Yeltsin

CHAPTER EIGHT Birth of a Nation

Gorbachev’s decision to begin political reform with his central government had a prodigious effect on the course of change. Because the society beneath was ever more restive—“moving to the left,” as Yeltsin put it, using “left” to mean hunger for change rather than in the socialist-capitalist dimension—and because curbs on contestation were breaking down, the next wave of change, in the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union and their provincial and local governments, was predestined to be more radical. Boris Yeltsin was checkmated at the USSR level. The Interregional Deputies Group was a minority in the Soviet congress, and he was not its unchallenged leader. With good reason, he felt he was in better sync than his adversaries, and even than his allies, with the times and with a popular constituency. Power and principle conjoined on a strategy of outflanking the general secretary and away from the moderation that had characterized Yeltsin’s views when he first took up the reform banner. It was “a classic polarizing game” intended to box Gorbachev in “and to create the conditions for a decisive break with the old order.”¹

Several members of the 1989 campaign team wanted Yeltsin to catch the coming political wave in Moscow. There he would have taken control of city hall and revenge on the local party machine. Yeltsin decided to train his sights on Russia. It was against Soviet law to sit in more than two elected legislatures. Yeltsin thus had to choose between Moscow and the RSFSR, unless he wanted first to resign his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet. It was not a hard choice. “This maximal program” of going for Russia, wrote Lev Sukhanov, “was more to Yeltsin’s taste. He does not like to take the same track twice: monotony nauseates him.”² The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was a much grander prize than Moscow. It accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population, two-thirds of its economy, and three-quarters of its landmass. The RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies was to be elected on March 4, 1990, under rules eased up from the USSR election: The filters for candidates were simplified, and there were no seats earmarked for the CPSU or other organizations.

Yeltsin sought nomination in his home province and was registered in District No. 74, comprising Sverdlovsk city and the industrial town of Pervoural’sk. His return to Sverdlovsk in the last days of January was front-page news, despite moves by the CPSU obkom, now headed by his old enemy Leonid Bobykin, to hush it up. “He met with electors in halls filled to bursting. Whenever possible, an audio feed onto the street was organized.”³ At one rally, three social scientists from the Urals Polytechnic Institute—Aleksandr Il’in, Gennadii Kharin, and Lyudmila Pikhoya—walked up to Yeltsin and told him his statement had been haphazard and he was too dependent on Q&A repartee. They offered to write a sample speech with greater thematic richness. Yeltsin liked the result and asked them to draft his candidate’s program in February.⁴

For half of the campaign, Yeltsin was on the stump for candidates outside of Sverdlovsk oblast. The lion’s share of them subscribed to Democratic Russia, a protoparty formed in January 1990 on the basis of the Interregional caucus, which listed nominees in several hundred urbanized districts. Yeltsin offered his signature on leaflets and posters, “creating a giant coattails effect from Boris Yeltsin on down to the city district level.”⁵ Russia was the only Soviet republic where the CPSU was without a committee, bureau, and first secretary. Reluctantly, Gorbachev in October 1989 reconstituted the Khrushchev-era Russian Bureau within the Central Committee apparatus. He accepted a Russian Communist Party only in the new year. It did not have its founding congress until June of 1990, three months after the election. So it was that the Communist Party was hit-or-miss in the RSFSR campaign and candidates who were members of it (as 70 percent were) were left to sink or swim. Vitalii Vorotnikov, the Politburo member who answered for the RSFSR, met with yawns when he tried to get Gorbachev to send heavy hitters into the fray. He offered his resignation to Gorbachev in January, and then agreed to stay through the election.⁶

The Yeltsin campaign offered a mélange of the familiar and the new. In pushing populism and calling for a blanket prohibition on nomenklatura privilege, he was aided by publication in February of the best-selling Confession on an Assigned Theme, with its purple prose about the lifestyles of the CPSU elite. It was widely quoted in the provincial press.⁷ The new ingredients had to do mostly with the governance of Russia and its place in a reformed federal system. Here Yeltsin preached making the RSFSR over into a “presidential republic” with an elective president, a full-time parliament, a constitutional court, a state bank, an academy of sciences, a territorial militia, and multiple political parties. A democratic constitution adopted by referendum would enshrine these provisions as well as “the principle of the paramountcy of law” and freedoms of expression, assembly, association, and worship. The Soviet state, de jure federal but de facto unitary, ought to be decentralized, Yeltsin’s program said, “because monopoly and the overcentralization of political and economic power have led our country to its present state.” The heavy hand of Moscow stultified natural communities of interest as surely as dictatorship stultified political freedom and command planning stultified economic enterprise. “We have to give the maximum possible self-reliance [or self-rule—samostoyatel’nost’] to the republics,” beginning with the RSFSR. “We have to see to it that we have strong republics, which should decide themselves what functions to give up to [the center] and which to keep for them.”⁸ The same held within Russia, where regions had to have more autonomy. Devolution, based on liberal, nonethnic Russian nationalism, augmented democratization and market reform as a third and equal strand in Yeltsin’s de-monopolization project. How the wish would be made reality, or what would happen if the strands came into conflict or were internally inconsistent, was not specified.⁹

March 4 brought another electoral landslide. Yeltsin toted up 84 percent of the votes in his Sverdlovsk district against eleven no-name candidates. He told a journalist friend he would now “go only to Golgotha”—to a reckoning in some form with the old regime. The look on his face was both elated and fearful.¹⁰

Gorbachev hurried to prop up his position by carpentering a new institutional framework for governing the Soviet Union. In early February he had the party Central Committee approve a motion to repeal Article 6 of the 1977 Brezhnev constitution, which stipulated that the CPSU was the only legal party—“the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system.” It was an overdue concession to the opposition and to democratic principles. On March 13, 1990, the USSR congress approved the measure. At the same sitting, on March 14, it introduced a Soviet presidency, to which it elected Gorbachev on March 19. The change was an acknowledgment that the Communist Party, whose general secretary he remained, was no longer plausible as the sole basis for political authority. At the Politburo session of March 7, Anatolii Luk’yanov, who was to succeed Gorbachev as USSR parliamentary chairman, asked him why they were acting in such unseemly haste. “So as to put them [the republics and the Russian democrats] in their place,” Gorbachev rejoined. Luk’yanov predicted, accurately, that the republics would counterpunch with presidencies of their own. He then brought up a deadlier point—about legitimacy. Why should Gorbachev be made president by the legislature and not by the whole people? “Why should the people not be the electors? This betokens mistrust of the people. All this will be exaggerated by [the opposition].” Gorbachev was unswayed, a blunder of biblical proportions.¹¹ Until June–July 1990, when Yeltsin streaked past him in the opinion polls, he would have won a general election.¹²

A couple of weeks after the election, Yeltsin, as Gorbachev noted with satisfaction at a Politburo meeting, requested and received a spa ticket from the Soviet parliament; he had notified Luk’yanov that he was worn to the bone and had to get away. The effort to make Yeltsin speaker of the RSFSR congress, which was to open in May, would have to begin without him.¹³ Once he was back from vacation, however, Yeltsin worked methodically on getting the position and agreed to put off formation of the Russian presidency until 1991. On the question of chairing the legislature, about 40 percent of the deputies were pro-Yeltsin (in the USSR congress, only 10 to 15 percent by this time adhered to the Interregional group) and 40 percent were anti-Yeltsin; the rest were known as the “swamp.” Hopeful of success, the Democratic Russia bloc nominated Yeltsin for the chair.

In camera, Nikolai Ryzhkov from Sverdlovsk, who was still Gorbachev’s prime minister, had a foreboding at the Politburo meeting of March 22, 1990, of a domino effect if Yeltsin and his allies were to succeed in their quest: “If they take Russia, they need not try hard to destroy the [Soviet] Union and cast off the central leadership: party and legislative and governmental. In my view, once they have taken Russia, everything else, the entire federal superstructure, will very quickly go to pieces.”¹⁴ The inhabitants of what had been an impregnable castle were pressing the panic button, this at a time when many analysts still asserted that Russia could never be a threat to Soviet stability. Bootlessly, Ryzhkov pushed the Politburo to nominate and promote a reliable candidate for Russian parliamentary chairman. At the April 20 meeting of the Politburo, Gorbachev expressed incredulity at Yeltsin’s growing standing in Russian society. “What Yeltsin is doing is incomprehensible…. Every Monday his face doubles in size [due to his selfimportance]. He speaks inarticulately, he often comes up with the devil knows what, he is like a worn-out record. But the people repeat over and over, ‘He is our man!’”¹⁵ Gorbachev could not understand why and could not bring himself to imitate Yeltsin.

