Yeltsin

CHAPTER NINE A Great Leap Outward

In its last top-of-the-line National Intelligence Estimate on the USSR before its downfall, completed in November 1990, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency saw “deterioration short of anarchy” as the most likely scenario over the next year, with a probability close to even. Three other scenarios were given chances of one in five or less. They were “anarchy,” “military intervention” either as an army coup or at the direction of the civilian leadership, and “light at the end of the tunnel,” which would be marked by “substantial progress” toward constructive relationships between the center and the republics, toward “the filling of the political power vacuum by new political institutions and parties,” and toward new economic relations based on the market principle.¹ The annus mirabilis 1991 proved the safest prediction wrong: Deterioration short of anarchy was unsustainable. Elements of the second, third, and fourth were all in evidence: There were anarchic outbreaks as governmental control over self-generating processes weakened; the August coup provided military intervention; and, in Russia, the emergence of an embryonic nation state led by Boris Yeltsin pointed to the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel. As the CIA had anticipated in its classified report, “enormous difficulties” in multiple realms would lie ahead under the most bullish of the scenarios, “but a psychological corner would be turned to give the population some hope for a brighter future.” Even with such a shift in mass attitudes, economic contraction and constitutional issues, if nothing else, would issue in pressures that “could break any government.”²

The Yeltsin of 1990–91 was adamant that the days of the Soviet partocracy were numbered, so differing with the allies in intellectual circles, and the observers abroad, who tended to think it would die a dragged-out death. At a clangorous rally on the Moscow Garden Ring in March 1991, Gavriil Popov lectured journalists not to ballyhoo the crisis and to expect the CPSU to hang on into the twenty-first century. Marching at his side, Yeltsin took tart exception: The system was “collapsing of its own weight” and the dénouement would come “very soon.”³ As to the means and timing, he was no more farsighted than the rest. Were Gorbachev to fail or the democrats to be beat out, he held that the populace “would take to the streets and would take their fate into their hands,” as it had been in Prague, Bucharest, and other bloc capitals in 1989.⁴ Yeltsin was taken unawares by the concatenation of a banana-republic coup and an implosion of the state. “I was in a tense emotional state,” he comments of the weeks after August 21, since “the events that had just occurred were so sudden.”⁵

Yeltsin all the while regarded winning the game with some trepidation. In Notes of a President, he records his response, as parliamentary chairman, to being allocated the White House office of Vitalii Vorotnikov in June 1990. The “seditious thought” that he was about to take charge of Russia, still an undergoverned subunit of the Soviet Union, “frightened” him.⁶ On the evening of December 23, 1991, around the Kremlin desk that had been his since July, he gathered cohorts to mark the ironing out of Gorbachev’s retirement. Lev Sukhanov, motioning at a wall map of the RSFSR, toasted him with the words, “On this whole territory, there is now nobody above you.” “Yes,” Yeltsin smiled radiantly, “and for this, life has been worth living !”⁷ Four days later he occupied Gorbachev’s working office on the third floor of Building No. 1, the triangular, green-domed Senate Palace of tsarist times. Yeltsin’s exuberance did not much outlast the bubbles in the drinks. “My rapture,” he says about the transfer of authority generally, “was replaced… by a bad case of the jitters.”⁸

Well might he have been jittery, for he was ill-prepared for victory. It was one thing to appropriate physical trophies and proclaim the goal of changing Russia forever. It was quite another to govern and to flesh out that goal.

Had Yeltsin arrived at Building No. 1 through an unhurried, well-bounded, and educative political contest, he would have had to nominate a shadow cabinet and to propound “profound and affirmative ideas” and “a model of rule,” to quote Oleg Poptsov, the editor and cagey observer of the Moscow scene. As it was, the stock advancement from disagreement to opposition and on into the halls of government was fast-forwarded: “The rotten tree of the state broke down, and power and its appurtenances fell at [the opposition’s] feet.”⁹ Yeltsin had shaken its branches and trunk and placed himself to harvest the apples. Except in the broadest brushstrokes, he had not worked through the constitutive choices he would be called upon to make if power were his, all the more so power in a Russian structure not encumbered by the Soviet superstructure.

A flotilla of his aides would conclude in their memoir The Yeltsin Epoch that, “not ready for so swift a development of the state of affairs,” Yeltsin “entered the genre of improvisation” in 1991.¹⁰ But the novelty was one of degree only. Yeltsin had been improvising brilliantly since 1985: at trying to make perestroika work, challenging Gorbachev, politicking. What distinguished this new situation was that the stakes were higher and the boundaries of the possible laxer than they were in communism’s tipping years. Social brakes and buffers had been obliterated. Nothing was sacred and everything of value was up for grabs—even the name of the republic, de-Sovietized and restyled the Russian Federation or Russia on December 25.¹¹ Yeltsin’s message in the 1991 presidential election gave little guidance on what to do next. Russians, Gennadii Burbulis said, voted for Yeltsin in “a purely religious form of protest and hope” and threw in with “a savior,” not a reform plan.¹²

Before he was snowed under by events, Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to manage change in the style of a symphony conductor—directing wellprimed instrumentalists from fixed, sequent sheet music. Boris Yeltsin conducted a political jazz combo—altering the frequency, duration, and accent of melody lines as he went and open to extemporization by members. The facility for thinking on his feet was part of his political mystique, and his organizational props had been slight, as he relied largely on unsalaried volunteers. “We worked as a team, as a single organism,” one of them, Valentina Lantseva, reminisced. “We were fellow fighters, not aides and not hired hands…. We worked on ebullience and Russian romanticism.”¹³

The amateurism of that innocent time was now an anachronism. President Yeltsin had in his hands the buttons and pedals to all the shambling machinery of government on Russian territory. The communist regime was no longer there as a scapegoat. Was he up to the new assignment? The philosopher Aleksandr Tsipko, a moderate Russian nationalist who wanted to save the USSR, spoke for many when he judged that Yeltsin was not. “I honestly would not want to be in Boris Nikolayevich’s shoes,” he wrote in Izvestiya in October 1991. “Yeltsin the fighter and destroyer is in the past. The time of Yeltsin the creator is upon him.” It was, Tsipko said, a terrifying burden that he was slow to face up to. Haunted by the chimera of “a center that no longer exists,” Yeltsin would have been content if the old foe were still around to beat up on.¹⁴

