Yeltsin
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“Checks and balances” (sderzhki i protivovesy), as the catchphrase went, were built into Yeltsinesque administration from the start, and spanned the bounds between external and internal resistances to purposive change. They would mean that no Kremlin staff and no government, from Gaidar through the premiership of Vladimir Putin in 1999, was homogeneous, and that all of them would present Himalayan challenges of coordination. The president “turned out to have people around him who in terms of their views and approaches would be difficult to call like-minded or brothers-in-arms.”28
Fractious government contributed to the aforesaid arrhythmia of decision making. However, it did not foreclose an underlying persistence of trajectory, a wobbly equilibrium within a broad band of possibilities. It was stabilized by the solar object—Yeltsin—around which all lesser bodies in the system, planetary and asteroidal, spun. To the extent that the country had a defined course in the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin is surely correct to say that within the structures of government its conservator and guarantor was the president:
Yeltsin was the flywheel. He could have said, “Hold it, let’s go back to where we were,” and we would have gone back. His strength was that he understood we had to take this path. . . . How to do it was another matter. But to move a whole gigantic country along—do you understand what that is? Yeltsin never faltered, Yeltsin never got distracted by trifles. . . . He had a very powerful intuition in this respect. He made it through it all and led the country through it all.29
Yeltsin’s subjective resistances to the oversights of reform policy at the micro level were not enough to knock him off his macro course.
Here the vagaries of economic policy in the year or two after the exit of Gaidar are revealing. There was much more continuity substantively, if not stylistically, than Burbulis’s elegy would admit. To take the place of Gaidar as minister of finance and deputy premier, Yeltsin hit upon Boris Fëdorov, who was two years younger than Gaidar and had held the job under Ivan Silayev in 1990. Fëdorov tilted against Viktor Gerashchenko and easy money and made some progress on monetary and fiscal restraint in the spring and fall of 1993, twinning with Gaidar when Yeltsin brought him back into the cabinet as deputy premier in September. These gains have been interpreted as evidence of “how much one forceful individual [Fëdorov] in a key post can accomplish in such a volatile situation,”30 but this disregards the role of a second individual—the Yeltsin who provided Fëdorov with political cover and encouragement. As Fëdorov found his bearings, Yeltsin called him with a tip that Chernomyrdin was preparing a directive on reimposition of curbs on some consumer prices. Fëdorov, with Gaidar’s help, sent Yeltsin a memorandum bashing the proposal as inconsistent with marketization. Yeltsin then invited Fëdorov and the prime minister into his office, gave the table a thump, and told Chernomyrdin that if he brought out such an order it would be countermanded by a presidential decree, which he said was ready in the file folder on his desk—a folder that, known to Fëdorov but not to Chernomyrdin, held one sheet of paper, the Fëdorov memo. Chernomyrdin dropped the plan.31
In January 1994 Gaidar and Fëdorov resigned from the government for a second time, after a parliamentary election in which liberal candidates were outvoted, and Chernomyrdin gave hints of wage and price controls. But in reality he perpetuated Fëdorov’s and Gaidar’s policies in 1994 and 1995 and took them further by developing a bond market for government debt. The authors of The Yeltsin Epoch, who hold no brief for Chernomyrdin, write of his economic record that, “with less gusto but more reliance on common sense and Russian conditions, [he] basically continued what Gaidar had begun” in 1991–92.32 This happened not because of Chernomyrdin’s priors but because he, like Yeltsin, was learning from changing conditions and because he worked for Yeltsin.
In the final analysis, changing Russia was for Yeltsin about Russians practicing individual self-reliance and collective self-determination and healing themselves as both autonomous and social creatures. The prime service the leader could provide was to loosen the corset of constraints and give them the latitude to think and act without fear of government, of a self-abnegating doctrine, or of one another: “Our ideal is not equality in poverty, self-denial, and envy. We are for people having greater chances to take the bull by the horns, earn good money, and improve their lives.”33
A corollary to this individualist and restorative idiom was another resistance to radicalism: antipathy to couching social reconstruction as intergroup or interclass warfare, which was how the Bolsheviks had conceived of their cause. And that antipathy deterred Yeltsin from expounding the changes he made as truly revolutionary changes.
When on the Gorbachev team from 1985 to 1987, he disagreed with the general secretary’s description of intrasystemic perestroika as a revolution, since Gorbachev was moving too slowly to warrant it. “Revolution” and “revolutionary” then mostly washed out of Yeltsin’s vocabulary.34 Partly this was a tactic to reassure supporters who did not want change to get out of hand. He was alert, as he said in the 1991 election campaign, to the need “not to scare people, since many are afraid of the destruction of that which exists.”35 As president, Yeltsin migrated to the position that he had done Russia a service by shielding it from a revolution. He preferred the emollients “radical reforms,” “democratic reconstruction,” “reformist breakthrough,” or, if revolutionary verbiage could not be helped, “quiet revolution” (tikhaya revolyutsiya).36
Yeltsin leaned against himself since he was driven to conclude that Russia was susceptible to social upheaval and that any recurrence of the nihilism of the Bolshevik Revolution would be fatal to the country. This is how he phrased it in a speech marking the anniversary of the 1991 coup:
After the putsch, Russia was in a quandary. The situation was again pushing the country toward revolution. Then, as now, I firmly believed that such a course would be a tremendous political mistake and would be Russia’s undoing.