On April 27 Yeltsin flew to London for a foreign diversion, the British book party for the English translation (as Against the Grain) of Confession on an Assigned Theme. Margaret Thatcher received him for forty-five minutes at 10 Downing Street. He tried to draw her out on a channel between the United Kingdom and “the new, free Russia” that would bypass the Soviet government. First, she replied suavely, Russia would need to be new and free in more than words. The Iron Lady had notified Gorbachev “to make it clear that I was receiving Mr Yeltsin in the way I would a Leader of the Opposition.” She found her guest “far more my idea of the typical Russian than was Mr Gorbachev—tall, burly, square Slavic face and shock of white hair.” He was sure-footed and mannerly, “with a smile full of good humour and a touch of self-mockery.” What most struck her was that Yeltsin “had… thought through some of the fundamental problems much more clearly than had Mr Gorbachev” and, “unlike President Gorbachev, had broken out of the communist mindset and language.” Thatcher shared her rave reviews with President Bush, who answered that “the Americans did not share them.”¹⁶

Yeltsin left the next day to give a talk at a symposium in Córdoba, Spain. The six-passenger airplane chartered to take him from there to Barcelona ran into engine and electrical trouble and had to make a rough landing at the Córdoba airport. Yeltsin suffered a slipped disk and numbness in his legs and feet. He had three hours of spinal surgery in Barcelona on April 30. Within two days, he was on his feet; on May 5 he was in Moscow, met at the airport by a crowd chanting “Yeltsin for President!” Never one to baby an injury, he made it on May 7 to a pre-congress meeting of reform-minded deputies in Priozersk, a lakeside resort near Leningrad. He and Lev Sukhanov sat in a pavilion and downed a liter of Armenian brandy, his preferred drink at that time—before repairing to the main party for toasts.¹⁷ If Yeltsin had been operated on in a Soviet hospital, he would have been bed-bound for weeks and might well have lost the contest for Russian parliamentary chief on that account.

Only on May 16 did Gorbachev nominate Aleksandr Vlasov, a lackluster apparatchik recently promoted to Vorotnikov’s place as head of the RSFSR government, as congress chairman. Gorbachev spoke on Vlasov’s behalf on May 23 and dropped the ball, packing his bags for a visit to Canada and the United States. He and the Central Committee men sent to twist the deputies’ arms could not conceive of losing—“as Nicholas II might have thought on the eve of the revolution,” to quote Georgii Shakhnazarov.¹⁸ But, straw polls showing his support to be soft, Vlasov backed out and left Yeltsin to face Ivan Polozkov, a regional secretary from Krasnodar in the North Caucasus similar in mentality to Ligachëv—but to Gorbachev more appetizing than Yeltsin.

A lot was riding on Yeltsin’s May 25 opening speech to the deputies. He and his team put the finishing touches on it past midnight. Discovering at daybreak that the ribbon from the office typewriter on which they had worked was missing, they were anxious that one of his opponents might read it and steal a march on Yeltsin, “and then there would be nothing for him to do on the podium.”¹⁹ It was a false alarm. Deputies made their way from the Rossiya Hotel to the Kremlin gates through lines of picketers bearing Yeltsin signs. In his self-introduction, Yeltsin conceded that attitudes toward him among the representatives ran the full gamut, and pledged “dialogue with various political forces” and give-and-take with Gorbachev. In the first round of voting, tabulated the morning of May 26, he polled 497 votes to Polozkov’s 473. On May 27 he tiptoed up to 503 votes, Polozkov drooping to 458. On Tuesday, May 29, with Vlasov back in the game, Yeltsin sat breathless through a third round. He squeaked through with 535 votes, outpolling Vlasov by sixty-eight and landing exactly four more than the compulsory 50-percent-plus-one.²⁰ Gorbachev heard the ill tidings midway across the Atlantic to Ottawa. He said in retirement that he might have been better off egging the deputies on to vote for Yeltsin, which would have motivated contrarians to vote against him: “They wanted to show their independence.”²¹ Independence from established authority was indeed the zeitgeist in 1990, and Yeltsin was channeling it.

In the afterglow of his cliff-hanger victory, Yeltsin moved into the Russian White House, the spanking new granite-and-marble skyscraper for the RSFSR’s legislature and executive on the Moskva River embankment, down a hill from the U.S. embassy. His cavernous office was on the fifth floor, with a private elevator, and had been occupied until then by Vitalii Vorotnikov. As parliamentary speaker, he got to form a small secretariat and to put on the payroll Aleksandr Korzhakov and irregulars from the provinces such as Valerii Bortsov, Valentina Lantseva, and the UPI speech writers, some of whom had lived out of suitcases and put themselves up in hotels, suburban hostels, and even railway stations.²² He asked Viktor Ilyushin, an apparatchik from Sverdlovsk oblast who had also worked with him in the Moscow party committee, to head the group. Under the revised RSFSR constitution, Yeltsin was to nominate candidates for head of government. On June 15, 1990, Ivan Silayev, formerly one of Ryzhkov’s deputy premiers and before that the head of the Soviet aviation industry, was confirmed as the first of his prime ministers. He and Yeltsin nominated ministers for the cabinet and secured parliamentary confirmation for them. Mikhail Bocharov, Yeltsin’s deputy in the USSR legislative committee and the point man for his election as chairman of the Russian parliament, had been led to believe the job would be his. Bocharov had been an active member of the Interregional group and finished sixth in the contest to elect its five co-chairmen. He was the principal liaison between Democratic Russia and the first session of the Russian congress, applying himself to this work while Yeltsin was out of Moscow on vacation. He says Yeltsin at first invited him to be prime minister, but was miffed when he drew up a list of cabinet members. Bocharov adds that at one point Yeltsin suggested that he himself become prime minister and Bocharov chair the parliament. Bocharov turned into a caustic critic, the first of many office seekers to become embittered.²³

The triumph, and the conservative drift within the party, also affected Yeltsin’s withdrawal from the communist fraternity. The Russian Communist Party elected Polozkov—the paleo-communist out of central casting—its first secretary on June 19. Yeltsin’s man Oleg Lobov, a political centrist, finished second in the balloting. Lobov, who had moved from Sverdlovsk to Moscow in 1987, had been sent to Armenia in 1989 as CPSU second secretary and was not an official delegate to the Russian party congress. Had he been better prepared and won, Yeltsin might have tried to work out an accommodation.²⁴ Yeltsin had indicated that if chosen as leader of the Russian congress he would ensure evenhandedness by quitting the party or putting his membership in abeyance. At the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress in early July, he called for the party’s conversion into a Party of Democratic Socialism or Union of Democratic Forces that would take its place in a multiparty democracy. Yeltsin wagged a finger at those unable to part with the “apparatus party” of yesteryear: “Let those who would think of any other variant look at the fate of the communist parties of the countries of Eastern Europe. They cut themselves off from the people, misunderstood their role, and found themselves left behind.”²⁵

Gorbachev would not take the bait. Expecting deadlock, Yeltsin had bargained with Gavriil Popov and the Moscow liberals over a collective goingaway letter—in the woods outside Popov’s dacha, to block KGB snooping.²⁶ But as usual he did things his way. He “wore out his speech writers” in drafting and redrafting his remarks and went over “all the details of the definitive moment—how he would mount the rostrum, how he would leave the hall after his statement, which doorway he would use.”²⁷ On July 12 he asked Gorbachev to let him speak and then said to the hall that he was leaving the party. The umbilical cord was snipped after twenty-nine years. “Taking into account our transition to a multiparty society,” he said, “I cannot carry out only the decisions of the CPSU.”²⁸ He then stalked up the center aisle of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, guffaws and whistles resounding in his ears. Soviet television broadcast the congress with a delay. When his statement began to play, Yeltsin came out of his White Office study into the corridor to watch the only large-screen set in the building. “His face was strained. He noticed no thing or person…. All that was important to him was to see himself from the side. As soon as the picture changed, he walked noiselessly to his desk—looking at no one, greeting no one, saying good-bye to no one. No doubt about it, this was one of the turning points of his life.”²⁹ Yeltsin seems to have left his party card at the meeting hall. Family members did not see it again, and, unlike his Soviet-period medals, which he kept, it was not found with his personal effects in 2007.³⁰

That evening Gorbachev’s guru, Anatolii Chernyayev, wrote a note to Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s “musical moment.” “You pulled teeth so as to keep the position of general secretary of the party. Yeltsin spit in its [the party’s] face and went to do what it was up to you to do.”³¹ Later in the congress, those leaders most at odds with Yeltsin—Yegor Ligachëv, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, and Lev Zaikov, who in 1988 had proclaimed the Yeltsin epoch to be over—were taken off the Politburo. The party as such would linger another thirteen months.

