The Rest Is History - 161. Yeltsin, Economic Chaos and President Putin

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

[Episode 3 of 4] 'You certainly won't understand what ordinary Russians see in Vladimir Putin if you don't understand what happened in the 1990s. A time of utter, utter collapse.'  In part three of our Soviet Union, Russia and Putin series, Tom and Dominic drill down into the details of the chaos in 90s Russia, the laughing stock Yeltsin became on the global stage, and Putin's brutal rise to power on the back of the Second Chechen War.  The final episode in the series is out tomorrow - or get it now by heading to restishistorypod.com! Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor & Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest is History and this is the third part of our series on the recent history of Russia. In the first two episodes we looked at how the Soviet Union came to an end and I wanted to open this section by reading a passage from a novel that came out in 1998 written by Robert Harris, the great thriller writer called Archangel. And it is set in the Russia, the early years of Russia under Yeltsin. And it describes a British historian, expert in Soviet history and particularly Stalin.

He's at a conference in Moscow. And while he's there, he meets with a journalist called O'Brien. And they go out to a bar. O'Brien buys some drinks. And then he starts talking to the British historian about how he sees things. Weimar Republic, that's how I see it. Like you see it. Six things the same, okay? One, you have a big country, proud country, lost its empire, really lost a war, but can't figure out how. Figures it must have been stabbed in the back. So there's a lot of resentment, right? Two, democracy in a country with no tradition of democracy. Russia doesn't know democracy from a fucking hole in the ground, frankly. People don't like it. Sick of all the arguing. They want a strong line, any line.

Three, border trouble. Lots of your own ethnic nationals suddenly stuck in other countries, saying they're getting picked on. Four, anti-Semitism. You can buy SS marching songs on the street corners, for Christ's sake. That leaves two. All right. And this is where the British historian finds it disconcerting, hearing his own views, crudely parroted. O'Brien continues, economic crash. And that's coming, don't you think? And the sixth, isn't it obvious? Hitler.

So. God, that was 1998, Tom. That's 1998. 1998. So Robert Howe is a very smart man, journalist, before he became a thriller writer. Finger always on the pulse um do you think he gets that i think um looking back i mean it's such a hackneyed parallel but it is the best

parallel um the weimar republic for what happens to russia in the weimar republic is germany after germany after the first world war before the coming to power of hitler i mean the sort of the the difference i suppose is that um, is that the Germans always knew that if they lost the First World War, I mean, there must have been part of something, even if they didn't want to admit it to themselves, they must have known that the consequence would be humiliation, would be privation of various kinds. And of course, they've suffered, you know, in colossal quantities of casualties. Very few people die in the, I mean, there are massacres in Tbilisi or Uzbekistan or the shooting in Vilnius, but very few people die in the dissolution of the Soviet

Union. And for most ordinary Russians just think the name of the state has changed. And there's been various other political changes they don't really comprehend. So it's an even greater shock. And in many ways, actually, what happens to Russia in the 1990s, which is the decade in which Vladimir Putin makes this extraordinary rise from utter obscurity to president of Russia, is even worse than what happened in Weimar Germany, Tom.

Just horrendous wars, terrorism political utter chaos and an economic meltdown that is just mind-bogglingly bad um so yeah i think robert harris is it was right the nine the combination of the 1980s and the 1990s that is the seed bed from which the kind of if i can mix my metaphors um the poisonous kind of toxic plants of today's Russia. The Venus flytrap of Putin's regime. From which they grew. And actually, you don't understand, and you certainly won't understand, what ordinary Russians see in Vladimir Putin

if you don't understand what happened in the 1990s. When people of our age, people in their 40s and 50s, people who are now the dominant, the opinion formers and so on in Russian society, they live through this and they remember it as a time of utter, utter collapse. So Dominic, Robert Harris wrote that novel in 1998. And 1998 was the year where the ruble completely collapsed. There was an utter economic meltdown in Russia that dwarfed all the previous economic meltdowns that they'd been kind of staggered. No, Tom, that's the thing. It didn't dwarf it. You would think it did because they defaulted on their loans and it was a devaluation. So you're right. If that had

