Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  I f you become president

  Of a surprising country,

  You will never be surprised

  By anything, you see!

  Here two times two makes thirty-eight,

  And the compass points to the east;

  Here princesses are made from frogs,

  And soup from axes.

  The Turks [Turkish construction workers] are in GUM

  [the big Moscow department store]

  And the Urks [goblins] are in the Duma,

  And the communists believe in Christ.

  And that, you see,

  Is why reform doesn’t work!

  You can sign as many decrees as you like

  And damn the consequences—

  It doesn’t matter because here in Russia

  No one carries them out!

  And if you want things to get better,

  They will get a thousand times worse.

  Here it is not so good to govern honorably—

  People won’t understand.

  Generally, I can’t believe

  What a weird country this is.

  Luckily, I have five more years

  To figure out what’s going on.109

  The conclusion is that the problem with the times lay not only with the man at the top but with the Russian disarray, which he had internalized and which had helped sweep him to power. Yeltsin may not have laughed at the charade—he watched Kukly only several times and decided it was not for him.110 He did, though, get out of the way of others laughing. In a country where politics were more associated with tears, this was something to be grateful for.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Governing the State

  Weekdays and most Saturdays through 1996, President Yeltsin got up at five A.M., did his ablutions, breakfasted, eyeballed briefs and a press digest, and was on the job by 8:30. From Barvikha-4 he commuted five miles eastward on the Rublëvo-Uspenskoye Highway and through the pine-forested corridor along the Moskva River where the Soviet upper crust had their dachas and the New Russians were beginning to put up more commodious dwellings. In Moscow, his car whisked him inbound on “the government route” (pravitel’stvennaya trassa) for official limousines and cavalcades, down Kutuzov Prospect and Novyi Arbat Street, and up a ramp into the Kremlin through the Borovitskii Gate.1

  Writ small, Boris Yeltsin’s workplace was the vaulted, wainscoted office in Building No. 1, handed over to him by Gorbachev in 1991. As a personal touch, he had the desk decorated with a lamp and writing set made of turquoise-hued Urals malachite.2 He described the room in retirement in hushed tones and in the present tense. To the left as he occupies his chair is the console through which he can dial any member of his government on a hotline. The wood surface before him he knows like the back of his hand. If one file folder is awry, “I experience an unaccountable irritation.”3 The shipshape folders, readied before his arrival by his head of chancery, Valerii Semenchenko, are color-coded: In the red ones, to the side of the control panel, lie decrees, letters, and papers that are to be read and signed at once; in the white, in the center, there is lesser correspondence needing his attention; and in the green folders, on the right, he finds laws voted by parliament and requests for clemency.

  As Yeltsin’s loving account conveys, his workplace writ large was the executive branch of the state. The white folders, on which he makes a checkmark as he riffles through them, were a porthole:

  They contain the entire life of the state—of the state as a vehicle, if you will, with a steering mechanism, an engine, and moving parts. From these white folders, you can understand how the vehicle works, whether the engine knocks, whether the wheels are falling off. They hold documents from various agencies and ministries, all of them awaiting my agreement. . . . Hidden behind each line is the intricate web of public administration. . . . The contents of these white folders, out of sight of the public, constitute the inner workings of our gargantuan state.

  The green folders captivate him least, since they mostly originate in the legislature. The papers in the red folders, holding draft edicts, are the business end of government:

  When a decree comes out of a folder, someone is dismissed or appointed. If it stays in the folder, the decision is shelved. Sometimes several people wait for these decrees and sometimes the whole country. . . . And [they are] not only about hiring and firing. . . . One thing I know for certain is that what sits in [these folders] today will be the main event tomorrow. . . . If a muddleheaded or ill-thought-out decision is found there, something is wrong with the system and with the mechanism for making decisions, and something is wrong inside of me.4

  Like so much in Russia after communism, this was a habitat in transition—partly continuous with the past, partly reformed, partly in disrepair. Yeltsin was required by circumstances to devote inordinate effort to keeping his state vital, to ensuring that the wheels did not fall off or the engine freeze up. But he also wanted to steer the vehicle to make his anti-revolutionary revolution. And this was an exercise that stretched him as few others did. The pulverizing effects of the Soviet collapse had made the post-communist state an object to be governed and not only a subject of governance. Yeltsin was a wizard at exerting personal control over the machine. He was less proficient at using it to effect social change.

