Remembering Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007)
Senior Fellow David Aikman saw a lot of Boris Yeltsin over the years and recalls a flawed and fascinating leader.
I first met Boris Yeltsin in Moscow in February 1989, when he was still Deputy Minister for the construction industry, a job to which Mikhail Gorbachev had sent him after Yeltin’s dramatic resignation from the Politburo in October 1987 and ouster from the Moscow Party leadership the following month. I was interviewing him for Time Magazine not only because he had already emerged from the gray tapestry of Soviet politics as an outspoken critic of corruption and stagnation within the Soviet bureaucracy, but also because the following month he was going to run as the at-large candidate for the seat representing Moscow’s eight million citizens.
As he spoke during the interview about his adventurous youth and early manhood, losing two fingers in right hand after trying to dissect a Soviet hand-grenade and later traveling like a hobo across the Soviet Union by train, it was obvious he was quite different from the colorless apparatchiks who usually occupied seats on the Soviet Politburo. He joked, he loved tennis, he enjoyed being asked personal questions. It was obvious to me then that he was a quite exceptional Soviet figure: lively, eccentric, and spontaneous.
A few days later, another Western reporter and I were the only two journalists who squeezed past security guards into Moscow ‘s House of Actors to observe some three hundred members of the Soviet elite—admirals, nuclear scientists, ballet dancers—pepper Yeltsin with questions about life in their own country. After all, he was the only former Soviet Politburo member they had ever been free to address freely. How much money did a Politburo member earn, they wanted to know? Was it true Raissa Gorbachev had ordered the redecoration of the kitchen of her husband Mikhail’s official dacha seven times? Yeltsin answered every question forthrightly (I think the Politburo salary was about 800 roubles a month) and with aplomb, his rubbery face captivating the audience with its smiles, its coy expressions of ignorance and its mock disapproval of some of the interrogation. None of the elite had ever seen anything like it.
Yeltsin won so handily in the March 1989 election in a free vote—by 80 percent, according to some statistics—that it was obvious he would go very far in Russian political life.
In September 1989, he arrived in the US with a small, unofficial delegation of four Soviet citizens as a guest of the Esalen Institute, an unlikely host if ever there was one for a Soviet politician. I traveled with him for much of the visit, often in his official limo. Yeltsin traveled from New York to Baltimore to Washington to Chicago to Minnesota to Houston on his first-ever trip to the US.
He was captivated by everything he saw: on his first night in Manhattan, sleepless and jet-lagged, cruising the Korean-run produce stalls still open late at night with good-quality produce; later, observing the tidiness of private housing in the suburbs of Minneapolis, and finally, sobbing with disillusionment at Gorbachev’s economic reforms after encountering the Aladdin-like cornucopia of choice available at a Houston supermarket. One morning, on Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway, he spotted the phone facing the back seat of the limo and had me ask the driver if he could call Moscow on it. It turned out he could. Then, like a kid in a candy-store, he exulted in a conversation with his personal assistant in Moscow, discussing Russian television’s treatment of his meeting with President Bush and the date of the next Central Committee Meeting.
Gorbachev, even then, resented Yeltsin deeply, making sure that Yeltsin’s one encounter too many with Jack Daniels was carried extensively on Russian TV. When Yeltsin met Brent Scowcroft in the White House, he was deeply disappointed that he had not met Bush and laid on Scowcroft an ambitious and unrealistic proposal for American investment in Russia. But Bush dropped in on that meeting, chatted for fifteen minutes with Yeltsin, and ensured that the tall, burly Russian got his moment of “face.”
I traveled with him on his campaign plane in 1991 when he was running for the first-ever free election in Russia against four other candidates. In Chelyabinsk, scene of a disastrous Russian nuclear accident in the 1950s, peasant women approached him as if he were the tsar of old to petition redress for their families from the state. At another stop on the route, he led his motorcade at one point blindly down an earth embankment into a field. Panic-stricken chatter erupted on hand-held radios—there were no cell phones in Russia at this time—among security personnel and political staff. Then word got back to everyone; Boris Nikolaevich simply wanted to relieve himself among the trees.
