Soon [on May 23] Anatolii Kvashnin was appointed chief of the General Staff. And Yeltsin was to work well with the new defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, and always respected him greatly.47
Yeltsin had evidently all but made up his mind to dismiss Rodionov before the meeting. The flow of it confirmed his decision and then had unexpected knock-on effects in the General Staff.48
Out of uniform, Rodionov turned to forming a lobby organization for retired officers; in 1999 he was elected to the Duma on the KPRF ticket. Like Lebed and Ryurikov, he may have had reasons to feel abused on the substance of policy, and he and Samsonov (and the poor Chechevatov) had more reason than the others to dislike the way they were disciplined.49 All, however, had brought this penalty on their own heads by misreading Yeltsin and poaching on presidential turf. As the saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The cat was back from limbo, though not for too long.
Right after his second-round victory over Gennadii Zyuganov, Yeltsin tested the turbid waters of cultural and symbolic politics. Speaking laboredly at a reception for several hundred campaign workers on July 12, 1996, and presenting them with wristwatches as souvenirs, Sverdlovsk-style, he thanked them for their assistance and asked them not to twiddle their thumbs now that the election had been won. The new Russia, he said, in contradistinction to the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, lacked a “national idea” or “national ideology,” “and that is too bad.” He asked them to give it some thought and promised to ask for a report by one year later, saying it would come in handy then or when his successor was elected in 2000.50 Yeltsin appointed an advisory committee chaired by his Kremlin assistant for political affairs, Georgii Satarov, and the government newspaper Rossiiskaya gazeta offered 10 million rubles (about $2,000) to the reader who produced the best essay on the topic, in seven pages or less.
The project fizzled on the launching pad. Satarov denied that Yeltsin meant to enact some Soviet-type ruling doctrine. No, what was being proposed was a consensual process to discover an idea that already existed in the minds of Russians, as opposed to inflicting one on them: “A national idea cannot be imposed by the state but should come from the bottom up. The president is not saying, ‘I’m going to give you a national idea.’ On the contrary, he is asking, ‘Go out and find it.’”51 Rossiiskaya gazeta made a preliminary award in January 1997 to Gurii Sudakov, a philologist from Vologda province, for an essay on “principles of Russianness,” by which time it was apparent that the exercise would be about navel-gazing and vaporous futurology. The newspaper never did decide on a grand winner and discontinued the essays in mid-1997. To the panel, Satarov commended as a model postwar West Germany, where an economic miracle was complemented by an outlook of “national penitence” after Nazi totalitarianism. Few members agreed, and the group was no better positioned to enunciate a nonexistent societal consensus than Yeltsin or Satarov would have been on his own. On the anniversary of its establishment, Satarov published an anthology of papers of liberal and centrist coloration. He then called it a day, and the commission fell into disuse.52
Yeltsin, knee-high in other concerns, did not weigh in and ignored his one-year target date. It is unlikely he could have salvaged much from the process, since it flew in the face of his own efforts to debunk Marxism-Leninism and of the very concept of “propaganda for the new life.” Intellectual critics of the idea of a national idea sounded like no one more than Boris Yeltsin. “It is intolerable to cultivate and instill in public consciousness something that has not formed spontaneously,” one of them wrote. “The banefulness of such experiments was evidenced by the socialist system,” which had a moral that reminded him of an alcohol-free wedding “where mineral water sits on the table and under the table they are pouring liquor.” Were post-communist Russia to be capable of working out a unifying idea at all, it could not possibly be done in one year or in several, and the hardships of daily life put no one in the mood for trying: “Ideologies come and go, but people always want to eat.”53 Yeltsin’s silence in the face of these strictures tells me that he came to realize he quite agreed with them.
If he felt free to orphan his national-idea initiative, Yeltsin did not wash his hands of myth making and the reckoning with the past. In his first official act after reclaiming statutory powers on November 6, 1996, he signed a decree renaming November 7, the celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the Day of Reconciliation and Accord, and unveiling a Year of Reconciliation to last until the following November. The edict was composed by Kremlin staff under Anatolii Chubais, who was of the belief that the vehement anti-communism of the re-election campaign had to be muzzled and that it was more important to get the KPRF-controlled Duma to approve progressive economic legislation than to refight 1917 or 1991 ad infinitum. Yeltsin supporters who were more interested in political change, like Satarov, were against the renaming but lost the argument.54 The pronouncement might be interpreted as an enhancement of pluralism or, alternatively, “as profoundly uncritical, in the sense that it embraced all perspectives on the past without acknowledging the contradictions inherent in different views.”55 It was, as a matter of fact, a smidgen of both, and Yeltsin’s ambivalence on historical questions continued throughout his second term.
One piece of the past where his views evolved only slowly concerned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the Soviet state. Yeltsin stroked Gorbachev’s name off the guest list for his second inauguration and made it hard for associates to maintain friendly relations with him. The president of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, Askar Akayev, bid welcome to Gorbachev in his capital, Bishkek, and honored him at a public event in July 1997. Yeltsin, a friend since they were deputies in the Soviet congress in 1989–90, refused to shake Akayev’s hand for the next year, asking him at one point, “Askar, how could you?” He did not apologize to Akayev until 2004.56 Yeltsin did relax the hostility some by inviting Gorbachev to attend a number of state functions in 1997, 1998, and 1999, but Gorbachev never accepted.57 When Raisa Gorbacheva took ill and died of leukemia in a German clinic in September 1999, Yeltsin sent condolences and had a government airplane return her body to Moscow for burial. Naina Yeltsina consoled Gorbachev at the graveside service. Boris Yeltsin did not attend.
The second-term Yeltsin did continue to rehabilitate visual markers of pre-Soviet Russia. The biggest architectural project was the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Palace, a building to which few Russians ever gain entry. It was reopened in June 1999. Several blocks away, workmen constructed a carbon copy of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, designed by Konstantin Ton as the largest church in Russia, which Stalin had dynamited in 1931. Yeltsin gave it his approval and laid the keystone, but the moving spirit, and the one to profit politically, was Yurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow.
An issue that would not go away was what to do with the body of Lenin in his shrine on Red Square. Yeltsin’s stance was a reprise of his first-term position. In May 1997 several aides gave him a plan for raising the issue afresh and bringing it to a “revolutionary resolution.” He agreed to the advice and to recast it as an ethical choice, and requested Patriarch Aleksii in a private audience to get the Orthodox hierarchy behind it.58 Aleksii, with some reluctance, spoke out directly and through lesser clergy, pointing out that prisoners had once been executed in Red Square and that it was now being used for rock concerts, and so was unsuitable to be a graveyard. On June 6 Yeltsin poured fat on the fire at a meeting in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. While Lenin and communism were part of the tapestry of Russian history, it was indecent, he said, for any person not to be buried in the ground. That autumn he called for a national referendum to settle the question: “Let the people decide whether to give him a Christian burial or to leave things the way they are.” The president did, though, deviate from the depoliticization line, saying with some relish that the communists would be opposed: “The communists, of course, will fight it. No need to worry, I know all about struggling with them.”59 Polls in 1997 showed Russian popular opinion to be evenly divided, but the numbers fluctuated over the next two years.60 And the intensity of feeling was greater among the enemies of reinterment, who took their cues from the KPRF and from the closest relative of Lenin’s to survive, his niece Olga Ul’yanova.61 Some threatened to use lawsuits, protest, and even violence to prevent the mausoleum from being emptied.