Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  4 “Boris Yel’tsin: glavnoye delo svoyei zhizni ya sdelal” (Boris Yeltsin: I have done with the main business of my life), Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 6, 2000.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Sergei Roy, review of Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), in Moscow Times, January 22, 2000. Aron’s book, elegantly written and uniformly praiseful, is the most informative on Yeltsin’s life by a Westerner. Several of the better books were put out by journalists at the turn of the 1990s: John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991); and Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography, trans. David Gurevich (New York: Putnam’s, 1992). George W. Breslauer’s fine scholarly monograph Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) compares how Yeltsin and Gorbachev “built authority” in the 1980s and 1990s, with Gorbachev’s predecessors as Soviet general secretary as the benchmark, and offers insights into Yeltsin’s “patriarchal” aspect. Further enlightenment comes from Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995); and Jerrold M. Post, “Boris Yeltsin: Against the Grain,” Problems of Post-Communism 43 (January–February 1996), 58–62. Stewart observed Yeltsin as a photojournalist, and Post is a psychiatrist who has profiled foreign leaders for the U.S. government.

  7 Sergei Markedonov, “Boris Yel’tsin: eskiz istoricheskogo portreta” (Boris Yeltsin: outline of a historical portrait), http://polit.ru/author/2006/02/01/eltsyn_75.

  8 A recent tour of the genre describes the English as historically more “biography-obsessed” than Americans, but adds that the celebrity culture of the United States partly compensates (James Atlas, “My Subject Myself,” New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2005). See also Lewis J. Edinger, “Political Science and Political Biography: Reflections on the Study of Leadership,” Journal of Politics 26 (May 1964), 423–39. Russia scores far below both Britain and America in acceptance of biography.

  9 The best-known biographical project in the country is the series “Lives of Outstanding People,” put out by the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house in Moscow. Its almost 1,200 titles cover cultural as well as political and military figures, in Russia and abroad. There was no Yeltsin title in the series until writer and editor Boris Minayev’s volume in 2010. The collective memoir by nine former aides, Yu. M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), is the best book about Yeltsin in power in any language. But the points of view of individual contributors are not identified, and it just scratches the surface of Yeltsin’s personality and decision-making processes. The journalist and editor Vitalii Tret’yakov, who was one of the first to comment on the Yeltsin phenomenon, and to do so favorably, wrote most of an unfavorable biography of him in 1998–99. Tiring, he said, of “the banality of the theme and of the main hero of the book,” he did not finish it. Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 1, Politicheskii klass, February 2006, 36. Selections from the manuscript, which takes Yeltsin to 1989 only, were published in the February through August issues of this magazine.

  10 “Authors are wary of tackling [the issue] precisely because Yeltsin has played a huge and overpowering role in the birth of the new Russia.” Peter Rutland, “The Boris Yeltsin of History,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 6 (Fall 1998), 692.

  11 A search of books for sale at www.amazon.com, using the person’s name and “biography” as keywords, on November 15, 2007, turned up 2,904 titles about Washington, 2,202 about Lincoln, 1,009 about Churchill, and 975 about Hitler.

  12 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 420. This book appeared in English as Midnight Diaries. Unless specially noted, I will quote the Russian originals of Yeltsin’s memoirs and cite them by their Russian titles—translating those titles, in the body of the text, into English. Englishand Russian-language texts of all three books are now available at the Yeltsin Foundation website: http://yeltsin.ru/yeltsin/books.

  13 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 218.

  14 Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 260.

  15 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:281.

  16 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 48.

  17 Boris Nikol’skii, Kremlëvskiye mirazhi (Kremlin mirages) (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2001), 124.

  18 Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 331.

  19 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 285. Clinton made the remark to U.S. officials traveling with him to meet Yeltsin in Moscow in the summer of 1998.

  20 Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 418–19.

  21 Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Dusk) (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 644 (italics added).

