Boris Yeltsin, Former Russian President, Dies at 78
Boris Yeltsin helped end the Cold War and begin a new era of freedom and democracy for his Russian people. But when he died Monday of heart failure at age 76, the Russian Federation’s first president was remembered mostly for his failures, not his triumphs.
Westerners recall Yeltsin as the defiant reformer with the thick thatch of white hair and the growl for a voice who stood atop a tank in 1991 to help bring down the Soviet Union. Russians, however, remember the flaccid face of Yeltsin’s second presidential term, the slurred speech, the extended absences and a tenure stained by bloodshed, corruption and widespread economic hardship.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who eventually would rue the day he brought Yeltsin from the provinces to Moscow, said Monday that Yeltsin was a man “on whose shoulders are both great deeds for the country and serious errors.”
Others were more generous, focusing on the early Yeltsin years.
“He brought an un-free country to freedom,” said Anatoly Chubais, a longtime Yeltsin adviser and one of the architects of Russia’s reviled privatization process. “(Yeltsin brought Russia) from a country in which lies were simply routine to a country that is trying to live by the truth.”
Like Russia, Yeltsin was complex and enigmatic. Also like Russia, he professed democratic ideals but struggled to live up to them. He often sought conflict over compromise, and in his efforts to thwart his enemies and enhance his power he trampled over the rule of law and the will of his people.
To the end, Yeltsin defied predictions.
He lived longer than anyone expected, given his heart problems, terrific bouts with pneumonia and a well-documented taste for vodka.
He faded deep into the political background after turning Russia over to President Vladimir Putin in a shocking resignation announcement on New Years Eve 1999. The man who loved the spotlight and rarely shied from a fight all of a sudden became a proper, docile ex-statesman who tended his garden, caught an occasional tennis match and kept his mouth shut.
And finally, despite critics’ vows that Yeltsin would pay for the crimes committed in Russia during his presidency _ whether as part of the wars in Chechnya or the fire sales of state assets to private businessmen _ Yeltsin lived out his days in peace, not under prosecution. Putin made sure of that.
That Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin would one day turn to an ex-KGB spy such as Putin to protect his reformist legacy, not to mention protect himself, would have been unthinkable during the last days of the Cold War.
The communist dinosaurs whom Yeltsin challenged in 1991 included KGB officials as well as military officers and hard-line politicians. They had detained Gorbachev and dreamed of putting everything back the way it was under Yuri Andropov, Leonid Brezhnev or perhaps even Josef Stalin, no matter that the Soviet Union was decaying all around them.
But while Gorbachev was being held under house arrest outside Moscow, Yeltsin rallied his people.
Outside the Russian White House, then the home of the government of the Soviet Russian Republic that Yeltsin headed, Yeltsin climbed aboard one of the tanks that had been sent to surround the building but instead had gone over to Yeltsin’s side.
Fearing an attack by other military units converging on the White House or moving throughout Moscow, Yeltsin spoke directly to the commanders on the scene. He was also speaking to the Russian people and, through cable television, to the world.
“I had to go to those tank commanders,” Yeltsin later explained. “I had to persuade them to change their minds. I had to ask them: `Are you going against democracy, or are you here to kill Yeltsin?’”
The attack on the White House never came. The coup fizzled, and Gorbachev returned to Moscow. Yeltsin’s stand made him a hero in the eyes of the world. It was one more example of Yeltsin’s opponents underestimating him.
“They made a mistake,” Yeltsin said later, “when they didn’t kill me in the morning.”
By the end of the year, the Soviet Union was history, split into 15 independent states. Yeltsin was suddenly president of the world’s largest (by area) nation and commander in chief of the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal.
It capped a remarkable rise for the son of peasants.
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was born on Feb. 1, 1931, in the Ural Mountains town of Butko. His childhood was poisoned by grueling poverty, Yeltsin wrote in the autobiography “Against the Grain,” and he grew up tough under a stern father partial to the strap and a grandfather who pushed him at all times.
Early on, Yeltsin played the rebel. He challenged inadequate teachers and led his friends in mischief. During World War II, he stole a hand grenade from an ammunition dump and tried to take it apart, smacking it with a hammer. The ensuing explosion cost him two fingers on his left hand.
By his 20s, Yeltsin moved into supervisory jobs in the construction trade. He also joined the Communist Party. Both careers moved ahead steadily, and by 1976 Yeltsin was named first secretary of Sverdlosk province. Within a decade he would be called to Moscow and elected to the Communist Party Central Committee.
The stage was set for his battles with Gorbachev.
That Yeltsin has joined Gorbachev as one of Russia’s most reviled politicians is only one irony of their bitter history.
In 1987 Gorbachev humiliated Yeltsin by having him hauled from a hospital bed, propped up before Communist Party leaders to undergo a 90-minute harangue and ousted from the Politburo for his outspoken push for reform.
