Yeltsin

Coda

Legacies of an Event-Shaping Man

What makes a political leader interesting is not necessarily what makes him influential. Reactions to his personality and to its unfolding over a life span will always be subjective. When it comes to the actor’s influence, it has to be gauged on two dimensions, the empirical and the normative. The key empirical question is about facts—how much of a difference the man made. The key normative question is about values—whether the difference was for good or for evil.

Immediate responses to Boris Yeltsin’s passing in 2007 are illustrative. The day of his funeral, KPRF deputies refused to stand for a minute of silence in the Duma. One of them joked bitterly that a stake of ash wood should be hammered into his grave, as if he were a vampire. The communists were in no doubt that Yeltsin’s influence had been overpowering. The source of their fury was the sentiment that communism’s and the Soviet Union’s demise was a crime for which he ought to be condemned.¹

It would have done Yeltsin’s heart good to hear Anatolii Chubais, his associate in many projects, reach for precedents: “If you try to understand who in the history of Russia measures up to Boris Nikolayevich in the sum of what he did, perhaps [you would look to] Peter the Great. Or maybe it would be Lenin and Stalin combined, only each of them had a minus sign and [Yeltsin] had a plus sign.”² Chubais thus rated Yeltsin high on both the empirical and the normative scales.

At the memorial banquet in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin preferred in his eulogy to link Yeltsin’s life with freedom: “It is the rare person who is given the destiny to become free himself and at the same time to carry millions along behind him, and to inspire truly historic changes in his homeland and transform the world.”³ Putin’s eloquent words make you wonder what he meant by freedom, given his labors since 1999 to retrench the liberties Yeltsin had helped install. One suspects they were propaganda for his approach no less than a heartfelt attempt to honor Yeltsin.

For one more assessment, we may turn to Viktor Shenderovich, the head writer of Kukly, the television satire that tirelessly parodied Yeltsin from 1994 to 1999. His tribute was emotional and poetic. Yeltsin, Shenderovich wrote, did many things right and many things wrong, but he apologized for his mistakes at the end of the day and he surrendered power, as no tsar or general secretary had ever done. The sincerity of his confession mitigated the mistakes. “He asked our forgiveness—so let’s forgive him!” Shenderovich’s Yeltsin was, quite like the Yeltsin of this volume, a paradox:

On the benevolent side, Shenderovich offered a selective comparison with Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. In the days Yeltsin came under fire for his missteps, he tolerated the flak. Putin, whose subordinates had Kukly yanked from the airwaves in 2002, did not, and therein lay a difference that gave “some basis for talking about the scope of [Yeltsin’s] personality.”⁴

If assessments of a historical figure, especially on the normative plane, often diverge, attempts to come to closure by appealing to the person himself or to the court of public opinion are unlikely to be satisfactory. Out of power, Yeltsin, in this instance, simultaneously stood by his record and conceded some veracity to the charge that he failed to bring about the speedy improvement he had promised. While still in office, he could display a sense of humor about the partial and discordant results he was getting. At a Kremlin luncheon in the mid-1990s, John Major asked him to describe the state of Russia in one word. “Good,” Yeltsin said. Major was flabbergasted, since he had the impression the place was going to the dogs. The Briton next asked him to give his diagnosis in two words. “Not good,” Yeltsin replied drolly.⁵

The populace, who in Yeltsin’s second term and into his retirement years were inclined to appraise him unkindly, have drifted toward a similar ambivalence. In April 2000 the Public Opinion Foundation asked a representative sample of voting-age adults whether Yeltsin had played a positive or negative role in Russian history. Only 18 percent saw him in a positive light, while 68 percent were negative and 14 percent could not answer. Shortly after Yeltsin’s death, the poll was repeated. By this time, favorable and unfavorable readings had equalized, as 40 percent of respondents believed Yeltsin’s contribution was positive, 41 percent saw it as negative, and 19 percent were unable to say. Positive reviews in 2007 were 13 percentage points ahead of negatives among respondents who fully trusted President Putin, presumably reflecting Putin’s gracious send-off as well as Yeltsin having been his patron. The gap was 10 to 12 points among persons thirty-five or younger, university graduates, and residents of the big cities.⁶ These are kinder results than polls have revealed for the contemporary reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev.⁷

