August 27, 2026 • 43 mins
The break-up of the USSR was a tough one for Russia, being the jilted republic. For the entire decade after, the country plunged into a type of controlled chaos, with a rampantly corrupt kleptocracy taking the place of the toppled socialist society.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Hey, Chuck, you ended
the last one. You want to start this one.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Bravo.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I hated doing that, by the way, Oh you did. Yeah.
This feels like Robin putting on Batman's outfit or something.
This is very strange.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
How do you know it's not Robin who announces the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Or whatever Batman putting on Robin's outfit, although I heard
he did that on the side as a kink.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
He did. But who hasn't. Who among us hasn't dressed
up like Robin from Batman?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I have to say you're you have stepped up your
style game lately and it's it's nice. Hey, thanks, your
traveling outfits are.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Well. I was always into clothes growing up, and then
I wore T shirts and cargo shorts for twenty five
years and then remembered, Hey, I like fashion, so I
back it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
You brought it back. Yeah, you're basically the Tom Ford
of the podcasting world.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
All right, So where we left off December eighth, nineteen
ninety one, 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, and like, what the heck is going
(01:52):
to happen? And who rolls into town but Boris Yelston
with a bottle of Stoli in his hand.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, and another one in his belly.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
So Boris Yeltsen was the first president of Russia, which
is kind of confusing because we said that Gorbachev was
the president of the USSR. But remember Russia and the
USSR were not one and the same. So for a
little while there, Russia itself had pretty much two presidents
(02:24):
at the same time. For a couple of months while
Gorbachev was still in power, and while Yeltsen, who had
been popularly elected in June of nineteen ninety one, while
he was like, I'm President of Russia. So there was
a what you could call a bit of a power struggle.
And despite that, it wasn't until a three day coup
(02:47):
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
(03:07):
of the West, the open arms of the West. And ironically,
that coup was by hardliners who wanted to keep who
wanted to save communism and the USSR, but instead 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.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, Yeah, And it was ended up being a failed coup. Technically,
but it had the result of finally sort of getting
Gorbachef out of power, so in a way it kind
of worked, but it was technically a failed coup. What
happened was, you know, Gorbachev came in with all these big,
sweeping reforms, and so the conservative elites that he had
(03:56):
previously worked with were terrified, obviously because they're existence depended
on the Soviet Union being the Soviet Union, so they
were like, Gorbachev is a trader. In nineteen ninety one,
they put him under house arrest while he was on
vacation in Crimea, and they sent tanks in to Moscow
and took control of the government. They didn't storm the
(04:17):
parliament building, but they lined up outside the parliament building.
And then they made a mistake in that they let
Boris Yeltsin, I keep saying, Yelston Yeltsin get on one
of those tanks and address the people. And this is
a time where they had not jammed the TV signals
coming from outside the Soviet Union. So all of these
(04:40):
Soviets all of a sudden are watching this unfold on
the BBC or CNN, and they're seeing this Yeltsin guy
sitting on top of a tank talking to them.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
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 Soviet Party, and not only
did it make the party look bad, it made Yelton
look really good. So remember he'd already been popularly elected,
but there was a power struggle between him and Gorbachev
(05:13):
going on. When the coup was overrun, the leaders were jailed,
Gorbachev managed to come 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 Gorbachev was like,
(05:38):
it's clear, 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 office that he held.
Somebody else could have come along and filled and tried
to challenge Yelton. He made sure that there would be
(05:58):
no further political chaos. As much as he could manage.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
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, and technically everybody,
I'm the only guy to have ever done that. So
just you know, keep that in your back pocket. And
he said, here's the nuclear codes, Boris, please take care
(06:23):
of those. Any Communists that are in public office. Well,
there is no Communist party, so you're not even a
valid member of that party because there is none. So
you're not even if you were elected, because there's no
such thing. Then you're out of your your seat. And
Russia is now the Russian Federation.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, I was. I didn't see what happened to those people.
Was it just like I guess I'm independent all of
a sudden, not by choice, 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 chain is that took place over the course
of a few days. I think the whole thing really
(07:03):
kicked off on December twenty fifth, nineteen ninety one, and
by the turn of nineteen ninety two was basically over.
