Yeltsin’s appetite for change grew as Soviet troubles mounted exponentially. Hard times, he was more willing to assume, made for hard decisions and not for band-aids and stopgaps. Any reform worth its salt needed to come to grips with the deficiencies of the communist paradigm, as he said in a pre-election interview in May 1991:
My electoral program . . . lays emphasis on radical reforms, above all in the economy. You cannot stretch out the transition to the market and assure people that the more radical the changes are the worse things will be for them. What could be worse than the way we are running around in circles, in fact on a precipice? . . . It seems to me we have to see the big thing here: Partial reforms . . . will destroy us. The people will not stand for it. When you hear it said it is logical to extend reforms over a period of years, that is not for us. That is for a society where a fairly good living standard has already been achieved and where the people can wait awhile. In our country, the situation is so critical, and the bureaucratic system so powerful, that we must bring [the reforms] to completion rapidly.39
The “big thing” grew out of the art of politics more than the science of economics. Yeltsin’s big-bang reform, like the coup de grâce to the USSR, expressed his penchant for dichotomizing choices. He itched to be his own master and not be gulled by erratic partners, as he felt he had been on the Five Hundred Days plan. A precipitous thrust would snap the “hypnosis of words” he so excoriated in Gorbachev. And it would have an ineffable cultural component. Anatolii Chernyayev, we have seen, remarked that in Russia “big things” had always gotten done by the method of “either win all or lose all.” In Chernyayev’s diary, “either win all or lose all” is rendered as the Russian saw that describes the doughty soldier’s choices as ili grud’ v krestakh, ili golova v kustakh: “Either you come home with medals on your chest or you leave your head in the bushes.”40
The academics and professionals Yeltsin inducted into his government as the Soviet Union fell apart were in many cases versed in the writings of Western free marketeers like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Janos Kornai. Others had dirigiste, Keynesian, technocratic, or social-democratic points of view. The reform discussion was outside the ken of an engineer without a liberal arts education, and a political animal to the marrow of his bones. Yeltsin’s approach sprang from a visceral intuition about the imperative of change and the general course it should take—not from highbrow theory but not from a whim, either. “I will not pretend to speak about the philosophy of economic reform,” he was to write in Notes of a President.41 It did not deter him. Waiting his turn to speak at a 1989 rally in a Moscow park, he had grilled an American correspondent on where he learned about economic affairs. The American in his time worked in a family business and read many books, including the screeds of pre-1917 Russian socialists. “Yeltsin said, ‘So neither of us knows about economics!’ Then he said, ‘We’ll find some young guys, there are some young guys who get this stuff.’ ”42 There were, and he found them in 1991–92, after several years, as Margaret Thatcher noticed in 1990, of brooding over the scourges of communism.
On his post-communist highway to Damascus, the freedom to which Yeltsin converted was closer to what the political thinker Isaiah Berlin labeled “negative liberty” (freedom from hindrance) than to Berlin’s “positive liberty” (freedom to accomplish some end).43 For Yeltsin’s contemporaries, deliverance from Marxist scripture and Soviet structures took many forms. For him, it was an ease with the market and recoil against the overbearing state. Mikhail Fridman, who became one of Russia’s first billionaires as a banker and oilman, makes the point welclass="underline"
Yeltsin as an individual who had inner freedom . . . instinctively moved toward the market as the end. That is because . . . as my namesake Milton Friedman says, “Capitalism is freedom.”. . . [Yeltsin thought] it was necessary to give people freedom and they would make out well. How exactly to do that he did not know. [But he did know] that it was necessary to free people from controclass="underline" We were squeezing them dry. He thought that if we let them go they could move heaven and earth. . . . This is the level on which he thought about it. . . . He took a dim view of all these [Soviet] controls. [He felt that] the controllers had long since believed in nothing.44
If Yeltsin was a social democrat at all, it was more in the stamp of Tony Blair of Britain, Felipe González of Spain, or Gerhard Schröder of Germany than of the left-wing statists of interwar and postwar Europe. He took it as uncontroversial that Russia could get by only with a just and effective state, but that its state would have the ability to rule and popular support only if it did something to cure Russia’s economic disease.
Yeltsin was able to anchor enthusiasm for capsizing Soviet ways in halfburied pieces of his past. In the chapter of Notes of a President where he eulogizes Ignatii and Nikolai Yeltsin, he speaks of the windmill, smithy, and land leases they gathered by the sweat of their brow and of the injustice and social disutility of the state expropriating them. He was aware of how Vasilii Starygin fended in exile by selling homemade furniture to local buyers. These kin’s only crime was that they held property, were hardworking, and “took many things upon themselves.” With its zero-sum thinking, “The Soviet regime liked modest, ordinary folk, people who did not stand out. It did not like and it showed no mercy to the strong, the ingenious, and the lively.” Yeltsin’s felt mandate, as someone who did stand out, was to undo this mistake and foster an enterprising society in which the writ of the state was circumscribed. For throwing off lassitude, he offered autobiographical role models: the sportsman who trains and betters a rival, as he had on the volleyball court; the public figure who survives after taking an independent stand, as he did in his secret speech in 1987; and the hospital patient who takes the first tottering steps after an operation, as he had after his back surgery in Barcelona in 1990. Russians, he said, needed to cast off their “slavish psychology” and open up space for “people without hangups, intrepid people, of the kind who earlier [in the Soviet period] were simply squelched.” The idealized historical reference most on Yeltsin’s mind was his thrifty Urals forebears. Russia was giving signs, he wrote, of reemergence of the outlook “of independent peasants [muzhiki] who do not wait for another’s help, who do not pin their hopes on anyone else . . . [who] scold everyone and stubbornly tend to their own business.”45
After the 1991 coup, Yeltsin was in no shape psychologically or politically to move into decision gear. He fled Moscow on August 29 for two weeks of sunbathing, swimming, and tennis in the Latvian playground of Jurmala. He was back in town briefly twice, did a peacemaking errand in Armenia, and was then off again to Sochi for another couple of weeks. On September 18, in Moscow, Yeltsin was drained and experienced coronary pain. But on September 25, the day he left for Sochi, Pavel Voshchanov said he “has taken a timeout . . . not for relaxation but so he can in calm surroundings work at his further plans and also on a new book.”46 Yeltsin supporters were stupefied that he had dropped out of sight and at such a juncture could be dabbling in authorship. It was as if Napoleon had repaired to the Riviera to compose poetry after routing the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, one Democratic Russia parliamentary deputy later said. Gorbachev’s advisers thought the Russian leader was playing “a cat-and-mouse game with us,” and Gorbachev refused to consider traveling to Sochi to see him (“We have to protect our honor”).47 Yeltsin at Bocharov Ruchei dictated a few paragraphs only of the manuscript, which was to grow into Notes of a President, the second volume of his memoirs, and had no interest in playing games with Gorbachev. But his “further plans” could not be put off and were the subject of searing interchanges with members of his team until his return to the capital on October 10.