The last of Yeltsin’s inbuilt resistances was to selling Russian society on the general reform course. Truth be told, he was not well equipped congenitally for outreach. By 1991 he had laid aside the harangues of the CPSU boss for question-and-answer volleys, saucy interviews, campaign oratory, and parliamentary interpellation. He treasured parsimony in speech and literature and loved to pull the printout of a talk from his jacket pocket and chuck it sportily in the wastebasket. Nine times out of ten, it was a masquerade: Either he had memorized the talk and would recite it rote, or he had a variation on the original which he then read out. But Yeltsin as president had to address the nation as a whole, and not merely live audiences, and to mate salesmanship with the dignity of a head of state. This meant working through the mass communications media with which Russia had been imbued under the Soviets. Yeltsin fulfilled the role with a sigh. He did not mind doing in front of television cameras; posing for the blue screen was not his cup of tea.84 Grouchily, he submitted to pancake makeup, a brittle coiffure (the handicraft of a hairdresser inherited from Gorbachev), and a teleprompter. He would fine-tune speeches with the writers, insisting on brevity, some peppy phrases, and pauses for effect. They would coach him on pronunciation and the purging of Urals localisms—such as his rolling of the letter “r,” his flattening of the Russian pronoun chto (what) to shta, and, in press conferences, his elision of the soft vowel “ye” from the expression for “If you know what I mean” (Ponimayesh’ became Ponimash’).85
The problem with Yeltsin as tribune of reform was not that he mishandled any one occasion but that the occasions were intermittent. He did not distill his radical reform into a lapidary phrase such as the New Deal or Great Society. He never related in depth how the economic, social, and political facets of the remaking of Russia cohered. He did not care to take on the task himself and, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff after Yurii Petrov, noted, “He was very jealous when others did it.”86
Yeltsin’s disinclination to promote Yeltsinism stemmed from cognitive dissonance over didactic speeches and from the conviction that empty promises had jaded the population and tarnished both true-blue Soviet leaders and Gorbachev’s perestroika.87 Verbal economy was appropriate in the early days, as his first press officer, Valentina Lantseva, recalled: “Compared to the verbose . . . Gorbachev, Boris Nikolayevich was closer to the people in his clumsiness [neuklyuzhest’] and bear-like quality [medvezhest’]. He . . . could answer in one word, yes or no. This was very significant to the people.”88 Once the communist regime was dead, though, Russians wanted to be reassured that their sacrifices were not in vain and to be given signposts for the road ahead. These Yeltsin was not the best person to provide. Hearing Marietta Chudakova advise him at a Kremlin meeting in 1994 to tape a televised presentation every two weeks, he clamped his jaw, after the fashion of someone with a toothache.89 Mark Zakharov, who was at the same meeting, warned of a dearth of ideas and information, which could leave the field to political fanatics and charlatans. Yeltsin countered that any systematic marketing plan would be a warmed-over version of totalitarian brainwashing: “What are you suggesting, that we introduce a ministry of propaganda, like the one under [Joseph] Goebbels?”90 In his 1994 and 2000 memoir volumes, Yeltsin defended his aversion to any idea of “shimmering heights that must be scaled.” No bombast was needed. “Propaganda for the new life is superfluous. The new life itself will persuade people that it has become a reality.”91
One part instinct and one part learning from the Soviet past, this was an exercise in throwing out the baby with the bath water. The defense of post-communist reforms was not doomed to excess any more than elimination of the KGB was doomed to unhinge the body politic. Comparative experience teaches that the political bully pulpit has its uses in democracies and not only in tyrannies. In a free polity, loquacity by leaders can go light years to galvanize citizen opinion behind government programs, shape the public sphere, and delimit the range of voices there.92 By selling it short, Yeltsin retarded his ability to make his quiet revolution palatable to the newly enfranchised populace and to enliven the debate about where Russia was headed in the long haul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Falling Apart, Holding Together
When inducted as national leader, Yeltsin intended to stick to economics and treat the structures of government with benign neglect. In retrospect he described this behavior as a mistake: “I probably erred in choosing the economic front as my principal one and leaving governmental reorganization to endless compromises and political games.” It put the economic program itself at risk, since, “without political backup, the Gaidar reforms were left hanging in midair.”1 He soon reconsidered: In order to use the state for his ends, he had to hold it together, and in a way that gave him and not others the steering power.2