happened anywhere else, people would say, oh my God, that must be seared into their collective memory. It's actually not as bad as what happened in 1992. Okay. So talk us through that. Talk us through what happens economically under Yeltsin. So Yeltsin comes into power. We ended the last podcast with literally the flag going down at the Kremlin. Yeltsin comes in the next day and what's his plan? He doesn't really have that much of a plan. I mean, the best... Well, because he's a communist. He's been brought up as a communist. I mean, he may not be one anymore, but I mean, he hasn't been to Harvard Business School or... No, he hasn't. But he and his aides for the last couple of years have been kicking around a lot of

rival plans without really fixing on one. There's been lots of sort of disputes among them. And while that's been happening, the economy has been getting worse and worse. So now there are colossal shortages in Russian shops. Now, a lot of people, when they give accounts of what went wrong with Russia, they sort of start in the early 1990s, in 1992, and they say, oh, it's all the fault of neoliberal economics being advised by the IMF

and the World Bank and Washington and stuff. Kind of 20-year-old American business graduates going over and privatizing airplanes. If you're going to defend these guys, you would say they have to do something because as it stands, they're going to run out of food. There's going to be nothing in the shops,

all of this stuff. And the thing they think, they just say, well, there's a guy called Yegor Gaidar. He is the key figure in drafting this. He's 35 years old. He's the son of so many of these people are, of people from the elite, from the nomenclature. And he's been looking to the West, as they all have, for inspiration.

And he basically says, what we just have to do is to utter shock therapy. We have to rush into a market economy, get rid of all the old controls. And the way we'll do that is by liberalizing prices because they had very, very strict price controls. So basically, you can charge whatever you like. The market will decide and that will ensure supply and demand reasserts itself and a flow of goods because producers will produce goods then to the flow into the shops. So in January 1992, to give you an example of how this works, the price of a loaf of bread or a pint of milk or whatever goes up by about 250%. And so nothing like this has been seen for 75 years. I mean, just imagine that, Tom.

I mean, for ordinary Russians, for people who live on pensions or on fixed incomes, this is absolutely catastrophic. But the Yeltsin team think this is the only way to kickstart this incredibly sclerotic, top-down economy. And even in Yeltsin's own sort of entourage, there are lots of people who are very anxious about this. So one of the key figures is his vice president, who's a former Air Force colonel called Alexander Rutskoy, who is going to make an appearance a bit later in the story. And he says they are young boys in pink shorts and yellow boots. And that sort of tells you that they're not, you know, they're brain boxes.

They're not macho. They're not truly Russian. They've been westernized, all this kind of stuff. That gives you a sense that even at this point, there are these resentments festering under the surface and is this not a theme that putin then picks up the idea that real russians are masculine and ride around on bears bare-chested and all that kind of stuff toting guns and it's kind of girly men yeah who who know about free market economics and all that kind of stuff. You've learned it all from books.

You don't really know what it is to be authentic. Yeah, I think there's definitely a sense that authentic Russian men have been left high and dry by the changes. Because, for example, a lot of the people who you suddenly see in the early 1990s begging on the streets. I mean, Moscow becomes full overnight of people begging. They're Afghan war veterans. They're people who've lost a limb in Afghanistan, done their bit for the motherland,

and now they've been thrown onto the scrap heap. Isn't it also that this shock therapy has the effect of closing down the factories that have been plonked all over the Soviet Union to churn stuff out? And essentially, often in cities and towns across Russia, these are the only employers. But they're not just employers, they're also in a sense, the kind of guarantors of social security, they provide services. So in effect, it's a bit like the Reformation in England, it's a kind of closing, you know, dissolution of the monasteries, that suddenly, this new regime has come in and has closed down everything that enabled the poor to get by. Is that part of what's going on too? So generally, as with, let's say, the monasteries or any institution, there was a general meltdown of the institutions on which people depended and which kind of structured their lives. The Communist Party being the obvious one.

