Writ small, Boris Yeltsin’s workplace was the vaulted, wainscoted office in Building No. 1, handed over to him by Gorbachev in 1991. As a personal touch, he had the desk decorated with a lamp and writing set made of turquoise-hued Urals malachite.2 He described the room in retirement in hushed tones and in the present tense. To the left as he occupies his chair is the console through which he can dial any member of his government on a hotline. The wood surface before him he knows like the back of his hand. If one file folder is awry, “I experience an unaccountable irritation.”3 The shipshape folders, readied before his arrival by his head of chancery, Valerii Semenchenko, are color-coded: In the red ones, to the side of the control panel, lie decrees, letters, and papers that are to be read and signed at once; in the white, in the center, there is lesser correspondence needing his attention; and in the green folders, on the right, he finds laws voted by parliament and requests for clemency.
As Yeltsin’s loving account conveys, his workplace writ large was the executive branch of the state. The white folders, on which he makes a checkmark as he riffles through them, were a porthole:
They contain the entire life of the state—of the state as a vehicle, if you will, with a steering mechanism, an engine, and moving parts. From these white folders, you can understand how the vehicle works, whether the engine knocks, whether the wheels are falling off. They hold documents from various agencies and ministries, all of them awaiting my agreement…. Hidden behind each line is the intricate web of public administration…. The contents of these white folders, out of sight of the public, constitute the inner workings of our gargantuan state.
The green folders captivate him least, since they mostly originate in the legislature. The papers in the red folders, holding draft edicts, are the business end of government:
When a decree comes out of a folder, someone is dismissed or appointed. If it stays in the folder, the decision is shelved. Sometimes several people wait for these decrees and sometimes the whole country…. And [they are] not only about hiring and firing…. One thing I know for certain is that what sits in [these folders] today will be the main event tomorrow…. If a muddleheaded or ill-thought-out decision is found there, something is wrong with the system and with the mechanism for making decisions, and something is wrong inside of me.4
Like so much in Russia after communism, this was a habitat in transition—partly continuous with the past, partly reformed, partly in disrepair. Yeltsin was required by circumstances to devote inordinate effort to keeping his state vital, to ensuring that the wheels did not fall off or the engine freeze up. But he also wanted to steer the vehicle to make his anti-revolutionary revolution. And this was an exercise that stretched him as few others did. The pulverizing effects of the Soviet collapse had made the post-communist state an object to be governed and not only a subject of governance. Yeltsin was a wizard at exerting personal control over the machine. He was less proficient at using it to effect social change.
Yeltsin cadged many particulars of formal institutional design from abroad.5 His model of leadership after communism, however, was a homegrown syncretism of ingredients shaped as much by usage and improvisation as by laws and organization charts. It borrowed from three wells of inspiration.
The first and for Yeltsin the definitive source was his sense of historical mission, which linked up with his success script and expansive sense of self. A presidential form of government, he exclaimed at his first inauguration, had resonance in a country whose populace had always been voiceless. By aggregating political power and personifying it in a freely chosen individual, presidentialism would engender “a voluntary interdependence” between leader and led, as there never was under the tsars or the Communist Party. His election was a wager on reform: “The citizens… have selected not only a personality but the road down which Russia is to go… the road of democracy, reforms, and rebirth of human dignity.”6
When Yeltsin spoke of carrying out the mandate, he frequently dramatized himself in the third person. His October 1991 speech previewing shock therapy is a top-flight example. Russia and its leader, he said, were at a branching point where a choice about trajectory had to be made. “Your president” had already chosen. “I have never sought out easy paths, but I can see with clarity that the coming months will be the most difficult for me. If I have your support and faith, I am ready to travel this road with you to the end.”7 A strong head of state would proceed down the chosen highway in lockstep with his fellow travelers in society. Their support, given in a democratic election, raised him above all other servants of the state and gave him the cape of legitimacy, as it had in his battle with Mikhail Gorbachev and the CPSU.
Some inspiration flowed, counterintuitively, from a second source: Russia’s monarchic heritage. Yeltsin as a reincarnation of the tsar was a recurrent motif in the discourse of the 1990s, as it once was for Stalin.8 Gorbachev, we have seen, attributed to his nemesis the ability “to conduct himself like a tsar,” a knack Gorbachev knew he could not equal. Some scholars have referred to Yeltsin pejoratively as “Tsar Boris” and an “elected monarch” ringed by courtiers and lackeys.9 Some Yeltsin supporters at the time put a positive spin on the royalist argot. Boris Nemtsov, the reformist governor of Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky from 1932 to 1990), who was to move to Moscow in Yeltsin’s second term, was the leading popularizer. He sketched the myth in expansive and flexible strokes:
Yeltsin is a true Russian tsar. That is what he is about, with all the pluses and minuses, with all his recklessness and sprees, with his decisiveness and courage, and the odd time with his bashfulness. Unlike the “bad” Russian tsars, Yeltsin is a “good” Russian tsar and a completely forgiving person. For all that, his physique plays a role: he is such an enormous peasant and from the Urals.
Naturally, all kinds of intrigues wind around him, and many people try to get something for themselves out of their closeness to him. But he is an unselfish person, of that I am certain.
He is a lord of the manor [barin], sure, yet not the kind who bathes in luxury. I think luxury is of little appeal to him. He is the tsar, and first and last he feels responsibility for what is going on. He takes to heart, though very much in his peculiar way, goings-on in the country.
Nemtsov recalled Yeltsin’s pyrotechnics in August 1991, which he witnessed from the plaza of the Russian White House: “He leaped up on the tank. Everyone held him in honor and was covered in goose pimples. ‘This is the kind of tsar we have [they thought], a president who is afraid of nothing.’” Nemtsov went on to describe a Yeltsin excursion to Nizhnii Novgorod in early 1992, when Nemtsov was presidential envoy. He and the city mayor were “spellbound” as Yeltsin castigated a factory manager for the inedible food in the workers’ canteen and then told Nemtsov to fire the director of a grocery store for overpricing butter—the destatization of retail prices on January 2, by presidential rescript, notwithstanding. “It all brought to mind the actions of a tsar who puts things in order when he drops in on one of his patrimonial estates.”10
Nemtsov was cavalier in his historiography: No factual tsar hailed from a peasant hut or the Urals. If utterances like his had little to offer as doctrine, they did conform to canonical themes in Russian political culture. In particular, they consorted with the timeless idea of the nation’s leader as a father figure both authoritative and possessing the common touch. Yeltsin as president looked the part, up to a point. Like a storybook tsar, he asserted the right, when justice and raison d’état prescribed, to buck parchment rules (by pardoning reprobates), bureaucratic formalities (by short-circuiting the chain of command), and precedent (by countermanding decrees he had authored). With citizens and midlevel officials, his bearing was regal—posture straight, chin held high, gestures spare, manner of speech magisterial.11