Yeltsin liked to tell his wife and children that he intended to see one hundred but might be willing to settle for eighty-five. As he grew old, he grew more introspective, and as he did he gave considerable thought to spiritual issues. There was abundant media speculation in Russia in 2007 that he had undergone a religious re-conversion and died a devout Orthodox Christian. It was whetted by the church funeral he received, by word that he had gone on a trip to the biblical Holy Land weeks before his fatal illness, and by the Patriarch’s statement at the fortieth-day rite, on June 1, that Yeltsin in recent times had journeyed from atheism to being a believer (veruyushchii).
It is clear that Yeltsin’s curiosity about, and regard for, religion revived during and after the collapse of communism. When he and Billy Graham spent an hour together in Moscow in July 1991, it was with pride that he said his grandchildren all wore crucifixes around their necks. “I could tell,” Graham recalled, “that he was growing in his sympathetic attitude toward the church and toward the gospel.”28 Yeltsin attended services on holidays from the late 1980s onward; during them, he would make an offering, light a votive candle, and cross himself in the Orthodox fashion, right shoulder before the left. At his mother’s funeral in 1993, he is said to have queried one of the priests about the afterlife.29 His attention to religious themes appears to have increased after 2000. In an interview in 2006, he for the only time in public referred to God as a presence and to himself as having a soul: “For me, God is the creature who knows what goes on in my soul. He sees within me that which no one else sees. And I want to believe God sees that my thoughts have been clean.”30 In late March and early April of 2007, he traveled to Jordan, which he had seen once before, on government business, in 1999. He and Naina stayed at a Dead Sea resort and took a drive one day to the River Jordan. Yeltsin waded in and washed his face in the waters of the river, close by the place Jesus is thought to have been baptized. The couple, in Naina’s words, “warmly addressed God” by voicing words of prayer together.31
Despite these incidents, Yeltsin, like most Russians, did not worship weekly, did not pray regularly or keep the Lenten fast, and did not delve in any detail into church teachings. He was drawn mostly in a general, cultural sense to the faith of his parents and grandparents. He did take comfort, however, from what he knew of it, and showed so in gestures that the communist of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s would never have made.
The beginning of the end for Yeltsin was the fall he took on the bathroom floor of a hotel suite in Sardinia on September 7, 2005. He fractured his left thigh bone up near the hip and had to have surgery on the joint upon his return to Moscow. He was on crutches for several months and walked with a limp after that. Less mobile than before, he exercised less and put on weight. He began to feel a malaise in the autumn of 2006. His perennial aide, Vladimir Shevchenko, noticed that winter that he was “more inside himself.” “He was thinking things over, taking them to heart, reconsidering.”32
Yeltsin caught a head cold in Jordan that did not respond to rest. Shortly after getting back to Moscow, on April 11, 2007, he was admitted to the Central Clinical Hospital. He persuaded the doctors to discharge him after two days. On April 16 he was readmitted with an upper respiratory infection and symptoms of failure of the heart, lungs, and internal organs. He and his wife fully expected him to recover: He had been sicker than this in 2001 and had pulled through. He laid plans that weekend to be given his release early the coming week. About eight A.M. on Monday, April 23, Naina spoke to his adjutant by phone and said she would come in to help him wash up and shave. At 8:20 Yeltsin’s eyes went blank. She was told and rushed to the hospital. He was in intensive care, in a coma, when she made it there. Naina covered him with a shawl and sprinkled him with water she had taken from the Jordan.33 His pulse stopped at 3:45 P.M.
