The Fall of the USSR, Pt II

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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:38Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:48Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Hey Chuck, you ended the last one. You want to start this one?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:09Josh Clark?

  Bravo.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  I hated doing that, by the way.

• 2:11Josh Clark?

  Oh, you did?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, this feels like Robin putting on Batman's outfit or something. This is very strange.

• 2:18Josh Clark?

  How do you know it's not Robin who announces the podcast?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Or whatever, Batman putting on Robin's outfit, although I heard he did that on the side as a kink.

• 2:26Josh Clark?

  He did. But who hasn't? Who among us hasn't dressed up like Robin from Batman?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  That's true. Or Josh Clark from Stuff You Should Know.

• 2:34Josh Clark?

  Which is one in the same.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I dress up like you.

• 2:38Josh Clark?

  You do?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cute shirts and cute sweatshirts.

• 2:42Josh Clark?

  I have to say, you're, you have stepped up your style game lately and it's, it's nice.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks.

• 2:49Josh Clark?

  Your traveling outfits are.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Well, I was always into clothes growing up and then I wore t-shirts and cargo shorts for 25 years and then remembered, hey, I like fashion, so.

• 3:02Josh Clark?

  You brought it back.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:04Josh Clark?

  You're basically the Tom Ford of the podcasting world.

• 3:08Speaker 02

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

• 3:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And another one in his belly.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:41Josh Clark?

  So Boris Yeltsin 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 in the same. So for a little while there, Russia itself had pretty much two presidents at the same time for a couple of months while Gorbachev was still in power. And while Yeltsin, who had been popularly elected in June of 1991, 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 was mounted and they didn't plan for three days.

• 4:26Josh Clark?

  They didn't know how long it was going to go on. It just turned out to be a three day coup, I guess is what I'm trying to say. It wasn't until that was mounted against Gorbachev that his power was eroded enough to take his position away and for Yeltsin to take over and take Russia straight into the hands of the West, the open arms of the West. And ironically, that coup was by hardliners who wanted to keep, who wanted to save communism and the USSR. But instead, they, they managed to remove the power from the one guy who conceivably could have still helped that happen and gave it to the guy who was diametrically opposed to making that happen, Yeltsin.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it ended up being a failed coup technically, but it had the result of finally sort of getting Gorbachev 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, came in with all these big sweeping reforms. And so the conservative elites that he had previously worked with were terrified, obviously, because their, their existence depended on the Soviet Union being the Soviet Union.

• 5:40Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  So they were like, Gorbachev is a traitor. In 1991, 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, they didn't storm the parliament building, but they, they lined up outside the parliament building. And then they made a mistake in that they let Boris Yeltsin, I keep saying Yeltsin, 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 Soviets, all of a sudden are watching this unfold on the BBC or CNN.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  And they're seeing this, this Yeltsin guy sitting on top of a tank, talking to them.

• 6:28Josh Clark?

  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 Yeltsin look really good. So remember, he'd already been popularly elected, but there was a power struggle between him and Gorbachev 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.

• 7:12Josh Clark?

  And so it, Gorbachev was like, 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, any office that he held that somebody else could have come along and filled and tried to challenge Yeltsin. He made sure that there would be no further political chaos as much as he could manage.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  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 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, you're not, even if you were elected, because there's no such thing, then you're, you're out of your, your seat and Russia is now the Russian Federation.

• 8:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I was, I didn't see what happened to those people. Was it just like, oh, I guess I'm independent all of a sudden, not by choice? Or if they were like, I guess I can't hold this office anymore. Who knows? But like, that was just one small component of the sweeping political changes that took place over the course of a few days. I think the whole thing really kicked off on December 25th, 1991. And by the turn of 1992 was basically over. I mean, Russia became the Russian Federation and that same anti-communist spirit of renewal and revolution and, and like change, the winds of change, you could even almost call

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  it, had swept through Russia itself.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  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, 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, you know, the Soviet man, what's, 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

• 9:48Speaker 02

  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, like, everything they knew was gone and they didn't know what to do.

• 10:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like the, the patriotic of the USSR, like everyday citizens, considered 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 underneath somebody, especially when it happens suddenly and essentially without warning, it just comes out of nowhere, like, it's, it's really hard to put yourself in that position, like, how would you handle that kind of thing? You know? And certainly, there were plenty of people who we'll see, who, who were rejoiced at this change.

• 10:50Josh Clark?

