In the final analysis, changing Russia was for Yeltsin about Russians practicing individual self-reliance and collective self-determination and healing themselves as both autonomous and social creatures. The prime service the leader could provide was to loosen the corset of constraints and give them the latitude to think and act without fear of government, of a self-abnegating doctrine, or of one another: “Our ideal is not equality in poverty, self-denial, and envy. We are for people having greater chances to take the bull by the horns, earn good money, and improve their lives.”33
A corollary to this individualist and restorative idiom was another resistance to radicalism: antipathy to couching social reconstruction as intergroup or interclass warfare, which was how the Bolsheviks had conceived of their cause. And that antipathy deterred Yeltsin from expounding the changes he made as truly revolutionary changes.
When on the Gorbachev team from 1985 to 1987, he disagreed with the general secretary’s description of intrasystemic perestroika as a revolution, since Gorbachev was moving too slowly to warrant it. “Revolution” and “revolutionary” then mostly washed out of Yeltsin’s vocabulary.34 Partly this was a tactic to reassure supporters who did not want change to get out of hand. He was alert, as he said in the 1991 election campaign, to the need “not to scare people, since many are afraid of the destruction of that which exists.”35 As president, Yeltsin migrated to the position that he had done Russia a service by shielding it from a revolution. He preferred the emollients “radical reforms,” “democratic reconstruction,” “reformist breakthrough,” or, if revolutionary verbiage could not be helped, “quiet revolution” (tikhaya revolyutsiya).36
Yeltsin leaned against himself since he was driven to conclude that Russia was susceptible to social upheaval and that any recurrence of the nihilism of the Bolshevik Revolution would be fatal to the country. This is how he phrased it in a speech marking the anniversary of the 1991 coup:
After the putsch, Russia was in a quandary. The situation was again pushing the country toward revolution. Then, as now, I firmly believed that such a course would be a tremendous political mistake and would be Russia’s undoing.
All too well do our people know what a revolution is, how great are its temptations, and how tragic its results. Under Russian conditions, revolution would spin out of control and bring forth colossal antagonisms and conflicts. And then once again we would hear, as Mayakovsky said [in 1918], “You have the floor, comrade Mauser”—only now it would be not a Mauser but a machine gun. Once the storm was unleashed, no one in the country or the world could stop it….
We have chosen the way of reforms and not of revolutionary jolts. Ours is the way of peaceful changes under the control of the state and the president. I consider this our common victory.37
To cast change as going forward under the president’s control was to cast him in the part of brakeman and regulator—or “arbitrator,” as Burbulis put it—as much as locomotive.
As he often did in his memoirs, Yeltsin in Notes of a President identified a unique moment when the idea jelled: when he observed Muscovites meting out rough justice in 1991. On the afternoon of Thursday, August 22, he caught a glimpse of the citizens milling around the Central Committee area on Old Square. In a carnival spirit, they broke windows and would have overrun the gates if policemen sent by Mayor Popov had not blocked them. Later that day, the crowd, numbering several tens of thousands, swarmed to the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, and daubed swastikas and graffiti on the walls; the staff inside had armed themselves and blocked the entranceways and corridors. It was under searchlights that night, in a scene flashed across the globe, that building cranes overseen by Sergei Stankevich and Aleksandr Muzykantskii brought down the iron statue of the founder of the Soviet terror apparatus, Felix Dzerzhinsky, which had stood in the square since 1958.38
In this scene, Yeltsin beheld only the apparition of mob rule. “I had visions of the ghost of October—of the pogroms, disorder, looting, constant rallies, and anarchy with which that great revolution began. One wave of the hand, one signature, would have turned August 1991 into October 1917. But I did not do that, and I have no regrets.” In Soviet history, the mob was succeeded by the party, which divided society into “the clean and the unclean,” he says, and tried to build its new world on the backs of the unclean. Yeltsin in government did not want to sort people or to commandeer the material gains so laboriously accumulated under communist rule. “I saw continuity between the society of the Khrushchev-Brezhnev period and the new Russia. It did not enter into my plans to smash and bust up everything as the Bolsheviks did.”39
The therapeutic take on the post-communist transition and rejection of revolutionism favored another choice—to soft-pedal the retributive side of the change of regime. Yeltsin knew as well as anyone that there was much in the communist past to atone for. In his writings and speeches as president, he decried forced collectivization, the Stalin terror and purges, and the Gulag, as most members of the late Soviet elite had done in the Gorbachev years. Gorbachev in December 1991 gave him the CPSU general secretary’s archive, housing the most sensitive papers from the Soviet era. The presidential archive, as it was renamed, threw up new disclosures about atrocities, and some of these he found deflating. Yeltsin was dumbstruck, says head speech writer Lyudmila Pikhoya, at news that Lenin had ordered the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, and that was only one example.40
Yeltsin in his first year in the Kremlin made frequent foreign policy–related use of the archives. In Washington in June 1992, he promised the U.S. Congress information about prisoners of war who might have ended up in Russia after the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Representatives of a Russian-American commission set off to explore the labor camps at Pechora in the northern Urals. “Beamed to television sets around the world, Yeltsin’s remarks and the Pechora jaunt served their political purpose,” although no actual American prisoners or records of them having been there were found.41 Vis-à-vis Eastern Europe, the Yeltsin government “proved far more willing to re-evaluate and condemn controversial episodes” in Soviet relations with these countries than Gorbachev had been.42 Gorbachev had disavowed the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia but never the 1956 intervention in Hungary. In November 1992 Yeltsin handed over to the post-communist government in Budapest a collection of secret materials on 1956, which were later published in Hungarian translation. That same autumn, Rudol’f Pikhoya, the new head of the Russian Archives Committee (and husband of Lyudmila Pikhoya), traveled on Yeltsin’s behalf to Warsaw to present the Polish president, Lech Wałesa, with copies of KGB and CPSU files proving culpability at the highest levels in the NKVD’s execution of more than 20,000 army officers and other Polish captives near Katyn, Russia, in 1940—files Gorbachev knew of but said did not exist. Yeltsin received journalists from Poland in the Kremlin and termed the shootings “a premeditated and depraved mass murder” at the instigation of “the party of the Bolsheviks.” In a visit to Warsaw in August 1993, he went to the city’s military cemetery, “knelt before a Polish priest, and kissed the ribbon of a wreath he had laid at the foot of the Katyn cross.”43 Yeltsin also provided to Wałesa the dossier Moscow kept on him when he was leader of the Solidarity labor movement in the 1980s. Similar information was released about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and wartime saver of Hungarian Jews, Raoul Wallenberg, and the Soviet air force’s shooting down of a Korean jetliner in the Far East in 1983.