31 In some of Yeltsin’s comments on the issue, there were intimations of patriotic pride and also of the right to live well, just as his countrymen were all entitled to live now. A campaign pamphlet in 1996 said of his transportation: “The president of Russia, like the president of any other country and like millions of other Russian citizens, does not go to work on a trolley bus.” “Special privileges,” it said, were an impossibility in post-communist society, in that luxuries were no longer distributed through secret channels and citizens with means could purchase them on the open market: “Ministers travel in Mercedes, yet anyone who is capable of earning enough money can buy a Mercedes. . . . In any department store, you can buy the same suit as [Prime Minister Viktor] Chernomyrdin and the same cap as [Moscow Mayor Yurii] Luzhkov.” Prezident Yel’tsin: 100 voprosov i otvetov (President Yeltsin: 100 questions and answers) (Moscow: Obshcherossiiskoye dvizheniye obshchestvennoi podderzhki B. N. Yel’tsina, 1996), 18.
32 Vadim Bakatin, the last head of the Soviet KGB, and Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, the last Soviet minister of defense, both appointed with Yeltsin’s backing in August, believed Yeltsin wanted more security coordination than obtained but was unable to sell it to the other states. Vadim Bakatin, Izbavleniye ot KGB (Deliverance from the KGB) (Moscow: Novosti, 1992), 232–33; author’s interviews with Bakatin (May 29, 2002) and Shaposhnikov (May 23, 2000). See also Robert V. Barylski, The Soldier in Russian Politics: Duty, Dictatorship, and Democracy Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), 173–225.
33 “Yeltsin News Conference with Foreign Journalists,” FBIS-SOV-91-174 (September 9, 1991), 66, 69.
34 Author’s interviews with Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001) and Ivan Rybkin (May 29, 2001); second interview with Sergei Filatov (May 25, 2002); second interview with Aleksandr Yakovlev (March 29, 2004); third Yeltsin interview.
35 Author’s first interview with Grigorii Yavlinskii (March 17, 2001). Yeltsin tried but failed to persuade Yavlinskii to tailor the program to Russia and not the USSR, reduce its running time to 400 days (its original length), and omit mention of price hikes. Yavlinskii feels that Yeltsin was fixated on his struggle with Gorbachev and had no intention of doing any serious reform until after his election as president of Russia.
36 Baturin et al., Epokha, 190.
37 Bill Keller, “Boris Yeltsin Taking Power,” New York Times, September 23, 1990.
38 Gwendolyn Elizabeth Stewart, “SIC TRANSIT: Democratization, Suverenizatsiia, and Boris Yeltsin in the Breakup of the Soviet Union” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1995), 280. Stewart, working as a photojournalist, taped Yeltsin’s remarks on August 24, 1990, in Dolinsk. She calls them “laissez-faire populism.” Her illustrated account of Yeltsin on Sakhalin is available at http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~gestewar/peopleschoice.html.
39 “B. N. Yel’tsin otvechayet na voprosy ‘Izvestii’” (B. N. Yeltsin answers the questions of Izvestiya), Izvestiya, May 23, 1991.
40 Anatolii Chernyayev, 1991 god: dnevnik pomoshchnika Prezidenta SSSR (The year 1991: diary of an assistant to the president of the USSR) (Moscow: TERRA, 1997), 260.
41 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 235. As several scholars have pointed out, this sentence is not in the English translation of the memoir.
42 Jonathan Sanders, interview with the author (January 21, 2004).
43 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Berlin thought negative freedom to be superior to positive liberty. Cf. for a different perspective Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999).
44 Mikhail Fridman, interview with the author (September 21, 2001). His reference is to Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
45 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 121, 235–36, 238, 392. See Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 70–71, 89; and George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153–54. This therapeutic aspect has sometimes been confused with Social Darwinism, which stresses survival of the fittest and abandonment of the weak. At the societal level, Yeltsin was interested in Russia converging with the West, not competing with it.
46 “Boris Yel’tsin otbyl na otdykh” (Boris Yeltsin has left for a rest), Izvestiya, September 25, 1991.
47 Viktor Sheinis, interview with the author (September 20, 2001); V. T. Loginov, ed., Soyuz mozhno bylo sokhranit’ (The union could have been saved), rev. ed. (Moscow: AST, 2007), 325.
48 Gennadii Burbulis, second interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001). Yeltsin’s invitation to Burbulis has never been on the public record.
49 Rutskoi interview; and Mikhail Poltoranin, interview with the author (July 11, 2001).
50 Yurii Petrov, second interview with the author (February 1, 2002). Petrov had looked Yeltsin up while on leave in Moscow at the end of July and told him he was willing to work in his new government. Yeltsin showed him a staff report on organization of the U.S. White House and offered him the job.
51 G. Shipit’ko, “B. Yel’tsin pytayetsya vosstanovit’ poryadok v koridorakh vlasti” (Boris Yeltsin tries to restore order in the corridors of power), Izvestiya, October 16, 1991. Deputy Premier Igor Gavrilov resigned on October 7 and Economics Minister Yevgenii Saburov on October 9. The acting chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, accused several ministers and advisers of incompetence and demanded their resignations, whereupon one of them, Sergei Shakhrai, stated that Khasbulatov was mentally unstable. Silayev was taken care of after December: Yeltsin appointed him Russian ambassador to the European Community in Brussels.