  Yeltsin cadged many particulars of formal institutional design from abroad.5 His model of leadership after communism, however, was a homegrown syncretism of ingredients shaped as much by usage and improvisation as by laws and organization charts. It borrowed from three wells of inspiration.

  The first and for Yeltsin the definitive source was his sense of historical mission, which linked up with his success script and expansive sense of self. A presidential form of government, he exclaimed at his first inauguration, had resonance in a country whose populace had always been voiceless. By aggregating political power and personifying it in a freely chosen individual, presidentialism would engender “a voluntary interdependence” between leader and led, as there never was under the tsars or the Communist Party. His election was a wager on reform: “The citizens . . . have selected not only a personality but the road down which Russia is to go . . . the road of democracy, reforms, and rebirth of human dignity.”6

  When Yeltsin spoke of carrying out the mandate, he frequently dramatized himself in the third person. His October 1991 speech previewing shock therapy is a top-flight example. Russia and its leader, he said, were at a branching point where a choice about trajectory had to be made. “Your president” had already chosen. “I have never sought out easy paths, but I can see with clarity that the coming months will be the most difficult for me. If I have your support and faith, I am ready to travel this road with you to the end.”7 A strong head of state would proceed down the chosen highway in lockstep with his fellow travelers in society. Their support, given in a democratic election, raised him above all other servants of the state and gave him the cape of legitimacy, as it had in his battle with Mikhail Gorbachev and the CPSU.

  Some inspiration flowed, counterintuitively, from a second source: Russia’s monarchic heritage. Yeltsin as a reincarnation of the tsar was a recurrent motif in the discourse of the 1990s, as it once was for Stalin.8 Gorbachev, we have seen, attributed to his nemesis the ability “to conduct himself like a tsar,” a knack Gorbachev knew he could not equal. Some scholars have referred to Yeltsin pejoratively as “Tsar Boris” and an “elected monarch” ringed by courtiers and lackeys.9 Some Yeltsin supporters at the time put a positive spin on the royalist argot. Boris Nemtsov, the reformist governor of Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky from 1932 to 1990), who was to move to Moscow in Yeltsin’s second term, was the leading popularizer. He sketched the myth in expansive and flexible strokes:

  Yeltsin is a true Russian tsar. That is what he is about, with all the pluses and minuses, with all his recklessness and sprees, with his decisiveness and courage, and the odd time with his bashfulness. Unlike the “bad” Russian tsars, Yeltsin is a “good” Russian t
sar and a completely forgiving person. For all that, his physique plays a role: he is such an enormous peasant and from the Urals.

  Naturally, all kinds of intrigues wind around him, and many people try to get something for themselves out of their closeness to him. But he is an unselfish person, of that I am certain.

  He is a lord of the manor [barin], sure, yet not the kind who bathes in luxury. I think luxury is of little appeal to him. He is the tsar, and first and last he feels responsibility for what is going on. He takes to heart, though very much in his peculiar way, goings-on in the country.

  Nemtsov recalled Yeltsin’s pyrotechnics in August 1991, which he witnessed from the plaza of the Russian White House: “He leaped up on the tank. Everyone held him in honor and was covered in goose pimples. ‘This is the kind of tsar we have [they thought], a president who is afraid of nothing.’” Nemtsov went on to describe a Yeltsin excursion to Nizhnii Novgorod in early 1992, when Nemtsov was presidential envoy. He and the city mayor were “spellbound” as Yeltsin castigated a factory manager for the inedible food in the workers’ canteen and then told Nemtsov to fire the director of a grocery store for overpricing butter—the destatization of retail prices on January 2, by presidential rescript, notwithstanding. “It all brought to mind the actions of a tsar who puts things in order when he drops in on one of his patrimonial estates.”10

