Well might he have been jittery, for he was ill-prepared for victory. It was one thing to appropriate physical trophies and proclaim the goal of changing Russia forever. It was quite another to govern and to flesh out that goal.
Had Yeltsin arrived at Building No. 1 through an unhurried, well-bounded, and educative political contest, he would have had to nominate a shadow cabinet and to propound “profound and affirmative ideas” and “a model of rule,” to quote Oleg Poptsov, the editor and cagey observer of the Moscow scene. As it was, the stock advancement from disagreement to opposition and on into the halls of government was fast-forwarded: “The rotten tree of the state broke down, and power and its appurtenances fell at [the opposition’s] feet.”9 Yeltsin had shaken its branches and trunk and placed himself to harvest the apples. Except in the broadest brushstrokes, he had not worked through the constitutive choices he would be called upon to make if power were his, all the more so power in a Russian structure not encumbered by the Soviet superstructure.
A flotilla of his aides would conclude in their memoir The Yeltsin Epoch that, “not ready for so swift a development of the state of affairs,” Yeltsin “entered the genre of improvisation” in 1991.10 But the novelty was one of degree only. Yeltsin had been improvising brilliantly since 1985: at trying to make perestroika work, challenging Gorbachev, politicking. What distinguished this new situation was that the stakes were higher and the boundaries of the possible laxer than they were in communism’s tipping years. Social brakes and buffers had been obliterated. Nothing was sacred and everything of value was up for grabs—even the name of the republic, de-Sovietized and restyled the Russian Federation or Russia on December 25.11 Yeltsin’s message in the 1991 presidential election gave little guidance on what to do next. Russians, Gennadii Burbulis said, voted for Yeltsin in “a purely religious form of protest and hope” and threw in with “a savior,” not a reform plan.12
Before he was snowed under by events, Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to manage change in the style of a symphony conductor—directing wellprimed instrumentalists from fixed, sequent sheet music. Boris Yeltsin conducted a political jazz combo—altering the frequency, duration, and accent of melody lines as he went and open to extemporization by members. The facility for thinking on his feet was part of his political mystique, and his organizational props had been slight, as he relied largely on unsalaried volunteers. “We worked as a team, as a single organism,” one of them, Valentina Lantseva, reminisced. “We were fellow fighters, not aides and not hired hands…. We worked on ebullience and Russian romanticism.”13
The amateurism of that innocent time was now an anachronism. President Yeltsin had in his hands the buttons and pedals to all the shambling machinery of government on Russian territory. The communist regime was no longer there as a scapegoat. Was he up to the new assignment? The philosopher Aleksandr Tsipko, a moderate Russian nationalist who wanted to save the USSR, spoke for many when he judged that Yeltsin was not. “I honestly would not want to be in Boris Nikolayevich’s shoes,” he wrote in Izvestiya in October 1991. “Yeltsin the fighter and destroyer is in the past. The time of Yeltsin the creator is upon him.” It was, Tsipko said, a terrifying burden that he was slow to face up to. Haunted by the chimera of “a center that no longer exists,” Yeltsin would have been content if the old foe were still around to beat up on.14
Bringing back the Soviet bugbear was impossible, and it was impossible to get along on differing from Gorbachev, for Gorbachev had been marginalized. Yeltsin forced him to vacate his Moscow apartment and country residence, together with the Kremlin offices, and to scale down his demands for pension and staff, but granted his request to start a Gorbachev Foundation with property deeded by the Russian administration.15 Gorbachev went on the transatlantic lecture circuit, learned to be a fundraiser (he would even appear in a Pizza Hut commercial in 1997), wrote his memoirs, and established Green Cross International, an environmental organization. He never spoke with Yeltsin after December 23, 1991, and as before looked down on him as a shifty megalomaniac.16 Yeltsin matched Gorbachev’s lack of humility with a lack of magnanimity, making him persona non grata in official Moscow. As Yeltsin planned his first state visit to Washington, D.C., in June 1992, one criterion he gave his hosts for the beyond-the-beltway portion was that it be at a place Gorbachev had never seen—which led him midway across the country to the state of Kansas.17 (He toured Wichita, rode a farm combine in a wheatfield, and took home a plastic bear filled with Grannie’s Homemade Mustard, from a family business in Hillsboro.) In August, convinced that comments by Gorbachev violated a promise made to him in December 1991 of noninterference in politics, Yeltsin had Interior Minister Viktor Yerin carry out a “financial and legal inspection” of the foundation. “Naturally, ‘abuses’ were uncovered, in particular, participation in trading operations.”18 In September Gorbachev was barred from foreign travel for refusing to testify at the hearing by the new Russian Constitutional Court into the legality of Yeltsin’s decrees banning the Communist Party—he would not participate, he said, even if brought into the courtroom in handcuffs. The ban was lifted within weeks, and Gorbachev was fined 100 rubles (the price of a hamburger and cola drink) for contempt of court.19 Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin eased off, and the dust settled.20
If time had passed by the battle with Gorbachev, it had done the same with the levers Yeltsin used to unseat Gorbachev. Foremost among them was the campaign against elite privilege.
In the last few years of the communist regime, Yeltsin lived decently yet not sumptuously, which gave him some standing to cast stones. In June 1991 the vice president–elect, Aleksandr Rutskoi, acting on his wife’s counsel, decided Yeltsin needed sartorial upgrade and procured him a smart suit, shoes, and some white shirts with coupons issued to Rutskoi as a military officer. Yeltsin accepted graciously but paid Rutskoi for the apparel.21 For a barbecue at Arkhangel’skoye-2 the weekend after the defeat of the putsch, press secretary Pavel Voshchanov splurged on a suckling pig he found in a Moscow peasant bazaar. “Naina Iosifovna was touched, because they could not permit themselves this.”22 At their Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya apartment, Naina bid a guest to be careful of the sofa, as the springs poked out through holes and they might rip his trousers: “When Boris Nikolayevich sits on it, first he puts on a little cushion, and then it’s okay. Here is a cushion for you.”23
Once in power, though, Yeltsin came to bask in the same creature comforts as Gorbachev and Leonid Brezhnev before him. He kept his Moscow residential registration at Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya until 1994, when he shifted it to the sixth floor of a new concrete building block on Osennyaya Street, in the Krylatskoye development, on the western outskirts of the capital. Yeltsin saw the building from his limousine and fell in love with it, much to the mystification of his family and of his security detail, who thought it too close to the windows of other houses. They objected, but, recalled his daughter Tatyana, “Papa said we were going to live here, and that was that.”24 Most nights from 1992 through 1996 Yeltsin actually spent at the state dacha Barvikha-4, a three-story river-front mansion in the settlement of Razdory, which was a ten-minute drive farther out the same westward radius from the Kremlin. The army built Barvikha-4 for Gorbachev in Second Empire style and equipped it with the latest communications and security gadgetry. Yeltsin as president took again to hunting, unwinding every several months by shooting deer, stag, wild boar, duck, and wood grouse at the bucolic Zavidovo. He made stops at other provincial retreats left by the Soviets: Valdai, in the northwest near Novgorod, where the big dacha was built for Stalin; Bocharov Ruchei in Sochi, on Russia’s semitropical Black Sea coast; Volzhskii Utës, on a crook in the lower Volga; and Shuiskaya Chupa in Kareliya, refurbished with the northernmost roofed tennis court in Europe.25