The Fall of the USSR, Pt II

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15:58Josh Clark:Yeah, that's what's great about it. It's flexible, everybody. You can start online, finish at the dealer. Start at the dealer, finish online. Your info stays with you so you're not starting the process from scratch.

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17:47Josh Clark:All right, so we promised talk of economics and finances and the new Russia, or I guess the Russian Federation. Gorbachev at least was trying to instill like a gradual reform, which is kind of funny now looking back because there's nothing gradual about it. But Boris Yeltsin was like, he really wanted to hit the gas economically. So he embraced this economist name. I'm going to pronounce it Yegor Gaidar or Gaidar. I'm not sure how it's pronounced. G-A-I-D-A-R. But he, along with some Harvard economists that were like, yeah, yeah, do this. He had an idea called shock therapy, which was kind of crazy when you look back at like this was the idea.

18:34Josh Clark:because, like I said, you can't just flick a switch overnight and be like, all right, we're a free market now. They had no infrastructure for that, no history of doing that or what that looked like. They didn't know how to manage that. And so out of nowhere, all of a sudden, they said, all right, Russia's open, everybody. They flipped the sign in the window around and said, we're open. Yeah.

18:57Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So here's basically how it worked. There were several points. This is just a few of them, and this is just such a back-of-the-envelope sketch of this whole thing. But some of the high points were, remember, the ruble was not recognized internationally. The Soviet ruble wasn't. Well, now we had the Russian ruble. And to become recognized as currency on the international market, it couldn't be artificially propped up by the government any longer. It had to basically sink or swim on its own with maybe a little bit of monkeying like everybody does, but not 100 % monkeying with it. So that was a big one, right?

19:32Chuck Bryant:That's right.

19:32Josh Clark:Yeah, that was a big one. They needed cash, like immediate inflow of cash. So they couldn't like take their time to ramp up stuff like that just by saying they're open. So the state owned businesses, we talked about them being privatized, which meant they were available for the rest of the world to invest in. They removed the tariffs on foreign imports so like trade could flow. And the West did step up. I don't know. Did the United States contribute at all to this?

20:01Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Very narrowly and economically. Okay. Basically in exchange for whatever it was asking for, the United States helped in that respect. It wasn't like any magnanimous way is what I was trying to say.

20:15Josh Clark:It was about$20 billion of the West in emergency loans, just like an infusion of cash, just to keep them from completely collapsing.

20:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I didn't see how much of that actually came through, but that was the proposal, right?

20:28Josh Clark:Right.

20:28Chuck Bryant:So this is all like major high level macroeconomic stuff. To get more on the micro level, what they came up with was a voucher program. And they basically said, hey, here is a voucher for a bunch of shares or say 10 shares in each of these state owned enterprises. We're going to privatize them. They're going to start selling this stuff on the world market. and we're going to distribute these vouchers equally among, I think, like 95 % of the Soviet citizenry. I didn't see why the other 5 % had to sit out, but basically everybody got shares in all of these amazingly soon-to-be wealthy companies.

21:10Josh Clark:And just to be clear, it wasn't like, you know, when they were making TVs. It was like our oil industry and our steel industry, like big, big stuff.

21:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And so the point was that they could benefit directly from this new amped up, juiced up Russian economy that was about to explode. None of this went at all well. The shock therapy went so poorly that a lot of Russians at the time and probably still today believe that it was deliberately inflicted by the West to keep the USSR hobbled so that it couldn't possibly come back. Yeah.

21:45Josh Clark:Was it like these Harvard economists and stuff? Was that the deal?

21:49Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they were very much in league with Yegor Gaidar. Okay. For sure.

21:56Josh Clark:Well, what this led to was hyperinflation because their currency was completely devalued. And a lot of Russians, I mean, I don't know the number, but I feel like a majority of the average Russian's life-saving just went away basically overnight. We've talked about the hyperinflation. And was it a whole episode on hyperinflation?

22:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and I know we've talked about it many times, but we did something, I think, just on it, yeah.