Bringing back the Soviet bugbear was impossible, and it was impossible to get along on differing from Gorbachev, for Gorbachev had been marginalized. Yeltsin forced him to vacate his Moscow apartment and country residence, together with the Kremlin offices, and to scale down his demands for pension and staff, but granted his request to start a Gorbachev Foundation with property deeded by the Russian administration.¹⁵ Gorbachev went on the transatlantic lecture circuit, learned to be a fundraiser (he would even appear in a Pizza Hut commercial in 1997), wrote his memoirs, and established Green Cross International, an environmental organization. He never spoke with Yeltsin after December 23, 1991, and as before looked down on him as a shifty megalomaniac.¹⁶ Yeltsin matched Gorbachev’s lack of humility with a lack of magnanimity, making him persona non grata in official Moscow. As Yeltsin planned his first state visit to Washington, D.C., in June 1992, one criterion he gave his hosts for the beyond-the-beltway portion was that it be at a place Gorbachev had never seen—which led him midway across the country to the state of Kansas.¹⁷ (He toured Wichita, rode a farm combine in a wheatfield, and took home a plastic bear filled with Grannie’s Homemade Mustard, from a family business in Hillsboro.) In August, convinced that comments by Gorbachev violated a promise made to him in December 1991 of noninterference in politics, Yeltsin had Interior Minister Viktor Yerin carry out a “financial and legal inspection” of the foundation. “Naturally, ‘abuses’ were uncovered, in particular, participation in trading operations.”¹⁸ In September Gorbachev was barred from foreign travel for refusing to testify at the hearing by the new Russian Constitutional Court into the legality of Yeltsin’s decrees banning the Communist Party—he would not participate, he said, even if brought into the courtroom in handcuffs. The ban was lifted within weeks, and Gorbachev was fined 100 rubles (the price of a hamburger and cola drink) for contempt of court.¹⁹ Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin eased off, and the dust settled.²⁰

If time had passed by the battle with Gorbachev, it had done the same with the levers Yeltsin used to unseat Gorbachev. Foremost among them was the campaign against elite privilege.

In the last few years of the communist regime, Yeltsin lived decently yet not sumptuously, which gave him some standing to cast stones. In June 1991 the vice president–elect, Aleksandr Rutskoi, acting on his wife’s counsel, decided Yeltsin needed sartorial upgrade and procured him a smart suit, shoes, and some white shirts with coupons issued to Rutskoi as a military officer. Yeltsin accepted graciously but paid Rutskoi for the apparel.²¹ For a barbecue at Arkhangel’skoye-2 the weekend after the defeat of the putsch, press secretary Pavel Voshchanov splurged on a suckling pig he found in a Moscow peasant bazaar. “Naina Iosifovna was touched, because they could not permit themselves this.”²² At their Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya apartment, Naina bid a guest to be careful of the sofa, as the springs poked out through holes and they might rip his trousers: “When Boris Nikolayevich sits on it, first he puts on a little cushion, and then it’s okay. Here is a cushion for you.”²³

Once in power, though, Yeltsin came to bask in the same creature comforts as Gorbachev and Leonid Brezhnev before him. He kept his Moscow residential registration at Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya until 1994, when he shifted it to the sixth floor of a new concrete building block on Osennyaya Street, in the Krylatskoye development, on the western outskirts of the capital. Yeltsin saw the building from his limousine and fell in love with it, much to the mystification of his family and of his security detail, who thought it too close to the windows of other houses. They objected, but, recalled his daughter Tatyana, “Papa said we were going to live here, and that was that.”²⁴ Most nights from 1992 through 1996 Yeltsin actually spent at the state dacha Barvikha-4, a three-story river-front mansion in the settlement of Razdory, which was a ten-minute drive farther out the same westward radius from the Kremlin. The army built Barvikha-4 for Gorbachev in Second Empire style and equipped it with the latest communications and security gadgetry. Yeltsin as president took again to hunting, unwinding every several months by shooting deer, stag, wild boar, duck, and wood grouse at the bucolic Zavidovo. He made stops at other provincial retreats left by the Soviets: Valdai, in the northwest near Novgorod, where the big dacha was built for Stalin; Bocharov Ruchei in Sochi, on Russia’s semitropical Black Sea coast; Volzhskii Utës, on a crook in the lower Volga; and Shuiskaya Chupa in Kareliya, refurbished with the northernmost roofed tennis court in Europe.²⁵

With a bang, the door had shut on Yeltsin’s populism. In an interview in retirement, he was unrepentant for using it. “It was necessary to do some undermining, to take things away from the nomenklatura. I did it and I did it correctly. It was not right for the big shots to puff up their privileges that way.” But it was “a stage” in his development, he added, and he and Russia outgrew it.²⁶

The incongruousness with his recent past required some rationalization. Yeltsin gave it mostly in Notes of a President. He had, he says, a brainstorm in 1990, shortly after he was elected speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet and he asked to be allotted a government dacha at Arkhangel’skoye-2:

And so, once the CPSU was no more, it was appropriate to exchange the unostentatious Arkhangel’skoye-2 for tony Barvikha-4 and Aeroflot for Gorbachev’s Ilyushin-62 jetliner, a “ROSSIYA” logo glued to its skin. The replacement for Aleksandr Korzhakov’s Niva was a ZIL, and in 1992 a sleek, armor-plated Mercedes limousine from Germany—an “office on wheels,” in Yeltsin’s words.²⁸

Many Russians wondered about the justice of it all. Yurii Burtin, a former dissident active in the shriveling Democratic Russia movement, took aim in an essay in March of 1992 at “the brassiness [that] lets our new leaders take the same offices and drive around in the same luxurious armored limousines that members of the Politburo used to help themselves to.”²⁹ In a television interview in 1993, shot at Gorki-9, an estate where Soviet leaders had lived, El’dar Ryazanov, a director of movie comedies and a Yeltsin supporter, personalized the question. What was it like for someone who had ridden the crest of a moral wave of the downtrodden to glean these benefits, and had he found that power “corrodes the soul”? “Some things inside me have changed,” Yeltsin said jumpily, giving Gorki-9 as a barometer: “Earlier, I would never have moved into such a residence. I guess I have come to take a more blasé attitude toward the morality of various privileges than I used to.”³⁰ He squirmed not because his perquisites were so atypical for the leader of a large country but because he had denounced his predecessors for enjoying them and had implied that in power he as people’s president would deny himself them.³¹