Neither the family nor the government had made funeral plans. That evening Putin announced a day of national mourning for the Wednesday. He proposed through his office and through the Patriarch an Orthodox service and accompanying state honors, with burial in Novodevichii Cemetery. Naina gladly accepted. Overnight Tuesday the body lay in state under the golden dome of the neo-Byzantine Cathedral of Christ the Savior, destroyed by Stalin in the 1930s and rebuilt from scratch in the 1990s. There had been no time to take down the banners from Easter, April 8. Yeltsin’s Soviet-era and post-Soviet medals were on view on a velvet cushion. Twenty-five thousand people filed briskly by the open oak casket, draped in the Russian tricolor. The morning of Wednesday, April 25, the family was comforted by Putin, by former Yeltsin associates, by foreign statesmen (Clinton and Kohl again, George H. W. Bush, Lech Wałesa, a total of thirty-five sitting and former national leaders), and by UPI classmates. The most surprising to find among the mourners was Yeltsin’s archrival, Gorbachev. Their paths had not crossed since December 1991. Gorbachev “stood there downcast and suddenly looked much older. It was evident that he was suffering in ways that few in the hall were. Together with the life of Boris Yeltsin, a piece of his own life had been torn away.”34 Naina thanked him for coming and wished him well.
Twenty white-robed clergy chanted the requiem mass at midday. A hearse took the coffin in procession from the cathedral to Novodevichii and an armored vehicle pulled it through the gates on a gun carriage. Behind the red walls, Yeltsin’s widow tucked a white handkerchief inside the casket and took her leave.35 It was lowered into one of the last plots left in the congested graveyard, where Nikita Khrushchev, alone of the Soviet leaders, and Yeltsin’s favorite writer, Anton Chekhov, lie and where he had planned to put Lenin. Three cannons fired a salvo and a band played the new-old national anthem.
Coda
Legacies of an Event-Shaping Man
What makes a political leader interesting is not necessarily what makes him influential. Reactions to his personality and to its unfolding over a life span will always be subjective. When it comes to the actor’s influence, it has to be gauged on two dimensions, the empirical and the normative. The key empirical question is about facts—how much of a difference the man made. The key normative question is about values—whether the difference was for good or for evil.
Immediate responses to Boris Yeltsin’s passing in 2007 are illustrative. The day of his funeral, KPRF deputies refused to stand for a minute of silence in the Duma. One of them joked bitterly that a stake of ash wood should be hammered into his grave, as if he were a vampire. The communists were in no doubt that Yeltsin’s influence had been overpowering. The source of their fury was the sentiment that communism’s and the Soviet Union’s demise was a crime for which he ought to be condemned.1
It would have done Yeltsin’s heart good to hear Anatolii Chubais, his associate in many projects, reach for precedents: “If you try to understand who in the history of Russia measures up to Boris Nikolayevich in the sum of what he did, perhaps [you would look to] Peter the Great. Or maybe it would be Lenin and Stalin combined, only each of them had a minus sign and [Yeltsin] had a plus sign.”2 Chubais thus rated Yeltsin high on both the empirical and the normative scales.
At the memorial banquet in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin preferred in his eulogy to link Yeltsin’s life with freedom: “It is the rare person who is given the destiny to become free himself and at the same time to carry millions along behind him, and to inspire truly historic changes in his homeland and transform the world.”3 Putin’s eloquent words make you wonder what he meant by freedom, given his labors since 1999 to retrench the liberties Yeltsin had helped install. One suspects they were propaganda for his approach no less than a heartfelt attempt to honor Yeltsin.
For one more assessment, we may turn to Viktor Shenderovich, the head writer of Kukly, the television satire that tirelessly parodied Yeltsin from 1994 to 1999. His tribute was emotional and poetic. Yeltsin, Shenderovich wrote, did many things right and many things wrong, but he apologized for his mistakes at the end of the day and he surrendered power, as no tsar or general secretary had ever done. The sincerity of his confessi
on mitigated the mistakes. “He asked our forgiveness—so let’s forgive him!” Shenderovich’s Yeltsin was, quite like the Yeltsin of this volume, a paradox:
He was someone out of [the nineteenth-century writers Alexander] Ostrovsky and [Nikolai] Leskov, with [Mikhail] Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoevsky thrown in. He was large-scale, authentic, perpetually breaking out of bounds, not susceptible to simple description. Everything he did, he did himself. His victories and his disasters were all in his own hand and were a match for his personality—enormous. . . . He had character enough for a whole army division. Fate broke itself against this flint many times. But he would not have been Russian if he was not capable of self-destruction. And he never would have been first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom of the CPSU if he did not know how to step all over people. He was of one bone and one flesh with the nomenklatura and of one bone and one flesh with the people.
