By the end of perestroika, in 1990, the overwhelming majority of Soviet people sincerely believed in the kind and caring Uncle Sam. It was widely argued that Russia no longer had enemies or adversaries; all around there are only friends; Western democracies only sleep and see how to help us build a happy, rich life - in their own image and likeness.
If you think about it, it is difficult to imagine more delirium; perhaps the most popular person in the liberal milieu was then the American ambassador Jack Matlock. From newspaper pages and television screens, Matlock regularly explained how to equip Russia, and broadcast about a new era in relations between the two great powers.
And they really believed him. Although the CIA station continued to operate actively under the auspices of the US Embassy, in reality it completely refuted all the bombastic Matlock maxims.
Alas, not a single sane person in the leadership of the country - both the Union and the nascent Russia - was simply not there at that moment. Despite the fact that the KGB had repeatedly warned the Kremlin about the possible development of events, regularly giving detailed forecasts for the future, no one wanted to hear the Chekists.
Even after the President of the USSR was informed that the American Secretary of State George Baker, who had flown to Moscow in the summer of 1991, secretly gathered the heads of most of the Union republics at the embassy and held a meeting with them behind closed doors, Mikhail Sergeevich only got angry and calmed down; he did not dare to send either notes of protest or angry petitions to Washington.
The rulers of the country were not up to it. Gorbachev was too busy with frantic attempts to keep the power slipping between his fingers; Yeltsin - by taking away this very power.
“Gorbachev always had this phrase that the KGB was dramatizing the situation,” says Philip Bobkov, who was then the first deputy chairman of the Committee. "That was his reaction to all our notes."
There is ample evidence that the processes of separatism, which began in almost all union republics, were skillfully supported by the West. It was both moral and material support. Which, in general, is quite logical and understandable.
Promotional video:
The main task of the West was to deprive the USSR of the status of a Eurasian superpower; and for this the Union had to be dismembered into specific principalities, breakaways from Moscow, once fraternal republics.
This goal did not appear yesterday or today; divide and conquer - said long before the XX century. Skillful playing on national feelings, stirring up base instincts - have always been used by our opponents; few people know, for example, that the white and red Belarusian flag, under which the Minsk opposition is marching today, was invented by the Germans during World War II - especially for Belarusian collaborators.
As soon as the union republics separated from Moscow, they inevitably fell into the stifling embrace of the West; and the next goal would then be a kind of tug-of-war. In principle, this is how it ultimately happened, but more on that later.
While swearing eternal love for the Soviet democrats, the Americans did not just hold a stone in their bosom; it was not a stone, but some kind of, God forgive me, granite rock.
Here are just a couple of examples. For example, to this day in the United States, the Captive Nations Act (PL 86-90), unanimously adopted by the Senate, House of Representatives and approved by President Eisenhower on July 17, 1959, is successfully operating in the United States. Nobody even thinks of canceling it, although the essence of this law cruelly affects Russian interests.
"Beginning in 1918, the imperialist policy of Russian communism led to the creation of a vast empire, which constitutes an ominous threat to the security of the United States and all free peoples of the world …" - this is just one of its formulations.
A more recent example is the "Liberation" doctrine, prepared in 1989 by the Heritage Foundation research center (thus, which is still actively working with "Russian topics") commissioned by President Bush Sr. It contained technologies for the collapse of the USSR and further management of the processes taking place in Russia.
In 1991, another doctrine saw the light - "Geopolitical pluralism in the post-Soviet space", which required the preservation of the fragmentation of the CIS up to forceful intervention, further dismemberment of Russia and the subsequent colonization of the post-Soviet space.
A year later, the G7 countries adopted an even more cynical document, under which the Honorable Doctor Rosenberg could have put his signature without fear. It spoke of the need to reduce by 2005 the population of Russia by 30 million people.
At the same time, mechanisms were developed to achieve this goal. In Washington, at a joint meeting of the governing bodies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a program to reduce the living standards of the Russian population was seriously discussed; ostensibly under the pretext of a tight monetary policy and the fight against inflation.