Of the questions dominating the late Soviet political agenda, the only two that were settled as of the rotation of the Kremlin flags were about the power of the CPSU and the tug-of-war between the center and the union republics. Yeltsin closed out the first with presidential Decree No. 169 on November 6, 1991, a day before the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It dismembered the palsied machinery of the party and took possession of its bank accounts, publishing houses, and real estate, from Old Square to the most far-flung Russian villages. The Belovezh’e and Alma-Ata accords and the exit of Gorbachev hardened interrepublic borders into international borders. The purpose of the Commonwealth of Independent States was to accomplish a genteel divorce in a dysfunctional family. With it as cover, Yeltsin took the assets of the KGB in mid-December, and the inter-republic security committee was discharged on January 15, 1992.³² The commonwealth’s charter mission was complete on May 18, 1992, when he gave up on the will-o’-the-wisp of a unified military (joint control over nuclear arms had been agreed at Belovezh’e) and formed national armed forces under Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. Grachëv oversaw the homecoming of troops from Germany, Poland, Mongolia, Cuba, and the post-Soviet states. All Soviet tactical nukes were in storage in Russia by July 1, 1992, as agreed at Alma-Ata in December 1991; the last strategic warheads from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were transported there by July 1, 1996, after negotiations brokered by the United States. The CIS was up to little else but holding summit meetings and offering a forum for working out bilateral agreements. Yevgenii Shaposhnikov’s job, as commander of CIS strategic forces, was to lapse in June 1993.

If the CIS was about tidying up after the past, Yeltsin as leader of the opposition had looked to the future, to the best of his abilities. The prospect he dangled before Russia was a three-pronged de-monopolization—after departing the Communist Party in 1990 he often called it a “de-communization”—comprising democratization, a free-enterprise economy, and territorial devolution. It would, he said, substitute the liberties of a normal life for the regimentation of communism.

At a press conference on September 7, 1991, the first question to Yeltsin, from a French journalist, was what kind of a country Russians lived in and would be living in now that the political logjam had been cleared. Here is what he said:

A little later, the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, buzzed again to what model Yeltsin had as a goal:

The statement is indicative of Yeltsin’s reasoning as he took the reins. He saw all good things as going together and downplayed trade-offs of one good against another—democracy versus the market, for example. These valued traits he discerned in the long-since developed Western nations and Japan (which he first visited as a Soviet parliamentarian in January 1990), although one country on his A-list, Spain, had transited to political freedom in the 1970s. Yeltsin was fixated not on destination but on trajectory: Civilization was a path leading in a particular direction. He did not totally abjure his socialist roots, in that he continued to brand himself a social democrat and to the left of center (left in the common European meaning of the word, indicating attachment to a sizable state role in the economy), a contention he made through the middle and late 1990s in conversations with other politicians and reiterated to me in 2002.³⁴ And Yeltsin was eclectic—if not to say platitudinous—about his societal models. He considered himself free to cherry-pick, without worrying about coherence in the abstract.

Practically speaking, Yeltsin was satisfied that the first and third elements of his triad, democracy (and its accompanying moral regeneration) and decentralization, had advanced with the shutdown of the CPSU. While there was much unfinished business, principally in devising a democratic and federal constitution for post-communist Russia, it was axiomatic for Yeltsin that, given the assurances he had made and the dismal state of the economy, the most urgent problem was the transition from Marx to market.

Yeltsin had no economic blueprint to pull off the shelf, but he did have thoughts about nongovernmental activity and entrepreneurship to build on. He had long since seen them at work in the interstices of the Soviet planned economy. In Berezniki, while Stalin reigned, his father constructed a private house. As a party boss in Sverdlovsk and Moscow, Yeltsin opposed restrictions on the nonstate sector, favored autonomous work brigades in the state sector, and spoke of the profit motive’s effect on economic efficiency in the West.

His ideas about reform while in opposition were initially scattershot and auxiliary to his duel with Gorbachev. The stillborn Five Hundred Days Program encouraged him to think about parameters. That said, Yeltsin never read a page of the two-tome compilation Grigorii Yavlinskii plunked on his desk. He homed in on the political facets—the zippy title and the taut timetable.³⁵ A law “On Property in the RSFSR,” enacted under Yeltsin’s legislative gavel in January 1991, after Gorbachev nixed Five Hundred Days, made private ownership a civil right. It was assailed by old-fashioned communists. “For him, the law… had greater political than economic significance, and it achieved its purpose.”³⁶

There were flickers of free-enterprise thinking in Yeltsin’s proposal to relegate governmental power from the USSR to Russia and its provinces. It would, he said, unlock social energy suppressed by the leaden hand of the center. In his August 1990 tour, Yeltsin parried demands for instructions and subventions from on high. The beauty of devolution was that local leaders and citizens would have incentives to figure out solutions on their own. In the Arctic coal city of Vorkuta, which had its origins as a Gulag forced-labor camp in the 1930s, he asked miners how they would handle “complete independence.” Some were curious about subsidies and guarantees of supplies and distribution. “Yeltsin cut them short: ‘No, that’s not how it works. Independence is something different. As owners of what you produce, you will have to decide whom you sell to, at what price. All these are your problems. We are not going to feed you anymore.’”³⁷ At a town meeting on Sakhalin Island, off the Pacific seaboard, a woman wished to know what he would do about the sludge and oil polluting the Naiva River. It was up to them, Yeltsin responded: “You yourselves must put your rivers in order, not Moscow. Our task is to give you independence in solving all kinds of questions, and not to press decisions upon you, to give you the right to settle everything yourselves.”³⁸

Yeltsin’s appetite for change grew as Soviet troubles mounted exponentially. Hard times, he was more willing to assume, made for hard decisions and not for band-aids and stopgaps. Any reform worth its salt needed to come to grips with the deficiencies of the communist paradigm, as he said in a pre-election interview in May 1991:

The “big thing” grew out of the art of politics more than the science of economics. Yeltsin’s big-bang reform, like the coup de grâce to the USSR, expressed his penchant for dichotomizing choices. He itched to be his own master and not be gulled by erratic partners, as he felt he had been on the Five Hundred Days plan. A precipitous thrust would snap the “hypnosis of words” he so excoriated in Gorbachev. And it would have an ineffable cultural component. Anatolii Chernyayev, we have seen, remarked that in Russia “big things” had always gotten done by the method of “either win all or lose all.” In Chernyayev’s diary, “either win all or lose all” is rendered as the Russian saw that describes the doughty soldier’s choices as ili grud’ v krestakh, ili golova v kustakh: “Either you come home with medals on your chest or you leave your head in the bushes.”⁴⁰

