"Politics in Russia is just intrigue," says Russian President Boris Yeltsin's former press secretary, setting the theme for tonight's incisive two-hour "Frontline" report (at 11 p.m. on KUED, Ch. 7 in the "Viewer's Choice" time slot).
"The Struggle for Russia" covers the tumultuous 21/2 years after the failed August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the expiring Soviet Union, from which Yeltsin emerged as the symbol of a new, democratic Russia. The idealism of that August, the narrator says, seems "a distant and melancholy memory."Interviews with politicians, journalists, academics, street-wise speculators, former officials and dazed citizens are blended with vivid newsreel excerpts to produce the shrewdest, toughest account yet on television of the shock of the breakup of the Soviet empire and of Russia's lurchings toward a market economy. It's like watching a political and economic earthquake.
The opening segment attributes the fall of Gorbachev to his inability to deal with or even understand the forces that his own reforms had set loose. But Yeltsin, his victorious rival, is also pictured as unprepared to deal with the upheavals in the old Soviet Union and the unravelings of the controlled economy.
Yegor T. Gaidar, who guided the Yeltsin reforms until he was forced out of office and who now heads Russia's Choice, the largest reformist party, is the closest thing to a hero in this account.
He says of his experience, "I'm sitting behind the wheel of a car, but someone else is controlling the gas and brake pedals and a third person has the ignition key."
Tuesday night's program focuses on such consequences of reform as the rise of racketeers, who have become the new exploiters of the people, and the bankruptcy of the old state farms and factories to the bewilderment of the workers, as state property is looted by unscrupulous insiders.
While the screen is jumping with scenes of the newly rich disporting in discos, casinos and hard-currency shops, ordinary Russians tell of their daily hardships and fears for the future. "Nobody needs us anymore," one says.
A pro-Yeltsin campaigner in last December's elections is seen granting that "in two years of reform, yes, the standard of living has fallen; production has decreased as well, and the total national income has also declined." And this man is an optimist.
So far, the main beneficiary of "privatization," one critic says, is the old communist nomenklatura. And the main political beneficiaries may turn out to be right-wing nationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who are trading on the hardships of a chaotic transition.
Asked after the December elections, in which democrats managed to win a small majority in Parliament, what the West's reaction should be, an observer says, "Watch and tremble."