I mean Russia became the Russian Federation, and that same
anti communist spirit of renewal and revolution and like change,
(07:24):
the winds of change you could even almost call it,
had swept through Russia itself.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, they were immediately no longer a superpower, all that
national identity. You know, we talked about some of this
stuff in Part one with Promise of More and that's
right now because for a lot of the people in
Russia it was like the fall of communism was a
great thing, but for a lot of others that was
(07:51):
you know, the Soviet man was labeled and it was,
I guess a pejorative term, but Homo Sovieticus. That was
just sort of the the average Soviet man who is
you know, probably works in a factory and has lived
his whole life with this ideology, this communist ideology and
(08:11):
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, it was they were unmoored and did
just like everything they knew was gone and they didn't
know what to do.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, like the patriotic of the USSR, like everyday citizens
consider themselves one part of this larger collective, the Soviet experiment,
and that was their identity. That's what a lot of
like the way they thought came from basically, like you
were saying. And so when you pull that out from
(08:51):
underneath somebody, especially when it happened suddenly and essentially without warning,
it just comes out of nowhere, like, it's really hard
to put yourself in that position, like, yeah, how would
you handle that kind of thing? You know. And certainly
there were plenty of people who will see who were
rejoiced at this change. They were glad communism went away,
(09:14):
but there were a lot of people who were not
happy that Communism had gone away, or that the Soviet
Union had gone away.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, for sure. You know, religion helped fill a little
of that void. The recovered Russian Orthodoxy became a little
more popular to help fill this moral vacuum that was
left in its wake. But there was a guy in
Dresden at the time. He was a KGB lieutenant colonel
in his villa and dressed in Germany, and this was
(09:45):
before a reunification. This was a nineteen ninety just sort
of a mid level officer who as far as you know,
criticism of the USSR in the Soviet way was very
prideful and very much defended it and got really mad
apparently super short views when it was criticized. His name
was Vladimir Putin, and he saw everything that was going
(10:07):
on around and there's a quote from him that kind
of sums it up. 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 you know,
over here in the United States, like it felt like
I felt like it. It kind of was a victory,
like we won. The Cold War is over. Their experiment
(10:28):
failed democracy wins, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
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 a great nation and you know,
a great partner to Europe and the rest of the
West and the rest of the world. And one of
the reasons why the United States didn't react like that
at a really really crucial time, which was nineteen ninety
(10:55):
one nineteen ninety two, was that President George H. W. Bush,
who was a Cold war, 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 foiled his
arms and turned his back and was basically like, good luck,
We're glad you fell over, but we're not gonna help you.
(11:16):
We hate you. We've hated you for decades now, so
we're not really gonna 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
(11:37):
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
friendship and cooperation, really step in and basically basically the
United States was a sore loser of the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Yeah, and I feel like most of that was sort
of aimed at Russia's typically because I don't know how
much they financially helped the former Russian states and satellite
states and things like that, But it seems like the
just the spirit of it all was more aimed directly
at Russia and like, hey, these other countries are finally
(12:16):
out from under your grip, so like good for them.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Right exactly. I think we failed to say in the
first episode, but Kyle helped us out with this our
man in Great Britain or the UK or England even Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
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
finished the job, buddy, in grand fashion.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Thank you. So he found a movie called Goodbye Lenin
from two thousand and three. It's a German film and
it's a parody of this Time where it's about a
man who tries to keep he tries to shield his mother,
his East German mother, from finding out that communism has collapse. Yeah,
(13:01):
and I guess it's probably hilarious. I gotta go see
that one because I love a good German comedy like
anybody else, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, I should see that too. So let's take a
break and we'll talk a little bit about sort of
the economics of this all in Russia right after this,
(13:33):
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
(13:53):
really wanted to hit the gas economically, so he embraced
this economist name I'm gonna pronounce at yegor Gaidar or Gaydar.
I'm not sure it's pronounced g ai dar. But he,
along with some Harvard economists that were like, yeah, yeah,
I do this. He had an idea called shock therapy,
(14:14):
which was kind of crazy when you look back 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,
(14:36):
rushes open everybody. They flipped a sign in the window
around and said we're open.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah. Yeah. So here's 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 right, some of the
high points were, Remember the ruble was not recognized internationally,
the Soviet ruble was. Well, now we had the Russian ruble,
and to become recognized as currency on the international market,
(15:06):
it couldn't be artificially propped up by the government any longer, right,
it had to basically sink or swim on its own. Yeah,
with maybe a little bit of monkeying like everybody does,
but not one hundred percent monkeying with it. So that
was a big one.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Right, right, 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
(15:38):
the terrace on foreign import so like trade could flow
and the West did step up. I don't know, did
the United States contribute at all to this?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying, very narrowly and economically, Okay,
In basically in exchange for whatever it was asking for.
The United States helped them that respect. It wasn't like
any magnanimous way, is what I was trying to say.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
It was about twenty billion dollars of the West in
emergency loans, just like an infusion of cash, just to
keep them from completely collapsing.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
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 of shares or
say ten shares in each of these state owned enterprises.
(16:34):
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 ninety five
percent of the Soviet citizenry. I didn't see why the
other five percent had to sit out, But basically everybody
got shares in all of these amazingly soon to be
wealthy companies.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
And just to be clear, it wasn't like, you know,
when they were making TVs. It was like our oil industry,
in our steel industry, like big big stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
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 believed that it was deliberately inflicted by the West
(17:26):
to keep the USSR hobbled so that it couldn't possibly
come back. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Was it like the these Harvard economists and stuff. Was
that the deal?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, they were very much in league with Jegol or
guide are okay for sure.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
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 we've talked about the hyper inflation. Was
(18:03):
it a whole episode on hyper inflation?
