He has thrown out hope to the people. This is the sign of charisma, for all his gaucheness as a person. As an individual he is all mediocrity and grayness, but as “chieftain” in the current concrete situation he is what is required.
And [Yeltsin] is placing his bets on Russia. I cannot repeat it too often: Gorbachev’s historic mistake was that, enfolded in the psychology of “internationalism,” he never understood the role of Russia. I feel human sympathy for him. He knows that it is not only senseless right now to oppose Yeltsin. It is simply impossible from the point of view of the country’s interests. He has no alternative…. The way out lies in an irrational consolidation of the Russians, in the despair that brings people together.118
Chernyayev had laid hold of Yeltsin’s broader appeal. The Russian leader was forging ahead, not treading water. He was conjuring hope out of despair. Giving up on an obsolete doctrine and the imperial structure it had held up, he was banking on a national community in which people shared material interests and sociocultural affinities. He was passing through a door the star-crossed Gorbachev had jimmied open but could not go through himself. And he was doing it the way he liked, in one stroke. “I have always been inclined toward simple solutions,” he was to write in Presidential Marathon. “It has always seemed to me that it is much easier to slice through the Gordian knot than to spend years untying it.”119 In 1991 he had the blade in his hands and was not squeamish about using it.
“What if?” analysis holds out myriad counterfactuals for the “thickened history” of 1985 to 1991.120 Boris Yeltsin was not an uncontainable force. His relations with Gorbachev and Yegor Ligachëv, the authors of his move to Moscow, were guarded at the best of times. Had they any inkling of how he would act, they would have left him in Sverdlovsk. In Moscow, two Soviet prime ministers in a row had misgivings about Yeltsin’s ability and malleability; those misgivings were swept under the carpet. Gorbachev could in all probability have kept Yeltsin on board after his mutiny in 1987 or invited him back into the fold at the 1988 party conference; or he could have had the foresight to get Yeltsin out of the country for the 1989 election. It was not too late after the election to genuflect to Yeltsin’s popularity by making him head of government. A motivated and more tightly organized CPSU would have blocked the Russian parliament from making Yeltsin its chairman in 1990 and instituting the presidency in 1991. The Five Hundred Days plan offered a sterling but wasted chance to mollify him. Suppler behavior by the Soviet leaders would have aggravated Russians less, and a softer posture on the union treaty would have given Yeltsin incentives to take a compromise position. Averting the opera bouffe of August 1991 would have bought Gorbachev time to try to cook up a hybrid successor regime. And a cutthroat coup d’état instead of a procrastinating one would have resulted in Yeltsin’s arrest, in the best of cases, or death in an inferno at the White House, at worst.
Others may have squandered their chances, but not Yeltsin. His criticism of and then defection from Gorbachev, confirmed by Gorbachev’s inability to engage him, positioned him as a unique political player. Drawing on currents in the environment and on personal predispositions, Yeltsin refashioned his sense of who he was politically and gravitated to some approximation of a Western paradigm of governance. He milked the opportunities that seismic structural shifts and accident threw his way.
One foot planted in the past and one in the future, Yeltsin was a boss for the bosses, who knew the old ways but looked forward to new ones. For him and the nation, the hard part—to graduate from the simplex of talking about a better country to the complex of building it—was just beginning.
CHAPTER NINE
A Great Leap Outward
In its last top-of-the-line National Intelligence Estimate on the USSR before its downfall, completed in November 1990, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency saw “deterioration short of anarchy” as the most likely scenario over the next year, with a probability close to even. Three other scenarios were given chances of one in five or less. They were “anarchy,” “military intervention” either as an army coup or at the direction of the civilian leadership, and “light at the end of the tunnel,” which would be marked by “substantial progress” toward constructive relationships between the center and the republics, toward “the filling of the political power vacuum by new political institutions and parties,” and toward new economic relations based on the market principle.1 The annus mirabilis 1991 proved the safest prediction wrong: Deterioration short of anarchy was unsustainable. Elements of the second, third, and fourth were all in evidence: There were anarchic outbreaks as governmental control over self-generating processes weakened; the August coup provided military intervention; and, in Russia, the emergence of an embryonic nation state led by Boris Yeltsin pointed to the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel. As the CIA had anticipated in its classified report, “enormous difficulties” in multiple realms would lie ahead under the most bullish of the scenarios, “but a psychological corner would be turned to give the population some hope for a brighter future.” Even with such a shift in mass attitudes, economic contraction and constitutional issues, if nothing else, would issue in pressures that “could break any government.”2
The Yeltsin of 1990–91 was adamant that the days of the Soviet partocracy were numbered, so differing with the allies in intellectual circles, and the observers abroad, who tended to think it would die a dragged-out death. At a clangorous rally on the Moscow Garden Ring in March 1991, Gavriil Popov lectured journalists not to ballyhoo the crisis and to expect the CPSU to hang on into the twenty-first century. Marching at his side, Yeltsin took tart exception: The system was “collapsing of its own weight” and the dénouement would come “very soon.”3 As to the means and timing, he was no more farsighted than the rest. Were Gorbachev to fail or the democrats to be beat out, he held that the populace “would take to the streets and would take their fate into their hands,” as it had been in Prague, Bucharest, and other bloc capitals in 1989.4 Yeltsin was taken unawares by the concatenation of a banana-republic coup and an implosion of the state. “I was in a tense emotional state,” he comments of the weeks after August 21, since “the events that had just occurred were so sudden.”5
Yeltsin all the while regarded winning the game with some trepidation. In Notes of a President, he records his response, as parliamentary chairman, to being allocated the White House office of Vitalii Vorotnikov in June 1990. The “seditious thought” that he was about to take charge of Russia, still an undergoverned subunit of the Soviet Union, “frightened” him.6 On the evening of December 23, 1991, around the Kremlin desk that had been his since July, he gathered cohorts to mark the ironing out of Gorbachev’s retirement. Lev Sukhanov, motioning at a wall map of the RSFSR, toasted him with the words, “On this whole territory, there is now nobody above you.” “Yes,” Yeltsin smiled radiantly, “and for this, life has been worth living !”7 Four days later he occupied Gorbachev’s working office on the third floor of Building No. 1, the triangular, green-domed Senate Palace of tsarist times. Yeltsin’s exuberance did not much outlast the bubbles in the drinks. “My rapture,” he says about the transfer of authority generally, “was replaced… by a bad case of the jitters.”8