Titans of History

GORBACHEV & YELTSIN

1931– & 1931–2007

We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The fall of communism, the break-up of the Soviet empire, the liberation of eastern Europe from Soviet oppression and the emergence of a new Russia were the achievements of two rival Russian leaders, both of whom had decent intentions that were ruined by the pressures of real politics. Neither of them intended things to turn out as they did. Both of their careers ended in failure—and both actually produced effects that were the very opposite of their intentions. Indeed the achievements of each were counterproductive—and yet world changing.

A communist believer during his entire active career and indeed a believer in one-party rule, Mikhail Gorbachev, son of a combine harvester driver from Stavropol in south Russia, swiftly entered the top stream of Soviet leadership: he qualified in law and then climbed the Communist Party hierarchy to become first secretary of Stavropol in 1970. Early on in his life he married Raisa, who was to be his partner and adviser in power: both of their families had experienced Stalin’s Terror in their own families—yet neither lost their faith in the party.

By the 1970s, the reign of Leonid Brezhnev had produced economic stagnation, political sclerosis and falling prestige for the communist regime. In a party ruled by octogenarian Stalinist bureaucrats, the dynamic, cheerful and highly intelligent Gorbachev was noticed: in 1979 he was promoted to the Politburo in Moscow and placed in charge of agriculture under the wing of the KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, probably the most capable politician in the leadership during the last decades of Soviet rule.

After Brezhnev’s death Andropov succeeded to the top post but was too old to reform the USSR. On his death in 1984, Gorbachev did not push for the leadership: the senile and exhausted Konstantin Chernenko assumed power and survived just a few months. With this death it was clear that a new and young leader was needed: Gorbachev became first secretary and took control.

Swiftly he changed both the tone and facts of Soviet rule: he declared perestroika—restructuring—and glasnost—openness; but as a devout communist committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party on which his power depended, he was no Western liberal democrat. He simply hoped to reform, consolidate and strengthen the Soviet dictatorship but instead unleashed forces he could not control. His economic mismanagement undermined his own achievements: his ban on alcohol deprived a desperate budget of key funds. Gorbachov’s tinkering with the command economy produced instant shortages and discontent—he did not understand how capitalism worked.

But he did gradually open up a semi-free press and allowed limited free elections—though he did not risk any kind of vote on his own role, relying on the party for his legitimacy. To Russians, he came to stand for a dangerous experiment, his tone—so charming to Westerners—sounded pompous and lecturing to his own people.

Abroad his achievements were truly revolutionary and titanic: he overturned the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention in eastern European satellites: in partnership with his Georgian foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, he negotiated arms control agreements with US President Ronald Reagan; more amazingly he offered to free countries like Poland after decades of tyranny. In 1989, he withdrew Soviet troops from their catastrophic war in Afghanistan and allowed eastern Europeans to grasp freedom: Soviet client regimes fell in every country. In Germany, he allowed the Berlin Wall to be brought down—and Germany to be reunited. Reagan had confronted the Soviet Union with powerful democratic rhetoric and rising American defense spending—both of which certainly played a part in the fall of the Soviet imperium—but the achievement of this was overwhelmingly thanks to Gorbachev’s conviction that this could be done peacefully. At home Gorbachev was determined to promote communist rule and the coherence of the Soviet Union but his own actions had undermined both fatally: the elections of leaders in the separate republics had produced a more legitimate leadership than that of the party.

When he came to power in 1985, Gorbachev had promoted a tall, energetic but reckless new leader named Boris Yeltsin to Moscow party chief and Politburo member. Almost the same age as Gorbachev, Yeltsin was the son of a builder who had been repressed by Stalin. Growing up in Sverdlovsk, he rose to local party secretary by 1976. Yeltsin was the opposite of Gorbachev: while the latter was contemplative, legalistic, sometimes verbose, often witty, and brave, Yeltsin was bombastic, emotional, courageous—and an alcoholic. The two soon clashed and Gorbachev sacked Yeltsin in 1987, giving him a public dressing-down. But, both opportunistic and idealistic, Yeltsin was ahead of Gorbachev in realizing that the Soviet Union and communism itself would and should soon fall. Yeltsin embraced liberal democracy—yet it also suited him. He was elected president of the Russian Republic in 1989, giving him potential legitimacy unavailable to Gorbachev. In July 1990 he dramatically resigned from the Communist Party.

