Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER TEN Resistances

Conscious beliefs and intuitions planted Yeltsin’s feet on the “civilized path” of radical reformation. They came forth intermingled from disenchantment with communism and a search for a better future. One has to wonder in wide angle why this effort accomplished what it did and why it did not accomplish more, and why not less painfully.

Post-communism as a milieu ought to have offered scope for statecraft. Above, a commanding leader promised fundamental change and was liberated from the roles and rules of the now-vanished civilization of the USSR. In so protean a medium, “The room for individual impact—that is, the impact of such things as intelligence, emotions, personality, aggressiveness, skill, timing, connections, and ambitions—is enormous.”¹ Yeltsin had all these qualities, from brainpower to timing to ambition. Below, in a time of exigency, a “rescue-hungry people” might have been receptive to charismatic inspiration and guidance.² The angst attendant upon the decease of a tyranny, an empire, or a failed social project—and the Soviet Union was all three—should have attracted the populace to a person who acted with dispatch, calmed nerves, and said he knew of a new way. Russia after the convulsions of 1985 to 1991 looked ripe for a season of “extraordinary politics” in which claimants would temper their ordinary demands and think in terms of the common good.³ The man in the best position to identify the common good and act as rescuer was Boris Yeltsin.

As the post-Soviet reforms got under way, this was the uplifting prospect before him and his colleagues. They faced, Yegor Gaidar has written, incalculable risks but also a freedom of maneuver few governments ever have. The Communist Party, its ideology, and its organizational transmission belts were gone. The army, the KGB, and the military-industrial and agricultural lobbies were paralytic, some of their chiefs moldering in prison for their participation in the August coup. Many Russians who had qualms about Western models held their fire: They were “interested in the most ungrateful [tasks] being undertaken by someone else’s hand” so that they could later profit at the reformers’ expense.⁴

The scenario of a tabula rasa hanging there, waiting for change to be written on it, was overdone from the beginning. It faded in Yeltsin’s first term—in fact, in the initial months of his first term—as resistances to change and to the agents of change multiplied. While no one resistance was an absolute, together they pushed Russia toward compromise though not desertion of the Great Leap Outward. They were twofold: external to Yeltsin, that is, located in his environment of operations; and internal, or dictated by his preferences and his perceptions of where he and Russia stood.

Exogenous constraints started with the fact that Yeltsin was nowhere near the sole winner from the dismemberment of communist authoritarianism. The Soviet collapse unshackled and energized actors who had come out of the woodwork with him and now clamored for their share of the spoils. As standard procedures were overwhelmed, the leader also had trouble employing institutional resources to attain his goals. The consummate resource for any politician in government is the state. In Yeltsin’s Russia, indiscipline, uncertainty, and decolonization demoralized and corrupted this resource and converted quotidian chores into an ordeal. The irony was superb. As with transitional leaders in many places and times, it dawned on Yeltsin that “the fluidity of the situation both empowers and weakens individuals,” hampering satisfaction of the very aspirations the environment has stirred up.⁵

Up to the 1991 watershed, Yeltsin as a communist heretic and then an anti-communist insurgent held a card none of his rivals had—the trust and affection of the powerless. This is not to say they were with him unanimously or unreservedly. In July of that year, the best-known polling organization in the Soviet Union, Yurii Levada’s VTsIOM (Center for the Study of Public Opinion), plumbed societal attitudes toward him. Confidence in Yeltsin, the survey showed, was unevenly distributed and was for millions contingent on other considerations. Twenty-nine percent of the interviewees were emotive supporters (“I fully support Yeltsin’s views and positions”), while another 11 percent assented “as long as he is leader of the democratic forces” in the country. This core constituency of 40 percent was well short of a majority and nearly 20 percentage points less than his vote total in the June presidential election. Eleven percent of Russians gave Yeltsin the most unfavorable evaluations (they were not supporters of his or would support anyone other than him). Many more than opposed him outright, and almost as many as supported him, gave ambivalent answers. They either were disappointed former aficionados (7 percent), found him unappealing but hopefully “useful to Russia” in the future (16 percent), or supported him “due to the absence of other worthy political figures” (15 percent). Yeltsin had climbed the heights of power only with the consent of a host of crosspressured citizens.⁶

Later studies using the same method traced a hemorrhaging of support. By March 1992, barely two months into his market reforms, the VTsIOM respondents placing Yeltsin in the topmost category had been sliced to 11 percent and his core constituency to 20 percent, or half what it was in July 1991. Those solidly against him were up to 18 percent, and those voicing ambivalence were now a plurality of 37 percent. By January 1993, only 5 percent of Russians were fully with him, 11 percent gave him qualified support, 22 percent were opposed, and a majority, 51 percent, were on the fence.⁷

In political terms, the most shocking thing about shock therapy was that it laid bare the limits of the nationwide consensus. Russians were united on the necessity of doing something about the economy and about instability in all things political and constitutional; on what was to be done, they were disunited. Bearish economic news and the whittling down of Yeltsin’s mass base emboldened elite players who had principled objections to his reform program, or who found it expedient to take up arms. The first yelps of criticism came even before price liberalization took effect, and some were from members of the president’s winning coalition, not from unreconstructed communists. Aleksandr Rutskoi, the running mate to Yeltsin a half-year before and now his vice president, spoke against headlong marketization on a tour of Siberian towns in late November 1991. In an interview with the newspaper Nezavisimaya gazeta on December 18, he declared that the government had been turned over to amateurs, “lads in pink trunks and yellow boots” who were hurling Russia toward disaster. Ruslan Khasbulatov, just chosen as parliamentary chairman, chimed in several weeks into the new year, and the Supreme Soviet adopted resolutions attacking the government.