Soviet communism died not even twenty years ago. Most would agree that ultimate perspective on Yeltsin and his role will be more attainable when a generation or two has passed than it is at present. The best we can do right now is come up with the first, rough draft. I put one forward in full recognition of Yeltsin’s many paradoxes and imperfections. His paradoxes do not rule out a verdict, and his imperfections do not rule out a positive one.

It is helpful in summing up Yeltsin’s record to revisit a thought-provoking treatise about “the hero in history” penned in the 1940s by the philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook discriminated between two types of hero, the “eventful man,” the pale imitation, and the “event-making man,” the hero deserving of the name. Both come along at “forking points of history” that are admissive of alternative solutions to human problems. The eventful man happens to be in the right spot at the right time and commits a trite act that pushes the players down one avenue and not another. The event-making man—Hook adduced as examples Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin—encounters a fork in the road and “also helps, so to speak, to create it.” The event maker goes beyond choosing the one tine of the fork; his qualities of intelligence, will, and temperament boost its odds of success.⁸

From his entry into the Soviet industrial establishment in the 1950s through to his appointment as Communist Party prefect of the city of Moscow in the 1980s, Yeltsin was either a historically irrelevant man or at very most an eventful man, confined by structures and routines that gave room for innovation only at the margin. The case for him as a hero in history, therefore, is going to be proved or disproved with reference to the event-packed years 1985 to 1999.

How would we know an event-making man if we saw one? Five tests are applicable to Yeltsin or any other candidate.

The first asks whether the leader in question has what Erik Erikson in Gandhi’s Truth called the capacity “to step out of line” and to address the central issues of the day in a fresh way. This happens, as Erikson wrote, only when there is “a confluence [between] a deeply personal need and a national trend,” the product of which, in a certain period of the person’s life, is a “locomotor drivenness” to effect change.⁹

Yeltsin stayed in line well into middle age. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, stirred by inner testing and rebellion scripts and by changes in the social environment, he broke stride and linked his personal journey to larger trends. In so doing, Yeltsin turned political disgrace into vindication and parlayed vindication into political realignment and victory. His gift was not originality or profundity of thought but the ability to translate abstractions into the idiom of ordinary people. From knee-jerk populism he moved to adopt a program for de-monopolization through democratization, market reform, and territorial devolution that addressed main issues of the day, and in such a way as to stay a half-step ahead of his rivals.¹⁰ It earned him the opportunity to preside over the birth of a nation and an attempt to construct a bold new future for it.

A second criterion for identifying an event-making man is the faculty of “political judgment,” as Isaiah Berlin succinctly labeled it. Political judgment has to do with grasping a political situation in its totality, synthesizing the whole out of discrete facts and imponderables, and discriminating “what matters from the rest.” Berlin drew an analogy with the motorist coming up to a rickety-looking bridge. The driver with road judgment, without ever learning about how to engineer piers, struts, or ties, senses through a “semi-instinctive skill” whether or not the bridge will bear the weight of his vehicle.¹¹ In public affairs, it takes a leader of political judgment to see Hook’s fork in the road for what it is, and not to overlook or misconstrue it.

