Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  Myth making could also have had a physical aspect, as it does in many societies. Yurii Afanas’ev and Yevgenii Yevtushenko lobbied Yeltsin on behalf of the Memorial Society (which Yeltsin had joined in 1988) to make over the KGB headquarters and prison in Lubyanka Square into a museum. Yakovlev favored the construction of a monument to the casualties of Stalinism in front of the building. In October 1990 the Memorial Society had emplaced there an unsculpted stone from one of the northern camps, but the removal of the Dzerzhinsky statue in 1991 created room for something eye-catching. Yeltsin did not warm to these ideas when approached. Yakovlev, he said afterward, should have “squeezed” the president but did not.56

  Yeltsin was gripped, though, by the reconfiguration of Russia’s stellar public space, Red Square. Laid out by Ivan III in the 1490s, it had over the centuries been a place for trade, worship, public gatherings, and executions. The communists made it primarily a parade ground. The square’s western margin was converted after 1917 into a necropolis for revolutionaries and Soviet officials and dignitaries. Since 1924 the corpse of Lenin, embalmed in a secret fluid, had been displayed under quartz glass in a mausoleum—of wood until 1930, in salmon-tinted granite and porphyry after then. In 1941, with the Wehrmacht on the approaches to Moscow, it was evacuated to Tyumen, Siberia; it returned to its place of honor after the war’s end.57 Tens of millions of Soviets and foreigners had lined up to file by Lenin, one of them the young Boris Yeltsin in 1953. To the rear of the mausoleum, the bodies and cremated ashes of Stalin (who had lain beside Lenin in the mausoleum until the 1961 CPSU congress ordered him removed), Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and about four hundred lesser lights lay in and at the foot of the ruddy Kremlin wall. Yeltsin’s friend, the stage director Mark Zakharov, suggested as early as 1989, at the first session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, that the Lenin mummy be put next to his mother at Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg and the mausoleum and tombs be closed down as “a pagan temple” in the heart of the capital. Democratic Russia embraced the idea after the 1991 coup, when Yeltsin, at the zenith of his popularity, could have made the change with ease. He chose not to respond.

  In late 1993, after he defeated the parliamentary opposition, Yeltsin swung to support of the Red Square plan, which resembled reburials in certain other post-communist states.58 He removed Sentry Post No. 1, the goose-stepping police honor guard, from the crypt on October 5 (in 1997, it was reinstated at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on another side of the Kremlin), closed the adjacent Lenin Museum, and decided in principle to move Lenin and the others to the graveyard of the Novodevichii Convent in Moscow—the very place Yeltsin would be buried in 2007. In the coming months, he had a section surveyed at Novodevichii, corresponded through his aide Georgii Satarov with family members, and commissioned public opinion polls. The relatives of foreigners buried in the square—including the only American, the Harvard man and revolutionary John Reed, interred there in 1920—were also approached. Distracted by other problems, though, Yeltsin mothballed the plan. He contented himself for the moment with small acts of de-Leninization—taking down a two-ton Lenin statue in the Kremlin garden and carting Lenin’s office in Building No. 1 to Gorki, a Moscow exurb.59

  With Lenin, 1917, and the building of communism no longer befitting sources of legitimacy, Yeltsin reinstated what he thought the best alternative—imagery of pre-Soviet Russia. On November 30, 1993, he gave official standing to a coat of arms featuring the double-headed eagle of Byzantium and Muscovy. The white, blue, and red Russian flag, originally brought in by Peter the Great as the empire’s trade banner but flown by the Romanovs as the state flag from 1883 to 1917, had been in use again from August 1991; a Yeltsin decree made it official on December 11, 1993. The white on top was said to stand for peace and purity, the blue in the middle for steadiness and honor, and the red at the bottom for love and generosity. That same day Yeltsin instituted the “Patriotic Song” by Mikhail Glinka (1804–57) as national anthem, replacing the “Hymn of the USSR” dating from 1944.60 Beginning with Hero of the Soviet Union, which was replaced by Hero of the Russian Federation in March 1992, he Russified most Soviet awards and medals. Over the years, he also created new honors and brought back some tsarist-period blazonry. By the end of the 1990s, the Russian Federation had as many state awards as the USSR had had. The recommendations were “my favorite documents.”61