His constitutional options in 1991 were not rosy. An attempt to reorder Russian institutions, at the moment Russia was unscrambling itself from the Soviet Union, was sure to strike many as distracting and incendiary. Yegor Gaidar, for one, was dead set against it. In any such move, Yeltsin would have bumped foreheads with other loci of authority, starting with the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, where his majority was precarious. Even were he somehow to force new parliamentary elections, voters, he admitted later, might not have elected “other, ‘good’ deputies.”3
The Soviet reflex was to consign almost any human problem to an administrative department of government. The liberal approach, flaunted by the youthful reformers and by the Western powers and organizations whose advice Yeltsin sought, posited solutions to lie outside of government. Had he acted strictly in this spirit, he would have chopped the post-communist state and pushed it out of the way of nongovernmental actors. Measured by the size of the bureaucracy, this was not quite obtained, as the workforce in the federal, provincial, and municipal governments drifted up by about 10 percent (from 2,682,000 to 2,934,000) between 1992 and 2000.4 But these figures exclude the host of Soviet factory-level managers who were struck from the rolls during the change to the market. Shock therapy and price decontrol reduced officialdom’s directive and regulatory grip on Russian society. And privatization, from the vouchers of 1992–94 to the loans-for-shares initiative of 1995–97, reduced its monopoly over resources.5 Yeltsin lent support to it at almost every step and believed that when it was over only electric power, atomic energy, the military-industrial complex, and the railroads should be left on the state ledger.6 In loans-for-shares, first authorized by Decree No. 478 on May 11, 1995, the government turned twelve large properties, mostly with high-value petroleum and mineral assets, over to private banks to manage, in return for forgivable loans from the banks. The banks were allowed to run stock auctions in which they themselves could place bids on the shares deposited with them as collateral for the loans. The auctioneer or an affiliated business won every auction of the state shares—a spectacular act of selfdealing. Formal title to them was reassigned a year later.7
The paring in governmental scope, while desirable, raised difficulties. Preeminent among these was the lack of clarity about boundaries between the public and the private realm and about responsibility for seeing to it that the state in its entirety did not go to smithereens. Shifting boundaries meant shifting options for individuals. Consumerism and affluence, forbidden fruit under the communists, were now smiled upon, but the seam between these licit wants and illicit avarice was not well demarcated. The short-range thinking bred by high uncertainty made many officeholders greedy, for feathering one’s nest was one way to hedge against an unascertainable future. As the trenchant Oleg Poptsov noted, “When [authority] is transient and when society is poor and has lost all basis for guarantees, the danger rises a hundredfold that someone will take advantage of power in order to live well after a stay in office.”8
The ambiguity of limits was only the half of it. Emulation of foreign models was the rage in Moscow, and it bled into things political. It could manifest itself in trivialities—such as the electric g
olf carts purchased for Barvikha-4 after Yeltsin saw George Bush tooling around in one at Camp David in February 1992—but it was not limited to them. Copycat and wishful thinking impelled Yeltsin and his peers toward institutional inventions (a presidency and vice presidency, a constitutional court, and so forth) that often were underspecified and unsynchronized with the surrounding scene. As Yeltsin was to observe mordantly in Notes of a President, “there arose beautiful structures and beautiful titles with nothing behind them.”9 Beneath the surface, the very infrastructure of government was buckling. There was marker after marker of it: a doubling in rates of violent crime, to levels comparable to those in Colombia, Jamaica, and Swaziland; spreading corruption, especially after privatization; porous borders; tax evasion by the business class and a yawning budget deficit; a torn social safety net; and demonetization, the flight from the inflation-devalued ruble into dollars, money surrogates, and barter.10 The army, the crown jewel of Russian governments since Ivan the Terrible, plunged from 2.75 million men under arms in 1992 to a million in 1999; officers and enlisted men huddled in tents after the post–Cold War efflux from Eastern Europe; the pay of a majority of the officer corps was in arrears.11 And the Communist Party, whose hierarchical apparatus and mass membership base had kept the Soviet state intact, was gone.
