Yeltsin
Page 62
A fourth and related criterion is about the short-term impact of the leader’s decisions during his time in the driver’s seat. Were his decisions while in a position of authority consequential or not? The easiest event for which to give an unqualified yes would be Yeltsin’s rallying of opposition to the attempted coup d’état of August 1991. Sergei Stankevich, the historian who was a democratic legislator and Yeltsin adviser until the mid-1990s, believes Yeltsin’s charisma counted for more than all other proximate causes combined. The Yeltsin factor, by Stankevich’s estimate, had 60 percent of the causal power in August. Guesswork the number may be, but it is suggestive guesswork. If it were 50 percent or 40 percent or 30 percent, it would still have been an awe-inspiring effect.13 The 1987 secret speech and the 1991 theater on the tank had powerful multiplier effects and reverberated in the system for years.
Countless other well-placed observers bear witness to the same for Yeltsin’s two terms as president. To quote but one of them, Anatolii Kulikov, who commanded Russian forces in Chechnya and headed the Interior Ministry for three years, and who finds fault with much of Yeltsin’s behavior:
There is one thing you cannot deny him, and that is that over the course of an entire decade he remained the central figure in the country’s political life. Let’s not kid ourselves. Boris Yeltsin—whether you are talking about the late Yeltsin or the early Yeltsin, good or bad, take your pick—not only loved to dominate but knew how to dominate the people around him. His character, his political calculations, and his energy and initiative were the causes of the majority of the huge events of this swift-flowing Yeltsin epoch. . . . His words and actions have left footprints on the fate of every Russian.14
Many of Yeltsin’s key decisions, in areas as diverse as shock therapy, rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims, and the interment of the Romanovs, were affirmative, about making something desirable happen. But some of his most important choices and impacts were preventive, about keeping something undesirable from happening.15 His anti-putsch actions in August 1991 are one obvious example. A no less telling one is his multifaceted management of center-periphery and majority-minority relations and his efforts to avert what could have been a vortex of territorial and ethnic hatreds on an order of magnitude ghastlier than in Yugoslavia.
This claim about causal impact must, of course, be qualified in sundry ways. As we have seen, Yeltsin was never the only mover, only the most potent one. His anti-revolutionary revolution was inadequately conceptualized and inadequately explained to the population. The economic changes that were its focus were too slow to bear fruit, partly because they were compromised by the voracity of the winners and governmental appeasement of the losers. Some of the mechanisms devised, such as loans-for-shares, were seriously flawed. In his first term, Yeltsin neglected his allies, caroused too much and had psychological ups and downs, made strategic decisions arrhythmically, and overdid divide-and-rule. In his second term, these proclivities were in check. But, with his health impaired and his liabilities on the increase, his grip on the system he had forged slackened. The boss for the bosses now took evasive action as often as forward thrusts. His influence, though, was always far greater than anyone else’s, as his imposition of Putin in 1999 showed.
There is a fifth test to apply to the would-be hero in history. It concerns the forward projection of influence, after he has exited the scene. How consequential are the departing leader’s decisions in the middle term? Do they constrain his successor or successors five to ten years out?
If we disentangle change in Russia’s mixed, post-Soviet economy from political change, it is striking how indicators have reversed in the second decade after communism. Ten years ago, the Yeltsin presidency was limping to its end and Russia was bankrupt. Today the country prospers, in “a remarkable trajectory no less exceptional than that of post–World War II Germany or Japan.”16 Output has surged by 7 percent a year, disposable income is up by 11 percent a year, foreign currency reserves stand at $450 billion, and the RTS stock index has topped 2,000 points, or fifty to sixty times the all-time low in 1998. The lines for matches, kettles, and caramels that Yeltsin had to act contrite for in Sverdlovsk in the 1980s are as quaintly remote from present-day experience as the early five-year plans.
