The problem with Yeltsin as tribune of reform was not that he mishandled any one occasion but that the occasions were intermittent. He did not distill his radical reform into a lapidary phrase such as the New Deal or Great Society. He never related in depth how the economic, social, and political facets of the remaking of Russia cohered. He did not care to take on the task himself and, as Sergei Filatov, his chief of staff after Yurii Petrov, noted, “He was very jealous when others did it.”86
Yeltsin’s disinclination to promote Yeltsinism stemmed from cognitive dissonance over didactic speeches and from the conviction that empty promises had jaded the population and tarnished both true-blue Soviet leaders and Gorbachev’s perestroika.87 Verbal economy was appropriate in the early days, as his first press officer, Valentina Lantseva, recalled: “Compared to the verbose . . . Gorbachev, Boris Nikolayevich was closer to the people in his clumsiness [neuklyuzhest’] and bear-like quality [medvezhest’]. He . . . could answer in one word, yes or no. This was very significant to the people.”88 Once the communist regime was dead, though, Russians wanted to be reassured that their sacrifices were not in vain and to be given signposts for the road ahead. These Yeltsin was not the best person to provide. Hearing Marietta Chudakova advise him at a Kremlin meeting in 1994 to tape a televised presentation every two weeks, he clamped his jaw, after the fashion of someone with a toothache.89 Mark Zakharov, who was at the same meeting, warned of a dearth of ideas and information, which could leave the field to political fanatics and charlatans. Yeltsin countered that any systematic marketing plan would be a warmed-over version of totalitarian brainwashing: “What are you suggesting, that we introduce a ministry of propaganda, like the one under [Joseph] Goebbels?”90 In his 1994 and 2000 memoir volumes, Yeltsin defended his aversion to any idea of “shimmering heights that must be scaled.” No bombast was needed. “Propaganda for the new life is superfluous. The new life itself will persuade people that it has become a reality.”91
One part instinct and one part learning from the Soviet past, this was an exercise in throwing out the baby with the bath water. The defense of post-communist reforms was not doomed to excess any more than elimination of the KGB was doomed to unhinge the body politic. Comparative experience teaches that the political bully pulpit has its uses in democracies and not only in tyrannies. In a free polity, loquacity by leaders can go light years to galvanize citizen opinion behind government programs, shape the public sphere, and delimit the range of voices there.92 By selling it short, Yeltsin retarded his ability to make his quiet revolution palatable to the newly enfranchised populace and to enliven the debate about where Russia was headed in the long haul.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Falling Apart, Holding Together
When inducted as national leader, Yeltsin intended to stick to economics and treat the structures of government with benign neglect. In retrospect he described this behavior as a mistake: “I probably erred in choosing the economic front as my principal one and leaving governmental reorganization to endless compromises and political games.” It put the economic program itself at risk, since, “without political backup, the Gaidar reforms were left hanging in midair.”1 He soon reconsidered: In order to use the state for his ends, he had to hold it together, and in a way that gave him and not others the steering power.2
His constitutional options in 1991 were not rosy. An attempt to reorder Russian institutions, at the moment Russia was unscrambling itself from the Soviet Union, was sure to strike many as distracting and incendiary. Yegor Gaidar, for one, was dead set against it. In any such move, Yeltsin would have bumped foreheads with other loci of authority, starting with the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, where his majority was precarious. Even were he somehow to force new parliamentary elections, voters, he admitted later, might not have elected “other, ‘good’ deputies.”3
The Soviet reflex was to consign almost any human problem to an administrative department of government. The liberal approach, flaunted by the youthful reformers and by the Western powers and organizations whose advice Yeltsin sought, posited solutions to lie outside of government. Had he acted strictly in this spirit, he would have chopped the post-communist state and pushed it out of the way of nongovernmental actors. Measured by the size of the bureaucracy, this was not quite obtained, as the workforce in the federal, provincial, and municipal governments drifted up by about 10 percent (from 2,682,000 to 2,934,000) between 1992 and 2000.4 But these figures exclude the host of Soviet factory-level managers who were struck from the rolls during the change to the market. Shock therapy and price decontrol reduced officialdom’s directive and regulatory grip on Russian society. And privatization, from the vouchers of 1992–94 to the loans-for-shares initiative of 1995–97, reduced its monopoly over resources.5 Yeltsin lent support to it at almost every step and believed that when it was over only electric power, atomic energy, the military-industrial complex, and the railroads should be left on the state ledger.6 In loans-for-shares, first authorized by Decree No. 478 on May 11, 1995, the government turned twelve large properties, mostly with high-value petroleum and mineral assets, over to private banks to manage, in return for forgivable loans from the banks. The banks were allowed to run stock auctions in which they themselves could place bids on the shares deposited with them as collateral for the loans. The auctioneer or an affiliated business won every auction of the state shares—a spectacular act of selfdealing. Formal title to them was reassigned a year later.7
The paring in governmental scope, while desirable, raised difficulties. Preeminent among these was the lack of clarity about boundaries between the public and the private realm and about responsibility for seeing to it that the state in its entirety did not go to smithereens. Shifting boundaries meant shifting options for individuals. Consumerism and affluence, forbidden fruit under the communists, were now smiled upon, but the seam between these licit wants and illicit avarice was not well demarcated. The short-range thinking bred by high uncertainty made many officeholders greedy, for feathering one’s nest was one way to hedge against an unascertainable future. As the trenchant Oleg Poptsov noted, “When [authority] is transient and when society is poor and has lost all basis for guarantees, the danger rises a hundredfold that someone will take advantage of power in order to live well after a stay in office.”8
The ambiguity of limits was only the half of it. Emulation of foreign models was the rage in Moscow, and it bled into things political. It could manifest itself in trivialities—such as the electric golf carts purchased for Barvikha-4 after Yeltsin saw George Bush tooling around in one at Camp David in February 1992—but it was not limited to them. Copycat and wishful thinking impelled Yeltsin and his peers toward institutional inventions (a presidency and vice presidency, a constitutional court, and so forth) that often were underspecified and unsynchronized with the surrounding scene. As Yeltsin was to observe mordantly in Notes of a President, “there arose beautiful structures and beautiful titles with nothing behind them.”9 Beneath the surface, the very infrastructure of government was buckling. There was marker after marker of it: a doubling in rates of violent crime, to levels comparable to those in Colombia, Jamaica, and Swaziland; spreading corruption, especially after privatization; porous borders; tax evasion by the business class and a yawning budget deficit; a torn social safety net; and demonetization, the flight from the inflation-devalued ruble into dollars, money surrogates, and barter.10 The army, the crown jewel of Russian governments since Ivan the Terrible, plunged from 2.75 million men under arms in 1992 to a million in 1999; officers and enlisted men huddled in tents after the post–Cold War efflux from Eastern Europe; the pay of a majority of the officer corps was in arrears.11 And the Communist Party, whose hierarchical apparatus and mass membership base had kept the Soviet state intact, was gone.