The Gorbachev group’s take on Yeltsin’s Russianism was that it was a smoke screen for his power-seeking. “All at once,” party secretary Vadim Medvedev said acridly to the Politburo in May, “he has become a Russian patriot, although he never gave a thought to Russia until now. This… is a dishonorable political game.” “Why is Yeltsin picking up this question?” Gorbachev inquired at the same session. “He is picking it up in order to play games. [He wants] to use it to make his way to power in Russia, and through Russia to blow up the CPSU and the country.”³²

Although expediency was a factor, it did not make Yeltsin a political mad bomber and it was not nearly the whole story. Yeltsin was no neophyte to Russia-firstism. In Sverdlovsk he had discoursed on Russia as ugly stepchild of the Soviet Union and dreamed up paper schemes for giving it status and devolving some powers to its regions. While Russian rights had not been his priority before the 1990 election, in his first speech to the USSR congress in May 1989 he had advocated “territorial sovereignty” and “economic and financial self-reliance” for all Soviet republics, specifically endorsing a proposal from the Baltic republic of Latvia.³³ By now, although the potshots from Medvedev and Gorbachev tried to obfuscate it, Russianist sentiment was quite widespread in the RSFSR elite. Partly it was contagion from nationalist movements in the Baltic and elsewhere and partly it pushed back against the Soviet congress’s decision on April 26, 1990, to put on a legal par with the fifteen “union” republics of the USSR the thirty-odd “autonomous” republics, the ethnic homelands implanted within the union republics, most of which were within Russia. “No other action could have so dramatized Yeltsin’s claim that the center ignored and repressed Russia and that Russia needed a strong leader and the right to abrogate USSR laws on Russian territory.”³⁴ The clarion statement on the part of the RSFSR was its congress’s declaration on June 12, 1990, of Russia’s “sovereignty” (suverenitet), meaning national self-determination, territorial integrity, and, once a new Soviet constitution or federative agreement was in place, the primacy of its laws over federal legislation.³⁵ Indicative of the breadth of feeling, the motion was first made by Vorotnikov and the communists and went through in a one-sided roll call (907 yeas, thirteen nays, nine abstentions). Yeltsin remembered the vote and the ear-splitting ovation as the acme of all his years in Moscow. “For me and for everyone… in the hall, this was a moment of rejoicing.”³⁶ The genie was out of the bottle. Six union republics, starting with Estonia in November 1988, had adopted such a manifesto, and the remainder were to do so later in 1990 (Kirgiziya or Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia was the last, in December).

The opening of the RSFSR’s books was salt on the wounds of Russian rancor over the economic terms of Soviet federalism. Prime Minister Silayev persuaded himself that the center had for seven decades been robbing Russia blind. He was scandalized to find that the RSFSR subsidized the federal budget to the tune of 46 billion rubles (about $30 billion at the official exchange rate). With Yeltsin’s backing, he tried to pare the figure in the 1991 budget to 10 billion rubles and to pass that sum to sister republics through an RSFSR-controlled account and collect some of what was owing in kind as consumer goods.³⁷ As talk grew of market pricing, Russia’s mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold to be protected from the center and from poorer Soviet republics. And Yeltsin voiced sympathy with the labor movement that had taken shape in Russian and Ukrainian heavy industry in 1989 and gone on strike in favor of workers’ control over productive assets.

Crisscrossing the regions of Russia for three weeks in August 1990—flying on scheduled Aeroflot flights—Yeltsin was in tip-top populist form. In Sterlitamak, Bashkiriya, in the southern Urals, an invitation-only audience gathered in the House of Culture of the Caustic Soda Works:

At several stops, Yeltsin was mobbed by well-wishers and had to step onto a streetcar or truck bed to get out of the press of people. In the hamlet of Raifa outside Kazan, Tatariya, where he had lived for five years before the war, he went for a half-hour swim in the local lake and then donated his striped swimsuit to his hosts, who made it the centerpiece of “one of the main legends of the village,” brought out for discussion once a year.³⁹

In the minority homelands, Yeltsin catered to the anti-Moscow mood. If he were a Tatar, he told writers in Kazan, he would be going after “the self-sufficiency of the Tatar republic.” At Kazan State University on August 5, where he was met with pickets who bore signs reading Azatlyk (Freedom, in the Tatar language), he put forth his famous summons to the Tatars to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” In Ufa, the capital of Bashkiriya, he rephrased the call: “We say to the Bashkir people: ‘You take the share of power which you yourselves can swallow!’”⁴⁰ The catchy phrase was minted by his new adviser on nationality questions, the ethnographer and sociologist Galina Starovoitova. It corresponded with Yeltsin’s take on the issue, and he unsheathed it to great effect. On the same expedition, he deplored the cost to Russians of the USSR as a superpower. “Charity begins at home,” he declared, “and Russia will not help other states” or keep up the Soviet Union’s defense, space, and foreign-aid budgets.⁴¹

Russia-USSR tensions were taken to the boiling point in 1990–91 not by this or that issue but by the intertwining of all the main issues dividing them. For the insurgent Yeltsin, devolution of power was a precondition of pursuing political and economic reform. He meant to become Russia’s first elected head of state and up the pace of economic change, toward a terminus he now would not put in the Marxist compartments: “I think you find in the real world neither the capitalism about which the classics spoke nor the socialism about which they spoke…. I am not for socialism for the sake of socialism. I am for the people living better.”⁴² The prelude to market reform would be an anti-crisis package to counter shortages and hoarding. And Russia would need to be paid a fair price by Soviet and foreign purchasers for its fuels and raw materials. Only self-direction would permit his government to take this route.

Gorbachev was more emphatic than Yeltsin in commingling devolution, politics, and economics. The play for sovereignty, he charged in May 1990, was a design for killing state socialism (communism) as an ideology and social model. “It contains an attempt to excommunicate Russia from socialism…. The program’s author… wants to invite us with one stroke of the pen to say farewell to the socialist choice we made in 1917.”⁴³ In defending the central power, Gorbachev saw himself as carrying on sacrosanct Soviet beliefs as much as constitutional stability.

Did this all make for an ineluctable collision between the two? High-level actors feared it did and tried to talk Gorbachev into co-opting Yeltsin by offering him a plum political position. Aleksandr Yakovlev and Georgii Shakhnazarov—who had earlier begged Gorbachev to send Yeltsin abroad—lobbied him after the Russian election to make Yeltsin vice president of the USSR. Gorbachev demurred, saying Yeltsin’s ambitiousness was too insatiable for him ever to accept.⁴⁴ In December 1990 he handed the post to Gennadii Yanayev, a former Komsomol official whom he said he could trust; Yanayev would be one of the leaders of the plot to depose him in August 1991. While Yeltsin would have turned down the vice presidency—it would lower him to “personal assistant to Gorbachev,” he said in an interview—he would have considered the meatier job of prime minister if it had been offered in 1989. Once he was RSFSR leader, it was out of the question.⁴⁵

Common ground was more likely to be found on policy than on the allocation of positions. Yeltsin’s ideas about economic and socioeconomic change continued to be sketchy. For some months in 1990, he backed a wacky plan, put forward by economic counselors Igor Nit and Pavel Medvedev, for motivating workers through the emission of a counter-currency they termed “red money.” Implementation in the agrarian sector divided the Silayev cabinet, and a more presentable alternative came up. The Five Hundred Days Program for economic reform furnished the last best chance for collaboration with the center. Drawn up between February and August of 1990 by a group of economists headed by Stanislav Shatalin and Yevgenii Yasin of Gorbachev’s camp and Grigorii Yavlinskii of Yeltsin’s, it called on Russia and the Soviet Union to move decisively to market harmonization of economic activity. In the space of a year and a half, it would have nullified most price controls, made a start on privatization of property (for which it used the euphemism “destatization”), scrapped the USSR’s industrial ministries, and relegated regulatory and overhead functions to an “interrepublic economic committee,” after agreement on a “treaty of economic union.” The project, Yeltsin assured crowds in the Volga basin and the Urals in August, would stabilize the economy in two years and lead to growth and improved consumer welfare in the third year. The Russian Supreme Soviet passed on it on September 11, at which point Gorbachev got cold feet. On October 16 he abandoned Five Hundred Days, saying it would emasculate the federal government. Yeltsin declared Russia would have to make reform on its own, which Kremlin conservatives took as evidence that it was impossible ever to cooperate with him.⁴⁶ Yavlinskii left his position as deputy premier of the RSFSR in frustration with Gorbachev but also with Yeltsin. Yeltsin was to vow in a private aside to Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov’s widow, that “I will not play the dupe [durachkom ne budu] the next time.”⁴⁷

Gorbachev’s backpedaling bore on more than economics. He bit off extra powers for his executive presidency, promoted hard-liners to positions such as prime minister (where he replaced Ryzhkov with the Soviet finance minister, Valentin Pavlov), and made spasmodic use of troops against nationalist unrest in the Baltic and Caucasus areas. In the consultations on a new “union treaty” for the Soviet federation, the necessity for which he announced on June 11, 1990, the day before the Russian sovereignty declaration, Gorbachev ceded nothing to the republics.