The academics and professionals Yeltsin inducted into his government as the Soviet Union fell apart were in many cases versed in the writings of Western free marketeers like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Janos Kornai. Others had dirigiste, Keynesian, technocratic, or social-democratic points of view. The reform discussion was outside the ken of an engineer without a liberal arts education, and a political animal to the marrow of his bones. Yeltsin’s approach sprang from a visceral intuition about the imperative of change and the general course it should take—not from highbrow theory but not from a whim, either. “I will not pretend to speak about the philosophy of economic reform,” he was to write in Notes of a President.⁴¹ It did not deter him. Waiting his turn to speak at a 1989 rally in a Moscow park, he had grilled an American correspondent on where he learned about economic affairs. The American in his time worked in a family business and read many books, including the screeds of pre-1917 Russian socialists. “Yeltsin said, ‘So neither of us knows about economics!’ Then he said, ‘We’ll find some young guys, there are some young guys who get this stuff.’ ”⁴² There were, and he found them in 1991–92, after several years, as Margaret Thatcher noticed in 1990, of brooding over the scourges of communism.

On his post-communist highway to Damascus, the freedom to which Yeltsin converted was closer to what the political thinker Isaiah Berlin labeled “negative liberty” (freedom from hindrance) than to Berlin’s “positive liberty” (freedom to accomplish some end).⁴³ For Yeltsin’s contemporaries, deliverance from Marxist scripture and Soviet structures took many forms. For him, it was an ease with the market and recoil against the overbearing state. Mikhail Fridman, who became one of Russia’s first billionaires as a banker and oilman, makes the point well:

If Yeltsin was a social democrat at all, it was more in the stamp of Tony Blair of Britain, Felipe González of Spain, or Gerhard Schröder of Germany than of the left-wing statists of interwar and postwar Europe. He took it as uncontroversial that Russia could get by only with a just and effective state, but that its state would have the ability to rule and popular support only if it did something to cure Russia’s economic disease.

Yeltsin was able to anchor enthusiasm for capsizing Soviet ways in halfburied pieces of his past. In the chapter of Notes of a President where he eulogizes Ignatii and Nikolai Yeltsin, he speaks of the windmill, smithy, and land leases they gathered by the sweat of their brow and of the injustice and social disutility of the state expropriating them. He was aware of how Vasilii Starygin fended in exile by selling homemade furniture to local buyers. These kin’s only crime was that they held property, were hardworking, and “took many things upon themselves.” With its zero-sum thinking, “The Soviet regime liked modest, ordinary folk, people who did not stand out. It did not like and it showed no mercy to the strong, the ingenious, and the lively.” Yeltsin’s felt mandate, as someone who did stand out, was to undo this mistake and foster an enterprising society in which the writ of the state was circumscribed. For throwing off lassitude, he offered autobiographical role models: the sportsman who trains and betters a rival, as he had on the volleyball court; the public figure who survives after taking an independent stand, as he did in his secret speech in 1987; and the hospital patient who takes the first tottering steps after an operation, as he had after his back surgery in Barcelona in 1990. Russians, he said, needed to cast off their “slavish psychology” and open up space for “people without hangups, intrepid people, of the kind who earlier [in the Soviet period] were simply squelched.” The idealized historical reference most on Yeltsin’s mind was his thrifty Urals forebears. Russia was giving signs, he wrote, of reemergence of the outlook “of independent peasants [muzhiki] who do not wait for another’s help, who do not pin their hopes on anyone else… [who] scold everyone and stubbornly tend to their own business.”⁴⁵

After the 1991 coup, Yeltsin was in no shape psychologically or politically to move into decision gear. He fled Moscow on August 29 for two weeks of sunbathing, swimming, and tennis in the Latvian playground of Jurmala. He was back in town briefly twice, did a peacemaking errand in Armenia, and was then off again to Sochi for another couple of weeks. On September 18, in Moscow, Yeltsin was drained and experienced coronary pain. But on September 25, the day he left for Sochi, Pavel Voshchanov said he “has taken a timeout… not for relaxation but so he can in calm surroundings work at his further plans and also on a new book.”⁴⁶ Yeltsin supporters were stupefied that he had dropped out of sight and at such a juncture could be dabbling in authorship. It was as if Napoleon had repaired to the Riviera to compose poetry after routing the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, one Democratic Russia parliamentary deputy later said. Gorbachev’s advisers thought the Russian leader was playing “a cat-and-mouse game with us,” and Gorbachev refused to consider traveling to Sochi to see him (“We have to protect our honor”).⁴⁷ Yeltsin at Bocharov Ruchei dictated a few paragraphs only of the manuscript, which was to grow into Notes of a President, the second volume of his memoirs, and had no interest in playing games with Gorbachev. But his “further plans” could not be put off and were the subject of searing interchanges with members of his team until his return to the capital on October 10.

As the Soviet Union was in extremis and Yeltsin composed himself, Russia’s government found itself in turmoil. In July he had asked Gennadii Burbulis, the scholar from Sverdlovsk who had just managed his election campaign, and whom he passed over for Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president, to be his chief of staff and set up a Presidential Executive Office (Administratsiya Prezidenta) for him. Burbulis balked: He pined to be a grand strategist and not “to work twenty-four hours a day with a card file.”⁴⁸ Yeltsin contrived the position of state secretary for him, with undefined duties. Rutskoi, elected without a job description, then exhorted Yeltsin to unite the office of vice president with headship of the executive office and to let him be the president’s channel to the state apparatus. Yeltsin, saying he had no need of “a commissar,” declined.⁴⁹ On August 5 he selected as chief of staff his old friend from the Sverdlovsk obkom, Yurii Petrov, who had been Soviet ambassador to Cuba since 1988; Yeltsin had to ask Gorbachev to release him from the post. Petrov reported for duty around noon on August 19, just as the tanks chugged up to the Russian White House. He had no time to introduce himself to Rutskoi, Burbulis, and staff before rushing downstairs to catch Yeltsin making his immortal speech on Tank No. 110.⁵⁰