22:25Josh Clark:Yeah, but it was one of the worst cases of hyperinflation, like, in world history. Consumer goods went, like, up in price by, like, 400%. These state-owned businesses, and we kind of touched on this in part one, but it was an inside job. They were being pillaged from the inside by these ministers who had overseen them as part of the Soviet Union. and these vouchers, you know, a lot of the citizens were just like, this is, I'm going to trade it for bread. Like, this means nothing.

22:52Chuck Bryant:Exactly, and they did. So there were people out there who were like, sure, I've got some bread. Here, have some bread. Give me your vouchers. And they started getting their hands on as many vouchers as they possibly could because those vouchers were eventually able to be traded for shares, right? They weren't shares themselves quite yet because things had to be organized a little more. So people ran around collecting these vouchers. And as a result, when those shares started coming out on the market and parts of these companies, these actually industries, were being auctioned off, they ended up in the hands of just a few people who had managed to collect a bunch of vouchers, concentrate this stuff.

23:34Chuck Bryant:And then they got together and said, I got a bunch of vouchers. You have a bunch of vouchers. Let's come together, form a cartel, and we'll actually take over this oil company. using these vouchers, right? And those people became what we now call the Russian oligarchs, who did not exist before this. It just did not exist. And now, all of a sudden, there were eye-poppingly wealthy people who just emerged out of the ashes, suddenly growing in size exponentially, just like Apache Chief. That's right.

24:08Josh Clark:You know, you hear that term a lot now, Russian oligarchs. And if you were always like, what the heck is that even? That this is where it comes from. The real big, like what sent that over the top was this loans for shares privatization situation because they feared that if they had a communist victory in 1996, that that would be a bad deal to all of a sudden reverse course on what had been happening. And so the government said, all right, all you new oligarchs, these super rich people, we got a deal for you. We'll loan you shares in our 12 biggest state-owned businesses in exchange for like quick cash now.

24:51Josh Clark:Ended up being about$800 million, essentially sort of allowing them to buy pieces of like oil companies and stuff like that.

25:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and they were loans, like you said, these shares are controlling interests, but they never gave them back. essentially. So the government sold it. Like you said, these were oil giants, metal producers, all like this is where it really got consolidated. Before they were using vouchers and stuff. Now it was like they were buying directly from the government. They went to the wholesaler, right? And Putin was one of those oligarchs. He had made some, he started to make cash, I think flipping real estate in St. Petersburg in the very early 90s and then started a bank. And then by the time this fire sale went on in 1996, he managed to secure a controlling stake in a nickel mining company by loaning$170 million to the government.

25:56Josh Clark:Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone knows how much money he has today, right?

25:59Chuck Bryant:No.

26:00Josh Clark:Isn't that kind of a mystery?

26:01Chuck Bryant:We talked about it in our book.

26:02Josh Clark:Yeah, that's right. Will there ever be a trillionaire?

26:05Chuck Bryant:I don't know. Will there?

26:10Josh Clark:So these oligarchs were and are greedy because they were like, that wasn't even enough. They were like, you know what? How we can make more money is instead of having these big, great industries like helping out Mother Russia and the Russian Federation, we can actually strip these companies of their raw materials and sell them for more money on these international markets. And so that made them even richer. And then what that did was that really created a wealth gap like they had never seen before. Because all of a sudden, factories are closing and entire towns and villages that were built around the central factory went into ruin.

26:52Josh Clark:And the safety net was gone. And like their unemployment rate in there was just like unbelievable. It was like 22 % in 1998.

27:03Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm. 40 % of the population was under the poverty line in 1995. Just eye-popping statistics because these oligarchs were allowed to basically pilfer the entire Russian economy for themselves. They carved out the middle classes, another way to put it. And so, like, when they figured out, like, we don't need to make stuff at home. We can sell that stuff for, we can just sell the raw materials on the market and make more money. Yeah, so many people were put out of work. And then bear in mind, there used to be a safety net. Like, the Soviet Union was kolugi. I heard a joke where, like an old Soviet joke that we pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us.

