Resident Scholar Leon Aron

What are we to make of the man who led post-Soviet Russia in its first nine years? Was he the "crude populist" and "erratic" and hard-drinking "quasi-autocrat" of the lore of many an expert and contemporary report in U.S. newspapers, magazines and television? Or was he indispensable to a profound and vital transformation of Russia? The answers should start with an examination of choices Yeltsin made in the context of the Soviet legacy and Russian history.

Few protagonists are better suited for the man-and-his-times genre than Boris Yeltsin. The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva used to say that her dear friend Boris Pasternak looked at once like an Arabian thoroughbred and its rider, the driven and the driver. Yeltsin was both a bellwether of the gathering Russian storm and part of the storm itself. As the pace of the revolution quickened, Boris Yeltsin's personal story and his country's history became tightly intertwined and, in several shining instances, welded together. The revolution was the wind, he the sail. Together they began to turn Russia around.

Like Lincoln or de Gaulle, Yeltsin took over a great nation at the time of a mortal crisis and held it together. In Yeltsin's case, there were three crises at once--political, economic and imperial. Not only did the country's political and economic systems lie in ruins, the country itself had to be reinvented. Against impossible odds, he succeeded, forging, for the first time in a thousand years, a sustainable Russian state that was neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship.

The territorial and economic concessions that Yeltsin made to Ukraine, whose independence he recognized ahead of all other world leaders on December 3, 1991, after it had been part of the Russian Empire for almost three and a half centuries, may be without precedent in the relations between metropoles and their former territories. The very special and tragic case of Chechnya aside, one needs only to recall the massive and systemic violence that accompanied the breakup of other colonies--India and Pakistan, Britain and Ireland, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and, of course, Yugoslavia--to appreciate the magnitude of Yeltsin's accomplishment. Yeltsin also decimated the garrison state by slashing the defense budget to under 5 percent of the GDP. He reduced Russia's nuclear arsenal by almost one-half.

Until Yeltsin, the unity of Russia had been achieved only by rigid and ruthless control from Moscow. Whenever the control loosened and the iron hand grew rusty or shaky, the country swiftly fell apart, descended into fratricide and anarchy, and then was reconstituted by a new tyrant. At Yeltsin's departure, Russia was, for the first time, both radically decentralized and whole.

The first Russian president oversaw the birth of a new Russian politics as well. He institutionalized the vital liberties that Gorbachev had granted only provisionally and often by default. Glasnost became freedom from government censorship of speech and of the press. Gorbachev's "political pluralism" evolved into freedom of political organization for all, including the regime's most radical and implacable opponents; free, multicandidate elections, both legislative and presidential; and a parliament, which was dominated by a radical opposition during Yeltsin's entire tenure, save half a year between his inauguration in July 1991 and the beginning of economic reforms in January 1992. His eight and a half years were by far the freest, most tolerant, and open period Russia had ever known, except for the eight months between February and November 1917.

Rid of its traditional cruelty and revenge, the new Russian political system, started by Gorbachev and decisively shaped by Yeltsin, granted losers not only their physical lives but their political lives as well. Not a hair fell from the heads of the leaders of the August 1991 putsch. They were never even brought to trial. In February 1994, Yeltsin signed into law the amnesty voted by the Duma for them and for the leaders of the armed rebellion in Moscow of Oct. 3-4, 1993. Remarkable in any revolution, in the bloodstained Russian history this act was nothing short of astounding; the victorious head of state releasing, unmolested, his violent and unrepentant foes, who would almost certainly have killed him had they prevailed.

Of all heroes, liberators fare the worst. Among the components of progress, liberty, like greatness, is perhaps the most suspect to social scientists (at least those of my generation), who were taught in graduate school that that which cannot be quantified is not worth dealing with. The elusiveness and misperception of the criteria by which liberators are judged bear much of the blame as well. In keeping with his central conviction of the multiplicity and occasional incompatibility of even the most noble of human wishes and values, Sir Isaiah Berlin greatly clarified the matter when he wrote, "Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience." (To which, in the Russian case, one can easily add honest and competent bureaucracy, universal sobriety, enlightened and generous captains of industry, pensioners paid on time, peace in Chechnya, a 5 percent annual growth of GDP, foreign investments, improvement in corporate governance, and decreasing male mortality.) Much of what passed for reporting on Yeltsin fell within the genre of political entomology: Like insects, political leaders are watched through a magnifying glass within the tiny confines of their personal foibles.

A great deal in Yeltsin's sorry public image at the time of his resignation is traceable to these genetic handicaps of liberators. Yet for much, perhaps most, he had only himself to blame. That as millions suffered, millions of others gained enormously from political and economic freedom does not absolve Yeltsin of responsibility for blunders in the strategy of economic reforms and for abetting corruption and a brief but pernicious reign of the so-called oligarchs, the Russian robber barons, whose presence became synonymous with crooked deals, rigged markets, fraudulent "auctions" and the incestuous relationship between political power and the privatized economy.