In February and March of 1992, as a second planned miniwave of decontrol of prices drew nigh, this one aimed at oil and the energy sector, factory directors and bureaucrats from state industry campaigned to preempt it. Gaidar, elevated to first deputy premier by Yeltsin on March 2, cringed: “Powerful pressure mounted on the president. He was deluged daily by foot-messengers reporting to him what a fearful misadventure, if not perfidy, these monetarists were starting.”⁸ The Congress of People’s Deputies took up the mantra when it convened in April and considered a motion to dismiss four economic ministers. Gaidar took Yeltsin off guard by standing up on April 13 to inform the deputies the entire cabinet was stepping down if the motion passed. Khasbulatov and his legislators did a volte face the next day. Yeltsin wrote in Notes of a President that the Gaidar move was unwelcome news to him, but he gave high grades to his understudy’s theatrical sense: “Yegor Timurovich grasped the nature of the congress as a political spectacle, a big circus, where only the most unexpected and abrupt thrusts would carry the day.”⁹ Gaidar recalls that Yeltsin, who was still officially prime minister, “shook his head in pique and doubt yet accepted the decision.” Gaidar’s sponsor, Gennadii Burbulis, whom Yeltsin demoted in April from first deputy premier without explanation (he stayed on as state secretary), was dubious about the threat. Says Gaidar, “Gennadii Eduardovich, who had worked with Boris Nikolayevich much longer than me and knew him better, understood that our demand was addressed not only to the congress but to the president.”¹⁰

The reprieve lasted only a few weeks. In a preview of what he would do again and again, Yeltsin spoke to Gaidar about introducing armaments specialist Yurii Skokov or Sverdlovsk partocrat Oleg Lobov into the cabinet “for equipoise” (dlya ravnovesiya). The suggestion “was proudly rejected.”¹¹ On May 30, at a Kremlin meeting on energy policy, Yeltsin announced that he was relieving the young minister for the branch, Vladimir Lopukhin, who was in favor of laissez-fire and was one of the four on the congress’s blacklist. Writes Yeltsin: “I think back to two faces: one was scarlet, almost vermilion—that was Gaidar; the other was pale as a sheet—that was Lopukhin. It was difficult to look at them.”¹² Appointed in Lopukhin’s stead and awarded the rank of deputy premier was Viktor Chernomyrdin, an engineer and red director from the Urals; two other experienced managers, Vladimir Shumeiko and Georgii Khizha, were brought in as deputy premiers in mid-June.

Yeltsin did not consult Gaidar on the Lopukhin firing. He knew, Gaidar says, that Gaidar would have resigned if given early warning. Gaidar considered quitting but was talked out of it by friends. The promotion to acting prime minister on June 15 was little solace. Anyone could see he and Burbulis had been taken down a peg.¹³ There was further evidence one month later when Yeltsin nominated, and the Supreme Soviet confirmed, Viktor Gerashchenko as chairman of the Central Bank of Russia. Gerashchenko, the last head of the USSR’s state bank, was at odds with the Gaidar brain trust’s tight-money policy and flooded industry and agriculture with cheap credits. Inflation, having subsided in the spring, took off again that autumn.¹⁴

When the congress gathered for its winter session (it assembled two or three times a year), Yeltsin’s twelve months to make staffing and economic decisions by decree had expired. He asked the deputies to regularize Gaidar’s appointment as prime minister, which they refused to do by 486 votes to 467 on December 9, 1992 (the congress had 1,068 members, of whom 252 sat in the Supreme Soviet). Flustered, Yeltsin decided to take his brief to the people. On December 11 he was driven to the AZLK Works, the carmaker in southeast Moscow that manufactured the rattletrap Moskvich. He knew from government documents that Russian workplaces were having hard times:

Workers bawled that Yeltsin should bury the hatchet with Khasbulatov and reanimate the socialist economy. Only ten or twenty, one observer divined, would have raised their hands for the motion if management and the trade union committee had not cracked the whips. Yeltsin was downcast as he climbed back into his limousine.¹⁶

AZLK and the dyspepsia of the parliamentarians took the wind out of Yeltsin’s sails. He sat down with Khasbulatov and reached a deal on a baroque formula for selecting a prime minister to serve until Russia had a new constitution. The congress on December 14 came up with eighteen candidates; Yeltsin shortened the list to five, and in the process disallowed the favorite of the deputies, Georgii Khizha, an arms manufacturer from St. Petersburg; the congress did a straw poll with three choices per deputy; the president was to make a choice from among the three leading nominees and submit that name for confirmation. Yurii Skokov was the top candidate with 637 votes, followed by Viktor Chernomyrdin with 621 and Gaidar with 400 votes. Chernomyrdin was Yeltsin’s pick of the three and was confirmed with 721 votes for.¹⁷ Gaidar, Burbulis, and several other reformists were excluded from the new Council of Ministers. The kamikazes had flamed out—and the commodore who had ordered them into the air stayed at his post.

Yeltsin was gratified in 1991 by Gaidar’s minimum of “Soviet baggage.” This could not have been said about Chernomyrdin, a jowly veteran of the petroleum industry and the founding head of Gazprom, the state company that took over the assets of the USSR Ministry of the Gas Industry in 1989. Two decades older than Gaidar and only seven years younger than Yeltsin, he was out of Orenburg oblast, the home region of Naina Yeltsina. He had hooked up with Yeltsin when the latter was Sverdlovsk party boss and together they supervised pipeline laying; he was kinder to Yeltsin than most after the rift with Gorbachev.¹⁸ “Viktor Stepanovich and I are united by common views on many things,” Yeltsin would say in Notes of a President, and were of the same generation. Chernomyrdin had principles but “is not up in the clouds.”¹⁹ The earthbound Chernomyrdin was to be an indispensable man, the prime minister for five-plus years, and to win fame equally for his competence, his wiliness, his partiality toward the Gazprom monopoly,²⁰ and his mangled syntax and diction. Like Yeltsin, he evolved with the times.

The headlines of 1992 illuminated the environmental encumbrances to Yeltsin’s reform program in all their abundance. Until he forcibly shut down the Congress of People’s Deputies in late 1993 and imposed a presidentialist constitution, an obstructionist legislature lurked over his shoulder and had the legal and often the political force to foil him. But some of his biggest problems were within the amorphous executive branch. It contained a runaway vice president, a chief banker more attuned to parliament than to Yeltsin, and ministers and counselors raring to score points and to draw him into their corner. Large producers in Russia, still the property of the state, entreated for financial assistance. Private business, which was in its infancy, was strong enough in one area, banking, to create a sordid interest-group politics. The banks plumped for, and profited bounteously from, measures to assign them contracts for transferring credits from the central bank to specific firms and sectors, to allow them to pay negative real interest rates to depositors, and to protect them from contributory deposit insurance and foreign competition.²¹ Although the populace only looked on from a distance, all principals knew well the peril of social unrest, and grassroots opinion was still viewed by government and opposition as mobilizable.