But as you say, the sort of the settled world of the kind of the very stagnant world of the factories and so on and all the little youth organizations through the factory and all that sort of stuff. A lot of that is gone, as you say. The other thing that the interesting about it, you mentioned the monasteries. So what the dissolution of the monasteries creates in 16th century England, there are beneficiaries, right? There are people who make a lot of money. Yes, there are. And what you have in Russia in the early 1990s, as well as you have prices in a single year going up by 2,500% and you have all the pensions collapsing and all of this sort of stuff. You also have a lot of people who become very rich very quickly. Because they introduce a voucher system, don't they? That when they privatize all these factories and companies and so on, that the idea is that

everyone will have a stake. So the privatization has two elements, both of which I find incredibly interesting. So they really want to rush forward with the privatization because Yeltsin and his team think we have to – they know there is a lot of opposition because, don't forget, he still has the old Russian – the Russian parliament is still the old parliament elected before the end of the Soviet Union. So it has a lot of communists, a lot of nationalists, and so on in it. They're not all Yeltsin supporters. He thinks, and they think, we have to create a class of capitalists, a lot of nationalists and so on in it. They're not all Yeltsin supporters.

He thinks, and they think, we have to create a class of capitalists. We have to move towards a capitalist, sort of popular capitalism, as Margaret Thatcher would have called it. And we're going to privatize all these industries, which are all state-owned. Now, one way of doing it is they'll give everybody a voucher for 10,000 rubles. I mean, of course, your rubles are worth much less. Well, because it's already becoming a dollar economy. Yeah. By this point. voucher for 10 000 rubles i mean of course your rubles are much worth much less you know well

because it's already becoming a dollar economy yeah but by this point because so you'll get a flat same up far you'll get a voucher but people who work in the factory or people who manage it um have the right to to take up to 25 can buy up to 25 of the factory so what basically happens is all the managers the people who've been running the factories, and people in organized crime, and the ambitious and the entrepreneurial, they buy up 25% of the factory and they buy people's vouchers. People are desperate for money in this world. So people are selling their vouchers for cash.

And they basically pulled all the vouchers and they get hold of all these companies. And so this is the making of the oligarchs. Well, there's another element to the making of the oligarchs. There's a second element to this. So a few years later, we're jumping ahead slightly, so we'll then backtrack. And so this is the making with the entrepreneurs and so on. He's a guy called Anatoly Chubais. He basically goes to these guys and he says, we will give you shares in these big kind of corporations that are being created.

You'll get shares if you give us loans. And so these are the gas companies and minerals. So these are things like, so you have, for example, the two famous examples is a company called Ucos, which is worth about $5 billion. And it's bought by a guy called Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who becomes the richest man in Russia. He pays 300 million pounds for it.

So an absolute fraction of what it's worth. And the even more famous example is a company called Sibneft, which is oil, gas from Siberia and so on. It's worth about £3 billion. Does this have a link to a Chelsea football club? Yeah, Chelsea football club, because it's bought by Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich for £100 million each. So again, a complete fraction of what it is worth. And the rationale of the Yeltsin, I mean, this obviously looks unbelievably corrupt. But the defense, I mean, Abramovich has admitted that he paid, they paid millions and millions in bribes to sort of to get this. The rationale for it is we just have to create capitalism, you know, one way or another.

We have to do everything in our power to to um make sure we win the next election i mean we'll get on to that actually because why does yeltsin think he's going to lose this election because you know when we talked about things are going well last podcast he was very popular it's not just they're not going well tom i mean catastrophically they're going laughably badly. So by 1993, 1994, authority has basically broken down. The police, bribery is everywhere. There are kind of gunmen in the markets. There are basically, yeah, there are people with guns on the streets. There are beggars everywhere.

