movement ”Democratic Russia”. On the eve before his death Ac. Sakharov expressed his support to my election as a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic (RSFSR) - then a con- stituent of the USSR, the second level parliament. His support, later publicized by his widow, Elena Bonner, was decisive for my success in the elections in 1990. Not later than in two years, after the Soviet Union was disbanded in Decem- ber 1991, this body became the top parliament of Russian Federation, now a separate state, to end up in the fire in 1993.

What a physicist can be doing in politics? I am often asked what use may be of a physicist’s involvement into an activity, which evidently should require quite a different professional training. I answer by citing a proverb: ”War is too important a business to be entrusted with to the militaries”. This proverb refers to the well recognized phenomenon of a professional narrow-mindedness. It evidently may be extended to many fields where professionals are not sufficient, revolutions go without saying. Our rev- olution of the ninetieth have recruited to all levels of public life thousands of people who, like Academician Sakharov in the first place, were not educated as believe. Only, if it was not one’s credo, one was subject to punishment. In every other respect it was deliberate. This credo made a basis of the like-mindedness, called ”moral and political unity of the Soviet people”, that cemented the regime. At least its leaders were sure that that was the case.

4 jurists, economists, socio-psychologists, historians or other carriers of education in humanitarian sciences considered to be best fitted to form a background for political services. On the contrary, they were mathematicians, physicists, biol- ogists, medical doctors, engineers, etc. The point is that under unprecedented, nonstandard conditions that a revolution proposes, an experience, both per- sonal, or collective historical experience accumulated in education, sometimes becomes a useless burden not fit to be consulted 3. I happened once to listen to a talk in a seminar led by the famous mathematician I.M. Gel’fand. I do not remember the name of the author of that work, but remember the statement whose validity he demonstrated in a certain model. A self-organized system that operates in a fast changing environment shows maximum efficacy provided its memory is bounded from above. An excess of memory makes it less adequate. This statement may also help to understand why political leaders of revolution- ary epochs are usually much younger than those of the times of stability. The gerontocracy of the stagnation period of the late Soviet state makes another example. An education and working experience in natural science do not produce any special approach as far as politics is concerned. Neither do them provide any special advantages in handling political matters. For these reasons, after a rev- olution is over one must decide either to become a professional politician, which turn requires a special character, or to leave this field for professionals. Many of those nonprofessionals, who had joined the political process, later became expelled from it, only few are left as professionals. I came back to the research work in theoretical physics soon after I had realized that my time as a politician had expired. Good luck, I was not too old at the moment.

God has not granted horns to a cow that is apt to butt - Russian proverb. Now I am passing, as I promised, to explaining the miraculous fall of the Soviet regime. It goes without saying that the start was done by Mikhail Gorbachev, who paralyzed the repressive machine and opened up the admittance of people to public life. I will speak about the rest. Ones upon a time, I was with other deputies working in a commission on proposed amendments to the old Brezhnev’s Constitution. We used to amend it very often. We were sitting in an ancient chamber of the Great Kremlin Palace,

3 It is said that the knowledge of past history is an invaluable tool for handling the current history, since it provides useful analogies. This is right, but my own life observation is of a reverse character: to the customary statement that the History, unfortunately, does not teach anything, I would add that an involvement in current historical events produces an understanding of the past history, not to be found in textbooks. My main impression is that in the past history, the same as it happened in my own eyes, crucial decisions were made under the effect of lack of time and lack of comprehension. Since then, I am skeptical to see in books a thorough analysis of the circumstantial basis underlying decisions taken by past politicians. I am convinced that most of them were taken off-hand.

