One foot planted in the past and one in the future, Yeltsin was a boss for the bosses, who knew the old ways but looked forward to new ones. For him and the nation, the hard part—to graduate from the simplex of talking about a better country to the complex of building it—was just beginning.
CHAPTER NINE
A Great Leap Outward
In its last top-of-the-line National Intelligence Estimate on the USSR before its downfall, completed in November 1990, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency saw “deterioration short of anarchy” as the most likely scenario over the next year, with a probability close to even. Three other scenarios were given chances of one in five or less. They were “anarchy,” “military intervention” either as an army coup or at the direction of the civilian leadership, and “light at the end of the tunnel,” which would be marked by “substantial progress” toward constructive relationships between the center and the republics, toward “the filling of the political power vacuum by new political institutions and parties,” and toward new economic relations based on the market principle.1 The annus mirabilis 1991 proved the safest prediction wrong: Deterioration short of anarchy was unsustainable. Elements of the second, third, and fourth were all in evidence: There were anarchic outbreaks as governmental control over self-generating processes weakened; the August coup provided military intervention; and, in Russia, the emergence of an embryonic nation state led by Boris Yeltsin pointed to the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel. As the CIA had anticipated in its classified report, “enormous difficulties” in multiple realms would lie ahead under the most bullish of the scenarios, “but a psychological corner would be turned to give the population some hope for a brighter future.” Even with such a shift in mass attitudes, economic contraction and constitutional issues, if nothing else, would issue in pressures that “could break any government.”2
The Yeltsin of 1990–91 was adamant that the days of the Soviet partocracy were numbered, so differing with the allies in intellectual circles, and the observers abroad, who tended to think it would die a dragged-out death. At a clangorous rally on the Moscow Garden Ring in March 1991, Gavriil Popov lectured journalists not to ballyhoo the crisis and to expect the CPSU to hang on into the twenty-first century. Marching at his side, Yeltsin took tart exception: The system was “collapsing of its own weight” and the dénouement would come “very soon.”3 As to the means and timing, he was no more farsighted than the rest. Were Gorbachev to fail or the democrats to be beat out, he held that the populace “would take to the streets and would take their fate into their hands,” as it had been in Prague, Bucharest, and other bloc capitals in 1989.4 Yeltsin was taken unawares by the concatenation of a banana-republic coup and an implosion of the state. “I was in a tense emotional state,” he comments of the weeks after August 21, since “the events that had just occurred were so sudden.”5
Yeltsin all the while regarded winning the game with some trepidation. In Notes of a President, he records his response, as parliamentary chairman, to being allocated the White House office of Vitalii Vorotnikov in June 1990. The “seditious thought” that he was about to take charge of Russia, still an undergoverned subunit of the Soviet Union, “frightened” him.6 On the evening of December 23, 1991, around the Kremlin desk that had been his since July, he gathered cohorts to mark the ironing out of Gorbachev’s retirement. Lev Sukhanov, motioning at a wall map of the RSFSR, toasted him with the words, “On this whole territory, there is now nobody above you.” “Yes,” Yeltsin smiled radiantly, “and for this, life has been worth living !”7 Four days later he occupied Gorbachev’s working office on the third floor of Building No. 1, the triangular, green-domed Senate Palace of tsarist times. Yeltsin’s exuberance did not much outlast the bubbles in the drinks. “My rapture,” he says about the transfer of authority generally, “was replaced . . . by a bad case of the jitters.”8
Well might he have been jittery, for he was ill-prepared for victory. It was one thing to appropriate physical trophies and proclaim the goal of changing Russia forever. It was quite another to govern and to flesh out that goal.
Had Yeltsin arrived at Building No. 1 through an unhurried, well-bounded, and educative political contest, he would have had to nominate a shadow cabinet and to propound “profound and affirmative ideas” and “a model of rule,” to quote Oleg Poptsov, the editor and cagey observer of the Moscow scene. As it was, the stock advancement from disagreement to opposition and on into the halls of government was fast-forwarded: “The rotten tree of the state broke down, and power and its appurtenances fell at [the opposition’s] feet.”9 Yeltsin had shaken its branches and trunk and placed himself to harvest the apples. Except in the broadest brushstrokes, he had not worked through the constitutive choices he would be called upon to make if power were his, all the more so power in a Russian structure not encumbered by the Soviet superstructure.
A flotilla of his aides would conclude in their memoir The Yeltsin Epoch that, “not ready for so swift a development of the state of affairs,” Yeltsin “entered the genre of improvisation” in 1991.10 But the novelty was one of degree only. Yeltsin had been improvising brilliantly since 1985: at trying to make perestroika work, challenging Gorbachev, politicking. What distinguished this new situation was that the stakes were higher and the boundaries of the possible laxer than they were in communism’s tipping years. Social brakes and buffers had been obliterated. Nothing was sacred and everything of value was up for grabs—even the name of the republic, de-Sovietized and restyled the Russian Federation or Russia on December 25.11 Yeltsin’s message in the 1991 presidential election gave little guidance on what to do next. Russians, Gennadii Burbulis said, voted for Yeltsin in “a purely religious form of protest and hope” and threw in with “a savior,” not a reform plan.12
Before he was snowed under by events, Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to manage change in the style of a symphony conductor—directing wellprimed instrumentalists from fixed, sequent sheet music. Boris Yeltsin conducted a political jazz combo—altering the frequency, duration, and accent of melody lines as he went and open to extemporization by members. The facility for thinking on his feet was part of his political mystique, and his organizational props had been slight, as he relied largely on unsalaried volunteers. “We worked as a team, as a single organism,” one of them, Valentina Lantseva, reminisced. “We were fellow fighters, not aides and not hired hands. . . . We worked on ebullience and Russian romanticism.”13
The amateurism of that innocent time was now an anachronism. President Yeltsin had in his hands the buttons and pedals to all the shambling machinery of government on Russian territory. The communist regime was no longer there as a scapegoat. Was he up to the new assignment? The philosopher Aleksandr Tsipko, a moderate Russian nationalist who wanted to save the USSR, spoke for many when he judged that Yeltsin was not. “I honestly would not want to be in Boris Nikolayevich’s shoes,” he wrote in Izvestiya in October 1991. “Yeltsin the fighter and destroyer is in the past. The time of Yeltsin the creator is upon him.” It was, Tsipko said, a terrifying burden that he was slow to face up to. Haunted by the chimera of “a center that no longer exists,” Yeltsin would have been content if the old foe were still around to beat up on.14