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, and I know we've talked about it many times,
but we did we did something I think just on it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
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 four hundred percent. 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
(18:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
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
(19:00):
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,
and then they got together and said I got a
(19:22):
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
(19:42):
people who just emerged out of the ashes, suddenly growing
in size exponentially, just like Apache chief.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yeah, that's right. I 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
(20:16):
in nineteen ninety six that that would be a bit
a bad deal to all of a sudden reverse course
on what had been happening. And so the government said,
all right, all you knew oligarxies, super rich people, we
got a deal for you. We'll loan you shares in
our twelve biggest state owned businesses in exchange for like
quick cash. Now, ended up being about eight hundred million dollars,
(20:40):
essentially sort of allowing them to buy pieces of like
oil companies and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
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.
(21:09):
They went to the wholesaler, right. And Putin was one
of those those oligarchs. He had made some they started
to make cash, I think, flipping real estate in Saint
Petersburg in the very early nineties, and then started a bank,
and then by the time this fire sale went on
(21:29):
in nineteen ninety six, he managed to secure a controlling
stake in a nickel mining company by loaning one hundred
and seventy million dollars to the government.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone knows how much
money he has today, right, No, and that kind of
a mystery.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
We talked about it in our book.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, that's right. Will there ever be a trillionaire?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I don't know. Will there.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
So 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 helping out Mother
Russia and the Russian Federation, we can actually strip these
companies of the raw materials and sell them for more
(22:17):
money on these international markets. And so that made them
even richer. And then what that did was that 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 this central factory
(22:37):
went into ruin and the safety net was gone, and
like their their unemployment rate and there was just just
like unbelievable, was like twenty two percent in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Forty percent of the population was under the poverty line
in nineteen ninety five, 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,
(23:13):
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 Coluji. I heard a joke where,
like an old Soviet joke that we pretend to work
(23:35):
and the government 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 in adrift, and
(23:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, for sure. I think I mentioned in part one,
like they they slowed the rate of having children just
because they couldn't afford it. I think by the end
of the nineties there were three point seven million fewer
children in Russia than in nineteen ninety so in the
course of a decade. And alcoholism was you know, it's
always been obviously a thing in Russia. With the free
(24:28):
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 nineties, and their life
expectancy changed. Like, if you can like literally change a
life expectancy over a decade, then something terrible has gone wrong.
(24:48):
I think the male life expectancy went from sixty four
to fifty seven over the course of three years between
nineteen ninety one and nineteen ninety four. 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.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah. I said earlier that a lot of Russians still believe,
probably still believed, they definitely did the time that the
West inflicted shock therapy upon them on purpose. I've also
seen this shock therapy as being labeled as responsible for
somebody like Putin to be able to come along and
(25:30):
get the kind of support as a 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
(25:51):
so somebody came along and said, I'm going to restore
Germany to its former glory. That's how Hitler came to power.
Putin came along and said I'm going to 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 you can find so many different streams of like
(26:14):
events and goings on and just different decisions that can
lead to such consequential actions. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah, for sure. So the decade that was the nineteen
nineties over there. In ninety one, 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 and now the official elected president of the Russian Federation, right,
(26:53):
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
(27:14):
wealth and power like a lot of the people from
the nomenclatura like they took care of them and they
stayed in that that sort of it was an elite status.
But it wasn't like the oligarchs. It was. It was
now billionaires compared to working stuffs, whereas before it was
more like sort of upper management versus working stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, 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 right, yeah,
wink wink, nudge, nudge. And so though George H. W.
Bush turned his back on Russia, Clinton turned around and
(27:58):
was like, hey, guys, let's get it on. We love you, Yelton.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
He's a lovable guy.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
He is. He's got big cheeks, he's like smiling all
the time. And the reason why is because he was
drunk constantly.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah. Now, 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 is someone who I think Bill
Clinton and people in the West knew that they could
(28:31):
kind of control.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
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 Helmet
Cole came to visit Russia after the Soviet Union dissault,
and it's a state visit. They're standing there watching a
Russian military parade go by, and all of a sudden,
(28:53):
Yelson just has moved to grab the baton from the
military band conductor and he starts conducting band too, but
like almost cartoonishly. Yeah, yeah, larger than life. He's blowing
kisses at people and it's like when you watch it,
like he's pretty drunk right now. And this is like
an official state thing, and this was not unusual for him.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
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 US and he was like,
this is fantastic. So the Secret Service allegedly found him
out trying to hail a cab in DC on Pennsylvania
(29:36):
Avenue and his underwear, so he drunk so he could
go get a pizza, and the Secret Service reins him
in and they're like, forest, buddy, we'll get you a pizza. Like,
come back inside.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Again, 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
and 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.
(30:09):
And if you dial back history a few years to
nineteen ninety three, you can see very clearly that Boris
Yelton was the one who kicked it off again. 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. All of
(30:32):
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 six percent, yeah, in the tank, and I
assume that that was with the margin of air plus
or minus six percent.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Him.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
So he was impeached by the legitimately elected parliament, and
he didn't like that very much.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
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.
(31:24):
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 communists.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Right exactly. That's how useful he was to the West
that they were just like just tried to save him
anyway they could. He managed to hang on to power.