5 called Hall of Facets. This hall is decorated with frescos depicting various scenes from the Russian history, so Princes and Tsars might oversee from the walls our attempts to redo the history of their country. It is a curious thing to be working in such environment. Just imagine, how after a sitting of the Congress had been closed someone took a microphone and advertised that, say, the deputies belonging to agrarian faction should gather in Tsaritsa’s (queen’s) Bedroom. And imagine this small bedroom with low arched ceiling updated with personal computers. . . It was deep night, everybody was tired, and the Kremlin staff brought us a snack to eat and to rest a little. I was seated at the table next to a Communist party official of a rather high rank, who politely asked me to pass him a sugar basin. The electorate would not believe that political enemies in the parliament could be peacefully sitting side by side drinking coffee or tea. When passing the sugar basin to him I remarked that ”We shall lay down our bones 4 as not to let you come back to power”. After thanking me for the sugar he replied in a very calm tone: ”Why, be sure, we shall step over your bones”. The real course of events has shown that these words were an idle boasting. They signified the absence of any moral hindrance on the part of our opponents, which came to no surprise, but no more than this. During the years of stagnation the regime has lost its bygone vital force. The top party positions were occupied by aged people promoted in the course of long careers. Their fighting spirit was not like the one of their predecessors, the Bolsheviks of 1917. The qualities, necessary for succeeding in the natural selec- tion, were subordination, readiness to demonstrate absence of personal opinion, obedience to the ones that are higher, conservativeness, and hence inability of making prompt or nontrivial decisions on their own, in short, the whole set of merits of a bureaucrat. They never faced an opposition and were not taught how to withstand it in the conditions of an open public dispute pressed on by M. Gorbachev. They only knew how to use repressions, but such means no longer were at their disposal. Besides, the 18-million strong Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was far from being what they called it ”a fighting unit”. The party membership was just a prerequisite for a career in any professional field. Evidently, the Party members were in the Party not because of their de- votion to the Marxist-communist philosophy. The 18 millions left their CPSU the moment it stopped being a ruling party. I am not surprised to be finding many of them in United Russia. When the highest Communist party officials, including the chiefs of the Army, Militia and KGB, ventured the coup d’etat in August 1991 against Pres- ident Gorbachev in order to prop up the shaking regime, they did not bother themselves to organize it in a due way, because they were not used to face a resistance and did not await it. They were unprepared to handle crowds that went out into streets to stop the tanks. The head of the rebellious Committee

4 A Russian idiom, more or less ”we shall fall in the battle”, so that our bones will be left in the field.

6 of Emergency State, Vice-president Yanayev appeared in front of TV cameras with his hands trembling either of fear, or of excess drinking the day before, or both. They made a list of 39 persons subject to arrest or, who knows, to more than arrest (I am proud to have been number five in that list!), but only three men out of that list were in fact arrested, President of RSFSR Yeltsin excluded. I refer to an event that relates to me personally to exemplify their inefficacy. KGB lingered half a day before it set a watchman in the yard outside my home, although my address was recorded in the official files of the Parliament. This is worth comparing with the way of actions of General Yaruselsky, the head of the last communist state in Poland. Even before his action was publicly claimed, he had switched off all telephones in Warsaw (thus Solidarnost was deprived of means of communication), and arrested a huge pack of Solidarnost’s activists during one night, with no tanks in the streets. In the long run, this did not save his regime, but that is a different story. . . I remember how the communists have lost the struggle for the chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet (the working Parliament) when the Congress of People’s Deputies of the RSFSR gathered to its first meeting in 1990. That defeat had most decisive consequences. We, then the democratic opposition, could hardly control one third of votes in the Congress. Hence, according to arithmetic laws, we by no means could succeed to elect our leader B.Yeltsin the Chairman, as we wished to (and did so against the will of Mr. Gorbachev). However... In- between April, 1990 when the Congress was elected, and May when it first gathered together, our deputies toiled on preparing the future agenda 5. I was charged by the collective to prepare a draft of what was intended to become Declaration of the Sovereignty of the Russian Federation, with a group of ex- perts to my aid, the future Chairman of the Constitutional Court V. Zor’kin among them. By the time the Congress meeting was opened, the draft had been ready. (Later I waived it in favour of another version, recognized by me as better in its idea, made by a deputy from our number Mr. L.B.Volkov, profes- sional jurist himself.) In the Congress, B.Yeltsin proposed to include the item of the sovereignty into the agenda. The congress officials could not resist. I will comment later on why, surprisingly, this idea attracted sympathies of the majority of the Congress, many communists included. The Chairman of the previous, Soviet-time-elected parliament of the RSFSR , Vitaly Vorotnikov had to become an official speaker on that subject. However, as being not prepared, he could say nothing interesting, in contrast to B. Yeltsin, who was armed with a well-done document. (The next day Gorbachev, from outside - he was not a

