How Russia went wrong, as told from the inside

Russia’s Dead End: An Insider’s Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin. By Andrei Kovalev. Translated by Steven Levine. Potomac Books; 392 pages; $34.95 and £26.50.

HIDDEN within the Soviet system were able, conscientious officials who were appalled by the crimes and lies they were asked to defend. One of them was Andrei Kovalev, a diplomat who under Mikhail Gorbachev helped dismantle some of the worst abuses of what he freely accepts was an evil empire. Now living in western Europe, Mr Kovalev is a piercing critic of Vladimir Putin’s misrule of Russia.

His sizzling memoir, which was first published in a two-volume Russian edition in 2012, is an unsparing account of the Soviet collapse, and of the hardliners’ revenge that followed. It is now available in a condensed and edited version, translated by Steven Levine, a professor at the University of Montana.

The central argument of the book is that Russia has returned to the dangerous stagnation of the 1980s, largely thanks to the resurgence of the old KGB. The authoritarian squeeze will worsen at home, Mr Kovalev predicts, while foreign policy will become increasingly hostile and unpredictable. In the long run he fears a break-up of Russia, before—possibly—the dawn of democracy, the rule of law and modernisation.

His language is strikingly blunt. Mr Putin is a “mumbling, stammering knock-kneed brow-furrowing ex-KGB agent who speaks the language of the gutter and values power above everything”. Echoing Alexander Herzen, a 19th-century émigré who declared Russia to be suffering from “patriotic syphilis”, Mr Kovalev diagnoses in his country “manic-depressive psychosis…acute megalomania, persecution complex and kleptomania”. Foreigners who write like this are accused of Russophobia. But it is hard to bring that charge against the erudite Mr Kovalev, with his long and distinguished public service.

He paints a convincing first-hand picture of the confusion of the Gorbachev years, the dysfunction of the Boris Yeltsin era and the ebb and flow of KGB influence in the highest reaches of power. Mr Kovalev’s finest hour was ending the practice of coercive psychiatry. As a senior diplomat dealing with human rights, he brought the power of the reformist foreign ministry to bear on the secretive health ministry, which flatly denied that any abuse was taking place. He also pioneered reforms to improve religious freedom. This involved dispiriting meetings with the leaders of the Russian Orthodox church, in which he noted their unpleasant views, worldly lifestyle and terror of competition.

Some may find that the book has a conspiratorial tinge. The botched 1991 coup which led to the break-up of the Soviet Union, he argues, was not the defeat for hardliners it appeared. It allowed them to make a break with the failures of the past, clearing the way for their return to power and wealth. But the evidence he adduces is thought-provoking.

Mr Kovalev chides American and European leaders for their naivety towards Yeltsin’s administration, in which hardliners soon gained a fatal grip, and their indulgence of the current regime, whose foreign policy he compares to Hitler’s. His main message is grim: Russia, as never before, is a danger to itself and those around it.