In the following months, the strain started to show as ethnic turmoil and bloodshed intensified in the Caucusus and Soviet security forces seemed to be out of control, killing protesters in Lithuania. The Politburo and security service, the KGB, plotted to overthrow Gorbachev: in August 1991, a committee of incompetent drunken communist leaders and Chekists arrested Gorbachev on his Black Sea holiday and sent tanks into Moscow, but crowds defended the White House offices of Yeltsin. Yeltsin bravely climbed onto a tank outside to defiantly address the crowds. The coup fell apart but its real victim was Gorbachev, who had lost his prestige.

When Gorbachev tried to regain the momentum, Yeltsin ended the monopoly of the Communist Party and then conspired with the elected presidents of the other Soviet republics to end the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991, thus ending the Soviet Union, which broke up into its independent republics. Gorbachev realized that communist oligarchy was wrong and after his fall he sincerely embraced liberal democracy but it was too late.

Yeltsin dominated Russia in the 1990s and, initially, his enthusiasm and openness were refreshing. Almost for the first time in its history, Russia enjoyed totally free elections, a totally free press, a free economy, a free investigation of history and of state crimes—and all these were Yeltsin’s achievements. But he was fatally flawed: alcoholic, inconsistent and capricious, he ruled like a tsar through cronies and henchmen such as his sinister bodyguard General Korzhakov and his billionaire financial adviser Boris Berezovsky. Yeltsin’s privatization of the Russian economy was hopelessly mismanaged, making billionaires of the so-called Oligarchs, over-powerful businessmen like Berezovsky.

In 1993, communist hardliners in Parliament threatened the entire democratic project with an armed revolt which Yeltisn defeated by ordering the storming by special forces of the White House in Moscow. The following year, faced with rebellion and the assertion of independence by Chechnya, Yeltsin invaded the little republic. As they committed atrocities on a vast scale, killing thousands of innocent civilians and utterly destroying cities such as Grozny, Russian forces were humiliated by dynamic Chechen fighters. Yeltsin was forced to retreat, withdraw Russian forces from Chechnya and infamously recognize Chechen independence—an unprecedented Russian humiliation. The decay of financial corruption, Kremlin intrigue, economic chaos, mafia disorder and resurgent repression unleashed by the Chechen war discredited his real achievements.

By 1996, Yeltsin, ill and isolated, faced a new election which he seemed likely to lose: his billionaire cronies, the Oligarchs, mobilized their fortunes to help him win re-election but now even democracy was tainted. The next three years saw economic meltdown and Yeltsin’s personal decline as he sacked prime ministers with imperial whimsy and embarrassed his country with acts of drunken buffoonery.

In 1999 he chose a young, ambitious and severe ex-KGB officer and cabinet minister named Vladimir Putin to be his successor and dramatically resigned the presidency. Putin proved more than equal to the task: he restored the power of the state and the prestige of Russia as a great power, crushed mafia corruption and broke the influence of the Oligarchs. At the same time he demonstrated his discipline and vigor by again attacking Chechnya with brutal and bloody competence, crushing the rebellion at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Putin promoted his colleagues from the security services who now dominated Russian government and business, diminished democracy and press freedom, ended the election of local governors and personified a new Russian form of authoritarian government that he called sovereign democracy. During two terms in the Kremlin, Putin utterly dominated Russia in a way Gorbachev and Yeltsin had never done: he was able to hand over the presidency to an aide, Dmitri Medvedev, while remaining the country’s ruler as prime minister. In 2012, he was able to return to the presidency, despite popular protests at widespread corruption and the regime’s authoritarianism. Putin may turn out to be the dominant Russian leader of the early 21st century.