Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  90 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 236.

  91 Oleg Poptsov, Trevozhnyye sny tsarskoi svity (The uneasy dreams of the tsar’s retinue) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 2000), 311.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1 Valerie Bunce and Maria Csanádi, “Uncertainty in the Transition: Post-Communism in Hungary,” East European Politics and Society 7 (Spring 1993), 269.

  2 Irvine Schiffer, Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 11. See also Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962), 300, and the reference to emergencies “associated with a collective excitement through which masses of people respond to some extraordinary experience and by virtue of which they surrender themselves to a heroic leader.”

  3 Leszek Balcerowicz, “Understanding Postcommunist Transitions,” in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Economic Reform and Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 96. Balcerowicz, who coined the term “extraordinary politics,” was the author of economic shock therapy in post-communist Poland from 1989 to 1991.

  4 Yegor Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed (Days of defeats and victories) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 170.

  5 Bunce and Csanádi, “Uncertainty in the Transition,” 270 (italics added). It is for this reason that another specialist predicts that, although charismatic leaders may well crop up in post-communist countries, they “will be of real, but limited, consequence—that is, they can affect the distribution of power in a larger or smaller area, but are unable to act as the catalyst for a new way of life.” Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 266.

  6 Yu, A. Levada et al., Obshchestvennoye mneniye—1999 (Public opinion—1999 edition) (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentr izucheniya obshchestvennogo mneniya, 2000), 100–101.

  7 Ibid. Another series of polls, using a more simply worded question, traces the decline in Yeltsin’s popularity in starker terms. Eighty-seven percent of Russians “fully supported” him in September 1991 and 4 percent said they did not support him. That ratio had dropped to 69 percent to 5 percent in November 1991 and to 43 percent to 19 percent in January 1992; it was 28 percent to 24 percent in March 1992, and 24 percent to 31 percent in July 1992. Leonty Byzov, “Power and Society in Post-Coup Russia : Attempts at Coexistence,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 1 (Spring 1993), 87.

  8 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 168.

  9 Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 256.

  10 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 176.

  11 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 258.

  12 Ibid., 256.

  13 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 190–91; author’s second interview with Yegor Gaidar (January 31, 2002). Yeltsin told Gaidar after the meeting that he had tried unsuccessfully to reach him by phone to tell him of the removal of Lopukhin. Gaidar did not believe it.

  14 Yeltsin left Gaidar to sign off on the Gerashchenko appointment on his behalf. Gaidar later called it the worst mistake he made in 1992 and said it would have been much better to go with Gerashchenko’s predecessor, Georgii Matyukhin. Yeltsin also told associates he almost immediately regretted the appointment. Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 195; Yu, M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 235.

  15 Baturin et al., Epokha, 251.

  16 Vyacheslav Terekhov, interview with the author (June 5, 2001).

  17 The greatest controversy was over the exclusion of Khizha, with whom Yeltsin did not want to work closely. One deputy protested that there had been a “gentlemen’s agreement” to put him on the final list, but Yeltsin denied it. Interviewed in the lobby after the action, he said,“My opinion had to be taken into account, too.” Vladimir Todres, “S”ezd” (The congress), Nezavisimaya gazeta, December 15, 1992; Nikolai Andreyev and Sergei Chugayev, “U Gaidara—golosa iskrennikh storonnikov, u Chernomyrdina—doveriye s”ezda” (Gaidar got the votes of sincere supporters and Chernomyrdin got the trust of the congress), Izvestiya, December 15, 1992. Khizha left the government in May 1993.

  18 Chernomyrdin was deputy minister of the oil and gas industry from 1982 to 1985, answering for the west Siberian fields. His responsibilities included the pipelines being built through Sverdlovsk oblast. He lived at the time, he told me, in the city of Tyumen, the capital of the province bordering Sverdlovsk on the east. He was appointed minister in February 1985 and saw much of Yeltsin when Yeltsin was department head and secretary in the Central Committee apparatus, touring the Siberian fields with him and Gorbachev in September 1985. Chernomyrdin, as a member of the CPSU Central Committee, attended the October 1987 plenum, where he walked up to Yeltsin and shook his hand at the intermission. Chernomyrdin, interview with the author (September 15, 2000).

  19 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 326.

  20 “Viktor Stepanovich . . . almost openly sympathized with Gazprom, which he had created practically with his own hands.” Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000),120.

  21 See on this point Daniel S. Treisman, “Fighting Inflation in a Transitional Regime: Russia’s Anomalous Stabilization,” World Politics 50 (January 1998), 250–52.

  22 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 183.

  23 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 256, 258. Not all managers in the petroleum industry favored price controls. As Gaidar describes, quite a few wanted the restrictions to be lifted.

  24 Author’s interviews with Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin (both on January 21, 2001). See also Valerii Vyzhutovich, “My podderzhivayem Yel’tsina uslovno” (We support Yeltsin conditionally), Izvestiya, October 7, 1991.

  25 Yurii Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya” (Gorbachev is continuing), in Burtin and Eduard Molchanov, eds., God posle avgusta: gorech’ i vybor (A year after August: bitterness and choice) (Moscow: Literatura i politika, 1992), 60. See for details 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), 677–87.