What was not so apparent in Yeltsin’s first year, except to those with inside dope, was the importance of his endogenous thought processes and inhibitions—some of them evincing the Soviet baggage he sought to escape in his advisers, some responding to his reading of popular sentiment. In the springtime flap over bank credits and economic stabilization, to take one example, Gaidar found the president a hard sell on the subject of tight money: “Time after time at meetings between us or sessions of the government, he returned to the question of why we were not increasing the money supply” and thus keeping cash-strapped firms going. “The arguments we advanced did not seem persuasive enough to him anymore.”²² Yeltsin also vetoed Gaidar’s call for an instantaneous, Russian-imposed end to the ruble zone in the former USSR. The currency reform occurred only in July 1993.

Yeltsin, rehashing the 1992 Lopukhin story in his memoirs, emphasized that he had his own reasons, and it was not just about pesky parliamentarians or lobbyists:

The jockeying over forming and re-forming the cabinet brought out another phenomenon: Yeltsin’s determination as president to have political independence from allies and associates. It applied to the intelligentsia-based movements with which he had made common cause in his tramp to power. Gavriil Popov, who had been elected mayor of Moscow, left city hall in June 1992 to found a private university—Yeltsin named Yurii Luzhkov, a red director and municipal bureaucrat, in his place—and no member of the former Interregional Deputies Group was given a high-level position. Leaders of the related Democratic Russia movement felt that Yeltsin owed them for their help in 1990 and 1991. Lev Ponomarëv and Gleb Yakunin, two of its three co-chairmen, stated publicly that Yeltsin should listen to their recommendations on cabinet positions and appoint members of the organization as his emissaries to the provinces. Ponomarëv and Yakunin invited themselves to Sochi in October 1991, during Yeltsin’s sojourn there, and prevailed on him to receive them. The president took notes during the meeting, commended joint action, and did nothing to follow up.²⁴ Yurii Afanas’ev, the third co-chairman, well known to Yeltsin from the Interregionals, led a faction that was against any collaboration with him. In early 1992 he and ex-dissident Yurii Burtin, ruing “authoritarian degradation” under Yeltsin, walked out of Democratic Russia, which promptly split up into pettifogging sects. Why, Burtin asked, was reform “put in the hands of a bunch of youngsters… about whom no one had heard a word a half-year ago?”²⁵ Yeltsin’s attitude is condensed in his memoir putdown of Afanas’ev as a scholastic “eternal oppositionist”: “Such people are very necessary, but not in government—somewhere to the side, or on a hilltop where the view is better.”²⁶

Burbulis, Gaidar, and the mavens of shock therapy, their ties to the older radicals flimsy, learned a little later about Yeltsin chasing his own star. Burbulis unburdened himself in an interview in 2001:

Yeltsin could not get over Burbulis’s refusal to serve as presidential chief of staff in 1991 and was ever more of the belief that Burbulis had an allergy to the gritty work of government, whereas the blemish he observed in Gaidar was inexperience and impracticality, not sloth. But the pulling back from the reform maximalists expressed a deeper tendency—in turn an outgrowth of character and habits of Urals self-sufficiency—that would apply to helpmates of sundry orientations. Everyone in the game was to be in orbit, and flight plans could be revised on short notice. The conservatives cited by Burbulis as beneficiaries of Yeltsin’s decisions help make the point. Vladimir Polevanov, a Siberian provincial leader who was named deputy premier and head of the State Property Committee in November 1994, and who used the appointment to try to undo the privatization of the aluminum industry, lasted only three months and was fired at the demand of Anatolii Chubais. Oleg Soskovets, an ethnic Russian technocrat from Kazakhstan and the last minister of metallurgy of the USSR, was made first deputy premier, the number two to Chernomyrdin, in April 1993. His turn to run afoul of the president came in June 1996, for factional activities in league with Aleksandr Korzhakov.

“Checks and balances” (sderzhki i protivovesy), as the catchphrase went, were built into Yeltsinesque administration from the start, and spanned the bounds between external and internal resistances to purposive change. They would mean that no Kremlin staff and no government, from Gaidar through the premiership of Vladimir Putin in 1999, was homogeneous, and that all of them would present Himalayan challenges of coordination. The president “turned out to have people around him who in terms of their views and approaches would be difficult to call like-minded or brothers-in-arms.”²⁸

Fractious government contributed to the aforesaid arrhythmia of decision making. However, it did not foreclose an underlying persistence of trajectory, a wobbly equilibrium within a broad band of possibilities. It was stabilized by the solar object—Yeltsin—around which all lesser bodies in the system, planetary and asteroidal, spun. To the extent that the country had a defined course in the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin is surely correct to say that within the structures of government its conservator and guarantor was the president:

Yeltsin’s subjective resistances to the oversights of reform policy at the micro level were not enough to knock him off his macro course.

Here the vagaries of economic policy in the year or two after the exit of Gaidar are revealing. There was much more continuity substantively, if not stylistically, than Burbulis’s elegy would admit. To take the place of Gaidar as minister of finance and deputy premier, Yeltsin hit upon Boris Fëdorov, who was two years younger than Gaidar and had held the job under Ivan Silayev in 1990. Fëdorov tilted against Viktor Gerashchenko and easy money and made some progress on monetary and fiscal restraint in the spring and fall of 1993, twinning with Gaidar when Yeltsin brought him back into the cabinet as deputy premier in September. These gains have been interpreted as evidence of “how much one forceful individual [Fëdorov] in a key post can accomplish in such a volatile situation,”³⁰ but this disregards the role of a second individual—the Yeltsin who provided Fëdorov with political cover and encouragement. As Fëdorov found his bearings, Yeltsin called him with a tip that Chernomyrdin was preparing a directive on reimposition of curbs on some consumer prices. Fëdorov, with Gaidar’s help, sent Yeltsin a memorandum bashing the proposal as inconsistent with marketization. Yeltsin then invited Fëdorov and the prime minister into his office, gave the table a thump, and told Chernomyrdin that if he brought out such an order it would be countermanded by a presidential decree, which he said was ready in the file folder on his desk—a folder that, known to Fëdorov but not to Chernomyrdin, held one sheet of paper, the Fëdorov memo. Chernomyrdin dropped the plan.³¹

In January 1994 Gaidar and Fëdorov resigned from the government for a second time, after a parliamentary election in which liberal candidates were outvoted, and Chernomyrdin gave hints of wage and price controls. But in reality he perpetuated Fëdorov’s and Gaidar’s policies in 1994 and 1995 and took them further by developing a bond market for government debt. The authors of The Yeltsin Epoch, who hold no brief for Chernomyrdin, write of his economic record that, “with less gusto but more reliance on common sense and Russian conditions, [he] basically continued what Gaidar had begun” in 1991–92.³² This happened not because of Chernomyrdin’s priors but because he, like Yeltsin, was learning from changing conditions and because he worked for Yeltsin.

