On his post-communist highway to Damascus, the freedom to which Yeltsin converted was closer to what the political thinker Isaiah Berlin labeled “negative liberty” (freedom from hindrance) than to Berlin’s “positive liberty” (freedom to accomplish some end).43 For Yeltsin’s contemporaries, deliverance from Marxist scripture and Soviet structures took many forms. For him, it was an ease with the market and recoil against the overbearing state. Mikhail Fridman, who became one of Russia’s first billionaires as a banker and oilman, makes the point welclass="underline"
Yeltsin as an individual who had inner freedom… instinctively moved toward the market as the end. That is because… as my namesake Milton Friedman says, “Capitalism is freedom.”… [Yeltsin thought] it was necessary to give people freedom and they would make out well. How exactly to do that he did not know. [But he did know] that it was necessary to free people from controclass="underline" We were squeezing them dry. He thought that if we let them go they could move heaven and earth…. This is the level on which he thought about it…. He took a dim view of all these [Soviet] controls. [He felt that] the controllers had long since believed in nothing.44
If Yeltsin was a social democrat at all, it was more in the stamp of Tony Blair of Britain, Felipe González of Spain, or Gerhard Schröder of Germany than of the left-wing statists of interwar and postwar Europe. He took it as uncontroversial that Russia could get by only with a just and effective state, but that its state would have the ability to rule and popular support only if it did something to cure Russia’s economic disease.
Yeltsin was able to anchor enthusiasm for capsizing Soviet ways in halfburied pieces of his past. In the chapter of Notes of a President where he eulogizes Ignatii and Nikolai Yeltsin, he speaks of the windmill, smithy, and land leases they gathered by the sweat of their brow and of the injustice and social disutility of the state expropriating them. He was aware of how Vasilii Starygin fended in exile by selling homemade furniture to local buyers. These kin’s only crime was that they held property, were hardworking, and “took many things upon themselves.” With its zero-sum thinking, “The Soviet regime liked modest, ordinary folk, people who did not stand out. It did not like and it showed no mercy to the strong, the ingenious, and the lively.” Yeltsin’s felt mandate, as someone who did stand out, was to undo this mistake and foster an enterprising society in which the writ of the state was circumscribed. For throwing off lassitude, he offered autobiographical role models: the sportsman who trains and betters a rival, as he had on the volleyball court; the public figure who survives after taking an independent stand, as he did in his secret speech in 1987; and the hospital patient who takes the first tottering steps after an operation, as he had after his back surgery in Barcelona in 1990. Russians, he said, needed to cast off their “slavish psychology” and open up space for “people without hangups, intrepid people, of the kind who earlier [in the Soviet period] were simply squelched.” The idealized historical reference most on Yeltsin’s mind was his thrifty Urals forebears. Russia was giving signs, he wrote, of reemergence of the outlook “of independent peasants [muzhiki] who do not wait for another’s help, who do not pin their hopes on anyone else… [who] scold everyone and stubbornly tend to their own business.”45
After the 1991 coup, Yeltsin was in no shape psychologically or politically to move into decision gear. He fled Moscow on August 29 for two weeks of sunbathing, swimming, and tennis in the Latvian playground of Jurmala. He was back in town briefly twice, did a peacemaking errand in Armenia, and was then off again to Sochi for another couple of weeks. On September 18, in Moscow, Yeltsin was drained and experienced coronary pain. But on September 25, the day he left for Sochi, Pavel Voshchanov said he “has taken a timeout… not for relaxation but so he can in calm surroundings work at his further plans and also on a new book.”46 Yeltsin supporters were stupefied that he had dropped out of sight and at such a juncture could be dabbling in authorship. It was as if Napoleon had repaired to the Riviera to compose poetry after routing the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, one Democratic Russia parliamentary deputy later said. Gorbachev’s advisers thought the Russian leader was playing “a cat-and-mouse game with us,” and Gorbachev refused to consider traveling to Sochi to see him (“We have to protect our honor”).47 Yeltsin at Bocharov Ruchei dictated a few paragraphs only of the manuscript, which was to grow into Notes of a President, the second volume of his memoirs, and had no interest in playing games with Gorbachev. But his “further plans” could not be put off and were the subject of searing interchanges with members of his team until his return to the capital on October 10.
As the Soviet Union was in extremis and Yeltsin composed himself, Russia’s government found itself in turmoil. In July he had asked Gennadii Burbulis, the scholar from Sverdlovsk who had just managed his election campaign, and whom he passed over for Aleksandr Rutskoi as vice president, to be his chief of staff and set up a Presidential Executive Office (Administratsiya Prezidenta) for him. Burbulis balked: He pined to be a grand strategist and not “to work twenty-four hours a day with a card file.”48 Yeltsin contrived the position of state secretary for him, with undefined duties. Rutskoi, elected without a job description, then exhorted Yeltsin to unite the office of vice president with headship of the executive office and to let him be the president’s channel to the state apparatus. Yeltsin, saying he had no need of “a commissar,” declined.49 On August 5 he selected as chief of staff his old friend from the Sverdlovsk obkom, Yurii Petrov, who had been Soviet ambassador to Cuba since 1988; Yeltsin had to ask Gorbachev to release him from the post. Petrov reported for duty around noon on August 19, just as the tanks chugged up to the Russian White House. He had no time to introduce himself to Rutskoi, Burbulis, and staff before rushing downstairs to catch Yeltsin making his immortal speech on Tank No. 110.50
The ministerial bureaucracy was the main mechanism for carrying out decisions. At its head as prime minister was Ivan Silayev, a “red director”—a widely used term in Russia for the Soviet-era industrial manager, serving at the pleasure of the Communist Party. Silayev, who was Yeltsin’s age and had left the besieged White House for his family in August, was in the president’s estimation an unsuitable sparkplug for a serious salvage and reform effort. He quit on September 27 to chair an interrepublic economic committee, leaving Oleg Lobov of Sverdlovsk as caretaker Russian premier. The cabinet was rife with jockeying for position; agreements were being signed and disowned and resignations tendered in disgust. The seclusion of the president, one reporter observed, “has produced a crisis of power” and “a conflict of all against all.”51
For the prime minister’s post, Yeltsin looked at first for a “miracle worker” unattached to any program. He offered it in September to Svyatoslav Fëdorov, the proprietor of the USSR’s first commercial eye-surgery clinic, who turned it down flat. He had no better luck with Yurii Ryzhov, the rector of the Moscow Aviation Institute, or Mikhail Poltoranin, the editor to whom he had been so close in the Moscow party committee. He then auditioned Yurii Skokov, a conservative industrialist from the military sector, and Grigorii Yavlinskii.52 In dialogue on beach chairs in Sochi, Burbulis got Yeltsin to look at less familiar names and to link his personnel decision to the reform conundrum. After three days, “Yeltsin understood very well the backlog of problems, the frightening inheritance that had come his way. And so our conversation came down to the hopelessness of surmounting all of this by conventional methods.” “It is going to be very sticky,” Yeltsin said to him. Burbulis felt “emaciated” by the conversation.53