And finally, the Harvard Project. The most detailed plan is not only the final destruction of Russia as a world power, but also an independent state. For 1996 - 2000 he set the following goals: liquidation of the Soviet Army; liquidation of Russia as a state; the elimination of the attributes of socialism, such as free education and medical care; the elimination of a well-fed and peaceful life in Leningrad and Moscow; the elimination of public and state property and the introduction of private property everywhere.
In accordance with this plan, the population of Russia was to be "reduced" 10 (!) Times, and the territory was divided into 40-45 independent political and economic zones and prepared for use by the Anglo-Saxon race.
It was these approaches and political decisions, spelled out in the documents cited, that determined the true attitude of the West towards Russia; and by no means the corny rantings of talker-politicians.
And again I have to repeat the phrase I said before: history has not taught our rulers anything. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin still firmly believed - or at least pretended - in the purity of the thoughts of their foreign friends; abroad will help us.
When in the fall of 1991 Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich gathered in Viskuli in order to dismember the Soviet Union into three, they were almost the first to rush to call US President George W. Bush.
Yeltsin, however, feared that Bush, who had repeatedly confessed his love to Gorbachev, would, out of caution, prefer to keep his stake on the allied power, but he gave up Gorby's old friend in one go, saying that he liked the "idea of a Pan-Slavist state" very much. Only after that did the emboldened presidents get in touch with Gorbachev; almost the main trump card with which Yeltsin stunned him, concerned the already received approval of Bush, a kind of sanction …
The first Russian president loved power more than anything else; for her sake he was ready to make any sacrifices; lust for power overshadowed all other vices.
Even before becoming president, Yeltsin traveled safely to major Western capitals in an effort to secure foreign support.
At that time Boris Nikolayevich tried in every possible way to demonstrate his pro-Western liberal sentiments; in this he differed little from the majority of the population.
At first, however, this did not evoke reciprocal feelings in the West; when in the summer of 1989 Yeltsin flew to America on a visit, Bush refused to hold an official meeting with him, although Boris Nikolayevich really wanted to. However, he was taken to a rendezvous with the president's national security adviser, General Scowcroft, and he was brought into the White House not from the front, but from the side, back entrance.
This disdain caused Yeltsin to become hysterical. He tried to be indignant, demanding to show due respect, but Condoleezza Rice, who was meeting him - the very future national security adviser and best friend of the Russian people - quickly put the overseas guest in his place.
As a result, Bush, although he accepted it, outwardly everything was furnished like an accidentally discovered piano in the bushes; the American leader allegedly inadvertently looked into the room where Boris Nikolayevich was languishing; however, this was quite enough for Yeltsin to tell later at all corners about the sign of the cross he had received. (Aide to the President, Scowcroft, indignantly called this "the pursuit of a two-penny ad.")
Only by the beginning of 1991, when it became obvious to everyone that Gorbachev's days were already numbered, did the Yankees change their anger to mercy and began to demonstrate the long-awaited sympathy and reciprocity to the future Russian president.
Mikhail Sergeyevich was very tormented by such perfidy, the essence of which was clearly formulated by US Secretary of State Baker as "balancing."
During a regular meeting of the Big Seven in the summer of 1991 in London, Gorbachev even threw a tantrum for Bush right after lunch, saying that he could not, they say, understand why his American friend still “did not come to a final answer to the main question: how does the United States want the Soviet Union? And in general: “This is strange to me, there was 100 billion dollars to cope with one regional conflict (I mean the war in Iraq. - Author), but here we are talking about such a project - to change the Soviet Union so that it reaches a new one, of a different quality, has become an organic part of the world economy”.
Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev's assistant, who was present at the meeting, later reproduced in his diary the response of the high interlocutor:
“Bush turned purple before his eyes, his eyes darkened … He stopped eating, pushed his nodules. I felt uneasy."
The answer of the US President came down to sheer demagoguery: he sees the USSR as "a democratic, market-based country, dynamically integrated into the Western economy."
“Gorbachev, in my opinion, did not understand then,” sums up Chernyaev, “that he was“rebuffed”."