In November 1990 Yeltsin visited Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, the secondranking Soviet republic, where he addressed its parliament and dealt with Ukrainian officials as equals. He signed a ten-year cooperation treaty with his counterpart, Leonid Kravchuk, on November 19. It recognized existing borders, which gave weight to Ukraine’s claim to Crimea, the idyllic peninsula in the Black Sea, populated chiefly by Russian speakers and home to the Black Sea Fleet, arbitrarily shifted from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian republic by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Yeltsin, said a leading nationalist, Vyacheslav Chornovil, had “injected a very constructive note” by holding out the prospect of greater Ukrainian autonomy from Moscow without severing ties with Russia.⁴⁸ A month later, Yeltsin’s Russia and Kravchuk’s Ukraine, with Belarus (Belorussia) and Kazakhstan (the fifth- and fourth-ranking republics, Uzbekistan being the third), formed a “council of four” to work on a bottom-up treaty as a counter to Gorbachev’s. In January 1991 the Soviet military put on a show of force in Lithuania and Latvia, slaying twenty people in firefights at a television tower in Vilnius and an office building in Riga. In fear of a crackdown that would be lethal to democratization, Yeltsin called down hellfire on it and issued an appeal to Russian soldiers in the Baltic garrisons not to take “a wrong step.” Anatolii Chernyayev, in a draft letter he kept to himself, reproached Gorbachev: “You started the process of returning the country to civilization, but it has come up against your line on the ‘unified and indivisible [USSR].’ You have said many times to me and other comrades of yours that the Russians will never forgive anyone for ‘breaking up the empire.’ But here is Yeltsin insolently doing it in Russia’s name, and very few Russians are protesting.”⁴⁹ On February 19 Yeltsin issued his first call for Gorbachev to resign. Gorbachev assured his assistants that “Yeltsin’s song has been sung” and time was working against him.⁵⁰

A related topic was Russia’s right to act in world affairs. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker was in Moscow on March 14–16, 1991, and refused to meet with Yeltsin privately; Yeltsin then refused to come to the embassy dinner party. Ambassador Matlock thought his handling of Baker “petty and selfdefeating.”⁵¹ In mid-April he got a chilly reception at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, leaving after several days of snubs, and was unable to get President François Mitterrand to meet with him at the Élysée Palace.⁵² After France, he tried again in the United States. Through Ambassador Jack Matlock, he stated his wish to visit Washington a second time and be guaranteed that he would be properly received by the president. He went shortly before his swearing in as Russian president, but at the bipartisan invitation of Senators Robert Dole and George Mitchell, not of George Bush. Hosting Yeltsin in the Rose Garden on June 20, Bush stressed relations with the Soviet government and mentioned Gorbachev’s name more often than Yeltsin’s. Strasbourg and Washington were both reminders “that the West only had eyes for Gorbachev.”⁵³

Or at least most of those in authority in the West did. Margaret Thatcher had been an admirer since their meeting, and John Major, her replacement, took a like view. They were joined by Richard Nixon, the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Nixon went to Moscow right after Baker and paid a call on Yeltsin. Yeltsin had been misinformed by staff members about the family history of his guest and held forth about Nixon’s grandfather having lived for a time in Yekaterinburg. Nixon’s grandfathers had never traveled outside the United States; he listened without comment, and they moved on to the current political situation.⁵⁴ Nixon, who had traded observations about the future of communism and capitalism with Nikita Khrushchev in the celebrated Kitchen Debate of July 1959, liked what he saw and heard in 1991. The Russia trip had held but one surprise, he told an assistant back in New Jersey. “What was that?” she asked:

Nixon made the point in a meeting with President Bush and in public articles and interviews.

American audiences got a peek at Yeltsin’s ability to cut to the chase in the June visit to Washington. At one dinner, he made it about two minutes into his prepared speech and told his interpreter to give it in English. “This cut the delivery time in half, and when it was over the crowd responded with a standing, cheering ovation.”⁵⁶ Desk analysts for the Central Intelligence Agency began giving Yeltsin respect right at this time. A secret assessment by the Office of Soviet Analysis circulated on June 1 argued that too much attention had been lavished in the government and the press on Yeltsin’s quirks, lust for power, relationship with Gorbachev, and tactics—“his larger-than-life persona and remarkable political odyssey invite this.” But that was not the whole picture, and it was high time to say so. “Contrary to the stereotype, Yeltsin does have goals that he has been consistently pursuing, and strategies for realizing them. These are important not only because they drive his actions, but also because they reflect in broad outline a coherent Russian democratic alternative to the imperial authoritarianism of the traditionalists.” The CIA team was especially impressed by Yeltsin’s ability to keep up with changes in the Soviet environment and by his “appreciation of the interdependency of goals.”⁵⁷

Yeltsin considered his parliamentary position the stepping stone to a Russian presidency. Most of his associates were more interested than he in legislation and were less vociferous on policy toward the Soviet center. Even Vladimir Isakov, the chairman of the Council of the Republic, one of the two halves of the Supreme Soviet—a professor of jurisprudence from Sverdlovsk and a centrist—was upset by his propensity for playing the lone hand. Yeltsin would listen intently to advice, agree in principle, and then act “as if the conversation had never taken place.”⁵⁸ Comity within the group dissipated in February–March 1991, and agitated sessions of the Supreme Soviet and congress were accompanied by pro-Yeltsin street demonstrations of up to 300,000 people, penned in by soldiers and riot police. Yeltsin’s salvation was to induce the legislature to piggyback a question on institution of the office of president onto an all-USSR referendum on the future of the union on March 17. Seventy percent of Russians endorsed the federation and 71 percent an elected Russian presidency. In a masterpiece of brinkmanship, Yeltsin got parliament to schedule the election for June 12, the anniversary of the 1990 sovereignty declaration, before agreeing on presidential powers—something it got to on May 24, with only three weeks to spare. The Communists for Democracy faction headed by Colonel Aleksandr Rutskoi, a mustachioed hero of the Afghan war, provided the requisite congressional votes.

Rutskoi was named Yeltsin’s vice-presidential running mate, at Lyudmila Pikhoya’s suggestion, and two members of Democratic Russia and the Interregional bloc, Gavriil Popov and Anatolii Sobchak, ran parallel campaigns for mayor of Moscow and Leningrad. Management of the Yeltsin campaign was entrusted to Gennadii Burbulis, an owlish professor of dialectical materialism from Sverdlovsk (born in the oblast town of Pervoural’sk), who was admitted to Yeltsin’s circle in 1990 and had hoped to be the vice-presidential nominee. An RSFSR television channel, one of the first inroads in the tussle over sovereignty, went on the air on May 13, in time for the race.

Of the five candidates who vied with Yeltsin in this, his third anti-establishment election in two years, only the former Soviet premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, the nominee of the Russian communists, was a serious contender. The party’s beetle-browed leader, Ivan Polozkov, impossible to get elected, would resign his post in August. Yeltsin ducked the all-candidates’ debates and did two rambles out of Moscow, formally on parliamentary business, presenting himself as statesmanlike and not grubbing for votes. If Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the windbag Russian nationalist who came in third, is speaking the truth, Gorbachev’s office, working through the KGB, implored him to visit the same cities as Yeltsin and covertly gave 3 million rubles (about $2 million) to his vice-presidential candidate, Andrei Zavidiya, to buy his cooperation. But Zavidiya, Zhirinovskii says, did not bring Zhirinovskii in on the scheme and skimmed off 90 percent of the money; Zhirinovskii did not alter his travel plans.⁵⁹

As in 1989 and 1990, an army of amateurish democrats delivered Yeltsin’s message. Loosely coordinated by a group around Yeltsin and by Democratic Russia, they printed and photocopied materials, distributed them at Moscow subway stations, and rang doorbells. Retired schoolteachers rode the commuter rails of the capital region and passed Yeltsin fliers out of train windows. The chairman of the pilots’ union at Aeroflot, Anatolii Kochur, prevailed upon flight crews to cram bales of broadsheets into cargo bays and get them to activists in the outback. The punchline of the authorized candidate’s poster read Narodnogo deputata v narodnyye prezidenty!—“People’s Deputy for People’s President!” The main concern in the Yeltsin camp was that he would not make a majority in the first round and would lose to an anyonebut-Yeltsin candidate in a runoff.

Yeltsin campaigned against Gorbachev and the CPSU, not Ryzhkov or Zhirinovskii. In a firebrand interview on central television, he alluded to Gorbachev’s more soothing line in recent weeks as proof that communism, which had made Soviet citizens guinea pigs in a grotesque experiment, was on its last legs:

Support for Yeltsin, polls showed, flagged in late May, then rebounded. He had husbanded his small advertising budget for the home stretch. Come voting day, Wednesday, June 12, the one-man electoral juggernaut received 45,552,041 votes, or 59 percent of the valid ballots cast, to 18 percent for Ryzhkov and 8 percent for Zhirinovskii. He drew best in the Urals, Moscow, Leningrad (which was about to go back to being called St. Petersburg), the urbanized portions of central Russia and Siberia, and the Volga basin; he drew worst in the “red belt” of pro-communist regions on the steppes south of Moscow.⁶¹ Yeltsin’s testing of his authority with the demos, as Anatolii Luk’yanov had prophesied, contrasted sharply with Gorbachev’s quailing at that test in 1990. You, a Yeltsin ally said to Gorbachev, have been too timorous to try to obtain a mandate from society. Yeltsin dared, and got his agency by being chosen “not in the cloakrooms, not by a narrow circle, but by the people.” If the Soviet bosses went on attacking Yeltsin, it would continue to boomerang: “The anti-Yeltsin actions of the bankrupt top echelon have always had effects antithetical to those intended. They have brought forth the people’s wrath and elevated his authority.”⁶²