  26 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 245.

  27 Gennadii Burbulis, second interview, conducted by Yevgeniya Al’bats (February 14, 2001).

  28 Baturin et al., Epokha, 202.

  29 Chernomyrdin interview.

  30 Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), 198.

  31 Boris Fëdorov, interview with the author (September 22, 2001). In September 1993 Yeltsin wanted to have Fëdorov replace Gerashchenko in the central bank, but canned the idea due to Chernomyrdin’s strong opposition.

  32 Baturin et al., Epokha, 256. On fiscal and monetary policy after Fëdorov, see Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, 200–203; and Treisman, “Fighting Inflation in a Transitional Regime,” 235–65.

  33 “Obrashcheniye prezidenta k sograzhdanam” (Address of the president to his fellow citizens), Rossiiskaya gazeta, August 20, 1992.

  34 In his first book of memoirs, in 1990, he did refer to perestroika as “a revolution from above,” but mostly to convey that it did not engage the populace and was resisted by established interests. Boris Yel’tsin, Ispoved’ na zadannuyu temu (Confession on an assigned theme) (Moscow: PIK, 1990), 103.

  35 “B. N. Yel’tsin otvechayet na voprosy ‘Izvestii’” (B. N. Yeltsin answers the questions of Izvestiya), Izvestiya, May 23, 1991.

  36 See Yel’tsin, Marafon, 236–37.

  37 “Obrashcheniye prezidenta k sograzhdanam.” The quotation is from Mayakovsky’s 1918 poem “Left March,” a celebration of the 1917 Revolution.

  38 These events are described in Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 654–57. On August 23 patrolmen and deputies had to escort Yurii Prokof’ev, Yeltsin’s successor as M
oscow first secretary, from the building of the city party committee adjacent to the Central Committee, after demonstrators refused to let him leave.

  39 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 166 (italics added).

  40 Lyudmila Pikhoya, interview with the author (September 26, 2001).

  41 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “Russian Archives in Transition: Caught between Political Crossfire and Economic Crisis,” International Research and Exchanges Board, Working Paper, January 1993, 3; conversations with Jonathan Sanders. One mentally deranged American from the Vietnam era was discovered; he stayed in Russia.

  42 Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (April 1998), 165.

  43 Benjamin B. Fischer, “Stalin’s Killing Field,” https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99–00/art6.html. For some reason, the Katyn massacre had a special resonance for Yeltsin. He had tears in his eyes at the meeting with the journalists in Moscow. In Warsaw, Fischer maintains, he was likely inspired by Willy Brandt, who as chancellor of West Germany in 1970 fell to his knees after placing a wreath at a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn deaths in 1990 but said Lavrentii Beriya, the head of the secret police, made the decision. The documents given to Wałesa in 1992 verify that the decision was taken in March 1940 by Stalin and the Politburo, six of whose members signed the resolution. Soviet propaganda before Gorbachev had claimed that German troops killed the captive Poles.

  44 “Beseda zhurnalistov s prezidentom Rossii” (Conversation of journalists with the president of Russia), Izvestiya, July 15, 1992.

  45 In the former East Germany, all citizens were in 1991 given the right to inspect their files in the archives of the Stasi security service. Millions did so, with devastating results. “There have been countless civil suits initiated when victims uncovered the names of those who had denounced and betrayed them, and many families and friendships were destroyed.” John O. Koehler, “East Germany: The Stasi and Destasification,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 12 (Summer 2004), 391. But the policy did shatter the police state, which never happened in Russia.

  46 This point is well brought out in Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2003).

  47 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 162. Yeltsin introduced Volkogonov to Bill Clinton at a meeting in Moscow several months before the general died of cancer. Volkogonov spoke about his work, and “Yeltsin’s face took on a look I’d never seen there before: one of unadulterated compassion, affection, admiration, and sorrow.” Ibid.

  48 Aleksandr Yakovlev, second interview with the author (March 29, 2004). On the process, see Natal’ya Rostova, “Vozhdi ochen’ toropilis’” (The leaders were in a big hurry), Nezavisimaya gazeta, October 26, 2001.

  49 A variation on the theme that would have been more relevant to Russia was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But it was appointed only in 1995, after the Russian debate had peaked, and I am unaware of any serious exploration of its applicability. In Latin America after military rule, there have been similar efforts in countries such as Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Uruguay.

  50 When the communists first presented their suit in the spring, parliamentary deputy Oleg Rumyantsev launched a countersuit signed by more than seventy legislators. The court combined the two cases in May. In November it declined to rule on the legislators’ suit. The litigation is ably analyzed in Kathleen E. Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 11–29; and Jane Henderson, “The Russian Constitutional Court and the Communist Party Case: Watershed or Whitewash?” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40 (March 2007), 1–16.

  51 Victor Yasmann, “Legislation on Screening and State Security in Russia,” RFE/RL Research Report 2 (August 13, 1993), 11–16; Kieran Williams, Aleks Szczerbiak, and Brigid Fowler, “Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: A Post-Communist Politics Approach,” European Institute, University of Sussex, Working Paper 62 (March 2003).