27:51Chuck Bryant:That's just kind of how things went. But you still had child care. You still had health care. You still had a free education. Like it might not have been very good, but the government was still doing what it could to deliver that stuff, right? After that, like you said, that safety net was just gone and people were just unmoored and adrift. And it was like, good luck. You're going to have to go figure out what to do yourself because now this is a capitalist economy.

28:19Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. I think I mentioned in part one, like they slowed the rate of having children just because they couldn't afford it. I think by the end of the 90s, there were 3.7 million fewer children in Russia than in 1990. So in the course of a decade. And alcoholism was, you know, it's always been obviously a thing in Russia with the free flowing of vodka. But after this, it was really, really bad. Heavy drinking accounted for two of every five deaths among Russian working age men in the 90s. And their life expectancy changed. Like if you can like literally change a life expectancy over a decade, then something terrible has gone wrong.

29:01Josh Clark:I think the male life expectancy went from 64 to 57 over the course of three years between 1991 and 1994. because, again, these, you know, the Soviet men, out of work, no ideals that they had grown up knowing and, like, believing in, all of a sudden stripped, so they drank themselves to death.

29:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I said earlier that a lot of Russians still believe, probably still believe, they definitely did at the time that the West inflicted shock therapy upon them on purpose. I've also seen the shock therapy as being labeled as responsible for somebody like Putin to be able to come along and get the kind of support as an autocratic nostalgist, basically, in very much the same way that Hitler was able to rise to power because of the deeply punitive measures in the Treaty of Versailles that just punished Germany, made Germany really unhappy with the rest of the world, and so somebody came along and said, I'm going to restore Germany to its former glory.

30:09Chuck Bryant:That's how Hitler came to power. Putin came along and said, I'm going to restore Russia to its former glory. And so he got support as an autocrat as well. It's always interesting to me that you can find so many different streams of events and goings-on and just different decisions that can lead to such consequential actions. that it's like, I was thinking about it, it's like nothing is black and white and even fewer things are one-sided. And that's a good example of that.

30:45Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. So the decade that was the 1990s over there, in 91, you know, we mentioned that Yeltsin was elected as the president of the Russian Federation. Or actually, I guess before that, he was president of Russia now the official elected president of the Russian Federation. And he was a, you know, he stood up to a corrupt system. So he was very popular. You know, there wasn't a revolution in Russia like happened elsewhere in Eastern Europe. They, you know, elsewhere, the political elites were replaced. That didn't happen here. They didn't massively distribute or redistribute wealth and power.

31:29Josh Clark:Like a lot of the people from the nomenclatura, like they took care of them and they stayed in that sort of it was an elite status, but it wasn't like the oligarchs. It was it was now billionaires compared to working stiffs, whereas before it was more like sort of upper management versus working stiff. Yeah.

31:51Chuck Bryant:And so, yes. So these these people, the Soviet elite just were like, oh, we're not communists anymore, but we're still going to stay elite, I guess. And so. Right. Right. Yeah. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And so the George H.W. Bush turned his back on Russia. Clinton turned around and was like, hey, guys, let's get it on. We love you, Yelton. he's a lovable guy he is he's got big cheeks he's like smiling all the time and the reason why is because he was drunk constantly

32:23Josh Clark:yeah no but I remember at the time though it was like this isn't what like the old Soviet style like this is a big teddy bear like you said he's smiling all the time and he wants he seemed to be very western friendly and he was also well partially because the alcoholism someone who I think Bill Clinton and people in the West knew that they could kind of control.

32:45Chuck Bryant:Yes. So he was a party animal. Like there's no two ways around it. There was there's this one thing you can look up on YouTube where German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to visit Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved. And it's a state visit. They're standing there watching a Russian military parade go by. And all of a sudden, Yeltsin just has moved to grab the baton from the military band conductor, and he starts conducting the band too, but like almost cartoonishly larger than life. He's blowing kisses at people, and it's like when you watch it, you're like, he's pretty drunk right now, and this is like an official state thing, and this was not unusual for him.