  They were glad communism went away, but there were a lot of people who were not happy that communism had gone away or that the Soviet Union had gone away.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  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 in Dresden, Germany. And this was before reunification, this was in 1990, just sort of a mid-level officer who, as far as, you know, criticism of the USSR and the Soviet way was very prideful and very much defended it and got really mad, apparently had a super short fuse when it was criticized. His name was Vladimir Putin.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  And he saw everything that was going 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, not felt like, it, it kind of was a victory, like, we won, the Cold War is over, their experiment failed, democracy wins, you know?

• 12:08Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. The problem was, is that the West wasn't like, we're gonna help, we wanna dig in here, we wanna 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 1991, 1992, was that President George H.W. Bush, who was a Cold Warrior, if there ever was one, was leading the United States. And I saw it described, I think it was on a site called History Guild, which is magnificent, by the way, that he folded his arms and turned his back. It was basically like, good luck, we're glad you, you fell over, but we're not gonna help

• 12:53Josh Clark?

  you, 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, 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.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I feel like most of that was sort of aimed at Russia specifically, because I, I don't know how much they financially helped the former Russian states and satellite states and things like that, but it, it seems like the, just the spirit of it all was more aimed directly at Russia and like, hey, these other countries are finally out from under your grip. So, like, good for them.

• 13:57Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly.

• 14:00Josh Clark?

  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.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, he provided the basis, and then when we started digging in, we were like, there's a lot more to this that we need to, to double up. And then you, you finished the job, buddy, in grand fashion.

• 14:17Josh Clark?

  Thank you. So, he found a movie called Goodbye Lenin from 2003, it's a German film, and it's a parody of this time, where it's about a man who tries to keep, he tries to shield his mother, his East German mother, from finding out that communism has collapsed. 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?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  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.

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• 18:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:38Josh Clark?

  No.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  But Boris Yeltsin was like, he really wanted to hit the gas economically. So he embraced this economist's name, I'm going to pronounce it, Yegor Gaidar or Gaidar, I'm not sure how it's pronounced, G A I D A R. But he, along with some Harvard economists that were like, yeah, yeah, do this. He had an idea called shock therapy, which was kind of crazy when you look 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

• 19:18Speaker 02

  manage that. And so, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, they said, all right, Russia's open, everybody. They flipped the sign in the window around and said, we're open.

• 19:30Josh Clark?

  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

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:41Josh Clark?

  Some of the high points were, remember, the ruble was not recognized internationally? The Soviet ruble wasn't. Well, now we had the Russian ruble. And to become recognized as currency on the international market, it couldn't be artificially propped up by the government any longer.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:57Josh Clark?

  It had to basically sink or swim on its own.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:00Josh Clark?

  You know, with maybe a little bit of monkeying, like everybody does, but not 100% monkeying with it. So that was a big one, right?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  That's 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 the tariffs on foreign imports, so like, trade could flow. And the West did step up. I don't know, did the United States contribute at all to this?

• 20:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Very narrowly and economically.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:40Josh Clark?

  Basically, in exchange for whatever it was asking for, the United States helped in that respect. It wasn't like any magnanimous way, is what I was trying to say.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  But it was about $20 billion of the West in emergency loans, just like an infusion of cash, just to keep them from completely collapsing.

• 20:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I didn't see how much of that actually came through, but that was the proposal, right?

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:03Josh Clark?

  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 10 shares, in each of these state-owned enterprises. We're going to privatize them, they're going to start selling this stuff on the world market, and we're going to distribute these vouchers equally among, I think, like 95% of the Soviet citizenry. I didn't see why the other 5% had to sit out, but basically, everybody got shares in all of these amazingly soon-to-be wealthy companies.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  And just to be clear, it wasn't like, you know, when they were making TVs, it was like, our oil industry and our steel industry, like, big, big stuff.

• 21:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And so the point was that they could benefit directly from, from this new, amped-up, juiced-up Russian economy that was about to explode.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:03Josh Clark?

  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 to keep the USSR hobbled, so that it couldn't possibly come back.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, was it like, the, these Harvard economists and stuff, was that the deal?

• 22:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they were, they were very much in league with Yegor Gaidar.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:29Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Well, what this led to was hyperinflation, because their currency was like, completely devalued. And a lot of Russians, like, I mean, I don't know the number, but I feel like a majority of the average Russians' life-saving just went away, basically overnight. We've talked about the, the hyperinflation, was it a whole episode on hyperinflation?

• 22:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I know we've talked about it many times, but we did, we did something, I think, just on it, yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was, it was one of the worst cases of hyperinflation, like, in world history. Consumer goods went like, up in price by like, 400%. These state-owned businesses, and we kind of touched on this in part one, but it was an inside job, they were being pillaged from the inside by these ministers who had overseen them as part of the Soviet Union. And these vouchers, you know, a lot of the citizens were just like, this is, I'm going to trade it for bread, like, this means nothing.