  Nemtsov was cavalier in his historiography: No factual tsar hailed from a peasant hut or the Urals. If utterances like his had little to offer as doctrine, they did conform to canonical themes in Russian political culture. In particular, they consorted with the timeless idea of the nation’s leader as a father figure both authoritative and possessing the common touch. Yeltsin as president looked the part, up to a point. Like a storybook tsar, he asserted the right, when justice and raison d’état prescribed, to buck parchment rules (by pardoning reprobates), bureaucratic formalities (by short-circuiting the chain of command), and precedent (by countermanding decrees he had authored). With citizens and midlevel officials, his bearing was regal—posture straight, chin held high, gestures spare, manner of speech magisterial.11

  Yeltsin’s take on president-as-tsar was mixed. He did speak openly about his admiration for Peter the Great and made several public references to himself as Boris I.12 The word was sometimes used nonchalantly in family circles.13 In closeted settings, he a few times donned the mantle, as when, on a state visit to Sweden, he ribbed King Carl Gustav about the lengthiness of the seven-course palace banquet. “The king answered, ‘You have to understand, Mr. President, that we have a certain ritual here, and it has been observed since the thirteenth century.’ And Yeltsin replied jovially, ‘Listen, you are a king and I am a tsar, and you tell me the two of us cannot solve such a problem?’” Carl Gustav had the wait staff speed up the feast.14 On occasions, Yeltsin would toss out the trope of the tsar to reprimand employees. He once chastised a cheeky press secretary with the words, “Go and do what the tsar has ordered.”15 And the figure of speech in which he and members of his staff belittled matters not worth his personal attention was that they were “not the tsar’s business” (ne tsarskoye delo).

  Yeltsin in the end recognized that the partial democratization of Russia made it impolitic to apply monarchism literally. As he knew, the plasticity that was the great boon of the monarchial legend was its great bane as well. Elected monarchy is an oxymoron. Kings are chosen on the hereditary principle from a royal caste, train for the throne from birth, and sit on it until death. Yeltsin was elected to a fixed term and knew that he would have to leave his post. In an exchange with me about the subject, he saw no way to conciliate tsardom with democracy: “How can a tsar lead in a democratic society? There are certain democratic institutions through which you have to act.”16 When subalterns pressed him too hard to address a ticklish issue, he was known to turn them aside with the question, “What do you think I am, a tsar?”

  A third template for directorship of the post-communist state came from Russia’s recent national past, the Soviet period, and from Yeltsin’s personal past. The reflex here was to the CPSU boss he was in Sverdlovsk and Moscow.

  Like the provincial party prefect of yore, Yeltsin as president felt qualified, when the spirit moved him, to intervene on any issue. His onetime economic adviser Aleksandr Livshits testifies he had “the mentality of the obkom first secretary” in assuming “the right and the duty to make decisions about urgent questions then and there.”17 The interventions that counted most, as in the Soviet system, were those given verbally. The richly experienced Viktor Chernomyrdin knew the norm: “The verbal assignments the premier received [from Yeltsin] . . . were carried out strictly, which cannot be said about decrees or even the written assignments of the president. That is to say, as things had been signified in the [party] apparatus, words spoken orally outranked pieces of paper.”18 As in the Sverdlovsk obkom and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin did not sweat the small stuff of public policy, the technicalities of administration, and the legal niceties, all of which were best farmed out to specialists. He “understood the limits of what he understood,” Yegor Gaidar has said.19 He would “‘grab’ a question on the wing . . . get a feel for problems without subjecting them to long and detailed study,” to cite Boris Fëdorov, who held several economic portfolios in the first term.20 Like the party secretary, Yeltsin in the Kremlin wanted to leave his door open to petitioners and not filter the upbound flow of information and advice. To quote Livshits again, “For him to say to people who made overtures to him that he had to check with Livshits or [Georgii] Satarov [another Kremlin aide] was as good as saying he did not have vlast’ [power], and that was something he could never admit.”21