That Shares for Voucher Scheme, the Great Shares for Voucher
Scheme in ninety six, that was designed to help Yelton
stay into power. He so hated that the Communists were
probably going to sweep the elections that year, and so
(31:59):
I think Kyle with it that people felt cheated twice
by Gorbachew first and then Yeltson afterward. So there was
not a lot of happiness in Russia in the nineteen nineties.
They say, we take our second break and come back
and wrap it up. Let's do it, okay, Chuck, wrap
(32:37):
it up. I'll take it. Do you remember that? So
good though, You're easy to listen to and fun. It
was that the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, fabulous Thunderbirds. Jimmy Vond Was it Jimmy in that one?
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:54):
I think it was Stevie Rayvaughd's brother. Jimmy.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Oh, Jimmy Vaughan. I thought you were talking about Jimmy
love Bond, Simon Lebon's brother.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeh, all right, So I knew we'd get a few
laughs in here, you know. All right? So where are
we here?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
We are?
Speaker 1 (33:11):
With Yeltsin, he had banned the Communist Party. That was
challenged and that resulted in a nineteen ninety two 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 the crimes committed under the name of
communism against the people. The sort of hitch to this
(33:37):
Nuremberg was that there were no actual defendants. It was
just sort of a sort of a show. It seems
like like they didn't actually prosecute individuals. It was just
sort of demonstrating the history of criminality of communism.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
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 nomenclatura, 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,
(34:12):
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. It just changed its
name to the FSB, the Federal Security Service, and there
(34:35):
was I think a member of the Supreme Soviet the
Parliament who suggested a illustration 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 nineteen ninety eight. So there wasn't a lot
of mood among the elites to really actually have some
(34:58):
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. Outside of Russia, there were it was a
lot easier to do that kind of thing because they
could blame Russia.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Right 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
(35:37):
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 Linen
Mausoleum and replace Revolution Day, so he was trying to
say like, hey, let's move forward, and like this past
(35:58):
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
(36:20):
old national anthem that Putin reverted in two thousand 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 missed the old days, just wait exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
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 seven ten months.
(37:00):
So Yeltsin was not doing very well by this time.
This is like the very end of the nineties, 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, and they just punished Cheeshnia. Under Putin,
(37:23):
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 ascendency to the presidency in nineteen ninety nine, when
(37:43):
Yeltsin suddenly out of nowhere, was like, I'm not president
anymore of this guy.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Is yeah, And once he was president, he was like
he started to reign in some of those market freedoms
that had been installed. He was like, you know, this
freedom of press thing isn't so great after so by
twenty ten, most of that private media was once again
owned by the government. He did kind of rein in
(38:08):
the oligarchs, but you know, not completely. Obviously, I get
the feeling he was sort of picking and choosing. Maybe,
so it seemed like he was. Is that accurate.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Oh okay.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
And they complied, and one of them didn't, Mikhail Kodorkovski.
Basically he 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 were like, oh,
this guy's quite serious. We better listen. And then from
those group or that group, Putin started to develop favorites
(38:54):
and all that. That's my impression of it.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, that sounds about right. And the great thing is
I know that they're 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 expert
exports happening and experts and that you know, all of
a sudden, your average living standard was going up. It
(39:18):
seems like this sort of just the chaos of the
nineties 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 and our place in the world. Like, get behind me.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Yeah, I mean, because of the nineties 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
at 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 twenty six year reign if
(39:59):
you count when he was the prime minister to Medevyev's puppet, Yeah,
twenty six 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. Yet it's still Putin.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I mean, he keeps winning those elections there, right, Yeah,
fair and squats, that's are all legit, and so yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
That brings us to today. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, I mean is that it? Are we done?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I think we're done. You did fantastic.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
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 in early college for me, and those
those were days where I just wasn't paying attention and
I was, you know, I was trying to score Pixies tickets.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
It was kind of like if this part of history,
we're an iced sugar cookie. As kids, we had just
kind of nibbled the sugar cookie part and now we've
just bid into the first icing and consume the whole cookie,
and we're just in sugar heaven right now.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah, agreed. I enjoyed these.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, that's a better way to put it, Chuck, just laugh.
So I think we should end this episode, this two
part episode, and say it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
This is about our episode on the UK are shorty,
hey guys, And this isn't don't worry, this isn't like
completely scalding us. Okay, 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 got about Cornwall.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
The thing come up in our research.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Ooh, I know you guys will see things official website
saying Cornwall is a county in England, but for one
it is a duchy, which is a different thing.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
You got to pass. Secondly, left hands.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Secondly, Cornwall is a Celtic nation, guys, like Scotland, Whales
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.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Wow. No, we did not come across that at all.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
I know, guys. Cornwall has its own language, Kernwick, I
think is how it's pronounced. It's closely related to Welsh
and barely distinguishable from Breton. Yes, Brittany is a Celtic
nation too, guys. It has its own flag, Saint Piran's flag,
which is Pirates. I'm not sure you pronounce it, which
is a white cross in a black background and there
(42:38):
are strong calls to establish the 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. And then he posts
this Colonel beast Vickan which is Cornwall Forever. Don't think
(43:00):
he's talking about the game, hen you know, and this
is from G.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Thanks G. 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
(43:26):
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
stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Hey, Chuck, you ended
the last one. You want to start this one.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Bravo.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I hated doing that, by the way, Oh you did. Yeah.
