Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  If time had passed by the battle with Gorbachev, it had done the same with the levers Yeltsin used to unseat Gorbachev. Foremost among them was the campaign against elite privilege.

  In the last few years of the communist regime, Yeltsin lived decently yet not sumptuously, which gave him some standing to cast stones. In June 1991 the vice president–elect, Aleksandr Rutskoi, acting on his wife’s counsel, decided Yeltsin needed sartorial upgrade and procured him a smart suit, shoes, and some white shirts with coupons issued to Rutskoi as a military officer. Yeltsin accepted graciously but paid Rutskoi for the apparel.21 For a barbecue at Arkhangel’skoye-2 the weekend after the defeat of the putsch, press secretary Pavel Voshchanov splurged on a suckling pig he found in a Moscow peasant bazaar. “Naina Iosifovna was touched, because they could not permit themselves this.”22 At their Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya apartment, Naina bid a guest to be careful of the sofa, as the springs poked out through holes and they might rip his trousers: “When Boris Nikolayevich sits on it, first he puts on a little cushion, and then it’s okay. Here is a cushion for you.”23

  Once in power, though, Yeltsin came to bask in the same creature comforts as Gorbachev and Leonid Brezhnev before him. He kept his Moscow residential registration at Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya until 1994, when he shifted it to the sixth floor of a new concrete building block on Osennyaya Street, in the Krylatskoye development, on the western outskirts of the capital. Yeltsin saw the building from his limousine and fell in love with it, much to the mystification of his family and of his security detail, who thought it too close to the windows of other houses. They objected, but, recalled his daughter Tatyana, “Papa said we were going to live here, and that was that.”24 Most nights from 1992 through 1996 Yeltsin actually spent at the state dacha Barvikha-4, a three-story river-front mansion in the settlement of Razdory, which was a ten-minute drive farther out the same westward radius from the Kremlin. The army built Barvikha-4 for Gorbachev in Second Empire style and equipped it with the latest communications and security gadgetry. Yeltsin as president took again to hunting, unwinding every several months by shooting deer, stag, wild boar, duck, and wood grouse at the bucolic Zavidovo. He made stops at other provincial retreats left by the Soviets: Valdai, in the northwest near Novgorod, where the big dacha was built for Stalin; Bocharov Ruchei in Sochi, on Russia’s semitropical Black Sea coast; Volzhskii Utës, on a crook in the lower Volga; and Shuiskaya Chupa in Kareliya, refurbished with the northernmost roofed tennis court in Europe.25

  With a bang, the door had shut on Yeltsin’s populism. In an interview in retirement, he was unrepentant for using it. “It was necessary to do some undermining, to take things away from the nomenklatura. I did it and I did it correctly. It was not right for the big shots to puff up their privileges that way.” But it was “a stage” in his development, he added, and he and Russia outgrew it.26

  The incongruousness with his recent past required some rationalization. Yeltsin gave it mostly in Notes of a President. He had, he says, a brainstorm in 1990, shortly after he was elected speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet and he asked to be allotted a government dacha at Arkhangel’skoye-2:

  When I was a deputy in the [USSR] Supreme Soviet, I had refused the perks of a chauffeured car and a dacha. I refused to go to a special polyclinic and signed up in my neighborhood one. But now I ran up against the fact that I needed to push for such things and not to reject them. It was not because the leader of Russia needed “privileges” but because he needed normal working conditions, which at that moment he was without. This revelation was so startling that I fell to thinking. Would people understand me correctly? For so many years, I had maligned privileges, and here I was asking for them. Then I decided that the people were as smart as I was. They had realized without me that the struggle was not against the privileges of the [Communist] party; it was against the party’s unbridled, all-enveloping power.27

  And so, once the CPSU was no more, it was appropriate to exchange the unostentatious Arkhangel’skoye-2 for tony Barvikha-4 and Aeroflot for Gorbachev’s Ilyushin-62 jetliner, a “ROSSIYA” logo glued to its skin. The replacement for Aleksandr Korzhakov’s Niva was a ZIL, and in 1992 a sleek, armor-plated Mercedes limousine from Germany—an “office on wheels,” in Yeltsin’s words.28

