Yeltsin

Paradoxes proliferated in the new Russia. Gorbachev in charge had distended cherished institutions and identities; Yeltsin shattered them and devised substitutes. While the changes he instituted were revolutionary in their scope and consequences, he recoiled from pronouncing them that. “The quintessential anti-revolutionary revolutionary,”¹⁸ he was as bent on moderating the revolution as on making it, and inducted into his administration a battalion of the functionaries from the party elite, the nomenklatura, he had been busy attacking as hoary reactionaries. Having catapulted to power as a populist critic of official privilege and arrogance did not deter Yeltsin from building a grossly unequal capitalist economy or ordering his conscript army to wage war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. And his seasoning in the Communist Party apparatus predisposed him to construct a Russian “superpresidency” that fit uneasily with the democratic way.

All that said, Yeltsin refused to set up a disciplined post-communist party allegiant to him and in the parting act of his presidency he voluntarily relinquished power. In decisions like the privatization of industry, territorial devolution, and support for autonomous communications media, he frequently employed power to disperse power. In 1999, withal, the person to whom he ceded his position was a product of an organization that was an embodiment of Soviet values as staunch as the defunct CPSU: the KGB, the secret police that in Yeltsin’s youth had oppressed his kinfolk. As if that were not mystifying enough, Yeltsin, baptized Orthodox at birth and having been responsible in the 1970s for demolishing the house in which the Romanovs, Russia’s last royal family, were executed, gave them a Christian burial as president in 1998, and, in retirement, rediscovered religion and was interred amid full church rites in 2007.

Looking back at this dialectic with all the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it is far from obvious what to take from it. And it is far from easy to escape the impression that one is chasing a slippery and constantly moving quarry.

Likewise, Yeltsin the man teemed with inner complexities. Bill Clinton, who saw him at close quarters in eighteen negotiating sessions, likened him to “an Irish poet” or an artist who “sees politics as a novel he’s writing or a symphony he’s composing.”¹⁹ Clinton, a person of some complexity himself, and also given to reinvention and to questioning general frameworks, is an approving observer. In researching this volume, I have heard an earful of other similes, and not all are as appreciative of Yeltsin. A sampling would be those drawn to:

• Roles and occupations: aerialist, architect, boss, builder, chef, chess master, chieftain, Cossack, criminal, crusader, deceiver, demagogue, democrat, diva, drummer, foreman, godfather, grandpa, hedonist, hermit, jester, knight, lord of the manor, magus, man on a white horse, martyr, mutineer, neo-Bolshevik, patriarch, pied piper, prizefighter, reformer, revolutionary, roughneck, shock worker, sorcerer’s apprentice, sultan, surgeon, thespian, tsar, Viking;

• Historical personages: Alexander the Great, Muhammad Ali, Julius Caesar, Fidel Castro, Cincinnatus, Christopher Columbus, Deng Xiaoping, Galileo, Charles de Gaulle, Boris Godunov, Harry Houdini, Ivan the Terrible, Andrew Jackson, Jesus, Lyndon Johnson, Judas, Nikita Khrushchev, Lenin, Abraham Lincoln, Huey Long, Mao Zedong, Napoleon, Richard Nixon, Peter the Great, Augusto Pinochet, Vidkun Quisling, Franklin Roosevelt, Pëtr Stolypin, Margaret Thatcher;

• Characters from literature and folklore: King David, Faust, Gulliver, Hamlet, Haroun al-Rashid, Hercules, Robin Hood, Icarus, Ivanushka, Lazarus, King Lear, Il’ya Muromets, Oedipus, Don Quixote, Samson, Tom Sawyer, Leonard Zelig, Zeus;

• Physical objects and forces: battering ram, cyborg, electric shock, false-bottom suitcase, hurricane, mannequin, puppet, sledgehammer;

• Animal species: bear, boa constrictor, bull, bulldog, chameleon, crocodile, eagle, elephant, phoenix, tiger, tortoise, wolf.