  The Kremlin fortress, venerated by Yeltsin as a monument to Russian statehood, received special attention. In late 1992 his office had Boris Ioganson’s socialist realist Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol, which had hung over the main staircase of the Grand Kremlin Palace since the 1950s, taken down. It was replaced by a panoramic painting of medieval Russian warriors under Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod fighting on ice against the Teutonic Knights in 1242. The title of the canvas, by Sergei Prisekin, is Whosoever Shall Come to Us with the Sword Shall Perish by the Sword.62 This was but a foretaste: Undeterred by economic stringency, Yeltsin authorized the spending of a king’s ransom on reconditioning the main edifices of state on the Kremlin squares.63 There is a tale making the rounds that he came to the decision after a fireplace in the Green Sitting Room of the Grand Palace disgorged smoke during Bill Clinton’s first presidential visit in January 1994.64 But Yeltsin had signed the first directive about renovations in March 1993, and the project, once started, went on for most of his two terms.

  The Red Staircase, which had led into the Faceted Chamber of the Grand Palace, and from whose steps the tsars addressed the people of Moscow on Cathedral Square, was the first piece to be fixed. Stalin had pulled down the staircase in the 1930s and constructed a canteen there. With Patriarch Aleksii, Yeltsin unveiled the replica in September 1994, saying it showed the way to Russians to bring back objects “buried under the former totalitarian regime.” Between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1996, the neoclassic Building No. 1, built by Matvei Kazakov for the Senate in the 1770s and 1780s, was remodeled and modernized. The coordinator of the project, Pavel Borodin, reports that the president pushed for what he thought of as a “stateish” (derzhavnoye) look modeled on masterworks of pre-Soviet Russian architecture and especially on Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg:

  Boris Nikolayevich played an enormous role in the reconstruction. Do not forget that Yeltsin is a builder and understands a thing or two about such matters. . . .

  The president knew what he wanted. We presented him many times with every possible interior, photograph, and suggestion about the reconstruction. He would look at them quietly, and then often he would grin and force us to come up with new ones. When it was September [1994] and we were seeing him for the sixteenth or seventeenth time, he said, “Come on, Pal Palych [Pavel Pavlovich], get your team together and go to St. Petersburg, look at Pavlovsk, Tsarskoye Selo, the Yusupov mansion, the Hermitage, everything they have. Do some sketches, some outlines, a film, look for yourself. Look at what Russian culture really is, at what being a power and being a state is all about. Then bring the whole thing back to me.”

  Another month of work passed. When we brought him materials for the twenty-first time, he exclaimed, “This is what Russia needs, now go ahead and do it.” And the work began on December 1.65

  His wife, among others, questioned whether the country could afford the reconstruction. But Yeltsin was undaunted. “The country had no money when the Kremlin was built,” he said. Someone had to restore it to its former beauty, “and it might as well be me.” Russians and foreigners, he let on to Borodin, would be swept up by what was done. “For Boris Nikolayevich this was only a plus: people will remember it two hundred years from now.”66

  Yeltsin was given interim housing in Building No. 14. When he moved back into Building No. 1, new statues by Anatolii Bichukov of four miscellaneous Russian monarchs—the empire builder Peter the Great, the enlightened despot Catherine the Great, the martinet Nicholas I, and the manumitter of the serfs, Alexander II—sat in niches in the walls of the ceremonial office, also call
ed the Oval Hall. There he received guests and foreign leaders under an almond-shaped cupola, with Peter behind his desk. The circular Sverdlov Hall, where Yeltsin had delivered his secret speech to the Central Committee in 1987, was given its original name, Catherine’s Hall, and redone in pale blue and gold, with old statuary and reliefs restored and new allegorical sculptures on Russia and Justice by Bichukov.

  After the Senate building, it was the turn of the opulent, 700-room Grand Kremlin Palace, erected by Konstantin Ton in the 1830s and 1840s on the initiative of Nicholas I. Yeltsin put out a first decree in 1994 and work began on St. George’s Hall, one of its five great vestibules, where Joseph Stalin had erased the tablets with the names of the twenty-five recipients of the Order of St. George, imperial Russia’s highest military award. Workers uncovered an infestation of rats, knee-deep water in the cellar, and fissures in the foundation, and had to solidify the base of the building and of the seventeenth-century Terem Palace.