And soon, upon returning to Moscow, the Soviet leader will say to his assistant:
“You know, the information came: after my breakfast with him in London, Bush told his friends that Gorbachev was tired, nervous, did not control the situation, was not sure of himself, therefore he suspected me of infidelity and was looking for more support… We must switch to Yeltsin.”
This change in mood was noted by many others at the same time. Leonid Shebarshin, who headed the KGB's foreign intelligence in 1991, recalls:
“Good information came to the“top”. Bush's entourage concluded that the dominant role of Gorbachev in the political life of the Soviet Union has ended, and the figure of Yeltsin, an alternative to him, is rising to his full height. While maintaining its previous relationship with Gorbachev, the United States should henceforth pay much more attention to the Russian president - in other words, not associate its policies with the losing player."
Confirmation of Shebarshin's words can be found in the memoirs of Yeltsin himself. “In the KGB certificate presented to Kryuchkov,” he writes in the “Presidential Notes”, “it was said that“in George Bush’s inner circle it is believed that Mikhail Gorbachev has practically exhausted his possibilities as the leader of a country like the USSR”.
As a potential ally, Yeltsin at that time was extremely convenient for the West. He never had any of his own foreign policy and economic concepts. When Yeltsin was asked how, if elected, he intends to rule the state, Boris Nikolayevich answered very simply, without hesitation: we will do as in America.
His ideas about economic reforms were like a child's faith in a magic wand, walking boots, a flying carpet and other fabulous attributes; just let us overthrow the hated communist regime, which, they say, prevents the "ruble from being converted into a convertible", and at once a new, happy, comfortable life with milk rivers and jelly banks will be established.
After returning from an American voyage in 1989, he described what he saw at meetings with voters:
“If you come to the store, then the seller follows you. Here - in the name of man. If there is a supermarket (this is a big grocery store), then you can imagine: there are thirty thousand names of products. Fantasy is not enough just to list …
If we have 40 passenger cars per thousand inhabitants, then they have 40 private planes per thousand inhabitants. Thousands of planes at special airfields, on which they boarded on Friday evening with their family and flew to the coast to relax … Well, I'm not saying that there are about 600 cars per thousand …
When I went to a grocery store, I stopped there with a woman. She is with a stroller, buys food for exactly a week … It turns out about $ 30 per person per week. A family member. Well, let's say, if there are three people, it means that $ 120 per month comes out per person with an average salary of 3.5-4 thousand dollars … It is clear that there is an apartment, gasoline. "Do you have a problem?" - I say. She thought, thought: yes, she says, the problem is to give birth to a second child or not to give birth? …"
People listened to these stories with wide mouths and bated breath. How could they have known then that life in a market is not only thirty thousand names of products and a string of planes flying for the weekend …
Yegor Gaidar, as the savior of the Fatherland, could only appear next to such a person as Yeltsin. When Gaidar was brought to meet him, he immediately won the president over with an abundance of macroeconomic terms. Yeltsin practically did not understand anything, but in order not to be suspected of ignorance, throughout the conversation he nodded and agreed. After that Gaidar was put at the head of a new government of reformers, in which he recruited people in his own image and likeness.
We will talk in more detail about these people who plunged Russia into the abyss of economic cataclysms a little later; by the way, they all still remain afloat; only now they have moved to the camp of the right opposition (either SPS or Yabloko) and are trying to teach the current government how it should live and work properly.
In the meantime, let us dwell on only one mysterious circumstance; the fact is that these marvelous market people had one more common similarity. At least three of their leaders - Gaidar, Chubais and Aven - managed to get a post-graduate course at a certain International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which was located … in Vienna. And this happened back in the 1980s.
Those who well remember the blessed Soviet times understand, perhaps, where I am going. A tourist trip abroad was then akin to a flight into space. To go to any Bulgaria, it was required to go through countless instances and approvals, similar to Dante's circles of hell: party committee, local committee, KGB, visiting commission. And as for the Western capitalist countries, to which Austria belonged - by the way, a member of the NATO bloc - there is no need to talk at all. Moreover, any doubtful fact in the biography, even a faint semblance of unreliability, automatically led to a ban on leaving.
