Of the questions dominating the late Soviet political agenda, the only two that were settled as of the rotation of the Kremlin flags were about the power of the CPSU and the tug-of-war between the center and the union republics. Yeltsin closed out the first with presidential Decree No. 169 on November 6, 1991, a day before the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It dismembered the palsied machinery of the party and took possession of its bank accounts, publishing houses, and real estate, from Old Square to the most far-flung Russian villages. The Belovezh’e and Alma-Ata accords and the exit of Gorbachev hardened interrepublic borders into international borders. The purpose of the Commonwealth of Independent States was to accomplish a genteel divorce in a dysfunctional family. With it as cover, Yeltsin took the assets of the KGB in mid-December, and the inter-republic security committee was discharged on January 15, 1992.32 The commonwealth’s charter mission was complete on May 18, 1992, when he gave up on the will-o’-the-wisp of a unified military (joint control over nuclear arms had been agreed at Belovezh’e) and formed national armed forces under Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. Grachëv oversaw the homecoming of troops from Germany, Poland, Mongolia, Cuba, and the post-Soviet states. All Soviet tactical nukes were in storage in Russia by July 1, 1992, as agreed at Alma-Ata in December 1991; the last strategic warheads from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were transported there by July 1, 1996, after negotiations brokered by the United States. The CIS was up to little else but holding summit meetings and offering a forum for working out bilateral agreements. Yevgenii Shaposhnikov’s job, as commander of CIS strategic forces, was to lapse in June 1993.
If the CIS was about tidying up after the past, Yeltsin as leader of the opposition had looked to the future, to the best of his abilities. The prospect he dangled before Russia was a three-pronged de-monopolization—after departing the Communist Party in 1990 he often called it a “de-communization”—comprising democratization, a free-enterprise economy, and territorial devolution. It would, he said, substitute the liberties of a normal life for the regimentation of communism.
At a press conference on September 7, 1991, the first question to Yeltsin, from a French journalist, was what kind of a country Russians lived in and would be living in now that the political logjam had been cleared. Here is what he said:
I think that the country is now devoid of all “isms.” It isn’t capitalist, nor communist, nor socialist; it’s a country in a transitional period, which wants to proceed along a civilized path, the path along which France, Britain, the United States, Japan, Germany, Spain, and other countries have been and still are proceeding. It’s an aspiration to proceed precisely along this path, that is, the de-communization of all aspects of society’s life, an aspiration to democracy, furthermore, a market economy, all equal varieties of property, including private property.
A little later, the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, buzzed again to what model Yeltsin had as a goaclass="underline"
SIMPSON: I want to go back to what Mr. Gorbachev said recently. He was talking about Swedish social democracy; that is his model. What is your model, Yeltsin’s model? Perhaps it is the model of François Mitterrand’s France, or John Major’s Britain, or the United States, or Japan, or Spain, or Germany?
YELTSIN: I would take everything together; I would take the best from each system and introduce it in Russia.
SIMPSON: That is a very politic answer. Mr. Gorbachev said you must have some kind of notion, whether you want to lean to the left, or to the right, to the conservatives, or to the socialists, and so on.
YELTSIN: Well, I have never been a conservative and have no intention of even being a centrist; no, I am still to the left of center; rather, I am for social democracy.
SIMPSON: Or the Swedish model, as Mr. Gorbachev says?
YELTSIN: Well, perhaps not 100 percent. You cannot just take a model and install it ready made. Maybe create a new model, but take something from the Swedish model, and why not take a piece from the Japanese model—an interesting piece—and from the French, too, especially as regards the parliamentary aspect? And in the United States, where they have 200 years of democracy . . . they have a definite framework for this democracy, and that’s interesting, too. So, in principle, I am in favor of social democracy, but nevertheless, to take the best there really is in these countries.33
The statement is indicative of Yeltsin’s reasoning as he took the reins. He saw all good things as going together and downplayed trade-offs of one good against another—democracy versus the market, for example. These valued traits he discerned in the long-since developed Western nations and Japan (which he first visited as a Soviet parliamentarian in January 1990), although one country on his A-list, Spain, had transited to political freedom in the 1970s. Yeltsin was fixated not on destination but on trajectory: Civilization was a path leading in a particular direction. He did not totally abjure his socialist roots, in that he continued to brand himself a social democrat and to the left of center (left in the common European meaning of the word, indicating attachment to a sizable state role in the economy), a contention he made through the middle and late 1990s in conversations with other politicians and reiterated to me in 2002.34 And Yeltsin was eclectic—if not to say platitudinous—about his societal models. He considered himself free to cherry-pick, without worrying about coherence in the abstract.
Practically speaking, Yeltsin was satisfied that the first and third elements of his triad, democracy (and its accompanying moral regeneration) and decentralization, had advanced with the shutdown of the CPSU. While there was much unfinished business, principally in devising a democratic and federal constitution for post-communist Russia, it was axiomatic for Yeltsin that, given the assurances he had made and the dismal state of the economy, the most urgent problem was the transition from Marx to market.
Yeltsin had no economic blueprint to pull off the shelf, but he did have thoughts about nongovernmental activity and entrepreneurship to build on. He had long since seen them at work in the interstices of the Soviet planned economy. In Berezniki, while Stalin reigned, his father constructed a private house. As a party boss in Sverdlovsk and Moscow, Yeltsin opposed restrictions on the nonstate sector, favored autonomous work brigades in the state sector, and spoke of the profit motive’s effect on economic efficiency in the West.
His ideas about reform while in opposition were initially scattershot and auxiliary to his duel with Gorbachev. The stillborn Five Hundred Days Program encouraged him to think about parameters. That said, Yeltsin never read a page of the two-tome compilation Grigorii Yavlinskii plunked on his desk. He homed in on the political facets—the zippy title and the taut timetable.35 A law “On Property in the RSFSR,” enacted under Yeltsin’s legislative gavel in January 1991, after Gorbachev nixed Five Hundred Days, made private ownership a civil right. It was assailed by old-fashioned communists. “For him, the law . . . had greater political than economic significance, and it achieved its purpose.”36
There were flickers of free-enterprise thinking in Yeltsin’s proposal to relegate governmental power from the USSR to Russia and its provinces. It would, he said, unlock social energy suppressed by the leaden hand of the center. In his August 1990 tour, Yeltsin parried demands for instructions and subventions from on high. The beauty of devolution was that local leaders and citizens would have incentives to figure out solutions on their own. In the Arctic coal city of Vorkuta, which had its origins as a Gulag forced-labor camp in the 1930s, he asked miners how they would handle “complete independence.” Some were curious about subsidies and guarantees of supplies and distribution. “Yeltsin cut them short: ‘No, that’s not how it works. Independence is something different. As owners of what you produce, you will have to decide whom you sell to, at what price. All these are your problems. We are not going to feed you anymore.’”37 At a town meeting on Sakhalin Island, off the Pacific seaboard, a woman wished to know what he would do about the sludge and oil polluting the Naiva River. It was up to them, Yeltsin responded: “You yourselves must put your rivers in order, not Moscow. Our task is to give you independence in solving all kinds of questions, and not to press decisions upon you, to give you the right to settle everything yourselves.”38