The scenario of a tabula rasa hanging there, waiting for change to be written on it, was overdone from the beginning. It faded in Yeltsin’s first term—in fact, in the initial months of his first term—as resistances to change and to the agents of change multiplied. While no one resistance was an absolute, together they pushed Russia toward compromise though not desertion of the Great Leap Outward. They were twofold: external to Yeltsin, that is, located in his environment of operations; and internal, or dictated by his preferences and his perceptions of where he and Russia stood.
Exogenous constraints started with the fact that Yeltsin was nowhere near the sole winner from the dismemberment of communist authoritarianism. The Soviet collapse unshackled and energized actors who had come out of the woodwork with him and now clamored for their share of the spoils. As standard procedures were overwhelmed, the leader also had trouble employing institutional resources to attain his goals. The consummate resource for any politician in government is the state. In Yeltsin’s Russia, indiscipline, uncertainty, and decolonization demoralized and corrupted this resource and converted quotidian chores into an ordeal. The irony was superb. As with transitional leaders in many places and times, it dawned on Yeltsin that “the fluidity of the situation both empowers and weakens individuals,” hampering satisfaction of the very aspirations the environment has stirred up.5
Up to the 1991 watershed, Yeltsin as a communist heretic and then an anti-communist insurgent held a card none of his rivals had—the trust and affection of the powerless. This is not to say they were with him unanimously or unreservedly. In July of that year, the best-known polling organization in the Soviet Union, Yurii Levada’s VTsIOM (Center for the Study of Public Opinion), plumbed societal attitudes toward him. Confidence in Yeltsin, the survey showed, was unevenly distributed and was for millions contingent on other considerations. Twenty-nine percent of the interviewees were emotive supporters (“I fully support Yeltsin’s views and positions”), while another 11 percent assented “as long as he is leader of the democratic forces” in the country. This core constituency of 40 percent was well short of a majority and nearly 20 percentage points less than his vote total in the June presidential election. Eleven percent of Russians gave Yeltsin the most unfavorable evaluations (they were not supporters of his or would support anyone other than him). Many more than opposed him outright, and almost as many as supported him, gave ambivalent answers. They either were disappointed former aficionados (7 percent), found him unappealing but hopefully “useful to Russia” in the future (16 percent), or supported him “due to the absence of other worthy political figures” (15 percent). Yeltsin had climbed the heights of power only with the consent of a host of crosspressured citizens.6
Later studies using the same method traced a hemorrhaging of support. By March 1992, barely two months into his market reforms, the VTsIOM respondents placing Yeltsin in the topmost category had been sliced to 11 percent and his core constituency to 20 percent, or half what it was in July 1991. Those solidly against him were up to 18 percent, and those voicing ambivalence were now a plurality of 37 percent. By January 1993, only 5 percent of Russians were fully with him, 11 percent gave him qualified support, 22 percent were opposed, and a majority, 51 percent, were on the fence.7
In political terms, the most shocking thing about shock therapy was that it laid bare the limits of the nationwide consensus. Russians were united on the necessity of doing something about the economy and about instability in all things political and constitutional; on what was to be done, they were disunited. Bearish economic news and the whittling down of Yeltsin’s mass base emboldened elite players who had principled objections to his reform program, or who found it expedient to take up arms. The first yelps of criticism came even before price liberalization took effect, and some were from members of the president’s winning coalition, not from unreconstructed communists. Aleksandr Rutskoi, the running mate to Yeltsin a half-year before and now his vice president, spoke against headlong marketization on a tour of Siberian towns in late November 1991. In an interview with the newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta on December 18, he declared that the government had been turned over to amateurs, “lads in pink trunks and yellow boots” who were hurling Russia toward disaster. Ruslan Khasbulatov, just chosen as parliamentary chairman, chimed in several weeks into the new year, and the Supreme Soviet adopted resolutions attacking the government.
