ECONOMIC SECURITY OF RUSSIA

Economic Security of Russia

Economic Security of Russia

Introduction

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, and its replacement by a Russian Federation and by a “commonwealth of independent states,” had been preceded by a dramatic series of conflicts and manoeuvres between two Communist leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Already in 1989, Yeltsin had positioned himself as the main antagonist of Gorbachev and as an alternative leader. At the time, Gorbachev himself was trying to strengthen his capacity to circumvent the Soviet bureaucracy's opposition to reform, by creating an executive presidency of the USSR and by being appointed to this position (Hough 1997, 35-47). The measures were finally enacted in 1991, but Gorbachev's powers remained in fact limited. His presidential decrees were disregarded as the Union was increasingly torn apart by innumerable difficulties and conflicts. In the meantime, the powers of Yeltsin grew appreciably. He was elected as leader of the Supreme Soviet in May 1990, and then established through a Declaration of State Sovereignty ratified by the Congress of the Russian Republic the primacy of Russian law over Soviet law on its territory and, at the same time, the idea of economic sovereignty for all the other Union republics. By February 1991 he insistently called for Gorbachev to resign as president of the Soviet Union, and soon afterward, on June 12, 1991, Yeltsin succeeded in being elected president of Russia.

Role of Government

Between August 19 to 21, as Gorbachev was away on vacation in Crimea and while Yeltsin was officially housed in Russia's centre of power of its parliament, the Russian White House, the anti-Yeltsin right wing of the Communist Party attempted a disastrous putsch on the White House. In the absence of Gorbachev, Yeltsin proclaimed himself supreme commander of the armed forces, denounced the plotters publicly from above a tank facing the White House, and finally triumphed against the putschists led notably by Valentin Pavlov, the Soviet prime minister, Dimitri Iazov, the defence minister, and Vladimir Kruickhov, the KGB's chair.

The primary objective of the leader of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR was to devise the set of policies that would ensure the transition to the market. The key instrument of this transition was the methodic change of the pattern of ownership in the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, that is, the privatization of state property. How did the privatization powers affect the decollectivization of agriculture, the right to sell and purchase land, the prices of agricultural products, and the upstream and the downstream connections of agriculture with other sectors? First, it should be noted that the privatization of agriculture was carried out in a sui generis fashion. Three state committees were involved in this field: The State Land Committee became responsible for all land privatization; the Ministry of Agriculture was in charge of the privatization of all non-land assets; and finally, the State Management of State Property was responsible for preparing legal documents as well as for privatizing the upstream and ...