  22 Talbott, Russia Hand, 185. Foreigners were not the only ones to spy these incongruities. A presidential press secretary was led to conclude Yeltsin was “warring against himself” (Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya [Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary] [Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997], 313). See also the general discussion in Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).

  23 Here I follow Clayton Roberts, who defines a historical interpretation as “an abbreviation of a complete explanation” and “an assertion that some variable or number of variables are the most important causal agencies in a particular historical development.” Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 242, 245.

  24 I have the dubious honor of being one of the first to do so, in Timothy J. Colton, “Moscow Politics and the Yeltsin Affair,” Harriman Institute Forum 1 (June 1988), 1–8.

  25 Indicative of the latter is the claim by Solovyov and Klepikova, written in the last months of 1991 (Boris Yeltsin, 23): “Boris Yeltsin’s historical mission has been completed. The titanic role he played was a destructive one; we are not sure he has enough strength for constructive activity.”

  26 As characterized, critically, by Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country,” Foreign Affairs 83 (March–April 2004), 20.

  27 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 349.

  28 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 32. For a forceful summary, see Dusko Doder, “Russia’s Potemkin Leader,” The Nation, January 29, 2001. A noxious specimen of what can only be called hate journalism, published after Yeltsin’s death in 2007, is Matt Taibbi, “The Low Post: Death of a Drunk,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14272792.

  29 I speak of a positive assessment beyond the empathy that usually goes with the writing of a life: “No honest biographer—as opposed to the propagandist or the avowed debunker—can long remain in company and consort with a subject and avoid at least a touch of empathy. Empathy . . . is the biographer’s spark of creation.” Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” in James F. Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 16–17.

  30 Viktor Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 35–36.

  31 Frank Vandiver’s term, from “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” 16.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 A. K. Ma
tveyev, Geograficheskiye nazvaniya Urala (Geographic names of the Urals) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1980), 49–50. It has also been suggested that the name comes from budka, the term for a sentry box such as European settlers in the area would have set up, and slang for toilet stall. There is an eponymous Butka Lake southeast of the village of Butka and a Butka River (a creek, really) that flows into the Belyakovka from the right. But the lake is not connected to either river, and the conflux of the Butka and Belyakovka rivers is about twelve miles downstream of the village on the Belyakovka.

  2 I. Butakov, “Butke—300 let” (Butka is 300 years old), Ural’skii rabochii, November 3, 1976.

  3 See A. A. Kondrashenkov, Krest’yane Zaural’ya v XVII–XVIII vekakh (The peasants of the Trans-Urals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) (Chelyabinsk: Yuzhno-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1966), 30, 53; “Iz istorii Butki” (From Butka’s history), http://rx9cfs.narod.ru/butka/7.html; and “Rodnomy selu Yel’tsina ispolnilos’ 325 let” (Yeltsin’s native village is 325 years old), http:/txt.newsru.com/russia/03nov2001/butka.html.

  4 See on this point Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Eighty percent of rural dwellers in the Urals on the eve of emancipation were state peasants. There were urban serfs in the Urals, attached to mines and factories.

  5 Vasilii Nemirovich-Danchenko, Kama i Ural (ocherki i vpechatleniya) (The Kama and the Urals [Essays and impressions]) (St. Petersburg: Tipografiya A. S. Suvorina, 1890), 551.

  6 V. P. Semënov-Tyan-Shyanskii, Rossiya: polnoye geograficheskoye opisaniye nashego otechestva (Russia: a complete geographic description of our fatherland), 11 vols. (St. Petersburg: Devrien, 1899–1914), 5:170.

  7 Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,” Slavic Review 25 (March 1966), 24. See also Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); and Georg Bernhard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Most Old Believers lived deep in the interior, but there were also concentrations, particularly of merchants, in the big cities. One-third of the population of Yekaterinburg in the mid-eighteenth century was Old Believer. The rural sectarians tended to be more radical in their beliefs than the urban, who were usually willing to say prayers for the tsar.

