Yeltsin

In the 1980s and 1990s, acting in spurts and out of intuition more than a panoramic master plan, Yeltsin made fateful decisions that put his society on a much more promising road than it had been on since 1917. He did so under arduous circumstances and avoided the apocalyptic scenarios—anarchy, nuclear blackmail, famine and industrial collapse, ethnic strife—that had haunted forecasts about the demise of one-party rule. For what he wrought, and for pulling it off in the main by ballots rather than bullets, he belongs with the instigators of the global trend away from authoritarianism and statism and toward democratic politics and market-based economics. As a democratizer, he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Wałesa, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Václav Havel. It is his due even when allowance is made for his blind spots and mistakes. As against those who would shrug him off as an oddball or an antihero, or who cannot get beyond his welter of contradictions to come to a summary judgment, my net assessment of Yeltsin is as a hero in history—enigmatic and flawed, to be sure, yet worthy of our respect and sympathy.²⁹

I initially intended to restrict myself to a portrait of Yeltsin’s leadership of Russia as its elected president and to treat everything before that as preface. The further I got, however, the more I asked myself what those tumultuous years had to do with precedent, what molded the man and his instincts, and how the new Yeltsin, if that is what he was, ever emerged from the chrysalis of the old. It is anything but self-evident how the virtuoso product and agent of a dictatorship could end up as its hangman.

A 1995 skit in Kukly (Puppets), the political satire on Russian television, lampooned Yeltsin’s shifting loyalties. “Boriska,” the Yeltsin doll, plays Faust, situated in a medieval scholar’s laboratory thick with books and test tubes. Tongue in cheek, he intones:

Once I was a communist

Faithful to the marrow of my bones:

From all three deities [Marx, Engels, and Lenin] I drank

And ate of the constituent parts.

I kept watch at the [party] congresses,

But really I was a democrat in spirit,

I was brother to the wind and sun

And godmother to the people of Sverdlovsk.

Lo and behold, when the clock struck and the moment came—

I was president of Russia!³⁰

In real life, the tale was not nearly so simple—not with Yeltsin’s abilities, not with his relationship to the ancien régime, not with his scorpions-in-a-bottle fight with Gorbachev or his conquest of power, and assuredly not with his use of power to make a new beginning.

My overarching aim in this “history made personal”³¹ is to submit Boris Yeltsin and his career to a textured scrutiny that does justice to their many-sided humanity. Years of fieldwork that afforded eye-opening interviews with Yeltsin, with family members, and with about 150 other principals, declassified files from the Soviet archives, and new memoirs shed fresh light on the extended drama of his life. It is necessary to explain why the lunge toward a better tomorrow did not cross the chasm with finality, as by his admission it did not. Indivisible from that, we must see why it was mounted, why by Boris Yeltsin, and why it took him and the former Soviet Union as far as it did.

CHAPTER ONE

Self-Reliance

The Urals, among the most ancient mountain ranges in the world, are the physiographic frontier between Europe and Asia. They rise 1,500 miles from the grasslands above the inland Caspian Sea, in present-day Kazakhstan, to the icebound coastal plain of the Arctic Ocean. Their creases push gelid northern air, and with it northern flora and fauna, southward. They are highest in the upper segment; in the lower segment, the Urals comprise parallel folds of hills and stony crests. The middle segment, which by convention runs from 55° 30’ to 61° north, consists largely of low plateaus trenched by ravines. Here are located most of the mountain belt’s deposits of ferrous and nonferrous metals, salt, gemstones, and bauxite. It was this subterranean bounty that, beginning in the 1550s, drew Russians in from the west and north. Metallurgy dominated the Urals economy by the eighteenth century—three-quarters of the Russian Empire’s iron and almost 100 percent of its copper were smelted there at century’s end—but regressed in the nineteenth under competition from the mills of the Donbass and Dnieper Valley, in southern Ukraine, where coal rather than wood was used for heat. Agrarian migrants also flocked to the mid-Urals’ lowlands, most of which bear a load of rich humus that responds well to the plow.