Yeltsin’s Legacy

“There is nothing more difficult to plan or more uncertain of success or more dangerous to carry out than an attempt to introduce new institutions,” Niccolo Machiavelli advised his prince in the early 16th century. Boris Yeltsin seems to have understood the difficulty, because he wrote shortly after becoming president of Russia that “[n]ot a single reform effort in Russia has ever been completed.” Fortunately, this did not prevent him from trying to build a new Russia from the debris of the collapsed communist empire. It should not be surprising that his success was less than complete.

Nevertheless, Russia’s difficult transition has surprised many observers. Acting as if the Russian Federation began its independent history in 1991 with a well-functioning economy and society, many journalists and scholars have tended to heap all the blame for Russia’s problems on the former president and the persons he placed in power. These critics forget (if they ever understood) that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the country was on the brink of famine. Its currency was worthless as a repository of value. Control of the command economy had collapsed. None of the institutions essential to a market economy existed, and Russia’s Communist-dominated legislature was against creating them.

Furthermore, more than seven decades of totalitarian control had atomized society. The country had been run as a giant criminal enterprise, with the Communist Party controlling all institutions from behind the scenes. Laws were enforced only when it was in the interest of the party. Courts decided cases not on their merits but on the basis of “telephone law”--the unofficial but binding diktat of Communist Party officials. At least a quarter of the gross national product was consumed by a voracious military-industrial complex.

To survive, Russia required not just reform but a complete revolution in the way the economy and government worked, in the structure of society and in public attitudes and habits. There was no way to carry out these revolutions in sequence; they had to occur simultaneously because progress in one was normally a precondition for progress in others.

No conceivable political leadership could have managed a successful transformation in months, or even in a few years. Some of the changes inevitably would have taken more than a single generation to complete. Yet those who condemn Yeltsin’s leadership seem to assume that a miracle was possible and that anything short of a miracle evidence of political failure.

Leon Aron takes on such feckless critics in his detailed but readable biography and offers a defense of the former Russian president more powerful than Yeltsin himself has managed to articulate. “Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life” is, furthermore, not just a biography. A century ago the book might have been entitled “The Life and Times of Boris Yeltsin,” because it deals as much with the times in which Yeltsin lived as it does with the man himself. But understanding the context in which Yeltsin rose to power and the circumstances under which he exercised it is essential if we are to place in perspective the achievements and failures of the first president of the Russian Federation.

Perspective is the critical element. Yeltsin’s shortcomings are numerous and have been so well publicized that they obscure his achievements. His recurrent bouts with illness, his lack of attention to detail, his ill-considered comments (often retracted), his habit of dismissing top officials without apparent preparation or justification, his occasional abuse of alcohol, his alleged tolerance of corruption in his official family--the list could be extended--have dominated the news from Russia in the daily press and on radio and television. These are not trivial faults, but they involve matters that are far from decisive for Russia’s future. The real question is whether Yeltsin managed to set Russia on a course that can lead to a free, democratic and eventually prosperous society or whether he squandered the opportunity to do so.

In Aron’s words, “If . . . a Russia peaceful, free, open to the world and gradually growing richer begins to take root and solidify,” Yeltsin can be placed in an “exclusive club” of those “who took over great countries on the very brink of a national catastrophe, held them together, repaired and restored them, and, in the process changed them fundamentally for the better.”

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Aron’s narrative ends a few months before Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation at the end of 1999. Nevertheless, everything that has happened since his book was written is consistent with the judgments offered in the biography. Despite widespread speculation throughout Yeltsin’s tenure that he would subvert the electoral process and never relinquish power voluntarily, he left office in a manner consistent with the constitution and made clear that his successor would have to win an election.

Yeltsin’s critics generally fault him for bungling Russia’s transition. In their eyes, he allowed dreamy theoreticians to impose “shock therapy” on the nation’s economy in 1992, with the result that inflation soared, wiping out savings. Then, it is alleged, rapid privatization of most state assets brought on the rule of super-rich oligarchs. Yeltsin also was accused of flouting democratic principles by sending tanks against a rebellious parliament in 1993 and of violating campaign spending laws when he won reelection in 1996.

As Aron demonstrates, none of these arguments is persuasive. They take actions out of context and ignore both cause and effect. They sometimes measure Russia by standards no country lives up to. As for “shock therapy” in 1992, it is clear that without the price liberalization that was immediately introduced, Russia would probably have experienced a famine. A sharp decline in the ruble’s value was inevitable because of the orgy of money printing that marked Mikhail Gorbachev’s last years in office. The Russian Supreme Soviet opposed most of the “therapy” and ordered the State Bank (under its control, not Yeltsin’s or his government’s) to continue heavy subsidies to state industries, which produced hyper-inflation. Crime of all types became more apparent because it was not suppressed by a police state and elements from the police state became part of the criminal world. Was this the result of bad policy or inevitable as the Yeltsin governments tried to avoid the abuses of a totalitarian past while building the basis for a civil society and the rule of law? What nation in history has managed to avoid similar lawlessness (though not always to the same degree) as it built the institutions of a market economy? Neither the author nor this reviewer can think of any.