5 This activity was organized and headed by Deputy M. Bocharov. The election of B. Yeltsin should be to a significant extent put to his credit. After being elected, B.Yeltsin nominated M. Bocharov for the position of the head of the Government of RSFSR, but readily gave him up when he faced a resistance of the Supreme Soviet. Another, compromise, person, Mr. Silaev, had been occupying this position until Russia became a separate state at the end of 1992. Many years later I once encountered Mr. Bocharov in the street. When I reminded him those past events, he excitedly cursed Mr. Yeltsin in strong words, and I must tell you, he surely is an expert in using them

7 deputy of that body and never showed himself in its meetings - fiercely attacked Yeltsin’s propositions). This is how we gained an important impulse, crucial for Yeltsin’s subsequent election. At first round, B. Yeltsin was lacking a few votes to be elected as a Chairman. If the communists would nominate Mr. Vorotnikov, I believe that he might have won, profiting from the status quo ante. However, the former ambassador was aged, tired, and hardly was disposed to public political games. So, he retired. Another man by the name Ivan Polozkov, a protagonist of the strange undertaking of creating a Communist party of the RSFSR as a part of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and its General Secretary, became their nominee. Before the second round I. Polozkov and B. Yeltsin appeared in front of groups of deputies to make propaganda in their favour. It would be better for I. Polozkov, if he stayed behind the scene! After they saw Mr. Polozkov close by, I am afraid that they would rather vote for Satan, but not for him. Our opponents were really lacking appropriate people in their ranks. All able ones were at our side. My friend and college Dr. Alexander Sobyanin, an expert in phase transition theory, belonged to a group of sup- porters of our deputies. He, like me, started his public activity in the struggle for Ac. Sakharov’s election. After each voting in the Congress, no matter what the issue was, Dr. Sobyanin collected files, where the way each deputy voted was recorded. This statistics made him a proprietor of a very valuable knowledge. He knew, which deputies, judging by their uncertain vote, could be attributed to the political centre. During the night preceding the decisive second round B.Yeltsin got at them. (It made no sense to try to persuade hard-liners, just wasting the valuable time). I do not know, what positions in his future ad- ministration were promised to them by B.Yeltsin - bribery was one of his pet weapons 6 - but the next day he won with the excess of four votes. (I use to be saying that one of them was mine.) The position of the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet made B.Yeltsin’s platform for being next year elected as the President of Russia. Such was Dr. Sobyanin’s best phase transition 7.

6 Another example of Yeltsin’s weakness for bribery relates to 1993, when the majority of the Congress did not obey his ordnance on the dissolution of the Parliament. Instead, they gathered in the Parliament cede by the candle light (the President switched off the electricity) to open what they called The 10th Meeting of the Congress of Peoples Deputies of the Russian Federation. After having expelled from its membership the absent President’s supporters (myself included) as ”participants of the revolt”, the 10th Congress impeached the President, too, and appointed its own ministers. Yeltsin declared that each deputy would be paid a smart-money of $2000 for the retirement ahead of schedule. The idea was to lure them out of the Parliament cede. I do not know, how many bit, but the next day after the Parliament was taken by tank attack, I curiously watched a crowd of my former parliament-mates - fresh from the siege, but, good luck, safe and sound - queuing up for that money. 7 Later Dr. Sobyanin became an influential member of the President’s Administration, an expert in electoral issues. In 1994 he performed a statistical analysis, referring to the Paret law of vote distribution, and claimed that he had proven in this way a falsification in the vote counting in the referendum on the new Constitution in 1993. Such an unheard of treason could not be pardoned, and he was driven away from the Administration. For him, the scientific

