Boris the Good

It was hard not to admire Boris Yeltsin when he first emerged as a primal force in Moscow. After all, he demonstrated tremendous political acumen and courage. He ostentatiously quit the Communist party before the Soviet system collapsed, and he stood up to the hardliners who tried to topple Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, jumping on a tank to talk the army into turning against the would-be putschists. He then orchestrated the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving him in charge of the new Russia and his archrival Gorbachev out of a job. He also vowed to turn Russia into a democratic state, with a free market economy and a newly empowered citizenry.

When Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007, Western leaders looked back nostalgically at his era and his efforts to end Cold War tensions. I happened to be visiting President George H.W. Bush in Houston the next day, just as he was preparing to board a presidential plane that would take him and Bill Clinton to Yeltsin’s funeral.

“There was one thing Clinton and I agreed on: We both liked Yeltsin,” he said. But it’s no accident that the Yeltsin era–and particularly, the initial optimism of that period–feels like ancient history now. In today’s Russia the 1990s are dismissed as the wild years, which set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s reversion to strong-arm rule that has eliminated almost all checks and balances, steadily strangled political freedoms, and allowed an oil-rich, cash-flush elite to throw its weight around again at home and abroad.

This latest biography of the father of the new Russia feels like a product of earlier times, when the Yeltsin glow was still there and Putin’s shadow was barely visible. In Yeltsin: A Life, Harvard professor Timothy J. Colton chronicles, often in painstaking detail, his political twists and turns, the multiple health crises that accompanied his latter years in power, and his endless hiring and firing of key people as he tried to keep one step ahead of the shifting alliances around him.

What’s sorely lacking, however, is the bigger picture that has been emerging with a bit of historical distance, and the kind of critical thinking about an innately attractive leader with a surfeit of glaringly visible failings. Colton is too much of an admirer of his subject and of his early, admittedly impressive, career to fill that void. He has produced a well-researched book with many interesting details drawn from his interviews with Yeltsin, his family, and a variety of other key players, but one that feels oddly incomplete.

Colton concedes that Yeltsin was “enigmatic and flawed,” but insists he was a hero nonetheless. “As a democratizer, he is in the company of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Vaclav Havel,” he writes.

The Gorbachev-Yeltsin comparisons and contrasts are a subject unto themselves, and South Africa presents a very different model. But when it comes to the most revealing comparisons, with Walesa and Havel, the results clearly contradict Colton: Poland and the Czech Republic have emerged as stable democracies; Russia is once again pursuing its own path, where all that is left of democratic practices are the formal trappings, like the sham election of Dmitry Medvedev in March, and none of the substance.

Yeltsin does deserve full credit for his role as, in Colton’s words, “the dragon slayer who sallied forth from the belly of the beast.” A loyal Communist party apparatchik for most of his career, he was perceptive enough to recognize that Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika couldn’t save the Soviet system, and then to launch his bold initiatives that would hasten its demise. Aside from developing a new relationship with Washington, Yeltsin won the sympathy of some of Russia’s neighbors, who were still smarting from Soviet subjugation.

His most stunning gesture: admitting historical truths–most notably, Soviet responsibility for the murder of thousands of Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1940. His predecessors had blamed the Germans, but in 1992, Yeltsin dispatched an envoy to Warsaw with the original Kremlin order for those executions. At home, Yeltsin also encouraged efforts to break with the country’s history of lies, and he appeared genuinely shocked by successive new revelations, such as Lenin’s orders to execute 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests during the civil war.

But soon Yeltsin’s domestic constituents were far more preoccupied with the impact of his economic program, which at first offered far more shock than therapy. His abrupt price liberalization led to astronomical inflation (2,520 percent in 1992), the loss of the life savings of millions, and a steady decline in national output.

“As downturns go, Russia’s in the 1990s ranks with the Great Depression of 1929-33 in the United States,” Colton points out. Little wonder that Yeltsin became the focus of widespread disillusionment and anger. While most Russians suffered, a new class of oligarchs divided up–and often fought over–the spoils of the Communist system. Corruption, mob hits, and general lawlessness prevailed. And increasingly, Yeltsin rewarded the oligarchs–to wit, the “loans-for-shares” scheme that helped bail him out at the cost of further plundering of the state’s assets, only to trigger more public fury.

Colton acknowledges all those negative trends, but never examines the impact on the lives of ordinary Russians in more than an abstract way. He implicitly suggests that no transition from the Soviet to a market economy could have avoided widespread pain and abuses. That’s certainly a tenable argument. And it’s worth noting that the Yeltsin era was marked by a steep decline in oil prices, the exact opposite of today’s situation that has allowed the Putin regime to trumpet its economic successes. But it was Yeltsin’s political tactics, as much as his economic decisions, which were responsible for the fact that Russia has deviated so dramatically from the democratic course that countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic have followed.

As much as he wanted to consider himself a democrat, Yeltsin had little patience for outright defiance. When opposition legislators refused to heed his edict to disband parliament in 1993, he ordered his troops and tanks to shell and storm the same building where he had defied the coup plotters two years earlier. The official death toll was 187, and the building was left a burnt-out shell. Yeltsin then pushed through a referendum on a new constitution that awarded him sweeping presidential powers. To ensure its passage, some of the extreme Communist and nationalist publications were closed down, while the mainstream media found themselves increasingly manipulated or controlled by the new oligarchs. But Yeltsin’s approval ratings continued to drop, particularly after he launched a highly unpopular war in Chechnya. His frequent disappearances, prompted by his heart problems and drinking binges, only contributed further to this downward trend.

The guarantee that Yeltsin wouldn’t abuse his new powers was supposed to be his own commitment to democracy, and Colton is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in most cases. It’s true that the Russian media were still freer than they ever had been (or would be afterwards) and that people began to take new freedoms for granted, such as the right to travel. But unlike Walesa and Havel, Yeltsin didn’t build democratic institutions that he would respect, even when they didn’t work in his favor. Rather than seeking consensus, he issued an endless stream of decrees, thus keeping alive the tradition of arbitrary executive power. When Lech Walesa was faced with a resurgent party of ex-Communists, he sometimes envied Yeltsin’s methods. But he never imitated them. In fact, Walesa preferred to lose to the ex-Communists rather than destroy Poland’s fragile new democratic institutions. As a result, democracy was strengthened even when its architects lost at the polls.

Contrast that record with Yeltsin’s. Arguing his case for a constitution that gave him sweeping presidential powers, he warned that anything less could lead to chaos, and then “people would demand a dictator.” The irony is that the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, whom he plucked from relative obscurity, has played that role quite well. Colton blithely dismisses charges that Yeltsin cut a deal with Putin to protect his family and entourage from corruption charges. And he doesn’t even mention the suspicious activities of the FSB (as the KGB is now called) that have prompted a few vocal critics to charge that a series of apartment bombings that took 300 lives in 1999, which Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists, may have been a provocation. The backlash to those bombings propelled Putin to an easy victory in the presidential contest of 2000. The rest, of course, is some well-known recent history.

The other irony is that, to justify his relentless power grab, Putin convinced most Russians that the 1990s under Yeltsin had been a period of unremitting anarchy and injustice. In fact, there was far more hope in those years that Russia would somehow find its way to a more open system than there is now. A new Yeltsin biography should make it easier to understand why the opposite could and did happen, but Colton generally prefers to downplay that part of the story.

There’s no doubt that Boris Yeltsin is a far more sympathetic character than Vladimir Putin, and that Putin is to blame for Russia’s path in recent years. But his enabler can’t be left off the hook, either.

Andrew Nagorski is a Newsweek International senior editor and the author, most recently, The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II.