The ministerial bureaucracy was the main mechanism for carrying out decisions. At its head as prime minister was Ivan Silayev, a “red director”—a widely used term in Russia for the Soviet-era industrial manager, serving at the pleasure of the Communist Party. Silayev, who was Yeltsin’s age and had left the besieged White House for his family in August, was in the president’s estimation an unsuitable sparkplug for a serious salvage and reform effort. He quit on September 27 to chair an interrepublic economic committee, leaving Oleg Lobov of Sverdlovsk as caretaker Russian premier. The cabinet was rife with jockeying for position; agreements were being signed and disowned and resignations tendered in disgust. The seclusion of the president, one reporter observed, “has produced a crisis of power” and “a conflict of all against all.”⁵¹

For the prime minister’s post, Yeltsin looked at first for a “miracle worker” unattached to any program. He offered it in September to Svyatoslav Fëdorov, the proprietor of the USSR’s first commercial eye-surgery clinic, who turned it down flat. He had no better luck with Yurii Ryzhov, the rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute, or Mikhail Poltoranin, the editor to whom he had been so close in the Moscow party committee. He then auditioned Yurii Skokov, a conservative industrialist from the military sector, and Grigorii Yavlinskii.⁵² In dialogue on beach chairs in Sochi, Burbulis got Yeltsin to look at less familiar names and to link his personnel decision to the reform conundrum. After three days, “Yeltsin understood very well the backlog of problems, the frightening inheritance that had come his way. And so our conversation came down to the hopelessness of surmounting all of this by conventional methods.” “It is going to be very sticky,” Yeltsin said to him. Burbulis felt “emaciated” by the conversation.⁵³

As crafter of the unconventional methods, Burbulis prevailed on the president to turn to Yegor Gaidar, an urbane, moon-faced economist and publicist from the Soviet baby boom—at thirty-five, he was but one year older than Yeltsin’s first daughter, Yelena. Born into an establishment family (his father was a navy admiral and both of his grandfathers were famed writers), Gaidar had two graduate degrees in economics, had written for Pravda and Kommunist (the CPSU’s theoretical journal), and directed a research institute. He also had a connection to the city of Sverdlovsk, which had just been renamed Yekaterinburg.⁵⁴ Working out of an Arkhangel’skoye-2 dacha, Gaidar and colleagues had drawn up a liberalization proposal more radical than Five Hundred Days and executable in Russia rather than in an undivided Soviet Union.⁵⁵ He was asked in the last week of October to return from a lecture booking at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, to meet with Yeltsin. Their interview took all of twenty minutes. The chief “grasped the breathtaking risk connected with the beginning of reforms,” yet also “that passivity and dallying would be suicidal.” “He seemed geared up to take upon himself political accountability for reforms that would inevitably be punishing, knowing this would add nothing to his popularity.”⁵⁶ Gaidar agreed to serve in some capacity, although he and his confederates at the dacha rubbed their eyes and “felt as if it were not for real.”⁵⁷

Yeltsin tipped his hand publicly on October 28 in a wide-ranging address to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies and the population. “The period of movement by small steps is over,” he declared. “We now need a reformist breakthrough…. We shall begin, in deeds and not just in words, to pull ourselves out of the morass that is sucking us in deeper and deeper.”⁵⁸ On November 1 the congress gave him carte blanche to make reforms by decree for twelve months. He was authorized to issue edicts contravening existing laws, reorganize the cabinet without checking with parliament, and appoint heads of provincial administrations. Ruslan Khasbulatov, the new chairman of the Supreme Soviet, shepherded the motion through the assembly. The composition of a reform government was revealed on November 6, the day Yeltsin consigned the CPSU to oblivion. On Burbulis’s advice, Yeltsin did the constitutional somersault of naming himself prime minister, averting the need to have anyone else confirmed by parliament. Burbulis was made first deputy premier and Gaidar finance minister and deputy premier for economic policy.⁵⁹ To their surprise, Yeltsin left Gaidar and Burbulis alone to nominate the holders of key portfolios. Most were thirtysomethings, up to twenty-five years younger than Yeltsin and Gavriil Popov and the reformists he had known in the Interregional Deputies Group. “Fresh faces were needed to cope with the job. I selected people with a minimum of Soviet baggage, people without mental and ideological blinkers, without a bureaucratic mentality.”⁶⁰ They passed with flying colors the test he had set in the Moscow party committee in the mid-1980s: readiness to put in insanely long hours at work. Gaidar’s days that fall and winter ended at three or four A.M.; eager beavers in his office snatched some slumber on cots or on pillows and blankets spread on the floor.

Political blowups heightened the pressure. One of them led Yeltsin on November 7 to impose martial law in Chechnya, a minority republic in the North Caucasus area of Russia. An air force general, Djokhar Dudayev, had been elected president in the Chechen capital of Grozny and peremptorily declared independence. Yeltsin’s show of force, promoted by Vice President Rutskoi, only fanned the flames, and Gorbachev, who still controlled Soviet troops, was opposed. On November 11 the Russian Supreme Soviet voted not to recognize Yeltsin’s decree, making it unenforceable. Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen, sided with the anti-Yeltsin forces.

For one week of all this Yeltsin was inaccessible to his staff and ministers. Gorbachev, the unsympathetic witness, claims Yeltsin was drunk when they spoke about Chechnya by telephone on November 10. Associates were unsure how much alcohol had to do with it but were disturbed by their leader’s unavailability. Either way, the stress of office was giving rise to insalubrious behavior.⁶¹

The October reform package went under the marquee “shock therapy” (shokoterapiya in Russian). The phrase applied to a wider field of action than its original meaning in Latin America and post-communist Eastern Europe, which was the lifting of price controls to halt an inflationary spiral and jumpstart economic growth.⁶² Yeltsin, he stated unsentimentally in retirement, aimed at a double-barreled modernizing revolution in economy and by extension in society: “to unloose prices, that is to introduce a real market forcefully and toughly, the way [Russian landlords and peasants] were ordered to plant potatoes under Peter the Great; and, second, to create private property… to create a class of owners.”⁶³ Peter had been his paladin since grade school, and Yeltsin was mesmerized by the tsar as enlightened reformator—a Russian noun, borrowed from the German, that connotes the likelihood of greater dislocations than the English “reformer.” Here was his chance to play Peter, although in a protodemocratic nation: His lords and peasants had the franchise and could topple him at the next election. He knew of Peter’s maniacal tendencies, he would concede in 1993 to an interviewer who pointed out that Peter “personally cut off the heads” of his enemies. It was true, Yeltsin said, “but we also have to keep in mind all the things he did for Russia.”⁶⁴