Meanwhile, neither Gaidar, nor Chubais, nor Aven clearly belonged to the category of die-hard communists. Subsequently, they themselves will tell how, back in 1984, in the midst of stagnation, they created a kind of informal circle of young economists, where they drank vodka and argued to the point of reorganizing the fatherland, in terms of which they were not particularly embarrassed. (The leader of the circle was Chubais, at that time a modest associate professor of the Leningrad Engineering and Economic Institute.)
Fantastic! Dissenting rebels, who do not even think to hide their freethinking, with a very delicate fifth point, instead of being summoned to the appropriate formidable organization in order to listen to a short lecture on the benefits of vigilance and cunning of the ubiquitous spies, are suddenly sent to the very heart of hostile Western Europe.
However, Mikhail Poltoranin, a former press minister and first deputy prime minister of the Yeltsin government, explains this mystery quite simply. According to his version, all three future ministers were sent to Austria with the knowledge and with the direct participation of the KGB.
After the collapse of the Union, Poltoranin worked on the commission for the study of the closed archives of the Politburo. Subsequently, he told me that he had seen with his own eyes the documents confirming the said version; as well as many other explosive papers that reveal the most terrible secrets of the last years of Soviet power; most of them are kept secret to this day.
On the basis of these sensational documents, Poltoranin even recently made a documentary film under the working title "Money for the Dictatorship of the Oligarchs", but none of the Russian TV channels - quite naturally - dared to show it. (In terms of the degree of censorship, the leaders of Russian liberalism can give even the ever-memorable Glavlit a hundred points ahead.)
However, you and I have the opportunity - if not to see, then at least read excerpts from the explosive film prohibited for screening. When he learned that I was working on this book, Mikhail Nikiforovich kindly gave me some materials - including a tape with a recording of a seditious picture.
Off-screen text:
“… As the head of the Fifth Directorate, Bobkov personally tracked where and what parties the youth were spending, recruiting those with whom they could deal. Before the very beginning of perestroika, his management of the KGB laid eyes on several novice economists defending the positions of the Soviet government, and began to send them to internships in capitalist countries.
(The faces of Gaidar and Chubais appear in the background.)
So the employees of the KGB of the USSR found in one of the clubs young pseudofronders - liberals Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, worked closely with them and sent them to Austria - to study, to establish contacts. Austria was like a financial Rome, all roads led there …"
According to Poltoranin, by the mid-1980s, the leadership of the KGB - and primarily General Philip Bobkov, who for a long time headed the famous Fifth Directorate, so hated by our intelligentsia (it was in charge of ideological counterintelligence and the fight against dissidents), realized that the USSR was heading for abyss.
It was then, according to the former Deputy Prime Minister, that it was decided in advance to prepare for the coming change; in addition to Gaidar, Chubais and Aven, future oligarchs Mikhail Fridman, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky also got into the Lubyanka networks. Through the efforts of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB, these people were taken out of rags to riches, they were allowed to put together start-up capital.
(It should also be added that, according to a number of sources, the same scholarly young people - Gaidar, Chubais, Aven, and Grigory Yavlinsky, another miracle economist, who joined them, managed to successfully listen to the course of the Club of Rome seminar.)
There is such a common phrase, attributed, it seems, to the American millionaire Rockefeller: "I can account for every cent I earn, just don't ask me about the origin of the first million."
Our homegrown oligarchs can easily subscribe to every word here.
Indeed, how did it happen that the head. lab. Berezovsky, a member of the bureau of the district committee of the Komsomol Khodorkovsky, a previously convicted commodity expert Smolensky, an unrecognized theater director Gusinsky - in a matter of hours, suddenly turned out to be the richest people in the state, owners of factories, newspapers, and ships.
Mikhail Poltoranin has an answer to this question; not indisputable, of course, but very, very curious.
In his opinion, on the eve of the collapse of the Union, the state actively began to export the gold reserves abroad - the main source of the country's economic stability.