Later still, in 1992, after his defiant and successful challenge to the Soviet coup plotters of August 1991, he arrived in the US for his first official state visit. The Soviet Union had collapsed at the end of 1991 and Yeltsin now headed Russia, a sovereign state among the Commonwealth of Independent States. He addressed a Joint Session of Congress and toured the American heartland in triumph as a Russian leader Americans were now encouraged to love. In Kansas, the leader of a meat-packers’ local at a hog-farm spontaneously handed Boris Yeltsin a windbreaker as a memento of the visit. Yeltsin, with equal spontaneity, handed the man his pale suit jacket, then headed for his limo in the motorcade that was about to depart. Another panic ensued, this time among Russian security personnel; the suit jacket he had just swapped for the windbreaker contained national security information like Russia’s nuclear codes.
Yeltsin’s shortcomings as the President of Russia for two terms, from 1991 until his resignation at the end of 1999, are well documented. His brutal war in Chechnya in 1994, his indulgence of Russian oligarchs who were robbing the Russian economy blind, his occasional drunken lapses, his lurching from great bouts of energy into almost sulky retreats from all activity, his inability to deliver to Russia the prosperity he had seen in the US; all these fell into the distaff side of his record.
But, in my view, his strengths far eclipsed his weaknesses. When, in August 1991, his car sped from his Moscow dacha to the Russian White House to enable him to face down the Soviet coup attempt, it passed coming in the opposite direction agents who had been sent to arrest him. His brave, decisive, inspiring action saved Russian democracy and did more to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire than anything else. Two years later, he aroused less sympathy when he ordered tanks to fire on the Russian White House, then held in thrall by an evil alliance of extreme right-wing and left-wing legislators who also wanted to overthrow democracy. In this action too, he displayed boldness and decisiveness that saved the day.
Russia during the Yeltsin years was undergoing an unprecedented transition from a unitary political empire run from Moscow and state-controlled economics to a market-economy democratic republic. There were many hiccups along the way, many errors of judgment. Yet in the face of economic uncertainty, social collapse, war in Chechnya, and the collapse of empire, Yeltsin vigorously defended democratic governance against repeated attempts to end it. The rambunctious, newly-free media loved to ridicule Yeltsin in innumerable ways. Yet he never shut them down, hedged them in with economic restrictions, let alone murdered their most outspoken critics of him, as Putin’s henchmen seem to have done in our own time. Yeltsin’s popularity, even at its highest, never approached Putin’s current approval level—around 80 percent—and on his death this week, not many Russians genuinely mourn him.
Yeltsin most admired, among preceding rulers of Russia, Peter the Great (1672–1725), who forced open Russian society and culture to the often strange and bracing winds blowing from the West. Yeltsin’s achievement never approached the transformative effect upon Russia that Peter had. Yeltsin, however, may be unique in the history not only of Russia, but of any country, in having undergone a genuine political conversion from Communist apparatchik to convinced champion of democracy. He ostentatiously resigned in public from the Soviet Communist Party in 1990.
His conversion, moreover, may have been not only political. One of the proudest events in his life, he recalled on one American trip, was when his grandson Boris had exchanged the red flag of the Young Pioneers for a crucifix around his neck. “All of Moscow’s Christians voted for me,” he told me in 1989 when discussing the demographics of his triumph in that year’s March elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies. It may have been an exaggeration, but it was one he expressed proudly.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who certainly made possible—however inadvertently—the collapse of Communism in Europe, resented Yeltsin for defying him when he led the country in 1987 and for humiliating him when a coup had nearly dethroned him in 1991. On the occasion of Yeltsin’s death, there was an unmistakable note of sour grapes in Gorbachev’s encomium for Yeltsin’s “great deeds, as well as serious errors.”
Gorbachev, without question, was a talented and human man when he ruled Moscow. But for my money, Yeltsin was braver, more idealistic, more realistic—and much greater fun.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Leadership, Wed 25 Apr 2007
