The Fall of the USSR, Pt II

Fall of the Soviet Union

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1:38Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Hey, Chuck, you ended the last one. You want to start this one? Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Charles W. Chuck Bryant. To my left is Josh Clark. Jerry's here in spirit and in reality this time. So this is part two of the fall of the Soviet Union. Bravo. I hated doing that, by the way. Oh, you did? Yeah, this feels like Robin putting

2:15on Batman's outfit or something. This is very strange. How do you know it's not Robin who announces the podcast? Or whatever. Batman putting on Robin's outfit. Although I heard he did that on the side as a kink. He did. But who among us hasn't dressed up like Robin from Batman? That's true. Or Josh Clark from Stuff You Should Know. Which is one and the same. Yeah, I dress up like you. You do? Yeah. I have shirts and cute sweatshirts. I have to say you're, um, you have stepped up your style game lately and it's, it's nice.

2:49Hey, thanks. Your traveling outfits are, mwah. Well, I was always into clothes growing up and then, uh, I wore t-shirts and cargo shorts for 25 years and then remembered, uh, hey, I like fashion. So I got back in there. You brought it back. Yeah. You're basically the Tom Ford of the

Boris Yeltsin takes power

3:06podcasting world. All right. So where we left off, uh, December 8th, 1991, the USSR is formally dissolved by decree by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. No one knows what's going to happen next with Russia. We've kind of covered the satellite states and the Soviet states themselves and what happened there. But everyone was sort of like, all right, well, Russia's still there. What the heck is going to happen? And who rolls into town? But Boris Yeltsin with a bottle of Stoli in his hand. Yeah. And another one in his belly. Yeah, for sure. So, um, Boris Yeltsin was the

3:44first president of Russia, um, which is kind of confusing because we said that, um, Gorbachev was the president of the USSR, but remember Russia and the USSR were not one in the same. So for a little while there, Russia itself had pretty much two presidents at the same time for a couple of months while Gorbachev was still in power. And while Yeltsin, who had been popularly elected in June of 1991, um, while he was like, I'm president of Russia. So there was a, um, what you could call a bit of a

4:17power struggle. And despite that, uh, it wasn't until a three-day coup was mounted and they didn't plan for three days. They didn't know how long it was going to go on. It just turned out to be a three-day coup, I guess is what I'm trying to say. It wasn't until that was mounted against Gorbachev that his power was eroded enough to take his position away and for Yeltsin to take over and take Russia straight into the hands of the West, the open arms of the West. And ironically, that coup

4:49was by hardliners who wanted to keep, uh, who wanted to save communism and the USSR, but instead they, they managed to remove the power from the one guy who conceivably could have still helped that happen and gave it to the guy who was diametrically opposed to making that happen. Yeltsin. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it ended up being a failed coup technically. Uh, but it had the result of, um, finally sort of getting Gorbachev out of power. So in a way it kind of worked, but it was technically

5:21a failed coup. Uh, what happened was, uh, you know, Gorbachev came, came in with all these big sweeping reforms. And so the conservative elites, uh, that he had previously worked with were terrified obviously, uh, because their, their existence depended on the Soviet union being the Soviet union. Right. So they were like, Gorbachev is a traitor. Uh, in 1991, they put him under house arrest, uh, while he was on vacation in, uh, Crimea and they sent tanks in to Moscow, uh, and took control

5:53of the government. They didn't, they didn't storm the parliament building, but they, they lined up outside the parliament building. And then they made, uh, a mistake in that, um, they let Boris Yeltsin, I keep saying Yeltsin, uh, Yeltsin get on one of those tanks and address the people. And this is a time where they had not, uh, jammed the TV signals coming from outside the Soviet union. So all of these Soviets all of a sudden are watching this unfold on the BBC or CNN. And they're seeing

