“Checks and balances” (sderzhki i protivovesy), as the catchphrase went, were built into Yeltsinesque administration from the start, and spanned the bounds between external and internal resistances to purposive change. They would mean that no Kremlin staff and no government, from Gaidar through the premiership of Vladimir Putin in 1999, was homogeneous, and that all of them would present Himalayan challenges of coordination. The president “turned out to have people around him who in terms of their views and approaches would be difficult to call like-minded or brothers-in-arms.”28
Fractious government contributed to the aforesaid arrhythmia of decision making. However, it did not foreclose an underlying persistence of trajectory, a wobbly equilibrium within a broad band of possibilities. It was stabilized by the solar object—Yeltsin—around which all lesser bodies in the system, planetary and asteroidal, spun. To the extent that the country had a defined course in the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin is surely correct to say that within the structures of government its conservator and guarantor was the president:
Yeltsin was the flywheel. He could have said, “Hold it, let’s go back to where we were,” and we would have gone back. His strength was that he understood we had to take this path. . . . How to do it was another matter. But to move a whole gigantic country along—do you understand what that is? Yeltsin never faltered, Yeltsin never got distracted by trifles. . . . He had a very powerful intuition in this respect. He made it through it all and led the country through it all.29
Yeltsin’s subjective resistances to the oversights of reform policy at the micro level were not enough to knock him off his macro course.
Here the vagaries of economic policy in the year or two after the exit of Gaidar are revealing. There was much more continuity substantively, if not stylistically, than Burbulis’s elegy would admit. To take the place of Gaidar as minister of finance and deputy premier, Yeltsin hit upon Boris Fëdorov, who was two years younger than Gaidar and had held the job under Ivan Silayev in 1990. Fëdorov tilted against Viktor Gerashchenko and easy money and made some progress on monetary and fiscal restraint in the spring and fall of 1993, twinning with Gaidar when Yeltsin brought him back into the cabinet as deputy premier in September. These gains have been interpreted as evidence of “how much one forceful individual [Fëdorov] in a key post can accomplish in such a volatile situation,”30 but this disregards the role of a second individual—the Yeltsin who provided Fëdorov with political cover and encouragement. As Fëdorov found his bearings, Yeltsin called him with a tip that Chernomyrdin was preparing a directive on reimposition of curbs on some consumer prices. Fëdorov, with Gaidar’s help, sent Yeltsin a memorandum bashing the proposal as inconsistent with marketization. Yeltsin then invited Fëdorov and the prime minister into his office, gave the table a thump, and told Chernomyrdin that if he brought out such an order it would be countermanded by a presidential decree, which he said was ready in the file folder on his desk—a folder that, known to Fëdorov but not to Chernomyrdin, held one sheet of paper, the Fëdorov memo. Chernomyrdin dropped the plan.31
In January 1994 Gaidar and Fëdorov resigned from the government for a second time, after a parliamentary election in which liberal candidates were outvoted, and Chernomyrdin gave hints of wage and price controls. But in reality he perpetuated Fëdorov’s and Gaidar’s policies in 1994 and 1995 and took them further by developing a bond market for government debt. The authors of The Yeltsin Epoch, who hold no brief for Chernomyrdin, write of his economic record that, “with less gusto but more reliance on common sense and Russian conditions, [he] basically continued what Gaidar had begun” in 1991–92.32 This happened not because of Chernomyrdin’s priors but because he, like Yeltsin, was learning from changing conditions and because he worked for Yeltsin.
In the final analysis, changing Russia was for Yeltsin about Russians practicing individual self-reliance and collective self-determination and healing themselves as both autonomous and social creatures. The prime service the leader could provide was to loosen the corset of constraints and give them the latitude to think and act without fear of government, of a self-abnegating doctrine, or of one another: “Our ideal is not equality in poverty, self-denial, and envy. We are for people having greater chances to take the bull by the horns, earn good money, and improve their lives.”33
A corollary to this individualist and restorative idiom was another resistance to radicalism: antipathy to couching social reconstruction as intergroup or interclass warfare, which was how the Bolsheviks had conceived of their cause. And that antipathy deterred Yeltsin from expounding the changes he made as truly revolutionary changes.
When on the Gorbachev team from 1985 to 1987, he disagreed with the general secretary’s description of intrasystemic perestroika as a revolution, since Gorbachev was moving too slowly to warrant it. “Revolution” and “revolutionary” then mostly washed out of Yeltsin’s vocabulary.34 Partly this was a tactic to reassure supporters who did not want change to get out of hand. He was alert, as he said in the 1991 election campaign, to the need “not to scare people, since many are afraid of the destruction of that which exists.”35 As president, Yeltsin migrated to the position that he had done Russia a service by shielding it from a revolution. He preferred the emollients “radical reforms,” “democratic reconstruction,” “reformist breakthrough,” or, if revolutionary verbiage could not be helped, “quiet revolution” (tikhaya revolyutsiya).36
Yeltsin leaned against himself since he was driven to conclude that Russia was susceptible to social upheaval and that any recurrence of the nihilism of the Bolshevik Revolution would be fatal to the country. This is how he phrased it in a speech marking the anniversary of the 1991 coup:
After the putsch, Russia was in a quandary. The situation was again pushing the country toward revolution. Then, as now, I firmly believed that such a course would be a tremendous political mistake and would be Russia’s undoing.
All too well do our people know what a revolution is, how great are its temptations, and how tragic its results. Under Russian conditions, revolution would spin out of control and bring forth colossal antagonisms and conflicts. And then once again we would hear, as Mayakovsky said [in 1918], “You have the floor, comrade Mauser”—only now it would be not a Mauser but a machine gun. Once the storm was unleashed, no one in the country or the world could stop it. . . .
We have chosen the way of reforms and not of revolutionary jolts. Ours is the way of peaceful changes under the control of the state and the president. I consider this our common victory.37
To cast change as going forward under the president’s control was to cast him in the part of brakeman and regulator—or “arbitrator,” as Burbulis put it—as much as locomotive.
As he often did in his memoirs, Yeltsin in Notes of a President identified a unique moment when the idea jelled: when he observed Muscovites meting out rough justice in 1991. On the afternoon of Thursday, August 22, he caught a glimpse of the citizens milling around the Central Committee area on Old Square. In a carnival spirit, they broke windows and would have overrun the gates if policemen sent by Mayor Popov had not blocked them. Later that day, the crowd, numbering several tens of thousands, swarmed to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and daubed swastikas and graffiti on the walls; the staff inside had armed themselves and blocked the entranceways and corridors. It was under searchlights that night, in a scene flashed across the globe, that building cranes overseen by Sergei Stankevich and Aleksandr Muzykantskii brought down the iron statue of the founder of the Soviet terror apparatus, Felix Dzerzhinsky, which had stood in the square since 1958.38