In the final analysis, changing Russia was for Yeltsin about Russians practicing individual self-reliance and collective self-determination and healing themselves as both autonomous and social creatures. The prime service the leader could provide was to loosen the corset of constraints and give them the latitude to think and act without fear of government, of a self-abnegating doctrine, or of one another: “Our ideal is not equality in poverty, self-denial, and envy. We are for people having greater chances to take the bull by the horns, earn good money, and improve their lives.”³³

A corollary to this individualist and restorative idiom was another resistance to radicalism: antipathy to couching social reconstruction as intergroup or interclass warfare, which was how the Bolsheviks had conceived of their cause. And that antipathy deterred Yeltsin from expounding the changes he made as truly revolutionary changes.

When on the Gorbachev team from 1985 to 1987, he disagreed with the general secretary’s description of intrasystemic perestroika as a revolution, since Gorbachev was moving too slowly to warrant it. “Revolution” and “revolutionary” then mostly washed out of Yeltsin’s vocabulary.³⁴ Partly this was a tactic to reassure supporters who did not want change to get out of hand. He was alert, as he said in the 1991 election campaign, to the need “not to scare people, since many are afraid of the destruction of that which exists.”³⁵ As president, Yeltsin migrated to the position that he had done Russia a service by shielding it from a revolution. He preferred the emollients “radical reforms,” “democratic reconstruction,” “reformist breakthrough,” or, if revolutionary verbiage could not be helped, “quiet revolution” (tikhaya revolyutsiya).³⁶

Yeltsin leaned against himself since he was driven to conclude that Russia was susceptible to social upheaval and that any recurrence of the nihilism of the Bolshevik Revolution would be fatal to the country. This is how he phrased it in a speech marking the anniversary of the 1991 coup:

To cast change as going forward under the president’s control was to cast him in the part of brakeman and regulator—or “arbitrator,” as Burbulis put it—as much as locomotive.

As he often did in his memoirs, Yeltsin in Notes of a President identified a unique moment when the idea jelled: when he observed Muscovites meting out rough justice in 1991. On the afternoon of Thursday, August 22, he caught a glimpse of the citizens milling around the Central Committee area on Old Square. In a carnival spirit, they broke windows and would have overrun the gates if policemen sent by Mayor Popov had not blocked them. Later that day, the crowd, numbering several tens of thousands, swarmed to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and daubed swastikas and graffiti on the walls; the staff inside had armed themselves and blocked the entranceways and corridors. It was under searchlights that night, in a scene flashed across the globe, that building cranes overseen by Sergei Stankevich and Aleksandr Muzykantskii brought down the iron statue of the founder of the Soviet terror apparatus, Felix Dzerzhinsky, which had stood in the square since 1958.³⁸

In this scene, Yeltsin beheld only the apparition of mob rule. “I had visions of the ghost of October—of the pogroms, disorder, looting, constant rallies, and anarchy with which that great revolution began. One wave of the hand, one signature, would have turned August 1991 into October 1917. But I did not do that, and I have no regrets.” In Soviet history, the mob was succeeded by the party, which divided society into “the clean and the unclean,” he says, and tried to build its new world on the backs of the unclean. Yeltsin in government did not want to sort people or to commandeer the material gains so laboriously accumulated under communist rule. “I saw continuity between the society of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period and the new Russia. It did not enter into my plans to smash and bust up everything as the Bolsheviks did.”³⁹

The therapeutic take on the post-communist transition and rejection of revolutionism favored another choice—to soft-pedal the retributive side of the change of regime. Yeltsin knew as well as anyone that there was much in the communist past to atone for. In his writings and speeches as president, he decried forced collectivization, the Stalin terror and purges, and the Gulag, as most members of the late Soviet elite had done in the Gorbachev years. Gorbachev in December 1991 gave him the CPSU general secretary’s archive, housing the most sensitive papers from the Soviet era. The presidential archive, as it was renamed, threw up new disclosures about atrocities, and some of these he found deflating. Yeltsin was dumbstruck, says head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, at news that Lenin had ordered the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, and that was only one example.⁴⁰

Yeltsin in his first year in the Kremlin made frequent foreign policy–related use of the archives. In Washington in June 1992, he promised the U.S. Congress information about prisoners of war who might have ended up in Russia after the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Representatives of a Russian-American commission set off to explore the labor camps at Pechora in the northern Urals. “Beamed to television sets around the world, Yeltsin’s remarks and the Pechora jaunt served their political purpose,” although no actual American prisoners or records of them having been there were found.⁴¹ Vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, the Yeltsin government “proved far more willing to re-evaluate and condemn controversial episodes” in Soviet relations with these countries than Gorbachev had been.⁴² Gorbachev had disavowed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia but never the 1956 intervention in Hungary. In November 1992 Yeltsin handed over to the post-communist government in Budapest a collection of secret materials on 1956, which were later published in Hungarian translation. That same autumn, Rudol’f Pikhoya, the new head of the Russian Archives Committee (and husband of Lyudmila Pikhoya), traveled on Yeltsin’s behalf to Warsaw to present the Polish president, Lech Wałesa, with copies of KGB and CPSU files proving culpability at the highest levels in the NKVD’s execution of more than 20,000 army officers and other Polish captives near Katyn, Russia, in 1940—files Gorbachev knew of but said did not exist. Yeltsin received journalists from Poland in the Kremlin and termed the shootings “a premeditated and depraved mass murder” at the instigation of “the party of the Bolsheviks.” In a visit to Warsaw in August 1993, he went to the city’s military cemetery, “knelt before a Polish priest, and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had laid at the foot of the Katyn cross.”⁴³ Yeltsin also provided to Wałesa the dossier Moscow kept on him when he was leader of the Solidarity labor movement in the 1980s. Similar information was released about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and wartime saver of Hungarian Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, and the Soviet air force’s shooting down of a Korean jetliner in the Far East in 1983.