  8 The Russian historian Rudol’f Pikhoya, quoted in Pilar Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya: Boris Yel’tsin, provintsial v Kremle” (The impossible Russia: Boris Yeltsin, a provincial in the Kremlin), Ural, April 1994, 15. This valuable study was first published in Spanish as La Rusia Imposible: Boris Yeltsin, un provinciano en el Kremlin (Madrid: El Paìs, S.A./Aguilar, S.A., 1994).

  9 Ocherki istorii staroobryadchestva Urala i sopredel’nykh territorii (Essays on the history of the Old Believers of the Urals and abutting territories) (Yekaterinburg: Izdatel’stvo Ural’skogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2000), 85. The 1897 census (which I consulted in the original) counted 23,762 Old Believers in Shadrinsk district, or 8 percent of the population. Experts have generally felt that official statistics underestimated the number of Old Believers.

  10 The census of 1897 said 780 of the 825 lawful residents of Butka were Orthodox. Most of the remaining forty-five would have been Old Believers, and undoubtedly quite a few of the 780 had mixed beliefs. Seventeen residents of Basmanovo and 105 in Talitsa were unaccounted for in the same way. In Butkinskoozërskaya village, at the terminus of the Butka River, the census recorded 162 of 914 persons as Old Believers.

  11 Irina Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi, yemu vidnei” (Boris is a big shot, he knows better), Moskovskii komsomolets, January 31, 2007, reports that approximately 1,000 people bearing the name live in today’s Sverdlovsk and Perm provinces.

  12 Students of twentieth-century cinema will recognize the name from the characters Aleksei and Fëdor Basmanov in Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film classic, Ivan the Terrible, released in parts in 1944 and 1958. Aleksei is a lieutenant of Tsar Ivan. His only son, Fëdor, is the bloodthirsty founder of the Oprichnina, Ivan’s palace guard.

  13 D. A. Panov, Opyt pokolennoi rospisi roda Yel’tsinykh (An experiment in doing a genealogy of the Yeltsin clan) (Perm: Assotsiatsiya genealogov-lyubitelei, 1992), and Panov’s work at http://www.vgd.ru/Ye, give years of birth and death for all male heads of the Yeltsin family prior to Yekim, and only a year of birth for him. At that point, the well runs dry because of changes in record keeping under the Soviet regime.

  14 Ivan Yeltsin (1794–1825) was a nephew of Savva. He returned to Basmanovo from the army and fathered two children. After his death, his widow, Marfa, had seven more sons and daughters by another man.

  15 For Boris Yeltsin’s grandparents on both sides, I rely on a personal communication from his daughter Tatyana Yumasheva dated March 4, 2005, which collated information from family sources, and on interviews with Stanislav Glebov, a distant cousin, in Butka and Serafima Gomzikova, Boris’s first cousin, in Basmanovo (both on September 11, 2005). Yumasheva appears in the pages of this book mostly as Tatyana Dyachenko, her married name when her father was president. The family has no record of Anna Dmitreyevna’s maiden name. Dmitrii Panov was unable to find even her given name and patronymic for his genealogy. Ignatii is sometimes referred to as Ignat Yeltsin.

  16 Pilar Bonet and Rudol’f Pikhoya have speculated about Yeltsin’s Old Believer roots. Klavdiya Yeltsina, his mother, spoke of them before her death in 1993: Alya Tanachëva, a Sverdlovsk political activist who befriended her, interview with the author (June 22, 2004). Surviving members of the family cannot confirm Klavdiya’s assertion and say that, if there were Old Believer roots, they were deep in the family’s past.

  17 Klavdiya Yeltsina in the 1950s, as recalled by Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).

  18 Yumasheva communication; police file on Nikolai Yeltsin compiled before his arrest in 1934, as given in A. L. Litvin, Yel’tsiny v Kazani (The Yeltsins in Kazan) (Kazan: Aibat, 2004), 28–29.

