Car bombs, lawlessness and psychic healers: Russia revisits wild 1990s
D eadly shoot-outs between gangsters. Soldiers returning home in body bags. A widespread belief in psychic healers and magic.
For many Russians, such things are mainly associated with the turbulent 1990s when, under President Yeltsin, their country was gripped by an unprecedented crime wave, war raged in Chechnya and people flocked to religious cults to escape economic and social chaos.
“The wild 1990s” is as common an expression in Russia as “the Swinging Sixties” is in Britain, albeit with far darker associations. “This isn’t democracy — it’s total lawlessness!” intoned a character in a trailer for Wild, a new Russian television drama about the era.
In 1999, on the last day of the decade, an ailing Yeltsin handed over power to Vladimir Putin. For years, Putin’s popularity was based on his success in ensuring relative stability and a rise in living standards, even if the latter was mainly thanks to a surge in global oil prices.
In return, Russians stayed largely silent as Putin, a Russian security services veteran, crushed all forms of dissent. It was an unspoken agreement that Oleg Orlov, the head of Memorial, a human rights group, once described as a “pact with the devil”.