Life expectancy for men has collapsed from almost 70 to almost 60 i mean that is in a country that was a superpower that is mind-boggling and is that um in in part because of uh increased alcoholism yeah massive alcoholism crisis but also people are suffering mental illness they're in terrible depression they're poor they're on the streets so the number of people in poverty in russia in the 19 they know the poverty line in the 1980s about about a third of the population live below the poverty line i've seen estimates that by the end of the 19 well it's in the mid-1990s about 70 80 percent of the russian population live i mean it's so odd, isn't it, that a state founded on Marx, on Marx's ideas, on the idea of exploitative capitalists crushing the worker should end up with what seems, you know, a kind of nightmarish parody of Marx's worst imaginings of what capitalism is. Yeah.

Well, I mean, lots of people would say it's just massive loot. It's a decade of utter looting. I mean, lots of people now would say the oligarchs, Yeltsin. Yeltsin presided over a sort of free-for-all in which he allowed the oligarchs to loot the state in return for supporting him in power. And so Yeltsin is doing this because he's trying to fight off the communists. Yeah.

Oh, literally fight them off in power. And so Yeltsin is doing this because he's trying to fight off the communists. Yeah. Oh, literally fight them off in 93. Yes. So he's got his parliament, Tom, that they're trying to block him, that are horrified by what's happening to Russia. So within a year of the transition from Gorbachev, the Russian parliament, the two big figures in that are his vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, and the speaker of the parliament, who's a Chechen, actually, an ethnic Chechen called ruslan kazbolatov they basically say what's going you

know this isn't what we left the soviet union for this is an absolute nightmare they start now yeltsin he does have this sort of i said but in the previous podcast that he could be a bully and he starts he increasingly he's ruling by decree he doesn't want to you know the parliament uh blocking him so he's ruling by presidential decree very charles first and basically yeah it is very so capel loft great listeners this podcast probably thinks that was splendid behavior um so in the course of 1993 you have this long running feud between yeltsin and his own parliament very charles the first the parliament tried to impeach him at various points he just survives. He says he's going to have a new constitution. They basically say we should have a referendum on Yeltsin himself. And it comes to a head in September, 93, he dissolves

parliament, very Charles I. And completely unconstitutionally, he gives an address to the nation and says, they're a bloc, they're backward, all this kind of stuff. And they've got to go. They, the very next day, impeach him and say he's out as president. Rutskoi, this Air Force colonel, is the new president now. And it's very complicated. I can't quite understand whether there's a bit of them barricading themselves in the building and him also barricading them in the building one way or another they're in the building and there's loads of armed men in the building with them and then his own troops outside

um yeltsin gives a tv address you know i mean you've seen putin's rhetoric during the ukraine crisis and and maybe one way it seems so outlandish and extreme to us when he accuses the ukrainians of being nazis and drug addicts but this kind of extreme rhetoric is very par for the course in russia so yeltsin gives an address where he says the parliament is full of bandits mercenaries communist revanchists and fascist leaders i mean these are the people he's been working with by the way for the last couple of years um and he basically gets his army to storm the russian parliament so tanks literally i mean anyone who's will remember this who lived through it tanks literally fire on blast holes in the russian parliament building okay let's take

a quick break there we'll see you back in a second. For free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. So, Dominic, none of this is helping Yeltsin focus on the demands of the economy, I'm guessing. I mean, he's essentially firefighting the whole time yeah he is also becoming increasingly fond of yeah he's a wreck he's a wreck when is the the famous thing where he um he's he's meant to be meeting the uh the t-shirt in shannon yes in ireland um and he arrives from uh from america so the teacher is waiting there is is it Albert Reynolds?