8 Treason out of unscrupulousness, selfishness and simplemindedness When I was first involved into the struggle against the communist regime, I def- initely overestimated not only the fighting spirit and abilities of our opponents, but also their adherence to their own principles and unselfishness: no wonder, they had been speaking so much of these qualities in their propaganda. The lack of them is another reason for their general defeat. For illustration, I will narrate more about how the Declaration of the State Sovereignty of the Russian Federation, already spoken of, was accepted by the Congress. This happened in an almost unanimous vote a few days after B. Yeltsin had been elected the Chairman, on the 12th of June, 1990. That day has become a national holiday since then, first called The Independence Day. People wondered: Whose independence, and of whom? - it was understood that in the Soviet Empire Russia was the parent state. As not to have anything to do with this paradox, B.Yeltsin later renamed the holiday to The Day of Russia. The idea underlying the Declaration was to state that Russia was a sovereign state that had deliberately waived a certain part of its sovereignty to the Soviet Union. The Declaration did not declare secession, but established juridical grounds for concluding a Union Treaty between the 15 Soviet Republics, to be put into the basement of ”renewed” existence of the Soviet Union, no longer an empire, as Academician A.D. Sakharov insisted in the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR a year before. For us, the main motivation for accepting the Declaration of the State Sovereignty was to declare the liberty to other 14 Republics by telling them that Russia would abandon its historical role of a parent state that had forcedly cemented them into the empire. We thought that it was very important for preventing a civil war 8. I realized that the opposite side would not be ruled by like considerations, and expected that our draft would be turned down by the majority of the Congress. After the first discussion of the sovereignty item in the Congress, a com- mission of deputies, charged to elaborate the final text of the Declaration, was established, and a group of Kremlin jurists was appointed for the professional help. There was a wise lady among them, who - amidst the common excitation - coldly insisted that the state sovereignty of Russia could not be derived from the existing Soviet Constitution and that what we were doing was as matter of fact a constitutional rebelion. It was hard to argue against this estimate, but nobody took care. Step by step, she, too, yielded to the common enthusi- asm, with which her colleagues were working on the document. They were full up of many years of preparing tedious documents for the Soviet Government. Everyone was bored with the graveyard monotony of the Soviet life. truth was above all. Physicists in politics do differ from professionals. Disappointed with the ways of the new authorities, whom he had helped to bring to power, Alexander soon died of lung cancer. In the funeral ceremony the head of our department in the Lebedev Institute and Nobel Prize laureate in physics Academician V.L. Ginsburg called him his favourite student. 8 The coup d’etat of 1991 was just undertaken in order to prevent conclusion of the Union Treaty scheduled for August 20. But the civil war on a large scale did not occur.

