Dimensions: 2.50'' x 9.50'' x 5.25'' 934 pages St. Martin's Press Publication Date: January 2000 Hardcover ISBN: 0312251858

Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life
By Leon Aron

Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected head of state in Russia’s thousand-year history, ended the Soviet military occupation of Eastern Europe, dissolved Russia’s domestic empire, introduced a free-market economy and private property, and, most important, forged the most open and tolerant regime that Russia has ever known. In telling Yeltsin’s story, the author recounts the struggles of a great nation at one of its most fateful moments and chronicles the twentieth century’s last great revolution.

Leon Aron, who was raised in the Soviet Union, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of its quarterly Russian Outlook.

Those who lead successful revolutions lend them their faces; they epitomize both the achievements and the limitations of the countries they forge. Along with Mikhail Gorbachev’s face, Boris Yeltsin’s is forever imprinted on the Fourth Russian Revolution. For years, perhaps decades, Yeltsin’s story will help us understand the actions of the world’s youngest nuclear superpower, post-Communist Russia, whose politics, economic system, and postimperial state he shaped decisively. Few protagonists are better suited for the man-and-his-times genre than Boris Yeltsin. He was both a bellwether of the gathering Russian storm and part of the storm itself.

Unshackled by Gorbachev, Russian public opinion was awakened by Yeltsin’s 1987 public rebellion against Communist Party dogma and by the devastating price that he paid for his dissent. From that time until a number of causes--his illnesses and blunders, the public’s bitter disappointments, and universal exhaustion after years of dizzying change--eroded trust in him, Yeltsin was driven by the revolt against the Communist state at the same time that he molded and channeled it. As the people, the voters, began to matter more in politics, so did he--and the more they mattered, the higher Yeltsin rose. As the pace of the revolution quickened, Yeltsin’s personal story and his country’s history became tightly intertwined. The anti-Communist revolution was the wind, he the sail. Together they began to turn Russia around.

The impeccable timing of a born politician, along with courage, calculation, and great luck, put Yeltsin in the center of every key phase of the revolution. This biography reconstructs each of these critical developments: Gorbachev’s ascent and the beginning of perestroika, the origins of which the book portrays and analyzes in detail; the destruction of the founding mythology and the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet state by glasnost between 1987 and 1990; the protodemocratic politics of the elections to the all-Union and Russian parliaments in 1989 and 1990; the unraveling of the Soviet empire and of the unitary economic system in 1990 and 1991; the end of the party state in August 1991; the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the economic collapse and the launch of a market revolution in the fall of 1991 and winter of 1992; the thwarting of a Communist restoration, first in the October 1993 confrontation between Yeltsin and the Left-nationalist radicals and then in the presidential election of 1996; and the political battles over the reforms between 1996 and 1998. Exhaustively researched and verified, the account of those stages of the revolution is one of the first attempts to present all the key aspects of the Russian upheaval.

Yeltsin’s reign in Sverdlovsk, the Soviet Union’s third largest industrial region, is a window on a world gone forever: Russian communist civilization. The last attempt to save it coincided with Yeltsin’s two years as the first secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee. Ordered by Gorbachev from Sverdlovsk to Moscow, Yeltsin turned the capital into a laboratory of reform. Everything that would later thwart Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the Soviet economic and political systems without breaking them was first revealed during Yeltsin’s exhilarating and frustrating years as the head of the Soviet Union’s largest party organization.

At that time that Yeltsin introduced a new language of Soviet politics. Throughout the country, no official communication by a high party functionary was as candid as Yeltsin’s Moscow speeches in 1986 and 1987. Insofar as what later became known as glasnost was practiced then at all, it was practiced in one place--Moscow--and by one man--Boris Yeltsin.

In the fall of 1991, Yeltsin--like Lincoln and de Gaulle--took over a great nation at a time of peril and held it together. Russia was undergoing three crises at once--the political, the economic, and the imperial. Not only did Russia’s political and economic systems lie in ruins, but the country itself had to be reinvented. Against impossible odds, Yeltsin succeeded in forging, for the first time in a thousand years, a sustainable Russian state that was neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship.

Until Yeltsin, Russian state-building--from Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great through Catherine the Great, Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev--had invariably included militarism and imperial expansion as its key components. Yeltsin shed the empire and decimated the militarized state by slashing the defense budget from more than 50 percent of the gross domestic product to 2.5 percent and by reducing the number of troops from four million to one million. In the process, he cut Russia’s nuclear arsenal from 10,000 warheads to 3,500. When the last Russian soldier left the radar base in Skrunda, Latvia, in October 1999, Russia ended almost three hundred years of its presence in East-Central Europe and returned to its seventeenth-century borders.

