In its most crisis-ridden year since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia careened from political shakeups to economic meltdown. The nation’s severe problems weakened its position in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and in the world at large. On March 23 Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin fired his entire Cabinet, including Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Chernomyrdin’s replacement, Sergey Kiriyenko, was unable to prevent Russia’s descent to total financial collapse. On August 17, with state coffers empty, Moscow devalued the ruble and imposed a moratorium on repayment of foreign debts. Within days the country defaulted on billions of dollars in treasury bills and bonds, banks lost liquidity, and millions of Russians lost savings and wages. Kiriyenko was sacked. Russia’s drama, against the background of the Asian economic crisis, exacerbated an ongoing flight of Western capital from the less-developed nations. The effect on other CIS economies was widespread.
Ukraine held parliamentary elections in March. The Communist Party and its allies significantly increased their representation by capturing 40% of the seats in the 450-member parliament. Both the democrats in the centrist Ukrainian Popular Movement and the party of Pres. Leonid Kuchma fared poorly (32 and 17 seats, respectively). The results, coupled with an upcoming presidential election in 1999, left Ukrainian politics in a stalemate.
Armenian Pres. Levon Ter-Petrosyan resigned in February over disagreements with an international peace plan for Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory within Azerbaijan inhabited mostly by Armenians. Calls by his successor, Robert Kocharyan, to resume peace talks were rejected by Azerbaijan in this long-standing conflict. Nevertheless, except for a violent interlude in Georgia’s Abkhazia republic, the Caucasus nations as a whole passed a year of relative calm.
Among the Central Asian nations, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan joined with Russia in calling for a united front against the militant Islamic Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. The idea foundered, however, because of a lack of interest in other Central Asian nations. The Central Asians did, however, continue to explore common action against such regional problems as drug trafficking. An evolving development at the year’s end was moves against his political opposition by Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakstan, who was running for reelection in 1999.
Russia’s post-August prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov (see BIOGRAPHIES), late in the year appeared to be setting a lower priority on Moscow’s relations with the West. Concurrently, his officials sought to restore Russia’s standing in the CIS with promises of Commonwealth-wide reform. Continuing instability in Russia, however, accentuated by President Yeltsin’s apparently failing health, caused the assurances to fall on skeptical ears.
In December Yeltsin and Belarusian Pres. Alyaksandr Lukashenka signed an agreement to begin unification of the two countries’ currencies and create a common citizenship.