6:24this, this Yeltsin guy sitting on top of a tank talking to them. Yeah. Basically saying like, look at what the communists are doing. They send in tanks to take over your government. Can you believe someone would do that? And it was not a good look for the, the Soviet party. Um, and not only did it make the party look bad, it made Yeltsin look really good. So remember he'd already been popularly elected, but there was a power struggle between him and Gorbachev going on. Uh, when the coup was overrun, the leaders were jailed. Um, Gorbachev managed to

6:57come back to Moscow, but now he came back and like his authority had been directly challenged. And even though the coup had failed, it had had a huge impact on removing his legitimacy while at the same time boosting Yeltsin's legitimacy. And so it, Gorbachev was like, it's clear I'm, I can't hold power any longer. So he very, very peacefully to his great credit, very peacefully handed over power and did away with any, any office that he held that somebody else could have come along and filled

7:32and tried to challenge Yeltsin. He made sure that there would be no further political chaos as much as he could manage. Yeah. He was like, I'm not president of the USSR anymore. And in fact, there is no president of the USSR, that office that I created no longer exists. Uh, and technically everybody, I'm the only guy to have ever done that. So just, you know, keep that in your back pocket. Uh, and he said, here's the nuclear codes, uh, Boris, uh, please take care of those. Uh, any communists that

8:03are in public office? Um, well, there is no communist party, so you're not even a valid member of that, uh, party cause there is none. So you're not, you're not, even if you were elected, uh, because there's no such thing, then you're, you're out of your, your seat. And, uh, Russia is now the Russian federation. Yeah. I was, I didn't see what happened to those people. Was it just like, Oh, I guess I'm independent all of a sudden, not by choice. I don't know. Or if they were like, I guess I can't hold this office anymore. Who knows? But like, that was just one small component of the sweeping political changes that took place over the course

8:39of a few days. I think the whole thing really kicked off on December 25th, 1991. And by the turn of 1992 was basically over. I mean, Russia became the Russian federation and that same anti-communist spirit of, uh, renewal and revolution and, and, um, like change, the winds of change, you could even almost call it had swept through Russia itself.

National identity and Putin

9:07Yeah. They were immediately no longer a superpower. Uh, all that national identity, you know, we talked about some of this stuff in part one with promise of more, uh, and that's right now because for, for a lot of the people in Russia, um, it was like, uh, uh, the fall of communism was a great thing, but for a lot of others, um, that was, you know, the Soviet man, what's, uh, was labeled and it was, I guess a pejorative term, but, uh, homo, uh, Sovieticus, that was just sort of the, the average

9:38Soviet, uh, man who is, you know, probably works in a factory and has lived his whole life with this, uh, ideology, this communist ideology and independent thought like which they, you know, a lot of them voluntarily sort of bought into this thing. And so once that identity was removed and there was a vacuum in its wake, uh, it was, they were, um, unmoored and did like everything they knew was gone and they didn't know what to do. Yeah. Like the, the, the patriotic of the USSR, like everyday

10:12citizens consider themselves one part of this larger collective, the Soviet experiment. And that was their identity. That's what a lot of the, like the way they thought came from basically, like you were saying. Um, and so when you pull that out from underneath somebody, especially when it happens suddenly and essentially without warning, it just comes out of nowhere. Like it's, it's really hard to put yourself in that position. Like how would you handle that kind of

10:43thing? You know? And certainly there were plenty of people who will see who, um, who were rejoiced at this change. They were glad communism went away, but there were a lot of people who were not happy that communism had gone away or that the Soviet union had gone away. Yeah, for sure. Uh, you know, religion helped fill a little of that void. The recovered, uh, Russian orthodoxy, uh, became a little more popular, uh, to help fill this moral vacuum that was left in its wake. Uh, but there was a guy

11:14in Dresden at the time. Uh, he was a KGB Lieutenant Colonel in his villa in Dresden, Germany. Uh, and this was before a reunification. This was in 1990, just sort of a mid-level officer who, as far as, you know, criticism of the USSR and the Soviet way was very prideful and very much defended it and got really mad. Apparently had a super short views when it was criticized. Uh, his name was Vladimir Putin and he saw everything that was going on around. And there's a quote from him that kind of sums it

