Another formula for de-Sovietizing the state that drew some interest was that of “lustration,” a screening of political institutions for former officers of and collaborators with the communist-era security services such as was done in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.51 Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s adviser on nationality issues in 1991–92, was one of the few Russian politicians to come out for a lustration law. A version of her draft statute would have forbidden former apparatchiks in the CPSU from holding political office or teaching positions for five years. Democratic Russia deputies in March 1992 favored a ban on former members of the CPSU who had not turned in their party cards by August 1991. Yeltsin attended the meeting and, with about half of the delegates, left the hall before the vote was taken.52 Commenting on the approach in 1994, he explicitly linked party and police workers: “The democratic press rebukes me for [the fact that] I preserved the state-security system and did not issue a decree that would debar from work in the state apparatus former officials of the Central Committee of the CPSU, of the party’s obkoms, and some would even say of its raikoms [district committees].”53 Yeltsin could not have been much worried about skeletons in his closet. But he was vexed about the onrush of events possibly getting out of control, and he wanted to keep the substratum of well-trained managers and professionals who, like he, had been part of the Soviet regime. Besides new faces and voices, he wanted “to use in the work of the state experienced implementers and organizers.” Although some old hands from the nomenklatura may have “dressed up as democrats,” he was more irritated by purely political types from the new wave who “generally did not know how to work.”54
Yeltsin could have attempted acts of symbolic rectification. For instance, he could have devised holidays and extravaganzas to display solidarity with opposition to the ancien régime and approval of its collapse. He did make a desultory effort to do so in 1992 when he proclaimed June 12, the anniversary of the 1990 sovereignty declaration, Free Russia Day, a nonworking holiday. He largely passed up the opportunity to make the August anniversary of the 1991 coup a commemorative event. After making speeches on the occasion in 1992 and 1993, in 1994 he decreed that August 22 would be State Flag Day, “but did not explain why the [Russian tricolor] flag was the one piece of August to be enshrined or how the day was meant to be marked,” and declined to make it a nonworking day.55 Another decree in 1994 made December 12, as anniversary of the 1993 constitutional referendum, Constitution Day, a nonworking holiday. Like June 12 and August 22, most Russians greeted it with indifference.
Myth making could also have had a physical aspect, as it does in many societies. Yurii Afanas’ev and Yevgenii Yevtushenko lobbied Yeltsin on behalf of the Memorial Society (which Yeltsin had joined in 1988) to make over the KGB headquarters and prison in Lubyanka Square into a museum. Yakovlev favored the construction of a monument to the casualties of Stalinism in front of the building. In October 1990 the Memorial Society had emplaced there an unsculpted stone from one of the northern camps, but the removal of the Dzerzhinsky statue in 1991 created room for something eye-catching. Yeltsin did not warm to these ideas when approached. Yakovlev, he said afterward, should have “squeezed” the president but did not.56
Yeltsin was gripped, though, by the reconfiguration of Russia’s stellar public space, Red Square. Laid out by Ivan III in the 1490s, it had over the centuries been a place for trade, worship, public gatherings, and executions. The communists made it primarily a parade ground. The square’s western margin was converted after 1917 into a necropolis for revolutionaries and Soviet officials and dignitaries. Since 1924 the corpse of Lenin, embalmed in a secret fluid, had been displayed under quartz glass in a mausoleum—of wood until 1930, in salmon-tinted granite and porphyry after then. In 1941, with the Wehrmacht on the approaches to Moscow, it was evacuated to Tyumen, Siberia; it returned to its place of honor after the war’s end.57 Tens of millions of Soviets and foreigners had lined up to file by Lenin, one of them the young Boris Yeltsin in 1953. To the rear of the mausoleum, the bodies and cremated ashes of Stalin (who had lain beside Lenin in the mausoleum until the 1961 CPSU congress ordered him removed), Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and about four hundred lesser lights lay in and at the foot of the ruddy Kremlin wall. Yeltsin’s friend, the stage director Mark Zakharov, suggested as early as 1989, at the first session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, that the Lenin mummy be put next to his mother at Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg and the mausoleum and tombs be closed down as “a pagan temple” in the heart of the capital. Democratic Russia embraced the idea after the 1991 coup, when Yeltsin, at the zenith of his popularity, could have made the change with ease. He chose not to respond.
In late 1993, after he defeated the parliamentary opposition, Yeltsin swung to support of the Red Square plan, which resembled reburials in certain other post-communist states.58 He removed Sentry Post No. 1, the goose-stepping police honor guard, from the crypt on October 5 (in 1997, it was reinstated at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on another side of the Kremlin), closed the adjacent Lenin Museum, and decided in principle to move Lenin and the others to the graveyard of the Novodevichii Convent in Moscow—the very place Yeltsin would be buried in 2007. In the coming months, he had a section surveyed at Novodevichii, corresponded through his aide Georgii Satarov with family members, and commissioned public opinion polls. The relatives of foreigners buried in the square—including the only American, the Harvard man and revolutionary John Reed, interred there in 1920—were also approached. Distracted by other problems, though, Yeltsin mothballed the plan. He contented himself for the moment with small acts of de-Leninization—taking down a two-ton Lenin statue in the Kremlin garden and carting Lenin’s office in Building No. 1 to Gorki, a Moscow exurb.59
With Lenin, 1917, and the building of communism no longer befitting sources of legitimacy, Yeltsin reinstated what he thought the best alternative—imagery of pre-Soviet Russia. On November 30, 1993, he gave official standing to a coat of arms featuring the double-headed eagle of Byzantium and Muscovy. The white, blue, and red Russian flag, originally brought in by Peter the Great as the empire’s trade banner but flown by the Romanovs as the state flag from 1883 to 1917, had been in use again from August 1991; a Yeltsin decree made it official on December 11, 1993. The white on top was said to stand for peace and purity, the blue in the middle for steadiness and honor, and the red at the bottom for love and generosity. That same day Yeltsin instituted the “Patriotic Song” by Mikhail Glinka (1804–57) as national anthem, replacing the “Hymn of the USSR” dating from 1944.60 Beginning with Hero of the Soviet Union, which was replaced by Hero of the Russian Federation in March 1992, he Russified most Soviet awards and medals. Over the years, he also created new honors and brought back some tsarist-period blazonry. By the end of the 1990s, the Russian Federation had as many state awards as the USSR had had. The recommendations were “my favorite documents.”61
The Kremlin fortress, venerated by Yeltsin as a monument to Russian statehood, received special attention. In late 1992 his office had Boris Ioganson’s socialist realist Lenin’s Speech at the Third Congress of the Komsomol, which had hung over the main staircase of the Grand Kremlin Palace since the 1950s, taken down. It was replaced by a panoramic painting of medieval Russian warriors under Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod fighting on ice against the Teutonic Knights in 1242. The title of the canvas, by Sergei Prisekin, is Whosoever Shall Come to Us with the Sword Shall Perish by the Sword.62 This was but a foretaste: Undeterred by economic stringency, Yeltsin authorized the spending of a king’s ransom on reconditioning the main edifices of state on the Kremlin squares.63 There is a tale making the rounds that he came to the decision after a fireplace in the Green Sitting Room of the Grand Palace disgorged smoke during Bill Clinton’s first presidential visit in January 1994.64 But Yeltsin had signed the first directive about renovations in March 1993, and the project, once started, went on for most of his two terms.