Officially, all these operations were formalized by secret resolutions of the Council of Ministers as foreign trade transactions - allegedly for the purchase of imported food products. In reality, in exchange for the exported gold, almost nothing was returned to the country; For example, after sending in 1990 50 tons of gold of the highest standard, which settled on the accounts of Vnesheconombank, only a few small lots of toilet soap arrived back in the USSR.
According to this scheme, in the period 1989-1991, more than 2 thousand tons of yellow metal were secretly exported from the country - almost the entire gold reserve of the state. If by the beginning of perestroika this reserve was over 2.5 thousand tons, then by the time the USSR collapsed it had already dropped to a critical level of 289.6 tons. (In 1990 alone, 478.1 tons were exported.)
Gold was exported by couriers from Vnesheconombank with mandates from the KGB and the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee; among them is named, for example, such a remarkable person as the future general director of "NTV", Gusinsky's confidant Igor Malashenko. With such powers, these people had nothing to fear from the frontier; all the more so since in 1990 the customs service received an unspoken order - to freely pass gold-bearing couriers through the Sheremetyevo-2 checkpoints.
It was not possible to trace the further fate of the disappeared gold; it was allegedly sold to foreign jewelry firms, but where the proceeds went to remain a mystery forever. However, it was at this moment that the newly-minted Russian oligarchs mysteriously managed to earn their first, start-up capital.
And - the most important moment - many of them were longtime KGB agents. Boris Berezovsky, for example, was recruited by the secret police back in 1979 and went through an agent network under the pseudonym "Moskovsky". There is evidence that Vladimir Gusinsky was also an agent of the "office", and he was personally in touch with the first deputy chairman of the KGB, Philip Denisovich Bobkov.
This detail is of the utmost importance, because, according to Poltoranin, it was Bobkov, along with his friend, Chairman of the Board of the State Bank of the USSR, Viktor Gerashchenko, the future chairman of the Russian Central Bank, who was the main driving center of these secret operations.
There was also another mechanism, remarkable in all respects, for transferring money from the state to private pockets. By secret order of the USSR State Bank, trade in the country's foreign exchange reserves was established. Despite the rapid inflation, "green" was sold to "their" structures at a fixed rate of 62 kopecks per dollar.
And soon the Union collapsed, the State Bank ordered to live long; on its remains - all of a sudden, private banks have sprung up: Menatep, Imperial, Stolichny, Inkombank, Tveruniversalbank. They not only got the huge property of the deceased State Bank for free - buildings, property, but also most importantly: customer deposits. And all the recent leaders, who directly or indirectly contributed to their magical flourishing, easily managed to find themselves in a new life.
Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, whose secret orders organized the export of gold, became the head of Tveruniversalbank. General Bobkov - became the head of the analytical service of Most Bank. Viktor Gerashchenko - even though he was considered a retrograde and an opponent of liberal reforms - being fired after the August putsch, was instantly reanimated later. Under pressure from Western investors, he was reinstated, and in July 1992 he was appointed chairman of the Russian Central Bank.
About Aven, Gaidar and Chubais - there is even no need to talk; these people are doing well to this day.
As for the missing two thousand tons of gold, no one particularly tried to look for them. (In his memoirs, Gaidar argues that the only reason for the export of the strategic reserve was the stupidity of the then rulers, who, he said, “did not show elementary prudence,” because “in any normal state they [gold reserves] are carefully stored, in no way wasted "According to Gaidar, the money raised from the sale of gold was used to buy food.)
The only attempt to get to the bottom of the truth was made in early 1992; The Russian government then entered into an agreement with the well-known detective company "Kroll", which volunteered to trace the fate of the financial resources exported from the USSR. For this work, "Kroll" received a generous fee of one and a half million dollars, but the report she performed is kept secret to this day.
Which, however, is not surprising at all, considering that coordinating the search was entrusted to … Gaidar with Aven.
Say what you like, with such leaders, Russia was waiting for a cheerful future …
From the book: "How Russia is Killed". Author: Khinshtein Alexander