58 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii k narodam Rossii, k s”ezdu narodnykh deputatov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (Address of the president of Russia to the peoples of Russia and the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Federation), Rossiiskaya gazeta, October 29, 1991.
59 On November 3 and 4, Yeltsin remained in contact with Yavlinskii about the possibility of him taking the job. Gaidar says when he heard of it he felt “as if he had just jumped out from under the wheels of an onrushing train.” Yavlinskii broke off the negotiations and Gaidar was given the position. Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 110.
60 Lyudmila Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin” (Voter Boris Yeltsin), Moskovskiye novosti, October 21, 2003. This revealing interview is translated as “Boris Yeltsin: The Wrecking Ball,” in Padma Desai, ed., Conversations on Russia: Reform from Yeltsin to Putin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 79–94. Burbulis, born in 1945, was senior in the new group. Gaidar was born in 1956, Anatolii Chubais (the minister for privatization) in 1955, and Aleksandr Shokhin (labor minister and deputy premier) in 1957. As early as the summer of 1990, Yeltsin had promoted several men in their thirties into high economic posts in the RSFSR—Grigorii Yavlinskii (deputy premier), who was born in 1952, and Boris Fëdorov (finance minister), born in 1958.
61 See Chernyayev, 1991 god, 265; Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 99–102; and Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 80. Ruslan Khasbulatov writes that Yeltsin was more upset at Gorbachev than at his Supreme Soviet: Chechnya: mne ne dali ostanovit’ voinu (Chechnya: they did not allow me to halt the war) (Moscow: Paleya, 1995), 20–21.
62 The expression is associated with the views of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Shock therapy in the narrow sense was first applied in Bolivia in 1985 and, in Eastern Europe, in Poland in 1990. Sachs, then at Harvard University and now at Columbia, modeled his approach on Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany’s postwar recovery.
63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 102. The passage on potato planting is mistranslated in the English version of the memoir as “just as potatoes were introduced under Catherine the Great.” Peter is thought to have brought potatoes back from Holland around 1700 and to have encouraged their cultivation in the greenhouses at his Strelna Palace, outside St. Petersburg.
64 Muzhskoi razgovor. Some leading Russian historians, now free to chastise the past, debunked Peter in the 1990s as a clumsy autocrat, at the same time Yeltsin thought he was imitating him. Ernest A. Zitser, “Post-Soviet Peter: New Histories of the Late Muscovite and Early Imperial Russian Court,” Kritika 6 (Spring 2003), 375–92.
65 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 235. For roughly the first year after the 1991 coup, Yeltsin often referred to a communist return to power as a real and present danger. In May 1992, for example, he spoke in favor of quick changes to the Russian constitution. “Otherwise those forces that are grouping together right now, the former party apparatus, will develop to the point that it would be very difficult to struggle with them.” “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ne skryvayu trudnostei.”
66 Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya,” 60.
67 Ibid.
68 Yurii Afanas’ev, “Proshël god… ” (A year has passed), in Burtin and Molchanov, God posle avgusta, 9.
69 Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin.”
70 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 105.
71 Baturin et al., Epokha, 177. Yeltsin said in the speech that the price reform would take place before the end of December. Gaidar and his team had pushed him not to give a definite date.
72 “Yeltsin Discusses Candidacy, Issues, Rivals,” FBIS-SOV-91-110 (June 7, 1991), 64–65. During the campaign Yeltsin also made crowd-pleasing promises that were sure to complicate any move to the market, such as indexing minimum wages, pensions, and student stipends at 150 percent of the USSR average. These benefits, he assured voters, would be funded by withholding financial transfers to the Soviet government. In June 1990 he stated that he was working with three alternative schemes for price reform, all of which “foresee a mechanism that will rule out a lowering of living standards.” L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 205.
73 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii.”
74 Gaidar, first interview with the author (September 14, 2000). Yeltsin said in his October speech that he had promised improvement by late 1992 in his presidential election campaign; I have not found any such statement. Gaidar writes in his memoir that, beginning with Five Hundred Days, the time limits in various reform plans were useful mostly as hooks for getting Yeltsin and the politicians to sign on to radical reform. “By itself, the realism or unrealism of a program had no significance from an economic point of view. But even a false idea, once taken aboard by the masses, becomes a material force.” Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 65. Yeltsin had to deal with that force before and after Gaidar’s exit.
75 Nine percent of Russian workers polled by sociologists in 1993 had not received the previous month’s wage in full. This proportion reached 49 percent in 1994 and 66 percent at the beginning of 1996. Eighteen percent of employees in 1994, and 32 percent in 1996, received no wages in the previous month. Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth, “Wage Arrears and the Distribution of Earnings in Russia,” William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan, Working Paper 421 (December 2001).
76 Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), the most adulatory of the Western studies, is no exception. Some of the most positive reviews of Yeltsin’s policies have been made by liberal economists. See especially Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), and Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Andrei Shleifer, A Normal Country: Russia after Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Cf. for diametrically opposed analyses Stefan Hedlund, Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (London: UCL, 1999); Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2001); Marshall I. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (London: Routledge, 2003); and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
77 Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000), 41, 49, 58. See also Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15 (January–March 1999), 37–55.
78 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 306, 629, 627. Less frequently, and not any more helpfully, Yeltsin has been gibbeted for the opposite vice, of infinite flexibility and unprincipledness. “Like many successful politicians,” writes Michael Specter, a Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times in the 1990s, “he is a human mood ring, a man whose ideology changes with the seasons, with the country he is visiting, with the phases of the moon. Such tactics work in Russia, which has never really decided whether it belongs in Europe or Asia.” Michael Specter, “My Boris,” New York Times Magazine, July 26, 1998. Another analyst, who met Yeltsin several times in the company of Richard Nixon, writes of him as selfobsessed and “devoid of any meaningful purpose beyond his own political fortunes.” Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 137.