But who could have found an easy way out at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the mere survival of the Russian state and its people was the only relevant issue? Yeltsin’s battering-ram power was sufficient to destroy the prison of the past, but he lacked the preparation and creativity to design the palace of the future.
Despite the challenges, by 2000 Russians lived in the same dimension as the rest of the civilized world, and we measured success and failure in our lives by the same standards. As did many of my compatriots, I always supported and voted for Yeltsin—with great expectations from 1989 to 1993, with hard feelings from 1994 to 1996, when his only great virtue was that he was an obstacle to Communist revanchism.
The growing disappointment of his last two years in office was due to Yeltsin’s inability to carry forward necessary reforms and root out corruption from Russia’s political and economic life. But, frankly speaking, we didn’t have any real alternative. In judging the pros and cons of Yeltsin’s rule, one may argue that he failed to root out the Communist and KGB seeds from Russian soil but at least he stopped them from sprouting on his watch.
Lenin still lies in Red Square, and the two bans (in 1991 and 1993) on the Communist Party marching under the banners of Lenin and Stalin were only temporary. As a dedicated anticommunist, I’m the last one to excuse such softness on what’s left of the criminal Soviet state. Yet I understand Yeltsin’s unease about dealing the final blow to the regime that propelled him to the top of the nomenclatura.
Perhaps the most important thing Yeltsin did was something he did not do when he took power. After the blackest pages of post-Communist Russian history had been turned in October 1993, and after several bloody days in Moscow, Yeltsin declined to do what his opponents almost surely would have done: wipe out the other side. For the first time in all of Russian history the new ruler did not eliminate the losers to consolidate control. What’s more, eventually they were integrated into the political process. Yeltsin called for immediate elections and accepted an independent parliament.
Out of nowhere, the career bureaucrat literally leapt to the front lines armed with an instinct for breaking down barriers and opening doors long closed. And yet Yeltsin’s inconsistency was boundless. He allowed regional leaders to have more power but then dived into the tragic war in Chechnya. He waged battle against special privileges for the elites but later opened the floodgates for the oligarchs to loot the country. He promoted free and fair elections, but in the end he couldn’t accept that popular will could decide supreme power.
It was clear Yeltsin couldn’t stay in power with fair elections and the abuses quickly mounted. From that point on the Putin police state was all but predestined. Putin had only to follow his own instincts and carry through what was already in motion. Yeltsin failed the final and most important test. The fragile democratic structures he allowed to form could not survive his own need for power and security. He failed to create lasting institutions. The structure relied on his leadership, and the freedoms that existed were there only because he allowed them. There was no way such a system could withstand the exit of the ruler who created it.
Worst of all, his collapse poisoned the minds of the Russian people against what they saw, incorrectly, as uncontrolled capitalism and democracy. The oligarchs who took power prevailed over the good of the people. Russians saw no benefits from the supposed blessings of elections and the free market. A new ruling elite was formed out of the old bureaucrats and the new technocrats, united in their indifference to the values of liberal democracy. The fights among them at the end of the 1990s to find Yeltsin’s successor could have gone differently, but democracy was sure to be the loser. They quickly recognized that elections and a free media could only threaten their grip on power. It was no coincidence that Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor came from the KGB.
Missed opportunities were inevitable considering the magnitude of the changes and problems that confronted Yeltsin. It’s still early to analyze what he could have done better, but it is relatively simple to compare how things have gone since Putin took over in 2000. There was chaos, but Yeltsin never attacked individual freedoms. Putin has built his entire presidency to be the opposite of the Yeltsin years, with a great deal of success. The entire government has been brought under the direct control of the president. The parliament attempted to impeach Yeltsin twice; now it is a puppet show. The corruption of the oligarchs has been moved inside the Kremlin walls where it has expanded to staggering levels. The media, which was free to criticize Yeltsin, is entirely at the service of the Putin administration. The economy is where we see the biggest difference, although most of the credit must go to the simple fact that during Putin’s tenure the price of oil went from $10 a barrel to over $100. And even with those untold energy riches the average Russian is seeing little improvement in his standard of living.
Boris Yeltsin had more than his share of faults, but he was a real person. He had virtues and vices in his flesh and blood. We exchanged him for a shadow of a man who wants only to keep us all in perpetual darkness. The long lines of Russians who waited to view Yeltsin’s coffin and pay their respects at a Moscow cathedral demonstrated that despite his many failures people sensed the possibility for good in what he attempted. This is a stark contrast to what we got in his successor.
Fifteen years into his rule in Russia, there is still an impressively large industry of pundits discussing Vladimir Putin’s true nature. Some guesswork is to be expected considering the lack of documentation about most of his early life and the conflicting reports and biographical portraits about him and about his career. Even his own autobiographical statements and interviews seem designed to obscure and mislead, which of course they are.
Putin’s early life story is not the subject of my interest or this book. Investigating the hardships of his Leningrad childhood and trying to sort fact from fiction in his biography has been done elsewhere by those who find such things more rewarding than I do. I expect there is much to learn that will never be learned until Putin is out of power, if ever. So I will cite a few authors whose opinions and analysis I respect and move ahead to Putin’s time in power. Russian journalist Masha Gessen knows as much as anyone can likely know about Putin and writes with her usual acuity on his character in her excellent 2012 biography, The Man Without a Face:
Like most Soviet citizens of his generation, Putin was never a political idealist. His parents may or may not have believed in a Communist future for all the world, in the ultimate triumph of justice for the proletariat, or in any of the other ideological clichés that had been worn thin by the time Putin was growing up; he never even considered his relationship to these ideals…. Like other members of his generation, Putin replaced belief in communism, which no longer seemed plausible or even possible, with faith in institutions. His loyalty was to the KGB and to the empire it served and protected: the USSR.
A new biography I haven’t had a chance to really study is Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin by Hill and Gaddy. This passage near the beginning caught my eye as an insightful explanation of Putin’s behavior during most of his public life. It jibes well with my description of Putin as a poker player who was adept at reading his opponents. Keep this description in mind as we move into discussion of what other world leaders thought of Putin when they met. In all likelihood it was whatever he wanted them to think.