52 The “miracle worker” reference comes from Gennadii Burbulis, third interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (August 31, 2001). Other information is from Poltoranin interview; interview with Ryzhov (September 21, 2001); and second interview with Yavlinskii (September 28, 2001). Poltoranin came closest to acceptance and wrote up a list of possible ministers, but withdrew because he felt he did not know enough about the economy.
53 Third Burbulis interview.
54 Gaidar’s mother was from Sverdlovsk and was the daughter of Pavel Bazhov, a distinguished writer of fairytales set in the Urals. She became friendly with Yeltsin’s mother when they were patients at a Moscow hospital. Yegor Gaidar, second interview with the author (January 31, 2002).
55 My reconstruction of the enlistment of Gaidar relies on accounts by him, Yeltsin, and Burbulis. Or see Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 163–64: “Why did I choose Yegor Gaidar? . . . Gaidar’s theories coincided with my private determination to travel the most painful part of the route [of economic reform] quickly. . . . If our minds were made up, it was time to get going!” For an alternative explanation based on envy and power-seeking, for which no evidence is cited, see Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 240–41: “Gaidar’s appointment served Burbulis’s purpose, because it ensured that Yeltsin would not appoint someone who was either more popular than Burbulis . . . or more influential with Yeltsin . . . thus endangering Burbulis’s position at court. One of Yeltsin’s reasons for picking Gaidar for the job of ‘leading reformer’ was that his bland and aloof manner in public made him an unlikely future contender for elective office, even if his reform package were to turn out to be successful and popular.”
56 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 105.
57 Moscow journalist Mikhail Berger, quoted in David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs : Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002), 180.
58 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii k narodam Rossii, k s”ezdu narodnykh deputatov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (Address of the president of Russia to the peoples of Russia and the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation), Rossiiskaya gazeta, October 29, 1991.
59 On November 3 and 4, Yeltsin remained
in contact with Yavlinskii about the possibility of him taking the job. Gaidar says when he heard of it he felt “as if he had just jumped out from under the wheels of an onrushing train.” Yavlinskii broke off the negotiations and Gaidar was given the position. Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 110.
60 Lyudmila Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin” (Voter Boris Yeltsin), Moskovskiye novosti, October 21, 2003. This revealing interview is translated as “Boris Yeltsin: The Wrecking Ball,” in Padma Desai, ed., Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 79–94. Burbulis, born in 1945, was senior in the new group. Gaidar was born in 1956, Anatolii Chubais (the minister for privatization) in 1955, and Aleksandr Shokhin (labor minister and deputy premier) in 1957. As early as the summer of 1990, Yeltsin had promoted several men in their thirties into high economic posts in the RSFSR—Grigorii Yavlinskii (deputy premier), who was born in 1952, and Boris Fëdorov (finance minister), born in 1958.
61 See Chernyayev, 1991 god, 265; Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 99–102; and Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 80. Ruslan Khasbulatov writes that Yeltsin was more upset at Gorbachev than at his Supreme Soviet: Chechnya: mne ne dali ostanovit’ voinu (Chechnya: they did not allow me to halt the war) (Moscow: Paleya, 1995), 20–21.
62 The expression is associated with the views of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Shock therapy in the narrow sense was first applied in Bolivia in 1985 and, in Eastern Europe, in Poland in 1990. Sachs, then at Harvard University and now at Columbia, modeled his approach on Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany’s postwar recovery.
63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 102. The passage on potato planting is mistranslated in the English version of the memoir as “just as potatoes were introduced under Catherine the Great.” Peter is thought to have brought potatoes back from Holland around 1700 and to have encouraged their cultivation in the greenhouses at his Strelna Palace, outside St. Petersburg.
64 Muzhskoi razgovor. Some leading Russian historians, now free to chastise the past, debunked Peter in the 1990s as a clumsy autocrat, at the same time Yeltsin thought he was imitating him. Ernest A. Zitser, “Post-Soviet Peter: New Histories of the Late Muscovite and Early Imperial Russian Court,” Kritika 6 (Spring 2003), 375–92.
65 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 235. For roughly the first year after the 1991 coup, Yeltsin often referred to a communist return to power as a real and present danger. In May 1992, for example, he spoke in favor of quick changes to the Russian constitution. “Otherwise those forces that are grouping together right now, the former party apparatus, will develop to the point that it would be very difficult to struggle with them.” “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ne skryvayu trudnostei.”
66 Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya,” 60.
67 Ibid.
68 Yurii Afanas’ev, “Proshël god . . . ” (A year has passed), in Burtin and Molchanov, God posle avgusta, 9.
69 Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin.”
70 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 105.
71 Baturin et al., Epokha, 177. Yeltsin said in the speech that the price reform would take place before the end of December. Gaidar and his team had pushed him not to give a definite date.