11:47up. He said, nothing different was proposed. That's what hurt is they just dropped everything and went away. So, you know, he sensed this vacuum and, uh, you know, over here in the United States, like it, it felt like, um, not felt like it, it kind of was a victory. Like we won the cold war is over their experiment failed. Democracy wins, you know? Oh yeah, for sure. The problem was, is that the West wasn't like, we're going to help. We want to dig in here. We want to help you like rebuild. We want you to be, uh, a great nation and, you know, a great partner to Europe and the rest of

12:22the West and the rest of the world. Um, and one of the reasons why the United States didn't react like that at a really, really crucial time, which was 1991, 1992, was that President George H.W. Bush, who was a cold warrior if there ever was one, was leading the United States. And I saw it described, I think it was on a site called History Guild, which is magnificent by the way, that he folded his arms and turned his back. It was basically like, good luck. We're glad you, you fell over,

12:53but we're not going to help you. We hate you. We've hated you for decades now. Um, so we're not really going to step in and help you rebuild. Just figure out how to do it yourself. And that had that gone differently, who knows what Russia would be like right now? Who knows? We have no idea. Could be worse. It could have been better. It could be, it could have played out exactly the same. But the fact that the West only helped in the most like specific economic terms and didn't in like a spirit of

13:25friendship and cooperation really step in. And basically, basically the United States was a sore loser of the Cold War. Yeah. And I feel like most of that was sort of aimed at Russia specifically, because I don't know how much they financially helped the former Russian states and satellite states and things like that. But, um, it seems like the, just the spirit of it all was more aimed directly at Russia and like, Hey, these other countries are finally out from under your grip. Yeah. So like good for them. Right. Exactly. Um, I think we failed to say in the first episode,

14:03but Kyle helped us out with this, our man in Great Britain or the UK or England even. Yeah. Yeah. He provided the basis. And then when we started digging in, we were like, there's a lot more to this that we need to double up. And then you, you finished the job, buddy in grand fashion. Thank you. Um, so he found a movie called Goodbye Lenin from 2003. It's a German film and it's a parody of this time where it's about a man who, um, tries to keep, he tries to shield his mother, his East German

14:34mother from finding out that communism has collapsed. Yeah. And I guess it's probably hilarious. I got to go see that one because I love a good German comedy like anybody else, you know? Yeah. I should see that too. So let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about, um, sort of the economics of this all in Russia, right after this. We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose

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Economic shock therapy

18:11the 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. No. 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

18:49back at like this was the idea. 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. Yeah. So here's basically how it worked. There were several points. This is just a few

19:21of 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, you know, with maybe a little bit of monkeying like everybody does, but not 100% monkeying with it. So that was a big one, right? That's right. Yeah, that was a big one. They needed cash, like immediate inflow of cash. So they couldn't

19:57like 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? Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. The very narrowly and economically. Okay. In basically in exchange for whatever it was asking for, the United States helped in that

20:29respect. It wasn't like any magnanimous way is what I was trying to say. It was about $20 billion of the West in emergency loans, just like an infusion of cash, just to keep them from completely collapsing. Yeah. And I didn't see how much of that actually came through, but that was the proposal, right? Right. 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

20:59of 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. And just to be clear, it wasn't like, you know, when they were making TVs, it was like

21:31our oil industry and our steel industry, like big, big stuff. 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. Yeah. 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.

22:02Yeah. Was it like the, these Harvard economists and stuff that were, was that the deal? Yeah. They were, they were very much in league with Yegor Gaidar. Okay. For sure. Well, what this led to was hyperinflation because their currency was like completely devalued. And a lot of Russians like, I mean, I don't know the number, but I feel like a majority of the average Russians life-saving just went away basically overnight. We've talked about the

22:33hyperinflation. Was it a whole episode on hyperinflation? Yeah. And I know we've talked about it many times, but we did, we did something, I think just on it. Yeah. Yeah. But it was, 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

23:08this means nothing. 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

23:43being 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. 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

24:18growing in size exponentially, just like Apache Chief.