  Many Russians wondered about the justice of it all. Yurii Burtin, a former dissident active in the shriveling Democratic Russia movement, took aim in an essay in March of 1992 at “the brassiness [that] lets our new leaders take the same offices and drive around in the same luxurious armored limousines that members of the Politburo used to help themselves to.”29 In a television interview in 1993, shot at Gorki-9, an estate where Soviet leaders had lived, El’dar Ryazanov, a director of movie comedies and a Yeltsin supporter, personalized the question. What was it like for someone who had ridden the crest of a moral wave of the downtrodden to glean these benefits, and had he found that power “corrodes the soul”? “Some things inside me have changed,” Yeltsin said jumpily, giving Gorki-9 as a barometer: “Earlier, I would never have moved into such a residence. I guess I have come to take a more blasé attitude toward the morality of various privileges than I used to.”30 He squirmed not because his perquisites were so atypical for the leader of a large country but because he had denounced his predecessors for enjoying them and had implied that in power he as people’s president would deny himself them.31

  Of the questions dominating the late Soviet political agenda, the only two that were settled as of the rotation of the Kremlin flags were about the power of the CPSU and the tug-of-war between the center and the union republics. Yeltsin closed out the first with presidential Decree No. 169 on November 6, 1991, a day before the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It dismembered the palsied machinery of the party and took possession of its bank accounts, publishing houses, and real estate, from Old Square to the most far-flung Russian villages. The Belovezh’e and Alma-Ata accords and the exit of Gorbachev hardened interrepublic borders into international borders. The purpose of the Commonwealth of Independent States was to accomplish a genteel divorce in a dysfunctional family. With it as cover, Yeltsin took the assets of the KGB in mid-December, and the inter-republic security committee was discharged on January 15, 1992.32 The commonwealth’s charter mission was complete on May 18, 1992, when he gave up on the will-o’-the-wisp of a unified military (joint control over nuclear arms had been agreed at Belovezh’e) and formed national armed forces under Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. Grachëv oversaw the homecoming of troops from Germany, Poland, Mongolia, Cuba, and the post-Soviet states. All Soviet tactical nukes were in storage in Russia by July 1, 1992, as agreed at Alma-Ata in December 1991; the last strategic warheads from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were transported there by July 1, 1996, after negotiations brokered by the United States. The CIS was up to little else but holding summit meetings and offering a forum for working out bilateral agreements. Yevgenii Shaposhnikov’s job, as commander of CIS strategic forces, was to lapse in June 1993.

  If the CIS was about tidying up after the past, Yeltsin as leader of the opposition had looked to the future, to the best of his abilities. The prospect he dangled before Russia was a three-pronged de-monopolization—after departing the Communist Party in 1990 he often called it a “de-communization”—comprising democratization, a free-enterprise economy, and territorial devolution. It would, he said, substitute the liberties of a normal life for the regimentation of communism.

  At a press conference on September 7, 1991, the first question to Yeltsin, from a French journalist, was what kind of a country Russians lived in and would be living in now that the political logjam had been cleared. Here is what he said:

  I think that the country is now devoid of all “isms.” It isn’t capitalist, nor communist, nor socialist; it’s a country in a transitional period, which wants to proceed along a civilized path, the path along which France, Britain, the United States, Japan, Germany, Spain, and other countries have been an
d still are proceeding. It’s an aspiration to proceed precisely along this path, that is, the de-communization of all aspects of society’s life, an aspiration to democracy, furthermore, a market economy, all equal varieties of property, including private property.

  A little later, the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, buzzed again to what model Yeltsin had as a goal:

  SIMPSON: I want to go back to what Mr. Gorbachev said recently. He was talking about Swedish social democracy; that is his model. What is your model, Yeltsin’s model? Perhaps it is the model of François Mitterrand’s France, or John Major’s Britain, or the United States, or Japan, or Spain, or Germany?

  YELTSIN: I would take everything together; I would take the best from each system and introduce it in Russia.

