With a bang, the door had shut on Yeltsin’s populism. In an interview in retirement, he was unrepentant for using it. “It was necessary to do some undermining, to take things away from the nomenklatura. I did it and I did it correctly. It was not right for the big shots to puff up their privileges that way.” But it was “a stage” in his development, he added, and he and Russia outgrew it.26
The incongruousness with his recent past required some rationalization. Yeltsin gave it mostly in Notes of a President. He had, he says, a brainstorm in 1990, shortly after he was elected speaker of the Russian Supreme Soviet and he asked to be allotted a government dacha at Arkhangel’skoye-2:
When I was a deputy in the [USSR] Supreme Soviet, I had refused the perks of a chauffeured car and a dacha. I refused to go to a special polyclinic and signed up in my neighborhood one. But now I ran up against the fact that I needed to push for such things and not to reject them. It was not because the leader of Russia needed “privileges” but because he needed normal working conditions, which at that moment he was without. This revelation was so startling that I fell to thinking. Would people understand me correctly? For so many years, I had maligned privileges, and here I was asking for them. Then I decided that the people were as smart as I was. They had realized without me that the struggle was not against the privileges of the [Communist] party; it was against the party’s unbridled, all-enveloping power.27
And so, once the CPSU was no more, it was appropriate to exchange the unostentatious Arkhangel’skoye-2 for tony Barvikha-4 and Aeroflot for Gorbachev’s Ilyushin-62 jetliner, a “ROSSIYA” logo glued to its skin. The replacement for Aleksandr Korzhakov’s Niva was a ZIL, and in 1992 a sleek, armor-plated Mercedes limousine from Germany—an “office on wheels,” in Yeltsin’s words.28
Many Russians wondered about the justice of it all. Yurii Burtin, a former dissident active in the shriveling Democratic Russia movement, took aim in an essay in March of 1992 at “the brassiness [that] lets our new leaders take the same offices and drive around in the same luxurious armored limousines that members of the Politburo used to help themselves to.”29 In a television interview in 1993, shot at Gorki-9, an estate where Soviet leaders had lived, El’dar Ryazanov, a director of movie comedies and a Yeltsin supporter, personalized the question. What was it like for someone who had ridden the crest of a moral wave of the downtrodden to glean these benefits, and had he found that power “corrodes the soul”? “Some things inside me have changed,” Yeltsin said jumpily, giving Gorki-9 as a barometer: “Earlier, I would never have moved into such a residence. I guess I have come to take a more blasé attitude toward the morality of various privileges than I used to.”30 He squirmed not because his perquisites were so atypical for the leader of a large country but because he had denounced his predecessors for enjoying them and had implied that in power he as people’s president would deny himself them.31
Of the questions dominating the late Soviet political agenda, the only two that were settled as of the rotation of the Kremlin flags were about the power of the CPSU and the tug-of-war between the center and the union republics. Yeltsin closed out the first with presidential Decree No. 169 on November 6, 1991, a day before the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It dismembered the palsied machinery of the party and took possession of its bank accounts, publishing houses, and real estate, from Old Square to the most far-flung Russian villages. The Belovezh’e and Alma-Ata accords and the exit of Gorbachev hardened interrepublic borders into international borders. The purpose of the Commonwealth of Independent States was to accomplish a genteel divorce in a dysfunctional family. With it as cover, Yeltsin took the assets of the KGB in mid-December, and the inter-republic security committee was discharged on January 15, 1992.32 The commonwealth’s charter mission was complete on May 18, 1992, when he gave up on the will-o’-the-wisp of a unified military (joint control over nuclear arms had been agreed at Belovezh’e) and formed national armed forces under Defense Minister Pavel Grachëv. Grachëv oversaw the homecoming of troops from Germany, Poland, Mongolia, Cuba, and the post-Soviet states. All Soviet tactical nukes were in storage in Russia by July 1, 1992, as agreed at Alma-Ata in December 1991; the last strategic warheads from Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were transported there by July 1, 1996, after negotiations brokered by the United States. The CIS was up to little else but holding summit meetings and offering a forum for working out bilateral agreements. Yevgenii Shaposhnikov’s job, as commander of CIS strategic forces, was to lapse in June 1993.
If the CIS was about tidying up after the past, Yeltsin as leader of the opposition had looked to the future, to the best of his abilities. The prospect he dangled before Russia was a three-pronged de-monopolization—after departing the Communist Party in 1990 he often called it a “de-communization”—comprising democratization, a free-enterprise economy, and territorial devolution. It would, he said, substitute the liberties of a normal life for the regimentation of communism.
At a press conference on September 7, 1991, the first question to Yeltsin, from a French journalist, was what kind of a country Russians lived in and would be living in now that the political logjam had been cleared. Here is what he said:
I think that the country is now devoid of all “isms.” It isn’t capitalist, nor communist, nor socialist; it’s a country in a transitional period, which wants to proceed along a civilized path, the path along which France, Britain, the United States, Japan, Germany, Spain, and other countries have been and still are proceeding. It’s an aspiration to proceed precisely along this path, that is, the de-communization of all aspects of society’s life, an aspiration to democracy, furthermore, a market economy, all equal varieties of property, including private property.
A little later, the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, buzzed again to what model Yeltsin had as a goaclass="underline"
SIMPSON: I want to go back to what Mr. Gorbachev said recently. He was talking about Swedish social democracy; that is his model. What is your model, Yeltsin’s model? Perhaps it is the model of François Mitterrand’s France, or John Major’s Britain, or the United States, or Japan, or Spain, or Germany?
YELTSIN: I would take everything together; I would take the best from each system and introduce it in Russia.
SIMPSON: That is a very politic answer. Mr. Gorbachev said you must have some kind of notion, whether you want to lean to the left, or to the right, to the conservatives, or to the socialists, and so on.
YELTSIN: Well, I have never been a conservative and have no intention of even being a centrist; no, I am still to the left of center; rather, I am for social democracy.
SIMPSON: Or the Swedish model, as Mr. Gorbachev says?
YELTSIN: Well, perhaps not 100 percent. You cannot just take a model and install it ready made. Maybe create a new model, but take something from the Swedish model, and why not take a piece from the Japanese model—an interesting piece—and from the French, too, especially as regards the parliamentary aspect? And in the United States, where they have 200 years of democracy… they have a definite framework for this democracy, and that’s interesting, too. So, in principle, I am in favor of social democracy, but nevertheless, to take the best there really is in these countries.33