Rise of Russian oligarchs

24:24That's right. You know, you hear that term a lot now, Russian oligarchs. And if you were always like, what the heck is that even? 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

24:58people, 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. Ended up being about $800 million, essentially sort of allowing them to buy pieces of like oil companies and stuff like that. 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

25:36stuff. Now it was like they were buying directly from the government. They went to the wholesaler, right? And Putin was one of those, those oligarchs. He had made some, he started to make cash, I think flipping real estate in St. Petersburg in the very early nineties, 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

26:07by loaning $170 million to the government. Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone knows how much money he has today, right? No. Isn't that kind of a mystery? We talked about it in our book. Yeah, that's right. Will there ever be a trillionaire? I don't know. Will there?

26:27So these oligarchs were, 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, 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, that really created a

26:58wealth 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 and the, the, the safety net was gone. And like their, their unemployment rate and their, was just like unbelievable. It was like 22% in 1998. Mm-hmm. 40% of the population was, um, under the poverty line in 1995. Just eye-popping statistics, um, because these oligarchs were allowed to basically, um, pilfer the entire Russian

27:35economy for themselves. Um, 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, I heard a joke where, um, like an old Soviet joke that, uh, we pretend to work and the

28:07government pretends to pay us. That's just kind of how things went. But you still had childcare, you still had healthcare, 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. Yeah, for sure. Uh, I think I mentioned in part one, like they, um, they slowed

28:42the rate of having children just because they couldn't afford it. I think by the end of the nineties, there were 3.7 million fewer children in Russia than in 1990. So in the course of a decade, uh, and alcoholism was, you know, it's, it's always been obviously a thing in Russia with the, the free flowing of vodka. But, um, after this, it was really, really bad. Um, heavy drinking accounted for two of every five deaths among Russian working age men in the nineties and their, their life expectancy changed. Like if you can like literally change a life expectancy over a decade, uh, then

29:18something terrible has gone wrong. I think the male life expectancy went from 64, uh, to 57 over the course of three years between 1991 and 1994, because again, these, you know, the Soviet men out of work, uh, no, uh, uh, ideals that they had grown up knowing and like believing in all of a sudden stripped. So they, they drank themselves to death. Yeah. The, um, I said earlier that a lot of Russians still believe, probably still believe they definitely did at the time that the West inflicted shock

29:50therapy upon them on purpose. Um, I've also seen the shock therapy as being labeled as responsible for, um, somebody like Putin to be able to come along and get the kind of support as a autocratic nostalgist, basically, um, in very much the same way that Hitler was able to rise to power because of the deeply punitive, um, like 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

30:24Germany to its former glory. That's how Hitler came to power. Putin came along and said, I'm going to restore, um, Russia to its former glory. And so he got support as an autocrat as well. It's just, it's always interesting to me that, that you can find so many different streams of like events and goings on and just different decisions that can lead to such consequential actions. Yeah. And it's like, I was

30:55thinking about it, it's like, um, nothing is black and white and even fewer things are one-sided. And that's a

Yeltsin and Western relations

31:01good example of that. Yeah, for sure. Uh, so the decade that, uh, was the 1990s over there, uh, in 91, you know, we mentioned that, uh, Yeltsin was elected as the president of the Russian Federation, or actually, I guess before that he was president of Russia and now the official elected president of the Russian Federation. Right. And he was a, uh, you know, he stood up to a corrupt system. So he was very popular. Um, you know, there wasn't a, uh, a revolution in Russia like happened elsewhere in, uh, Eastern Europe.

31:37Mm-hmm. Um, they, you know, elsewhere, the political elites were replaced. That didn't happen here. Um, they didn't massively distribute or redistribute wealth and power. Like a lot of the, the people from the, um, uh, nomenclatura, like they, they took care of them and they stayed in that, that sort of, um, 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. And so, yes. So these, these people,

32:11the Soviet elite just were like, oh, we're not communists anymore, but we're still going to stay elite, I guess. And so, um, yeah. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Um, 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. Um, 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. Yeah. No, but I remember at the time though, it was

32:44like, 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, uh, Western friendly. And, uh, 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. Yes. So he was a party animal, like there's no two ways around it. Um, there was, uh, there's this one, um, thing you can look up on YouTube where, uh, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl came to visit Russia after, uh, the Soviet Union dissolved.