9 The ready document was exposed to the Congress, and, lo and behold, it was supported by almost everybody and greeted by storm of applause in the hall after the vote, to my great surprise. I joined the ovation, however. When going out of the hall together with the crowd of other deputies, I unwillingly overheard a deputy telling to his mate: ”What a wonderful declaration we have just approved! There is still one point that I do not understand. Why did these Jews 9 toil actively in favour of a thing, so good for Russia?” When I heard this, I thought ironically: again the cursed Jews have cheated you, fools. The chauvinism - and the majority of the Congress were chauvinistic - may have two outcomes. The most common one is the imperialistic mood: let us make everybody subordinate and similar to us. With this attitude the Congress should not have voted for the Declaration of the State Sovereignty. There were a few hard-liners among the communists who were loyal to the principles of the Soviet Empire of its last period, when the primordial ”proletarian internation- alism” of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, inherent to the early Soviet epoch, had been long since forgotten. These opposed the Declaration, but their party comrades did not listen to them: who would take seriously the people who base their motivations on principles! At that moment the majority was enveloped with the reverse outcome of the chauvinism that may be denoted as isolationism, whose dominating mood is: let us get rid of all our dependants, who cost us too much, and let them go to hell. Even an ”exact” figure of 78 billions roubles was called by nobody-knows-whom, which was supposedly spent yearly by Russia to financially assist the 14 republics. This figure was launched into circulation in the Congress environment and deeply impressed every deputy. Later many of those who had approved the Declaration repelled publicly, since they viewed the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union - with catastrophic impact to the production and to the fate of those Russians who were left to be living in the former Soviet Union outside the Russian Federation - to be a consequence of this declaration. As a matter of fact, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was inevitable, and the fact that it occurred without a civil war should be to a large extent attributed to the Declaration of the State Sovereignty. As for the ”constitutional rebelion”. It proved, indeed, to be impossible to derive the new laws from the old ones following procedures, incorporated in the old Soviet Constitution. It never was a working document, since the country was living under the rule of the Communist Party, not under the rule of laws. The Constitution was not a consistent law, because it set the Congress above itself. And the Congress many times misused its right to amend the Constitution in 1992, 1993, the years when Russia already existed as a separate state. These amendments were intended to reduce to nothing the role of the publicly elected president, despite the verdict of the Referendum in the Spring of 1993, which had expressed the confidence

9 There were Jews in our ranks, indeed. In spite of the antisemitism in private life, the population did elect many Jews to the office. There was an equal portion of Jews in the ranks of our opponents, too.

10 to President Yeltsin. The dissolution of the Congress by him in the Autumn of 1993 and the armed conflict that followed was the overturn, indeed. The new Constitution was set to public vote; in the meanwhile the Declaration of the State Sovereignty remained the only acting document that determined ground for the new Constitution. Accepted in a Referendum in December 1993, the new Constitution was never amended since then. It was only reinterpreted to convenience of the present authorities... As time passed, it became evident that the consideration presented above, referring to the two forms that the chauvinism may take etc, is too idealistic. The future events revealed deeper, mayhap, unconscious motivations, which were followed by the majority of the Congress when they supported the Dec- laration of the State Sovereignty. These were of completely egoistic nature. A struggle for power and influence between people from the ruling class, who unite for this purpose into temporary groups, is a common fact. The Commu- nists of the Congress of Peoples Deputies of the RSFSR were naturally united by a common selfish interest. It was to achieve a greater role for the body to which they belonged. It was the Parliament of the second level, the one of the Russian Federation as a part of the Soviet Union, and they were second-rank people as compared to the deputies of the Congress of Peoples Deputies of the USSR. On their part, the Declaration of the Sovereignty was a riot, to which M. Gorbachev failed to resist, against the central communist leadership. When, after the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, the deputies of the Russian Federation delightfully dissolved the Parliament of the Soviet Union. Moreover, when doing so, they did not even agree to preserve the honorary status for its former members. No matter, how passionately the then Chair- man of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation Ruslan Khasbulatov tried to persuade them by saying: ”Suppose Academician Sakharov would be alive, would you deprive him of the status, too?” All in vain. They were celebrating their elevation to a higher level of authority and taking vengeance to their party comrades, who had been occupying that level before. Definitely, the defeat of Communism in Russia occurred as a result of a trea- son, committed by its apologists out of selfishness and thoughtlessness, joined to general disability. One might, nevertheless, expect that the communists would propose a serious rear-guard battle. Yes, they did. During the first years of independent Russia, 1992, 1993, the Congress of People’s deputies did its best to overthrow President Yeltsin. But it was a mere struggle for power of a certain group at the top. There was not any mass resistance. The point was that they had been payed off. Remember Yeltsin’s inclination to bribe. At that time the privatization of the state property was going on. The privatization produced the dilemma faced by each, small or big, communist chief: while he or she may be wasting time in defending the high principles of communism, his or her mates will be enriching themselves. It was not hard to predict which way they would solve this dilemma. The communist party officials and administrators of all levels were

11 busy using their commanding positions to grab as much property as they could. They secured a law according to which the privatization should be organized in such a way as to provide special privileges in getting the property of enterprizes to their workers. They always claim that they are the party of the working class. In practice that meant that the directors became proprietors, because the workers fully depend on their directors. The property went to wrong hands, to people that did not know how to handle it in the market conditions. The country was forced to pay this ”tax”. But this way the civil peace was bought.