A gala inaugural was held on July 10 at the Palace of Congresses. Yeltsin seated a Russian Orthodox priest, a rabbi, and a Muslim cleric in the front row as a cue to the television audience that his Russia would be an openminded place. Patriarch Aleksii II and Oleg Basilashvili, a parliamentary deputy and stage and movie actor from Leningrad, spoke before Yeltsin took the oath of office for a five-year term, with left hand on a copy of the Russian constitution and right hand over his heart. Yeltsin’s undertaking as president, he said, beaming, was to transport Russia into the community of nations as “a prosperous, democratic, peace-loving, law-abiding, and sovereign state.” He also tried to trim expectations: “The president is not God, he is not a new monarch, he is not an all-powerful worker of miracles, he is a citizen.”⁶³

Gorbachev said to Shakhnazarov that he had to disabuse Yeltsin of suggestions for projecting the swearing-in onto a jumbo screen on Red Square, firing a twenty-four-gun salute, and taking the oath on the Bible, like an American president. The Soviet president arrived late and spoke briefly. The honoree responded in kind: As Gorbachev reached to shake his hand, Yeltsin took several steps forward and stopped, forcing Gorbachev to come to him. Gorbachev, seeing red at Yeltsin’s ambitions, as always, had a new regard for his acumen: “Such… a simpleminded yen for the scepter!” he let on to Shakhnazarov. “I am at my wit’s end to understand how he combines this with political instinct [chut’ë]. God knows, maybe this is his secret, maybe this is why he is forgiven everything. A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar. And that I do not know how to do.”⁶⁴ After the inauguration, Gorbachev approved rooms in the Kremlin for Yeltsin. They were in Building No. 14, across a cobblestoned square from Gorbachev’s lair in Building No. 1.⁶⁵

Gorbachev, having zigged toward the counterreformist pole in 1990, zagged back toward reformism in the spring of 1991. In dread of losing his support in the USSR congress and the Central Committee, of the republics coming to agreement at their own initiative, and of consumer ire at price increases, he restarted the effort to herd the republics together into a union treaty. The “Nine Plus One” talks (nine willing republics and the Soviet government) at the Novo-Ogarëvo state residence west of Moscow, built for Georgii Malenkov as Soviet prime minister in the 1950s, was one more sparring match with Yeltsin and dragged on from April 23 to late July. Gorbachev wanted a federation in which the center retained as many powers as possible.⁶⁶ With some sadness, Yeltsin thought the Soviet Union as constituted by Lenin and Stalin was doomed. “I am a Russian,” he confided to a French academic of Russian origin in Strasbourg, “and I am not happy with the idea of the collapse of the empire. For me, it is Russia, it is Russian history. But I know it is the end…. The only way [forward] is to get rid of this empire as quickly as possible, or to accept the process.”⁶⁷ He wanted in effect a confederation (although he stuck to the word “federation”), with Russia and the other sovereign republics controlling all taxation and natural resources and delegating a few functions (national security, railroads, the power grid, and atomic energy) to a central authority, which would haggle over its budget with them line by line. Verbal fisticuffs between Yeltsin and Gorbachev on May 24 spotlighted the disagreement over the monetary lifeblood of government:

Gorbachev yielded on taxation after Yeltsin called his bluff on a threat to pull out of Nine Plus One. “Do not,” Yeltsin upbraided Gorbachev privately, “take things to the point where we have to decide this question without you.”⁶⁹ To increase Russian autonomy and defang the CPSU, Yeltsin on July 20 issued Decree No. 14, proscribing any party from having cells or operations within organs of government in the RSFSR. Gorbachev seemed powerless to do anything about it.

A draft treaty for a Union of Sovereign States was initialed by the Novo-Ogarëvo working group on July 23, published on August 15, and its signing fixed for August 20. It largely embodied Russian preferences on taxation, natural resources, and the lesser republics within the RSFSR (they were to sign only as subunits of Russia). The center would still have the power to declare war and manage the military, but even foreign policy and public safety were to be subject to joint jurisdiction. In recognition of Russia’s new global stature, President Bush, in Moscow for a summit with Gorbachev, was received by Yeltsin in his new Kremlin office on July 30. To Soviet and foreign correspondents after the meeting, Yeltsin talked up the treaty and the July 20 decree. At the state dinner in the Kremlin, he tried unsuccessfully to upstage Gorbachev by making a beeline for Barbara Bush and escorting her from receiving line to table. Gorbachev also reports Yeltsin pouting over not being seated at the head table at a dinner at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassadorial residence, and pressing a conversation on George Bush.⁷⁰ The previous evening, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Nursultan Nazarbayev, the party prefect and now president of Kazakhstan, had met at Novo-Ogarëvo and agreed that Nazarbayev would replace Pavlov as prime minister after the treaty signing, the vice presidency would be dissolved, and other heads would roll. The KGB, whose chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, was one of those to be demoted, bugged their nocturnal conversation. Yeltsin warned Gorbachev that the walls had ears; Gorbachev did not believe him but acknowledged in his memoirs that Yeltsin had it right.⁷¹

The misbegotten coup d’état of August 19–21, 1991, whisked the rug out from under Gorbachev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet state. It was sprung by the conservatives with whom he had aligned himself in 1990–91 and was timed to forestall the signing of the union treaty. Confining Gorbachev to his summer residence at Foros, Crimea, the eight principals inundated Moscow with armor (about 750 tanks and vehicles) and troops, declared Gennadii Yanayev acting president, and appointed themselves a Public Committee for the State of Emergency, a condition they promulgated for a period of six months. As Yeltsin observed in Notes of a President, the committee, or GKChP, was a motley crew. It “had no leader. There was no authoritative person whose opinion would be a watchword and a signal to act.”⁷² Prime Minister Pavlov found refuge in the bottle; Kryuchkov of the KGB pulled strings behind the scenes; Vice President Yanayev spoke for the GKChP, ashen-faced and with trembling hands. Others represented the higher party apparatus and the military-industrial and agrarian complexes.

The worst oversights were vis-à-vis the born leader who was president of Russia. The fumbling plotters had puzzled at length about Gorbachev but gave little thought to Yeltsin or to his Russian administration. In February 1991, after Yeltsin’s public demand for Gorbachev to resign, a KGB colonel contacted Pavel Voshchanov, a journalist who accompanied Yeltsin on the U.S. trip in 1989, to ask for a meeting with Yeltsin to discuss how he and Yanayev could work together “to save the country.” Voshchanov took the message to Yeltsin, who said, “Let’s see what they are going to do, but we will not have any contact with this hoodlum [shantrapa].”⁷³ The question resurfaced in a conversation on August 7 or 8 between Kryuchkov and the Politburo member and Moscow first secretary, Yurii Prokof’ev, who had delivered a diatribe against Yeltsin at the plenum removing him from the Moscow post in November 1987 and would give the GKChP qualified support. Prokof’ev pushed for a change of heart on Yeltsin: “Now [he told Kryuchkov] the main figure is not Gorbachev, in that Mikhail Sergeyevich has lost all of his authority, but Yeltsin. He is popular and the people support him. This is the figure on whom the problem will hinge.” Betting that Yeltsin’s authoritarian leanings and the animosity he nursed toward Gorbachev would be enough to make him putty in their hands, Kryuchkov “said roughly this: We will reach an agreement with Yeltsin, we will fix this problem without taking any measures beforehand.”⁷⁴

Yeltsin had been to see Nazarbayev for talks in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, since August 16. Acting on a premonition, he delayed his return on Sunday, August 18, by four hours (he swam in a mountain stream and attended a concert). He had the pilots land at Kubinka, a military field some miles out of Moscow. Had they put down wheels as scheduled at Vnukovo airport, he said in an interview, he would have been arrested and shot by order of Kryuchkov, and the violence used as cover for a nationwide wave of repression. The claim about a plan to shoot him is not made in Yeltsin’s memoir account and seems implausible.⁷⁵ A post-coup inquiry turned up evidence that KGB officials intended to divert his aircraft to another landing strip, at Chkalovsk, and to detain him there for a conversation with Defense Minister Dmitrii Yazov and then “negotiations with the Soviet leadership.” At Kryuchkov’s direction, Viktor Grushko, his first deputy, chaired a meeting on this stratagem at one P.M. on August 17, in which Deputy Defense Minister Vladislav Achalov made it clear that force would have to be used, but, because of uncertainty about Yeltsin’s reaction, was unable to pull the others along. “After the landing [at Chkalovsk], the chief of the airport, on the pretense of delays on the part of those welcoming [the travelers], was to invite B. N. Yeltsin into another room, where Yazov would talk with him. In the course of the meeting, Achalov said that paratroopers and the Alpha Unit [of the KGB] would have to neutralize the guard of the RSFSR president, so as to exclude undesirable excesses such as taking a stand or the use of weapons. Since the participants in the meeting were unable to come to conclusions about how Yeltsin would react to this and what kinds of actions he would take in response, no final decision was made.” And none would be made.⁷⁶

One of the kingpins of the coup, Oleg Baklanov, notified Gorbachev at Foros on August 18 that they had already arrested Yeltsin, and then modified his story to say they would do so shortly. The available documentation shows Yeltsin to have been high on the general list of seventy persons the GKChP marked for roundup once the tanks went into action. Sixty Alpha rangers were sent in the wee hours of August 19 to the enclosure of RSFSR government dachas in the village of Arkhangel’skoye-2, where Yeltsin slept the night. They had orders to take him alive and hold him on an island at the Zavidovo wildlife reserve ninety miles north of Moscow. Yeltsin was woken up shortly after six in the morning and huddled with his political team, most of whom had been staying at dachas within strolling distance. After first preferring to call a two-hour “precautionary strike” by workers, he moved to more radical tactics. The group put together an anti-coup appeal “To the Citizens of Russia,” which Yeltsin’s daughters typed up in the dacha kitchen and Ivan Silayev telephoned in to the Russian White House. One of its recommendations was for a general strike of indefinite duration.⁷⁷