• 23:26Josh Clark?

  Exactly, and they did. So there were people out there who were like, sure, I've got some bread, here, have some bread, give me your vouchers. And they started getting their hands on as many vouchers as they possibly could, because those vouchers were eventually able to be traded for shares, right? They weren't shares themselves quite yet, because things had to be organized a little more. So people ran around collecting these vouchers, and as a result, when those shares started coming out on the market, and parts of these companies, these actually industries, were 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 bunch of vouchers, you have

• 24:11Josh Clark?

  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, just did not exist. And now, all of a sudden, there were eye-poppingly wealthy people who just emerged out of the ashes, suddenly growing in size exponentially, just like Apache Chief.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  That's right. Like, you know, you hear that term a lot now, Russian oligarchs, and if you, if you were always like, what the heck is that even? But this is where it comes from. The real big, like, what, what sent that over the top was this loans-for-shares privatization situation, because they feared that if they had a communist victory in 1996, that that would be a bad, a bad deal to all of a sudden reverse course on what had been happening. And so the government said, all right, all you new oligarchs, these super rich people, we got a deal for you. We'll loan you shares in our 12 biggest state-owned

• 25:21Speaker 02

  businesses in exchange for, like, quick cash now. Ended up being about $800 million, essentially sort of allowing them to buy pieces of, like, oil companies and stuff like that.

• 25:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and they were loans, like you said, these, these shares are controlling interests, but they never gave them back, essentially. So the government sold, 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, they were buying directly from the government. They, they went to the wholesaler, right? And Putin was one of those, those oligarchs. He had made some, he started to make cash, I think, flipping real estate in St. Petersburg in the very early 90s, and then started a bank.

• 26:15Josh Clark?

  And then by the time this fire sale went on in 1996, he managed to secure a controlling stake in a nickel mining company by loaning $170 million to the government.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone knows how much money he has today, right?

• 26:34Josh Clark?

  No.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Isn't that kind of a mystery?

• 26:35Josh Clark?

  We talked about it in our book.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Will there ever be a trillionaire?

• 26:40Josh Clark?

  I don't know. Will there?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  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, like, helping out Mother Russia and the Russian Federation, we can actually strip these companies of their raw materials and sell them for more money on these international markets. And so, that made them even richer. And then, what that did was that, that really created a wealth gap like, they had never seen before. Because all of a sudden, factories are closing, and entire towns and villages

• 27:22Speaker 02

  that were built around this central factory went into ruin, and the, the safety net was gone. And like, their, their unemployment rate in there was just like, unbelievable, was like, 22% in 1998?

• 27:38Josh Clark?

  40% of the population was under the poverty line in 1995. Just eye-popping statistics. Because these oligarchs were allowed to basically pilfer the entire Russian economy for themselves. They carved out the middle class, is another way to put it. And so, like, when they figured out, like, we don't need to make stuff at home, we can sell that stuff for, we can just sell the raw materials on the market and make more money. Yeah, so many people were put out of work. And then, bear in mind, there used to be a safety net. Like, the Soviet Union was kalugi. I heard a joke where, like, an

• 28:20Josh Clark?

  old Soviet joke, that we pretend to work 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 unmored and adrift. And it was like, good luck, you're going to have to go figure out what to do yourself, because now this is a capitalist economy.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I think I mentioned in part one, like they slowed the rate of having children just because they couldn't afford it. I think by the end of the 90s, there were 3.7 million fewer children in Russia than in 1990. So in the course of a decade. And alcoholism was, you know, it's always been obviously a thing in Russia with the free 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 90s. And their life expectancy changed. Like, if you can, like, literally change a life expectancy over a decade, then something terrible has gone wrong. I think the male life expectancy went

• 29:37Speaker 02

  from 64 to 57 over the course of three years, between 1991 and 1994. Because, again, these, you know, the Soviet man, 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.

• 29:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The, I said earlier that a lot of Russians still believe, probably still believe, they definitely did at the time that the West inflicted shock therapy upon them on purpose. I've also seen the shock therapy as being labeled as responsible for somebody like Putin to be able to come along and 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, like, measures in the Treaty of Versailles that just punished Germany, made Germany really unhappy with the rest of the world. And so somebody came

• 30:39Josh Clark?

  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 restore 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, events and goings on and just different decisions that can lead to such consequential actions. And 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.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So, the decade that was the 1990s over there, in 91, 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.

• 31:40Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  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 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 stiffs, whereas before, it was more like, sort of, upper management versus working stiff.