Within Russia, Yeltsin approached questions of history gingerly. The monstrosity of the Stalinist repressions, he believed, raised concern that rummaging through the files on individuals and abused groups would be injurious to political and social peace. Russians had held back from recrimination and revenge, he told a group of news reporters in July 1992: “And how hard it has been to hold back…. Some people were saying, Let us dig away. But, you know, digging things up on the 15 or 20 million who suffered, plus their families, would make society boil with rage.”⁴⁴ That it might have had the cathartic and prophylactic effect it did in post-communist Eastern Europe was always secondary in Yeltsin’s thinking to its destabilizing potential.⁴⁵

Nonetheless, Yeltsin after 1991 did favor the dissemination of knowledge and the righting of wrongs, case by case. Researchers, Russian and foreign, had unexampled access during his presidency to archival information, excepting only top-secret troves such as those of the presidency and security services.⁴⁶ Books, memoirs, and documentary films probed the past, and Russian historians rejoined the international scholarly community. General Dmitrii Volkogonov, an orthodox communist turned reformer who served as an aide to Yeltsin until his death in 1995, sprang many materials loose and traced the inhumanity of Soviet communism not to Stalin but to its initiator, Lenin. Yeltsin saw Volkogonov “as a military version of himself—a product and a servant of the old system who had seen the light and was now combating the dark forces of the past.”⁴⁷ After adoption of a legal framework in October 1991, Yeltsin appointed Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Central Committee secretary who led a CPSU committee on the depredations of the Stalin period, to chair a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Some 4.5 million Russians were exonerated over the next ten years, 92 percent of them posthumously. They included kulaks, priests (several hundred thousand of whom were shot or died in captivity), military men, dissidents, and wartime prisoners of the Germans who were sent to Siberia in 1945, some of them sentenced under nonpolitical articles of the criminal code. Yeltsin, in Yakovlev’s recollection, “actively supported” his work and signed directives on opening up records and clearing individuals’ names prepared for him by the commission. “Of all the requests I brought to him, I do not remember one that he disputed.”⁴⁸

What Yeltsin was not prepared for was to come to terms with the communist legacy on a more emblematic level. Some in the dissident counterculture advocated a Nuremberg-type tribunal for surviving malfeasants. But a model for Nazi war criminals in the 1940s was a poor fit with Russian circumstances in the 1990s, since it was predicated on military defeat and the administration of the tribunal, and implementation of its verdicts, by foreign occupiers.⁴⁹ In 1992 a group of communists put the Yeltsin government on trial by questioning the constitutionality of the decrees of August and November 1991 that outlawed the CPSU and its Russian offshoot. Sergei Shakhrai represented the government in six months of Constitutional Court hearings, filing thirty-six volumes of evidence to the effect that the ruling party had been so intertwined with the Soviet state and its repressive apparatus that it was undeserving of protection in Russia’s democracy. On November 30 a panel of the court—all thirteen members of which had been members of the CPSU—rendered a Solomonic verdict that confirmed the legality of Yeltsin’s disassembly of the structures of the old party but said there must be no persecution of individual communists and they must be free to organize a new party if they so wished.⁵⁰ A Communist Party of the Russian Federation was established in February 1993 and was to play a significant part in the politics of the decade.

Another formula for de-Sovietizing the state that drew some interest was that of “lustration,” a screening of political institutions for former officers of and collaborators with the communist-era security services such as was done in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.⁵¹ Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s adviser on nationality issues in 1991–92, was one of the few Russian politicians to come out for a lustration law. A version of her draft statute would have forbidden former apparatchiks in the CPSU from holding political office or teaching positions for five years. Democratic Russia deputies in March 1992 favored a ban on former members of the CPSU who had not turned in their party cards by August 1991. Yeltsin attended the meeting and, with about half of the delegates, left the hall before the vote was taken.⁵² Commenting on the approach in 1994, he explicitly linked party and police workers: “The democratic press rebukes me for [the fact that] I preserved the state-security system and did not issue a decree that would debar from work in the state apparatus former officials of the Central Committee of the CPSU, of the party’s obkoms, and some would even say of its raikoms [district committees].”⁵³ Yeltsin could not have been much worried about skeletons in his closet. But he was vexed about the onrush of events possibly getting out of control, and he wanted to keep the substratum of well-trained managers and professionals who, like he, had been part of the Soviet regime. Besides new faces and voices, he wanted “to use in the work of the state experienced implementers and organizers.” Although some old hands from the nomenklatura may have “dressed up as democrats,” he was more irritated by purely political types from the new wave who “generally did not know how to work.”⁵⁴

Yeltsin could have attempted acts of symbolic rectification. For instance, he could have devised holidays and extravaganzas to display solidarity with opposition to the ancien régime and approval of its collapse. He did make a desultory effort to do so in 1992 when he proclaimed June 12, the anniversary of the 1990 sovereignty declaration, Free Russia Day, a nonworking holiday. He largely passed up the opportunity to make the August anniversary of the 1991 coup a commemorative event. After making speeches on the occasion in 1992 and 1993, in 1994 he decreed that August 22 would be State Flag Day, “but did not explain why the [Russian tricolor] flag was the one piece of August to be enshrined or how the day was meant to be marked,” and declined to make it a nonworking day.⁵⁵ Another decree in 1994 made December 12, as anniversary of the 1993 constitutional referendum, Constitution Day, a nonworking holiday. Like June 12 and August 22, most Russians greeted it with indifference.

Myth making could also have had a physical aspect, as it does in many societies. Yurii Afanas’ev and Yevgenii Yevtushenko lobbied Yeltsin on behalf of the Memorial Society (which Yeltsin had joined in 1988) to make over the KGB headquarters and prison in Lubyanka Square into a museum. Yakovlev favored the construction of a monument to the casualties of Stalinism in front of the building. In October 1990 the Memorial Society had emplaced there an unsculpted stone from one of the northern camps, but the removal of the Dzerzhinsky statue in 1991 created room for something eye-catching. Yeltsin did not warm to these ideas when approached. Yakovlev, he said afterward, should have “squeezed” the president but did not.⁵⁶