This feels like Robin putting on Batman's outfit or something.
This is very strange.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
How do you know it's not Robin who announces the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Or whatever Batman putting on Robin's outfit, although I heard
he did that on the side as a kink.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
He did. But who hasn't. Who among us hasn't dressed
up like Robin from Batman?
Speaker 1 (00:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I have to say you're you have stepped up your
style game lately and it's it's nice. Hey, thanks, your
traveling outfits are.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Well. I was always into clothes growing up, and then
I wore T shirts and cargo shorts for twenty five
years and then remembered, Hey, I like fashion, so I
back it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
You brought it back. Yeah, you're basically the Tom Ford
of the podcasting world.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
All right, So where we left off December eighth, nineteen
ninety one, 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, and like, what the heck is going
(01:52):
to happen? And who rolls into town but Boris Yelston
with a bottle of Stoli in his hand.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, and another one in his belly.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
So Boris Yeltsen was the first president of Russia, which
is kind of confusing because we said that Gorbachev was
the president of the USSR. But remember Russia and the
USSR were not one and the same. So for a
little while there, Russia itself had pretty much two presidents
(02:24):
at the same time. For a couple of months while
Gorbachev was still in power, and while Yeltsen, who had
been popularly elected in June of nineteen ninety one, while
he was like, I'm President of Russia. So there was
a what you could call a bit of a power struggle.
And despite that, it wasn't until a three day coup
(02:47):
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
(03:07):
of the West, the open arms of the West. And ironically,
that coup was by hardliners who wanted to keep who
wanted to save communism and the USSR, but instead 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.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Yeah, Yeah, And it was ended up being a failed coup. Technically,
but it had the result of finally sort of getting
Gorbachef out of power, so in a way it kind
of worked, but it was technically a failed coup. What
happened was, you know, Gorbachev came in with all these big,
sweeping reforms, and so the conservative elites that he had
(03:56):
previously worked with were terrified, obviously because they're existence depended
on the Soviet Union being the Soviet Union, so they
were like, Gorbachev is a trader. In nineteen ninety one,
they put him under house arrest while he was on
vacation in Crimea, and they sent tanks in to Moscow
and took control of the government. They didn't storm the
(04:17):
parliament building, but they lined up outside the parliament building.
And then they made a mistake in that they let
Boris Yeltsin, I keep saying, Yelston Yeltsin get on one
of those tanks and address the people. And this is
a time where they had not jammed the TV signals
coming from outside the Soviet Union. So all of these
(04:40):
Soviets all of a sudden are watching this unfold on
the BBC or CNN, and they're seeing this Yeltsin guy
sitting on top of a tank talking to them.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
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 Soviet Party, and not only
did it make the party look bad, it made Yelton
look really good. So remember he'd already been popularly elected,
but there was a power struggle between him and Gorbachev
(05:13):
going on. When the coup was overrun, the leaders were jailed,
Gorbachev managed to come 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 Gorbachev was like,
(05:38):
it's clear, 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 office that he held.
Somebody else could have come along and filled and tried
to challenge Yelton. He made sure that there would be
(05:58):
no further political chaos. As much as he could manage.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
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, and technically everybody,
I'm the only guy to have ever done that. So
just you know, keep that in your back pocket. And
he said, here's the nuclear codes, Boris, please take care
(06:23):
of those. Any Communists that are in public office. Well,
there is no Communist party, so you're not even a
valid member of that party because there is none. So
you're not even if you were elected, because there's no
such thing. Then you're out of your your seat. And
Russia is now the Russian Federation.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, I was. I didn't see what happened to those people.
Was it just like I guess I'm independent all of
a sudden, not by choice, 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 chain is that took place over the course
of a few days. I think the whole thing really
(07:03):
kicked off on December twenty fifth, nineteen ninety one, and
by the turn of nineteen ninety two was basically over.