• 32:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, 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 so...

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Right, right?

• 32:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And so, though George H. W. Bush turned his back on Russia, Clinton turned around and was like, hey, guys, let's get it on. We love you, Yeltsin.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  He was a lovable guy.

• 32:52Josh Clark?

  He is. He's got big cheeks. He's like, smiling all the time. And the reason why is because he was drunk constantly.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, 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, who's smiling all the time. And he wants, he seemed to be very Western friendly. And he was also, well, partially because of the alcoholism, someone who, I think Bill Clinton and people in the West knew that they could kind of control.

• 33:19Josh Clark?

  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 Helmut Kohl came to visit Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved. And it's a state visit. They're standing there watching a Russian military parade go by. And all of a sudden, Yeltsin just has moved to grab the baton from the military band conductor, and he starts conducting the band too, but like, almost cartoonishly

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:51Josh Clark?

  Larger-than-life. He's blowing kisses at people. And it's like, when you watch it, you're like, he's pretty drunk right now. And this is like, an official state thing. And this was not unusual for him.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  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 Avenue in his underwear. So he, drunk, so he could go get a pizza. And the Secret Service reins him in and they're like, Boris, buddy, we'll get you a pizza. Like, come back inside.

• 34:34Josh Clark?

  Again, that's not a legend. Like, that happened.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:38Josh Clark?

  So, a lot of people, like, so yes, he was a lovable teddy bear. 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

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:52Josh Clark?

  To Russia.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Back to Russia.

• 34:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. As like, he's the guy. And if you dial back history a few years to 1993, you can see very clearly that Boris Yeltsin 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.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:19Josh Clark?

  All of 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 6%.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was in the tank.

• 35:36Josh Clark?

  And I assume that that was with a margin of error, plus or minus 6%.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Right. Nobody liked him.

• 35:42Josh Clark?

  So, he was impeached by the legitimately elected parliament. And he didn't like that very much.

• 35:50Speaker 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, 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.

• 36:23Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly. That's how useful he was to the West, that, that they were just like, they just tried to save him any way they could. He managed to hang on to power that shares-for-vouchers scheme, the great shares-for-vouchers scheme in 96. That was designed to help Yeltsin stay into power. He was so hated that the communists were probably going to sweep the elections that year. And so, I think Kyle put it, that people felt cheated twice by Gorbachev first, and then Yeltsin afterward. So there was a, not a lot of happiness in Russia in the 1990s. And say, we take our second break and come back and wrap it up.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 37:17Josh Clark?

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• 38:19Josh Clark?

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• 39:06Josh Clark?

  That's pretty awesome. And Smart Downloads automatically downloads videos by your favorite creators, so even if you forget to download it ahead of time, Premium has you covered. So if you like YouTube, you'll love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  You know, you're never done decorating your home. You know what I mean?

• 39:30Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's a process. There's always something you could do, or buy, or update. The only question is, what's next? For us, our animals just wear out our rugs so quickly, it's usually a new rug.

• 39:41Josh Clark?

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• 39:59Josh Clark?

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• 40:32Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, wrap it up. I'll take it. Do you remember that? They were so good, though. They were just easy to listen to and fun.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  It was at the...

• 40:45Josh Clark?

  Fabulous Thunderbirds.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Fabulous Thunderbirds. Jimmy Vaughn? Was it Jimmy in that one?

• 40:49Josh Clark?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was Stevie Ray Vaughan's brother, Jimmy.

• 40:53Josh Clark?

  Oh, Jimmy Vaughn. I thought you were talking about Jimmy LaBon, Simon LaBon's brother.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  All right. So I knew we'd get a few laughs in here, you know? All right, so where are we here? We are with Yeltsin. He had banned the Communist Party. That was challenged, and that resulted in a 1992 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 of the crimes committed under the name of communism against the people. The sort of hitch to this Nuremberg was that there were no actual defendants. It was just sort of a, sort of a show, it seems like.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Like, they didn't actually prosecute individuals. It was just sort of demonstrating the history of criminality of communism.

• 41:47Josh Clark?

  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, 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 the, those levers of power remained in Russia. Like, the KGB, it was still around. It just changed its name to the FSB, the Federal

• 42:29Josh Clark?

  Security Service. And there was a, I think, a member of the Supreme Soviet Parliament who suggested a lustration bill. Lustration is where you identify and remove public officials who are tainted from their association with the former regime. That member of parliament was assassinated in 1998. So there wasn't a lot of mood among the elites to really actually have some sort of reckoning, which, again, that in and of itself might have helped steer Russia in a different 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, right?