The exit of the former Soviet republics from the Russian-Soviet domestic empire during Yeltsin’s watch was unprecedented for its absence of violence. Most remarkable was the peacefulness of the separation from Ukraine, a vital and integral part of the Russian state for more than three hundred years, the birthplace of the Russian state and of Russian Christianity, and the homeland of millions of ethnic Russians. The first head of state to recognize Ukraine’s independence in December 1991, Yeltsin made painful territorial concessions to it in the face of the howling opposition of almost the entire Russian political class and, in May 1997, confirmed Ukraine’s independence by signing a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Kiev. One need only recall the bloodshed that has attended disintegration of other multinational and multiethnic colonial empires--Serbia and the former republics of Yugoslavia, for instance--to appreciate the immensity of that achievement.

Until Yeltsin came to power, the unity of Russia had been achieved by ruthless control from Moscow. Whenever that control loosened, the country swiftly fell apart, descended into fratricide and anarchy, and then was reconstituted by a new tyrant. Today, for the first time, Russia is both radically decentralized and whole.

Yeltsin presided over the birth of a new Russian politics. He institutionalized all the vital liberties that Gorbachev had provisionally granted, and he made them the society’s right rather than the state’s concession. Glasnost became freedom of speech and of the press, and Gorbachev’s "political pluralism" evolved into freedom of political organization for the regime’s implacable opponents; free, multicandidate parliamentary and presidential elections; and a parliament dominated by radical opposition. Though deeply flawed and deficient by the standards of older Western democracies, Yeltsin’s regime was by far the freest, most tolerant, and most open that Russia has ever known.

Rid of its traditional cruelty and revenge, the Russian political system now grants losers not only their physical lives but their political lives as well. Not a hair fell off the heads of the leaders of the August 1991 hard-line Communist putsch, which precipitated the demise of the Soviet one-party state; those leaders 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 October 3, 1993, armed rebellion in Moscow. Remarkable as it would have been in any revolution, in the context of Russia’s bloodstained history that 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.

Still, Yeltsin is hardly a hagiography. It is cognizant of its subject’s many and deep flaws--personal and political alike. Yeltsin’s bravery, determination, courage, and remarkable political instincts are shown to coexist with haughtiness, occasional boorishness, petulance and depression, quick temper, obsession with power, and jealousy of anyone who might replace him. Along with blunders in the strategy of Yeltsin’s economic reform, the book records his cynical and petty palace games, the appalling brutality of the 1994–1996 Chechen war, his brazen manipulation of Russian politics to enhance his power, and his abetment of (if not, indeed, complicity in) epidemic corruption and the brief but pernicious reign of the so-called oligarchs, the Russian robber barons.

For decades, the secrecy at the heart of Soviet totalitarianism badly distorted Russia’s political history and allowed commentators to engage in amateurish pontification, ill-informed editorializing, and sensationalism. The opportunity to write a biography of Yeltsin was also a chance to write about a new Russia in a new way, to reject the arcane ways of Kremlinology, with its concentration on palace intrigue and its tortured deconstruction of official Kremlin pronouncements. Perestroika, glasnost, and, later, Russia’s flawed but real democratic institutions made the Russian people a key political actor and the Russian mass media the chronicler of the people’s moods and of state affairs. Yeltsin was Russia’s first modern politician, and telling his story properly required the tools of modern historiography: archives, newspapers, videotapes, interviews, and public opinion surveys. Extensive sources, the author’s ability to observe the drama directly and personally, and his access to witnesses made possible a richly textured and vivid tapestry.

Until the epilogue, the book avoids comment and interpretation as much as possible. In contrast to dozens of volumes filled with pontification and editorializing that have been passed off as histories of the Russian revolution and post-Communist Russia, this book respects the reader’s intelligence and judgment. Yeltsin’s own words--culled from over 200 speeches, interviews, and articles--tell his story. The portrait that emerges is augmented by memoirs of and interviews with those who observed him at close range. Whenever possible, the author has accorded the same privilege of speaking for themselves to other actors in the historical drama: from Mikhail Gorbachev to Gennady Zyuganov (the Communist Party leader and Yeltsin’s competitor in the 1996 presidential race) to the August 1991 hard-line putschists, the leftist nationalist rebels of October 1993, and their journalistic soulmates who castigated Yeltsin in innumerable cartoons and editorials.

In short, Yeltsin stands as both a biography and a history of the Russian revolution.