On the benevolent side, Shenderovich offered a selective comparison with Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. In the days Yeltsin came under fire for his missteps, he tolerated the flak. Putin, whose subordinates had Kukly yanked from the airwaves in 2002, did not, and therein lay a difference that gave “some basis for talking about the scope of [Yeltsin’s] personality.”4
If assessments of a historical figure, especially on the normative plane, often diverge, attempts to come to closure by appealing to the person himself or to the court of public opinion are unlikely to be satisfactory. Out of power, Yeltsin, in this instance, simultaneously stood by his record and conceded some veracity to the charge that he failed to bring about the speedy improvement he had promised. While still in office, he could display a sense of humor about the partial and discordant results he was getting. At a Kremlin luncheon in the mid-1990s, John Major asked him to describe the state of Russia in one word. “Good,” Yeltsin said. Major was flabbergasted, since he had the impression the place was going to the dogs. The Briton next asked him to give his diagnosis in two words. “Not good,” Yeltsin replied drolly.5
The populace, who in Yeltsin’s second term and into his retirement years were inclined to appraise him unkindly, have drifted toward a similar ambivalence. In April 2000 the Public Opinion Foundation asked a representative sample of voting-age adults whether Yeltsin had played a positive or negative role in Russian history. Only 18 percent saw him in a positive light, while 68 percent were negative and 14 percent could not answer. Shortly after Yeltsin’s death, the poll was repeated. By this time, favorable and unfavorable readings had equalized, as 40 percent of respondents believed Yeltsin’s contribution was positive, 41 percent saw it as negative, and 19 percent were unable to say. Positive reviews in 2007 were 13 percentage points ahead of negatives among respondents who fully trusted President Putin, presumably reflecting Putin’s gracious send-off as well as Yeltsin having been his patron. The gap was 10 to 12 points among persons thirty-five or younger, university graduates, and residents of the big cities.6 These are kinder results than polls have revealed for the contemporary reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev.7
Soviet communism died not even twenty years ago. Most would agree that ultimate perspective on Yeltsin and his role will be more attainable when a generation or two has passed than it is at present. The best we can do right now is come up with the first, rough draft. I put one forward in full recognition of Yeltsin’s many paradoxes and imperfections. His paradoxes do not rule out a verdict, and his imperfections do not rule out a positive one.
It is helpful in summing up Yeltsin’s record to revisit a thought-provoking treatise about “the hero in history” penned in the 1940s by the philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook discriminated between two types of hero, the “eventful man,” the pale imitation, and the “event-making man,” the hero deserving of the name. Both come along at “forking points of history” that are admissive of alternative solutions to human problems. The eventful man happens to be in the right spot at the right time and commits a trite act that pushes the players down one avenue and not another. The event-making man—Hook adduced as examples Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin—encounters a fork in the road and “also helps, so to speak, to create it.” The event maker goes beyond choosing the one tine of the fork; his qualities of intelligence, will, and temperament boost its odds of success.8
From his entry into the Soviet industrial establishment in the 1950s through to his appointment as Communist Party prefect of the city of Moscow in the 1980s, Yeltsin was either a historically irrelevant man or at very most an eventful man, confined by structures and routines that gave room for innovation only at the margin. The case for him as a hero in history, therefore, is going to be proved or disproved with reference to the event-packed years 1985 to 1999.
How would we know an event-making man if we saw one? Five tests are applicable to Yeltsin or any other candidate.
