Immediate responses to Boris Yeltsin’s passing in 2007 are illustrative. The day of his funeral, KPRF deputies refused to stand for a minute of silence in the Duma. One of them joked bitterly that a stake of ash wood should be hammered into his grave, as if he were a vampire. The communists were in no doubt that Yeltsin’s influence had been overpowering. The source of their fury was the sentiment that communism’s and the Soviet Union’s demise was a crime for which he ought to be condemned.1
It would have done Yeltsin’s heart good to hear Anatolii Chubais, his associate in many projects, reach for precedents: “If you try to understand who in the history of Russia measures up to Boris Nikolayevich in the sum of what he did, perhaps [you would look to] Peter the Great. Or maybe it would be Lenin and Stalin combined, only each of them had a minus sign and [Yeltsin] had a plus sign.”2 Chubais thus rated Yeltsin high on both the empirical and the normative scales.
At the memorial banquet in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin preferred in his eulogy to link Yeltsin’s life with freedom: “It is the rare person who is given the destiny to become free himself and at the same time to carry millions along behind him, and to inspire truly historic changes in his homeland and transform the world.”3 Putin’s eloquent words make you wonder what he meant by freedom, given his labors since 1999 to retrench the liberties Yeltsin had helped install. One suspects they were propaganda for his approach no less than a heartfelt attempt to honor Yeltsin.
For one more assessment, we may turn to Viktor Shenderovich, the head writer of Kukly, the television satire that tirelessly parodied Yeltsin from 1994 to 1999. His tribute was emotional and poetic. Yeltsin, Shenderovich wrote, did many things right and many things wrong, but he apologized for his mistakes at the end of the day and he surrendered power, as no tsar or general secretary had ever done. The sincerity of his confession mitigated the mistakes. “He asked our forgiveness—so let’s forgive him!” Shenderovich’s Yeltsin was, quite like the Yeltsin of this volume, a paradox:
He was someone out of [the nineteenth-century writers Alexander] Ostrovsky and [Nikolai] Leskov, with [Mikhail] Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoevsky thrown in. He was large-scale, authentic, perpetually breaking out of bounds, not susceptible to simple description. Everything he did, he did himself. His victories and his disasters were all in his own hand and were a match for his personality—enormous…. He had character enough for a whole army division. Fate broke itself against this flint many times. But he would not have been Russian if he was not capable of self-destruction. And he never would have been first secretary of the Sverdlovsk obkom of the CPSU if he did not know how to step all over people. He was of one bone and one flesh with the nomenklatura and of one bone and one flesh with the people.
On the benevolent side, Shenderovich offered a selective comparison with Yeltsin’s handpicked successor. In the days Yeltsin came under fire for his missteps, he tolerated the flak. Putin, whose subordinates had Kukly yanked from the airwaves in 2002, did not, and therein lay a difference that gave “some basis for talking about the scope of [Yeltsin’s] personality.”4
If assessments of a historical figure, especially on the normative plane, often diverge, attempts to come to closure by appealing to the person himself or to the court of public opinion are unlikely to be satisfactory. Out of power, Yeltsin, in this instance, simultaneously stood by his record and conceded some veracity to the charge that he failed to bring about the speedy improvement he had promised. While still in office, he could display a sense of humor about the partial and discordant results he was getting. At a Kremlin luncheon in the mid-1990s, John Major asked him to describe the state of Russia in one word. “Good,” Yeltsin said. Major was flabbergasted, since he had the impression the place was going to the dogs. The Briton next asked him to give his diagnosis in two words. “Not good,” Yeltsin replied drolly.5
The populace, who in Yeltsin’s second term and into his retirement years were inclined to appraise him unkindly, have drifted toward a similar ambivalence. In April 2000 the Public Opinion Foundation asked a representative sample of voting-age adults whether Yeltsin had played a positive or negative role in Russian history. Only 18 percent saw him in a positive light, while 68 percent were negative and 14 percent could not answer. Shortly after Yeltsin’s death, the poll was repeated. By this time, favorable and unfavorable readings had equalized, as 40 percent of respondents believed Yeltsin’s contribution was positive, 41 percent saw it as negative, and 19 percent were unable to say. Positive reviews in 2007 were 13 percentage points ahead of negatives among respondents who fully trusted President Putin, presumably reflecting Putin’s gracious send-off as well as Yeltsin having been his patron. The gap was 10 to 12 points among persons thirty-five or younger, university graduates, and residents of the big cities.6 These are kinder results than polls have revealed for the contemporary reputation of Mikhail Gorbachev.7
Soviet communism died not even twenty years ago. Most would agree that ultimate perspective on Yeltsin and his role will be more attainable when a generation or two has passed than it is at present. The best we can do right now is come up with the first, rough draft. I put one forward in full recognition of Yeltsin’s many paradoxes and imperfections. His paradoxes do not rule out a verdict, and his imperfections do not rule out a positive one.
It is helpful in summing up Yeltsin’s record to revisit a thought-provoking treatise about “the hero in history” penned in the 1940s by the philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook discriminated between two types of hero, the “eventful man,” the pale imitation, and the “event-making man,” the hero deserving of the name. Both come along at “forking points of history” that are admissive of alternative solutions to human problems. The eventful man happens to be in the right spot at the right time and commits a trite act that pushes the players down one avenue and not another. The event-making man—Hook adduced as examples Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin—encounters a fork in the road and “also helps, so to speak, to create it.” The event maker goes beyond choosing the one tine of the fork; his qualities of intelligence, will, and temperament boost its odds of success.8
From his entry into the Soviet industrial establishment in the 1950s through to his appointment as Communist Party prefect of the city of Moscow in the 1980s, Yeltsin was either a historically irrelevant man or at very most an eventful man, confined by structures and routines that gave room for innovation only at the margin. The case for him as a hero in history, therefore, is going to be proved or disproved with reference to the event-packed years 1985 to 1999.
How would we know an event-making man if we saw one? Five tests are applicable to Yeltsin or any other candidate.
The first asks whether the leader in question has what Erik Erikson in Gandhi’s Truth called the capacity “to step out of line” and to address the central issues of the day in a fresh way. This happens, as Erikson wrote, only when there is “a confluence [between] a deeply personal need and a national trend,” the product of which, in a certain period of the person’s life, is a “locomotor drivenness” to effect change.9