Around this time, Kryuchkov revoked the arrest order. He did it upon consultation with Anatolii Luk’yanov, Yeltsin’s former dacha mate, who had fallen in with the putsch and promised to get the USSR Supreme Soviet to provide it with legal cover (though not until August 26). “Kryuchkov was impressed by Luk’yanov’s advice to take a wait-and-see position, letting Yeltsin ‘declare himself’ and giving the people to understand that the democratic leader of Russia was against the imposition of order in the country.”⁷⁸ Shortly afterward, Kryuchkov tried honey rather than vinegar. It did not work: “Yeltsin refuses to cooperate. I spoke with him by telephone. I tried to make him see reason. It was useless.”⁷⁹ The one general who wanted “measures to extirpate B. N. Yeltsin’s group of adventurists” by force was Valentin Varennikov, the commander of Soviet ground forces, and he spent August 19 and 20 in Crimea and Kiev, Ukraine. If Varennikov, who fought in Berlin in 1945 and in Afghanistan in the 1980s, had been in Moscow, military behavior toward Yeltsin might have been more ruthless.⁸⁰

By the time Kryuchkov made news of Yeltsin’s obstreperousness known to his co-conspirators, the president of the RSFSR, after discussion in his team of whether to stay in Arkhangel’skoye-2 and the risks of moving, had been allowed to speed off in a car a little after nine A.M., headed to his office at the White House. He put on a bulletproof vest as he left. Naina Yeltsina said it would not be much use, since his head would be unprotected: “And the main thing is the head.”⁸¹ His limousine and several accompanying automobiles drove past paratroopers and tanks. Korzhakov’s bodyguard detail was armed but under orders not to shoot unless the presidential automobile was hit. Yeltsin did not speak to his family again until he phoned Yelena to wish her a happy birthday on the morning of August 21.

Holed up in the White House, Yeltsin, his government, and the parliamentary chairman pro tem, Ruslan Khasbulatov, demanded Gorbachev’s release and coordinated resistance to the putsch and the junta that had mounted it. They propagated their edicts by telephone, fax, and the foreign media, since the Soviet media were closed to them. Yeltsin declared that as president of Russia he was assuming command of all military and police units located in the RSFSR. At half past noon, in gray suit (buttoned at the waist) and tie, he marched onto the White House driveway. He was motivated by curiosity as much as anything and dismissed a warning from Gennadii Burbulis that he would be in danger from snipers, from the bushes or a nearby roof. Four or five aides grabbed at his arm and tried to keep him from going forward. “He was completely fearless—either oblivious of the danger or just thinking it didn’t really matter.”⁸²

A light drizzle was falling. A twelve-wheeled, olive-green T-72 tank, No. 110, from the Taman Motorized Rifle Division, built at the Urals Wagon Works in Sverdlovsk oblast, had just rumbled toward the bottom of the stairs. Yeltsin walked slowly down the steps, grabbed a small Russian flag from a bystander, and stood in front of the machine, intending, he said, to keep it and the three or four additional tanks behind it from coming any closer. For a few seconds, he looked down the barrel of its cannon, “confident that they would not run over a president.” Only when the forty-five tons of metal screeched to a halt did it occur to him to heave himself onto the hull, something his training as a tank operator at UPI and his service as party overseer of industry in Sverdlovsk let him know how to do. Once on it, Yeltsin reached into the hatch to shake hands with the driver and gunner and improvised again.⁸³ Perched on hardware that symbolized Soviet power—and what had been done in its name in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, and in Kabul in 1979—he pumped his right fist twice. He then read out his appeal to the citizenry, a copy of which he had clutched in his hand as he walked out of the building, unamplified to a knot of television cameras and a sparse audience that grew from about fifty when he began to speak to no more than 150 at the end, as passersby and shoppers from nearby stores came to have a look. Nikolai Vorontsov (the Soviet environment minister), Aleksandr Korzhakov, Gennadii Burbulis, and members of his entourage scampered up the side of the tank as he spoke.

The appeal, rather like Yeltsin’s secret speech in 1987, was not particularly eloquent, and it was composed with two other people, Khasbulatov and Silayev. The values it cited were those of the democratic fragment of the fast-dissolving Soviet civilization. Russia’s new government, it said, had tried to preserve “the unity of the Soviet Union and the unity of Russia,” and it could not accept the illegal and immoral acts of the GKChP, which would “return us to the epoch of the Cold War and the isolation of the Soviet Union from the world community.”⁸⁴ Yeltsin’s most musical moment, to use Anatolii Chernyayev’s phrase, was formed less by the words he spoke than by how he spoke them and where.

Within minutes, footage of Yeltsin’s stagecraft was transmitted internationally on CNN. Soviet television was allowed to show snippets only, but staffers gave friends in the Western news bureaus tapes they themselves could not broadcast, and copies were sent to the Urals and Siberia. Any Moscow family with a wire antenna could tune in CNN on their home television. Shots of Yeltsin on Tank No. 110 came in a flood when the coup was over. Indigenous viewers saw in them glimmerings of a totemic image from another revolution, tattooed in their heads by the history primers they had read as children—of Lenin at the Finland Station, returning from Swiss exile and holding forth to the Petrograd proletariat from an armored car in April 1917. Immortalized on celluloid from eye level, “Yeltsin’s rather awkward bulk makes him appear someone ‘larger than life,’ his unrefined speaking style ‘the voice of the people,’ his rather unkempt appearance a sign, not of the confusion of a politician caught by surprise but of a strong leader, righteously indignant and full of selfless resolve.”⁸⁵

There were anxious hours still to come. The hoped-for general strike did not happen, although the GKChP was unable to make use of that failure. In the White House, Yeltsin and 300 to 400 followers hunkered down behind sandbags and office furniture, with gas masks and weapons at the ready. Maybe 75,000 people (in the daylight, fewer at night) massed on the streets below.⁸⁶ At five P.M. on August 19, he assigned RSFSR Deputy Premier Oleg Lobov, his political client from the Urals, to institute a command center for a “reserve government” at a bomb shelter in Verkhnyaya Sysert, south of Sverdlovsk. Andrei Kozyrev, the hitherto ornamental Russian foreign minister and a fluent speaker of English, was sent to London to lay the groundwork for a government-in-exile.⁸⁷ In another decree, Yeltsin reached out to the military, enjoining them not to carry out the orders of the coup makers: “Soldiers, officers, and generals, the clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country. They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.”

John Major of Britain was the first of a chain of foreign leaders to telephone with words of support. George H. W. Bush called from the Oval Office the morning of Tuesday, August 20, and for the first time Yeltsin aroused his admiration. “After hearing Yeltsin’s voice, Bush began to believe that there might yet be a hero in this drama, one who would actually vanquish the villains—and it was not Gorbachev, but Yeltsin.” If he won out over the tanks, the American told Yeltsin, Russia would “pave its way into the civilized community of states.”⁸⁸ Bush clandestinely ordered U.S. national-security agencies to provide Yeltsin with signals intelligence from intercepts of Soviet military sources, and had a communications specialist from the embassy go the Moscow White House to help the Yeltsin group secure their telephone calls.⁸⁹

That afternoon Yeltsin blazed away at the concourse in front of the White House, this time with loudspeakers to amplify his voice: “You can build a throne out of bayonets, but can you sit on it for long? I am convinced that there is not and will not be any return to the past…. Russia will be free!”⁹⁰ By telephone and through mediators, he proselytized military officers, after which Generals Yevgenii Shaposhnikov and Pavel Grachëv, the commanders of the Soviet air force and airborne troops, agreed between them to have Shaposhnikov send two jets to strafe military vehicles in the Kremlin if the White House were stormed. The pop groups Helios, Mister Twister, Metallic Corrosion, and Time Machine rocked it up in the square. Poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko did a reading for the crowd, stand-up comedian Gennadii Khazanov performed impersonations of Gorbachev and Yanayev, and the master cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich lionized the opponents of the coup and waved a Kalashnikov rifle. Tension was astronomically high that evening, when soldiers accidentally killed three young male civilians.⁹¹ Yeltsin was nonplussed that the coup makers did not attack or even seal off the White House: “How could Kryuchkov be so blockheaded as not to understand how dangerous such indecision could be?”⁹² The GKChP blinked first. At three in the morning of August 21, Kryuchkov decided not to storm the White House, concluding that the carnage would be politically unmanageable. The blockade was lifted in the afternoon and the troops began to evacuate Moscow. By midnight the putschists were behind bars—arrested by agents of the RSFSR procurator general—and Gorbachev, the emperor who had no clothes, was back from Foros, escorted by Vice President Rutskoi of Russia. Descending the stairs of the plane, Gorbachev thanked Yeltsin and, tone-deaf to the end, spoke of being “an adherent of socialism.” On August 24, at the funeral for the three young men who died, Gorbachev was ill at ease, while Yeltsin movingly asked the parents’ forgiveness for not saving their sons’ lives.