Yeltsin was gripped, though, by the reconfiguration of Russia’s stellar public space, Red Square. Laid out by Ivan III in the 1490s, it had over the centuries been a place for trade, worship, public gatherings, and executions. The communists made it primarily a parade ground. The square’s western margin was converted after 1917 into a necropolis for revolutionaries and Soviet officials and dignitaries. Since 1924 the corpse of Lenin, embalmed in a secret fluid, had been displayed under quartz glass in a mausoleum—of wood until 1930, in salmon-tinted granite and porphyry after then. In 1941, with the Wehrmacht on the approaches to Moscow, it was evacuated to Tyumen, Siberia; it returned to its place of honor after the war’s end.⁵⁷ Tens of millions of Soviets and foreigners had lined up to file by Lenin, one of them the young Boris Yeltsin in 1953. To the rear of the mausoleum, the bodies and cremated ashes of Stalin (who had lain beside Lenin in the mausoleum until the 1961 CPSU congress ordered him removed), Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and about four hundred lesser lights lay in and at the foot of the ruddy Kremlin wall. Yeltsin’s friend, the stage director Mark Zakharov, suggested as early as 1989, at the first session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, that the Lenin mummy be put next to his mother at Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg and the mausoleum and tombs be closed down as “a pagan temple” in the heart of the capital. Democratic Russia embraced the idea after the 1991 coup, when Yeltsin, at the zenith of his popularity, could have made the change with ease. He chose not to respond.

In late 1993, after he defeated the parliamentary opposition, Yeltsin swung to support of the Red Square plan, which resembled reburials in certain other post-communist states.⁵⁸ He removed Sentry Post No. 1, the goose-stepping police honor guard, from the crypt on October 5 (in 1997, it was reinstated at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on another side of the Kremlin), closed the adjacent Lenin Museum, and decided in principle to move Lenin and the others to the graveyard of the Novodevichii Convent in Moscow—the very place Yeltsin would be buried in 2007. In the coming months, he had a section surveyed at Novodevichii, corresponded through his aide Georgii Satarov with family members, and commissioned public opinion polls. The relatives of foreigners buried in the square—including the only American, the Harvard man and revolutionary John Reed, interred there in 1920—were also approached. Distracted by other problems, though, Yeltsin mothballed the plan. He contented himself for the moment with small acts of de-Leninization—taking down a two-ton Lenin statue in the Kremlin garden and carting Lenin’s office in Building No. 1 to Gorki, a Moscow exurb.⁵⁹

With Lenin, 1917, and the building of communism no longer befitting sources of legitimacy, Yeltsin reinstated what he thought the best alternative—imagery of pre-Soviet Russia. On November 30, 1993, he gave official standing to a coat of arms featuring the double-headed eagle of Byzantium and Muscovy. The white, blue, and red Russian flag, originally brought in by Peter the Great as the empire’s trade banner but flown by the Romanovs as the state flag from 1883 to 1917, had been in use again from August 1991; a Yeltsin decree made it official on December 11, 1993. The white on top was said to stand for peace and purity, the blue in the middle for steadiness and honor, and the red at the bottom for love and generosity. That same day Yeltsin instituted the “Patriotic Song” by Mikhail Glinka (1804–57) as national anthem, replacing the “Hymn of the USSR” dating from 1944.⁶⁰ Beginning with Hero of the Soviet Union, which was replaced by Hero of the Russian Federation in March 1992, he Russified most Soviet awards and medals. Over the years, he also created new honors and brought back some tsarist-period blazonry. By the end of the 1990s, the Russian Federation had as many state awards as the USSR had had. The recommendations were “my favorite documents.”⁶¹

The Kremlin fortress, venerated by Yeltsin as a monument to Russian statehood, received special attention. In late 1992 his office had Boris Ioganson’s socialist realist Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol, which had hung over the main staircase of the Grand Kremlin Palace since the 1950s, taken down. It was replaced by a panoramic painting of medieval Russian warriors under Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod fighting on ice against the Teutonic Knights in 1242. The title of the canvas, by Sergei Prisekin, is Whosoever Shall Come to Us with the Sword Shall Perish by the Sword.⁶² This was but a foretaste: Undeterred by economic stringency, Yeltsin authorized the spending of a king’s ransom on reconditioning the main edifices of state on the Kremlin squares.⁶³ There is a tale making the rounds that he came to the decision after a fireplace in the Green Sitting Room of the Grand Palace disgorged smoke during Bill Clinton’s first presidential visit in January 1994.⁶⁴ But Yeltsin had signed the first directive about renovations in March 1993, and the project, once started, went on for most of his two terms.

The Red Staircase, which had led into the Faceted Chamber of the Grand Palace, and from whose steps the tsars addressed the people of Moscow on Cathedral Square, was the first piece to be fixed. Stalin had pulled down the staircase in the 1930s and constructed a canteen there. With Patriarch Aleksii, Yeltsin unveiled the replica in September 1994, saying it showed the way to Russians to bring back objects “buried under the former totalitarian regime.” Between the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1996, the neoclassic Building No. 1, built by Matvei Kazakov for the Senate in the 1770s and 1780s, was remodeled and modernized. The coordinator of the project, Pavel Borodin, reports that the president pushed for what he thought of as a “stateish” (derzhavnoye) look modeled on masterworks of pre-Soviet Russian architecture and especially on Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg:

His wife, among others, questioned whether the country could afford the reconstruction. But Yeltsin was undaunted. “The country had no money when the Kremlin was built,” he said. Someone had to restore it to its former beauty, “and it might as well be me.” Russians and foreigners, he let on to Borodin, would be swept up by what was done. “For Boris Nikolayevich this was only a plus: people will remember it two hundred years from now.”⁶⁶

Yeltsin was given interim housing in Building No. 14. When he moved back into Building No. 1, new statues by Anatolii Bichukov of four miscellaneous Russian monarchs—the empire builder Peter the Great, the enlightened despot Catherine the Great, the martinet Nicholas I, and the manumitter of the serfs, Alexander II—sat in niches in the walls of the ceremonial office, also called the Oval Hall. There he received guests and foreign leaders under an almond-shaped cupola, with Peter behind his desk. The circular Sverdlov Hall, where Yeltsin had delivered his secret speech to the Central Committee in 1987, was given its original name, Catherine’s Hall, and redone in pale blue and gold, with old statuary and reliefs restored and new allegorical sculptures on Russia and Justice by Bichukov.

After the Senate building, it was the turn of the opulent, 700-room Grand Kremlin Palace, erected by Konstantin Ton in the 1830s and 1840s on the initiative of Nicholas I. Yeltsin put out a first decree in 1994 and work began on St. George’s Hall, one of its five great vestibules, where Joseph Stalin had erased the tablets with the names of the twenty-five recipients of the Order of St. George, imperial Russia’s highest military award. Workers uncovered an infestation of rats, knee-deep water in the cellar, and fissures in the foundation, and had to solidify the base of the building and of the seventeenth-century Terem Palace.