In February and March of 1992, as a second planned miniwave of decontrol of prices drew nigh, this one aimed at oil and the energy sector, factory directors and bureaucrats from state industry campaigned to preempt it. Gaidar, elevated to first deputy premier by Yeltsin on March 2, cringed: “Powerful pressure mounted on the president. He was deluged daily by foot-messengers reporting to him what a fearful misadventure, if not perfidy, these monetarists were starting.”8 The Congress of People’s Deputies took up the mantra when it convened in April and considered a motion to dismiss four economic ministers. Gaidar took Yeltsin off guard by standing up on April 13 to inform the deputies the entire cabinet was stepping down if the motion passed. Khasbulatov and his legislators did a volte face the next day. Yeltsin wrote in Notes of a President that the Gaidar move was unwelcome news to him, but he gave high grades to his understudy’s theatrical sense: “Yegor Timurovich grasped the nature of the congress as a political spectacle, a big circus, where only the most unexpected and abrupt thrusts would carry the day.”9 Gaidar recalls that Yeltsin, who was still officially prime minister, “shook his head in pique and doubt yet accepted the decision.” Gaidar’s sponsor, Gennadii Burbulis, whom Yeltsin demoted in April from first deputy premier without explanation (he stayed on as state secretary), was dubious about the threat. Says Gaidar, “Gennadii Eduardovich, who had worked with Boris Nikolayevich much longer than me and knew him better, understood that our demand was addressed not only to the congress but to the president.”10
The reprieve lasted only a few weeks. In a preview of what he would do again and again, Yeltsin spoke to Gaidar about introducing armaments specialist Yurii Skokov or Sverdlovsk partocrat Oleg Lobov into the cabinet “for equipoise” (dlya ravnovesiya). The suggestion “was proudly rejected.”11 On May 30, at a Kremlin meeting on energy policy, Yeltsin announced that he was relieving the young minister for the branch, Vladimir Lopukhin, who was in favor of laissez-fire and was one of the four on the congress’s blacklist. Writes Yeltsin: “I think back to two faces: one was scarlet, almost vermilion—that was Gaidar; the other was pale as a sheet—that was Lopukhin. It was difficult to look at them.”12 Appointed in Lopukhin’s stead and awarded the rank of deputy premier was Viktor Chernomyrdin, an engineer and red director from the Urals; two other experienced managers, Vladimir Shumeiko and Georgii Khizha, were brought in as deputy premiers in mid-June.
Yeltsin did not consult Gaidar on the Lopukhin firing. He knew, Gaidar says, that Gaidar would have resigned if given early warning. Gaidar considered quitting but was talked out of it by friends. The promotion to acting prime minister on June 15 was little solace. Anyone could see he and Burbulis had been taken down a peg.13 There was further evidence one month later when Yeltsin nominated, and the Supreme Soviet confirmed, Viktor Gerashchenko as chairman of the Central Bank of Russia. Gerashchenko, the last head of the USSR’s state bank, was at odds with the Gaidar brain trust’s tight-money policy and flooded industry and agriculture with cheap credits. Inflation, having subsided in the spring, took off again that autumn.14
When the congress gathered for its winter session (it assembled two or three times a year), Yeltsin’s twelve months to make staffing and economic decisions by decree had expired. He asked the deputies to regularize Gaidar’s appointment as prime minister, which they refused to do by 486 votes to 467 on December 9, 1992 (the congress had 1,068 members, of whom 252 sat in the Supreme Soviet). Flustered, Yeltsin decided to take his brief to the people. On December 11 he was driven to the AZLK Works, the carmaker in southeast Moscow that manufactured the rattletrap Moskvich. He
knew from government documents that Russian workplaces were having hard times:
But this was all on paper. Here in the immense assembly shop, darkish and slathered in machinery oil, all of the disillusionment and discontent heaped up over the year of reforms poured out. The workers met Yeltsin with a hush. All that rang out were some peals of applause, to which he was completely unaccustomed. There were no cries of acclaim, no supportive posters. The president plainly got skittish. Workers, mute and tense, listened. The concluding words of his speech—“I trust I will have your support”—struck no sparks. The prepackaged resolution was approved, but without any ardor.15
Workers bawled that Yeltsin should bury the hatchet with Khasbulatov and reanimate the socialist economy. Only ten or twenty, one observer divined, would have raised their hands for the motion if management and the trade union committee had not cracked the whips. Yeltsin was downcast as he climbed back into his limousine.16
AZLK and the dyspepsia of the parliamentarians took the wind out of Yeltsin’s sails. He sat down with Khasbulatov and reached a deal on a baroque formula for selecting a prime minister to serve until Russia had a new constitution. The congress on December 14 came up with eighteen candidates; Yeltsin shortened the list to five, and in the process disallowed the favorite of the deputies, Georgii Khizha, an arms manufacturer from St. Petersburg; the congress did a straw poll with three choices per deputy; the president was to make a choice from among the three leading nominees and submit that name for confirmation. Yurii Skokov was the top candidate with 637 votes, followed by Viktor Chernomyrdin with 621 and Gaidar with 400 votes. Chernomyrdin was Yeltsin’s pick of the three and was confirmed with 721 votes for.17 Gaidar, Burbulis, and several other reformists were excluded from the new Council of Ministers. The kamikazes had flamed out—and the commodore who had ordered them into the air stayed at his post.