It is Albert Reynolds, Tom. Well remembered. Yeah, thank you. You definitely didn't record a previous version where you said it was Bertie Ahern. So yes, Yeltsin has become a bit of a wreck by this point, understandably. So he tries to conduct an orchestra in Berlin in 1994,

gets drunk. There's the story that when he goes to conduct an orchestra in Berlin in 1994, gets drunk. There's the story that when he goes to visit Bill Clinton at the White House, Clinton tells the story himself that one night Yeltsin sneaks out in his underpants and tries to get a pizza. And the most famous example is the Shannon Airport. He's flying somewhere. He's going to fly to America, and he's going to stop at Shannon Airport, which is the first ever Western European base for Aeroflot, I think.

And the teacher has come all the way back specially to meet him. From Australia. Was on a visit of his own to Australia and has come back specially and has organized a reception at a local castle and a military band. And the Russian planes circle Shannon Airport for over an hour before landing because something's wrong. And then they land and Blake comes out of the plane and says, he's been taken ill, he's not coming.

And Boris Yeltsin is unwell. Yeah, and Albert Reynolds is standing there for absolutely ages, kind of, you know, doesn't know what to do. Everything is organised. Yeah, of course. And these are funny to us. But Russia is obviously a proud country

that only a few years before was a serious nuclear superpower that had aspirations to kind of lead the world. And I think for a lot of ordinary Russians, and we're meant to be doing this about Vladimir Putin, for somebody like Putin, who at this stage is in St. Petersburgburg working for the mayor of st petersburg scenes like this are utterly humiliating i mean when he goes to america you know clinton always people are fond they treat him like this sort of shambling drunken bear and that's how we

yeah that's how we think of boris yelts. But of course, Yeltsin was once a serious politician. And for ordinary Russians, this is absolutely awful. So Dominic, 1996, he gets reelected. In a crooked rigged election. In a crooked rigged election that kind of gives the green light to all the oligarchs that start buying their yachts and all that kind of football clubs and things. Right. They basically buy his re-election against the communist Gennady Zyuganov. Yeah. What is Putin's role in this? So Putin at this point,

well, here's an interesting thing, Tom. When Boris Yeltsin defeated his own parliament in 1993, he pushed through a new constitution that would give the president far greater executive power. So it got rid of the old system after just a couple of years, new system where the president far greater executive power. So it got rid of the old system after just a couple of years. New system where the president appoints the prime minister, he appoints kind of governors and stuff.

He basically pulls all the strings now. And the man who writes, one of the key men who writes that constitution is a man called Anatoly Sobchak, who is the mayor of St. Petersburg, as it has now become. Now, years before, Anatoly Sobchak had been a law professor at Leningrad State University. And do you know who one of his favorite students was? Would it by any chance be one Vladimir Putin? It was.

So now Vladimir Putin has hooked up with his old law professor. A lot of these people in 1990s Russia, including the oligarchs, they're people who sometimes had previous lives doing completely, you know, utterly different things. So Roman Abramovich had been a street trader and a mechanic. Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg, had been a professor. And he hooks up with Putin. Putin is his vice mayor and and he's in charge of

attracting foreign investments and stuff but really putin is a fixer putin is the key man who's the go-between between organized crime between um foreign businesses he's a tough guy he's a he's a he's very loyal to sobchak he gets he's loyal to him all his life he gets stuff done for him and he does the dirty work is he still in the kgb what's not the kgb well we don't know the fsb the fsb almost certainly kind of links yes ish so he still has all these links so that so because this is going to become an issue actually when putin's regime a lot of the people in the KGB, what the FSB is it now is, really feel that they've been shut out of the carve up of Russian wealth in the 90s. And actually, one of Putin's kind of

cards is that he's going to be their tool to get the securocrats hands on all the wealth and get it back from some of the oligarchs. So anyway, yes. So that's what Putin is doing. Meanwhile, there is another dimension to this sort of story. Because, of course, this is round about the point where NATO starts to expand in the 1990s. So, Dominic, just at this point, I think we should just explain a little bit about NATO, shouldn't we?

