When a statesman dies he gets tributes — even from those who suffered most at his hands. The news of Boris Yeltsin’s death on Monday was no sooner out than Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, expressed his condolences to the family of the man who had forced him from office. Gorbachev said that ”major events for good” rested on Yeltsin’s shoulders, but even the charitable Russian reformer could not resist adding ”and some serious mistakes”. The truth is that Yeltsin’s legacy proved to be a bitter pill, from which Russia is still suffering.
Yeltsin did not start his political life as a democrat. Ordered by the politburo to demolish the house where the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family were shot by bolsheviks — a spot that was becoming the focus of embarrassing demonstrations — the young first secretary of Sverdlovsk party, like the slavish apparatchik he was, complied readily, sending the bulldozers in at night. He was always a quick-thinking opportunist, and when at the height of perestroika he was promoted by Gorbachev to run Moscow, Yeltsin sensed his sponsor’s weakness.
And yet for a fleeting moment he almost made it as the hero of Russia’s nascent democracy. In July 1990 he abandoned the Communist party altogether. Soviet forces seized the television headquarters in Lithuania in January 1991 in response to the Baltic republic’s moves towards independence. With some courage, Yeltsin called on the troops not to obey illegal orders. He persuaded a majority of deputies in the Russian Parliament to amend the Constitution and establish a directly elected executive presidency for Russia. When communist hardliners took Gorbachev hostage in the Crimea in August that year, Yeltsin jumped on a tank, urging its embarrassed crew to break from the coup. It was the iconic image of the fall of the old regime, but the truth of that day is that the tank commanders were so unsure of what they were meant to be doing that they stopped at red traffic lights.
But if Yeltsin cast himself as the founding father of post-communist Russia, a Thomas Jefferson he was not. A meeting at which the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus plotted the downfall of the union ended in a drunken brawl. Russia’s democratic dawn lasted for only two years, until the new president ordered the tanks in against the same Parliament that he had used to bring down the Soviet system. Now blood was being shed in the name of liberal democracy, and some democrats were uncomfortable. Yeltsin’s dogmatic abandonment of state subsidies on prices set inflation galloping to 2 000%. It was called shock therapy, only it was too much shock and too little therapy. Millions saw their savings wiped out overnight, while those close to the president and his family helped themselves to vast fortunes, which they keep to this day.
Even before Yeltsin sent an unmarked column of tanks into Grozny to crush the separatists and start a decade of brutal war in Chechnya, liberal democracy was being crushed by the president’s fatal embrace. The Western backing that the president enjoyed only sealed the fate of the democrats. Many of the seeds of Russia’s authoritarianism were planted in that era. If Yeltsin’s free-market reforms caused a bigger fall in industrial output than that inflicted by Hitler’s 1941 invasion, the response of an oil- and gas-rich Russia today is to be aggressively nationalistic. If Russia had a president who was drunk — who, according to a joke at the time, had difficulty keeping his seat in the upright position — Russia today has an all too sober, Teutonic-looking man who is terrified of releasing his grip on power. Yeltsin’s and Vladimir Putin’s Russia are inverse images of each other, and our failure to see the link between them continues to bedevil our relations with Moscow. In the end, Yeltsin proved more effective as a destroyer of the Soviet Union than he was as a builder of Russian democracy. — Â