7 Sergei Markedonov, “Boris Yel’tsin: eskiz istoricheskogo portreta” (Boris Yeltsin: outline of a historical portrait), http://polit.ru/author/2006/02/01/eltsyn_75.
8 A recent tour of the genre describes the English as historically more “biography-obsessed” than Americans, but adds that the celebrity culture of the United States partly compensates (James Atlas, “My Subject Myself,” New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2005). See also Lewis J. Edinger, “Political Science and Political Biography: Reflections on the Study of Leadership,” Journal of Politics 26 (May 1964), 423–39. Russia scores far below both Britain and America in acceptance of biography.
9 The best-known biographical project in the country is the series “Lives of Outstanding People,” put out by the Molodaya Gvardiya publishing house in Moscow. Its almost 1,200 titles cover cultural as well as political and military figures, in Russia and abroad. There was no Yeltsin title in the series until writer and editor Boris Minayev’s volume in 2010. The collective memoir by nine former aides, Yu. M. Baturin et al., Epokha Yel’tsina: ocherki politicheskoi istorii (The Yeltsin epoch: essays in political history) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), is the best book about Yeltsin in power in any language. But the points of view of individual contributors are not identified, and it just scratches the surface of Yeltsin’s personality and decision-making processes. The journalist and editor Vitalii Tret’yakov, who was one of the first to comment on the Yeltsin phenomenon, and to do so favorably, wrote most of an unfavorable biography of him in 1998–99. Tiring, he said, of “the banality of the theme and of the main hero of the book,” he did not finish it. Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka” (Sverdlovsk upstart), part 1, Politicheskii klass, February 2006, 36. Selections from the manuscript, which takes Yeltsin to 1989 only, were published in the February through August issues of this magazine.
10 “Authors are wary of tackling [the issue] precisely because Yeltsin has played a huge and overpowering role in the birth of the new Russia.” Peter Rutland, “The Boris Yeltsin of History,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 6 (Fall 1998), 692.
11 A search of books for sale at www.amazon.com, using the person’s name and “biography” as keywords, on November 15, 2007, turned up 2,904 titles about Washington, 2,202 about Lincoln, 1,009 about Churchill, and 975 about Hitler.
12 Boris Yel’tsin, Prezidentskii marafon (Presidential marathon) (Moscow: AST, 2000), 420. This book appeared in English as Midnight Diaries. Unless specially noted, I will quote the Russian originals of Yeltsin’s memoirs and cite them by their Russian titles—translating those titles, in the body of the text, into English. Englishand Russian-language texts of all three books are now available at the Yeltsin Foundation website: http://yeltsin.ru/yeltsin/books.
13 Oleg Poptsov, Khronika vremën “Tsarya Borisa” (Chronicle of the times of “Tsar Boris”) (Moscow: Sovershenno sekretno, 1995), 218.
14 Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 260.
15 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:281.
16 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 48.
17 Boris Nikol’skii, Kremlëvskiye mirazhi (Kremlin mirages) (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2001), 124.
18 Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 331.
19 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 285. Clinton made the remark to U.S. officials traveling with him to meet Yeltsin in Moscow in the summer of 1998.
20 Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 418–19.
21 Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Dusk) (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 644 (italics added).
22 Talbott, Russia Hand, 185. Foreigners were not the only ones to spy these incongruities. A presidential press secretary was led to conclude Yeltsin was “warring against himself” (Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya [Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary] [Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997], 313). See also the general discussion in Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).
23 Here I follow Clayton Roberts, who defines a historical interpretation as “an abbreviation of a complete explanation” and “an assertion that some variable or number of variables are the most important causal agencies in a particular historical development.” Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 242, 245.
24 I have the dubious honor of being one of the first to do so, in Timothy J. Colton, “Moscow Politics and the Yeltsin Affair,” Harriman Institute Forum 1 (June 1988), 1–8.
25 Indicative of the latter is the claim by Solovyov and Klepikova, written in the last months of 1991 (Boris Yeltsin, 23): “Boris Yeltsin’s historical mission has been completed. The titanic role he played was a destructive one; we are not sure he has enough strength for constructive activity.”
26 As characterized, critically, by Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country,” Foreign Affairs 83 (March–April 2004), 20.
27 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 349.
28 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 32. For a forceful summary, see Dusko Doder, “Russia’s Potemkin Leader,” The Nation, January 29, 2001. A noxious specimen of what can only be called hate journalism, published after Yeltsin’s death in 2007, is Matt Taibbi, “The Low Post: Death of a Drunk,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14272792.
29 I speak of a positive assessment beyond the empathy that usually goes with the writing of a life: “No honest biographer—as opposed to the propagandist or the avowed debunker—can long remain in company and consort with a subject and avoid at least a touch of empathy. Empathy . . . is the biographer’s spark of creation.” Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” in James F. Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 16–17.