The Fall of the USSR, Pt II

Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

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

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.

Bravo.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

You brought it back. Yeah, you're basically the Tom Ford of the podcasting world.

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 to happen? And who rolls into town but Boris Yelston with a bottle of Stoli in his hand.

Yeah, and another one in his belly.

Yeah for sure.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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,

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 no further political chaos. As much as he could manage.

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 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.

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 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, the winds of change you could even almost call it, had swept through Russia itself.

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 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 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.

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 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, but there were a lot of people who were not

happy that Communism had gone away, or that the Soviet Union had gone away.

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 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 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 failed democracy wins, you know.

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 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. 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.

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 out from under your grip, so like good for them.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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, 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 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, 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, rushes open everybody. They flipped a sign in the window around and said we're open.

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, 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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Was it like the these Harvard economists and stuff. Was that the deal?

Yeah, they were very much in league with Jegol or guide are okay for sure.

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 it a whole episode on hyper inflation?

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

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 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.

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 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 people who just emerged out of the ashes, suddenly growing in size exponentially, just like Apache chief.

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 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,

essentially sort of allowing them to buy pieces of like oil companies and stuff like that.

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.

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 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.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think anyone knows how much money he has today, right, No, and that kind of a mystery.

We talked about it in our book.

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

I don't know. Will there.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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.

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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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.

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, 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 stuffs, whereas before it was more like sort of upper management versus working stuff.

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 was like, hey, guys, let's get it on. We love you, Yelton.

He's a lovable guy.

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

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 kind of control.

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, 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Him.

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

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.

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 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 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.

Yeah, fabulous Thunderbirds. Jimmy Vond Was it Jimmy in that one?

Yeah?

I think it was Stevie Rayvaughd's brother. Jimmy.

Oh, Jimmy Vaughan. I thought you were talking about Jimmy love Bond, Simon Lebon's brother.

Yeh, 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 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 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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, 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 Yeltsin suddenly out of nowhere, was like, I'm not president

anymore of this guy.

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 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.

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.

Oh okay.

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 and all that. That's my impression of it.

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 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.

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 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.

I mean, he keeps winning those elections there, right, Yeah, fair and squats, that's are all legit, and so yeah.

That brings us to today. Chuck.

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

I think we're done. You did fantastic.

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.

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.

Yeah, agreed. I enjoyed these.

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.

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.

The thing come up in our research.

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.

You got to pass. Secondly, left hands.

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.

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

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 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 he's talking about the game, hen you know, and this

is from G.

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 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.

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,

The Fall of the USSR, Pt II

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