Yeltsin stayed in line well into middle age. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, stirred by inner testing and rebellion scripts and by changes in the social environment, he broke stride and linked his personal journey to larger trends. In so doing, Yeltsin turned political disgrace into vindication and parlayed vindication into political realignment and victory. His gift was not originality or profundity of thought but the ability to translate abstractions into the idiom of ordinary people. From knee-jerk populism he moved to adopt a program for de-monopolization through democratization, market reform, and territorial devolution that addressed main issues of the day, and in such a way as to stay a half-step ahead of his rivals.10 It earned him the opportunity to preside over the birth of a nation and an attempt to construct a bold new future for it.
A second criterion for identifying an event-making man is the faculty of “political judgment,” as Isaiah Berlin succinctly labeled it. Political judgment has to do with grasping a political situation in its totality, synthesizing the whole out of discrete facts and imponderables, and discriminating “what matters from the rest.” Berlin drew an analogy with the motorist coming up to a rickety-looking bridge. The driver with road judgment, without ever learning about how to engineer piers, struts, or ties, senses through a “semi-instinctive skill” whether or not the bridge will bear the weight of his vehicle.11 In public affairs, it takes a leader of political judgment to see Hook’s fork in the road for what it is, and not to overlook or misconstrue it.
Yeltsin incontrovertibly possessed political judgment. It was based primarily on the instinctive aptitude that Berlin put accent on. Intuition, not grand theory, whispered in his ear in 1986–87 that Gorbachev’s gradualist program was falling short. We saw in Chapter 8 that Gorbachev concluded about Yeltsin’s feel for the situation and for his commanding role in it that “A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar.” Gorbachev could not take charge with that kind of force; Yeltsin could and did. An inner voice led him to conclude in 1991–92 that a Great Leap Outward was indispensable to compel the new Russia into step with a rapidly evolving world. It convinced him to go for the brass ring in the constitutional conflict of 1992–93 and to throw himself into the presidential race of 1996. After re-election and medical intervention, it led him to try to reform the reforms and, when that did not work, to try to salvage them. While nothing like infallible, Yeltsin’s political judgment repeatedly showed itself to be superior to that of his adversaries, from Gorbachev through Ruslan Khasbulatov, Gennadii Zyuganov, and Yurii Luzhkov.
The third test to pose of a potentially great leader is to see if he demonstrates a talent for identifying and tapping into new sources of political power. For example, Robert Caro in his epic study of Lyndon Johnson finds that as majority leader of the U.S. Senate in the 1950s he “looked for power in places where no previous [holder of that office] had thought to look for it—and he found it. And he created new powers, employing a startling ingenuity and imagination to transform parliamentary techniques… transforming them so completely that they became in effect new techniques and mechanisms.”12 Johnson on Capitol Hill leveraged, adjusted, and manipulated procedural rules. Other effective leaders have acted as entrepreneurs in markets wider than the institutions in which they are based.
By this yardstick, Yeltsin fares no less well. Unlike Gorbachev, he had the ingenuity and imagination in the perestroika period to realize that people power, as channeled in competitive elections, would trump administrative power and build legitimacy. He used symbolic acts, such as his demand for rehabilitation at the Nineteenth CPSU Conference in 1988 and his magical moment on Tank No. 110 in 1991, to craft and project an image that towered over all others. Enough remained of his legitimacy and his image to save him in 1996 and, combined with the powers of the presidency, as ratified in the 1993 constitutional referendum, to tide him over the recurrent crises of the late 1990s.
A fourth and related criterion is about the short-term impact of the leader’s decisions during his time in the driver’s seat. Were his decisions while in a position of authority consequential or not? The easiest event for which to give an unqualified yes would be Yeltsin’s rallying of opposition to the attempted coup d’état of August 1991. Sergei Stankevich, the historian who was a democratic legislator and Yeltsin adviser until the mid-1990s, believes Yeltsin’s charisma counted for more than all other proximate causes combined. The Yeltsin factor, by Stankevich’s estimate, had 60 percent of the causal power in August. Guesswork the number may be, but it is suggestive guesswork. If it were 50 percent or 40 percent or 30 percent, it would still have been an awe-inspiring effect.13 The 1987 secret speech and the 1991 theater on the tank had powerful multiplier effects and reverberated in the system for years.
Countless other well-placed observers bear witness to the same for Yeltsin’s two terms as president. To quote but one of them, Anatolii Kulikov, who commanded Russian forces in Chechnya and headed the Interior Ministry for three years, and who finds fault with much of Yeltsin’s behavior:
There is one thing you cannot deny him, and that is that over the course of an entire decade he remained the central figure in the country’s political life. Let’s not kid ourselves. Boris Yeltsin—whether you are talking about the late Yeltsin or the early Yeltsin, good or bad, take your pick—not only loved to dominate but knew how to dominate the people around him. His character, his political calculations, and his energy and initiative were the causes of the majority of the huge events of this swift-flowing Yeltsin epoch…. His words and actions have left footprints on the fate of every Russian.14
Many of Yeltsin’s key decisions, in areas as diverse as shock therapy, rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims, and the interment of the Romanovs, were affirmative, about making something desirable happen. But some of his most important choices and impacts were preventive, about keeping something undesirable from happening.15 His anti-putsch actions in August 1991 are one obvious example. A no less telling one is his multifaceted management of center-periphery and majority-minority relations and his efforts to avert what could have been a vortex of territorial and ethnic hatreds on an order of magnitude ghastlier than in Yugoslavia.
This claim about causal impact must, of course, be qualified in sundry ways. As we have seen, Yeltsin was never the only mover, only the most potent one. His anti-revolutionary revolution was inadequately conceptualized and inadequately explained to the population. The economic changes that were its focus were too slow to bear fruit, partly because they were compromised by the voracity of the winners and governmental appeasement of the losers. Some of the mechanisms devised, such as loans-for-shares, were seriously flawed. In his first term, Yeltsin neglected his allies, caroused too much and had psychological ups and downs, made strategic decisions arrhythmically, and overdid divide-and-rule. In his second term, these proclivities were in check. But, with his health impaired and his liabilities on the increase, his grip on the system he had forged slackened. The boss for the bosses now took evasive action as often as forward thrusts. His influence, though, was always far greater than anyone else’s, as his imposition of Putin in 1999 showed.
There is a fifth test to apply to the would-be hero in history. It concerns the forward projection of influence, after he has exited the scene. How consequential are the departing leader’s decisions in the middle term? Do they constrain his successor or successors five to ten years out?