Politically, on the other hand, we see a different picture. Russia under Yeltsin could be classified as “feckless pluralism,” less than a fully articulated democracy. The regime was characterized by the presence of considerable political freedoms and of electoral contestation, although democratic practices were shallowly rooted and there was widespread mistrust of the government. Yeltsin in his valedictory speech on December 31, 1999, proclaimed that, as he had hoped in the early 1990s, change was irreversible and Russia would “proceed only forward” from now on. If the forecast holds up reasonably well in the economy, it does not in politics, where the nation has in many regards gone backward. Russia now has a “dominant-power politics” in which there is “a limited but still real political space” and some electoral competition, and yet a single power grouping, the one hinged on Putin, “dominates the system in such a way that there seems to be little possibility of alternation of power in the foreseeable future.”17
This does not mean all hope for democracy is lost. At the social base, the modernization of Russia proceeds apace. The unshackling of the individual, begun under Gorbachev and intensified under Yeltsin, has positioned its citizens well to partake in innovations in communications that give them more autonomous access to information. At the end of 2007, some 29 million Russians, or one-fifth of the population, used the Internet with some frequency, as compared to 5.7 million in 1999, and Russia had the fastestgrowing Internet community in Europe. There were 3.1 million blogs in Russia in 2007. In a country of 142 million people, cell phones numbered more than 100 million. About 3 million Russians traveled abroad that year, with passports available for the asking and the costs affordable to more and more members of the new middle class.
Developments signify that Russians treasure their personal independence but place a lower premium on political openness and accountability. In 1999, pulling off an extrication from peril worthy of Houdini and designating as his heir a KGB man through and through, Yeltsin’s vaunted intuition let him down, so far as political if not economic and social variables go. Putin has exploited the superpresidential constitution Yeltsin made and the base in public opinion Yeltsin taught him how to cultivate.18 Yeltsin unquestionably would have reversed the decision later if given the chance, sending Putin the way of Silayev, Gaidar, Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Primakov, and Stepashin. But pensioned-off leaders do not get second chances on such matters, as he was aware. Putin’s political system, a dispassionate British scholar notes, retains “the potential for renewed democratic advance.”19 Assuming that is so, it will be up people other than Yeltsin to realize that potential.
It is vital, again, to keep in mind the full range of counterfactual alternatives to what has happened. Neo-Soviet impulses in Russia and the post-Soviet space would have been much harder to contain if Yeltsin had not dissolved the CPSU and the Soviet Union in 1991. Thanks to him, the barrier to re-monopolization is high, and tens of millions of others are lucky that it is.
I conclude that Boris Yeltsin, although he managed to do much more with the cards dealt him than the ho-hum eventful man, impinged rather less and in a less linear manner than Hook’s event-making man. To talk of the agent purposefully sculpting events is to cast the role in more architectonic terms than suit Yeltsin. Revising Hook somewhat, I envisage him as an event-shaping man, an intuitivist planted in intermediate ground between event making and eventfulness. The event-shaping man recognizes the fork in the historical road, shakes up the status quo, and bumps things off their familiar track. His inbuilt qualities magnify his influence, as do ambient tendencies and ripple effects. Concurrently, these same factors limit his ability to direct and to consolidate the changes he touches off, so that he comes up short of fulfilling promises and short of
making his solutions stick. The event-shaping man kicks history’s wheels into motion, yes, but not invariably as he intends or as the situation requires.
In August 2007, Art4.ru, a private art gallery in the Moscow business district, organized an unofficial competition to design a monument to commemorate Boris Yeltsin. Nothing like the contest would have been conceivable in Soviet days. It received more than a hundred submissions from professional and amateur sculptors and graphic artists. Several dozen mockups were put on display at the gallery and on its website. The public was allowed to vote in person or electronically on five finalists selected by an expert jury. According to the coordinator, the entries fell into three categories. There were figural likenesses in the old socialist realist style. These were quickly discarded, as were “the bitter, sarcastic parodies, mostly from people who had fallen on bad luck in the 1990s and wanted to blame Yeltsin. . . . Then there were some really interesting pieces—very different from each other—that show a complicated picture of Yeltsin’s legacy.”20 The best of them captured significant and not always harmonious aspects of the historical Yeltsin.
