His constitutional options in 1991 were not rosy. An attempt to reorder Russian institutions, at the moment Russia was unscrambling itself from the Soviet Union, was sure to strike many as distracting and incendiary. Yegor Gaidar, for one, was dead set against it. In any such move, Yeltsin would have bumped foreheads with other loci of authority, starting with the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, where his majority was precarious. Even were he somehow to force new parliamentary elections, voters, he admitted later, might not have elected “other, ‘good’ deputies.”3
The Soviet reflex was to consign almost any human problem to an administrative department of government. The liberal approach, flaunted by the youthful reformers and by the Western powers and organizations whose advice Yeltsin sought, posited solutions to lie outside of government. Had he acted strictly in this spirit, he would have chopped the post-communist state and pushed it out of the way of nongovernmental actors. Measured by the size of the bureaucracy, this was not quite obtained, as the workforce in the federal, provincial, and municipal governments drifted up by about 10 percent (from 2,682,000 to 2,934,000) between 1992 and 2000.4 But these figures exclude the host of Soviet factory-level managers who were struck from the rolls during the change to the market. Shock therapy and price decontrol reduced officialdom’s directive and regulatory grip on Russian society. And privatization, from the vouchers of 1992–94 to the loans-for-shares initiative of 1995–97, reduced its monopoly over resources.5 Yeltsin lent support to it at almost every step and believed that when it was over only electric power, atomic energy, the military-industrial complex, and the railroads should be left on the state ledger.6 In loans-for-shares, first authorized by Decree No. 478 on May 11, 1995, the government turned twelve large properties, mostly with high-value petroleum and mineral assets, over to private banks to manage, in return for forgivable loans from the banks. The banks were allowed to run stock auctions in which they themselves could place bids on the shares deposited with them as collateral for the loans. The auctioneer or an affiliated business won every auction of the state shares—a spectacular act of selfdealing. Formal title to them was reassigned a year later.7
The paring in governmental scope, while desirable, raised difficulties. Preeminent among these was the lack of clarity about boundaries between the public and the private realm and about responsibility for seeing to it that the state in its entirety did not go to smithereens. Shifting boundaries meant shifting options for individuals. Consumerism and affluence, forbidden fruit under the communists, were now smiled upon, but the seam between these licit wants and illicit avarice was not well demarcated. The short-range thinking bred by high uncertainty made many officeholders greedy, for feathering one’s nest was one way to hedge against an unascertainable future. As the trenchant Oleg Poptsov noted, “When [authority] is transient and when society is poor and has lost all basis for guarantees, the danger rises a hundredfold that someone will take advantage of power in order to live well after a stay in office.”8
The ambiguity of limits was only the half of it. Emulation of foreign models was the rage in Moscow, and it bled into things political. It could manifest itself in trivialities—such as the electric golf carts purchased for Barvikha-4 after Yeltsin saw George Bush tooling around in one at Camp David in February 1992—but it was not limited to them. Copycat and wishful thinking impelled Yeltsin and his peers toward institutional inventions (a presidency and vice presidency, a constitutional court, and so forth) that often were underspecified and unsynchronized with the surrounding scene. As Yeltsin was to observe mordantly in Notes of a President, “there arose beautiful structures and beautiful titles with nothing behind them.”9 Beneath the surface, the very infrastructure of government was buckling. There was marker after marker of it: a doubling in rates of violent crime, to levels comparable to those in Colombia, Jamaica, and Swaziland; spreading corruption, especially after privatization; porous borders; tax evasion by the business class and a yawning budget deficit; a torn social safety net; and demonetization, the flight from the inflation-devalued ruble into dollars, money surrogates, and barter.10 The army, the crown jewel of Russian governments since Ivan the Terrible, plunged from 2.75 million men under arms in 1992 to a million in 1999; officers and enlisted men huddled in tents after the post–Cold War efflux from Eastern Europe; the pay of a majority of the officer corps was in arrears.11 And the Communist Party, whose hierarchical apparatus and mass membership base had kept the Soviet state intact, was gone.
Inside the machinery of Russian government, Yeltsin was faced with an enfeeblement of discipline and accountability, as comes out in his anecdote about two reformist members of his first cabinet. Eduard Dneprov, the education minister put into office in 1990, wanted curriculum changes in the schools. He was able to implement some, having had “the luck to work things out under the old regime, when people still listened to the bosses.” Academician Andrei Vorob’ëv was commissioned minister of health in late 1991, and made no headway with his advocacy of a role for private physicians and clinics: “Vorob’ëv’s system immediately fell into disorganization. No one understood it or wanted to do a thing about it for one reason only—the staff of the ministry had simply ceased to function.”12 For Yeltsin the mutineer, remember, being a steely “boss for the bosses” had been a selling point. Now the compliance of bosses and underbosses was a question mark.
Boris Yeltsin’s predicament had an international dimension. Governments the length and breadth of Eurasia faced problems of staggering complexity. In fourteen of the fifteen post-Soviet capitals, there was the silver lining of freedom from foreign—Russian—domination. It was a unity elixir and bought reformers a blame-free startup period. In Moscow, there was no silver lining. The Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Georgians had attained statehood and membership in the global community. What Yeltsin and the Russians got was less of what they had before—a diminished state struggling to maintain regional influence, let alone the USSR’s say in global affairs. About three in four Russian citizens in 1992 accepted the expiration of the Soviet Union as an accomplished fact; two in three were sorry that it had happened.13 Once the divorce was final, little about it redounded to the political benefit of Yeltsin. “I was convinced,” he testifies, “that Russia had to rid itself of its imperial mission.” Once nationalized, it “needed a stronger, tougher… policy in order not to lose its significance and authority altogether.” Greater authority, however, did not come to pass in the post-Soviet space. Yeltsin himself bewailed the hole in the heart of the deposed ruling nation: “We [Russians] seem almost to be embarrassed by the fact that we are so big and incoherent, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves. We are tortured by a certain feeling of emptiness.”14 If the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union made the United States the solitary superpower, it made Russia the solitary ex-superpower. One had a superiority complex, the other an inferiority complex for which no curative was offered.
Yeltsin was not overdrawing when he said “the specter of discord and civil war” hung over Russia and the ex-USSR in the first half of the 1990s.15 Gorbachev rates praise for self-restraint and the prevention of a bloodletting. Yeltsin deserves more and has not always received it. The celerity of the parting of the ways after Belovezh’e was preferable many times over to an endeavor to salvage the union state through violence. At home, Yeltsin dampened Russian revanchism, jingoism, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In the “Near Abroad,” he reached understandings with the majority of the non-Russian fourteen, repatriated troops, did not employ ethnic Russians as a fifth column, and helped float their economies by supplying oil and gas at discounted prices. The most combustive of the potential altercations in the region involved lands over the Russian frontier and populated mostly by ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, a list that for some nationalists included northern Kazakhstan, Trans-Dniester in Moldova, and the Donbass, Sevastopol and all of the Crimean peninsula, and Odessa area in Ukraine. Yeltsin never pressed claims to these territories. Russia’s military involvement as a peacekeeper in three fragile states (Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan) shaded over into tampering and patronage of pro-Moscow districts, but these were the aberrations that proved the rule.