For one week of all this Yeltsin was inaccessible to his staff and ministers. Gorbachev, the unsympathetic witness, claims Yeltsin was drunk when they spoke about Chechnya by telephone on November 10. Associates were unsure how much alcohol had to do with it but were disturbed by their leader’s unavailability. Either way, the stress of office was giving rise to insalubrious behavior.61
The October reform package went under the marquee “shock therapy” (shokoterapiya in Russian). The phrase applied to a wider field of action than its original meaning in Latin America and post-communist Eastern Europe, which was the lifting of price controls to halt an inflationary spiral and jumpstart economic growth.62 Yeltsin, he stated unsentimentally in retirement, aimed at a double-barreled modernizing revolution in economy and by extension in society: “to unloose prices, that is to introduce a real market forcefully and toughly, the way [Russian landlords and peasants] were ordered to plant potatoes under Peter the Great; and, second, to create private property . . . to create a class of owners.”63 Peter had been his paladin since grade school, and Yeltsin was mesmerized by the tsar as enlightened reformator—a Russian noun, borrowed from the German, that connotes the likelihood of greater dislocations than the English “reformer.” Here was his chance to play Peter, although in a protodemocratic nation: His lords and peasants had the franchise and could topple him at the next election. He knew of Peter’s maniacal tendencies, he would concede in 1993 to an interviewer who pointed out that Peter “personally cut off the heads” of his enemies. It was true, Yeltsin said, “but we also have to keep in mind all the things he did for Russia.”64
Much as summaries—including Yeltsin’s wistful retirement speech in December 1999—often refer to the assault as one fast-flying leap, his thinking at the time showed flexibility and realism. Concerning Peter the Great, he writes level-headedly in Notes of a President that turning Russians into good Europeans was “an ambitious goal unattainable in one generation.” “In a certain sense,” the Petrine reforms “have not been completed to this day.” “Although we have become Europeans, we have remained ourselves.” Every flurry of reform in Russia’s past, he said, was followed by a backlash and a rollback. This mold he was determined to break. “The goal I posed for myself was to make reform irrevocable.” If there were economic restructuring and “grandiose political changes,” the process would be unstoppable and a return of the communists inconceivable: “After us, other people will come who will finish the job off and move the country toward prosperity.”65
Yeltsin wanted the path chosen to outlive the first burst of change and to outlive him. What he did not want was to take the time to ask the population’s approval of his project or to spell out what awaited them. Perhaps, as Yurii Burtin said in 1992, he tended to patronize the people “as one would a child who does not understand his own interests and cannot be allowed to participate in affairs of state.”66 I doubt Yeltsin was as misanthropic as that. As Burtin wrote, condescension toward the population coexisted in the minds of Yeltsin and his men with fear of disorder, a yen to please, and a catering to “the prejudices and the far from admirable feelings of the less conscious strata.”67 Society itself, after generations of communism, was not organized to protect or promote the shared interests of its members, particularly when the patrimonial idols lay broken on the temple floor. The historian Yurii Afanas’ev, formerly co-chairman with Yeltsin of the Interregional group, noted in an essay in the same volume as Burtin’s how underdeveloped Russia’s civil society was and that political parties, which could now be legally formed, were insubstantial startups: “The absence of large-scale social groups tutored in their own distinct group interests allows the administration of Boris Yeltsin to forget about our current anemic ‘multipartyness.’”68 Most citizens waited for their leader to act and hoped for the best.
Yeltsin’s words and his taking on of the premiership left no doubt about who had willed the turnabout in policy. But he held open an escape route. In mid-1992 he was to raise Gaidar in rank to acting prime minister. By the end of 1992, Gaidar and his benefactor from 1991, Burbulis, were both out of government. Yeltsin professed that he always saw the Gaidar-Burbulis grouping as “a kamikaze crew that would step into the line of fire and forge ahead . . . that would go up in flames but remain in history.”69 Did the warriors know they were taking to the sky on a suicide mission? Yeltsin says he never discussed it with them; the head kamikaze says he did. In their getacquainted meeting, asserts Gaidar in his memoir of the 1990s, he warned Yeltsin that once the most unsavory decisions were behind them the president might have to dismiss the government. Yeltsin “gave me a skeptical smile and waved his arm, as if to say it would not come to that.”70 Either the president was holding his cards close to his vest or, more likely, he was not yet certain how it would all play out.
The decisive break in Yeltsin’s October manifesto on reforming the economy, as announced to the Congress of Deputies, was in the realm of prices. Ninety percent of retail prices in Russia, and 80 percent of wholesale prices, were to be freed from state dictate and left to the impersonal forces of supply and demand. Yeltsin dressed down aides when the draft of the speech, in a typing screw-up, omitted the section on price deregulation.71 Another priority was macroeconomic stabilization through slashing the budget deficit and cutting back on the emission of money and credit. Still another was privatization of state property, to forge “a healthy mixed economy with a strong private sector.” Half of all small and medium-sized firms were to be turned over to nonstate owners within six months; large enterprises were going to be refashioned as joint stock corporations, shares in which would later be distributed and sold at supply-and-demand prices. Yeltsin described these actions as proactive and equally as reactive to developments. Members of the nomenklatura had already been sidestepping price controls, trafficking on the black market, and speculating in currency. And they were furtively amassing money and unofficial rights over, and rents from, state property: “Privatization has been going on in Russia for some time, but in a wild . . . and often criminal fashion. Today we need to seize the initiative, and we are intent on doing so.”
Yeltsin tended most meticulously in the speech to the politics of the breakthrough. “The experience of global civilization” showed that Russia’s plight was “difficult but not hopeless.” The nation that overcame Napoleon and Hitler had special reserves that would see it through: “Russia has more than once in its rich history shown that a crucible period is when it is able to mobilize its will and its many powers, talents, and resources in order to lift up and strengthen itself.” All could pull together, he said, in the knowledge that relief was in sight. “The uncertainty will be gone and the prognosis will be clear.”
When Yeltsin got around to owning up to and distributing the costs of his changes, he was on thin ice. He had been claiming since the 1990 election campaign that he could move Russia toward the market—he did not apply the word kapitalizm, so unmusical to Soviet ears, until his second term—without people of ordinary means losing out. In the 1991 presidential campaign, he flailed at Gorbachev for the administered increases in consumer and food prices that Apriclass="underline" “They ought not to have begun economic reform by unscrupulously laying all the hardships on the population.”72 Now that he answered for policy, he had to sell belt-tightening. “It will be worse for everyone for approximately a half-year. Then prices will go down, the consumer market will fill with goods, and by the autumn of 1992 . . . the economy will stabilize and living standards will slowly improve.”73 The one round year seems to have been mostly a figment of his imagination, and was more optimistic than Five Hundred Days, which had posited a two-year stabilization period. Gaidar maintains that two or three years were the minimum needed for growth to return and denies that he misled Yeltsin as to the time needed.74