A facile parallel with Bolshevism would overrate the mercilessness and consistency of Yeltsin’s conduct over the full course of his presidency. Overrigorous design of the reforms, while sometimes a factor, was to be far from the only cause of the agonies associated with them. Policies that prolonged the needed changes, lacked cohesion, and spared the cost did as much harm, especially but not exclusively in the economic area.89 As Reddaway and Glinski note—and as flies in the face of the postulate of messianism—Yeltsin and successive subleaders to him adjusted their economic and other policies as they proceeded and seldom behaved as though they had a stepby-step scheme: “Their ruling passion was political pragmatism.”90
Pragmatism in policy generated neither mere opportunism nor an even flow of decisions. Instead, the reality in the Russia Yeltsin remade was a perplexing blend of types. Reform would be a long footslog—down a winding road, against a headwind. Its political history was studded with acts of statesmanship but also with wasted chances and spells of inaction. As will become apparent in subsequent chapters, when this discombobulated country forged ahead, as it surely did on Yeltsin’s watch, it was in fits and starts and not in a steady beat. So it went because of rearing uncertainty, institutional and coalitional politics, and what Oleg Poptsov called “swings in the social temperature.” And so it went because of the person whose hand was at the tiller. “Political arrhythmia,” as Poptsov colorfully put it, was to be a lasting ingredient of Yeltsin’s style as national leader.91
CHAPTER TEN
Resistances
Conscious beliefs and intuitions planted Yeltsin’s feet on the “civilized path” of radical reformation. They came forth intermingled from disenchantment with communism and a search for a better future. One has to wonder in wide angle why this effort accomplished what it did and why it did not accomplish more, and why not less painfully.
Post-communism as a milieu ought to have offered scope for statecraft. Above, a commanding leader promised fundamental change and was liberated from the roles and rules of the now-vanished civilization of the USSR. In so protean a medium, “The room for individual impact—that is, the impact of such things as intelligence, emotions, personality, aggressiveness, skill, timing, connections, and ambitions—is enormous.”1 Yeltsin had all these qualities, from brainpower to timing to ambition. Below, in a time of exigency, a “rescue-hungry people” might have been receptive to charismatic inspiration and guidance.2 The angst attendant upon the decease of a tyranny, an empire, or a failed social project—and the Soviet Union was all three—should have attracted the populace to a person who acted with dispatch, calmed nerves, and said he knew of a new way. Russia after the convulsions of 1985 to 1991 looked ripe for a season of “extraordinary politics” in which claimants would temper their ordinary demands and think in terms of the common good.3 The man in the best position to identify the common good and act as rescuer was Boris Yeltsin.
As the post-Soviet reforms got under way, this was the uplifting prospect before him and his colleagues. They faced, Yegor Gaidar has written, incalculable risks but also a freedom of maneuver few governments ever have. The Communist Party, its ideology, and its organizational transmission belts were gone. The army, the KGB, and the military-industrial and agricultural lobbies were paralytic, some of their chiefs moldering in prison for their participation in the August coup. Many Russians who had qualms about Western models held their fire: They were “interested in the most ungrateful [tasks] being undertaken by someone else’s hand” so that they could later profit at the reformers’ expense.4
The scenario of a tabula rasa hanging there, waiting for change to be written on it, was overdone from the beginning. It faded in Yeltsin’s first term—in fact, in the initial months of his first term—as resistances to change and to the agents of change multiplied. While no one resistance was an absolute, together they pushed Russia toward compromise though not desertion of the Great Leap Outward. They were twofold: external to Yeltsin, that is, located in his environment of operations; and internal, or dictated by his preferences and his perceptions of where he and Russia stood.
Exogenous constraints started with the fact that Yeltsin was nowhere near the sole winner from the dismemberment of communist authoritarianism. The Soviet collapse unshackled and energized actors who had come out of the woodwork with him and now clamored for their share of the spoils. As standard procedures were overwhelmed, the leader also had trouble employing institutional resources to attain his goals. The consummate resource for any politician in government is the state. In Yeltsin’s Russia, indiscipline, uncertainty, and decolonization demoralized and corrupted this resource and converted quotidian chores into an ordeal. The irony was superb. As with transitional leaders in many places and times, it dawned on Yeltsin that “the fluidity of the situation both empowers and weakens individuals,” hampering satisfaction of the very aspirations the environment has stirred up.5
Up to the 1991 watershed, Yeltsin as a communist heretic and then an anti-communist insurgent held a card none of his rivals had—the trust and affection of the powerless. This is not to say they were with him unanimously or unreservedly. In July of that year, the best-known polling organization in the Soviet Union, Yurii Levada’s VTsIOM (Center for the Study of Public Opinion), plumbed societal attitudes toward him. Confidence in Yeltsin, the survey showed, was unevenly distributed and was for millions contingent on other considerations. Twenty-nine percent of the interviewees were emotive supporters (“I fully support Yeltsin’s views and positions”), while another 11 percent assented “as long as he is leader of the democratic forces” in the country. This core constituency of 40 percent was well short of a majority and nearly 20 percentage points less than his vote total in the June presidential election. Eleven percent of Russians gave Yeltsin the most unfavorable evaluations (they were not supporters of his or would support anyone other than him). Many more than opposed him outright, and almost as many as supported him, gave ambivalent answers. They either were disappointed former aficionados (7 percent), found him unappealing but hopefully “useful to Russia” in the future (16 percent), or supported him “due to the absence of other worthy political figures” (15 percent). Yeltsin had climbed the heights of power only with the consent of a host of crosspressured citizens.6
Later studies using the same method traced a hemorrhaging of support. By March 1992, barely two months into his market reforms, the VTsIOM respondents placing Yeltsin in the topmost category had been sliced to 11 percent and his core constituency to 20 percent, or half what it was in July 1991. Those solidly against him were up to 18 percent, and those voicing ambivalence were now a plurality of 37 percent. By January 1993, only 5 percent of Russians were fully with him, 11 percent gave him qualified support, 22 percent were opposed, and a majority, 51 percent, were on the fence.7