I mean Russia became the Russian Federation, and that same
anti communist spirit of renewal and revolution and like change,
(07:24):
the winds of change you could even almost call it,
had swept through Russia itself.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, they were immediately no longer a superpower, all that
national identity. You know, we talked about some of this
stuff in Part one with Promise of More and that's
right now because for a lot of the people in
Russia it was like the fall of communism was a
great thing, but for a lot of others that was
(07:51):
you know, the Soviet man was labeled and it was,
I guess a pejorative term, but Homo Sovieticus. That was
just sort of the the average Soviet man who is
you know, probably works in a factory and has lived
his whole life with this ideology, this communist ideology and
(08:11):
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, it was they were unmoored and did
just like everything they knew was gone and they didn't
know what to do.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, like the patriotic of the USSR, like everyday citizens
consider themselves one part of this larger collective, the Soviet experiment,
and that was their identity. That's what a lot of
like the way they thought came from basically, like you
were saying. And so when you pull that out from
(08:51):
underneath somebody, especially when it happened suddenly and essentially without warning,
it just comes out of nowhere, like, it's really hard
to put yourself in that position, like, yeah, how would
you handle that kind of thing? You know. And certainly
there were plenty of people who will see who were
rejoiced at this change. They were glad communism went away,
(09:14):
but there were a lot of people who were not
happy that Communism had gone away, or that the Soviet
Union had gone away.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, for sure. You know, religion helped fill a little
of that void. The recovered Russian Orthodoxy became a little
more popular to help fill this moral vacuum that was
left in its wake. But there was a guy in
Dresden at the time. He was a KGB lieutenant colonel
in his villa and dressed in Germany, and this was
(09:45):
before a reunification. This was a nineteen ninety just sort
of a mid level officer who as far as you know,
criticism of the USSR in the Soviet way was very
prideful and very much defended it and got really mad
apparently super short views when it was criticized. His name
was Vladimir Putin, and he saw everything that was going
(10:07):
on around and there's a quote from him that kind
of sums it up. 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 you know,
over here in the United States, like it felt like
I felt like it. It kind of was a victory,
like we won. The Cold War is over. Their experiment
(10:28):
failed democracy wins, you know.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
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 a great nation and you know,
a great partner to Europe and the rest of the
West and the rest of the world. And one of
the reasons why the United States didn't react like that
at a really really crucial time, which was nineteen ninety
(10:55):
one nineteen ninety two, was that President George H. W. Bush,
who was a Cold war, 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 foiled his
arms and turned his back and was basically like, good luck,
We're glad you fell over, but we're not gonna help you.
(11:16):
We hate you. We've hated you for decades now, so
we're not really gonna 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
(11:37):
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
friendship and cooperation, really step in and basically basically the
United States was a sore loser of the Cold War.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Yeah, and I feel like most of that was sort
of aimed at Russia's typically because I don't know how
much they financially helped the former Russian states and satellite
states and things like that, But it seems like the
just the spirit of it all was more aimed directly
at Russia and like, hey, these other countries are finally
(12:16):
out from under your grip, so like good for them.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Right exactly. I think we failed to say in the
first episode, but Kyle helped us out with this our
man in Great Britain or the UK or England even Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
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
finished the job, buddy, in grand fashion.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Thank you. So he found a movie called Goodbye Lenin
from two thousand and three. It's a German film and
it's a parody of this Time where it's about a
man who tries to keep he tries to shield his mother,
his East German mother, from finding out that communism has collapse. Yeah,
(13:01):
and I guess it's probably hilarious. I gotta go see
that one because I love a good German comedy like
anybody else, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yeah, I should see that too. So let's take a
break and we'll talk a little bit about sort of
the economics of this all in Russia right after this,
(13:33):
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
(13:53):
really wanted to hit the gas economically, so he embraced
this economist name I'm gonna pronounce at yegor Gaidar or Gaydar.
I'm not sure it's pronounced g ai dar. But he,
along with some Harvard economists that were like, yeah, yeah,
I do this. He had an idea called shock therapy,
(14:14):
which was kind of crazy when you look back 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,
(14:36):
rushes open everybody. They flipped a sign in the window
around and said we're open.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah. Yeah. So here's 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 right, some of the
high points were, Remember the ruble was not recognized internationally,
the Soviet ruble was. Well, now we had the Russian ruble,
and to become recognized as currency on the international market,
(15:06):
it couldn't be artificially propped up by the government any longer, right,
it had to basically sink or swim on its own. Yeah,
with maybe a little bit of monkeying like everybody does,
but not one hundred percent monkeying with it. So that
was a big one.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Right, right, 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
(15:38):
the terrace on foreign import so like trade could flow
and the West did step up. I don't know, did
the United States contribute at all to this?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying, very narrowly and economically, Okay,
In basically in exchange for whatever it was asking for.
The United States helped them that respect. It wasn't like
any magnanimous way, is what I was trying to say.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
It was about twenty billion dollars of the West in
emergency loans, just like an infusion of cash, just to
keep them from completely collapsing.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
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 of shares or
say ten shares in each of these state owned enterprises.
(16:34):
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 ninety five
percent of the Soviet citizenry. I didn't see why the
other five percent had to sit out, But basically everybody
got shares in all of these amazingly soon to be
wealthy companies.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
And just to be clear, it wasn't like, you know,
when they were making TVs. It was like our oil industry,
in our steel industry, like big big stuff.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
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 believed that it was deliberately inflicted by the West
(17:26):
to keep the USSR hobbled so that it couldn't possibly
come back. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Was it like the these Harvard economists and stuff. Was
that the deal?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, they were very much in league with Jegol or
guide are okay for sure.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
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 we've talked about the hyper inflation. Was
(18:03):
it a whole episode on hyper inflation?