  Yeltsin also bore a resemblance to a CPSU first secretary in swinging the big stick of control over cadres.22 Anyone was expendable if he connived against the president, was flagrantly inefficient, or if Yeltsin had simply had his fill of him or wanted to reshuffle his team. Upon removal, an official would not normally be granted an audience to hear why. He could consider himself lucky if he got a telephone call giving him the news and wishing him well, and luckier still if Yeltsin found him a new position.23 On average, deputy premiers in Yeltsin’s first term lasted sixteen months; ordinary members of the Council of Ministers lasted twenty-three months. By the time he faced re-election in 1996, Yeltsin was on his seventh finance minister, his sixth minister of economics and trade, his fifth minister of regional development, and his fourth ministers of agriculture and energy. In the national-security realm, he had one defense minister and two foreign ministers in term one, but three chairmen of the Security Council, four heads of state security, and four interior ministers.24

  Yeltsin, like many partocrats in their day, turned courtesies and picayune favors to his advantage. He did it not only to build personal fealty, as had been the practice in Soviet days, but to paper over cracks in the post-Soviet institutional edifice. During the strife with Ruslan Khasbulatov and the Supreme Soviet, he played this card adroitly, especially with holdovers from the communist establishment:

  Having all that experience in the nomenklatura, Yeltsin appreciated that if former communists, even those numbered among his most ferocious opponents, could be “affectionately” brought nearer to the president’s chair, then their communist radicalism might blow off like smoke. Besides “political goodies,” Yeltsin made skillful and maybe cynical use of pittances—a prestigious position, an apartment, a dacha, medical care in the Central Clinical [Kremlin] Hospital, a car. In a quid pro quo for political loyalty, he could tolerate and forgive a great deal, foremost with the regional leaders. Many leaders of the [parliamentary] opposition and opposition deputies were seduced in the same way and at the requisite moment ended up as “clients” of the president.25

  Parliament at first had an independent apparatus for granting supplies and perquisites to members, as did the prime minister’s office and the judiciary. In November 1993, a month after coming down on the parliamentary rebels, Yeltsin centralized
the servicing of the federal government under one roof, a unified Presidential Business Department with more than 30,000 employees. The Fourth Chief Directorate of the old Soviet Ministry of Health, of which he had been so critical when in opposition, had been under presidential control since 1991. It was renamed the department’s Government Medical Center.26 Yeltsin selected Pavel Borodin, a Siberian city mayor championed by Aleksandr Korzhakov, to head the department and exhorted him to “feed the administration [executive office] and the government well.”27 The department’s budgetary demands “grew in geometrical progression” the moment Borodin was appointed, says Boris Fëdorov, the finance minister in 1993.28 The Kremlin quartermaster also showed great inventiveness in giving his unit a market aspect—primarily to finance operations and special projects such as the Kremlin reconstruction, although many suspected it was also to provide emoluments to officials. The business department not only operated facilities taken from its Soviet antecedents (such as office and apartment buildings, the TsKB and other clinics, hotels, farms, construction organizations, and ateliers) but diversified its funding by going into for-profit healthcare, banking, commercial real estate, and oil exports.29 Borodin spent the next six years on Yeltsin’s behalf meting out perks—offices, apartments and dachas, travel and vacation vouchers, hospital stays, and even books and cellphones—to lawmakers, bureaucrats, and judges.

  Borodin—known to one and all as Pal Palych, a contraction of his first name and patronymic—was a bon vivant and reputed to be the best joketeller in the government, able to hold his ground with professional comedians. He emceed many presidential lunches and dinners and was the only official permitted to tell gags at them. The function of the Ministry of Privileges, as the press christened his agency, was no laughing matter. For the good of Yeltsin and democracy, it systematized service provision for the elite on a scale surpassing Soviet precedent. The soil was fertile: Housing and other goods and services were starting to be distributed commercially in Russia; state officials could not afford the best of them on their wages; and any revision of individual status still required a sheaf of permissions. “Goodies” that could be granted could also be withheld. When Yeltsin wanted to turn up the political heat on the Duma in the summer of 1995 and the spring of 1996, deputies were put on notice that, were the Duma to be dissolved, they would lose their offices and attendants, franking privileges, and VIP apartments in Moscow.