All too well do our people know what a revolution is, how great are its temptations, and how tragic its results. Under Russian conditions, revolution would spin out of control and bring forth colossal antagonisms and conflicts. And then once again we would hear, as Mayakovsky said [in 1918], “You have the floor, comrade Mauser”—only now it would be not a Mauser but a machine gun. Once the storm was unleashed, no one in the country or the world could stop it. . . .
We have chosen the way of reforms and not of revolutionary jolts. Ours is the way of peaceful changes under the control of the state and the president. I consider this our common victory.37
To cast change as going forward under the president’s control was to cast him in the part of brakeman and regulator—or “arbitrator,” as Burbulis put it—as much as locomotive.
As he often did in his memoirs, Yeltsin in Notes of a President identified a unique moment when the idea jelled: when he observed Muscovites meting out rough justice in 1991. On the afternoon of Thursday, August 22, he caught a glimpse of the citizens milling around the Central Committee area on Old Square. In a carnival spirit, they broke windows and would have overrun the gates if policemen sent by Mayor Popov had not blocked them. Later that day, the crowd, numbering several tens of thousands, swarmed to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and daubed swastikas and graffiti on the walls; the staff inside had armed themselves and blocked the entranceways and corridors. It was under searchlights that night, in a scene flashed across the globe, that building cranes overseen by Sergei Stankevich and Aleksandr Muzykantskii brought down the iron statue of the founder of the Soviet terror apparatus, Felix Dzerzhinsky, which had stood in the square since 1958.38
In this scene, Yeltsin beheld only the apparition of mob rule. “I had visions of the ghost of October—of the pogroms, disorder, looting, constant rallies, and anarchy with which that great revolution began. One wave of the hand, one signature, would have turned August 1991 into October 1917. But I did not do that, and I have no regrets.” In Soviet history, the mob was succeeded by the party, which divi
ded society into “the clean and the unclean,” he says, and tried to build its new world on the backs of the unclean. Yeltsin in government did not want to sort people or to commandeer the material gains so laboriously accumulated under communist rule. “I saw continuity between the society of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period and the new Russia. It did not enter into my plans to smash and bust up everything as the Bolsheviks did.”39
The therapeutic take on the post-communist transition and rejection of revolutionism favored another choice—to soft-pedal the retributive side of the change of regime. Yeltsin knew as well as anyone that there was much in the communist past to atone for. In his writings and speeches as president, he decried forced collectivization, the Stalin terror and purges, and the Gulag, as most members of the late Soviet elite had done in the Gorbachev years. Gorbachev in December 1991 gave him the CPSU general secretary’s archive, housing the most sensitive papers from the Soviet era. The presidential archive, as it was renamed, threw up new disclosures about atrocities, and some of these he found deflating. Yeltsin was dumbstruck, says head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, at news that Lenin had ordered the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, and that was only one example.40
Yeltsin in his first year in the Kremlin made frequent foreign policy–related use of the archives. In Washington in June 1992, he promised the U.S. Congress information about prisoners of war who might have ended up in Russia after the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Representatives of a Russian-American commission set off to explore the labor camps at Pechora in the northern Urals. “Beamed to television sets around the world, Yeltsin’s remarks and the Pechora jaunt served their political purpose,” although no actual American prisoners or records of them having been there were found.41 Vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, the Yeltsin government “proved far more willing to re-evaluate and condemn controversial episodes” in Soviet relations with these countries than Gorbachev had been.42 Gorbachev had disavowed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia but never the 1956 intervention in Hungary. In November 1992 Yeltsin handed over to the post-communist government in Budapest a collection of secret materials on 1956, which were later published in Hungarian translation. That same autumn, Rudol’f Pikhoya, the new head of the Russian Archives Committee (and husband of Lyudmila Pikhoya), traveled on Yeltsin’s behalf to Warsaw to present the Polish president, Lech Wałesa, with copies of KGB and CPSU files proving culpability at the highest levels in the NKVD’s execution of more than 20,000 army officers and other Polish captives near Katyn, Russia, in 1940—files Gorbachev knew of but said did not exist. Yeltsin received journalists from Poland in the Kremlin and termed the shootings “a premeditated and depraved mass murder” at the instigation of “the party of the Bolsheviks.” In a visit to Warsaw in August 1993, he went to the city’s military cemetery, “knelt before a Polish priest, and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had laid at the foot of the Katyn cross.”43 Yeltsin also provided to Wałesa the dossier Moscow kept on him when he was leader of the Solidarity labor movement in the 1980s. Similar information was released about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and wartime saver of Hungarian Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, and the Soviet air force’s shooting down of a Korean jetliner in the Far East in 1983.