  SIMPSON: That is a very politic answer. Mr. Gorbachev said you must have some kind of notion, whether you want to lean to the left, or to the right, to the conservatives, or to the socialists, and so on.

  YELTSIN: Well, I have never been a conservative and have no intention of even being a centrist; no, I am still to the left of center; rather, I am for social democracy.

  SIMPSON: Or the Swedish model, as Mr. Gorbachev says?

  YELTSIN: Well, perhaps not 100 percent. You cannot just take a model and install it ready made. Maybe create a new model, but take something from the Swedish model, and why not take a piece from the Japanese model—an interesting piece—and from the French, too, especially as regards the parliamentary aspect? And in the United States, where they have 200 years of democracy . . . they have a definite framework for this democracy, and that’s interesting, too. So, in principle, I am in favor of social democracy, but nevertheless, to take the best there really is in these countries.33

  The statement is indicative of Yeltsin’s reasoning as he took the reins. He saw all good things as going together and downplayed trade-offs of one good against another—democracy versus the market, for example. These valued traits he discerned in the long-since developed Western nations and Japan (which he first visited as a Soviet parliamentarian in January 1990), although one country on his A-list, Spain, had transited to political freedom in the 1970s. Yeltsin was fixated not on destination but on trajectory: Civilization was a path leading in a particular direction. He did not totally abjure his socialist roots, in that he continued to brand himself a social democrat and to the left of center (left in the common European meaning of the word, indicating attachment to a sizable state role in the economy), a contention he made through the middle and late 1990s in conversations with other politicians and reiterated to me in 2002.34 And Yeltsin was eclectic—if not to say platitudinous—about his societal models. He considered himself free to cherry-pick, without worrying about coherence in the abstract.

  Practically speaking, Yeltsin was satisfied that the first and third elements of his triad, democracy (and its accompanying moral regeneration) and decentralization, had advanced with the shutdown of the CPSU. While there was much unfinished business, principally in devising a democratic and federal constitution for post-communist Russia, it was axiomatic for Yeltsin that, given the assurances he had made and the dismal state of the economy, the most urgent problem was the transition from Marx to market.

  Yeltsin had no economic blueprint to pull off the shelf, but he did have thoughts about nongovernmental activity and entrepreneurship to build on. He had long since seen them at work in the interstices of the Soviet planned economy. In Berezniki, while Stalin reigned, his father constructed a private house. As a party boss in Sverdlovsk and Moscow, Yeltsin opposed restrictions on the nonstate sector, favored autonomous work brigades in the state sector, and spoke of the profit motive’s effect on economic efficiency in the West.

  His ideas about reform while in opposition were initially scattershot and auxiliary to his duel with Gorbachev. The stillborn Five Hundred Days Program encouraged him to think about parameters. That said, Yeltsin never read a page of the two-tome compilation Grigorii Yavlinskii plunked on his desk. He homed in on the political facets—the zippy title and the taut timetable.35 A law “On Property in the RSFSR,” enacted under Yeltsin’s legislative gavel in January 1991, after Gorbachev nixed Five Hundred Days, made private ownership a civil right. It was assailed by old-fashioned communists. “For him, the law . . . had greater political than economic significance, and it achieved its purpose.”36

  There were flickers of free-enterprise thinking in Yeltsin’s proposal to relegate governmental power from the USSR to Russia and its provinces. It would, he said, unlock social energy suppressed by the leaden hand of the center. In his August 1990 tour, Yeltsin parried demands for instructions and subventions from on high. The beauty of devolution was that local leaders and citizens would have incentives to figure out solutions on their own. In the Arctic coal city of Vorkuta, which had its origins as a Gulag forced-labor camp in the 1930s, he asked miners how they would handle “complete independence.” Some were curious about subsidies and guarantees of supplies and distribution. “Yeltsin cut them short: ‘No, that’s not how it works. Independence is something different. As owners of what you produce, you will have to decide whom you sell to, at what price. All these are your problems. We are not going to feed you anymore.’”37 At a town meeting on Sakhalin Island, off the Pacific seaboard, a woman wished to know what he would do about the sludge and oil polluting the Naiva River. It was up to them, Yeltsin responded: “You yourselves must put your rivers in order, not Moscow. Our task is to give you independence in solving all kinds of questions, and not to press decisions upon you, to give you the right to settle everything yourselves.”38