  Already in 1994 Yeltsin decided to move on to the St. Andrei’s and Alexander Nevsky halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In 1932–34, to accommodate the USSR Supreme Soviet and other functions, Stalin had them gutted and unified into an anodyne auditorium adorned with plywood desks and chairs, reinforced-concrete balconies, and a titanic stone Lenin standing behind the platform. The Russian Congress of People’s Deputies met here from 1990 until Yeltsin decreed it out of existence in September 1993. Yeltsin was ignorant of the story of the halls until, some weeks after the death blow to parliament, he saw a quaint image of the original rooms in several watercolors by the nineteenth-century artist Konstantin Ukhtomskii. He asked an official what had happened to them and heard that “the Bolsheviks destroyed them.” “Yeltsin’s face grew dark—seemingly he recalled that here the [congressional] deputies had more than once chastised him and had tried to impeach him [in March 1993]—and he intoned, ‘Then we will begin restoring them!’”67 The decree was issued in January 1996. Yeltsin “studied in fine detail” every sketch considered by the state commission he appointed to oversee, although he left the filigree to them to settle. The commission would meet with him about six times in 1997 alone. His consistent advice was to adhere to Ton’s plan.68 The original halls and their artwork were re-created from drawings and photographs, helped by archival materials Ton had sent to London and finishing details stored in the basement. The nationalist artist Il’ya Glazunov consulted on some lesser rooms and donated several of his paintings. Ninety-nine firms and 2,500 people worked to complete the project.69

  Yeltsin was to say in Presidential Marathon in 2000 that he should have legislated legal and political continuity between post-communist and precommunist Russia, somehow bypassing the communist era. Going “from 1991 to 1917” would have restored “historical justice” and “historical continuity” and sanctified the liberal values that gained currency in the decades before World War I, when urban business, private farms, free speech, and parliamentarism thrived.70 But this was never done. Neither mass nor elite opinion was prepared for what could have been a Great Leap Backward with unpredictable and perhaps comic results. The Russia of tsars, onion domes, and Cossacks (and, until 1861, of serfdom) was not a democracy, and territorially and ethnically it was organized as an empire.

  Yeltsin’s ideological eclecticism and fascination with representations of history made him a practitioner of political bricolage, patchwork that makes a useable past out of whatever fabrics happen to be at the leader’s disposal.71 Just as there was no wholesale assault on the communist order, Yeltsin bridled at a wholesale reconciliation with the imperial order. Five-pointed red stars and other Soviet motifs abounded after 1991, on the Kremlin battlements and all over Russia. Thousands of likenesses of Lenin and streets, squares, and buildings in his name were not touched, even in Moscow.72 Some cities and city streets were returned to their ancestral appellations, while many others were left alone, at times creating anomalies such as provinces and their formerly eponymous capitals bearing different names. Yeltsin’s area of birth was still Sverdlovsk oblast, after the Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, even as the city of Sverdlovsk was given back its birth name, Yekaterinburg—and one of the main avenues of Yekaterinburg, leading from downtown out to the former Urals Polytechnic Institute, was still called Lenin Prospect. Yeltsin reached out to post-1917 Russian émigrés in the West in 1992,73 but no plan to restore their titles and property back in Russia was ever enacted. No agreement was struck on the words to be set to Glinka’s nineteenth-century music, so the anthem was a melody without lyrics to which the Russians never took. And aspects of the Soviet experience in which there was popular pride—such as industrialization, wartime victory, and the space program—remained in good odor officially. As a sign, the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War in 1995 touched off an orgy of nostalgia and completion of the brutalist war monument on Moscow’s Poklonnaya Hill, whose construction Yeltsin as local party leader had halted the decade before. Yeltsin’s government, Mayor Luzhkov, and local communists “all held massive dueling celebrations, blanketing the city in military banners, posters, and other paraphernalia.”74

  Although Yeltsin greeted and forced changes in many Russian institutions, his concern about a loss of control decelerated or halted change in several domains. It influenced him to oppose the eradication of communist-era law codes and regulations, which were considered to be in force unless expressly repealed. To tear up the body of Soviet legislation, and of Russia’s prerogatives as juridical heir to the USSR, would in his assessment have brought “so many problems and worries that we were just not prepared to handle at so difficult a time.”75

