Yeltsin always had the capacity to surprise us, such as when he criticized Gorbachev at the Communist Party Central Committee Plenum in October 1987; or when he clambered up onto a tank outside the White House during the coup in August 1991; or when, with a weak heart, he danced on stage at a rock concert before the uncompromising presidential elections in 1996. He had a wide Russian nature the size of his personality, and to match it he had the broad scope of his gestures, the energy of a ram; he was sincere in his delusion – and just as sincere in his very Russian ability to forgive and to ask forgiveness, as he did in his final address to the nation on 31 December 1999, when he announced he was stepping down.
We shall probably never agree about Yeltsin, just as sensible Chinese people officially declare themselves about Mao: 70 percent right, 30 percent wrong. We can’t give such a balanced assessment; we can’t reach a consensus for the sake of calm in society and universal harmony. We don’t know the proportions and the half-tones: Russia is a country with a binary, black-and-white way of thinking. In our social and political structures this binary nature inevitably leads to polarization and clashes, to revolution and explosions. That’s why today we are living in a transformer box, in a humming electric field, where all ideas and historical personalities that come within the focus of public discussion lead to instant polarization. We can’t agree about Crimea, or about Ukraine, or about Lenin, or about Stalin, or about gays, or about migrants. Our arguments instantly divide society, splitting it into two irreconcilable camps; they cause splits in families and among friends and colleagues. ‘The Yeltsin Test’ is just such a marker of irreconcilability, a symptom of social schism.
A symbol of this eternal Russian binary nature is the memorial to Nikita Khrushchev in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. The work of the sculptor, Ernst Neizvestny, it has black tiles clashing with white tiles. This is exactly how we look at Yeltsin: black and white, no room for grey. For some, he is Judas and an agent of American imperialism; for others, the grave-digger of a rotten state that was ridiculed by the world. For some, like Vladimir Putin, the collapse of the USSR was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’; for others, it was the breakthrough to freedom. There is no middle view.
No one loves grave-diggers, but ultimately we can’t avoid them. By the end of the 1980s an explosion was building up in the Soviet Union; the atmosphere was stifling and fraught with thunderstorms. The thunder roared and the turbulent flow of the nineties cleaned out the Soviet stables and threw us forward onto the banks of the twenty-first century. Yeltsin was that explosion of a man who broke the bounds of the possible. It is no coincidence that one of the nicknames that stuck with him from the time he was First Secretary of the Reginal Committee of the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg was then called) was ‘the Bulldozer’. In reality, he reminded one more of a bear – not the caricature of the Russian bear, but a real beast from the Taiga, clever, threatening, but ultimately the eternally good hero of Russian folktales. There is an almost certainly apocryphal story about how, one summer, the fifteen-year-old Yeltsin became lost in the Taiga with a pair of younger schoolboys, how they wandered around lost for a month, living on berries and roots, before eventually Yeltsin brought them out to their people. He was a powerful beast with a natural instinct for survival, a true ‘political animal’, zoon politikon, in Aristotle’s terms, a mythical totem of the Russian forests.
And even if the victory achieved by Yeltsin over the dying USSR in August 1991 turned out to be only temporary, it did at least give us a breathing space for almost two decades, when we could live with the air of freedom in our lungs. The atmosphere in Russia today is once more stuffy and fraught with thunder, like in the 1980s, but there’s no new Yeltsin visible on the horizon ready to burst out like a ram and break this rotting system; there are no demonstrations of almost a million people on the streets of Moscow, as there were in 1990–1, no nationalist ferment on the edges of the empire. But even if Yeltsin’s energy for change is largely forgotten, we can always remember two of his characteristics which can forgive much: his ability to ask for our pardon, and his ability to leave on time. These are, sadly, lacking among the present leadership.
MAIDAN IN MOSCOW
Unmentioned in official propaganda and half-forgotten by the people, yet another anniversary passed of the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which was carried out by the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP in Russian, made up of certain members of the Soviet government) in August 1991. The only ones to remember it were the liberal media and a couple of dozen of the old democrats, who laid flowers at the monument to the three young men who died under an armoured personnel carrier on the Garden Ring Road in Moscow on the night of 20–21 August 1991. In fact, this event could have become the main holiday for modern Russia – the day of its founding and independence, our Fourth of July or Bastille Day, but the total oblivion surrounding it these days is no less significant.
According to the Constitution of the Russian Federation (Chapter 1, Article 3): ‘The bearer of sovereignty and the sole source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.’ What happened in August 1991 was an act of people’s sovereignty, when tens of thousands of people stood up to the tanks of the coup plotters, took the weakened power into their own hands and handed it to the nascent Russian state. The principal actors here were not those playing at being plotters in the GKChP, who were simply frightened men, nor was it Gorbachev or even Yeltsin. The most important participants were the people, who constituted the real power and legitimized its passing from Gorbachev to Yeltsin. It was the classic scenario of a national-liberation and bourgeois-democratic revolution.
The events of August 1991 and the collapse of the USSR became the basis for a new Russian statehood, and it is exactly from there that the current Russian elite have their beginnings, having received power and property in the post-Soviet collapse. If those August events hadn’t taken place, Putin would now be a retired KGB colonel, living in his three-roomed flat with his dacha and ‘Volga’ car, and today’s oligarchs would have lived out their time in state scientific research institutes, or would have spent long periods in prison for economic crimes. It’s no coincidence that today they all stubbornly criticize the collapse of the USSR and the 1990s, the decade of changes, yet they all got everything thanks to that period, and they are all children of August 1991, products of the semi-collapse of empire.
That August I was in Moscow and spent three days and two nights on the barricades around the White House, the seat of the Russian Supreme Soviet (Parliament), which had become the centre of resistance to the coup. There are two feelings that remain with me from those incredible days. The first is the feeling of the implausibility of all that was going on; it was as if I was taking part in a huge dramatization. I remember feeling this from the first moments of the coup, when I heard the strains of Swan Lake playing on every TV channel (this classic performance by the Bolshoi Ballet was always broadcast at moments of crisis, instead of normal programming), and when I saw the tanks on Manezh Square near the Kremlin to where I hurried from home. The tanks stood around uncertainly, awaiting further orders, and here and there soldiers started to crawl out of the hatches, looking to bum a cigarette off passers-by. Already at that stage I began to feel that this wasn’t for real. On the one hand, there was alarm, tanks, the Manezh, the silent Kremlin towers: in a word, a Soviet Tiananmen. On the other, the tankmen were curious to know what was going on, there was a holiday crowd, children climbing on the tanks: a typical family day out, a real carnival atmosphere.