Much as he might have wanted it under wraps, Yeltsin, not so different from the Samson Agonistes pushing the grain mill in John Milton’s verse, played out his torments in public view. This was because Russia’s press was freer and livelier in the 1990s than in any other period of the nation’s history. Censorship had been abolished by Soviet legislation in June 1990. Two of the three authors of that law, Yurii Baturin and Mikhail Fedotov, were to hold senior positions after 1991. The constitution of 1993 affirmed the ban on censorship, and in the drafting sessions Yeltsin agreed to language that strengthened it.98
The media frankness about Yeltsin’s derelictions and peccadillos was unprecedented for a Russian leader. Yeltsin did not cotton to criticism of his person, or of his policies, and had no shortage of opportunities to throttle it. His refusal to take them is traceable to principle, psychology, and realism. After communism, he accepted the need for a modern country to have an inquisitive and contentious press. “Criticism is a necessary thing,” he declaimed in 1992. “If we do not take part in criticism today, we will fall into the same swamp in which we wallowed for decades.” Suppression of it would also be a confession of pusillanimity: “If a statesman or leader or president goes about squeezing the press, this means he is weak-kneed. A strong leader will not squeeze the press, even if it criticizes him.”99 Once in a great while, he had to be reminded this was so. He asked press secretary Kostikov in 1994 if he could not do something about the withering stories carried by Kostikov’s friend Igor Golembiovskii, the editor of Izvestiya. Kostikov replied that he could take care of the problem if Yeltsin arranged to give him “the powers of Suslov”—Mikhail Suslov, the intransigent overseer of ideology in Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo. Yeltsin left it at that and based his press strategy on carrots more than sticks.100 His first-term press secretaries, all of them professional journalists, helped him cajole political reporters and commentators; Gorbachev had talked only to the editors-in-chief. Yeltsin could name the anchors on the national television news programs (although he watched only excerpts from the evening news spliced together by staff), the main correspondents for the several Russian wire services, and half of the roughly twenty print journalists in the “Kremlin pool” started by Kostikov in 1994. While formal press conferences were rare, he made himself available to reporters for weekly off-the-record briefings and conversed quietly with them at proforma events, such as the accreditation of ambassadors.
In the television market, the population’s primary source of political information, Yeltsin inherited two state-owned national networks, Ostankino (Channel 1) from the Soviet government, and Russian Television or RTR (Channel 2), created in 1991. He did not shrink from using the personnel weapon, firing Ostankino director Yegor Yakovlev in November 1992 and the chairman of Channel 2, Oleg Poptsov, in February 1996.101 Editorial autonomy on state television was greater than in the Soviet era, by virtue of drift and division in the executive branch as well as legal guarantees and ethical scruples.102 Yeltsin’s biggest gift to pluralism on television was his agreement to the establishment of a full-service private network, NTV. Headed by Igor Malashenko, a former Central Committee deskman, and owned by Vladimir Gusinskii, one of the first of the oligarchs, it aimed for white-collar, urban viewers and soon distinguished itself by hard-hitting reportage of Moscow political scandals and the war in Chechnya. It went on the air October 10, 1993, the week after the shelling of parliament. 103
A landmark was NTV’s launch of the hilarious weekly satire Kukly (Puppets) in November 1994. In it, life-sized rubber dolls of politicians acted out skits that were often based on literary or film classics. The puppets did not have fixed roles but rotated through a repertoire. The creators had some doubts about the propriety of deriding the president of the country. It did not take long to resolve them. Like the man-woman Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image, the British prototype, so Boriska, a gimpy, apple-cheeked double of Boris Yeltsin, was the drawing card in Kukly. Aleksandr Korzhakov, unprompted by Yeltsin, tried several acts of intimidation against NTV in the winter of 1994–95. He and his government ally Oleg Soskovets demanded that Gusinskii scrap Kukly, which he would not do.104 In June 1995 Procurator General Aleksei Il’yushenko indicted the show for slander. The provocation was a burlesque, “The Lower Depths”—its title taken from Maxim Gorky’s 1902 drama—that showed Yeltsin and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin as besotted vagrants panning for loose change in post–shock therapy Russia, with Korzhakov as a wailing babe in Yeltsin’s arms. The criminal charge was dropped in October 1995 and Kukly went its merry way. Two other episodes—“Feast in the Time of Plague” (about revelers in a miserable land, the title taken from a poem by Pushkin) and a Winnie-the-Pooh piece that showed Yeltsin as the teddy bear with fluff in his head—were quashed by NTV as too salty. One hundred and fifty others were aired unamended. Boriska was in about two-thirds of them. 105
For head writer Viktor Shenderovich, Yeltsin was the caricaturist’s dream. He evoked the coroneted tragic heroes of William Shakespeare and the protagonists of the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–60), who were merchants or clerks in patriarchal families, living lives of contradiction and futility. Shenderovich’s favorite was the first sketch he wrote in January 1995. It limned Yeltsin as a Hamlet torn by warring impulses. Boriska, the orotund voice supplied by actor Sergei Bezrukov, was “unsure if he is a tsar or a democratic president,” asking whether to lock up his opposition or promulgate liberal reforms. He was “many-threaded . . . willful and capricious but conscientious for all that . . . lonely . . . never knowing what he is going to do tomorrow.”106 One of the wickedest of the Kukly spoofs, in early 1996, cast Yeltsin as the director of a surgical clinic. In a play on the word operatsiya, operation, it slammed both the Russian military action in Chechnya and economic shock therapy. Boriska explains to visiting journalists that he was elected head surgeon five years before “by a democratic assembly of the seriously ill.” He and his staff are all ignoramuses, but not to worry. “Lack of expertise and lack of nimbleness,” he says, “can be offset by power of the will and devotedness to the reforms.” “So what is the main thing” at the clinic? the narrator asks. “The main thing is to convince everyone that you are head surgeon. Once you have convinced them, you can cut away at anything you want and have nothing to fear.”107
Most of the Kukly skits were friendlier to Yeltsin than this—Shenderovich, Malashenko, and Gusinskii all counted themselves supporters of the president—and interlarded praise, disapproval, and puzzlement. Besides the accursed Hamlet, Faust, and Othello (Mayor Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow, with whom Yeltsin had feuded, was the inconstant Desdemona), the latex Yeltsin was God (gazing down smugly at Russia from the empyrean), Robinson Crusoe, a woebegone Don Quixote, Louis XIII, Priam of Troy, the Grand Inquisitor, a sultan closeted with his servants and ambassadors, the winner in a cheesy game show, the custodian of a Soviet communal apartment, a fireman, a Russian motorist bribing his way through a safety check, a Mafioso, a superannuated hospital patient padding around in his pajamas, and Caligula bullying senators to confirm one of his racehorses as consul of Rome—among others. 108