Much as summaries—including Yeltsin’s wistful retirement speech in December 1999—often refer to the assault as one fast-flying leap, his thinking at the time showed flexibility and realism. Concerning Peter the Great, he writes level-headedly in Notes of a President that turning Russians into good Europeans was “an ambitious goal unattainable in one generation.” “In a certain sense,” the Petrine reforms “have not been completed to this day.” “Although we have become Europeans, we have remained ourselves.” Every flurry of reform in Russia’s past, he said, was followed by a backlash and a rollback. This mold he was determined to break. “The goal I posed for myself was to make reform irrevocable.” If there were economic restructuring and “grandiose political changes,” the process would be unstoppable and a return of the communists inconceivable: “After us, other people will come who will finish the job off and move the country toward prosperity.”⁶⁵

Yeltsin wanted the path chosen to outlive the first burst of change and to outlive him. What he did not want was to take the time to ask the population’s approval of his project or to spell out what awaited them. Perhaps, as Yurii Burtin said in 1992, he tended to patronize the people “as one would a child who does not understand his own interests and cannot be allowed to participate in affairs of state.”⁶⁶ I doubt Yeltsin was as misanthropic as that. As Burtin wrote, condescension toward the population coexisted in the minds of Yeltsin and his men with fear of disorder, a yen to please, and a catering to “the prejudices and the far from admirable feelings of the less conscious strata.”⁶⁷ Society itself, after generations of communism, was not organized to protect or promote the shared interests of its members, particularly when the patrimonial idols lay broken on the temple floor. The historian Yurii Afanas’ev, formerly co-chairman with Yeltsin of the Interregional group, noted in an essay in the same volume as Burtin’s how underdeveloped Russia’s civil society was and that political parties, which could now be legally formed, were insubstantial startups: “The absence of large-scale social groups tutored in their own distinct group interests allows the administration of Boris Yeltsin to forget about our current anemic ‘multipartyness.’”⁶⁸ Most citizens waited for their leader to act and hoped for the best.

Yeltsin’s words and his taking on of the premiership left no doubt about who had willed the turnabout in policy. But he held open an escape route. In mid-1992 he was to raise Gaidar in rank to acting prime minister. By the end of 1992, Gaidar and his benefactor from 1991, Burbulis, were both out of government. Yeltsin professed that he always saw the Gaidar-Burbulis grouping as “a kamikaze crew that would step into the line of fire and forge ahead… that would go up in flames but remain in history.”⁶⁹ Did the warriors know they were taking to the sky on a suicide mission? Yeltsin says he never discussed it with them; the head kamikaze says he did. In their getacquainted meeting, asserts Gaidar in his memoir of the 1990s, he warned Yeltsin that once the most unsavory decisions were behind them the president might have to dismiss the government. Yeltsin “gave me a skeptical smile and waved his arm, as if to say it would not come to that.”⁷⁰ Either the president was holding his cards close to his vest or, more likely, he was not yet certain how it would all play out.

The decisive break in Yeltsin’s October manifesto on reforming the economy, as announced to the Congress of Deputies, was in the realm of prices. Ninety percent of retail prices in Russia, and 80 percent of wholesale prices, were to be freed from state dictate and left to the impersonal forces of supply and demand. Yeltsin dressed down aides when the draft of the speech, in a typing screw-up, omitted the section on price deregulation.⁷¹ Another priority was macroeconomic stabilization through slashing the budget deficit and cutting back on the emission of money and credit. Still another was privatization of state property, to forge “a healthy mixed economy with a strong private sector.” Half of all small and medium-sized firms were to be turned over to nonstate owners within six months; large enterprises were going to be refashioned as joint stock corporations, shares in which would later be distributed and sold at supply-and-demand prices. Yeltsin described these actions as proactive and equally as reactive to developments. Members of the nomenklatura had already been sidestepping price controls, trafficking on the black market, and speculating in currency. And they were furtively amassing money and unofficial rights over, and rents from, state property: “Privatization has been going on in Russia for some time, but in a wild… and often criminal fashion. Today we need to seize the initiative, and we are intent on doing so.”

Yeltsin tended most meticulously in the speech to the politics of the breakthrough. “The experience of global civilization” showed that Russia’s plight was “difficult but not hopeless.” The nation that overcame Napoleon and Hitler had special reserves that would see it through: “Russia has more than once in its rich history shown that a crucible period is when it is able to mobilize its will and its many powers, talents, and resources in order to lift up and strengthen itself.” All could pull together, he said, in the knowledge that relief was in sight. “The uncertainty will be gone and the prognosis will be clear.”

When Yeltsin got around to owning up to and distributing the costs of his changes, he was on thin ice. He had been claiming since the 1990 election campaign that he could move Russia toward the market—he did not apply the word kapitalizm, so unmusical to Soviet ears, until his second term—without people of ordinary means losing out. In the 1991 presidential campaign, he flailed at Gorbachev for the administered increases in consumer and food prices that April: “They ought not to have begun economic reform by unscrupulously laying all the hardships on the population.”⁷² Now that he answered for policy, he had to sell belt-tightening. “It will be worse for everyone for approximately a half-year. Then prices will go down, the consumer market will fill with goods, and by the autumn of 1992… the economy will stabilize and living standards will slowly improve.”⁷³ The one round year seems to have been mostly a figment of his imagination, and was more optimistic than Five Hundred Days, which had posited a two-year stabilization period. Gaidar maintains that two or three years were the minimum needed for growth to return and denies that he misled Yeltsin as to the time needed.⁷⁴

The price reform, postponed two weeks at the request of the Ukrainians and Belarusians, clicked in on January 2, 1992. Budgetary restraint took effect forthwith. On January 29 Yeltsin’s Decree No. 65, “On Freedom of Trade,” pulled the plug on a state monopoly dating back to the late 1920s. Outside of a few interdicted items like firearms and narcotics, Russians were at liberty to buy and sell anything without asking permission; in effect, exchange had been decriminalized. One of Gaidar’s first decisions as deputy premier was to select another youthful economist, Anatolii Chubais from St. Petersburg, as chairman of the State Property Committee and ask him to work out a design for denationalization. Chubais confected a white paper in December 1991, with the preferred formula to transfer assets to “work collectives” (employees and managers) and to call off government output quotas and subsidies. In the first half of 1992, Gosplan, Gosstroi, Goskomtsen (the State Prices Committee), Gossnab (the State Supplies Committee), Gosagroprom (the State Committee for the Agroindustrial Complex), and their ilk were disestablished, while all except for a few of the Soviet industrial ministries were stripped of their command rights and reorganized as holding companies. On August 20, 1992, a year after the 1991 coup d’état, Yeltsin trumpeted a program to call forth “millions of owners rather than a few millionaires” by distributing vouchers citizens could use to purchase equity in 15,000 government-owned companies.