Russia had entered an intermezzo of duopoly, dvoyevlastiye, like between the February and October revolutions of 1917. One aspirant, Yeltsin, elected by the people, was ascendant; the other, Gorbachev, chosen by two now lifeless bodies (the Central Committee of the CPSU, which he dissolved on August 24, and the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, which voted to shut itself down on September 5), was descendant.

Capitalizing on the legitimacy gap, Yeltsin compelled Gorbachev to annul his post-coup decrees on leadership of the national-security agencies and appoint men Yeltsin trusted. Gorbachev had made General Mikhail Moiseyev, who was complicit in the plot, acting defense minister on August 21. On August 22 Moiseyev was called to Gorbachev’s office and found Yeltsin next to the Soviet president and commander-in-chief. “Explain to him that he is not minister any longer,” Yeltsin barked at Gorbachev. “Gorbachev repeated Boris Nikolayevich’s words. Moiseyev listened in silence, and off he went.” The dovish Shaposhnikov, sight unseen by Yeltsin, was made minister of defense, and Vadim Bakatin, whom Gorbachev had fired as interior minister the winter before, was made chairman of the KGB.⁹³ On September 1 a Shaposhnikov order cleared by Yeltsin abolished the political directorate of the armed forces, long an implement of party control.

With Gorbachev, Yeltsin went for the jugular in public on Friday, August 23, in the Russian Supreme Soviet. Gorbachev had been requested to make a statement and answer questions from the benches, which he did for ninety minutes. With a national television audience watching, Yeltsin sashayed up to Gorbachev and stuck in his face a transcript by Nikolai Vorontsov showing that most Soviet cabinet members backstabbed Gorbachev at a cabinet meeting on August 19. “Gorbachev kept his dignity when he was alone at the podium. But when Yeltsin came over, the effect was almost as if he crumpled.”⁹⁴ Yeltsin hectored Gorbachev into reading out quotations from the paper to the lawmakers. That done, Yeltsin asked members, “on a lighter note,” to watch him finalize Decree No. 79, suspending the organs of the Russian Communist Party. He scrawled his signature slowly for the delectation of the deputies. They applauded him and heckled the red-faced Gorbachev, who mumbled “Boris Nikolayevich” several times. As an Izvestiya reporter noted, in an eerie inversion of the taunting of October–November 1987, Yeltsin, had now selected Gorbachev for the part of “naughty schoolboy.”⁹⁵

Brent Scowcroft, viewing the Supreme Soviet scene with President Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, said it was “all over” for Gorbachev. “Yeltsin’s telling him what to do. I don’t think Gorbachev understands what happened.” Bush concurred: “I’m afraid he may have had it.”⁹⁶ Scowcroft and Bush were correct. After the overmatch on August 23—Gorbachev called it sadistic in his memoirs—it was anticlimactic the next day when Gorbachev dissolved the Central Committee and resigned as general secretary of the party. Yeltsin’s Decree No. 90 on August 25 authorized the RSFSR Council of Ministers to seize all property of the CPSU and its Russian chapter. Yeltsin on August 26 publicly declined Gorbachev’s offer to make him a Hero of the Soviet Union. On August 31 Pravda, which had remained a much more conservative paper than Izvestiya, reprinted an International Herald Tribune cartoon of a smiling Yeltsin reaching down to pump the hand of a miniaturized Gorbachev; the tagline read, “Welcome back to power, Mikhail.”

The coup could not have been more destabilizing, and politics, economics, and culture converged more than ever on the constitutional question. The union treaty initialed in July was a dead letter. Only six union republics had been prepared to sign it, and, riddled with non sequiturs and ambiguities, it would in any event have been impracticable.⁹⁷ As of August 19, two Soviet republics (Lithuania and Georgia) had announced their independence from the USSR. Between August 20 and September 1, nine (Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan) followed their example. Tajikistan was to join the crowd in September, Turkmenistan in October, and Kazakhstan in December.

Gorbachev, his administration comatose (with no prime minister, parliament, budget, or bullion reserves), made a last-ditch effort to forge a treaty of union. The negotiating minuet started again at Novo-Ogarëvo, with the republic leaders sitting as the USSR State Council. Yeltsin was uncheerful about it and deputed two leading Russianists, Gennadii Burbulis and Sergei Shakhrai, to prepare working papers. The line had hardened. Earlier, Russia had been prepared to act as cash cow to the USSR and was “ready to cover any breach… even at the cost of its own ruination.” After the coup, this was impossible. “The republics had gone their disjunct ways and did not want to return to the old arrangement. The only possibility in these new conditions was an agreement among them in which Gorbachev would act as middleman.”⁹⁸

Russia came out for a rump “union of states” or “confederation of states” rather than the “union state” Yeltsin had consented to in July. Gorbachev, who would have taken any form of union with a viable central authority, made the point to the State Council on November 14 that every time he agreed with one of Yeltsin’s suggestions Yeltsin would slow down his speech, as if he were asking himself why Gorbachev was acting so agreeably. Yes, Yeltsin said, he was always wary of Gorbachev. Gorbachev “laughed, but without merriment.”⁹⁹ The talks went on against a backdrop of Russian appropriation of assets from the shell Soviet government. By the late autumn, Gorbachev and his men were accepting receivership as an improvement on insolvency.¹⁰⁰ With Gorbachev caving in to most of Yeltsin’s constitutional demands, agreement appeared within reach, yet slipped away at a last Novo-Ogarëvo meeting on November 25. Yeltsin, fresh from a trip to Germany and to Soviet forces there, said he would be prepared to take a confederative agreement to the Russian parliament, only without an irrevocable endorsement from him as president. Gorbachev accused him of weaseling out of commitments. Feeling trapped, Gorbachev said people were whispering that he was a spent force, and the republic leaders seemed to be of the same opinion. In that case, he went on ominously, “Go ahead and agree among yourselves”—something Yeltsin had warned he might do in their tête-à-tête that summer. He would have no part of the “further chaos that would follow from this diffuse position.”¹⁰¹

Besides the difference over the roles of central and Russian governments, there was another sticking point—the place of Ukraine. It was republic number two of the Soviet Union, with almost 50 million people, and the one for which Russians felt the greatest emotional warmth. On August 24 its parliament had voted for separation from the USSR and set a confirmatory referendum for December 1, to coincide with a presidential election. A real country with its own passports, army, and currency seemed in the offing. “What kind of union would there be without Ukraine?” Yeltsin asked on November 25. “I cannot imagine it.” Relations with Kiev could not be sorted out until December at the earliest. Until they were to its satisfaction, any Ukrainian participation would only give feet of clay to a new confederation, since quite likely it would soon have pulled out or set unacceptable terms.¹⁰² Leader Leonid Kravchuk made it clear in comments on November 26 that his reservations were not only about a renewed union but about the Russian entity within it, whose head, Yeltsin, seemed to assume that Ukraine and the others would revolve around it “as if it were the sun.”¹⁰³ On December 1, 90 percent of the Ukrainian electorate, including a majority of ethnic Russians, who were about one-fifth of the republic’s population, voted for independent statehood. Kravchuk was elected president that same day, with 62 percent of the popular vote, and announced he would not negotiate with Gorbachev. Kravchuk and the Ukrainian elite had been encouraged in thinking that secession was a possibility for them by Yeltsin and his Russian elite, and together they were now prepared to drive the final nail in the coffin.¹⁰⁴

As the November 25 State Council session ended, the new head of state of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, a nuclear physicist whom Yeltsin knew from the Interregional group, invited him to tack onto a planned visit to Minsk some time hunting in Belovezh’e Forest. This was a place where they could talk things over in peace—an old-growth wooded area, the only one surviving in Europe, on the border with Poland, where Warsaw Pact meetings had been held and Khrushchev and Brezhnev had gone shooting. Following the Ukrainian referendum and election, Shushkevich took it upon himself to ask Kravchuk to join them.¹⁰⁵ Kravchuk was the only one of the leaders to do any hunting. Over herbal vodka and supper in the government villa at Viskuli on December 7, they and their advisers (Yeltsin had with him Burbulis, Shakhrai, Kozyrev, his aide Viktor Ilyushin, and Yegor Gaidar, his new deputy premier for economic reform) briefly reviewed the impasse. The Russians favored a trilateral agreement that would end it. Shakhrai, a legal scholar by background, hit upon a juridical device, the argument that the trinity of Slavic republics was qualified to act because they had been high parties to the Bolshevik-engineered treaty in 1922 that formed the USSR. Gaidar handwrote a text late that night. Around four A.M., Kozyrev slid it under the door of the one stenographer present, who was asleep; a cleaning woman picked it up overnight and it had to be retrieved from the trash in the morning and typed up.¹⁰⁶