33:28Josh Clark:Oh, for sure. There was another famous story where when he was on an official state visit, one of the first ones, I think, it might have been the first one to the United States, he was all of a sudden turned loose in the U.S. And he was like, this is fantastic. So the Secret Service allegedly found him out trying to hail a cab in D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear, drunk, so he could go get a pizza. And the Secret Service reigns him in and they're like, Boris, buddy, we'll get you a pizza. Like, come back inside.

34:00Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and that's not a legend. Like, that happened. Oh, yeah. So a lot of people, like, so yes, he was a lovable teddy bearer. He certainly looked that way. But a lot of people point to Putin as the person who started autocratic rule or brought autocracy to Russia. Back to Russia. Yeah. As, like, he's the guy. And if you dial back history a few years to 1993, you can see very clearly that Boris Yeltsin was the one who kicked it off again. And he, because of his antics, because of the just general chaos of the transition out of the Soviet economy that he presided over or just failed to preside over.

34:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah. All of these oligarchs first starting to get super rich off of the government and off of what's supposed to belong to the people. He got very unpopular, as we'll see. I think at one point before he left office, his approval rating was 6%.

35:00Josh Clark:Yeah, it was in the tank.

35:01Chuck Bryant:And I assume that that was with the margin of error, plus or minus 6%. Right.

35:07Josh Clark:Nobody liked him.

35:08Chuck Bryant:So he was impeached by the legitimately elected parliament, and he didn't like that very much.

35:16Josh Clark:No, he dissolved parliament or tried to as a result of that. And parliament was like, no, we're not dissolving. So he had the military come in and shell parliament, which was, I mean, if you want to talk about an autocratic move, I mean, that's certainly it. But, you know, it was spun. Well, I don't know about spun, but in the West, it was viewed as more of a like, hey, Clinton's like, look at this guy. Like, he's a hero of democracy. Like, he's shelling communist parliament. Like, that's how much he hates communism.

35:49Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. That's how useful he was to the West, that they were just like, just tried to save him any way they could. He managed to hang on to power that shares for vouchers scheme, the great shares for vouchers scheme in 96. That was designed to help Yeltsin stay into power. He was so hated that the communists were probably going to sweep the elections that year. And so I think Kyle put it that people felt cheated twice by Gorbachev first and then Yeltsin afterward. word. So there was not a lot of happiness in Russia in the 1990s. I say we take our second break and come back and wrap it up.

36:29Josh Clark:Let's do it.

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39:41Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck, wrap it up. I'll take it. Do you remember them?

39:47Josh Clark:They were so good, though.

39:49Chuck Bryant:They were just easy to listen to and fun. Who was that? Fabulous Thunderbirds.

39:55Josh Clark:Yeah, Fabulous Thunderbirds. Jimmy Vaughn? Was it Jimmy in that one? Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I think it was Stevie Ray Vaughn's brother, Jimmy.

40:01Chuck Bryant:Oh, Jimmy Vaughn. I thought you were talking about Jimmy LeBond, Simon LeBond's brother.

40:07Josh Clark:All right. So I knew we'd get a few laughs in here, you know? All right. So where are we here? We are with Yeltsin. He had banned the Communist Party. That was challenged. And that resulted in a 1992 trial that was televised. And it was billed as like the big Russian Nuremberg trial. and it was basically like, hey, we're going to reckon with our past as a party because of all of the crimes committed under the name of communism against the people. The sort of hitch to this Nuremberg was that there were no actual defendants. It was just sort of a show, it seems like. Like they didn't actually prosecute individuals.

40:51Josh Clark:It was just sort of demonstrating the history of criminality of communism.

40:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, like they put Soviet communism itself on trial, not the people who perpetrated it. And so that's a really good, that's good evidence of what you were saying earlier, that the nomenclature, the party elites just stopped being party members, but stayed elite. They were still pulling the levers of power. So, of course, they're not going to let themselves be prosecuted. But they know that, again, the winds of change are moving against communism. So they're going to go along with the show trial. It's also really good evidence of just how strong those levers of power remained in Russia. Like the KGB, it was still around.

41:35Chuck Bryant:It just changed its name to the FSB, the Federal Security Service. And there was a, I think, a member of the Supreme Soviet Parliament who suggested a lustration bill. Lustration is where you identify and remove public officials who are tainted from their association with the former regime. that member of parliament was assassinated in 1998. So there wasn't a lot of mood among the elites to really actually have some sort of reckoning, which, again, that in and of itself might have helped steer Russia in a different direction. But the people who had been in charge were still basically in charge.

42:13Chuck Bryant:Outside of Russia, there were, it was a lot easier to do that kind of thing because they could blame Russia, right?

42:24Josh Clark:Yeah, saying like, you know, we were under the thumb of communism as a state. So it was a lot easier to sort of rally people around this idea that they were free and had a new way forward. Yeltsin tried, you know, he tried to pull some other levers that weren't like huge economic reforms or whatever that were just like, hey, let me let me readopt the imperial tricolor and let me replace the Soviet anthem. And these are all really divisive moves. I think he was trying to sort of he attempted to close the Lenin mausoleum and replace Revolution Day. So he was trying to say, like, hey, let's move forward.

43:01Josh Clark:And like this past is haunting us. But it was a really divided thing because after this pretty horrible decade of chaos and like financial ruin, the I feel like sort of the broad view of your average Russian was like things were better before. And they started pining for the old days. And there was a nostalgia that came around, you know, for that old national anthem that Putin reverted in 2000. And that's when Putin, like, I mean, I think he really believed it. But I think he also really saw an opening there to come in and be like, I'm your guy. You miss the old days. Just wait.

43:42Chuck Bryant:Exactly. I saw there was a Russian joke from the time that said the worst part of communism is post-communism. Right. And yeah, so Putin came along and was like, hey, I'm going to bring Russia back, baby. Just, you know, trust me. He was appointed prime minister under Yeltsin. He was the fourth prime minister under Yeltsin in 17 months. So Yeltsin was not doing very well by this time. This is like the very end of the 90s. And one of the first things that Putin did was just pound Chechnya, which was trying to break away from Russia itself. and I guess Russia had had quite enough of breaking away for one century.

44:24Chuck Bryant:And they just punished Chechnya under Putin. He decided that he was going to make an example of them. And there were a lot of atrocities and it was just really bad. But in Russia itself, they were like, oh, we like this guy. He gets stuff done. He takes no guff from anybody. And that helped support his ascendancy to the presidency in 1999 when Yeltsin suddenly out of nowhere was like, I'm not president anymore. This guy is.

44:53Josh Clark:Yeah. And once he was president, he was like he started to rein in some of those market freedoms that had been installed. He was like, you know, these this this freedom of press thing isn't so great after all. So by 2010, most of that private media was once again owned by the government. He did kind of rein in the oligarchs, but, you know, not completely, obviously. I get the feeling it was he was sort of picking and choosing maybe. So it seemed like he was. Is that accurate?

45:24Chuck Bryant:The impression I have is that he brought them all to heel. He basically made a deal saying, like, you guys can have free reign on your respective industries, but you have to stay out of politics. That's my industry.

45:35Josh Clark:Oh, OK.

45:36Chuck Bryant:And they complied. And one of them didn't. Mikhail Khodorkovsky basically was like, no, I'm going to generate a bunch of political power and try to remove Putin. He got jailed. His whole assets stripped. The state took over his oil company and the rest of the oligarchs were like, oh, this guy is quite serious. We better listen. And then from those group or that group, Putin started to develop favorites and all that. That's my impression of it.