Yeltsin incontrovertibly possessed political judgment. It was based primarily on the instinctive aptitude that Berlin put accent on. Intuition, not grand theory, whispered in his ear in 1986–87 that Gorbachev’s gradualist program was falling short. We saw in Chapter 8 that Gorbachev concluded about Yeltsin’s feel for the situation and for his commanding role in it that “A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar.” Gorbachev could not take charge with that kind of force; Yeltsin could and did. An inner voice led him to conclude in 1991–92 that a Great Leap Outward was indispensable to compel the new Russia into step with a rapidly evolving world. It convinced him to go for the brass ring in the constitutional conflict of 1992–93 and to throw himself into the presidential race of 1996. After re-election and medical intervention, it led him to try to reform the reforms and, when that did not work, to try to salvage them. While nothing like infallible, Yeltsin’s political judgment repeatedly showed itself to be superior to that of his adversaries, from Gorbachev through Ruslan Khasbulatov, Gennadii Zyuganov, and Yurii Luzhkov.

The third test to pose of a potentially great leader is to see if he demonstrates a talent for identifying and tapping into new sources of political power. For example, Robert Caro in his epic study of Lyndon Johnson finds that as majority leader of the U.S. Senate in the 1950s he “looked for power in places where no previous [holder of that office] had thought to look for it—and he found it. And he created new powers, employing a startling ingenuity and imagination to transform parliamentary techniques… transforming them so completely that they became in effect new techniques and mechanisms.”¹² Johnson on Capitol Hill leveraged, adjusted, and manipulated procedural rules. Other effective leaders have acted as entrepreneurs in markets wider than the institutions in which they are based.

By this yardstick, Yeltsin fares no less well. Unlike Gorbachev, he had the ingenuity and imagination in the perestroika period to realize that people power, as channeled in competitive elections, would trump administrative power and build legitimacy. He used symbolic acts, such as his demand for rehabilitation at the Nineteenth CPSU Conference in 1988 and his magical moment on Tank No. 110 in 1991, to craft and project an image that towered over all others. Enough remained of his legitimacy and his image to save him in 1996 and, combined with the powers of the presidency, as ratified in the 1993 constitutional referendum, to tide him over the recurrent crises of the late 1990s.

A fourth and related criterion is about the short-term impact of the leader’s decisions during his time in the driver’s seat. Were his decisions while in a position of authority consequential or not? The easiest event for which to give an unqualified yes would be Yeltsin’s rallying of opposition to the attempted coup d’état of August 1991. Sergei Stankevich, the historian who was a democratic legislator and Yeltsin adviser until the mid-1990s, believes Yeltsin’s charisma counted for more than all other proximate causes combined. The Yeltsin factor, by Stankevich’s estimate, had 60 percent of the causal power in August. Guesswork the number may be, but it is suggestive guesswork. If it were 50 percent or 40 percent or 30 percent, it would still have been an awe-inspiring effect.¹³ The 1987 secret speech and the 1991 theater on the tank had powerful multiplier effects and reverberated in the system for years.

Countless other well-placed observers bear witness to the same for Yeltsin’s two terms as president. To quote but one of them, Anatolii Kulikov, who commanded Russian forces in Chechnya and headed the Interior Ministry for three years, and who finds fault with much of Yeltsin’s behavior:

Many of Yeltsin’s key decisions, in areas as diverse as shock therapy, rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims, and the interment of the Romanovs, were affirmative, about making something desirable happen. But some of his most important choices and impacts were preventive, about keeping something undesirable from happening.¹⁵ His anti-putsch actions in August 1991 are one obvious example. A no less telling one is his multifaceted management of center-periphery and majority-minority relations and his efforts to avert what could have been a vortex of territorial and ethnic hatreds on an order of magnitude ghastlier than in Yugoslavia.

This claim about causal impact must, of course, be qualified in sundry ways. As we have seen, Yeltsin was never the only mover, only the most potent one. His anti-revolutionary revolution was inadequately conceptualized and inadequately explained to the population. The economic changes that were its focus were too slow to bear fruit, partly because they were compromised by the voracity of the winners and governmental appeasement of the losers. Some of the mechanisms devised, such as loans-for-shares, were seriously flawed. In his first term, Yeltsin neglected his allies, caroused too much and had psychological ups and downs, made strategic decisions arrhythmically, and overdid divide-and-rule. In his second term, these proclivities were in check. But, with his health impaired and his liabilities on the increase, his grip on the system he had forged slackened. The boss for the bosses now took evasive action as often as forward thrusts. His influence, though, was always far greater than anyone else’s, as his imposition of Putin in 1999 showed.