There is no question that rapid privatization produced what can appropriately be termed grand larceny of state assets and that it has been followed by a pattern of insider deals, corrupt relations with government, special privileges and the further impoverishment of persons near the economic bottom of Russia’s highly stratified society. The effects are serious, and Russia still has not overcome them. But those who assert that this result could easily have been avoided have not explained how. Nobody has devised a practical plan for privatizing state assets fairly when there are no sources of legitimate private capital in society.

There were only two courses open to the Russian government in 1992 and 1993: to privatize rapidly whatever this required or to delay privatization until more institutions had been built to support a market economy. The latter course, however, had a catch--two catches, in fact. Delaying privatization would have preserved enough of the old system to prevent building the institutions a market economy needed. (This has been the experience of Ukraine, which delayed large-scale privatization.) Also, if privatization had been delayed, attempts to reestablish state control of the economy (a goal held by the majority in Russia’s parliament at that time) would have been likely. Understandably, Yeltsin opted for the quick and dirty privatization managed by Anatoly Chubais. It left much control of the economy in the hands of the managers from the Communist era and the newly minted oligarchs but avoided total economic collapse and the civil conflict that would have followed.

So far as representative government is concerned, Yeltsin used military force against a rump Supreme Soviet in 1993, but only after its leaders had repeatedly violated the constitution and had attempted to seize power by force, having rejected Yeltsin’s proposal to settle their differences in a new election. The dispersal of the Supreme Soviet was followed by a referendum that approved a new constitution and an election that put Yeltsin’s opponents in control of the new parliament, renamed the State Duma. One of its first acts was to grant amnesty to those who had plotted against Gorbachev in 1991 and Yeltsin in 1993--an act which Yeltsin opposed but accepted, as he had an earlier court decision permitting the restoration of a Communist Party.

The war against Chechnya that Yeltsin authorized in 1994, in contrast, was an egregious error--though not, as some charged, an act of imperialism, since Chechnya was legally a subject of the Russian Federation with a right to autonomy but not to secession. Furthermore, the Chechen leaders had seized power by force, so their authority to represent the desires of the people in Chechnya was unproven.

Nevertheless, the war not only ended in failure and united many Chechens against Russia, but also violated the principle established by Gorbachev, that force should not be used to solve political problems. Gorbachev’s fidelity to that principle had permitted Russia and the other Soviet republics to gain their freedom from the Soviet Union without setting off a civil war. The 1994-96 war against the Chechens seriously damaged Russia’s embryonic democratic institutions and its image abroad. It was overwhelmingly unpopular and was settled shortly after Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996 on terms that conceded all important Chechen demands except formal sovereignty. That was left to be decided by 2002.

When Russia reopened the war just after Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister in 1999, Russian public opinion had changed. This time, it was a popular war. Russians had seen Chechnya become a center of crime and lawlessness, replete with Islamic militants intent on establishing Sharia law, including public hangings, severed hands and the like. Kidnapping had become a daily occurrence, and when ransom was not paid promptly, the victims were often murdered. The elected government in Chechnya seemed either impotent or complicit in the crimes. Finally, forces from Chechnya invaded Dagestan, a neighboring Russian province, and terrorists--assumed without clear proof to be Chechen--bombed apartment houses in Moscow and other Russian cities, killing hundreds of people.

The second war in Chechnya, still under way, occurred after “Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life” went to press. It has been conducted with inexcusable brutality and will doubtless hamper development of a humane, law-based government in Russia. But Chechnya has been an exception in Moscow’s policy toward the Russian Federation’s territorial units. Relations with the other 88 have been negotiated without the threat of violence. The resort to military force that has occurred in Chechnya is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere.

We cannot know history’s ultimate judgment of Boris Yeltsin. His reputation is likely to be controversial for a long time, as Russia either progresses toward a more just and stable society, stays mired in corrupt crony capitalism or retrogresses into the authoritarianism by which it has traditionally been ruled. Nevertheless, only those blind to the realities of Soviet communism can argue that Yeltsin left the country in worse condition than that prevailing when he took office.

In Aron’s words, Yeltsin “managed, somehow, to resolve the key dilemma of modernity. . . . He engineered a transition to the market without resorting to terror and dictatorship, and he married capitalism and democracy in a country that had known little of the former and none of the latter.” The author might have added that Yeltsin continued to cooperate with the United States and its European allies even when they exacerbated his problems at home by effectively excluding a friendly Russia from European security decisions and using NATO in ways they had promised not to.

Aron proposes the following one-sentence summation of Boris Yeltsin’s life work: “He made irreversible the collapse of Soviet totalitarian communism, dissolved the Soviet Russian empire, ended state ownership of the economy--and held together and rebuilt his country while it coped with new reality and losses.”

If you agree with this assessment, you will read this book with delight, because it provides abundant evidence to support its conclusions. If you disagree, you owe it to yourself to read it. But beware: It could well change your mind.