Yeltsin

In the West, it has been suggested that Yeltsin scared authors off because he was sui generis and so hulking a presence.¹⁰ This argument does not pass muster. Historians have not ignored such unique, outsized figures as Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Hitler.¹¹

The inverse possibility is not readily brushed aside. Maybe all individual actors would be insignificant in a scene scoured by large-scale social and political forces, as this one was. Yeltsin pointed out in Presidential Marathon, the last in his trilogy of memoirs, that as paramount leader he did not fly solo. “Much of what occurred depended on my actions, right or wrong,” he averred. “But in the end history is not written by individuals. There are general and sometimes cryptic patterns in the lives of nations.”¹²

The surreal events that ripped asunder a superpower are comparable to angry eruptions in the natural world. Mere interrogation of Soviet officialdom’s political monopoly in the late 1980s was for a snugly encased society “as if a meteorite had hit the planet, after which the climate changed and floods and earthquakes broke out,” wrote a Moscow essayist.¹³ The passing of the Soviet partocracy in 1991, a nanosecond in political time, has been equated with the extinction of the dinosaurs. A communist bloc guided in varying degrees by the USSR was omnipresent in the affairs of the twentieth century. As a Berkeley professor wrote in 1992, “We have thought in terms of East and West,” and now “there is no East as such.”¹⁴

Although vast collective forces were involved in its creation and development, communism was also an artifact of leadership, of concerted action to mobilize people for a joint purpose. So, at the outset, was the effort to save communism from its own follies—Gorbachev’s perestroika, or “restructuring” of the system. Gorbachev reminds us that “perestroika started from above. It could not have been otherwise in totalitarian conditions.”¹⁵ The Soviet old guard warded it off as best they could. Newcomers to the corridors of power gave it impetus and vied over its direction. They set the terms under which non-leaders, in concentric circles, entered into it. Not always alert to the effects, they let change snowball from reform to revolution. Thereupon, Yeltsin, and the subset of leaders who had hitched their chariot to his, came to constitutive choices about the future after communism and after the USSR.

The downplaying of Yeltsin, therefore, can be ascribed neither to his having too much stature and influence nor to his having too little. The clincher is something else again: that his odyssey from Homo sovieticus to Homo antisovieticus and Homo postsovieticus confronts us with one paradox after another. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a pair of primary definitions for “paradox”: “a phenomenon that exhibits some contradiction or conflict with preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible” and “a person of perplexingly inconsistent life or behavior.” Yeltsin squares with both.

Yeltsinism scorned canonic wisdom in and about his motherland and flouted policies he had previously embraced. It has rightfully been said that no other contemporary leader “has played this many political roles” in a single lifetime.¹⁶ The scion of an agrarian household dispossessed by the Stalinists, Yeltsin led a hardscrabble Soviet childhood. Somehow, he became a CPSU stalwart and rose to a seat on its Politburo. He then turned out, phantasmagorically, to renounce his party card and be the communists’ nemesis. On October 21, 1987, he made what I call his “secret speech,” a phrase coined originally for Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU on February 25, 1956. His critique of Gorbachev’s policies led to dismissal from the party inner circle only two years after he had been admitted into it and to Yeltsin becoming leader of the opposition to Gorbachev, seeking to change the system radically from without. Innocuous as it might appear by comparison, the 1987 speech was as momentous a chapter in the history of communism as Khrushchev’s in 1956. On August 19, 1991, Yeltsin, this former party prefect in Sverdlovsk province, a beehive of the USSR’s military-industrial complex, stared down a hard-line coup d’état from the armor of a battle tank manufactured in that same province, and in a factory he knew inside out. “Life presents us with surprising paradoxes,” marvels one Muscovite raconteur. “Isn’t it amazing that destiny prepared the part of executioner of the Soviet system for . . . a Yeltsin who . . . was the archetypal Soviet man?”¹⁷ This dragon slayer sallied forth from the belly of the beast.