When they reconvened after breakfast, Yeltsin unexpectedly made one last stab at salvaging a single state. He had “an assignment from Gorbachev,” he said to Kravchuk, to ask whether he would sign the kind of agreement Gorbachev pushed at Novo-Ogarëvo, “if Mikhail Sergeyevich and the others moved to give Ukraine more rights and freedoms.” Kravchuk said he might have at some earlier date but could not now, and Yeltsin expressed understanding. They then nailed down the accord outlined by Gaidar.¹⁰⁷ It was signed around one P.M. on Sunday, December 8, Yeltsin and Burbulis doing the honors for Russia. Its fourteen articles recorded the slipping of the Soviet Union under the waves as a fait accompli (it “is ceasing to exist as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality”) and created a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), headquartered in Minsk, with limited supranational powers on issues of trade, finance, mobility of persons, and security. Russia, not the CIS, was to be legal successor to the USSR and to its obligations and rights, one of them, it was soon to be revealed, the Soviets’ permanent, veto-bearing seat in the United Nations Security Council. Yeltsin phoned George Bush and then USSR Defense Minister Yevgenii Shaposhnikov with the news. “Mr. President,” he said to Bush, using Foreign Minister Kozyrev as interpreter, “the Soviet Union is no more.” Yeltsin was nervous, giving Bush the impression he was reading from a prepared statement. As host, Shushkevich had the thankless duty of calling Gorbachev, and could not get through to him in the Kremlin until Yeltsin and Bush had rung off. Gorbachev demanded that Yeltsin be put on the line and assailed him for a double-cross and for informing a foreign head of state before the president of the USSR. Yeltsin said Gorbachev had to realize they had no alternative but to make the deal.¹⁰⁸ Yeltsin was apprehensive of some military or KGB group, perhaps with Gorbachev’s connivance, taking matters into their own hands. Before going to see Gorbachev on December 9, upon his return from Belarus, he asked him on the telephone whether his security would be guaranteed. Gorbachev said it would be.¹⁰⁹

The Russian Supreme Soviet ratified the Belovezh’e agreement on December 12, after one hour of deliberation, with a mere six out of 252 deputies voting against and seven abstentions. When Yeltsin received James Baker in the Kremlin on December 16, it was in the St. Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace, with Shaposhnikov at his side. He greeted Baker with the words, “Welcome to this Russian building on Russian soil.” Baker made a point of telling Yeltsin the Americans would “look with disfavor” on any attempt to shame Gorbachev as he left office. “Gorbachev should be treated with respect,” Yeltsin replied reassuringly. “It’s about time our leaders can be retired with honor.”¹¹⁰

Eight of the post-Soviet nations joined the CIS at Alma-Ata on December 21. (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania never did sign on; Georgia did so in 1993.) Seeing the writing on the wall, Gorbachev on December 23 negotiated a retirement package with Yeltsin and Aleksandr Yakovlev. On Wednesday, December 25, he took leave of the presidency and the Soviet Union on television and gave control of the USSR’s 35,000 nuclear weapons to Yeltsin. He described the dismemberment of the USSR as a mistake and a betrayal of a thousand years of Russian history, but accepted that he was unable to prevent it. Thirty-eight minutes after he began, he was done and the hammer-and-sickle was run by hand down the Kremlin flagstaff; five minutes after that, the Russian tricolor was run up to flutter in the hibernal breeze. Gorbachev and Yeltsin bickered down to the wire about the handoff. They had agreed to meet one-on-one in Gorbachev’s study, but Yeltsin, seeing red over parts of the resignation speech that were critical of the republic leaders, demanded he take the nuclear briefcase (the black Samsonite bag containing the authorization codes) in another Kremlin spot. They ended up doing it through the good offices of Shaposhnikov, who received the case from Gorbachev ten minutes after Gorbachev’s talk.¹¹¹ The USSR had gone the way of the overland empires of the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians and refracted into fifteen countries.

For Gorbachev, the alternatives had been unpalatable. One was to get Yeltsin to work with him to save the union. Yakovlev plied Gorbachev again after the coup with the nonstarter idea of Yeltsin as vice president; Georgii Shakhnazarov made several similar proposals. Gorbachev did not move a muscle to pursue them. Another possibility was for Gorbachev to fall on his sword and resign in Yeltsin’s favor. Shaposhnikov saw this as desirable and thought it could be followed by USSR-wide elections. The delicate state of civil-military relations kept him from raising it with either Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Gorbachev himself aired the possibility with Gavriil Popov, by now the mayor of Moscow, in late August (“Maybe I should hand everything over to Boris”), and Eduard Shevardnadze spoke with Yeltsin about it around this time. Popov advised against such a choice, thinking Yeltsin as USSR president would drive the non-Russian elites away.¹¹² Yeltsin heard of this talk but considered it “unserious” and the post-coup Soviet presidency “ephemeral.”¹¹³

Gorbachev’s only other option was to reverse the tide by force. This was not in him to do, and his disinclination since 1989 to take responsibility for local tests of strength had made the army officer corps distrustful of his intentions. Any praetorian ambitions the generals might have had were wrung out of them after the coup. In late November the Soviet president fished in his Kremlin office for Shaposhnikov’s opinion of a temporary military takeover, to be followed by a return to barracks. The reply was that it would land its authors in jail, upon which Gorbachev replied that his query was only hypothetical. The army did not have the training or equipment for police work, the minister said, and Yeltsin would torpedo any such policy. It could bring August redux or, worse yet, “mountains of corpses and a sea of gore.”¹¹⁴

Yeltsin, with a steelier spine and far more political capital, had greater choice than Gorbachev did in the matter. It goes without saying that he took power into account, but his actions in late 1991 were not driven by power alone.¹¹⁵ He came down against even a diluted post-Soviet federation for two reasons. First was his skepticism of the viability of such a construct. Seven union republics (all three in the Baltic, all three in the Caucasus, and the western borderland of Moldova) had boycotted the post-coup talks.¹¹⁶ The Ukrainians took part in some consultations, but Kravchuk did not darken the door of Novo-Ogarëvo. His refusal to agree was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

For Yeltsin, another point, as I see it, was determinative. He opted against a neo-USSR because he was opting for a Russian state—self-standing, governable, and capable of modernization and normalization. To put it another way, he opted for nation-building over empire-saving.¹¹⁷ What he desperately wanted was to leap into post-communism in the protocountry, Russia, that had freely elected him president. The opening move was laid out in the rousing address to the Russian congress on October 28 in which Yeltsin committed Russia to radical economic reform. A liberalization of prices, something Gorbachev had hemmed and hawed about for years, was the key component. The diarist Chernyayev cast a Gorbachevian scowl on Yeltsin’s uncouthness but sank it in a panegyric to his call to arms, with an allusion to the French Revolution:

Chernyayev had laid hold of Yeltsin’s broader appeal. The Russian leader was forging ahead, not treading water. He was conjuring hope out of despair. Giving up on an obsolete doctrine and the imperial structure it had held up, he was banking on a national community in which people shared material interests and sociocultural affinities. He was passing through a door the star-crossed Gorbachev had jimmied open but could not go through himself. And he was doing it the way he liked, in one stroke. “I have always been inclined toward simple solutions,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon. “It has always seemed to me that it is much easier to slice through the Gordian knot than to spend years untying it.”¹¹⁹ In 1991 he had the blade in his hands and was not squeamish about using it.

“What if?” analysis holds out myriad counterfactuals for the “thickened history” of 1985 to 1991.¹²⁰ Boris Yeltsin was not an uncontainable force. His relations with Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv, the authors of his move to Moscow, were guarded at the best of times. Had they any inkling of how he would act, they would have left him in Sverdlovsk. In Moscow, two Soviet prime ministers in a row had misgivings about Yeltsin’s ability and malleability; those misgivings were swept under the carpet. Gorbachev could in all probability have kept Yeltsin on board after his mutiny in 1987 or invited him back into the fold at the 1988 party conference; or he could have had the foresight to get Yeltsin out of the country for the 1989 election. It was not too late after the election to genuflect to Yeltsin’s popularity by making him head of government. A motivated and more tightly organized CPSU would have blocked the Russian parliament from making Yeltsin its chairman in 1990 and instituting the presidency in 1991. The Five Hundred Days plan offered a sterling but wasted chance to mollify him. Suppler behavior by the Soviet leaders would have aggravated Russians less, and a softer posture on the union treaty would have given Yeltsin incentives to take a compromise position. Averting the opera bouffe of August 1991 would have bought Gorbachev time to try to cook up a hybrid successor regime. And a cutthroat coup d’état instead of a procrastinating one would have resulted in Yeltsin’s arrest, in the best of cases, or death in an inferno at the White House, at worst.

Others may have squandered their chances, but not Yeltsin. His criticism of and then defection from Gorbachev, confirmed by Gorbachev’s inability to engage him, positioned him as a unique political player. Drawing on currents in the environment and on personal predispositions, Yeltsin refashioned his sense of who he was politically and gravitated to some approximation of a Western paradigm of governance. He milked the opportunities that seismic structural shifts and accident threw his way.

One foot planted in the past and one in the future, Yeltsin was a boss for the bosses, who knew the old ways but looked forward to new ones. For him and the nation, the hard part—to graduate from the simplex of talking about a better country to the complex of building it—was just beginning.