In this scene, Yeltsin beheld only the apparition of mob rule. “I had visions of the ghost of October—of the pogroms, disorder, looting, constant rallies, and anarchy with which that great revolution began. One wave of the hand, one signature, would have turned August 1991 into October 1917. But I did not do that, and I have no regrets.” In Soviet history, the mob was succeeded by the party, which divided society into “the clean and the unclean,” he says, and tried to build its new world on the backs of the unclean. Yeltsin in government did not want to sort people or to commandeer the material gains so laboriously accumulated under communist rule. “I saw continuity between the society of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period and the new Russia. It did not enter into my plans to smash and bust up everything as the Bolsheviks did.”39
The therapeutic take on the post-communist transition and rejection of revolutionism favored another choice—to soft-pedal the retributive side of the change of regime. Yeltsin knew as well as anyone that there was much in the communist past to atone for. In his writings and speeches as president, he decried forced collectivization, the Stalin terror and purges, and the Gulag, as most members of the late Soviet elite had done in the Gorbachev years. Gorbachev in December 1991 gave him the CPSU general secretary’s archive, housing the most sensitive papers from the Soviet era. The presidential archive, as it was renamed, threw up new disclosures about atrocities, and some of these he found deflating. Yeltsin was dumbstruck, says head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, at news that Lenin had ordered the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, and that was only one example.40
Yeltsin in his first year in the Kremlin made frequent foreign policy–related use of the archives. In Washington in June 1992, he promised the U.S. Congress information about prisoners of war who might have ended up in Russia after the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Representatives of a Russian-American commission set off to explore the labor camps at Pechora in the northern Urals. “Beamed to television sets around the world, Yeltsin’s remarks and the Pechora jaunt served their political purpose,” although no actual American prisoners or records of them having been there were found.41 Vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, the Yeltsin government “proved far more willing to re-evaluate and condemn controversial episodes” in Soviet relations with these countries than Gorbachev had been.42 Gorbachev had disavowed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia but never the 1956 intervention in Hungary. In November 1992 Yeltsin handed over to the post-communist government in Budapest a collection of secret materials on 1956, which were later published in Hungarian translation. That same autumn, Rudol’f Pikhoya, the new head of the Russian Archives Committee (and husband of Lyudmila Pikhoya), traveled on Yeltsin’s behalf to Warsaw to present the Polish president, Lech Wałesa, with copies of KGB and CPSU files proving culpability at the highest levels in the NKVD’s execution of more than 20,000 army officers and other Polish captives near Katyn, Russia, in 1940—files Gorbachev knew of but said did not exist. Yeltsin received journalists from Poland in the Kremlin and termed the shootings “a premeditated and depraved mass murder” at the instigation of “the party of the Bolsheviks.” In a visit to Warsaw in August 1993, he went to the city’s military cemetery, “knelt before a Polish priest, and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had laid at the foot of the Katyn cross.”43 Yeltsin also provided to Wałesa the dossier Moscow kept on him when he was leader of the Solidarity labor movement in the 1980s. Similar information was released about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and wartime saver of Hungarian Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, and the Soviet air force’s shooting down of a Korean jetliner in the Far East in 1983.
Within Russia, Yeltsin approached questions of history gingerly. The monstrosity of the Stalinist repressions, he believed, raised concern that rummaging through the files on individuals and abused groups would be injurious to political and social peace. Russians had held back from recrimination and revenge, he told a group of news reporters in July 1992: “And how hard it has been to hold back. . . . Some people were saying, Let us dig away. But, you know, digging things up on the 15 or 20 million who suffered, plus their families, would make society boil with rage.”44 That it might have had the cathartic and prophylactic effect it did in post-communist Eastern Europe was always secondary in Yeltsin’s thinking to its destabilizing potential.45
Nonetheless, Yeltsin after 1991 did favor the dissemination of knowledge and the righting of wrongs, case by case. Researchers, Russian and foreign, had unexampled access during his presidency to archival information, excepting only top-secret troves such as those of the presidency and security services.46 Books, memoirs, and documentary films probed the past, and Russian historians rejoined the international scholarly community. General Dmitrii Volkogonov, an orthodox communist turned reformer who served as an aide to Yeltsin until his death in 1995, sprang many materials loose and traced the inhumanity of Soviet communism not to Stalin but to its initiator, Lenin. Yeltsin saw Volkogonov “as a military version of himself—a product and a servant of the old system who had seen the light and was now combating the dark forces of the past.”47 After adoption of a legal framework in October 1991, Yeltsin appointed Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Central Committee secretary who led a CPSU committee on the depredations of the Stalin period, to chair a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Some 4.5 million Russians were exonerated over the next ten years, 92 percent of them posthumously. They included kulaks, priests (several hundred thousand of whom were shot or died in captivity), military men, dissidents, and wartime prisoners of the Germans who were sent to Siberia in 1945, some of them sentenced under nonpolitical articles of the criminal code. Yeltsin, in Yakovlev’s recollection, “actively supported” his work and signed directives on opening up records and clearing individuals’ names prepared for him by the commission. “Of all the requests I brought to him, I do not remember one that he disputed.”48
What Yeltsin was not prepared for was to come to terms with the communist legacy on a more emblematic level. Some in the dissident counterculture advocated a Nuremberg-type tribunal for surviving malfeasants. But a model for Nazi war criminals in the 1940s was a poor fit with Russian circumstances in the 1990s, since it was predicated on military defeat and the administration of the tribunal, and implementation of its verdicts, by foreign occupiers.49 In 1992 a group of communists put the Yeltsin government on trial by questioning the constitutionality of the decrees of August and November 1991 that outlawed the CPSU and its Russian offshoot. Sergei Shakhrai represented the government in six months of Constitutional Court hearings, filing thirty-six volumes of evidence to the effect that the ruling party had been so intertwined with the Soviet state and its repressive apparatus that it was undeserving of protection in Russia’s democracy. On November 30 a panel of the court—all thirteen members of which had been members of the CPSU—rendered a Solomonic verdict that confirmed the legality of Yeltsin’s disassembly of the structures of the old party but said there must be no persecution of individual communists and they must be free to organize a new party if they so wished.50 A Communist Party of the Russian Federation was established in February 1993 and was to play a significant part in the politics of the decade.