There is a fifth test to apply to the would-be hero in history. It concerns the forward projection of influence, after he has exited the scene. How consequential are the departing leader’s decisions in the middle term? Do they constrain his successor or successors five to ten years out?

If we disentangle change in Russia’s mixed, post-Soviet economy from political change, it is striking how indicators have reversed in the second decade after communism. Ten years ago, the Yeltsin presidency was limping to its end and Russia was bankrupt. Today the country prospers, in “a remarkable trajectory no less exceptional than that of post–World War II Germany or Japan.”¹⁶ Output has surged by 7 percent a year, disposable income is up by 11 percent a year, foreign currency reserves stand at $450 billion, and the RTS stock index has topped 2,000 points, or fifty to sixty times the all-time low in 1998. The lines for matches, kettles, and caramels that Yeltsin had to act contrite for in Sverdlovsk in the 1980s are as quaintly remote from present-day experience as the early five-year plans.

Politically, on the other hand, we see a different picture. Russia under Yeltsin could be classified as “feckless pluralism,” less than a fully articulated democracy. The regime was characterized by the presence of considerable political freedoms and of electoral contestation, although democratic practices were shallowly rooted and there was widespread mistrust of the government. Yeltsin in his valedictory speech on December 31, 1999, proclaimed that, as he had hoped in the early 1990s, change was irreversible and Russia would “proceed only forward” from now on. If the forecast holds up reasonably well in the economy, it does not in politics, where the nation has in many regards gone backward. Russia now has a “dominant-power politics” in which there is “a limited but still real political space” and some electoral competition, and yet a single power grouping, the one hinged on Putin, “dominates the system in such a way that there seems to be little possibility of alternation of power in the foreseeable future.”¹⁷

This does not mean all hope for democracy is lost. At the social base, the modernization of Russia proceeds apace. The unshackling of the individual, begun under Gorbachev and intensified under Yeltsin, has positioned its citizens well to partake in innovations in communications that give them more autonomous access to information. At the end of 2007, some 29 million Russians, or one-fifth of the population, used the Internet with some frequency, as compared to 5.7 million in 1999, and Russia had the fastestgrowing Internet community in Europe. There were 3.1 million blogs in Russia in 2007. In a country of 142 million people, cell phones numbered more than 100 million. About 3 million Russians traveled abroad that year, with passports available for the asking and the costs affordable to more and more members of the new middle class.

Developments signify that Russians treasure their personal independence but place a lower premium on political openness and accountability. In 1999, pulling off an extrication from peril worthy of Houdini and designating as his heir a KGB man through and through, Yeltsin’s vaunted intuition let him down, so far as political if not economic and social variables go. Putin has exploited the superpresidential constitution Yeltsin made and the base in public opinion Yeltsin taught him how to cultivate.¹⁸ Yeltsin unquestionably would have reversed the decision later if given the chance, sending Putin the way of Silayev, Gaidar, Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Primakov, and Stepashin. But pensioned-off leaders do not get second chances on such matters, as he was aware. Putin’s political system, a dispassionate British scholar notes, retains “the potential for renewed democratic advance.”¹⁹ Assuming that is so, it will be up people other than Yeltsin to realize that potential.

It is vital, again, to keep in mind the full range of counterfactual alternatives to what has happened. Neo-Soviet impulses in Russia and the post-Soviet space would have been much harder to contain if Yeltsin had not dissolved the CPSU and the Soviet Union in 1991. Thanks to him, the barrier to re-monopolization is high, and tens of millions of others are lucky that it is.