Just say what that was. Yes. Because NATO't really i mean because nato's been massively in the news at the moment so probably people have they have sense but they may not know the precise details of how it came into being what its organizing principles are that kind of thing okay fair enough tom so so nato was born in 1948 49 um it's a product of the cold war it's and the labor party right yeah it's found as basically i suppose certainly in britain we would tell the stories that's found as the three men there clement atley the british prime minister his foreign secretary ernest bevin who's a trade unionist who is very you know he's he's definitely on the left but he's he's very fervently anti-communist

and the american president harry treeman and so what it basically is, is Stalin, the Red Army are in Eastern Europe. There's this fear that they're about to export communism. They're toppling non-communist governments in Eastern Europe and basically installing Stalinist governments. And it's a way of doing two things. One, it's a way of saying, we will tie ourselves together in this mutual defense treaty, that if any of us is attacked by Stalin, Soviet Union, the others will defend. So that's kind of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and so on. And that's important, isn't it? That it's a defensive treaty, not an aggressive treaty. It's not. But the second element is, it's about binding America into Europe. So America and Western Europe now are

kind of indivisible, that they have a mutual defense, they expect an attack on one is an attack on all and the other members of NATO will jump to their defense. So that's why, for example, after September the 11th, the Americans, you know, there's this sort of expectation NATO will defend the United States because they have been attacked, just as NATO would defend Luxembourg if Luxembourg were attacked. And NATO became the main sort of defense arm of the capitalist, democratic, free world during the Cold War. So, you know, when we grew up, we used to see these, I bet you can remember them too,

these sort of maps that would be drawn. NATO and the Warsaw Pact, who's got the most, you know, the country's all shaded. Who's got the most tanks? Who's got the most missiles? And when the Cold War ended, the West was determined, you know, NATO has been very important to our sense of kind of solidarity and so on.

We're not going to scrap NATO because NATO, it's still important to have a defence pact and it's still important to have a military alliance that kind of stands for our values. And the great controversy hinges on the fact that NATO expanded after the Cold War. So when the Americans and the Soviet Union were discussing German reunification at the sort of 1990, 1991, I suppose 1990 really, 1989, 90, the Americans kind of verbally said to the Soviet Union, well, of course, one thing, we can have Germany reunified, but don't as much sort of pull as push, I guess. And because the Soviet people in the Soviet Union, like Putin, Putin born in 1952, comes of age in the 1970s, he's always thought of NATO as the kind of evil enemy.

And NATO still has this kind of bogeyman role in Russia, to the extent that we in the West probably don't really appreciate. has this kind of bogeyman yeah role in in uh russia to extent that we in the west probably don't really appreciate but it's a kind of humiliation isn't it for the water pack countries are now enrolled in in nato i mean it's kind of if if you were in britain and scotland went independent and joined the water pact well no but but an independent scotland then leased fazlain out to russia yeah and it would well i suppose that would be, yes, it would be... I mean, I'm kind of groping after a parallel, but it kind of would convey perhaps a sense...

I suppose part of the trouble is, you see, that some of the countries that are most inflammatory to Russia, so the Baltic states, for example, because... But the Baltic states are later, aren't they? Yeah. So the first wave is mid-90s, and that's Poland and... It's the kind of Visegrad group, as it's called. Yes, Poland, Hungary, all that kind of...

But of course, they're countries that want to join NATO because they have a... Because they're menaced. Yeah, because they feel... Because Hungary, 1956, Czechoslovakia, 1968. And the Baltic states were actually part of Russia, so they're even more... Sorry, the Soviet Union.