33:18And, um, 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. Oh, for sure. There was another famous story where when he, uh, was on an official state visit,

33:50one of the first ones, I think it might've been the first one to the United States. Uh, 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, uh, out trying to hail a cab in DC on Pennsylvania Avenue and his underwear. So he 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. Again, that's not a legend. Like that happened.

34:21Oh yeah. So a lot of people like, so yes, he was a lovable teddy bear. He certainly looked that way, but in a lot of people point to Putin as the, 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, um, to 1993, you can see very clearly that Boris Yeltsin was the one who kicked it off again. Um, he, because

34:52of 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. Yeah. All of these oligarchs first starting to get super rich off of the government and off of what is supposed to belong to the people. He got very unpopular as we'll see. Um, I think at one point before he left office, his approval rating was 6%. Yeah. It was in the tank. And I assume that that was with the margin of error, plus or minus 6%.

35:23Right. Nobody liked him. So, um, he was impeached by the legitimately elected parliament and he didn't like that very much.

Political crisis and parliament

35:34No, he dissolved parliament or tried to, uh, as a result of that. And parliament was like, no, we're not dissolving. So he had the military come in and shell parliament, uh, which was, uh, I mean, if you want to talk about an autocratic move, I mean, that's certainly it. Uh, 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.

36:07Right. Exactly. That's how useful he was to the West that, that they were just like, just tried to save them 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, um, I think Kyle put it that people felt cheated twice by Gorbachev first and then Yeltsin afterward. So there was a, a, not a lot of, um, happiness in Russia

36:41in the 1990s. I say we take our second break and come back and wrap it up. Let's do it.

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40:07Okay, Chuck, wrap it up. I'll take it. Do you remember that? They were so good, though. They're just easy to listen to and fun. Who was that? The, uh... Fabulous Thunderbirds. 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. Oh, Jimmy Vaughn. I thought you were talking about Jimmy Laughn, Simon Laughn's brother. All right, so I knew we'd get a few laughs in here, you know?

Show trials and elite continuity

40:38Mm-hmm. All right, so where are we here? We are with Yeltsin. He had banned the Communist Party. Uh, that was challenged, and that resulted in a 1992, uh, trial that was televised, and it was billed as, like, the big Russian Nuremberg trial, and it was basically like, hey, we're gonna reckon with our past as a party because of all of the crimes committed under the name of communism, uh, against the people. Uh, the, the sort of hitch to this Nuremberg was that there were no actual defendants. It was just sort of a, sort

41:14of a show, it seems like. Yeah. Um, like, they didn't actually prosecute individuals. It was just sort of demonstrating the history of criminality of communism. Yeah, like, they put Soviet communism itself on trial, not the people who perpetrated it. And so, that's a really good, um, uh, that's good evidence of what you were saying earlier, that the, 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 gonna let themselves be prosecuted, but they know that the, again, the winds of change are moving against communism,

41:49so they're gonna go along with the show trial. It's also really good evidence of just how strong the, um, those levers of power remained in Russia. Like, the KGB, it was still around. It just changed its name to the FSB, the Federal Security Service. And there was, um, a, uh, 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

42:21the former regime. That, um, member of Parliament was assassinated in 1998. Yeah. 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, uh, direction. But the people who had been in charge were still basically in charge. Outside of, um, Russia, there were, there were, um, it was a lot easier to do that kind of thing because they could blame Russia, right? Yeah, saying, like, you know, we were under the thumb of communism as a state, so it was a lot

42:56easier to sort of rally people around this idea that they were free, uh, and had a new way forward. Uh, 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, uh, let me re-adopt the Imperial Tricolor and let me replace the Soviet Anthem. Uh, and these were all really divisive moves. Um, 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, and, like, this past is, is haunting

43:30us. But it was a really divided thing because after this pretty horrible decade of chaos and, like, financial ruin, the, 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, uh, you know, for that old national anthem that Putin, uh, reverted in 2000. And that's when Putin, like, uh, I mean, I think he really believed it, but I think he also really saw an

44:02opening there to come in and be like, I'm your guy. You, you miss the old days, just wait.