46:02Josh Clark:Yeah, that sounds about right. And the great thing is I know that there are people that are real students of this stuff, and I can't wait to get some listener mails on this. But, you know, things started to turn around financially, too, because they had some booming oil exports happening and experts. And that, you know, all of a sudden your average living standard was going up. But it seems like this sort of just the chaos of the 90s started to wane and things started to get a little bit better enough to, you know, for people to get behind Putin. And he was like, yeah, I'm restoring Russia in our place in the world.

46:40Josh Clark:Like, get behind me.

46:41Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I mean, because the 90s were shameful to the average Russian. Like, they did not feel good about what they had just gone through. And now there was a guy who was saying he was going to end it all. And he did. I mean, in a lot of ways. I mean, he inherited an economy that was just had just started to get back on course. So under Putin and what his 26 year reign, if you count when he was the prime minister to Medvedev's puppet. But, yeah, 26 years. Like, Russia definitely came back financially, and their quality of living increased. And he, you know, he did a lot of stuff that he said he was going to do.

47:22Chuck Bryant:Yet it's still Putin.

47:24Josh Clark:I mean, he keeps winning those elections, though, right?

47:26Chuck Bryant:Yeah, fair and square. Those are all legit. And so, yeah, that brings us to today, Chuck.

47:35Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, is that it? Are we done? I think we're done. You did fantastic. You did too, man. I really am super psyched about this one because this is one of those that I knew so little about because, again, it was the end of high school and early college for me. And those were days where I just wasn't paying attention. And I was, you know, I was trying to score Pixies tickets.

47:55Chuck Bryant:It was kind of like if this part of history were an iced sugar cookie. As kids, we had just kind of nibbled the sugar cookie part. And now we just bit into the first bite of icing and consume the whole cookie. And we're just in sugar heaven right now.

48:10Josh Clark:Yeah, agreed. I enjoyed these.

48:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's a better way to put it. Chuck just laughed. So I think we should end this episode, this two-part episode, and say it's time for Listener Mail.

48:24Josh Clark:This is about our episode on the UK, our shorty. Hey, guys. And this isn't, don't worry. This isn't like completely scalding us.

48:33Chuck Bryant:Okay, good.

48:35Josh Clark:Hey, guys, listening to the episode and I thought, and I was thinking, I bet they'll do it. And you did. Guys, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, no Cornwall. I forgot about Cornwall.

48:45Chuck Bryant:Did it come up in our research?

48:48Josh Clark:Ooh. I know you guys will see things, official websites saying Cornwall is a county in England. But for one, it is a duchy, which is a different thing.

48:56Chuck Bryant:You got to pass it on the left-hand side.

48:59Josh Clark:Secondly, Cornwall is a Celtic nation, guys, like Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, including Northern Ireland. And finally, the UK government formally recognized the Cornish as a national minority under the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, granting them the same status as the Scots, Welsh, and Irish. Wow.

49:19Chuck Bryant:No, we did not come across that at all.

49:21Josh Clark:I know. Guys, Cornwall has its own language. Kyrnavik, I think is how it's pronounced. No, but it's not. It's closely related to Welsh and barely distinguishable from Breton. Yes, Brittany is a Celtic nation too, guys. It has its own flag, St. Pyrrans flag, which is, or Pyrrans, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, which is a white cross and a black background, and there are strong calls to establish a Cornish assembly similar to the other Celtic nations in the UK. I hope you give this a mention to correct the record. I love your respectful and open approach to what you do, guys, so I figured you'd be interested.

49:57Josh Clark:And then he posts this, Colonel Beesviken, which is Cornwall forever. And I don't think he's talking about the game hen.

50:07Chuck Bryant:No.

50:08Josh Clark:And this is from G. Thanks, G.

50:10Chuck Bryant:That was brand new info for us, and we appreciate it big time. I've always wanted to go to Cornwall because they have a witchcraft museum there that I've always wanted to see. Nice. So I'll see you eventually, G. I'll let you know when I'm there and we can go to the Witchcraft Museum. If you want to be like G and give us some brand new information we had never heard before and didn't run across in our research, we love that kind of stuff. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

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