Already in 1994 Yeltsin decided to move on to the St. Andrei’s and Alexander Nevsky halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In 1932–34, to accommodate the USSR Supreme Soviet and other functions, Stalin had them gutted and unified into an anodyne auditorium adorned with plywood desks and chairs, reinforced-concrete balconies, and a titanic stone Lenin standing behind the platform. The Russian Congress of People’s Deputies met here from 1990 until Yeltsin decreed it out of existence in September 1993. Yeltsin was ignorant of the story of the halls until, some weeks after the death blow to parliament, he saw a quaint image of the original rooms in several watercolors by the nineteenth-century artist Konstantin Ukhtomskii. He asked an official what had happened to them and heard that “the Bolsheviks destroyed them.” “Yeltsin’s face grew dark—seemingly he recalled that here the [congressional] deputies had more than once chastised him and had tried to impeach him [in March 1993]—and he intoned, ‘Then we will begin restoring them!’”⁶⁷ The decree was issued in January 1996. Yeltsin “studied in fine detail” every sketch considered by the state commission he appointed to oversee, although he left the filigree to them to settle. The commission would meet with him about six times in 1997 alone. His consistent advice was to adhere to Ton’s plan.⁶⁸ The original halls and their artwork were re-created from drawings and photographs, helped by archival materials Ton had sent to London and finishing details stored in the basement. The nationalist artist Il’ya Glazunov consulted on some lesser rooms and donated several of his paintings. Ninety-nine firms and 2,500 people worked to complete the project.⁶⁹

Yeltsin was to say in Presidential Marathon in 2000 that he should have legislated legal and political continuity between post-communist and precommunist Russia, somehow bypassing the communist era. Going “from 1991 to 1917” would have restored “historical justice” and “historical continuity” and sanctified the liberal values that gained currency in the decades before World War I, when urban business, private farms, free speech, and parliamentarism thrived.⁷⁰ But this was never done. Neither mass nor elite opinion was prepared for what could have been a Great Leap Backward with unpredictable and perhaps comic results. The Russia of tsars, onion domes, and Cossacks (and, until 1861, of serfdom) was not a democracy, and territorially and ethnically it was organized as an empire.

Yeltsin’s ideological eclecticism and fascination with representations of history made him a practitioner of political bricolage, patchwork that makes a useable past out of whatever fabrics happen to be at the leader’s disposal.⁷¹ Just as there was no wholesale assault on the communist order, Yeltsin bridled at a wholesale reconciliation with the imperial order. Five-pointed red stars and other Soviet motifs abounded after 1991, on the Kremlin battlements and all over Russia. Thousands of likenesses of Lenin and streets, squares, and buildings in his name were not touched, even in Moscow.⁷² Some cities and city streets were returned to their ancestral appellations, while many others were left alone, at times creating anomalies such as provinces and their formerly eponymous capitals bearing different names. Yeltsin’s area of birth was still Sverdlovsk oblast, after the Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, even as the city of Sverdlovsk was given back its birth name, Yekaterinburg—and one of the main avenues of Yekaterinburg, leading from downtown out to the former Urals Polytechnic Institute, was still called Lenin Prospect. Yeltsin reached out to post-1917 Russian émigrés in the West in 1992,⁷³ but no plan to restore their titles and property back in Russia was ever enacted. No agreement was struck on the words to be set to Glinka’s nineteenth-century music, so the anthem was a melody without lyrics to which the Russians never took. And aspects of the Soviet experience in which there was popular pride—such as industrialization, wartime victory, and the space program—remained in good odor officially. As a sign, the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War in 1995 touched off an orgy of nostalgia and completion of the brutalist war monument on Moscow’s Poklonnaya Hill, whose construction Yeltsin as local party leader had halted the decade before. Yeltsin’s government, Mayor Luzhkov, and local communists “all held massive dueling celebrations, blanketing the city in military banners, posters, and other paraphernalia.”⁷⁴

Although Yeltsin greeted and forced changes in many Russian institutions, his concern about a loss of control decelerated or halted change in several domains. It influenced him to oppose the eradication of communist-era law codes and regulations, which were considered to be in force unless expressly repealed. To tear up the body of Soviet legislation, and of Russia’s prerogatives as juridical heir to the USSR, would in his assessment have brought “so many problems and worries that we were just not prepared to handle at so difficult a time.”⁷⁵

In the same spirit, Yeltsin did not wipe out the KGB, the coercive sidearm of the Communist Party, which it was in his power to do in 1991–92. This is not the outcome one might have expected, for, although he had cooperative personal relations with some KGB officers before 1987, in his days in opposition he came to distrust the organization. In 1989 he was one of the few deputies to abstain on the confirmation vote for Vladimir Kryuchkov in the USSR Supreme Soviet, and, says one then volunteer assistant of his, he developed “spy mania” and saw “in every new person a stoolpigeon for the KGB.” Asked about a possible recruit, he would tap two fingers on a shoulder, a sign in the USSR for eavesdropping.⁷⁶ Yeltsin knew of the KGB’s and Kryuchkov’s centrality in the 1991 putsch from experience and from the five assorted committees to investigate it, one of which, under Sergei Stepashin, he himself had appointed.

When the committees reported, Yeltsin seemed to lose his zeal for shaking up the organization. Its last Soviet chairman, Vadim Bakatin, says wryly in his memoirs that Yeltsin’s men wanted nothing more than “to change the nameplate from ‘KGB of the USSR’ to ‘KGB of the RSFSR.’”⁷⁷ This is rather unfair, in that Yeltsin agreed demonstratively with the decision to shut down the Fifth Chief Directorate, which had been in charge of secret informants and hunting dissidents, and to restrict the main body of the agency to counterintelligence and home security. After an experiment with subordinating it to the regular police hierarchy in the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), it was restyled the Ministry of Security in 1992, the Federal Counterintelligence Service or FSK in 1993, and in 1995 the Federal Security Service or FSB. And Yeltsin spun off independent functional units for foreign intelligence, border guards, protection of leaders, and governmental electronic communications. All these components were put on a short political leash, monitored by Yeltsin and reporting to him through discrete channels.