Yeltsin was gratified in 1991 by Gaidar’s minimum of “Soviet baggage.” This could not have been said about Chernomyrdin, a jowly veteran of the petroleum industry and the founding head of Gazprom, the state company that took over the assets of the USSR Ministry of the Gas Industry in 1989. Two decades older than Gaidar and only seven years younger than Yeltsin, he was out of Orenburg oblast, the home region of Naina Yeltsina. He had hooked up with Yeltsin when the latter was Sverdlovsk party boss and together they supervised pipeline laying; he was kinder to Yeltsin than most after the rift with Gorbachev.18 “Viktor Stepanovich and I are united by common views on many things,” Yeltsin would say in Notes of a President, and were of the same generation. Chernomyrdin had principles but “is not up in the clouds.”19 The earthbound Chernomyrdin was to be an indispensable man, the prime minister for five-plus years, and to win fame equally for his competence, his wiliness, his partiality toward the Gazprom monopoly,20 and his mangled syntax and diction. Like Yeltsin, he evolved with the times.
The headlines of 1992 illuminated the environmental encumbrances to Yeltsin’s reform program in all their abundance. Until he forcibly shut down the Congress of People’s Deputies in late 1993 and imposed a presidentialist constitution, an obstructionist legislature lurked over his shoulder and had the legal and often the political force to foil him. But some of his biggest problems were within the amorphous executive branch. It contained a runaway vice president, a chief banker more attuned to parliament than to Yeltsin, and ministers and counselors raring to score points and to draw him into their corner. Large producers in Russia, still the property of the state, entreated for financial assistance. Private business, which was in its infancy, was strong enough in one area, banking, to create a sordid interest-group politics. The banks plumped for, and profited bounteously from, measures to assign them contracts for transferring credits from the central bank to specific firms and sectors, to allow them to pay negative real interest rates to depositors, and to protect them from contributory deposit insurance and foreign competition.21 Although the populace only looked on from a distance, all principals knew well the peril of social unrest, and grassroots opinion was still viewed by government and opposition as mobilizable.
What was not so apparent in Yeltsin’s first year, except to those with inside dope, was the importance of his endogenous thought processes and inhibitions—some of them evincing the Soviet baggage he sought to escape in his advisers, some responding to his reading of popular sentiment. In the springtime flap over bank credits and economic stabilization, to take one example, Gaidar found the president a hard sell on the subject of tight money: “Time after time at meetings between us or sessions of the government, he returned to the question of why we were not increasing the money supply” and thus keeping cash-strapped firms going. “The arguments we advanced did not seem persuasive enough to him anymore.”22 Yeltsin also vetoed Gaidar’s call for an instantaneous, Russian-imposed end to the ruble zone in the former USSR. The currency reform occurred only in July 1993.
Yeltsin, rehashing the 1992 Lopukhin story in his memoirs, emphasized that he had his own reasons, and it was not just about pesky parliamentarians or lobbyists:
The thing is that I myself worked for decades in Soviet economic management. It has no secrets for me. I know just what disorder there is there, what life is really like in factories big and small, what are the best and worst qualities of our directors, workers, and engineers. Despite the fact that I am a builder by profession, which has left its mark on me, I know all about heavy and light industry. In Sverdlovsk I had to be involved in this up to my elbows.