The immediate aftershock of these measures, as is well known, was fearsome. Counter to Yeltsin’s rubicund forecast, conditions did not meliorate in the autumn of 1992, or the next year, or the year after that. Consumer prices rose 296 percent in January 1992; inflation hit 2520 percent for the year 1992 and thereby shredded the ruble savings of millions—most of them in Soviet paper printed in the Gorbachev years and stowed under the mattress or in bank accounts because there was nothing in the shops to buy with it. Real national output fell off every single year through 1996 (by 14.5 percent in 1992, 8.7 percent in 1993, 12.7 percent in 1994, 4.1 percent in 1995, and 3.5 percent in 1996), ticked up (by 0.8 percent) in 1997, and fell again (by 4.6 percent) in 1998 to a low point of 40 percent less than it had been in 1989 and 35 percent less than in 1991, the year Yeltsin took office. Fear of layoffs was pervasive in the workforce, as factories were weaned off of state subsidies and contracts and the government budget was squeezed. In 1993 and 1994, the withholding of wage payments and government pensions and allowances became common practice, with the arrears for some extending months and even years.⁷⁵ As downturns go, Russia’s in the 1990s ranks with the Great Depression of 1929–33 in the United States.

The statistics on gross domestic product and consumer welfare provoked a political firestorm then and cast a pall over later evaluations of the Yeltsin era. They are why no defender of him and his reforms fails to leaven bravos with caveats.⁷⁶ Recall that it was Yeltsin, as he went on pension in 1999, who vented remorse at having let down the buoyant hopes that Russia could coast from its despotic past to a bountiful future.

Yeltsin’s critics in the West, who are legion, rely on the economic and socioeconomic distress of the time to fuel their indictments. One oft-voiced criticism rivets a Burkean animus against social engineering to left-of-center political values. Historian Stephen F. Cohen, for example, argues that Gorbachev had shown Soviet communism to be reformable and that piecemeal adaptation of the old system, statist and respectful of Russian custom, was preferable to throwing caution to the winds. The drive to rebuild Russia from the ground up, abetted by an evangelizing America, was guilty of the “de-modernization” of a great industrial nation: “Never… have so many fallen so far.”⁷⁷ Political scientist Peter Reddaway and Russian coauthor, Dmitri Glinski, agree with Cohen on the noxiousness of the changes of the 1990s (Russia was “slowly succumbing to shock therapy’s sequelae while the world watches”), but save their sharpest harpoons for the “market Bolshevik” techniques used to bring them about. Yeltsin and company, in the service of anti-Marxist objectives, were like the Marxist revolutionaries of old in exemplifying “the self-confident, almost messianic vanguard mentality of a self-anointed elite that sees itself entitled to impose ‘progress’ and ‘development’… on the ‘backward’ majority.” Shock therapy, they say, was an “administrative revolution from above” comparable to Stalin’s collectivization of Soviet agriculture.⁷⁸ The titles of the two books—Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, by Cohen, and The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy, by Reddaway and Glinski—give away their contents.

The changes Yeltsin set in train in 1991–92 deserve more nuanced analysis than this. There are several perspectives from which this is true. One pertains to the circumstances of the reforms. The slump of the 1990s was to be bad but not as bad as frequently depicted, and the government data that track it exclude the illegal and informal sector. Economic shrinkage was ubiquitous in the post-communist space in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In that the coming apart of the Soviet Union wreaked havoc on supply networks and trade flows among the CIS nations, they were all at a disadvantage compared to their neighbors west of the pre-1991 Soviet border. On output loss, Russia fared perceptibly better than the CIS average, and was not in a league of its own.⁷⁹ It did so despite unique handicaps going into the reform maelstrom. Russia was saddled with 80 to 90 percent of the bloated military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union, demand for whose wares tumbled after the Cold War. It would have had an easier time of it had it not agreed to bear all of the USSR’s debt, the bulk of it incurred by Gorbachev, and if it had controlled its money supply out of the starting gate and not waited until 1993 or 1994 for the ex-republics to jettison the ruble. Russia would have been much better off if world prices for oil, its most precious natural resource, had not dipped below $20 a barrel for most of the post-Soviet decade. The petrodollars that producers were to be flooded with in the 2000s would have limited the sag in Russian GDP and kept the Yeltsin government out of the red.⁸⁰

Another corrective comes from pondering the Yeltsin revolution in time. The troubles that stimulated his attack on communism did not come out of thin air. Derived from defects hardwired into it by Lenin and Stalin, they heaped up over decades. Well before Yeltsin moved from Sverdlovsk to Moscow in 1985, system decay was manifesting itself in economic decline, social division, and anomie. Once the myopia about these problems was dispelled, large segments of the elite and the population chafed, as they were bound to, at what they took as half-solutions to them. Panglossian assessments of the reformability of the Soviet regime elide this impatience and the rudderless changes and mismanaged mini-reforms that made the everyday life of most Russians bedlam in the perestroika years. Reforming the system from within, as Gorbachev meant to do, was a respectable choice. Heading for the exits was a cleaner and better one.⁸¹

Economic liberalization fused to political autocracy and a strong state—not to Gorbachev’s muzzy humanism—was effected in communist China after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976. The Soviet Union could possibly have pursued this formula, although it was more industrialized and did not have China’s ethnic uniformity and its sea of rural labor. The window of opportunity for adopting a Chinese model was the Kremlin tenure of Yurii Andropov, the righteous former chairman of the KGB, in 1982–84; Andropov was not in power long enough, or definite enough on his policies, to be its guiding spirit. In 1991, after a half-decade of upheaval, atomization of the political class, and state deconstruction, the window was long since closed.⁸² Decontrolling prices was the sine qua non for uncorking market forces. When Yeltsin decided to let prices go, Gorbachev, who had refused to drink from this chalice for years, was pleased, one of his aides felt, that Yeltsin “was ready to take upon himself the responsibility for reforms fraught with serious social shocks and to relieve Gorbachev of it.”⁸³ The prime alternative was to recentralize and rebureaucratize the economy, with the option of embarking at a later date on reforms in the mold of Deng Xiaoping. Institutional malaise, the legitimacy deficit, and the nationality problem made such a course impractical without a clampdown that could have rivaled the 1989 massacre in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square.⁸⁴ The one option not on the table was to do nothing.