So they were even more nervous. But that's even more of a provocation, presumably. Well, the Baltic states you see is a really complicated one because as you say the baltic states were annexed by stalin they were independent countries in the interwar period they were annexed by stalin they never ever accommodated to being in the soviet union and western governments also never really you know always paid lip service to the idea that they were still nominally independent um but so so it's understandable that they would join that they they yearn that they want to join they craved joining nato as pretense but at the same time

what what made it incendiary but also explains why they did it is some of those countries have a third of their population or so a quarter to a third of their population, Russian speakers. So they were kind of anxious that we are harboring the Sudeten Germans of the 21st century within our borders, that this could be the casus belli. And we need the reassurance of NATO. That's how they would see it. We absolutely need the same reason that Finland and Sweden right now, this week, the big debates are about whether Finland and Sweden will join NATO because they also crave the reassurance. But of course, the Russians say Finland and Sweden joining NATO would be an intolerable

provocation. So it's understandable why they did it. It's understandable why the Russians feel threatened and aggrieved by it. Right, okay. So I'm sorry, I distracted you from the flow of the narrative there. No, no, no, it's an important subject, Tom. So let's get back to where we were.

So Chechnya is in the Caucasus. The Chechen people were horrifically treated by Stalin, deported, and then they were allowed back by Khrushchev, but they've declared independence in 1991. And majority Muslim. And Muslim, exactly. At the end of 1994, there's been a sort of stalemate. Every other federal subject of the Russian Federation,

except Tatarstan on the Volga, has signed a deal and agreed to stay in the Russian Federation. But the Chechens haven't. And in the end of 1994, Yeltsin basically sends in the troops to attack Grozny, the Chechen capital. And here you see a bit of a, frankly, a chilling foretaste of what is to come because the attack on Grozny, it's a debark, by the way.

Thousands of Russians are killed, conscripts kind of thrown into this kind of firestorm. Because morale in the Russian army is terrible. Drunkenness, morale, bad equipment. That kind of conscripts and all that kind of stuff. But what happens to Grozny, I mean, Grozny is the most ravaged city since World War II, since the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg or the battle for Stalingrad. And the Chechen War is a war of unbelievably horrific atrocities on both sides. And the first Chechen War is a complete and utter catastrophe for the Russians.

They lose thousands of men. The total death toll is probably about 120,000 people. And they don't even win. They end up being another stalemate. So that's another reason why Yeltsin should have lost. But he wins in 96. So he does win in 96, yes. And he has this power to appoint his own prime minister. He does indeed. And who does he appoint?

Well, he appoints everybody first. So he goes through loads of different people. And then you mentioned the financial crisis of 98 when the ruble collapses. And so Yeltsin, by this point, I mean, if you ever see pictures of him in the late 1990s, he's a great bloated kind of drunken figure. At the end of 1999 or the summer of 1999, the Russians are planning a second Chechen war.

And the Chechens give them a pretext in August because they launch a sort of incursion into the Russian Republic of Dagestan, the Islamic militants in Chechnya, and this is the pretext the Russians need. At the same time, there are a series of apartment bombings in September. In Moscow?

Across Russia, actually. About 330, 350 people are killed. At one of these apartments, the police actually catch FSB men planting the bombs, supposedly. I mean, that's the story. And they're told to hush it up. So ever since then, people have said, is this a false flag operation? The person who's just recently been running the FSB for a year is one Vladimir Putin, who has moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow and made himself indispensable to the Yeltsin regime.

And it's at pretty much exactly this point in August, September 1999, that Yeltsin gets rid of his previous prime minister, a guy called Sergei Stepashin, and he appoints Vladimir Putin, who is completely obscure, who's just come from the security service, to be his new prime minister and to run the second war in Chechnya. And it's a war that takes nine months. Also fought with unbelievable ferocity again, and this time the Russians win. And in the middle of this war, on the 31st of December 1999, the last day of the millennium, Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigns and says, my prime minister will succeed me before an election in the spring. His prime minister, who's only been there a matter of months,

being one Vladimir Putin. And what's basically happened is Putin has done a deal. Putin will protect Yeltsin, protect his family, the people around him who have benefited, the people who made money. No prosecution. No, will not be prosecuted for corruption or anything like that. He'll protect their wealth and he will take the reins at the head of the Russian state. Right. Well, I think that's enough for today's episode.

We will see you tomorrow for the final episode of this series to hear about Putin taking the reins at the very dawn of the millennium. Literally so. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets,

head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.