Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (subtitled in promotional media as What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy) is a seven-part BBC documentary television series created by Adam Curtis. It was released on BBC iPlayer on 13 October 2022. Using stock footage shot by the BBC, the series chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. (wiki)
I have written elsewhere about Adam Curtis and while I definitely do not dig his “God” perspective, his overbearing voice, his simplifications, and his political position, I think it is an important documentary in the light of what has happened in the East after 1989. This is not to mean that it justifies in any way the destruction and the crimes committed in Ukraine by Russian troops at the present time or the neo-imperialism at stake. But it is important to realize that the West needs some Eastplaining since it cannot fully comprehend what it means that a world has collapsed. A world good and bad, a world certainly repressive and certainly lacking Western consumer goods, but with an aftermath that can not as easily be forgotten. What happened in the wake of this imminent collapse, as we have seen (like in other places such as South America) was full-on privatization that came undemocratically, imposed from above and more or less at the point of a gun. The rise of the mafia state, under extreme free market rule was a bounty for kleptocratic leadership. These are far from isolated phenomena that happened at the margins of the capitalist core. The best example is probably the so-called Wirecard Skandal – a German e-commerce firm whose massive level of fraud and market manipulation is a clear example of what went on during the last 30 years of financialization.
So yes think not just about East, Africa or the Global South but the entire world financial infrastructure, auditing firms, regulatory bodies and politicians. Apart from neoliberal schism and morphing we have today what some have called “market civilizations” that encapsulate a transnational neoliberal movement from the Global South and Eastern Europe. The entire deregulatory push and austerity politics in Russia was undertaken under the guidance of global institutions and their specialists and is part of the increasing financialization of the world economy.
The collapse of the URSS has coincided with the collapse of supply chains, the destruction of the medical safety nets, of reduced and ailing educational and social welfare systems, and the immiseration of a great majority while the demand was now for the building markets and transforming overnight everyone into a hustling entrepreneur and rapid siphoning of funds abroad into bank account safety or feeding into financial markets speculation. One has to see this in parallel with Clinton’s administration opening up the floodgates of speculation and financial deregulation that even today affects us all.
More importantly, the entire West has been privy to this and especially American foreign policy. This documentary has to be seen and read with a book by historian and economist Isabelle Weber – who went on to describe how China escaped Russia’s fate (shock therapy) narrowly and during several times of its homegrown attempts at privatization and liberalization. I think one has to think about how during the planned economy something like this never happened. While I think that Adam Curtis is a bad guide to both the Soviet cybernetic history (and maybe even its Western examples), and one should take with a grain of salt all his comments on GOSPLAN and everything that has to do with the Perestroika years, I think his selection on the way the economist and prime minister Yegor Gaidar became the most hated man in Russia are quite telling. At the same time, because of his anti-statist bias, Adam Curtis dully ignored the way economic cybernetics has played out in Siberian institutes (which merits a documentary).
I think that Jeffrey Sach’s career and change of mind after being called in as economic advisor to the Russian state during Eltsin is also telling. Russia and Moscow was welcome into the fold of global capitalism, and it important it has profited as much as financial centers such as London have profited from it. Russian companies were very welcome till recently and they had mixed ownerships, behind tied with foreign Western interests. Oligarchs were sponsoring private schools in the UK, and till the recent sudden superficial boycott, they were quite welcome in The City (especially London the money laundering capital of the world where a majority of the offshore firms are registered).
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