Conclusion. We should not have won

I sense that I have lived fascinating years, notwithstanding the deplorable result of the whole revolution, in which I took part. I often ask myself a question, could my friends and I act differently, did we commit essential mistakes or take wrong stands? Our only mistake was that we have, unfortunately, led our struggle to suc- cess. It is known that revolutions should not win. A revolution that retreats at some stage may have far reaching fruitful renovating results as a serious message to the ruling class, telling them that they should radically change their ways. On the contrary, a victorious revolution lifts up to the top of power someone who feels himself a conqueror and thus is free to do whatever he likes, with every opposition suppressed. It is a common thing that under the banners of liberty a victorious revolution establishes an oppression worse than before. We always suspected that Boris Yeltsin, a former Communist Party functionary and a very masterful man, might become a candidate for carrying out that role. He, how- ever, remained loyal to democratic values to the end of his career. It was hard to expect that the general trend might be extended to the second generation of authority. Could that be helped? Could we purposely stop our victorious advance- ment, for instance, by supporting Mr. G. Zyuganov, the leader of the present Russian Communists, who was the only realistic alternative to B. Yeltsin in the presidential elections in 1996? I am sure that, if elected President, he would be cautious enough as not to dare to destroy the democratic achievements the way Mr. V. Putin has. I am afraid that this is but an academic question. Such a turn is possible for an individual, but not for a mass movement. How is it possible to support those who have not learned any lesson and continue to rally with portraits of Stalin? If they had been a little cleverer, no revolution would be needed. Their inability to oppose it, as I described it in my talk, was a direct continuation of their previous inability to change, while it was not too late. Their stubbornness and rigidity before and during the ”perestroyka” time made the communist regime irreformable. It could be overcome in no other way but by breaking. However, a destruction does not lead to a good. We are now harvesting the results.

12 List of important dates

1989, April 21 - Academician A. Sakharov elected a People’s Deputy of the USSR by the Academy of Sciences.

1989, March 14 - M. Gorbachev elected the President of the USSR by the Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR

1989, December 14 - Academician A. Sakharov died

1990, May 29 - B. Yeltsin elected the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR in the First meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the RSFSR

1990, June 12 - The Declaration of the State Sovereignty of the Russian Federation approved by the First meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies of the RSFSR

1990, July 19 - 1991, Sept. 20 - I. Silayev’s term as a head of the Government of the RSFSR,

1991, March17 -ReferendumonpreservationofarenewedUnion of SSR

1991, June 12 - B. Yeltsin elected President of the Russian Federation in public vote

1991, June 12 - 1993, Nov. 3 - R. Khasbulatov’s term as a chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, later RF (elected on Oct. 29, 1991, acting chairman until that time)

1991, August 18 - 21 - The coup d’etat of the ”State Committee of Emergency State”

1991, Nov. 6 - 1992, Dec. 14 - Y. Gaidar’s term as a head of the government of RF (first the vice-head under B. Yeltsin as the head, and the acting head since June 15, 1992)

1991, December 8 - Conclusion of the (Bielovezhskoye) Treaty on creation of the CIS

1991, December 12 - Ratification by the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation of the Bielovezhskoye Treaty, and denunciation of the Union Treaty of 1922 (secession of Russia from the Soviet Union)

1991,December25 -ResignationofM.GorbachevasthePresident of the USSR

1993, April 25 - Referendum on confidence to B.Yeltsin as the President of the Russian Federation

1993, Sept. 21 - Oct. 4 - Yeltsin’s ordnance on the dissolution of the Congress of People’s Deputies, military confrontation with its Xth Meeting

1993, December 12 - Elections of the State Duma and referendum on the new Constitution 13