So let’s say some elderly industrialist comes to me and says in an agitated voice, “Boris Nikolayevich, I have been working for forty years in the gas industry. Now look at what this Lopukhin is up to, things are going on, here are the statistics to prove it, it is a nightmare, everything is going to hell.” What am I going to do? I cannot be indifferent . . . and I feel I have to respond.
Gaidar, Yeltsin elaborated, “was putting the squeeze on me” via Lopukhin to approve liberalized energy prices, and “I considered that we could not adopt so hard a policy.”23
The jockeying over forming and re-forming the cabinet brought out another phenomenon: Yeltsin’s determination as president to have political independence from allies and associates. It applied to the intelligentsia-based movements with which he had made common cause in his tramp to power. Gavriil Popov, who had been elected mayor of Moscow, left city hall in June 1992 to found a private university—Yeltsin named Yurii Luzhkov, a red director and municipal bureaucrat, in his place—and no member of the former Interregional Deputies Group was given a high-level position. Leaders of the related Democratic Russia movement felt that Yeltsin owed them for their help in 1990 and 1991. Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin, two of its three co-chairmen, stated publicly that Yeltsin should listen to their recommendations on cabinet positions and appoint members of the organization as his emissaries to the provinces. Ponomarëv and Yakunin invited themselves to Sochi in October 1991, during Yeltsin’s sojourn there, and prevailed on him to receive them. The president took notes during the meeting, commended joint action, and did nothing to follow up.24 Yurii Afanas’ev, the third co-chairman, well known to Yeltsin from the Interregionals, led a faction that was against any collaboration with him. In early 1992 he and ex-dissident Yurii Burtin, ruing “authoritarian degradation” under Yeltsin, walked out of Democratic Russia, which promptly split up into pettifogging sects. Why, Burtin asked, was reform “put in the hands of a bunch of youngsters . . . about whom no one had heard a word a half-year ago?”25 Yeltsin’s attitude is condensed in his memoir putdown of Afanas’ev as a scholastic “eternal oppositionist”: “Such people are very necessary, but not in government—somewhere to the side, or on a hilltop where the view is better.”26
Burbulis, Gaidar, and the mavens of shock therapy, their ties to the older radicals flimsy, learned a little later about Yeltsin chasing his own star. Burbulis unburdened himself in an interview in 2001:
Soon we felt that the trust that had let us spread our wings, that untied ou
r hands to make decisions and put them into life, had somehow changed into a well-thought-out distancing, into what I would say was the putting of us into orbit [orbitnost’]. Gradually, the president made over his image from courageous leader of a transformative program into not even a partner but some kind of arbitrator—and he convinced himself that this was the reality. This was the wellspring of his vagueness, of the combinative voting [he encouraged in the Congress of Deputies], of his dangerous ambiguity in relation to the intractable [anti-reform] group in the congress, of his reprisals against people on our side. And then we got inconsistency in his ideas, which was tangled up with big blows to Yeltsin’s instinct for power. This came out in the incoherence of the reforms. Before you knew it, everything was clear—Polevanov, Soskovets [two relatively conservative officials], and the so-called checks and balances, which bore not only on personnel decisions but on the loss of ideals, the loss of goals and orienting points.27
Yeltsin could not get over Burbulis’s refusal to serve as presidential chief of staff in 1991 and was ever more of the belief that Burbulis had an allergy to the gritty work of government, whereas the blemish he observed in Gaidar was inexperience and impracticality, not sloth. But the pulling back from the reform maximalists expressed a deeper tendency—in turn an outgrowth of character and habits of Urals self-sufficiency—that would apply to helpmates of sundry orientations. Everyone in the game was to be in orbit, and flight plans could be revised on short notice. The conservatives cited by Burbulis as beneficiaries of Yeltsin’s decisions help make the point. Vladimir Polevanov, a Siberian provincial leader who was named deputy premier and head of the State Property Committee in November 1994, and who used the appointment to try to undo the privatization of the aluminum industry, lasted only three months and was fired at the demand of Anatolii Chubais. Oleg Soskovets, an ethnic Russian technocrat from Kazakhstan and the last minister of metallurgy of the USSR, was made first deputy premier, the number two to Chernomyrdin, in April 1993. His turn to run afoul of the president came in June 1996, for factional activities in league with Aleksandr Korzhakov.
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