Economic liberalization fused to political autocracy and a strong state—not to Gorbachev’s muzzy humanism—was effected in communist China after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976. The Soviet Union could possibly have pursued this formula, although it was more industrialized and did not have China’s ethnic uniformity and its sea of rural labor. The window of opportunity for adopting a Chinese model was the Kremlin tenure of Yurii Andropov, the righteous former chairman of the KGB, in 1982–84; Andropov was not in power long enough, or definite enough on his policies, to be its guiding spirit. In 1991, after a half-decade of upheaval, atomization of the political class, and state deconstruction, the window was long since closed.82 Decontrolling prices was the sine qua non for uncorking market forces. When Yeltsin decided to let prices go, Gorbachev, who had refused to drink from this chalice for years, was pleased, one of his aides felt, that Yeltsin “was ready to take upon himself the responsibility for reforms fraught with serious social shocks and to relieve Gorbachev of it.”83 The prime alternative was to recentralize and rebureaucratize the economy, with the option of embarking at a later date on reforms in the mold of Deng Xiaoping. Institutional malaise, the legitimacy deficit, and the nationality problem made such a course impractical without a clampdown that could have rivaled the 1989 massacre in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square.84 The one option not on the table was to do nothing.
Considering the Yeltsin record as de-modernization or a tragedy from start to finish sheds more heat than light. From the vantage of 1992 or 1995, there was little to show statistically for shock therapy. By the day Yeltsin called it quits in 1999, the cradle of state socialism boasted a market economy of sorts. Sixty to 70 percent of material and financial assets, everything from newspaper kiosks to coal mines and aluminum mills, were off the government’s books, and most goods and services traded at a going price set by profit-oriented private firms. Anatolii Chubais’s privatization had few precedents in Russia, where history and the cultural fiber are congruent with state power, and was the largest divestiture of state resources anywhere in history. Inflation was wrestled down into the double digits by 1996, jumped in 1998 when Russia was in financial crisis, and receded to double digits in 1999 and henceforth. Russia by 1999 had a stock exchange (it first appeared in Moscow in 1994), commodity exchanges by the dozen, private banks by the hundred, and scads of business schools. Most pertinent politically, economic growth had resumed, and there has been no stopping it since then. Russia overshot the CIS norm in length of the economic contraction after communism; it undershot it in magnitude of the contraction. With better leadership and better public policy, the economy might have bottomed out several years sooner—on average, output was lowest in the twelve CIS countries in 1996, versus 1998 in Russia—and it might have begun to expand, and the standard of living to improve, several years sooner.
Yeltsin’s post-communist reforms transcended the economy. By relaxing the hammerlock of the state on production and distribution, Yeltsin parted with dogma and breathed into being new social categories, and ones that did not necessarily meet with social approval—a propertied middle class, people of means (parodied in the popular culture as the crass “New Russians”), and the super-rich parvenus, “the oligarchs.” In daily life, for all the problems, within six months Russia was done with artificial scarcities and the lineups in which the average Soviet adult had wasted one hour per day, waiting to buy sausage or vodka or matches, in 1990. Home ownership went up from 33 percent in 1990 to about 60 percent in 2000. Reform also created political space by enlarging citizens’ autonomy, breeding new interests, and making new resources available for acquiring influence in the public domain.85 And sweeping changes, economic and non-economic, had sweeping implications worldwide as well. Russia, as Yeltsin was to say from every podium offered, no longer had any foundational reason to stand apart from the United States or the Western alliance.
These facts all belie any deep equivalency between Yeltsinism and Bolshevism. Lenin and the revolutionaries of 1917 were violent utopians, hellbent on building a brave new world on universalist precepts inimical to those of the capitalist democracies. On Soviet territory, they were monopolists, centralizers, and annihilators of the tsarist ruling stratum and of lesser social groups, such as the kulaks, whom they saw as uncongenial to the new order. On the international stage, they were a disruptive force. In sum, the Bolsheviks sought to make a Great Leap Forward, blazing the trail for others to follow. Yeltsin sought a Great Leap Outward. He meant for his de-monopolizing revolution to make Russia more similar to the rest of Europe and mankind by affording it the ABCs of a market economy and of a democratic social and political order, as he conceptualized them. Russia, in his mind’s eye, needed “to catch up, to strain every nerve, and to make super efforts in order to become like the rest.”86 He parceled out power and had nothing against old-timers from the previous regime going into politics (like Yegor Ligachëv, who was elected to parliament in 1993, and Nikolai Ryzhkov, elected in 1995) or into business. In foreign policy, he was a joiner of transnational organizations and a realistic taker of terms from stronger powers.87
In the political realm, Yeltsin after 1991 infracted democratic principles more than once and resorted to military force to quell opponents in 1993 against the Congress of People’s Deputies and in 1994 against the separatist rebels in Chechnya. However, there were extenuating circumstances in both these cases, as we shall see. Viktor Sheinis, a distinguished foreign-policy scholar and legislator, who took strong issue with him on specifics, strikes an appropriate balance in his memoirs on the things Yeltsin did right:
Now that Boris Yeltsin’s career is completed and the sternest accusations have been made against him, I would like to underscore something opposite: that the undeniable authoritarianism in his style of behavior and rule had its limits. It was limited by his recognition of certain democratic values, far from all but very important ones, which he did not drink in with his mother’s milk but to which, once he had assimilated them, he remained loyal. These would include the right of people to have and express their opinions, freedom of the press and freedom to criticize the government, and the free movement of citizens. Curbs on political pluralism and straightforward suppression of opposition, unless it itself had moved to violent actions, were in a forbidden zone for him. It is impossible not to take into the perspective one other noteworthy factor. From the earliest phase of his ascent to power, starting in 1990, Yeltsin displayed a quality exceptional for a person of his age and circle—an aptitude for educating himself and for intellectual growth.88
As president, Yeltsin confined himself by and large to pacific means of realizing his goals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, he did not put his opponents before an execution squad or behind razor wire. He would slough off powers and revenues to the provinces, enlarge media freedoms, and win mass consent through election. For the first sustained period in modern times, Yeltsin’s Russia was to be a land without political censors, political exiles, or political prisoners—a museum was built in 1994 at the last camp, Perm-36, which Gorbachev had closed in 1987. Both Peter the Great and the early communists made a cultural revolution in Russia. Peter ordered his subjects to shave their beards, forsake traditional clothing, and take communion once a year. Lenin and Stalin prescribed atheism, discipline on the factory floor, and reverence for the party and backed them up with terror and cradle-tograve indoctrination. Yeltsin had no stomach for interventions in matters of manners and morals and would continue the trend under perestroika away from state controls over the individual.