I conclude that Boris Yeltsin, although he managed to do much more with the cards dealt him than the ho-hum eventful man, impinged rather less and in a less linear manner than Hook’s event-making man. To talk of the agent purposefully sculpting events is to cast the role in more architectonic terms than suit Yeltsin. Revising Hook somewhat, I envisage him as an event-shaping man, an intuitivist planted in intermediate ground between event making and eventfulness. The event-shaping man recognizes the fork in the historical road, shakes up the status quo, and bumps things off their familiar track. His inbuilt qualities magnify his influence, as do ambient tendencies and ripple effects. Concurrently, these same factors limit his ability to direct and to consolidate the changes he touches off, so that he comes up short of fulfilling promises and short of making his solutions stick. The event-shaping man kicks history’s wheels into motion, yes, but not invariably as he intends or as the situation requires.

In August 2007, Art4.ru, a private art gallery in the Moscow business district, organized an unofficial competition to design a monument to commemorate Boris Yeltsin. Nothing like the contest would have been conceivable in Soviet days. It received more than a hundred submissions from professional and amateur sculptors and graphic artists. Several dozen mockups were put on display at the gallery and on its website. The public was allowed to vote in person or electronically on five finalists selected by an expert jury. According to the coordinator, the entries fell into three categories. There were figural likenesses in the old socialist realist style. These were quickly discarded, as were “the bitter, sarcastic parodies, mostly from people who had fallen on bad luck in the 1990s and wanted to blame Yeltsin…. Then there were some really interesting pieces—very different from each other—that show a complicated picture of Yeltsin’s legacy.”²⁰ The best of them captured significant and not always harmonious aspects of the historical Yeltsin.

The winner announced in October, by Dmitrii Kavarga, was a chaotic mass of dark metal with white figurines hanging upside-down from flat surfaces within it. One figure, Yeltsin, stands upright on top, which “emphasizes the force Yeltsin’s person had in a period of instability.”²¹ Another highly plastic scheme, by Yuliya Gukova, portrayed a rough-surfaced wall with a large crack, and out of the wall Yeltsin’s face, hands, and feet protrude. Its message was that Yeltsin was an inalienable part of the social reality he was trying to change. “With incredible, ox-like stubbornness, Yeltsin is turning the wall out of which he has grown and into which he has implanted himself. The wall turns just as the country’s history turned, and the crack is not only a yawning break in the wall but in him, too.”²² The runnerup, by Rostan Tavasiyev, was a fanciful image of Yeltsin as a toy rabbit at the foot of a wobbling stele, at the top of which sits a porcelain vase—all set against the backdrop of the Lubyanka, the KGB/FSB’s headquarters. Yeltsin here is a balancer instead of a dominator or sufferer. “Why the bunny?” the artist asked in his description. “Because there was no one else to do it. Maybe it was he who tipped it over or maybe he just happened to be near when the column started to fall.”²³

My favorite composition was not in the final group, and so I was not able to cast a ballot for it when I dropped by the gallery in September. It was by Mikhail Leikin and Mariya Miturich-Khlebnikova, who collaborate under the name MishMash Project, and was titled Boris Yeltsin: The Man Who Broke Through the Wall. It features a stainless steel wall painted bright red. On one side a runner carpet, also in red, leads to a gap in the wall. The gap traces a life-size figure of Yeltsin, including hairdo and misshapen left hand. Yeltsin here is not a prisoner of the wall: He has punched right through it and left the scene. But attendees at the exhibit are to have a choice, rather as Yeltsin’s real-life legacy has given them a choice. “The viewer himself can go through the breach and feel its real human dimensions, compare them with his own and feel the toughness of the wall’s metal. He can return to the past along the carpeted path…. [Alternatively] the exit of the viewer out of the red zone is the path that Yeltsin traveled.”²⁴ No future is foreclosed. The citizen can go through the wall either way, forward or backward.