Inside the machinery of Russian government, Yeltsin was faced with an enfeeblement of discipline and accountability, as comes out in his anecdote about two reformist members of his first cabinet. Eduard Dneprov, the education minister put into office in 1990, wanted curriculum changes in the schools. He was able to implement some, having had “the luck to work things out under the old regime, when people still listened to the bosses.” Academician Andrei Vorob’ëv was commissioned minister of health in late 1991, and made no headway with his advocacy of a role for private physicians and clinics: “Vorob’ëv’s system immediately fell into disorganization. No one understood it or wanted to do a thing about it for one reason only—the staff of the ministry had simply ceased to function.”12 For Yeltsin the mutineer, remember, being a steely “boss for the bosses” had been a selling point. Now the compliance of bosses and underbosses was a question mark.
Boris Yeltsin’s predicament had an international dimension. Governments the length and breadth of Eurasia faced problems of staggering complexity. In fourteen of the fifteen post-Soviet capitals, there was the silver lining of freedom from foreign—Russian—domination. It was a unity elixir and bought reformers a blame-free startup period. In Moscow, there was no silver lining. The Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Georgians had attained statehood and membership in the global community. What Yeltsin and the Russians got was less of what they had before—a diminished state struggling to maintain regional influence, let alone the USSR’s say in global affairs. About three in four Russian citizens in 1992 accepted the expiration of the Soviet Union as an accomplished fact; two in three were sorry that it had happened. 13 Once the divorce was final, little about it redounded to the political benefit of Yeltsin. “I was convinced,” he testifies, “that Russia had to rid itself of its imperial mission.” Once nationalized, it “needed a stronger, tougher . . . policy in order not to lose its significance and authority altogether.” Greater authority, however, did not come to pass in the post-Soviet space. Yeltsin himself bewailed the hole in the heart of the deposed ruling nation: “We [Russians] seem almost to be embarrassed by the fact that we are so big and incoherent, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We are tortured by a certain feeling of emptiness.”14 If the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union made the United States the solitary superpower, it made Russia the solitary ex-superpower. One had a superiority complex, the other an inferiority complex for which no curative was offered.
Yeltsin was not overdrawing when he said “the specter of discord and civil war” hung over Russia and the ex-USSR in the first half of the 1990s.15 Gorbachev rates praise for self-restraint and the prevention of a bloodletting. Yeltsin deserves more and has not always received it. The celerity of the parting of the ways after Belovezh’e was preferable many times over to an endeavor to salvage the union state through violence. At home, Yeltsin dampened Russian revanchism, jingoism, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In the “Near Abroad,” he reached understandings with the majority of the non-Russian fourteen, repatriated troops, did not employ ethnic Russians as a fifth column, and helped float their economies by supplying oil and gas at discounted prices. The most combustive of the potential altercations in the region involved lands over the Russian frontier and populated mostly by ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, a list that for some nationalists included northern Kazakhstan, Trans-Dniester in Moldova, and the Donbass, Sevastopol and all of the Crimean peninsula, and Odessa area in Ukraine. Yeltsin never pressed claims to these territories. Russia’s military involvement as a peacekeeper in three fragile states (Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan) shaded over into tampering and patronage of pro-Moscow districts, but these were the aberrations that proved the rule.
Let us not forget Yugoslavia, communism’s other multiethnic federation, in those same years. It was a school picnic compared to a possible conflagration in the middle of Eurasia, where the Russians would have been cast as the xenophobic and irredentist Serbs and Yeltsin as Slobodan Milošević. The Russians outnumber the Serbs fifteen to one, and a war of Russians against non-Russians in the former Soviet Union, or of all against all, would have been fought on territory larger than the South American continent and housing millions of soldiers, trainloads of atomic arms (many of them not initially under Moscow’s control),16 and a thousand tons of fissile material. Yeltsin’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, Andrei Kozyrev, knew the Balkans well and often hashed over with him a Yugoslav scenario for Russia. Gaidar, who had lived in Belgrade as a boy and graduated from secondary school there, had similar conversations with the president.17 The range of comparisons would include partitions and intercommunal wars in the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and Indochina. Without hyperbole, the historian Stephen Kotkin underlines what Yeltsin avoided: “The decolonization of Western Europe’s overseas possessions had been drawn out and bloody. The Soviet land empire . . . could have unleashed a far nastier bloodbath, even an end to the world” through thermonuclear holocaust.18
For diplomacy with the world powers, the man from Sverdlovsk was at first woefully unprepared. Kozyrev shopped around in Washington and West European capitals the message that their leaders should personalize their relations with him and appeal to his better instincts.19 Yeltsin took to addressing his opposite numbers by their first names, often prefaced by “my friend” (my friend George, my friend Bill, my friend Helmut), no easy thing for a stolid Russian male. A mutual admiration society with Robert S. Strauss, the American ambassador to Moscow in 1991–92, helped groom him for the relationship with the United States.20 Yeltsin was a quick study. On his first official visit to Washington, D.C., he announced in Reaganesque words to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 17, 1992, that Russia “has made its final choice in favor of a civilized way of life, common sense, and universal human heritage. . . . Communism has no human face. Freedom and communism are incompatible.” Referring to an agreement he and Bush had just concluded to trim nuclear arms by the year 2000, Yeltsin pointedly told Americans that it was in the West’s as well as Russia’s interest for his Great Leap Outward to succeed: “Today the freedom of America is being upheld in Russia. Should the reforms fail, it will cost hundreds of billions” to mop up.21
The hope for a deep partnership with Western governments and institutions, and for buttressing the post-communist Russian state from without, proved evanescent. In 1991–92, as price reform bit and living standards sank, never did the United States, the European Union, or the G-7 really consider forgiveness of Russia’s foreign debt—a liability, incurred by the regime the reformers were trying to put behind, whose impact has been compared to that of World War I reparations on Weimar Germany.22 The U.S. Freedom Support Act, passed in October 1992, earmarked about $400 million for technical and humanitarian assistance to all the post-Soviet countries, a drop in the bucket of need if there ever was one. Under the Clinton administration, American bilateral assistance came to $2,580,500,000. Two-thirds of those dollars were spent in 1994, and Russia’s slice of the pie, with no ethnic lobby to fight for it, slouched from more than 60 percent in 1994 to less than 20 percent in 1999.23 From 1993 to 1999, American aid would come to $2.50 annually per Russian man, woman, and child. It totaled about 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget in the year 1996, or one-quarter of the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier—at a time when the evisceration of the Soviet threat let the United States draw down military manpower by 30 percent—and the money flowed primarily to American contractors, not to Russians or Russian organizations. Multilateral assistance siphoned through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the IMF, which Russia joined in June 1992) was larger in volume, yet was belated and took the form of repayable loans. “In spite of requests for support from radical reformers of whose goals it could only approve . . . the Fund was slow in giving meager support on stringent terms.”24 Not inaccurately, Bill Clinton was to adjudge the effort as “a forty-watt bulb in a damned big darkness.”25 In the security sphere, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (sponsored by Democratic senator Sam Nunn and Republican senator Richard Lugar) funded the decommissioning of nuclear arsenals in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and enhanced the safety of all. In Yeltsin’s and Russia’s estimation, and in mine, this gain paled before the loss caused by the policy of mechanically expanding the NATO military alliance eastward to take in former republics and dependencies of the USSR but not Russia itself.