If we disentangle change in Russia’s mixed, post-Soviet economy from political change, it is striking how indicators have reversed in the second decade after communism. Ten years ago, the Yeltsin presidency was limping to its end and Russia was bankrupt. Today the country prospers, in “a remarkable trajectory no less exceptional than that of post–World War II Germany or Japan.”16 Output has surged by 7 percent a year, disposable income is up by 11 percent a year, foreign currency reserves stand at $450 billion, and the RTS stock index has topped 2,000 points, or fifty to sixty times the all-time low in 1998. The lines for matches, kettles, and caramels that Yeltsin had to act contrite for in Sverdlovsk in the 1980s are as quaintly remote from present-day experience as the early five-year plans.
Politically, on the other hand, we see a different picture. Russia under Yeltsin could be classified as “feckless pluralism,” less than a fully articulated democracy. The regime was characterized by the presence of considerable political freedoms and of electoral contestation, although democratic practices were shallowly rooted and there was widespread mistrust of the government. Yeltsin in his valedictory speech on December 31, 1999, proclaimed that, as he had hoped in the early 1990s, change was irreversible and Russia would “proceed only forward” from now on. If the forecast holds up reasonably well in the economy, it does not in politics, where the nation has in many regards gone backward. Russia now has a “dominant-power politics” in which there is “a limited but still real political space” and some electoral competition, and yet a single power grouping, the one hinged on Putin, “dominates the system in such a way that there seems to be little possibility of alternation of power in the foreseeable future.”17
This does not mean all hope for democracy is lost. At the social base, the modernization of Russia proceeds apace. The unshackling of the individual, begun under Gorbachev and intensified under Yeltsin, has positioned its citizens well to partake in innovations in communications that give them more autonomous access to information. At the end of 2007, some 29 million Russians, or one-fifth of the population, used the Internet with some frequency, as compared to 5.7 million in 1999, and Russia had the fastestgrowing Internet community in Europe. There were 3.1 million blogs in Russia in 2007. In a country of 142 million people, cell phones numbered more than 100 million. About 3 million Russians traveled abroad that year, with passports available for the asking and the costs affordable to more and more members of the new middle class.
Developments signify that Russians treasure their personal independence but place a lower premium on political openness and accountability. In 1999, pulling off an extrication from peril worthy of Houdini and designating as his heir a KGB man through and through, Yeltsin’s vaunted intuition let him down, so far as political if not economic and social variables go. Putin has exploited the superpresidential constitution Yeltsin made and the base in public opinion Yeltsin taught him how to cultivate.18 Yeltsin unquestionably would have reversed the decision later if given the chance, sending Putin the way of Silayev, Gaidar, Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Primakov, and Stepashin. But pensioned-off leaders do not get second chances on such matters, as he was aware. Putin’s political system, a dispassionate British scholar notes, retains “the potential for renewed democratic advance.”19 Assuming that is so, it will be up people other than Yeltsin to realize that potential.
It is vital, again, to keep in mind the full range of counterfactual alternatives to what has happened. Neo-Soviet impulses in Russia and the post-Soviet space would have been much harder to contain if Yeltsin had not dissolved the CPSU and the Soviet Union in 1991. Thanks to him, the barrier to re-monopolization is high, and tens of millions of others are lucky that it is.
I conclude that Boris Yeltsin, although he managed to do much more with the cards dealt him than the ho-hum eventful man, impinged rather less and in a less linear manner than Hook’s event-making man. To talk of the agent purposefully sculpting events is to cast the role in more architectonic terms than suit Yeltsin. Revising Hook somewhat, I envisage him as an event-shaping man, an intuitivist planted in intermediate ground between event making and eventfulness. The event-shaping man recognizes the fork in the historical road, shakes up the status quo, and bumps things off their familiar track. His inbuilt qualities magnify his influence, as do ambient tendencies and ripple effects. Concurrently, these same factors limit his ability to direct and to consolidate the changes he touches off, so that he comes up short of fulfilling promises and short of making his solutions stick. The event-shaping man kicks history’s wheels into motion, yes, but not invariably as he intends or as the situation requires.
In August 2007, Art4.ru, a private art gallery in the Moscow business district, organized an unofficial competition to design a monument to commemorate Boris Yeltsin. Nothing like the contest would have been conceivable in Soviet days. It received more than a hundred submissions from professional and amateur sculptors and graphic artists. Several dozen mockups were put on display at the gallery and on its website. The public was allowed to vote in person or electronically on five finalists selected by an expert jury. According to the coordinator, the entries fell into three categories. There were figural likenesses in the old socialist realist style. These were quickly discarded, as were “the bitter, sarcastic parodies, mostly from people who had fallen on bad luck in the 1990s and wanted to blame Yeltsin…. Then there were some really interesting pieces—very different from each other—that show a complicated picture of Yeltsin’s legacy.”20 The best of them captured significant and not always harmonious aspects of the historical Yeltsin.
The winner announced in October, by Dmitrii Kavarga, was a chaotic mass of dark metal with white figurines hanging upside-down from flat surfaces within it. One figure, Yeltsin, stands upright on top, which “emphasizes the force Yeltsin’s person had in a period of instability.”21 Another highly plastic scheme, by Yuliya Gukova, portrayed a rough-surfaced wall with a large crack, and out of the wall Yeltsin’s face, hands, and feet protrude. Its message was that Yeltsin was an inalienable part of the social reality he was trying to change. “With incredible, ox-like stubbornness, Yeltsin is turning the wall out of which he has grown and into which he has implanted himself. The wall turns just as the country’s history turned, and the crack is not only a yawning break in the wall but in him, too.”22 The runnerup, by Rostan Tavasiyev, was a fanciful image of Yeltsin as a toy rabbit at the foot of a wobbling stele, at the top of which sits a porcelain vase—all set against the backdrop of the Lubyanka, the KGB/FSB’s headquarters. Yeltsin here is a balancer instead of a dominator or sufferer. “Why the bunny?” the artist asked in his description. “Because there was no one else to do it. Maybe it was he who tipped it over or maybe he just happened to be near when the column started to fall.”23
My favorite composition was not in the final group, and so I was not able to cast a ballot for it when I dropped by the gallery in September. It was by Mikhail Leikin and Mariya Miturich-Khlebnikova, who collaborate under the name MishMash Project, and was titled Boris Yeltsin: The Man Who Broke Through the Wall. It features a stainless steel wall painted bright red. On one side a runner carpet, also in red, leads to a gap in the wall. The gap traces a life-size figure of Yeltsin, including hairdo and misshapen left hand. Yeltsin here is not a prisoner of the walclass="underline" He has punched right through it and left the scene. But attendees at the exhibit are to have a choice, rather as Yeltsin’s real-life legacy has given them a choice. “The viewer himself can go through the breach and feel its real human dimensions, compare them with his own and feel the toughness of the wall’s metal. He can return to the past along the carpeted path…. [Alternatively] the exit of the viewer out of the red zone is the path that Yeltsin traveled.”24 No future is foreclosed. The citizen can go through the wall either way, forward or backward.