When Yeltsin spoke of carrying out the mandate, he frequently dramatized himself in the third person. His October 1991 speech previewing shock therapy is a top-flight example. Russia and its leader, he said, were at a branching point where a choice about trajectory had to be made. “Your president” had already chosen. “I have never sought out easy paths, but I can see with clarity that the coming months will be the most difficult for me. If I have your support and faith, I am ready to travel this road with you to the end.”7 A strong head of state would proceed down the chosen highway in lockstep with his fellow travelers in society. Their support, given in a democratic election, raised him above all other servants of the state and gave him the cape of legitimacy, as it had in his battle with Mikhail Gorbachev and the CPSU.
Some inspiration flowed, counterintuitively, from a second source: Russia’s monarchic heritage. Yeltsin as a reincarnation of the tsar was a recurrent motif in the discourse of the 1990s, as it once was for Stalin.8 Gorbachev, we have seen, attributed to his nemesis the ability “to conduct himself like a tsar,” a knack Gorbachev knew he could not equal. Some scholars have referred to Yeltsin pejoratively as “Tsar Boris” and an “elected monarch” ringed by courtiers and lackeys.9 Some Yeltsin supporters at the time put a positive spin on the royalist argot. Boris Nemtsov, the reformist governor of Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky from 1932 to 1990), who was to move to Moscow in Yeltsin’s second term, was the leading popularizer. He sketched the myth in expansive and flexible strokes:
Yeltsin is a true Russian tsar. That is what he is about, with all the pluses and minuses, with all his recklessness and sprees, with his decisiveness and courage, and the odd time with his bashfulness. Unlike the “bad” Russian tsars, Yeltsin is a “good” Russian tsar and a completely forgiving person. For all that, his physique plays a role: he is such an enormous peasant and from the Urals.
Naturally, all kinds of intrigues wind around him, and many people try to get something for themselves out of their closeness to him. But he is an unselfish person, of that I am certain.
He is a lord of the manor [barin], sure, yet not the kind who bathes in luxury. I think luxury is of little appeal to him. He is the tsar, and first and last he feels responsibility for what is going on. He takes to heart, though very much in his peculiar way, goings-on in the country.
Nemtsov recalled Yeltsin’s pyrotechnics in August 1991, which he witnessed from the plaza of the Russian White House: “He leaped up on the tank. Everyone held him in honor and was covered in goose pimples. ‘This is the kind of tsar we have [they thought], a president who is afraid of nothing.’” Nemtsov went on to describe a Yeltsin excursion to Nizhnii Novgorod in early 1992, when Nemtsov was presidential envoy. He and the city mayor were “spellbound” as Yeltsin castigated a factory manager for the inedible food in the workers’ canteen and then told Nemtsov to fire the director of a grocery store for overpricing butter—the destatization of retail prices on January 2, by presidential rescript, notwithstanding. “It all brought to mind the actions of a tsar who puts things in order when he drops in on one of his patrimonial estates.”10
Nemtsov was cavalier in his historiography: No factual tsar hailed from a peasant hut or the Urals. If utterances like his had little to offer as doctrine, they did conform to canonical themes in Russian political culture. In particular, they consorted with the timeless idea of the nation’s leader as a father figure both authoritative and possessing the common touch. Yeltsin as president looked the part, up to a point. Like a storybook tsar, he asserted the right, when justice and raison d’état prescribed, to buck parchment rules (by pardoning reprobates), bureaucratic formalities (by short-circuiting the chain of command), and precedent (by countermanding decrees he had authored). With citizens and midlevel officials, his bearing was regal—posture straight, chin held high, gestures spare, manner of speech magisterial.11
Yeltsin’s take on president-as-tsar was mixed. He did speak openly about his admiration for Peter the Great and made several public references to himself as Boris I.12 The word was sometimes used nonchalantly in family circles.13 In closeted settings, he a few times donned the mantle, as when, on a state visit to Sweden, he ribbed King Carl Gustav about the lengthiness of the seven-course palace banquet. “The king answered, ‘You have to understand, Mr. President, that we have a certain ritual here, and it has been observed since the thirteenth century.’ And Yeltsin replied jovially, ‘Listen, you are a king and I am a tsar, and you tell me the two of us cannot solve such a problem?’” Carl Gustav had the wait staff speed up the feast.14 On occasions, Yeltsin would toss out the trope of the tsar to reprimand employees. He once chastised a cheeky press secretary with the words, “Go and do what the tsar has ordered.”15 And the figure of speech in which he and members of his staff belittled matters not worth his personal attention was that they were “not the tsar’s business” (ne tsarskoye delo).
Yeltsin in the end recognized that the partial democratization of Russia made it impolitic to apply monarchism literally. As he knew, the plasticity that was the great boon of the monarchial legend was its great bane as well. Elected monarchy is an oxymoron. Kings are chosen on the hereditary principle from a royal caste, train for the throne from birth, and sit on it until death. Yeltsin was elected to a fixed term and knew that he would have to leave his post. In an exchange with me about the subject, he saw no way to conciliate tsardom with democracy: “How can a tsar lead in a democratic society? There are certain democratic institutions through which you have to act.”16 When subalterns pressed him too hard to address a ticklish issue, he was known to turn them aside with the question, “What do you think I am, a tsar?”
A third template for directorship of the post-communist state came from Russia’s recent national past, the Soviet period, and from Yeltsin’s personal past. The reflex here was to the CPSU boss he was in Sverdlovsk and Moscow.
Like the provincial party prefect of yore, Yeltsin as president felt qualified, when the spirit moved him, to intervene on any issue. His onetime economic adviser Aleksandr Livshits testifies he had “the mentality of the obkom first secretary” in assuming “the right and the duty to make decisions about urgent questions then and there.”17 The interventions that counted most, as in the Soviet system, were those given verbally. The richly experienced Viktor Chernomyrdin knew the norm: “The verbal assignments the premier received [from Yeltsin] . . . were carried out strictly, which cannot be said about decrees or even the written assignments of the president. That is to say, as things had been signified in the [party] apparatus, words spoken orally outranked pieces of paper.”18 As in the Sverdlovsk obkom and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin did not sweat the small stuff of public policy, the technicalities of administration, and the legal niceties, all of which were best farmed out to specialists. He “understood the limits of what he understood,” Yegor Gaidar has said.19 He would “‘grab’ a question on the wing . . . get a feel for problems without subjecting them to long and detailed study,” to cite Boris Fëdorov, who held several economic portfolios in the first term.20 Like the party secretary, Yeltsin in the Kremlin wanted to leave his door open to petitioners and not filter the upbound flow of information and advice. To quote Livshits again, “For him to say to people who made overtures to him that he had to check with Livshits or [Georgii] Satarov [another Kremlin aide] was as good as saying he did not have vlast’ [power], and that was something he could never admit.”21