Yeltsin

Many of these will be discussed in the chapters that follow. It can be said here that no one image captures the whole man. As those who worked closely with him can confirm, the qualities that made Yeltsin tick always eluded others: “Much about him is arcane and under figurative lock and key.”²⁰ The ideological doyen of perestroika, Aleksandr Yakovlev, noted that Yeltsin had “not a little of the extravagant” to him and regularly incorporated polar opposites. “He was too credulous and too suspicious, too daring and too careful, too open and too inclined to crawl back into his shell.”²¹ The same politico who at incandescent moments, especially of risk and crisis, could move mountains, could on other days be maddeningly indecisive or self-indulgent. In demotic memory, unfair as it is, the snapshot of Yeltsin on the tank in Moscow in August 1991, the valiant defender of democracy, collides with the Yeltsin of August 1994, when he tipsily conducted a German band alfresco at Berlin’s city hall. He could be “both a very big man and a very bad boy,” in the breezy epigram of Strobe Talbott, a fly on the wall at all of President Clinton’s summits with Yeltsin.²²

The biography of this singular person provides an interpretive prism for the decline and fall of Soviet communism, the grandest of the past century’s failed social experiments, and for the harrowing genesis of post-communism.²³ Yeltsin leaves nobody indifferent. He needs to be understood if we are to understand the age we inhabit and how we got here.

When Yeltsin made his debut in high Soviet politics in 1985, many onlookers, in the West in particular, misconstrued him as a bumpkin, or at best as a cat’s paw in a game controlled by others more gifted than he. When he parted ways with Gorbachev in 1987, they were overhasty to write his political obituary.²⁴ There were those who saw him as a flash in the pan in his recusant phase and who thought he was fading out as Gorbachev and the USSR were sidelined in 1991.²⁵ When these prognoses were refuted, the tenor changed to flattery, and Yeltsin as president was valorized as a veritable archangel of reform. At first at home and then abroad, this vision segued into one of haplessness and aloofness. His growing unpopularity, a deadly altercation with parliament in 1993, and health issues in 1995 prompted predictions of an imminent cessation of Yeltsin’s reign. Most cognoscenti foresaw an ignominious defeat in the 1996 presidential election, were he to hazard it—but he ran for re-election, won a dazzling victory, and was saluted as a political maestro. After 1996 the pendulum swung yet again. With political and economic crises peaking in 1998–99 and the hourglass running out on his second term, he was pilloried as a national embarrassment and his Russia as “a disastrous failure . . . threatening other countries with multiple contagions.”²⁶

On the personal and moral level, there were those who maintained early on that Yeltsin did not hold a candle to his great rival, Gorbachev. President George H. W. Bush, underwhelmed when he first met Yeltsin in 1989, was incensed by Yeltsin’s demand in February 1991 that Gorbachev leave office. “This guy Yeltsin,” he muttered to staffers, “is really a wild man, isn’t he?”²⁷ Bush came around on Yeltsin, but in the middle and late 1990s two other character leitmotifs gained currency. One brought to the forefront Yeltsin’s frailties and foibles and depicted him as someone “at the mercy of the pettiest passions,”²⁸ notably his fondness for strong drink. The other latched onto what Russian wordsmiths titled “the Family” (with a capital “F”): supposedly a camarilla of advisers, officials, and big-business oligarchs associated with his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and the plutocrat Boris Berezovskii, and, it was said, the force behind the throne in the twilight years of the Yeltsin presidency.

While these pictures are all overblown, some fudge the truth worse than others. For example, although he overindulged in alcohol, the habit must be seen in perspective and most of the time was not central to his public activities. And although the nexus between wealth and power in the Yeltsin period has to be of concern, he was no marionette of the oligarchs, whom he invented sociologically, and the idea of the late Yeltsin fronting for a palace-cum-business consortium has little relation to reality.