After the Senate building, it was the turn of the opulent, 700-room Grand Kremlin Palace, erected by Konstantin Ton in the 1830s and 1840s on the initiative of Nicholas I. Yeltsin put out a first decree in 1994 and work began on St. George’s Hall, one of its five great vestibules, where Joseph Stalin had erased the tablets with the names of the twenty-five recipients of the Order of St. George, imperial Russia’s highest military award. Workers uncovered an infestation of rats, knee-deep water in the cellar, and fissures in the foundation, and had to solidify the base of the building and of the seventeenth-century Terem Palace.
Already in 1994 Yeltsin decided to move on to the St. Andrei’s and Alexander Nevsky halls of the Grand Kremlin Palace. In 1932–34, to accommodate the USSR Supreme Soviet and other functions, Stalin had them gutted and unified into an anodyne auditorium adorned with plywood desks and chairs, reinforced-concrete balconies, and a titanic stone Lenin standing behind the platform. The Russian Congress of People’s Deputies met here from 1990 until Yeltsin decreed it out of existence in September 1993. Yeltsin was ignorant of the story of the halls until, some weeks after the death blow to parliament, he saw a quaint image of the original rooms in several watercolors by the nineteenth-century artist Konstantin Ukhtomskii. He asked an official what had happened to them and heard that “the Bolsheviks destroyed them.” “Yeltsin’s face grew dark—seemingly he recalled that here the [congressional] deputies had more than once chastised him and had tried to impeach him [in March 1993]—and he intoned, ‘Then we will begin restoring them!’”67 The decree was issued in January 1996. Yeltsin “studied in fine detail” every sketch considered by the state commission he appointed to oversee, although he left the filigree to them to settle. The commission would meet with him about six times in 1997 alone. His consistent advice was to adhere to Ton’s plan.68 The original halls and their artwork were re-created from drawings and photographs, helped by archival materials Ton had sent to London and finishing details stored in the basement. The nationalist artist Il’ya Glazunov consulted on some lesser rooms and donated several of his paintings. Ninety-nine firms and 2,500 people worked to complete the project.69
Yeltsin was to say in Presidential Marathon in 2000 that he should have legislated legal and political continuity between post-communist and precommunist Russia, somehow bypassing the communist era. Going “from 1991 to 1917” would have restored “historical justice” and “historical continuity” and sanctified the liberal values that gained currency in the decades before World War I, when urban business, private farms, free speech, and parliamentarism thrived.70 But this was never done. Neither mass nor elite opinion was prepared for what could have been a Great Leap Backward with unpredictable and perhaps comic results. The Russia of tsars, onion domes, and Cossacks (and, until 1861, of serfdom) was not a democracy, and territorially and ethnically it was organized as an empire.
Yeltsin’s ideological eclecticism and fascination with representations of history made him a practitioner of political bricolage, patchwork that makes a useable past out of whatever fabrics happen to be at the leader’s disposal.71 Just as there was no wholesale assault on the communist order, Yeltsin bridled at a wholesale reconciliation with the imperial order. Five-pointed red stars and other Soviet motifs abounded after 1991, on the Kremlin battlements and all over Russia. Thousands of likenesses of Lenin and streets, squares, and buildings in his name were not touched, even in Moscow.72 Some cities and city streets were returned to their ancestral appellations, while many others were left alone, at times creating anomalies such as provinces and their formerly eponymous capitals bearing different names. Yeltsin’s area of birth was still Sverdlovsk oblast, after the Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, even as the city of Sverdlovsk was given back its birth name, Yekaterinburg—and one of the main avenues of Yekaterinburg, leading from downtown out to the former Urals Polytechnic Institute, was still called Lenin Prospect. Yeltsin reached out to post-1917 Russian émigrés in the West in 1992,73 but no plan to restore their titles and property back in Russia was ever enacted. No agreement was struck on the words to be set to Glinka’s nineteenth-century music, so the anthem was a melody without lyrics to which the Russians never took. And aspects of the Soviet experience in which there was popular pride—such as industrialization, wartime victory, and the space program—remained in good odor officially. As a sign, the fiftieth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War in 1995 touched off an orgy of nostalgia and completion of the brutalist war monument on Moscow’s Poklonnaya Hill, whose construction Yeltsin as local party leader had halted the decade before. Yeltsin’s government, Mayor Luzhkov, and local communists “all held massive dueling celebrations, blanketing the city in military banners, posters, and other paraphernalia.”74
Although Yeltsin greeted and forced changes in many Russian institutions, his concern about a loss of control decelerated or halted change in several domains. It influenced him to oppose the eradication of communist-era law codes and regulations, which were considered to be in force unless expressly repealed. To tear up the body of Soviet legislation, and of Russia’s prerogatives as juridical heir to the USSR, would in his assessment have brought “so many problems and worries that we were just not prepared to handle at so difficult a time.”75
In the same spirit, Yeltsin did not wipe out the KGB, the coercive sidearm of the Communist Party, which it was in his power to do in 1991–92. This is not the outcome one might have expected, for, although he had cooperative personal relations with some KGB officers before 1987, in his days in opposition he came to distrust the organization. In 1989 he was one of the few deputies to abstain on the confirmation vote for Vladimir Kryuchkov in the USSR Supreme Soviet, and, says one then volunteer assistant of his, he developed “spy mania” and saw “in every new person a stoolpigeon for the KGB.” Asked about a possible recruit, he would tap two fingers on a shoulder, a sign in the USSR for eavesdropping.76 Yeltsin knew of the KGB’s and Kryuchkov’s centrality in the 1991 putsch from experience and from the five assorted committees to investigate it, one of which, under Sergei Stepashin, he himself had appointed.
When the committees reported, Yeltsin seemed to lose his zeal for shaking up the organization. Its last Soviet chairman, Vadim Bakatin, says wryly in his memoirs that Yeltsin’s men wanted nothing more than “to change the nameplate from ‘KGB of the USSR’ to ‘KGB of the RSFSR.’”77 This is rather unfair, in that Yeltsin agreed demonstratively with the decision to shut down the Fifth Chief Directorate, which had been in charge of secret informants and hunting dissidents, and to restrict the main body of the agency to counterintelligence and home security. After an experiment with subordinating it to the regular police hierarchy in the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), it was restyled the Ministry of Security in 1992, the Federal Counterintelligence Service or FSK in 1993, and in 1995 the Federal Security Service or FSB. And Yeltsin spun off independent functional units for foreign intelligence, border guards, protection of leaders, and governmental electronic communications. All these components were put on a short political leash, monitored by Yeltsin and reporting to him through discrete channels.