The winner announced in October, by Dmitrii Kavarga, was a chaotic mass of dark metal with white figurines hanging upside-down from flat surfaces within it. One figure, Yeltsin, stands upright on top, which “emphasizes the force Yeltsin’s person had in a period of instability.”21 Another highly plastic scheme, by Yuliya Gukova, portrayed a rough-surfaced wall with a large crack, and out of the wall Yeltsin’s face, hands, and feet protrude. Its message was that Yeltsin was an inalienable part of the social reality he was trying to change. “With incredible, ox-like stubbornness, Yeltsin is turning the wall out of which he has grown and into which he has implanted himself. The wall turns just as the country’s history turned, and the crack is not only a yawning break in the wall but in him, too.”22 The runnerup, by Rostan Tavasiyev, was a fanciful image of Yeltsin as a toy rabbit at the foot of a wobbling stele, at the top of which sits a porcelain vase—all set against the backdrop of the Lubyanka, the KGB/FSB’s headquarters. Yeltsin here is a balancer instead of a dominator or sufferer. “Why the bunny?” the artist asked in his description. “Because there was no one else to do it. Maybe it was he who tipped it over or maybe he just happened to be near when the column started to fall.”23
My favorite composition was not in the final group, and so I was not able to cast a ballot for it when I dropped by the gallery in September. It was by Mikhail Leikin and Mariya Miturich-Khlebnikova, who collaborate under the name MishMash Project, and was titled Boris Yeltsin: The Man Who Broke Through the Wall. It features a stainless steel wall painted bright red. On one side a runner carpet, also in red, leads to a gap in the wall. The gap traces a life-size figure of Yeltsin, including hairdo and misshapen left hand. Yeltsin here is not a prisoner of the wall: He has punched right through it and left the scene. But attendees at the exhibit are to have a choice, rather as Yeltsin’s real-life legacy has given them a choice. “The viewer himself can go through the breach and feel its real human dimensions, compare them with his own and feel the toughness of the wall’s metal. He can return to the past along the carpeted path. . . . [Alternatively] the exit of the viewer out of the red zone is the path that Yeltsin traveled.”24 No future is foreclosed. The citizen can go through the wall either way, forward or backward.
Acknowledgments
The spark for this book was struck in a multi-sided conversation I had with several Russian friends and acquaintances toward the end of 1999. The idea was that a group of scholars and public-policy analysts would meet with Boris Yeltsin, who was still president of the country, and, after his expected retirement, possibly organize a collective study of his presidency. The participants in that discussion were Sergei Grigoriev, Mikhail Shvydkoi, Dmitrii Yakushkin, and Valentin Yumashev. No sooner had we had our chat than Yeltsin had quit office, and, for a variety of reasons, the original impulse to begin the study was lost. My conversation mates, however, proved willing to cooperate with my launching a one-man project, which came to encompass the full course of Yeltsin’s life. In researching and writing the book, I amassed all manner of debts to informants and information brokers. I trust they will not need to be reminded, however, that all responsibility for its line of argument and its flaws lies with me.
Interviews with players in, and close observers of, the story were key sources from the beginning. Individuals who provided specific bits of evidence used in the text are cited in the endnotes. I also had benefit of the knowledge and insights of Yevgeniya Al’bats, Anders Åslund, Pilar Bonet, Maksim Boiko, Vladimir Bykodorov, Dmitrii Donskoi, Mikhail Fedotov, Chrystia Freeland, Leonid Gozman, Kirill Ignat’ev, Irina Il’ina, Andrei Illarionov, Sergei Karaganov, Sergei Khrushchev, Yurii Kir’yakov, Paul Klebnikov, Al’fred Kokh, Pavel Kuznetsov, Yurii Levada, Viktor Manyukhin, Vladimir Mau, Garri Minkh, Vyacheslav Nikonov, Pavel Palazchenko, Nikolai Petrov, Oleg Rumyantsev, Vladimir Semënov, Lilia Shevtsova, Andrei Shleifer, Aleksandr Shokhin, Andrei Shtorkh, Vladimir Shumeiko, Nadezhda Smirnova, Boris Smolenitskii, Dmitrii Trenin, Dmitrii Vasil’ev, Aleksei Venediktov, Vladimir Vlasov, and Grace Kennan Warnecke.