Inside the machinery of Russian government, Yeltsin was faced with an enfeeblement of discipline and accountability, as comes out in his anecdote about two reformist members of his first cabinet. Eduard Dneprov, the education minister put into office in 1990, wanted curriculum changes in the schools. He was able to implement some, having had “the luck to work things out under the old regime, when people still listened to the bosses.” Academician Andrei Vorob’ëv was commissioned minister of health in late 1991, and made no headway with his advocacy of a role for private physicians and clinics: “Vorob’ëv’s system immediately fell into disorganization. No one understood it or wanted to do a thing about it for one reason only—the staff of the ministry had simply ceased to function.”12 For Yeltsin the mutineer, remember, being a steely “boss for the bosses” had been a selling point. Now the compliance of bosses and underbosses was a question mark.
Boris Yeltsin’s predicament had an international dimension. Governments the length and breadth of Eurasia faced problems of staggering complexity. In fourteen of the fifteen post-Soviet capitals, there was the silver lining of freedom from foreign—Russian—domination. It was a unity elixir and bought reformers a blame-free startup period. In Moscow, there was no silver lining. The Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Georgians had attained statehood and membership in the global community. What Yeltsin and the Russians got was less of what they had before—a diminished state struggling to maintain regional influence, let alone the USSR’s say in global affairs. About three in four Russian citizens in 1992 accepted the expiration of the Soviet Union as an accomplished fact; two in three were sorry that it had happened. 13 Once the divorce was final, little about it redounded to the political benefit of Yeltsin. “I was convinced,” he testifies, “that Russia had to rid itself of its imperial mission.” Once nationalized, it “needed a stronger, tougher . . . policy in order not to lose its significance and authority altogether.” Greater authority, however, did not come to pass in the post-Soviet space. Yeltsin himself bewailed the hole in the heart of the deposed ruling nation: “We [Russians] seem almost to be embarrassed by the fact that we are so big and incoherent, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We are tortured by a certain feeling of emptiness.”14 If the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union made the United States the solitary superpower, it made Russia the solitary ex-superpower. One had a superiority complex, the other an inferiority complex for which no curative was offered.
Yeltsin was not overdrawing when he said “the specter of discord and civil war” hung over Russia and the ex-USSR in the first half of the 1990s.15 Gorbachev rates praise for self-restraint and the prevention of a bloodletting. Yeltsin deserves more and has not always received it. The celerity of the parting of the ways after Belovezh’e was preferable many times over to an endeavor to salvage the union state through violence. At home, Yeltsin dampened Russian revanchism, jingoism, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In the “Near Abroad,” he reached understandings with the majority of the non-Russian fourteen, repatriated troops, did not employ ethnic Russians as a fifth column, and helped float their economies by supplying oil and gas at discounted prices. The most combustive of the potential altercations in the region involved lands over the Russian frontier and populated mostly by ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, a list that for some nationalists included northern Kazakhstan, Trans-Dniester in Moldova, and the Donbass, Sevastopol and all of the Crimean peninsula, and Odessa area in Ukraine. Yeltsin never pressed claims to these territories. Russia’s military involvement as a peacekeeper in three fragile states (Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan) shaded over into tampering and patronage of pro-Moscow districts, but these were the aberrations that proved the rule.