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Yeah, and I know we've talked about it many times,
but we did we did something I think just on it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
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 four hundred percent. 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
(18:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
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
(19:00):
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,
and then they got together and said I got a
(19:22):
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
(19:42):
people who just emerged out of the ashes, suddenly growing
in size exponentially, just like Apache chief.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yeah, that's right. I 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
(20:16):
in nineteen ninety six that that would be a bit
a bad deal to all of a sudden reverse course
on what had been happening. And so the government said,
all right, all you knew oligarxies, super rich people, we
got a deal for you. We'll loan you shares in
our twelve biggest state owned businesses in exchange for like
quick cash. Now, ended up being about eight hundred million dollars,
(20:40):
essentially sort of allowing them to buy pieces of like
oil companies and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
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.
(21:09):
They went to the wholesaler, right. And Putin was one
of those those oligarchs. He had made some they started
to make cash, I think, flipping real estate in Saint
Petersburg in the very early nineties, and then started a bank,
and then by the time this fire sale went on
(21:29):
in nineteen ninety six, he managed to secure a controlling
stake in a nickel mining company by loaning one hundred
and seventy million dollars to the government.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone knows how much
money he has today, right, No, and that kind of
a mystery.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
We talked about it in our book.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, that's right. Will there ever be a trillionaire?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
I don't know. Will there.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
So 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 helping out Mother
Russia and the Russian Federation, we can actually strip these
companies of the raw materials and sell them for more
(22:17):
money on these international markets. And so that made them
even richer. And then what that did was that 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 this central factory
(22:37):
went into ruin and the safety net was gone, and
like their their unemployment rate and there was just just
like unbelievable, was like twenty two percent in nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Forty percent of the population was under the poverty line
in nineteen ninety five, 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,
(23:13):
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 Coluji. I heard a joke where,
like an old Soviet joke that we pretend to work
(23:35):
and the government 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 in adrift, and
(23:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
Yeah, for sure. I think I mentioned in part one,
like they they slowed the rate of having children just
because they couldn't afford it. I think by the end
of the nineties there were three point seven million fewer
children in Russia than in nineteen ninety so in the
course of a decade. And alcoholism was you know, it's
always been obviously a thing in Russia. With the free
(24:28):
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 nineties, and their life
expectancy changed. Like, if you can like literally change a
life expectancy over a decade, then something terrible has gone wrong.
(24:48):
I think the male life expectancy went from sixty four
to fifty seven over the course of three years between
nineteen ninety one and nineteen ninety four. 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.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah. I said earlier that a lot of Russians still believe,
probably still believed, they definitely did the time that the
West inflicted shock therapy upon them on purpose. I've also
seen this shock therapy as being labeled as responsible for
somebody like Putin to be able to come along and
(25:30):
get the kind of support as a 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
(25:51):
so somebody came along and said, I'm going to restore
Germany to its former glory. That's how Hitler came to power.
Putin came along and said I'm going to 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 you can find so many different streams of like
(26:14):
events and goings on and just different decisions that can
lead to such consequential actions. Yeah, 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.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah, for sure. So the decade that was the nineteen
nineties over there. In ninety one, 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 and now the official elected president of the Russian Federation, right,
(26:53):
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
(27:14):
wealth and power like a lot of the people from
the nomenclatura like they took care of them and they
stayed in that that sort of it was an elite status.
But it wasn't like the oligarchs. It was. It was
now billionaires compared to working stuffs, whereas before it was
more like sort of upper management versus working stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, 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 right, yeah,
wink wink, nudge, nudge. And so though George H. W.
Bush turned his back on Russia, Clinton turned around and
(27:58):
was like, hey, guys, let's get it on. We love you, Yelton.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
He's a lovable guy.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
He is. He's got big cheeks, he's like smiling all
the time. And the reason why is because he was
drunk constantly.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah. Now, 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 is someone who I think Bill
Clinton and people in the West knew that they could
(28:31):
kind of control.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
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 Helmet
Cole came to visit Russia after the Soviet Union dissault,
and it's a state visit. They're standing there watching a
Russian military parade go by, and all of a sudden,
(28:53):
Yelson just has moved to grab the baton from the
military band conductor and he starts conducting band too, but
like almost cartoonishly. Yeah, yeah, larger than life. He's blowing
kisses at people and it's like when you watch it,
like he's pretty drunk right now. And this is like
an official state thing, and this was not unusual for him.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
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 US and he was like,
this is fantastic. So the Secret Service allegedly found him
out trying to hail a cab in DC on Pennsylvania
(29:36):
Avenue and his underwear, so he drunk so he could
go get a pizza, and the Secret Service reins him
in and they're like, forest, buddy, we'll get you a pizza. Like,
come back inside.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Again, 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
and 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.
(30:09):
And if you dial back history a few years to
nineteen ninety three, you can see very clearly that Boris
Yelton was the one who kicked it off again. 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. All of
(30:32):
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 six percent, yeah, in the tank, and I
assume that that was with the margin of air plus
or minus six percent.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Him.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
So he was impeached by the legitimately elected parliament, and
he didn't like that very much.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
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.
(31:24):
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 communists.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Right exactly. That's how useful he was to the West
that they were just like just tried to save him
anyway they could. He managed to hang on to power.
That Shares for Voucher Scheme, the Great Shares for Voucher
Scheme in ninety six, that was designed to help Yelton
stay into power. He so hated that the Communists were
probably going to sweep the elections that year, and so
(31:59):
I think Kyle with it that people felt cheated twice
by Gorbachew first and then Yeltson afterward. So there was
not a lot of happiness in Russia in the nineteen nineties.