Putin assumes the presidency

44:09Exactly. Um, 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, um, 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

44:40pound Chechnya, which was trying to break away from Russia itself. And I guess Russia had had quite enough of breaking away for one century. And, um, 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, ooh, we like this guy. He gets stuff done. He takes no guff from anybody. And that helped support his, um, ascendancy to the presidency,

45:13uh, in 1999 when Yeltsin suddenly out of nowhere was like, I'm not president anymore. This guy is. Yeah. And once he was president, he was like, he started to rein in some of those, uh, market freedoms that had been installed. He was like, you know, these, this, uh, this freedom of press thing isn't so great after all. Uh, so by 2010, most of that private media was once again owned by the government. Um, he did kind of, uh, rein in the oligarchs. Um, but you know, not completely, obviously.

45:45Uh, I get the feeling it was, he was sort of picking and choosing maybe. So it, it seemed like he was. Is that accurate? 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. Oh, okay. 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 asset stripped. The state took over his oil company and the rest of the oligarchs

46:17are like, oh, this guy's 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. Yeah, that sounds about right. Uh, 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. Uh, but you know, things started to turn around financially too, because they had, uh, some, some booming oil expert, uh, exports happening, uh, and experts and that, you know, all of a sudden that your average living standard was going up. Um, it seems like the sort of just

46:51the chaos of the nineties, uh, started to, to wane and things started to get a little bit better enough to, to, you know, for people to get behind Putin. And he was like, yeah, I'm restoring Russia in our, in our place in the world. Like get behind me. Yeah. I mean, because of the nineties were shameful to the, 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 a, an economy that was just, had just started to get back on course.

47:25So under Putin and what his 26 year reign, if you count when he was the, the, um, prime minister to Medvedev's puppet, um, yeah, 26 years, uh, 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. Um, yet it's still Putin. I mean, he keeps winning those elections though, right? Yeah. Fair and square. Those are all legit.

47:57And so, yeah, that brings us to today, Chuck. 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. Cause 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, those were days where I just wasn't paying attention. And I was, uh, you know, I was trying to score Pixies tickets. It was kind of like if this part of history were an iced sugar cookie, as kids, we had just

48:27kind 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. Yeah. Agreed. I enjoyed these. Yeah. That's a better way to put it. Uh, Chuck just laughed. So I think we should end this episode, this two part episode and say, it's time for listener mail.

Listener mail on Cornwall

48:50Uh, this is about our episode on the UK, our shorty. Uh, Hey guys. And, um, this isn't, don't worry. This isn't like completely scalding us. Okay. Good. Hey guys, listening to the episode. And I thought, uh, 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. Did they come up in our research? Ooh, I know you guys will see things, uh, official websites saying Cornwall is a county in England, but for one, it is a duchy, which is a different thing.

49:23You got to pass it on the left-hand side.

49:26Secondly, 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. No, we did not come across that at all. Cornwall. I know, uh, guys, Cornwall has its own language, uh, Curnawic, I think is how it's pronounced. No, but it's not. Uh, it's closely related to Welsh and barely distinguishable from, uh, Breton.

50:00Yes, Brittany is a Celtic nation too, guys. It has its own flag, uh, 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. Uh, I love your respectful and open approach to what you do, guys, so I figured you'd be interested. Uh, and then he posts this, uh, Colonel Beesvikin, which is Cornwall forever,

50:31and I don't think he's talking about the game hen. No. And this is from G. Thanks, G. That was brand new info for us, and we appreciate it big time. Um, 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. Uh, 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,

51:04spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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