Let us not forget Yugoslavia, communism’s other multiethnic federation, in those same years. It was a school picnic compared to a possible conflagration in the middle of Eurasia, where the Russians would have been cast as the xenophobic and irredentist Serbs and Yeltsin as Slobodan Milošević. The Russians outnumber the Serbs fifteen to one, and a war of Russians against non-Russians in the former Soviet Union, or of all against all, would have been fought on territory larger than the South American continent and housing millions of soldiers, trainloads of atomic arms (many of them not initially under Moscow’s control),16 and a thousand tons of fissile material. Yeltsin’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, Andrei Kozyrev, knew the Balkans well and often hashed over with him a Yugoslav scenario for Russia. Gaidar, who had lived in Belgrade as a boy and graduated from secondary school there, had similar conversations with the president.17 The range of comparisons would include partitions and intercommunal wars in the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and Indochina. Without hyperbole, the historian Stephen Kotkin underlines what Yeltsin avoided: “The decolonization of Western Europe’s overseas possessions had been drawn out and bloody. The Soviet land empire . . . could have unleashed a far nastier bloodbath, even an end to the world” through thermonuclear holocaust.18
For diplomacy with the world powers, the man from Sverdlovsk was at first woefully unprepared. Kozyrev shopped around in Washington and West European capitals the message that their leaders should personalize their relations with him and appeal to his better instincts.19 Yeltsin took to addressing his opposite numbers by their first names, often prefaced by “my friend” (my friend George, my friend Bill, my friend Helmut), no easy thing for a stolid Russian male. A mutual admiration society with Robert S. Strauss, the American ambassador to Moscow in 1991–92, helped groom him for the relationship with the United States.20 Yeltsin was a quick study. On his first official visit to Washington, D.C., he announced in Reaganesque words to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 17, 1992, that Russia “has made its final choice in favor of a civilized way of life, common sense, and universal human heritage. . . . Communism has no human face. Freedom and communism are incompatible.” Referring to an agreement he and Bush had just concluded to trim nuclear arms by the year 2000, Yeltsin pointedly told Americans that it was in the West’s as well as Russia’s interest for his Great Leap Outward to succeed: “Today the freedom of America is being upheld in Russia. Should the reforms fail, it will cost hundreds of billions” to mop up.21
The hope for a deep partnership with Western governments and institutions, and for buttressing the post-communist Russian state from without, proved evanescent. In 1991–92, as price reform bit and living standards sank, never did the United States, the European Union, or the G-7 really consider forgiveness of Russia’s foreign debt—a liability, incurred by the regime the reformers were trying to put behind, whose impact has been compared to that of World War I reparations on Weimar Germany.22 The U.S. Freedom Support Act, passed in O
ctober 1992, earmarked about $400 million for technical and humanitarian assistance to all the post-Soviet countries, a drop in the bucket of need if there ever was one. Under the Clinton administration, American bilateral assistance came to $2,580,500,000. Two-thirds of those dollars were spent in 1994, and Russia’s slice of the pie, with no ethnic lobby to fight for it, slouched from more than 60 percent in 1994 to less than 20 percent in 1999.23 From 1993 to 1999, American aid would come to $2.50 annually per Russian man, woman, and child. It totaled about 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget in the year 1996, or one-quarter of the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier—at a time when the evisceration of the Soviet threat let the United States draw down military manpower by 30 percent—and the money flowed primarily to American contractors, not to Russians or Russian organizations. Multilateral assistance siphoned through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the IMF, which Russia joined in June 1992) was larger in volume, yet was belated and took the form of repayable loans. “In spite of requests for support from radical reformers of whose goals it could only approve . . . the Fund was slow in giving meager support on stringent terms.”24 Not inaccurately, Bill Clinton was to adjudge the effort as “a forty-watt bulb in a damned big darkness.”25 In the security sphere, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (sponsored by Democratic senator Sam Nunn and Republican senator Richard Lugar) funded the decommissioning of nuclear arsenals in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and enhanced the safety of all. In Yeltsin’s and Russia’s estimation, and in mine, this gain paled before the loss caused by the policy of mechanically expanding the NATO military alliance eastward to take in former republics and dependencies of the USSR but not Russia itself.
Yeltsin Page 36