20 These actions are well analyzed in Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).
21 “Gusinsky’s cynical brilliance throughout the campaign against him was to cloak his commercial interests and political ambitious in the language of freedom of speech.” Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 155. Berezovskii was less cynical, and had always treated ORT as a source of influence, not a money maker.
22 Boris Nemtsov, third interview with the author (April 12, 2002). Instead of Yeltsin, Yevgenii Primakov headed up the new board. The station was soon converted into a sports channel and went off the air in 2003.
23 Yegor Gaidar, “On ne khotel nasiliya, no tol’ko on ne byl slabakom” (He did not want to use force, but he was no weakling, either), Novoye vremya/New Times, April 30, 2007.
24 Details of the interaction from interviews with family members.
25 Author’s conversation with Putin on the sidelines of the Valdai Discussion Club, Bocharov Ruchei residence, Sochi, September 14, 2007.
26 Dybskii, “Ot pervogo litsa.”
27 Andrei Kolesnikov, “Boris Yel’tsin poproshchalsya so svoyei epokhoi” (Boris Yeltsin said good-bye to his epoch), Kommersant-Daily, February 6, 2006.
28 “A Conversation with Billy Graham,” http://www/midtod.com/9612/billygraham.phtml.
29 Father Georgii Sudenov in “Ushël Boris Yel’tsin” (Boris Yeltsin has departed), Izvestiya, April 24, 2007. Sudenov, the deacon of the church in the Moscow suburb of Troparëvo, was sometimes invited to dine with the Yeltsins. Before eating, he always said grace and Yeltsin joined him in singing the Slavic hymn “Mnogaya leta” (Many years).
30 “Boris Yel’tsin: ya khotel, chtoby lyudi byli svobodny.”
31 Second Yeltsina interview.
32 Aleksandr Gamov, “Utraty” (Losses), Komsomol’skaya pravda, April 25, 2007.
33 Second Yeltsina interview.
34 Andrei Kolesnikov, “Poslednii put’ pervogo prezidenta” (The first president’s last road), Kommersant-Daily, April 26, 2007. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were both at Putin’s first inauguration and a few other ceremonial events but studiously avoided one another. Another notable attendee at the funeral was Aleksandr Rutskoi, the vice president Yeltsin put in jail during the constitutional conflict of 1993. Ruslan Khasbulatov, Rutskoi’s ally against Yeltsin, skipped the funeral, as did Aleksandr Korzhakov.
35 The press reported as fact or rumor that Naina’s handkerchief contained an icon or a cross. One journalist claimed that the crucifix from Yeltsin’s christening in 1931 had been saved all these years and was buried with him. These stories were all untrue.
CODA
1 Mikhail Gorbachev, who attended the funeral, took a moderate but still critical position when he said in a statement that Yeltsin would be remembered for his “tragic fate” and misguided policies. He softened his response in a press interview in which he noted that he and Yeltsin had both set out to improve life for the people.
2 Quoted at http://gazeta.ru/politics/yeltsin/1614107.shtml.
3 Quoted in Yekaterina Grigor’eva and Vladimir Perekrest, “Provodili po-khristianski” (He was given a Christian sendoff), Izvestiya, April 26, 2007.
4 Viktor Shenderovich, “Yel’tsin,” at http://www.shender.ru/paper/text/?file=154.
5 Commencement address at Washington University, St. Louis, May 19, 2006, at http://www.olin.wustl.edu/discovery/feature.cfm?sid=668&i=30&pg=8.
6 “Boris Yeltsin and His Role in Russian History,” at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/dominant/edomt0718_2/ed071820.
7 The latest survey for which data are available was done by the Public Opinion Foundation in February 2006. The question was whether Gorbachev had done more good or more harm to the nation, and a middle category, for good and harm in equal measure, was available. Eleven percent of Russians thought Gorbachev had done more good than harm, 23 percent that he had done them in equal measure, 52 percent that he had done more harm than good, and 14 percent found it hard to answer. “Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the USSR,” at http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/cat/societas/rus_im/rus_history/gorbachev_m_s_/etb060812.
8 Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: Humanities Press, 1943), 156–57. The Russian Lenin was the only one of Hook’s examples about whom he wrote an entire chapter. The prevalent image in many recent studies of social and political change is that of “path dependency,” whereby positive reinforcement, short time horizons, and inertia keep things on the same track over extended periods of time. See in particular Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1. Before a path can be established, however, it has been pointed out that relatively small factors, such as choices by leaders or bargains struck among different groups, may push things down one of several competing paths, so that the pattern is one of “periods of relative (but not total) openness, followed by periods of relative (but not total or permanent) stability.” Ibid., 53. Yeltsin made his mark in a period of relative openness in which Hook’s metaphor of a fork in the road holds up well.
9 Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969), 113, 402.
10 Gorbachev, of course, addressed these same issues in his own way, and, unlike Yeltsin, he also made conceptual breakthroughs on issues of war and peace. But Gorbachev’s reassessments on domestic issues were less thorough than Yeltsin’s, which explains why, in the radical climate of the times, Yeltsin consistently outbid him.
11 Isaiah Berlin, “On Political Judgment,” New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996, 26–30.
12 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002), xx.
13 Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001). Stankevich by the time of the interview had no use for Yeltsin and could not be suspected of bias in his favor.
14 Anatolii Kulikov, Tyazhëlyye zvëzdy (Heavy stars) (Moscow: Voina i mir, 2002), 410 (italics added).
15 The significance of negative as well as positive choices is clearly drawn in Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli’s Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 19.
16 Martin Gilman, “Becoming a Motor of the Global Economy,” Moscow Times, November 14, 2007.
17 Quotations from Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002), 10, 12. Carothers was writing generally of countries that have lost their way in the transition, and not specifically about Russia.
18 Even Putin’s treatment of lower-level officials brings to mind Yeltsin’s early reputation as boss for the bosses. One observer has called him “the people’s czar who reins in ministers, bureaucrats, tycoons, and even the politicians of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.” Peter Finn, “In a Russian City, Clues to Putin’s Abiding Appeal,” The Washington Post, November 24, 2007.