TV Review : The Struggle for a Wounded Russia

The history of Russia--especially the most recent chapters starring communist Mikhail Gorbachev, reformer Boris Yeltsin and nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky--is too complex to be summed up in a thought. But on the intensive two-hour “Frontline” report, “The Struggle for Russia,” former Yeltsin press secretary Pavel Voshchanov, really does sum up what looks to the outside like a peculiar Russian drive for self-destruction.

“Russia,” he says, “by nature or maybe by its communist experience, has a tendency toward maximalism--it’s not used to an evolutionary way of development. Our entire political mentality has been trained for constant battle.”

Producer Sherry Jones lucidly maps out the battle royal that has plagued Russia since the waning days of the old U.S.S.R. and Gorbachev’s perestroika . (How charming that term now sounds.) From 1987 to the present, Yeltsin has stood at the center of the storm, either as the leader of democratic reform and revolution against the old Soviet regime, or as an increasingly besieged president of a chaotic nation-in-the-making.

“The Struggle for Russia,” however, does not include any mention of Yeltsin’s new book, a frank diary describing his deep despair during the violent October, 1993, uprising by nationalist parliamentary officials.

Then again, this blow-by-blow account probably needs no more despair; it is a kind of video autopsy of a dead empire and possibly dead national ideals.

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Jones’ report posits that the central struggle was between Gorbachev, overcome by the very kind of reforms he had long been promising, and Yeltsin, former party man and self-styled democrat who eventually dismantled both the U.S.S.R. and the subsequent Confederation of Independent States.

But what this story actually reveals is a country playing out a media-informed game of free-form capitalism without the cultural tradition to make democratic capitalism actually work. The popular face of new Russian enterprise may be McDonald’s on the New Arbat, but the real face belongs to the young nightclub owner who looks into the camera and openly praises the reliability of the “protection” provided by the Russian Mafia while dismissing the government.

“The Struggle for Russia” skillfully balances the view from the street--even the public bathhouse--and from the parliamentary hallway, each increasingly resembling the other as forces for a romanticized past vie with forces for an undefined future.

Caught in the middle is a figure like Yegor Gaidar, architect of the “shock therapy” plan of privatization and the lifting of price controls. Prodded by Western nations to adopt extreme measures, Gaidar and Yeltsin had to face the ire of kopek-less voters.

But the very idea of facing voters is still an alien concept, and for the voters the easy answer may lie with a demagogue like Zhirinovsky. The former closed society has become a giant gaping wound.

* “The Struggle for Russia” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR-TV Channel 24.