Some of the more memorable Kukly offerings painted Yeltsin as a man molded by his time and place no less than a molder of them. In a 1995 sketch modeled on the children’s fantasies of Grigorii Oster, Boriska looks raffishly in the mirror and says to himself:
I f you become president
Of a surprising country,
You will never be surprised
By anything, you see!
Here two times two makes thirty-eight,
And the compass points to the east;
Here princesses are made from frogs,
And soup from axes.
The Turks [Turkish construction workers] are in GUM
[the big Moscow department store]
And the Urks [goblins] are in the Duma,
And the communists believe in Christ.
And that, you see,
Is why reform doesn’t work!
You can sign as many decrees as you like
And damn the consequences—
It doesn’t matter because here in Russia
No one carries them out!
And if you want things to get better,
They will get a thousand times worse.
Here it is not so good to govern honorably—
People won’t understand.
Generally, I can’t believe
What a weird country this is.
Luckily, I have five more years
To figure out what’s going on.109
The conclusion is that the problem with the times lay not only with the man at the top but with the Russian disarray, which he had internalized and which had helped sweep him to power. Yeltsin may not have laughed at the charade—he watched Kukly only several times and decided it was not for him.110 He did, though, get out of the way of others laughing. In a country where politics were more associated with tears, this was something to be grateful for.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Governing the State
Weekdays and most Saturdays through 1996, President Yeltsin got up at five A.M., did his ablutions, breakfasted, eyeballed briefs and a press digest, and was on the job by 8:30. From Barvikha-4 he commuted five miles eastward on the Rublëvo-Uspenskoye Highway and through the pine-forested corridor along the Moskva River where the Soviet upper crust had their dachas and the New Russians were beginning to put up more commodious dwellings. In Moscow, his car whisked him inbound on “the government route” (pravitel’stvennaya trassa) for official limousines and cavalcades, down Kutuzov Prospect and Novyi Arbat Street, and up a ramp into the Kremlin through the Borovitskii Gate.1
Writ small, Boris Yeltsin’s workplace was the vaulted, wainscoted office in Building No. 1, handed over to him by Gorbachev in 1991. As a personal touch, he had the desk decorated with a lamp and writing set made of turquoise-hued Urals malachite.2 He described the room in retirement in hushed tones and in the present tense. To the left as he occupies his chair is the console through which he can dial any member of his government on a hotline. The wood surface before him he knows like the back of his hand. If one file folder is awry, “I experience an unaccountable irritation.”3 The shipshape folders, readied before his arrival by his head of chancery, Valerii Semenchenko, are color-coded: In the red ones, to the side of the control panel, lie decrees, letters, and papers that are to be read and signed at once; in the white, in the center, there is lesser correspondence needing his attention; and in the green folders, on the right, he finds laws voted by parliament and requests for clemency.
As Yeltsin’s loving account conveys, his workplace writ large was the executive branch of the state. The white folders, on which he makes a checkmark as he riffles through them, were a porthole:
They contain the entire life of the state—of the state as a vehicle, if you will, with a steering mechanism, an engine, and moving parts. From these white folders, you can understand how the vehicle works, whether the engine knocks, whether the wheels are falling off. They hold documents from various agencies and ministries, all of them awaiting my agreement. . . . Hidden behind each line is the intricate web of public administration. . . . The contents of these white folders, out of sight of the public, constitute the inner workings of our gargantuan state.
The green folders captivate him least, since they mostly originate in the legislature. The papers in the red folders, holding draft edicts, are the business end of government:
When a decree comes out of a folder, someone is dismissed or appointed. If it stays in the folder, the decision is shelved. Sometimes several people wait for these decrees and sometimes the whole country. . . . And [they are] not only about hiring and firing. . . . One thing I know for certain is that what sits in [these folders] today will be the main event tomorrow. . . . If a muddleheaded or ill-thought-out decision is found there, something is wrong with the system and with the mechanism for making decisions, and something is wrong inside of me.4
Like so much in Russia after communism, this was a habitat in transition—partly continuous with the past, partly reformed, partly in disrepair. Yeltsin was required by circumstances to devote inordinate effort to keeping his state vital, to ensuring that the wheels did not fall off or the engine freeze up. But he also wanted to steer the vehicle to make his anti-revolutionary revolution. And this was an exercise that stretched him as few others did. The pulverizing effects of the Soviet collapse had made the post-communist state an object to be governed and not only a subject of governance. Yeltsin was a wizard at exerting personal control over the machine. He was less proficient at using it to effect social change.
Yeltsin cadged many particulars of formal institutional design from abroad.5 His model of leadership after communism, however, was a homegrown syncretism of ingredients shaped as much by usage and improvisation as by laws and organization charts. It borrowed from three wells of inspiration.
The first and for Yeltsin the definitive source was his sense of historical mission, which linked up with his success script and expansive sense of self. A presidential form of government, he exclaimed at his first inauguration, had resonance in a country whose populace had always been voiceless. By aggregating political power and personifying it in a freely chosen individual, presidentialism would engender “a voluntary interdependence” between leader and led, as there never was under the tsars or the Communist Party. His election was a wager on reform: “The citizens . . . have selected not only a personality but the road down which Russia is to go . . . the road of democracy, reforms, and rebirth of human dignity.”6