As crafter of the unconventional methods, Burbulis prevailed on the president to turn to Yegor Gaidar, an urbane, moon-faced economist and publicist from the Soviet baby boom—at thirty-five, he was but one year older than Yeltsin’s first daughter, Yelena. Born into an establishment family (his father was a navy admiral and both of his grandfathers were famed writers), Gaidar had two graduate degrees in economics, had written for Pravda and Kommunist (the CPSU’s theoretical journal), and directed a research institute. He also had a connection to the city of Sverdlovsk, which had just been renamed Yekaterinburg.54 Working out of an Arkhangel’skoye-2 dacha, Gaidar and colleagues had drawn up a liberalization proposal more radical than Five Hundred Days and executable in Russia rather than in an undivided Soviet Union.55 He was asked in the last week of October to return from a lecture booking at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, to meet with Yeltsin. Their interview took all of twenty minutes. The chief “grasped the breathtaking risk connected with the beginning of reforms,” yet also “that passivity and dallying would be suicidal.” “He seemed geared up to take upon himself political accountability for reforms that would inevitably be punishing, knowing this would add nothing to his popularity.”56 Gaidar agreed to serve in some capacity, although he and his confederates at the dacha rubbed their eyes and “felt as if it were not for real.”57
Yeltsin tipped his hand publicly on October 28 in a wide-ranging address to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies and the population. “The period of movement by small steps is over,” he declared. “We now need a reformist breakthrough…. We shall begin, in deeds and not just in words, to pull ourselves out of the morass that is sucking us in deeper and deeper.”58 On November 1 the congress gave him carte blanche to make reforms by decree for twelve months. He was authorized to issue edicts contravening existing laws, reorganize the cabinet without checking with parliament, and appoint heads of provincial administrations. Ruslan Khasbulatov, the new chairman of the Supreme Soviet, shepherded the motion through the assembly. The composition of a reform government was revealed on November 6, the day Yeltsin consigned the CPSU to oblivion. On Burbulis’s advice, Yeltsin did the constitutional somersault of naming himself prime minister, averting the need to have anyone else confirmed by parliament. Burbulis was made first deputy premier and Gaidar finance minister and deputy premier for economic policy.59 To their surprise, Yeltsin left Gaidar and Burbulis alone to nominate the holders of key portfolios. Most were thirtysomethings, up to twenty-five years younger than Yeltsin and Gavriil Popov and the reformists he had known in the Interregional Deputies Group. “Fresh faces were needed to cope with the job. I selected people with a minimum of Soviet baggage, people without mental and ideological blinkers, without a bureaucratic mentality.”60 They passed with flying colors the test he had set in the Moscow party committee in the mid-1980s: readiness to put in insanely long hours at work. Gaidar’s days that fall and winter ended at three or four A.M.; eager beavers in his office snatched some slumber on cots or on pillows and blankets spread on the floor.
Political blowups heightened the pressure. One of them led Yeltsin on November 7 to impose martial law in Chechnya, a minority republic in the North Caucasus area of Russia. An air force general, Djokhar Dudayev, had been elected president in the Chechen capital of Grozny and peremptorily declared independence. Yeltsin’s show of force, promoted by Vice President Rutskoi, only fanned the flames, and Gorbachev, who still controlled Soviet troops, was opposed. On November 11 the Russian Supreme Soviet voted not to recognize Yeltsin’s decree, making it unenforceable. Speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen, sided with the anti-Yeltsin forces.
For one week of all this Yeltsin was inaccessible to his staff and ministers. Gorbachev, the unsympathetic witness, claims Yeltsin was drunk when they spoke about Chechnya by telephone on November 10. Associates were unsure how much alcohol had to do with it but were disturbed by their leader’s unavailability. Either way, the stress of office was giving rise to insalubrious behavior.61
The October reform package went under the marquee “shock therapy” (shokoterapiya in Russian). The phrase applied to a wider field of action than its original meaning in Latin America and post-communist Eastern Europe, which was the lifting of price controls to halt an inflationary spiral and jumpstart economic growth.62 Yeltsin, he stated unsentimentally in retirement, aimed at a double-barreled modernizing revolution in economy and by extension in society: “to unloose prices, that is to introduce a real market forcefully and toughly, the way [Russian landlords and peasants] were ordered to plant potatoes under Peter the Great; and, second, to create private property… to create a class of owners.”63 Peter had been his paladin since grade school, and Yeltsin was mesmerized by the tsar as enlightened reformator—a Russian noun, borrowed from the German, that connotes the likelihood of greater dislocations than the English “reformer.” Here was his chance to play Peter, although in a protodemocratic nation: His lords and peasants had the franchise and could topple him at the next election. He knew of Peter’s maniacal tendencies, he would concede in 1993 to an interviewer who pointed out that Peter “personally cut off the heads” of his enemies. It was true, Yeltsin said, “but we also have to keep in mind all the things he did for Russia.”64
Much as summaries—including Yeltsin’s wistful retirement speech in December 1999—often refer to the assault as one fast-flying leap, his thinking at the time showed flexibility and realism. Concerning Peter the Great, he writes level-headedly in Notes of a President that turning Russians into good Europeans was “an ambitious goal unattainable in one generation.” “In a certain sense,” the Petrine reforms “have not been completed to this day.” “Although we have become Europeans, we have remained ourselves.” Every flurry of reform in Russia’s past, he said, was followed by a backlash and a rollback. This mold he was determined to break. “The goal I posed for myself was to make reform irrevocable.” If there were economic restructuring and “grandiose political changes,” the process would be unstoppable and a return of the communists inconceivable: “After us, other people will come who will finish the job off and move the country toward prosperity.”65
Yeltsin wanted the path chosen to outlive the first burst of change and to outlive him. What he did not want was to take the time to ask the population’s approval of his project or to spell out what awaited them. Perhaps, as Yurii Burtin said in 1992, he tended to patronize the people “as one would a child who does not understand his own interests and cannot be allowed to participate in affairs of state.”66 I doubt Yeltsin was as misanthropic as that. As Burtin wrote, condescension toward the population coexisted in the minds of Yeltsin and his men with fear of disorder, a yen to please, and a catering to “the prejudices and the far from admirable feelings of the less conscious strata.”67 Society itself, after generations of communism, was not organized to protect or promote the shared interests of its members, particularly when the patrimonial idols lay broken on the temple floor. The historian Yurii Afanas’ev, formerly co-chairman with Yeltsin of the Interregional group, noted in an essay in the same volume as Burtin’s how underdeveloped Russia’s civil society was and that political parties, which could now be legally formed, were insubstantial startups: “The absence of large-scale social groups tutored in their own distinct group interests allows the administration of Boris Yeltsin to forget about our current anemic ‘multipartyness.’”68 Most citizens waited for their leader to act and hoped for the best.