They say, we take our second break and come back
and wrap it up. Let's do it, okay, Chuck, wrap
(32:37):
it up. I'll take it. Do you remember that? So
good though, You're easy to listen to and fun. It
was that the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, fabulous Thunderbirds. Jimmy Vond Was it Jimmy in that one?
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:54):
I think it was Stevie Rayvaughd's brother. Jimmy.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Oh, Jimmy Vaughan. I thought you were talking about Jimmy
love Bond, Simon Lebon's brother.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeh, all right, So I knew we'd get a few
laughs in here, you know. All right? So where are
we here?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
We are?
Speaker 1 (33:11):
With Yeltsin, he had banned the Communist Party. That was
challenged and that resulted in a nineteen ninety two 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 the crimes committed under the name of
communism against the people. The sort of hitch to this
(33:37):
Nuremberg was that there were no actual defendants. It was
just sort of a sort of a show. It seems
like like they didn't actually prosecute individuals. It was just
sort of demonstrating the history of criminality of communism.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
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 nomenclatura, 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,
(34:12):
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. It just changed its
name to the FSB, the Federal Security Service, and there
(34:35):
was I think a member of the Supreme Soviet the
Parliament who suggested a illustration 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 nineteen ninety eight. So there wasn't a lot
of mood among the elites to really actually have some
(34:58):
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. Outside of Russia, there were it was a
lot easier to do that kind of thing because they
could blame Russia.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Right 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
(35:37):
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 Linen
Mausoleum and replace Revolution Day, so he was trying to
say like, hey, let's move forward, and like this past
(35:58):
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
(36:20):
old national anthem that Putin reverted in two thousand 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 missed the old days, just wait exactly.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
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 seven ten months.
(37:00):
So Yeltsin was not doing very well by this time.
This is like the very end of the nineties, 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, and they just punished Cheeshnia. Under Putin,
(37:23):
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 ascendency to the presidency in nineteen ninety nine, when
(37:43):
Yeltsin suddenly out of nowhere, was like, I'm not president
anymore of this guy.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Is yeah, And once he was president, he was like
he started to reign in some of those market freedoms
that had been installed. He was like, you know, this
freedom of press thing isn't so great after so by
twenty ten, most of that private media was once again
owned by the government. He did kind of rein in
(38:08):
the oligarchs, but you know, not completely. Obviously, I get
the feeling he was sort of picking and choosing. Maybe,
so it seemed like he was. Is that accurate.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Oh okay.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
And they complied, and one of them didn't, Mikhail Kodorkovski.
Basically he 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 were like, oh,
this guy's quite serious. We better listen. And then from
those group or that group, Putin started to develop favorites
(38:54):
and all that. That's my impression of it.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, that sounds about right. And the great thing is
I know that they're 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 expert
exports happening and experts and that you know, all of
a sudden, your average living standard was going up. It
(39:18):
seems like this sort of just the chaos of the
nineties 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 and our place in the world. Like, get behind me.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Yeah, I mean, because of the nineties 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
at 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 twenty six year reign if
(39:59):
you count when he was the prime minister to Medevyev's puppet, Yeah,
twenty six 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. Yet it's still Putin.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I mean, he keeps winning those elections there, right, Yeah,
fair and squats, that's are all legit, and so yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
That brings us to today. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Yeah, I mean is that it? Are we done?
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I think we're done. You did fantastic.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
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 in early college for me, and those
those were days where I just wasn't paying attention and
I was, you know, I was trying to score Pixies tickets.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
It was kind of like if this part of history,
we're an iced sugar cookie. As kids, we had just
kind of nibbled the sugar cookie part and now we've
just bid into the first icing and consume the whole cookie,
and we're just in sugar heaven right now.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah, agreed. I enjoyed these.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, that's a better way to put it, Chuck, just laugh.
So I think we should end this episode, this two
part episode, and say it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
This is about our episode on the UK are shorty,
hey guys, And this isn't don't worry, this isn't like
completely scalding us. Okay, 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 got about Cornwall.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
The thing come up in our research.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Ooh, I know you guys will see things official website
saying Cornwall is a county in England, but for one
it is a duchy, which is a different thing.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
You got to pass. Secondly, left hands.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Secondly, Cornwall is a Celtic nation, guys, like Scotland, Whales
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.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Wow. No, we did not come across that at all.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
I know, guys. Cornwall has its own language, Kernwick, I
think is how it's pronounced. It's closely related to Welsh
and barely distinguishable from Breton. Yes, Brittany is a Celtic
nation too, guys. It has its own flag, Saint Piran's flag,
which is Pirates. I'm not sure you pronounce it, which
is a white cross in a black background and there
(42:38):
are strong calls to establish the 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. And then he posts
this Colonel beast Vickan which is Cornwall Forever. Don't think
(43:00):
he's talking about the game, hen you know, and this
is from G.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Thanks G. 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
(43:26):
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
stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.