But this was no root-and-branch reform such as had taken down the StB agency in Czechoslovakia and the Stasi in East Germany. There were Russians who were interested in going this route. Gavriil Popov asked Yeltsin in the fall of 1991 to make him chairman of the agency. He wanted, Gennadii Burbulis says, to dig out the roots of (vykorchevyvat’) the organization—to pare it down, air its secrets, bring its remnants under strict, many-sided civilian control. Yeltsin was unwilling. To Burbulis, he said that the CPSU had been the country’s brain and the KGB its spinal cord: “And he clearly did not want to rupture the spinal cord now that the head had been lopped off.”⁷⁸ Yeltsin kept the spinal cord whole out of fear of multiple threats—to political stability, to democracy, to national unity, and to safekeeping of Russia’s weapons of mass destruction.⁷⁹

A last chance at a more intrusive solution was to be missed in 1993–94. Yeltsin felt let down by the Ministry of Security during his 1993 confrontation with parliament (see Chapter 11). The minister, Viktor Barannikov, a favorite of the president’s dismissed in August 1993 for corruption, defected to the anti-Yeltsin ultras and headed the shadow security department in Aleksandr Rutskoi’s “Provisional Government.” On October 4, 1993, the security forces under a new chief, Nikolai Golushko, permitted dozens of deputies and their armed auxiliaries to flee through underground tunnels.⁸⁰ In December Yeltsin replaced Golushko with Sergei Stepashin, a former parliamentarian, and issued a statement referring to all changes in the former KGB as having had “a superficial and cosmetic character” with no “strategic concept” behind them.⁸¹ He appointed Oleg Lobov to chair a commission to review the force, making Sergei Kovalëv, a Brezhnev-era political prisoner, a member. Kovalëv asked for but did not receive a list of officers who had gone after dissidents in the past. Lobov “said that Boris Nikolayevich did not have in view any radical changes… that we cannot afford to lose professionals.”⁸² Staff cuts imposed on the FSK were largely reversed by mid-1994. Yeltsin then lapsed back into the confidence that it was enough to subdivide the service—replacing a leviathan with a hydra—place restrictions on surveillance networks, define democratic control as that exercised by him as chief executive, and let sleeping dogs lie. The brotherhood of active and reserve KGB officers, be they engrossed in domestic snooping, foreign spying, or commercial opportunities, persevered. Not until he was a pensioner did Yeltsin confide in Aleksandr Yakovlev that he had “not thought through everything” about the agency and put too much faith in changing the line of command and leaving the essence of the organization intact.⁸³

The last of Yeltsin’s inbuilt resistances was to selling Russian society on the general reform course. Truth be told, he was not well equipped congenitally for outreach. By 1991 he had laid aside the harangues of the CPSU boss for question-and-answer volleys, saucy interviews, campaign oratory, and parliamentary interpellation. He treasured parsimony in speech and literature and loved to pull the printout of a talk from his jacket pocket and chuck it sportily in the wastebasket. Nine times out of ten, it was a masquerade: Either he had memorized the talk and would recite it rote, or he had a variation on the original which he then read out. But Yeltsin as president had to address the nation as a whole, and not merely live audiences, and to mate salesmanship with the dignity of a head of state. This meant working through the mass communications media with which Russia had been imbued under the Soviets. Yeltsin fulfilled the role with a sigh. He did not mind doing in front of television cameras; posing for the blue screen was not his cup of tea.⁸⁴ Grouchily, he submitted to pancake makeup, a brittle coiffure (the handicraft of a hairdresser inherited from Gorbachev), and a teleprompter. He would fine-tune speeches with the writers, insisting on brevity, some peppy phrases, and pauses for effect. They would coach him on pronunciation and the purging of Urals localisms—such as his rolling of the letter “r,” his flattening of the Russian pronoun chto (what) to shta, and, in press conferences, his elision of the soft vowel “ye” from the expression for “If you know what I mean” (Ponimayesh’ became Ponimash’).⁸⁵

The problem with Yeltsin as tribune of reform was not that he mishandled any one occasion but that the occasions were intermittent. He did not distill his radical reform into a lapidary phrase such as the New Deal or Great Society. He never related in depth how the economic, social, and political facets of the remaking of Russia cohered. He did not care to take on the task himself and, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff after Yurii Petrov, noted, “He was very jealous when others did it.”⁸⁶

Yeltsin’s disinclination to promote Yeltsinism stemmed from cognitive dissonance over didactic speeches and from the conviction that empty promises had jaded the population and tarnished both true-blue Soviet leaders and Gorbachev’s perestroika.⁸⁷ Verbal economy was appropriate in the early days, as his first press officer, Valentina Lantseva, recalled: “Compared to the verbose… Gorbachev, Boris Nikolayevich was closer to the people in his clumsiness [neuklyuzhest’] and bear-like quality [medvezhest’]. He… could answer in one word, yes or no. This was very significant to the people.”⁸⁸ Once the communist regime was dead, though, Russians wanted to be reassured that their sacrifices were not in vain and to be given signposts for the road ahead. These Yeltsin was not the best person to provide. Hearing Marietta Chudakova advise him at a Kremlin meeting in 1994 to tape a televised presentation every two weeks, he clamped his jaw, after the fashion of someone with a toothache.⁸⁹ Mark Zakharov, who was at the same meeting, warned of a dearth of ideas and information, which could leave the field to political fanatics and charlatans. Yeltsin countered that any systematic marketing plan would be a warmed-over version of totalitarian brainwashing: “What are you suggesting, that we introduce a ministry of propaganda, like the one under [Joseph] Goebbels?”⁹⁰ In his 1994 and 2000 memoir volumes, Yeltsin defended his aversion to any idea of “shimmering heights that must be scaled.” No bombast was needed. “Propaganda for the new life is superfluous. The new life itself will persuade people that it has become a reality.”⁹¹

One part instinct and one part learning from the Soviet past, this was an exercise in throwing out the baby with the bath water. The defense of post-communist reforms was not doomed to excess any more than elimination of the KGB was doomed to unhinge the body politic. Comparative experience teaches that the political bully pulpit has its uses in democracies and not only in tyrannies. In a free polity, loquacity by leaders can go light years to galvanize citizen opinion behind government programs, shape the public sphere, and delimit the range of voices there.⁹² By selling it short, Yeltsin retarded his ability to make his quiet revolution palatable to the newly enfranchised populace and to enliven the debate about where Russia was headed in the long haul.