There seemed to be two Yeltsins coexisting in the public eye, occasionally overlapping, sometimes clashing and retreating, but always remaining distinct and resilient. One was Yeltsin the leader and the visionary. The other was Yeltsin the politician, an avid and very competent greasy-pole climber, obsessed with power and its many gaudy trappings, petty, and jealous of competitors' popularity. In many ways he ran the Kremlin like a Byzantine court (or like the obkom, a provincial party committee, where he spent 17 years). It was rife with intrigue, back-stabbing, favorites and outcasts, sudden firings and hirings, demotions and promotions.

No matter what happens in the short run, ultimately history appears to recognize only choice, not luck or accident. Sooner or later, therefore, a search for a historic Yeltsin must confront the matter of choice. Did Yeltsin, not to put too fine a point on it, know what he was doing? Or did he, as the currently fashionable Russian and Washington lore directs us to believe, wake up with a hangover after nonstop drinking in Belavezhskaya Pushcha on Dec. 8, 1991, and decide to dissolve the Soviet Union? And did he introduce capitalism by freeing the prices on Jan. 2, 1992, in much the same manner: impulsively, even capriciously, concerned only with petty political gain and unaware of the gravity of the consequences?

The choice of economic liberty was unique because Yeltsin had to abandon the strategy that had served him so well before. Until then, he had sensed the direction of Russian public opinion and followed--as well as guided and molded--it. Yet if democracy were clearly in tune with the sense of the majority, and if the abandonment of the Soviet Union, at least for the moment, seemed a fair price to pay for Russian liberty and prosperity, neither the freeing of prices nor the privatization of the economy was being clamored for by tens of millions. With the market revolution, Yeltsin was, so to speak, on his own.

This was, literally, Yeltsin's first major "unpopular" decision. He would confess later that for "two whole months" he and his advisers had searched for "more acceptable," "less onerous" ways to begin the reforms without freeing the prices, but could not find any. No politician makes such choices lightly, least of all someone who until then had been close in status to the nation's savior, basking in the adoration of millions.

On Oct. 28, 1991, Yeltsin went to the Congress of People's Deputies of Russia to seek a mandate for the price liberalization and privatization plan (which, as many in Russia and the West would soon so conveniently forget, was granted by an 876-16 vote). In one of the best speeches he ever made, Yeltsin declared that the time of "small steps" was past. We must in deeds, he went on, not words, begin extricating ourselves from "the swamp that pulls us deeper and deeper." Only a "large-scale reformist breakthrough" could save Russia's economy from disintegration, her people from poverty, and her state from collapse.

On Dec. 29, four days before price controls were to be lifted, Yeltsin addressed the nation in a televised speech, in which he placed the economic revolution at the center of the general "decommunization" of Russia. Along with prices set by the state, "we are abandoning mirages and illusions," Yeltsin said. It was clear that the communist utopia "could not be built."

We have inherited "a devastated land," a "gravely ill Russia," Yeltsin concluded, but "we must not despair." No matter how difficult things are at the time, "we have a chance to climb out of this pit." Our people are "no worse, no lazier than any other. It is necessary only to help people find themselves in this new life."

Of course, liberty, even if consciously chosen, is not democracy (although it is a necessary condition for democracy) and a liberator is not a democrat. What label, what shorthand will history settle on in the case of Yeltsin? Here was the man who ordered troops into Chechnya in December 1994 and for a year and a half prosecuted a war there, incompetently, cruelly, and with complete disregard for the country's public opinion. (Five years later, this time with public opinion on his side, he allowed his handpicked successor to unleash another savage attack on Chechnya.) Yeltsin weakened the nascent constitutional order and cheapened free political discourse with his cynical palace games. He was responsible for a great deal of the alienation of the people from power in the new Russia. Perhaps most important of all, Yeltsin freed Russia from what the great English poet Robert Graves called "the never changing circuit of its fate." He gave Russia a "peredyshka," a time to catch its breath.

He was also someone who allowed complete freedom of speech and political organization for his most outrageous and crudest critics; who, except for three days in August 1991 and two weeks in October 1993, never closed down a single opposition newspaper; who sought popular mandates for his policies and his office in a referendum and free elections open to those same critics. In the 1996 presidential race, he quite literally risked his life for victory, ignoring the doctors' warnings, suffering a heart attack a few days before the final vote, and undergoing quintuple bypass heart surgery four months later.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semi-authoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites' competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled. Yeltsin's legacy is a collection of necessary, though far from sufficient, conditions for a modern capitalist democracy: free elections; freedom of political opposition; demilitarization of state and society; decentralization of the traditionally unitary state; a largely privatized economy; and a still small and weak but increasingly assertive civil society, sustained by civil liberties, freedom of the press from government censorship, and an increasingly independent and assertive judiciary. The political organism that he forged is full of severe defects, both genetic and acquired, yet capable of development and of peacefully thwarting communist restoration without succumbing to authoritarianism. Yeltsin's name, next to Gorbachev's, will be inscribed by history among those of the greatest liberators.

Leon Aron is a resident scholar at AEI.