Within Russia, Yeltsin approached questions of history gingerly. The monstrosity of the Stalinist repressions, he believed, raised concern that rummaging through the files on individuals and abused groups would be injurious to political and social peace. Russians had held back from recrimination and revenge, he told a group of news reporters in July 1992: “And how hard it has been to hold back…. Some people were saying, Let us dig away. But, you know, digging things up on the 15 or 20 million who suffered, plus their families, would make society boil with rage.”44 That it might have had the cathartic and prophylactic effect it did in post-communist Eastern Europe was always secondary in Yeltsin’s thinking to its destabilizing potential.45
Nonetheless, Yeltsin after 1991 did favor the dissemination of knowledge and the righting of wrongs, case by case. Researchers, Russian and foreign, had unexampled access during his presidency to archival information, excepting only top-secret troves such as those of the presidency and security services.46 Books, memoirs, and documentary films probed the past, and Russian historians rejoined the international scholarly community. General Dmitrii Volkogonov, an orthodox communist turned reformer who served as an aide to Yeltsin until his death in 1995, sprang many materials loose and traced the inhumanity of Soviet communism not to Stalin but to its initiator, Lenin. Yeltsin saw Volkogonov “as a military version of himself—a product and a servant of the old system who had seen the light and was now combating the dark forces of the past.”47 After adoption of a legal framework in October 1991, Yeltsin appointed Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Central Committee secretary who led a CPSU committee on the depredations of the Stalin period, to chair a blue-ribbon Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. Some 4.5 million Russians were exonerated over the next ten years, 92 percent of them posthumously. They included kulaks, priests (several hundred thousand of whom were shot or died in captivity), military men, dissidents, and wartime prisoners of the Germans who were sent to Siberia in 1945, some of them sentenced under nonpolitical articles of the criminal code. Yeltsin, in Yakovlev’s recollection, “actively supported” his work and signed directives on opening up records and clearing individuals’ names prepared for him by the commission. “Of all the requests I brought to him, I do not remember one that he disputed.”48
What Yeltsin was not prepared for was to come to terms with the communist legacy on a more emblematic level. Some in the dissident counterculture advocated a Nuremberg-type tribunal for surviving malfeasants. But a model for Nazi war criminals in the 1940s was a poor fit with Russian circumstances in the 1990s, since it was predicated on military defeat and the administration of the tribunal, and implementation of its verdicts, by foreign occupiers.49 In 1992 a group of communists put the Yeltsin government on trial by questioning the constitutionality of the decrees of August and November 1991 that outlawed the CPSU and its Russian offshoot. Sergei Shakhrai represented the government in six months of Constitutional Court hearings, filing thirty-six volumes of evidence to the effect that the ruling party had been so intertwined with the Soviet state and its repressive apparatus that it was undeserving of protection in Russia’s democracy. On November 30 a panel of the court—all thirteen members of which had been members of the CPSU—rendered a Solomonic verdict that confirmed the legality of Yeltsin’s disassembly of the structures of the old party but said there must be no persecution of individual communists and they must be free to organize a new party if they so wished.50 A Communist Party of the Russian Federation was established in February 1993 and was to play a significant part in the politics of the decade.
Another formula for de-Sovietizing the state that drew some interest was that of “lustration,” a screening of political institutions for former officers of and collaborators with the communist-era security services such as was done in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.51 Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s adviser on nationality issues in 1991–92, was one of the few Russian politicians to come out for a lustration law. A version of her draft statute would have forbidden former apparatchiks in the CPSU from holding political office or teaching positions for five years. Democratic Russia deputies in March 1992 favored a ban on former members of the CPSU who had not turned in their party cards by August 1991. Yeltsin attended the meeting and, with about half of the delegates, left the hall before the vote was taken.52 Commenting on the approach in 1994, he explicitly linked party and police workers: “The democratic press rebukes me for [the fact that] I preserved the state-security system and did not issue a decree that would debar from work in the state apparatus former officials of the Central Committee of the CPSU, of the party’s obkoms, and some would even say of its raikoms [district committees].”53 Yeltsin could not have been much worried about skeletons in his closet. But he was vexed about the onrush of events possibly getting out of control, and he wanted to keep the substratum of well-trained managers and professionals who, like he, had been part of the Soviet regime. Besides new faces and voices, he wanted “to use in the work of the state experienced implementers and organizers.” Although some old hands from the nomenklatura may have “dressed up as democrats,” he was more irritated by purely political types from the new wave who “generally did not know how to work.”54
Yeltsin could have attempted acts of symbolic rectification. For instance, he could have devised holidays and extravaganzas to display solidarity with opposition to the ancien régime and approval of its collapse. He did make a desultory effort to do so in 1992 when he proclaimed June 12, the anniversary of the 1990 sovereignty declaration, Free Russia Day, a nonworking holiday. He largely passed up the opportunity to make the August anniversary of the 1991 coup a commemorative event. After making speeches on the occasion in 1992 and 1993, in 1994 he decreed that August 22 would be State Flag Day, “but did not explain why the [Russian tricolor] flag was the one piece of August to be enshrined or how the day was meant to be marked,” and declined to make it a nonworking day.55 Another decree in 1994 made December 12, as anniversary of the 1993 constitutional referendum, Constitution Day, a nonworking holiday. Like June 12 and August 22, most Russians greeted it with indifference.
Myth making could also have had a physical aspect, as it does in many societies. Yurii Afanas’ev and Yevgenii Yevtushenko lobbied Yeltsin on behalf of the Memorial Society (which Yeltsin had joined in 1988) to make over the KGB headquarters and prison in Lubyanka Square into a museum. Yakovlev favored the construction of a monument to the casualties of Stalinism in front of the building. In October 1990 the Memorial Society had emplaced there an unsculpted stone from one of the northern camps, but the removal of the Dzerzhinsky statue in 1991 created room for something eye-catching. Yeltsin did not warm to these ideas when approached. Yakovlev, he said afterward, should have “squeezed” the president but did not.56
Yeltsin was gripped, though, by the reconfiguration of Russia’s stellar public space, Red Square. Laid out by Ivan III in the 1490s, it had over the centuries been a place for trade, worship, public gatherings, and executions. The communists made it primarily a parade ground. The square’s western margin was converted after 1917 into a necropolis for revolutionaries and Soviet officials and dignitaries. Since 1924 the corpse of Lenin, embalmed in a secret fluid, had been displayed under quartz glass in a mausoleum—of wood until 1930, in salmon-tinted granite and porphyry after then. In 1941, with the Wehrmacht on the approaches to Moscow, it was evacuated to Tyumen, Siberia; it returned to its place of honor after the war’s end.57 Tens of millions of Soviets and foreigners had lined up to file by Lenin, one of them the young Boris Yeltsin in 1953. To the rear of the mausoleum, the bodies and cremated ashes of Stalin (who had lain beside Lenin in the mausoleum until the 1961 CPSU congress ordered him removed), Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and about four hundred lesser lights lay in and at the foot of the ruddy Kremlin wall. Yeltsin’s friend, the stage director Mark Zakharov, suggested as early as 1989, at the first session of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, that the Lenin mummy be put next to his mother at Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg and the mausoleum and tombs be closed down as “a pagan temple” in the heart of the capital. Democratic Russia embraced the idea after the 1991 coup, when Yeltsin, at the zenith of his popularity, could have made the change with ease. He chose not to respond.