Is this Weimar Russia?
Eerie parallels to Germany during Hitler's rise to power
BY CHRISTIAN CARYL
U.S. News Online, World Report 11/16/98
MOSCOW-The president is old, tired, and very possibly senile. Hyperinflation is making the currency worthless. Once a great power, the country feels beaten down, and its weak democracy may soon be crushed by a hybrid of nationalism and socialism. Is this Russia in the 1990s? Or Germany on the eve of Hitler taking power?
It could be either. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several prominent historians have called attention to the frightening parallels between contemporary Russia and Germany's Weimar Republic, which lasted from 1918 to 1933. But never has the comparison seemed as apt as it does today, with the Russian economy in shambles and President Boris Yeltsin surrendering daily control over government affairs to Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov.
In the aftermath of World War I, Germany had to swallow the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty, giving up territory and stifling its arms industry. "It was a country that lost a war, lost its dignity, and tried to become a democracy under the worst possible conditions," says Alexander Konovalov, a historian and political analyst at Russia's flagship ORT television network. Similarly, he argues, Russia today is reeling from a tacit defeat in the cold war and has "lost huge amounts of territory, one half of its gross domestic product, and 10 years of male life expectancy."
Befuddled. Yeltsin's 1930s counterpart was Paul von Hindenburg, the German president and former general who was considered the guarantor of the German Constitution. Yet it was an exhausted, befuddled Hindenburg in his second term of office who opened the door of power to Adolf Hitler in 1933.
Yeltsin is also in his second term, and last week Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that he cannot run again in the year 2000. Like Berliners in the early 1930s, Muscovites openly mock their president's mental capacity: In recent months, Yeltsin mistakenly identified Japan and Germany as nuclear powers, failed to recognize one of his own ministers during a public appearance, and blabbered incoherently at a press conference. (Making the parallel even sharper, Yeltsin has become dependent on the advice of two advisers, his daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev. Hindenburg also relied on his son, Oskar, and chief of staff, Otto Meissner.)
The precedent of Weimar's failed democracy began worrying Russia watchers during the early 1990s, when Yeltsin lifted state controls on prices and inflation soared to 2,600 percent. Some Russians papered their walls with worthless currency, just as Germans did in the 1920s. But fears of "Weimar Russia" faded in the mid-1990s as the country gained a semblance of stability and as Moscow, in particular, experienced a boom in construction and lavish spending by the new rich.
Now, economic similarities with Weimar are apparent again. Last week the United States agreed to send 3.1 million tons of food aid-worth about $625 million-to help Russians get through the winter after their worst harvest in 45 years and the sudden devaluation of the ruble in August. Though the United States never gave such massive aid to Germany between the wars, Russia's devaluation and widespread misery have a close parallel in the catastrophic devaluation of the mark that wiped out much of the German middle class in the 1920s.
The nouveau-riche "oligarchs" of today's Russia also have a counterpart in Hugo Stinnes, the Weimar tycoon who built up a gigantic economic empire overnight on the ruins of assets made cheap by inflation. Stinnes made his first fortune by exporting coal for hard currency; the oligarchs did the same with oil and gas.
Still, even those who are enamored of the Weimar analogy cannot avoid an obvious point: "The major difference today is the absence of Hitler," says Alexander Yanov, a historian who claims to have coined the phrase "Weimar Russia." Neither of the present front-runners in the race to succeed Yeltsin, former Gen. Alexander Lebed and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, appears to be a reincarnation of the Führer, though both are outspoken nationalists.
Weimar "is a justified parallel, but there are significant differences," argues Konstantin Borovoi, a liberal deputy in the Russian parliament. "We live in a different information society. I hope that world opinion won't allow concentration camps and other things like that to happen again." Borovoi is among a group of Russian politicians who are lobbying for the prosecution of ultranationalist parliament member Albert Makashov, a vehement antisemite who recently called for Yeltsin "to be turned into soap."
Ultimately, knowledge of the Holocaust may be the biggest difference between then and now. Weimar Germany, after all, didn't have itself as an example to avoid. Russia's political elite has been strongly influenced by the failure of interwar democracy in Germany and speaks about it often. Russian constitutional lawyer William Smirnov says, for example, that Weimar "was a negative example for the planners of Russia's present-day Constitution," who were afraid of the possibility of extreme nationalists coming to power by parliamentary means. That fear seemed real enough in October 1993, when right-wing deputies led by former Vice President Alexander Rutskoi tried to topple Yeltsin, who sent tanks and troops to drive them out of the Russian White House. The Constitution was subsequently rewritten to concentrate power in Yeltsin's hands and to eliminate the vice presidency-both provisions that are now under review by a panel of Russian legal experts because of Yeltsin's health.
What to do. Another problem with the Weimar comparison is that even those who find it compelling may disagree on the lessons to be drawn from it. Borovoi, for example, cites the example of Weimar to argue for a tough Western approach to Russia. Any future aid, he says, should be contingent "if not on the introduction of truly democratic institutions, then at least on the observation of humane norms of behavior." Konovalov, however, thinks the West is being needlessly vituperative. NATO's expansion, he argues, is evidence that Western policy makers are repeating the errors of their 1920s predecessors. "When they isolated Germany, it reacted with Hitler," he says. "When they came to Germany after the Second World War with the Marshall Plan and tried to integrate it in the world community, Germany reacted with openness and democracy. Now they're behaving toward Russia like they did [toward Germany] in 1919, not 1945."
The great question mark is whether Russia's people today would follow a demagogic, nationalist leader of Hitler's ilk. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the hate-spewing parliament deputy who pulled the hair of a female colleague and befriended Saddam Hussein, has seen his popularity plummet.
Yet Konovalov believes that the chaos and corruption that have accompanied democracy have made many Russians long for the totalitarian past:
"The desire for security, for law and order, probably outweighs the desire for freedom." And demonstrators are resorting again to rhetoric that would have been perfectly familiar to Germans 50 years ago, blaming a conspiracy of scheming Jews and vengeful Westerners for Russia's problems.
One Moscow intellectual trooping along during a recent protest march made this sober observation:
"The birth of civil freedoms shouldn't be accompanied by a stark drop in living standards. That leads to a loss of faith in freedom." Few historians of Weimar could have put the problem more succinctly.
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