The first asks whether the leader in question has what Erik Erikson in Gandhi’s Truth called the capacity “to step out of line” and to address the central issues of the day in a fresh way. This happens, as Erikson wrote, only when there is “a confluence [between] a deeply personal need and a national trend,” the product of which, in a certain period of the person’s life, is a “locomotor drivenness” to effect change.9
Yeltsin stayed in line well into middle age. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, stirred by inner testing and rebellion scripts and by changes in the social environment, he broke stride and linked his personal journey to larger trends. In so doing, Yeltsin turned political disgrace into vindication and parlayed vindication into political realignment and victory. His gift was not originality or profundity of thought but the ability to translate abstractions into the idiom of ordinary people. From knee-jerk populism he moved to adopt a program for de-monopolization through democratization, market reform, and territorial devolution that addressed main issues of the day, and in such a way as to stay a half-step ahead of his rivals.10 It earned him the opportunity to preside over the birth of a nation and an attempt to construct a bold new future for it.
A second criterion for identifying an event-making man is the faculty of “political judgment,” as Isaiah Berlin succinctly labeled it. Political judgment has to do with grasping a political situation in its totality, synthesizing the whole out of discrete facts and imponderables, and discriminating “what matters from the rest.” Berlin drew an analogy with the motorist coming up to a rickety-looking bridge. The driver with road judgment, without ever learning about how to engineer piers, struts, or ties, senses through a “semi-instinctive skill” whether or not the bridge will bear the weight of his vehicle. 11 In public affairs, it takes a leader of political judgment to see Hook’s fork in the road for what it is, and not to overlook or misconstrue it.
Yeltsin incontrovertibly possessed political judgment. It was based primarily on the instinctive aptitude that Berlin put accent on. Intuition, not grand theory, whispered in his ear in 1986–87 that Gorbachev’s gradualist program was falling short. We saw in Chapter 8 that Gorbachev concluded about Yeltsin’s feel for the situation and for his commanding role in it that “A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar.” Gorbachev could not take charge with that kind of force; Yeltsin could and did. An inner voice led him to conclude in 1991–92 that a Great Leap Outward was indispensable to compel the new Russia into step with a rapidly evolving world. It convinced him to go for the brass ring in the constitutional conflict of 1992–93 and to throw himself into the presidential race of 1996. After re-election and medical intervention, it led him to try to reform the reforms and, when that did not work, to try to salvage them. While nothing like infallible, Yeltsin’s political judgment repeatedly showed itself to be superior to that of his adversaries, from Gorbachev through Ruslan Khasbulatov, Gennadii Zyuganov, and Yurii Luzhkov.
The third test to pose of a potentially great leader is to see if he demonstrates a talent for identifying and tapping into new sources of political power. For example, Robert Caro in his epic study of Lyndon Johnson finds that as majority le
ader of the U.S. Senate in the 1950s he “looked for power in places where no previous [holder of that office] had thought to look for it—and he found it. And he created new powers, employing a startling ingenuity and imagination to transform parliamentary techniques . . . transforming them so completely that they became in effect new techniques and mechanisms.”12 Johnson on Capitol Hill leveraged, adjusted, and manipulated procedural rules. Other effective leaders have acted as entrepreneurs in markets wider than the institutions in which they are based.
By this yardstick, Yeltsin fares no less well. Unlike Gorbachev, he had the ingenuity and imagination in the perestroika period to realize that people power, as channeled in competitive elections, would trump administrative power and build legitimacy. He used symbolic acts, such as his demand for rehabilitation at the Nineteenth CPSU Conference in 1988 and his magical moment on Tank No. 110 in 1991, to craft and project an image that towered over all others. Enough remained of his legitimacy and his image to save him in 1996 and, combined with the powers of the presidency, as ratified in the 1993 constitutional referendum, to tide him over the recurrent crises of the late 1990s.
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