• 43:15Speaker 02

  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 were just like, hey, let me, let me re-adopt the Imperial Tricolor, and let me replace the Soviet anthem. And these were all really divisive moves. I think he was trying to sort of, he attempted to close the Lenin mausoleum and replace Revolution Day. So he was trying to say like, hey, let's move forward, and like, this past is haunting us. But it was a really divided thing, because

• 43:58Speaker 02

  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 old national anthem that Putin reverted in 2000. 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 miss the old days? Just wait.

• 44:34Josh Clark?

  Exactly. I saw, there was a Russian joke from the time that said, the worst part of communism is post-communism.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:42Josh Clark?

  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 17 months, so Yeltsin was not doing very well by this time. This is like the very end of the 90s. And one of the first things that Putin did was just 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 Chechnya under Putin. He decided that he was going to make an example of them.

• 45:23Josh Clark?

  And there were a lot of atrocities, and it was just really bad. But in Russia itself, they were like, ooh, we like this guy. He gets stuff done. He takes no guff from anybody. And that helped support his ascendancy to the presidency in 1999, when Yeltsin suddenly, out of nowhere, was like, I'm not president anymore, this guy is.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And once he was president, he was like, he started rein in some of those market freedoms that had been installed. He was like, you know, this, this freedom of press thing isn't so great after all. So by 2010, most of that private media was once again owned by the government. He did kind of rein in the oligarchs, but, you know, not completely, obviously. I get the feeling it was, he was sort of picking and choosing, maybe, so it seemed like he was? Is that accurate?

• 46:15Josh Clark?

  The impression I have is that he brought them all to heel. He basically made a deal saying like, you guys can have free rein on your respective industries, but you have to stay out of politics. That's my industry.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 46:27Josh Clark?

  And they complied. And one of them didn't. Mikhail Kodorovski basically was like, no, I'm going to generate a bunch of political power and try to remove Putin. He got jailed, his whole assets 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 and all that. That's my impression of it.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that sounds about right. And the great thing is, I know that there are people that are real students of this stuff, and I can't wait to get some listener mails on this. But, you know, things started to turn around financially, too, because they had some booming oil export happening, and experts. And that, you know, all of a sudden, your average living standard was going up. It seems like the sort of, just the chaos of the 90s 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.

• 47:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I mean, because the 90s 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 it 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 26-year reign, if you count when he was the, the Prime Minister to Medeviev's puppet, yeah, 26 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.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  I mean, he keeps winning those elections, though, right?

• 48:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, fair and square.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Those are all legit.

• 48:22Josh Clark?

  And so, yeah, that brings us to today, Chuck.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, is that it? Are we done?

• 48:28Josh Clark?

  I think we're done. You did fantastic.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  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 and early college for me. And those were days where I just wasn't paying attention. And I was, you know, I was trying to score Pixies tickets.

• 48:46Josh Clark?

  It was kind of like, if this part of history were an iced sugar cookie, as kids, we just kind of nibbled the sugar cookie part, and now we just bit into the first bite of icing and consumed the whole cookie, and we're just in sugar heaven right now.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, agreed. I enjoyed these.

• 49:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's a better way to put it. Chuck just laughed, so I think we should end this episode, this two-part episode, and say it's time for listener mail.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  This is about our episode on the UK, our shorty. Hey, guys. And this isn't, don't worry, this isn't like completely scalding us.

• 49:25Josh Clark?

  Okay, good.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  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. Forgot about Cornwall.

• 49:37Josh Clark?

  Didn't come up in our research.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:48Josh Clark?

  You gotta pass it on the left hand side.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Secondly, Cornwall is a Celtic nation, guys, like Scotland, Wales and Ireland, including Northern Ireland. And finally, the UK government formally recognized the Cornish as a national minority under the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, granting them the same status as the Scots, Welsh and Irish.

• 50:10Josh Clark?

  Wow, no, we did not come across that at all.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  I know, guys, Cornwall has its own language.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Kernewick, I think, is how it's pronounced.

• 50:19Josh Clark?

  No, but it's not.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  It's closely related to Welsh and barely distinguishable from Breton. Yes, Brittany is a Celtic nation too, guys. It has its own flag, St Pyron's flag, which is, or Pyrens, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, which is a white cross and a black background. And there 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, Kurnau Biest Wicken, which is Cornwall forever. And I don't think he's talking about the game hen.

• 50:58Josh Clark?

  No.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  And this is from G.

• 51:01Josh Clark?

  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.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 51:14Josh Clark?

  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 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 [email protected].

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 51:47Josh Clark?

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