I am particularly grateful to those individuals, mostly Russians, who opened other people’s doors to me—this in a climate in which imparting sensitive information to foreign specialists is not always welcomed by the authorities. Valentin Yumashev and Tatyana Yumasheva arranged for me to see Boris Yeltsin and Naina Yeltsina. They also made themselves available for interviews and follow-up exchanges on numerous points of fact and interpretation, and Tatyana located and shared revealing photographs from the family’s private collection. Sergei Grigoriev in particular put himself out to facilitate meetings in Moscow, especially in the first two years. Yevgeniya Al’bats, plying her very different network, also spared no effort. Thanks in this regard go also to Dmitrii Bakatin, Vladimir Bokser, Valerii Bortsov, James Collins, Leonid Dobrokhotov, Mikhail Fedotov, Leonid Gozman, Sergei Kolesnikov, Mikhail Margelov, Michael McFaul, Vitalii Nasedkin, Aleksandr Popov, Vladimir Shevchenko, Olga Sidorovich, and Vladimir Voronkov. When midway through the project I ran into certain travel difficulties, crucial interventions were made by several Russians and Americans whose names will go unmentioned for now.
A number of colleagues were good enough to go over draft text. Elise Giuliano, Marshall Goldman, Thane Gustafson, Mark Kramer, Alena Ledeneva, Thomas Simons, and Gwendolyn Stewart were beady-eyed readers of an early version of the entire book. I was especially influenced by the close comments of Jonathan Sanders, for whom many years ago I wrote my first (quite awful) paper on Yeltsin, and who gave me dozens of valuable leads, and by William Taubman, who convinced me to take the time needed to bring the two halves of the volume into harmony. Nanci Adler, Elena Campbell, John Dunn, Yoshiko Herrera, Edward Keenan, Gijs Kessler, Eva Maeder, Terry Martin, Olga Nikonova, Sarah Oates, Thomas Remington, Roman Szporluk, and Lynne Viola guided me to published and unpublished sources. Stephen White let me use the interview with Yakov Ryabov that is part of his oral history project at the University of Glasgow. Leon Aron shared important printed material that I was unable to locate on my own. Mark Kramer has my gratitude for identifying and retrieving key documents from the Communist Party archives and related troves. Yevgenii Kiselëv and Irena Lesnevskaya made available unique videotapes from the 1990s, and Aleksandr Oslon did the same with previously confidential polling data from the 1996 presidential election campaign. In Yekaterinburg, Anatolii Kirillov and Galina Stepanova were generous with their time, contacts, and expertise. In Berezniki, Aleksandr Abramov, Aleksandr Kerimov, Oleg Kotelnikov, and Natalya Kuznetsova were hospitable and informative. Aleksei Litvin, Dane Ponte, and Artur Yusupov helped me obtain information about Yeltsin’s childhood years in Kazan.
Masha Hedberg was my research assistant at Harvard for the two make-or-break years of the project and could not have done a better job. She accompanied me to the Urals in 2005 for a journey made productive by her tenacity. At the Davis Center for R
ussian and Eurasian Studies, Maria Altamore, Sarah Failla, Melissa Griggs, Helen Grigoriev, Ann Sjostedt, Penelope Skalnik, Lisbeth Tarlow, and Patricia Vio gave me unflagging administrative support. Masha Tarasova in Moscow patched through dozens of communications and shored up logistics. The Davis Center, the Government Department, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies underwrote travel and other expenses.
My wife, Pat, kept the home fires burning and was the first to see and apply pencil to rough drafts.
Wesley Neff placed the project with Basic Books. At Basic, Lara Heimert was wise and patient in equal measure, and Norman MacAfee expertly edited the manuscript into shape on a tight schedule.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 The lunch with a few ministers and aides began at 11:30. But the television in the dining room did not work, and so at noon the group briefly repaired to the nearby office of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko to watch the speech. The legal transfer of powers to Putin as acting president took effect at that very minute.
2 The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. It currently lags thirteen days behind the more accurate Gregorian calendar in use in the West since 1582 A.D., and so Russian Christmas falls on January 7. The Soviet government introduced the Gregorian calendar for secular purposes in 1918.
3 This was the ruling party’s name as of 1952, before which it was the All-Russian Communist Party and the Bolshevik Party.