Within Russia, Yeltsin approached questions of history gingerly. The monstrosity of the Stalinist repressions, he believed, raised concern that rummaging through the files on individuals and abused groups would be injurious to political and social peace. Russians had held back from recrimination and revenge, he told a group of news reporters in July 1992: “And how hard it has been to hold back. . . . Some people were saying, Let us dig away. But, you know, digging things up on the 15 or 20 million who suffered, plus their families, would make society boil with rage.”44 That it might have had the cathartic and prophylactic effect it did in post-communist Eastern Europe was always secondary in Yeltsin’s thinking to its destabilizing potential.45
Nonetheless, Yeltsin after 1991 did favor the dissemination of knowledge and the righting of wrongs, case by case. Researchers, Russian and foreign, had unexampled access during his presidency to archival information, excepting only top-secret troves such as those of the presidency and security services.46 Books, memoirs, and documentary films probed the past, and Russian historians rejoined the international scholarly community. General Dmitrii Volkogonov, an orthodox communist turned reformer who served as an aide to Yeltsin until his death in 1995, sprang many materials loose and traced the inhumanity of Soviet communism not to Stalin but to its initiator, Lenin. Yeltsin saw Volkogonov “as a military version of himself—a product and a servant of the old system who had seen the light and was now combating the dark forces of the past.”47 After adoption of a legal framework in October 1991, Yeltsin appointed Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Central Committee secretary who led a CPSU committee on the depredations of the Stalin period, to chair a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Some 4.5 million Russians were exonerated over the next ten years, 92 percent of them posthumously. They included kulaks, priests (several hundred thousand of whom were shot or died in captivity), military men, dissidents, and wartime prisoners of the Germans who were sent to Siberia in 1945, some of them sentenced under nonpolitical articles of the criminal code. Yeltsin, in Yakovlev’s recollection, “actively supported” his work and signed directives on opening up records and clearing individuals’ names prepared for him by the commission. “Of all the requests I brought to him, I do not remember one that he disputed.”48
What Yeltsin was not prepared for was to come to terms with the communist legacy on a more emblematic level. Some in the dissident counterculture advocated a Nuremberg-type tribunal for surviving malfeasants. But a model for Nazi war criminals in the 1940s was a poor fit with Russian circumstances in the 1990s, since it was predicated on military defeat and the administration of the tribunal, and implementation of its verdicts, by foreign occupiers.49 In 1992 a group of communists put the Yeltsin government on trial by questioning the constitutionality of the decrees of August and November 1991 that outlawed the CPSU and its Russian offshoot. Sergei Shakhrai represented the government in six months of Constitutional Court hearings, filing thirty-six volumes of evidence to the effect that the ruling party had been so intertwined with the Soviet state and its repressive apparatus that it was undeserving of protection in Russia’s democracy. On November 30 a panel of the court—all thirteen members of which had been members of the CPSU—rendered a Solomonic verdict that confirmed the legality of Yeltsin’s disassembly of the structures of the old party but said there must be no persecution of individual communists and they must be free to organize a new party if they so wished.50 A Communist Party of the Russian Federation was established in February 1993 and was to play a significant part in the politics of the decade.
Another formula for de-Sovietizing the state that drew some interest was that of “lustration,” a screening of political institutions for former officers of and collaborators with the communist-era security services such as was done in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.51 Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s adviser on nationality issues in 1991–92, was one of the few Russian politicians to come out for a lustration law. A version of her draft statute would have forbidden former apparatchiks in the CPSU from holding political office or teaching positions for five years. Democratic Russia deputies in March 1992 favored a ban on former members of the CPSU who had not turned in their party cards by August 1991. Yeltsin attended the meeting and, with about half of the delegates, left the hall before the vote was taken.52 Commenting on the approach in 1994, he explicitly linked party and police workers: “The democratic press rebukes me for [the fact that] I preserved the state-security system and did not issue a decree that would debar from work in the state apparatus former officials of the Central Committee of the CPSU, of the party’s obkoms, and some would even say of its ra
ikoms [district committees].”53 Yeltsin could not have been much worried about skeletons in his closet. But he was vexed about the onrush of events possibly getting out of control, and he wanted to keep the substratum of well-trained managers and professionals who, like he, had been part of the Soviet regime. Besides new faces and voices, he wanted “to use in the work of the state experienced implementers and organizers.” Although some old hands from the nomenklatura may have “dressed up as democrats,” he was more irritated by purely political types from the new wave who “generally did not know how to work.”54
Yeltsin could have attempted acts of symbolic rectification. For instance, he could have devised holidays and extravaganzas to display solidarity with opposition to the ancien régime and approval of its collapse. He did make a desultory effort to do so in 1992 when he proclaimed June 12, the anniversary of the 1990 sovereignty declaration, Free Russia Day, a nonworking holiday. He largely passed up the opportunity to make the August anniversary of the 1991 coup a commemorative event. After making speeches on the occasion in 1992 and 1993, in 1994 he decreed that August 22 would be State Flag Day, “but did not explain why the [Russian tricolor] flag was the one piece of August to be enshrined or how the day was meant to be marked,” and declined to make it a nonworking day.55 Another decree in 1994 made December 12, as anniversary of the 1993 constitutional referendum, Constitution Day, a nonworking holiday. Like June 12 and August 22, most Russians greeted it with indifference.