Considering the Yeltsin record as de-modernization or a tragedy from start to finish sheds more heat than light. From the vantage of 1992 or 1995, there was little to show statistically for shock therapy. By the day Yeltsin called it quits in 1999, the cradle of state socialism boasted a market economy of sorts. Sixty to 70 percent of material and financial assets, everything from newspaper kiosks to coal mines and aluminum mills, were off the government’s books, and most goods and services traded at a going price set by profit-oriented private firms. Anatolii Chubais’s privatization had few precedents in Russia, where history and the cultural fiber are congruent with state power, and was the largest divestiture of state resources anywhere in history. Inflation was wrestled down into the double digits by 1996, jumped in 1998 when Russia was in financial crisis, and receded to double digits in 1999 and henceforth. Russia by 1999 had a stock exchange (it first appeared in Moscow in 1994), commodity exchanges by the dozen, private banks by the hundred, and scads of business schools. Most pertinent politically, economic growth had resumed, and there has been no stopping it since then. Russia overshot the CIS norm in length of the economic contraction after communism; it undershot it in magnitude of the contraction. With better leadership and better public policy, the economy might have bottomed out several years sooner—on average, output was lowest in the twelve CIS countries in 1996, versus 1998 in Russia—and it might have begun to expand, and the standard of living to improve, several years sooner.

Yeltsin’s post-communist reforms transcended the economy. By relaxing the hammerlock of the state on production and distribution, Yeltsin parted with dogma and breathed into being new social categories, and ones that did not necessarily meet with social approval—a propertied middle class, people of means (parodied in the popular culture as the crass “New Russians”), and the super-rich parvenus, “the oligarchs.” In daily life, for all the problems, within six months Russia was done with artificial scarcities and the lineups in which the average Soviet adult had wasted one hour per day, waiting to buy sausage or vodka or matches, in 1990. Home ownership went up from 33 percent in 1990 to about 60 percent in 2000. Reform also created political space by enlarging citizens’ autonomy, breeding new interests, and making new resources available for acquiring influence in the public domain.⁸⁵ And sweeping changes, economic and non-economic, had sweeping implications worldwide as well. Russia, as Yeltsin was to say from every podium offered, no longer had any foundational reason to stand apart from the United States or the Western alliance.

These facts all belie any deep equivalency between Yeltsinism and Bolshevism. Lenin and the revolutionaries of 1917 were violent utopians, hellbent on building a brave new world on universalist precepts inimical to those of the capitalist democracies. On Soviet territory, they were monopolists, centralizers, and annihilators of the tsarist ruling stratum and of lesser social groups, such as the kulaks, whom they saw as uncongenial to the new order. On the international stage, they were a disruptive force. In sum, the Bolsheviks sought to make a Great Leap Forward, blazing the trail for others to follow. Yeltsin sought a Great Leap Outward. He meant for his de-monopolizing revolution to make Russia more similar to the rest of Europe and mankind by affording it the ABCs of a market economy and of a democratic social and political order, as he conceptualized them. Russia, in his mind’s eye, needed “to catch up, to strain every nerve, and to make super efforts in order to become like the rest.”⁸⁶ He parceled out power and had nothing against old-timers from the previous regime going into politics (like Yegor Ligachëv, who was elected to parliament in 1993, and Nikolai Ryzhkov, elected in 1995) or into business. In foreign policy, he was a joiner of transnational organizations and a realistic taker of terms from stronger powers.⁸⁷

In the political realm, Yeltsin after 1991 infracted democratic principles more than once and resorted to military force to quell opponents in 1993 against the Congress of People’s Deputies and in 1994 against the separatist rebels in Chechnya. However, there were extenuating circumstances in both these cases, as we shall see. Viktor Sheinis, a distinguished foreign-policy scholar and legislator, who took strong issue with him on specifics, strikes an appropriate balance in his memoirs on the things Yeltsin did right:

As president, Yeltsin confined himself by and large to pacific means of realizing his goals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, he did not put his opponents before an execution squad or behind razor wire. He would slough off powers and revenues to the provinces, enlarge media freedoms, and win mass consent through election. For the first sustained period in modern times, Yeltsin’s Russia was to be a land without political censors, political exiles, or political prisoners—a museum was built in 1994 at the last camp, Perm-36, which Gorbachev had closed in 1987. Both Peter the Great and the early communists made a cultural revolution in Russia. Peter ordered his subjects to shave their beards, forsake traditional clothing, and take communion once a year. Lenin and Stalin prescribed atheism, discipline on the factory floor, and reverence for the party and backed them up with terror and cradle-tograve indoctrination. Yeltsin had no stomach for interventions in matters of manners and morals and would continue the trend under perestroika away from state controls over the individual.

A facile parallel with Bolshevism would overrate the mercilessness and consistency of Yeltsin’s conduct over the full course of his presidency. Overrigorous design of the reforms, while sometimes a factor, was to be far from the only cause of the agonies associated with them. Policies that prolonged the needed changes, lacked cohesion, and spared the cost did as much harm, especially but not exclusively in the economic area.⁸⁹ As Reddaway and Glinski note—and as flies in the face of the postulate of messianism—Yeltsin and successive subleaders to him adjusted their economic and other policies as they proceeded and seldom behaved as though they had a stepby-step scheme: “Their ruling passion was political pragmatism.”⁹⁰

Pragmatism in policy generated neither mere opportunism nor an even flow of decisions. Instead, the reality in the Russia Yeltsin remade was a perplexing blend of types. Reform would be a long footslog—down a winding road, against a headwind. Its political history was studded with acts of statesmanship but also with wasted chances and spells of inaction. As will become apparent in subsequent chapters, when this discombobulated country forged ahead, as it surely did on Yeltsin’s watch, it was in fits and starts and not in a steady beat. So it went because of rearing uncertainty, institutional and coalitional politics, and what Oleg Poptsov called “swings in the social temperature.” And so it went because of the person whose hand was at the tiller. “Political arrhythmia,” as Poptsov colorfully put it, was to be a lasting ingredient of Yeltsin’s style as national leader.⁹¹