For Gorbachev, the alternatives had been unpalatable. One was to get Yeltsin to work with him to save the union. Yakovlev plied Gorbachev again after the coup with the nonstarter idea of Yeltsin as vice president; Georgii Shakhnazarov made several similar proposals. Gorbachev did not move a muscle to pursue them. Another possibility was for Gorbachev to fall on his sword and resign in Yeltsin’s favor. Shaposhnikov saw this as desirable and thought it could be followed by USSR-wide elections. The delicate state of civil-military relations kept him from raising it with either Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Gorbachev himself aired the possibility with Gavriil Popov, by now the mayor of Moscow, in late August (“Maybe I should hand everything over to Boris”), and Eduard Shevardnadze spoke with Yeltsin about it around this time. Popov advised against such a choice, thinking Yeltsin as USSR president would drive the non-Russian elites away.112 Yeltsin heard of this talk but considered it “unserious” and the post-coup Soviet presidency “ephemeral.”113
Gorbachev’s only other option was to reverse the tide by force. This was not in him to do, and his disinclination since 1989 to take responsibility for local tests of strength had made the army officer corps distrustful of his intentions. Any praetorian ambitions the generals might have had were wrung out of them after the coup. In late November the Soviet president fished in his Kremlin office for Shaposhnikov’s opinion of a temporary military takeover, to be followed by a return to barracks. The reply was that it would land its authors in jail, upon which Gorbachev replied that his query was only hypothetical. The army did not have the training or equipment for police work, the minister said, and Yeltsin would torpedo any such policy. It could bring August redux or, worse yet, “mountains of corpses and a sea of gore.”114
Yeltsin, with a steelier spine and far more political capital, had greater choice than Gorbachev did in the matter. It goes without saying that he took power into account, but his actions in late 1991 were not driven by power alone.115 He came down against even a diluted post-Soviet federation for two reasons. First was his skepticism of the viability of such a construct. Seven union republics (all three in the Baltic, all three in the Caucasus, and the western borderland of Moldova) had boycotted the post-coup talks.116 The Ukrainians took part in some consultations, but Kravchuk did not darken the door of Novo-Ogarëvo. His refusal to agree was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
For Yeltsin, another point, as I see it, was determinative. He opted against a neo-USSR because he was opting for a Russian state—self-standing, governable, and capable of modernization and normalization. To put it another way, he opted for nation-building over empire-saving.117 What he desperately wanted was to leap into post-communism in the protocountry, Russia, that had freely elected him president. The opening move was laid out in the rousing address to the Russian congress on October 28 in which Yeltsin committed Russia to radical economic reform. A liberalization of prices, something Gorbachev had hemmed and hawed about for years, was the key component. The diarist Chernyayev cast a Gorbachevian scowl on Yeltsin’s uncouthness but sank it in a panegyric to his call to arms, with an allusion to the French Revolution:
Yeltsin’s report . . . is a breakthrough to a new country, to a new society, although the ideas and concepts behind this very exit were all laid down in the philosophy of Gorbachev-style perestroika. He himself [Gorbachev] was not able to break in good time with his habits, although he more than once confessed, “We are all from the past.” I hate to say it, but not everyone has the will to break with this past conclusively and at the right time. . . .
In [Yeltsin’s] report it’s either win all or lose all. But in Russia that has always been how big things are done. M. S. [Gorbachev] never went further than Mirabeau. This fellow is going all the way to Napoleon, skipping over Danton, Robespierre, Barras, and even the enragés.
He has thrown out hope to the people. This is the sign of charisma, for all his gaucheness as a person. As an individual he is all mediocrity and grayness, but as “chieftain” in the current concrete situation he is what is required.
And [Yeltsin] is placing his bets on Russia. I cannot repeat it too often: Gorbachev’s historic mistake was that, enfolded in the psychology of “internationalism,” he never understood the role of Russia. I feel human sympathy for him. He knows that it is not only senseless right now to oppose Yeltsin. It is simply impossible from the point of view of the country’s interests. He has no alternative. . . . The way out lies in an irrational consolidation of the Russians, in the despair that brings people together.118
Chernyayev had laid hold of Yeltsin’s broader appeal. The Russian leader was forging ahead, not treading water. He was conjuring hope out of despair. Giving up on an obsolete doctrine and the imperial structure it had held up, he was banking on a national community in which people shared material interests and sociocultural affinities. He was passing through a door the star-crossed Gorbachev had jimmied open but could not go through himself. And he was doing it the way he liked, in one stroke. “I have always been inclined toward simple solutions,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon. “It has always seemed to me that it is much easier to slice through the Gordian knot than to spend years untying it.”119 In 1991 he had the blade in his hands and was not squeamish about using it.
“What if?” analysis holds out myriad counterfactuals for the “thickened history” of 1985 to 1991.120 Boris Yeltsin was not an uncontainable force. His relations with Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv, the authors of his move to Moscow, were guarded at the best of times. Had they any inkling of how he would act, they would have left him in Sverdlovsk. In Moscow, two Soviet prime ministers in a row had misgivings about Yeltsin’s ability and malleability; those misgivings were swept under the carpet. Gorbachev could in all probability have kept Yeltsin on board after his mutiny in 1987 or invited him back into the fold at the 1988 party conference; or he could have had the foresight to get Yeltsin out of the country for the 1989 election. It was not too late after the election to genuflect to Yeltsin’s popularity by making him head of government. A motivated and more tightly organized CPSU would have blocked the Russian parliament from making Yeltsin its chairman in 1990 and instituting the presidency in 1991. The Five Hundred Days plan offered a sterling but wasted chance to mollify him. Suppler behavior by the Soviet leaders would have aggravated Russians less, and a softer posture on the union treaty would have given Yeltsin incentives to take a compromise position. Averting the opera bouffe of August 1991 would have bought Gorbachev time to try to cook up a hybrid successor regime. And a cutthroat coup d’état instead of a procrastinating one would have resulted in Yeltsin’s arrest, in the best of cases, or death in an inferno at the White House, at worst.
Others may have squandered their chances, but not Yeltsin. His criticism of and then defection from Gorbachev, confirmed by Gorbachev’s inability to engage him, positioned him as a unique political player. Drawing on currents in the environment and on personal predispositions, Yeltsin refashioned his sense of who he was politically and gravitated to some approximation of a Western paradigm of governance. He milked the opportunities that seismic structural shifts and accident threw his way.