  Yeltsin’s appetite for change grew as Soviet troubles mounted exponentially. Hard times, he was more willing to assume, made for hard decisions and not for band-aids and stopgaps. Any reform worth its salt needed to come to grips with the deficiencies of the communist paradigm, as he said in a pre-election interview in May 1991:

  My electoral program . . . lays emphasis on radical reforms, above all in the economy. You cannot stretch out the transition to the market and assure people that the more radical the changes are the worse things will be for them. What could be worse than the way we are running around in circles, in fact on a precipice? . . . It seems to me we have to see the big thing here: Partial reforms . . . will destroy us. The people will not stand for it. When you hear it said it is logical to extend reforms over a period of years, that is not for us. That is for a society where a fairly good living standard has already been achieved and where the people can wait awhile. In our country, the situation is so critical, and the bureaucratic system so powerful, that we must bring [the reforms] to completion rapidly.39

  The “big thing” grew out of the art of politics more than the science of economics. Yeltsin’s big-bang reform, like the coup de grâce to the USSR, expressed his penchant for dichotomizing choices. He itched to be his own master and not be gulled by erratic partners, as he felt he had been on the Five Hundred Days plan. A precipitous thrust would snap the “hypnosis of words” he so excoriated in Gorbachev. And it would have an ineffable cultural component. Anatolii Chernyayev, we have seen, remarked that in Russia “big things” had always gotten done by the method of “either win all or lose all.” In Chernyayev’s diary, “either win all or lose all” is rendered as the Russian saw that describes the doughty soldier’s choices as ili grud’ v krestakh, ili golova v kustakh: “Either you come home with medals on your chest or you leave your head in the bushes.”40

  The academics and professionals Yeltsin inducted into his government as the Soviet Union fell apart were in many cases versed in the writings of Western free marketeers like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Janos Kornai. Others had dirigiste, Keynesian, technocratic, or social-democratic points of view. The reform discussion was outside the ken of an engineer without a liberal arts education, and a political animal to the marrow of his bones. Yeltsin’s approach sprang from a visceral intuition about the imperative of change and the general course
it should take—not from highbrow theory but not from a whim, either. “I will not pretend to speak about the philosophy of economic reform,” he was to write in Notes of a President.41 It did not deter him. Waiting his turn to speak at a 1989 rally in a Moscow park, he had grilled an American correspondent on where he learned about economic affairs. The American in his time worked in a family business and read many books, including the screeds of pre-1917 Russian socialists. “Yeltsin said, ‘So neither of us knows about economics!’ Then he said, ‘We’ll find some young guys, there are some young guys who get this stuff.’ ”42 There were, and he found them in 1991–92, after several years, as Margaret Thatcher noticed in 1990, of brooding over the scourges of communism.

  On his post-communist highway to Damascus, the freedom to which Yeltsin converted was closer to what the political thinker Isaiah Berlin labeled “negative liberty” (freedom from hindrance) than to Berlin’s “positive liberty” (freedom to accomplish some end).43 For Yeltsin’s contemporaries, deliverance from Marxist scripture and Soviet structures took many forms. For him, it was an ease with the market and recoil against the overbearing state. Mikhail Fridman, who became one of Russia’s first billionaires as a banker and oilman, makes the point well:

  Yeltsin as an individual who had inner freedom . . . instinctively moved toward the market as the end. That is because . . . as my namesake Milton Friedman says, “Capitalism is freedom.”. . . [Yeltsin thought] it was necessary to give people freedom and they would make out well. How exactly to do that he did not know. [But he did know] that it was necessary to free people from control: We were squeezing them dry. He thought that if we let them go they could move heaven and earth. . . . This is the level on which he thought about it. . . . He took a dim view of all these [Soviet] controls. [He felt that] the controllers had long since believed in nothing.44