  In the same spirit, Yeltsin did not wipe out the KGB, the coercive sidearm of the Communist Party, which it was in his power to do in 1991–92. This is not the outcome one might have expected, for, although he had cooperative personal relations with some KGB officers before 1987, in his days in opposition he came to distrust the organization. In 1989 he was one of the few deputies to abstain on the confirmation vote for Vladimir Kryuchkov in the USSR Supreme Soviet, and, says one then volunteer assistant of his, he developed “spy mania” and saw “in every new person a stoolpigeon for the KGB.” Asked about a possible recruit, he would tap two fingers on a shoulder, a sign in the USSR for eavesdropping.76 Yeltsin knew of the KGB’s and Kryuchkov’s centrality in the 1991 putsch from experience and from the five assorted committees to investigate it, one of which, under Sergei Stepashin, he himself had appointed.

  When the committees reported, Yeltsin seemed to lose his zeal for shaking up the organization. Its last Soviet chairman, Vadim Bakatin, says wryly in his memoirs that Yeltsin’s men wanted nothing more than “to change the nameplate from ‘KGB of the USSR’ to ‘KGB of the RSFSR.’”77 This is rather unfair, in that Yeltsin agreed demonstratively with the decision to shut down the Fifth Chief Directorate, which had been in charge of secret informants and hunting dissidents, and to restrict the main body of the agency to counterintelligence and home security. After an experiment with subordinating it to the regular police hierarchy in the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), it was restyled the Ministry of Security in 1992, the Federal Counterintelligence Service or FSK in 1993, and in 1995 the Federal Security Service or FSB. And Yeltsin spun off independent functional units for foreign intelligence, border guards, protection of leaders, and governmental electronic communications. All these components were put on a short political leash, monitored by Yeltsin and reporting to him through discrete channels.

  But this was no root-and-branch reform such as had taken down the StB agency in Czechoslovakia and the Stasi in East Germany. There were Russians who were interested in going this route. Gavriil Popov asked Yeltsin in the fall of 1991 to make him chairman of the agency. He wanted, Gennadii Burbulis says, to dig out the roots of (vykorchevyvat’) the organization—to pare it down, air its secrets, bring its remnants under strict, many-sided civilian control. Yeltsin was unwilling. To Burbulis, he said that the CPSU had been the country’s br
ain and the KGB its spinal cord: “And he clearly did not want to rupture the spinal cord now that the head had been lopped off.”78 Yeltsin kept the spinal cord whole out of fear of multiple threats—to political stability, to democracy, to national unity, and to safekeeping of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction.79

  A last chance at a more intrusive solution was to be missed in 1993–94. Yeltsin felt let down by the Ministry of Security during his 1993 confrontation with parliament (see Chapter 11). The minister, Viktor Barannikov, a favorite of the president’s dismissed in August 1993 for corruption, defected to the anti-Yeltsin ultras and headed the shadow security department in Aleksandr Rutskoi’s “Provisional Government.” On October 4, 1993, the security forces under a new chief, Nikolai Golushko, permitted dozens of deputies and their armed auxiliaries to flee through underground tunnels.80 In December Yeltsin replaced Golushko with Sergei Stepashin, a former parliamentarian, and issued a statement referring to all changes in the former KGB as having had “a superficial and cosmetic character” with no “strategic concept” behind them.81 He appointed Oleg Lobov to chair a commission to review the force, making Sergei Kovalëv, a Brezhnev-era political prisoner, a member. Kovalëv asked for but did not receive a list of officers who had gone after dissidents in the past. Lobov “said that Boris Nikolayevich did not have in view any radical changes . . . that we cannot afford to lose professionals.”82 Staff cuts imposed on the FSK were largely reversed by mid-1994. Yeltsin then lapsed back into the confidence that it was enough to subdivide the service—replacing a leviathan with a hydra—place restrictions on surveillance networks, define democratic control as that exercised by him as chief executive, and let sleeping dogs lie. The brotherhood of active and reserve KGB officers, be they engrossed in domestic snooping, foreign spying, or commercial opportunities, persevered. Not until he was a pensioner did Yeltsin confide in Aleksandr Yakovlev that he had “not thought through everything” about the agency and put too much faith in changing the line of command and leaving the essence of the organization intact.83