Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Colton had amazing access as a journalist and academic to Yeltsin and his entourage, his daughter and his daughter’s husband. In the years before Yeltsin stood down, they ran the Kremlin like this tsarist fiefdom. If you give people private freedoms, they matter a lot. You can have lunch with someone and take the mickey out of some prominent man and you are not going to be denounced, Stalin-style. It takes an active effort to enter into a public role, and it’s at that point that the state then seeks its redress.
Your next book, Yeltsin: A Life, addresses this.
Yes, that is the fascinating angle of this account by Timothy Colton. He had amazing access as a journalist and academic to Yeltsin and his entourage, his daughter and his daughter’s husband. In the years before Yeltsin stood down, they ran the Kremlin like this tsarist fiefdom. I lived in Russia from 1990 to 1994 and I was there during the most exciting parts of the collapse of communism and the demise of the Soviet Union, the failed coup and the astonishing rise of unbridled democracy. It was amazing, it was a free for all, pretty much everything that could be said was said in the newspapers for several years. It was extremely exciting.
For various reasons it all came unstuck, one of which was the terrible arrogance of Western advisers. I remember sitting at press conferences with the ministry of finance and the Russian ministers were just regarded as puppets, doing the bidding of the IMF types and others, who I think were well intentioned but totally insensitive to the pride of a great country. I don’t believe in great conspiracy theories. It did, though, obey the law of unintended consequence. At the same time, much of the infrastructure went down the tubes, including financial management. If you have huge numbers of public sector workers who are literally not being paid, particularly army, doctors, teachers, police, train drivers, you have a recipe for absolute disaster.
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John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship, a London-based organisation set up in 1972 by the poet Stephen Spender and a group of intellectuals, originally to campaign for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. After a career in political journalism at Reuters, the Daily Telegraph, the BBC and Financial Times, culminating in an award-winning three years as editor of the New Statesman, John joined Index in 2008. Most recently, he has spearheaded a campaign to reform the UK’s libel laws – laws which he says have made London courts a magnet for anyone with cash wishing to suppress inconvenient information.