  52 Yevgenii Krasnikov, “Protivostoyanie” (Opposition), Nezavisimaya gazeta, May 7, 1993; Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta, 699.

  53 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 165.

  54 Ibid., 166.

  55 Smith, Mythmaking, 48.

  56 Second Yakovlev interview.

  57 The removal of the body was kept secret. The mausoleum was draped in a tarpaulin to fool German bombers, and sentries were still posted. “Ordinary Russians assumed that Lenin was still there, a symbol of resistance and eventual victory.” Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War (London: Profile, 2006), 95; and more generally I. B. Zbarskii, Ob”ekt No. 1 (Object No. 1) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000).

  58 For comparisons, see Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Examples would be Hungary, Rumania, and the post-Yugoslav countries.

  59 Most details here are from my second interview with Yeltsin (February 9, 2002); first interview with Georgii Satarov (June 5, 2000); and interview (January 21, 2004) with Jonathan Sanders, who advised the Reed family. Stalin’s office and personal rooms in Building No. 1 were also emptied and the pieces put in storage or sold off.

  60 Glinka’s song had finished second in a contest for an anthem for the empire in 1833. The contest was won by “God Save the Tsar” by Aleksei L’vov (1798–1870). “The Internationale” was the Soviet anthem until 1944, when the composition by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (1883–1946) and Sergei Mikhal’kov (1913–), its lyrics approved by Stalin, was instated.

  61 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 172. On the number of awards, see Vladimir Shevchenko, Povsednevnaya zhizn’ Kremlya pri prezidentakh (The everyday life of the Kremlin under the presidents) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2004), 67. The biggest batch of new orders and medals was the several dozen instituted by presidential decree on March 2, 1994. Fifty-two Soviet honorary titles were renewed as Russian awards on December 30, 1995. The Order for Services to the Fatherland, instated on March 2, 1994, was roughly equivalent to the Order of Lenin. The Order of Honor substituted for the Soviet Badge of Honor, the first state award Yeltsin had received in Sverdlovsk in 1966. The most significant reinstatement of a pre-1917 award was of the Order of St. Andrei in 1998.

  62 The Prisekin painting can be viewed at http://prisekin.ru. The Ioganson canvas had replaced a pre-1917 portrait of Alexander III, the second-last of the tsars, by Il’ya Repin of the Wanderers school. Alexander Nevsky was known to all Russians of Yeltsin’s generation from schoolbooks and from the 1938 film by Alexander Eisenstein, which climaxes in thirty minutes of fighting on the ice, with the music of Sergei Prokofiev in the background.

  63 The price tag is unknown. Officials stated that the Grand Kremlin Palace project in Yeltsin’s second term cost $335 million. I very much doubt this was all that was spent. Even if it was, other projects would have pushed the total over the $500 million mark.

  64 Boris Grishchenko, Postoronnyi v Kremle: reportazhi iz “osoboi zony” (A stranger in the Kremlin: reportage from “the special zone”) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2004), 82–83.

  65 “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye” (Everything here is genuine), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, March 24, 1999.

  66 Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007); and “U nas tut vsë nastoyashcheye.”

  67 Aleksandr Gamov, “K dnyu rozhdeniyia Yel’tsina v Kreml’ zavezli bulyzhniki iz Sverdlovska” (For Yeltsin’s birthday they have brought cobblestones from Sverdlovsk), Komsomol’skaya pravda, January 29, 1999.

  68 “Vse govoryat—strana v nishchete, a tut takiye khoromy” (Everybody says the country is impoverished
, but here we have such mansions), interview with Pavel Borodin in Kommersant-Daily, June 19, 1999.

  69 The work in the Kremlin had many critics. According to some, preservationists in the Ministry of Culture were not consulted on the contract for Building No. 1 and it was implemented hastily and roughly. Others insisted that many corners were cut both there and in the Grand Kremlin Palace, some ersatz materials were employed, and chandeliers and other objects were sold off below market value. There were also allegations of graft involving the Swiss firm Mabetex. See on this issue Chapter 16.

  70 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 196–97.

  71 Richard J. Samuels, with a debt to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

  72 Five Moscow streets named after Lenin were renamed in the Yeltsin years, and six were unchanged. Of forty-three other Soviet figures after whom streets were named, all references were dropped to nineteen and to twenty-four they were not (for eight of the twenty-four the name was changed in some cases but not in others). Graeme Gill, “Changing Symbols: The Renovations of Moscow Place Names,” Russian Review 64 (July 2005), 480–503.

  73 During his first official visit to France, in February 1992, Yeltsin spoke at Versailles and asked the French to invite persons of Russian origin, many of them members of Parisian high society, to the event. He spoke from the prepared text for a few minutes and then addressed the local Russians directly, pronouncing them welcome in their country of origin and thanking France for having sheltered them. “It was a fantasy moment,” recalled one participant, as protocol was abandoned and guests embraced Yeltsin and the Moscow delegation. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, interview with the author (September 11, 2007).