  19 Excerpted in Igor Neverov, “Otets prezidenta” (The president’s father), fragment of an unpublished manuscript by Neverov, Nikomu ne otdam svoyu biografiyu (We won’t give anyone our biography), 1998; copy provided to the author in September 2005 by the Museum of History and Art, Berezniki, Russia.

  20 Or so local residents told a foreign correspondent in the 1990s: Matt Taibbi, “Butka: Boris Yeltsin, Revisited,” http://exile.ru/105/yeltsin. Nikolai and Taisiya Bersenëva romanced before her marriage and resumed the relationship after five years.

  21 Izabella Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov ot Belogo doma” (Thousands of kilometers from the White House), Vechernyaya Moskva, October 2, 1991.

  22 Yumasheva communication. The phrase about the Yeltsins’ golden hands is in Verbova, “Za tysyachi kilometrov,” and was repeated in my interview with Serafima Gomzikova. Klavdiya’s ancestors up to her parents’ generation can be located at www.vgd.ru/S.

  23 For a claim that Boris Yeltsin was born in Basmanovo and not Butka, see Natal’ya Zenova, “Mesto rozhdeniya prezidenta izmenit’ nel’zya” (You cannot change a president’s place of birth), Obshchaya gazeta, April 30, 1997. Yeltsin hotly denied it and said he had “all the documentation” to prove he was born in Butka. Boris Yeltsin, second interview with the author (February 9, 2002).

  24 Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 18. This volume was published in English as Against the Grain. A relative said sixty years afterward (Bonet, “Nevozmozhnaya Rossiya,” 15) that the story about the font is apocryphal and Yeltsin was baptized at home, the Butka church having been closed. Yeltsin’s report that the church was being made to serve the surrounding villages, and that baptisms were being held there only one day a month, suggests the closing of places of worship was under way. His description educes a long-standing Russian image of the intoxicated rural clergyman
, going back at least as far as Vasilii Perov’s 1861 painting Easter Procession in a Village.

  25 Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi,” reports incorrectly that Yeltsin’s birthplace was demolished some time ago. Stanislav Glebov gave me the address in 2005, and several residents of the street confirmed that this was the place. The household took in Ignatii and Anna Yeltsin, their four sons, the wives of the three oldest sons, and, it seems, three grandchildren. Ignatii’s daughter, Mariya, had married one Yakov Gomzikov in the early 1920s and remained in Basmanovo.

  26 Leonid Brezhnev, Vospominaniya (Memoirs) (Moscow: Politizdat, 1983), 27. There were more than 1,300 peasant uprisings and mass protests in the Soviet Union in 1929 and the early 1930s. Fifty-two occurred in the Urals in only the first three months of 1930. I. S. Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala s drevneishikh vremën do nashikh dnei (History of the Urals from ancient times to our day) (Yekaterinburg: Sokrat, 2003), 346.

  27 T. I. Slavko, Kulatskaya ssylka na Urale, 1930–1936 (The banishment of the kulaks in the Urals, 1930–36) (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1995), 33; Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 348.

  28 The bell tower fell to the ground at one point. After communism, in 1993, the church was reconsecrated; a temporary tower was built in the yard and five bells purchased. Boris Yeltsin as president (personally or via a government grant, it is not clear) made a contribution to restoration (Bobrova, “Boris bol’shoi”). A gutting and reconstruction funded by local businessmen began in 2005. The church in Basmanovo, dating from 1860, was torn down in the 1930s and never replaced. The location is still a debris-strewn vacant lot. Orthodox services are held in the village in a home chapel.

  29 On cannibalism, Pëtr Porotnikov, a regional official who grew up in Butka, interview with the author (September 10, 2004). See the reference to the phenomenon in Ogonovskaya et al., Istoriya Urala, 347.

  30 Raskulachivaniye (dekulakization) was a pre-existing Russian word adapted to a new purpose. Derived from kulak, whose original meaning was “fist,” it denoted the relaxing of the fingers in a clenched fist. In the context of Stalinist class warfare, it signified the draining away of the wealth of the village elite, the heartless kulaks.