72 “Yeltsin Discusses Candidacy, Issues, Rivals,” FBIS-SOV-91-110 (June 7, 1991), 64–65. During the campaign Yeltsin also made crowd-pleasing promises that were sure to complicate any move to the market, such as indexing minimum wages, pensions, and student stipends at 150 percent of the USSR average. These benefits, he assured voters, would be funded by withholding financial transfers to the Soviet government. In June 1990 he stated that he was working with three alternative schemes for price reform, all of which “foresee a mechanism that will rule out a lowering of living standards.” L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 205.
73 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii.”
74 Gaidar, first interview with the author (September 14, 2000). Yeltsin said in his October speech that he had promised improvement by late 1992 in his presidential election campaign; I have not found any such statement. Gaidar writes in his memoir that, beginning with Five Hundred Days, the time limits in various reform plans were useful mostly as hooks for getting Yeltsin and the politicians to sign on to radical reform. “By itself, the realism or unrealism of a program had no significance from an economic point of view. But even a false idea, once taken aboard by the masses, becomes a material force.” Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 65. Yeltsin had to deal with that force before and after Gaidar’s exit.
75 Nine percent of Russian workers polled by sociologists in 1993 had not received the previous month’s wage in full. This proportion reached 49 percent in 1994 and 66 percent at the beginning of 1996. Eighteen percent of employees in 1994, and 32 percent in 1996, received no wages in the previous month. Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth, “Wage Arrears and the Distribution of Earnings in Russia,” William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan, Working Paper 421 (December 2001).
76 Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), the most adulatory of the Western studies, is no exception. Some of the most positive reviews of Yeltsin’s policies have been made by liberal economists. See especially Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), and Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Andrei Shleifer, A Normal Country: Russia after Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Cf. for diametrically opposed analyses Stefan Hedlund, Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (London: UCL, 1999); Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2001); Marshall I. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (London: Routledge, 2003); and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
77 Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000), 41, 49, 58. See also Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15 (January–March 1999), 37–55.
78 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 306, 629, 627. Less frequently, and not any more helpfully, Yeltsin has been gibbeted for the opposite vice, of infinite flexibility and unprincipledness. “Like many successful politicians,” writes Michael Specter, a Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times in the 1990s, “he is a human mood ring, a man whose ideology changes with the seasons, with the country he is visiting, with the phases of the moon. Such tactics work in Russia, which has never really decided whether it belongs in Europe or Asia.” Michael Specter, “My Boris,” New York Times Magazine, July 26, 1998. Another analyst, who met Yeltsin several times in the company of Richard Nixon, writes of him as selfobsessed and “devoid of any meaningful purpose beyond his own political fortunes.” Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 137.
79 Main indicators are conveniently summarized in Åslund, Building Capitalism ; Shleifer, Normal Country; and Peter T. Leeson and William N. Trumbull, “Comparing Apples: Normalcy, Russia, and the Remaining Post-Socialist World,” Post-Soviet Affairs 22 (July–September 2006), 225–48.
80 The military-industrial complex, currency question, and oil pricing were largely out of Moscow’s hands. Not so the London Club (commercial) and Paris Club (sovereign) debts of the Soviet Union. Moscow assumed these $100 billion worth of obligations in exchange for Russia having the agreed-upon status of legal heir to the USSR. It was forced to restructure the sovereign debt twice in the Yeltsin years, in 1996 and 1999, and retired it in 2006.
81 This point is well made in M. Steven Fish, “Russian Studies Without Studyin
g,” Post-Soviet Affairs 17 (October–December 2001), 332–74, which is a reply to Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia.” See more generally Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
82 As argued in William Tompson, “Was Gaidar Really Necessary? Russian ‘Shock Therapy’ Reconsidered,” Problems of Post-Communism 49 (July–August 2002), 1–10.
83 Andrei Grachëv, Dal’she bez menya: ukhod prezidenta (Go ahead without me: the exit of a president) (Moscow: Progress, 1994), 82.
84 Gorbachev arrived in Beijing for a state visit on May 15, 1989, just as the Tienanmen student protest began. The demonstrators were admirers of his and timed their action to coincide with his arrival, so as to deter the police from reprisal. They displayed banners praising Gorbachev, which he would have seen from his motorcade that day. The government declared martial law on May 20, after his departure, and cracked down on the protesters on June 3–4.
85 An excellent treatment of these variables is Kelly M. McMann, Economic Autonomy and Democracy: Hybrid Regimes in Russia and Kyrgyzstan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
86 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 265 (italics added).
87 See on this general point Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 330–35; and Martin Malia in Desai, Conversations on Russia, 344–46.
88 Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 670.
89 “While many complain about ‘shock therapy’ in Russia, the sad truth is that too little shock was delivered to achieve any therapy, and the actual reforms were far less radical than those in Central Europe.” Åslund, Building Capitalism, xiii. This is an economist’s assessment. A political scientist comes to the same point. Since it scores in about the fortieth percentile among post-communist countries on indices of economic freedom, “gradualism, rather than shock therapy, best characterizes economic policy in post-Soviet Russia.” M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159–60.
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