The blow, which wounded Yeltsin and strengthened Gorbachev’s position, would backfire eventually. Yeltsin quit the party and went on the attack.
“As the man who would not go away, Yeltsin was, for the Communist Party, an intolerable dissident,” wrote David Remnick in “Lenin’s Tomb.”"Such was his vital importance, his first important contribution to the collapse of the regime.
“Despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, the history of Soviet politics will show it was Yeltsin _ vain, comic, clever, crude _ who accelerated the essential step in political reform: the shattering of the Communist Party monolith.”
However improbably, Yeltsin’s stature grew. Russia’s fledgling democracy movement coalesced behind this character from Sverdlosk _ sly and clownish, forceful and vulnerable.
In 1991 he was elected president of the Soviet Russian Republic, easily outpolling Gorbachev, who remained general secretary of the Communist Party and thus leader of the U.S.S.R. Soon thereafter came the failed coup.
Once the Soviet Union ended officially, Yeltsin promised the Russian people not only freedom to travel, to speak, to read and write what they wanted, to vote, but also prosperity.
Yet under Yeltsin, that prosperity never materialized.
Some Russians, thanks in large part to Yeltsin’s various methods of selling off state property, became extraordinarily rich. Yet the large middle class that Yeltsin’s economic policymakers envisioned barely began to sprout until Putin’s presidency.
The Kremlin plan to give Russia’s state-dominated economy a heavy dose of bitter medicine, including lifting price controls, closing or selling off unprofitable businesses and turning the ruble into a truly convertible currency, failed the vast majority of Russians.
As a result, Western ideals and economic models such as democracy and the free market became discredited. Russia’s economic crisis of 1998 shook the faith even of some of the young, the well-educated, professional classes that represent the best hope for Russia’s future.
Yeltsin’s greatest achievement, then, remains the unshackling of his people.
Under Yeltsin, the media in Russia were not as free as they could be, but the exchange of views was often lively and varied, especially in the big cities.
The security services routinely violated citizens’ rights during Yeltsin’s tenure. But political repression was a mere whiff of what it was under the Soviets, or what it would become under Putin.
Russia’s electoral process is flawed, sometimes deeply, but most people believe their vote will be counted fairly.
Human rights activists and Russia’s liberal democrats _ embittered by the erosion of civil society and media freedoms under Putin’s program of “managed democracy” _ will remember Yeltsin as the driving force behind Russia’s first few breaths of freedom.
“He set a strategy towards the country’s democratic development, which regrettably is now gradually being curtailed,” said Nikita Belykh, leader of Russia’s liberal Union of Right Forces Party.
The failures in the economic realm have many culprits. But Yeltsin himself must rank at the top.
For all his stated commitment to the free market, Yeltsin often wavered from the reform path. He did little to rein in the big-business tycoons who bankrolled his re-election, and that cost the government billions of dollars in revenues and cultivating resentment among many average Russians.
When critics and even some advisers were urging the president to seek compromise, Yeltsin chose conflict. He argued, rightly at times, that his opponents in the national legislature were unrepentant communists who would never give in on the reforms Russia needed to break free of its Soviet past. So he tried to run around them or over them.
When opposition legislators took over the White House in 1993, he put down their revolt by ordering tanks to fire on the building and dislodge them. Scores of people died.
When Chechen leaders moved to secede from Russia, Yeltsin listened to his hawkish generals and opened a war on the Caucasian republic. Indiscriminate bombing and the pushing forward of raw Russian conscripts against a skilled guerrilla force led to more than 40,000 deaths on both sides, a carnage that shocked the Russian people.
Yeltsin called the war the biggest mistake of his presidency. Yet in 1999, with Putin in as prime minister and Chechen guerrillas being blamed for attacks in neighboring provinces and in Moscow, Yeltsin sent in the military again.
“Power is his ideology, his friend, his concubine, his mistress, his passion,” said Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin’s former spokesman. “Everything that goes beyond that, beyond struggle for power, concerned him much less.”
Indeed, for much of his tenure, Yeltsin was an absentee president. His health bedeviled him, as did his drinking. During his second term, in particular, days that Yeltsin spent at work in the Kremlin were exceptional.
“A two-year coma interrupted by fits,” is how The Economist put it.
What fits they were, though. Yeltsin used to refer to himself, only half-jokingly, as Czar Boris. He would emerge one day from his country home where officially he was working on documents to lash out at critics or fire a minister or two, sometimes a whole government.
Just as he was declared a spent force in 1996, before rallying behind big money to capture the presidency again, Yeltsin was often deemed a has-been in 1997 and the first half of 1998.
Then without warning he would confound observers and wield the massive power that Russia’s 1993 constitution _ written specifically for Yeltsin and relegating the parliament to mostly a debating club _ affords the president. That was always the thing about Yeltsin: He was unpredictable and resilient and impetuous. And for a long time, rivals baited him at their peril.
Gennady Burbulis, once one of Yeltsin’s chief aides, told Remnick for his book “Resurrection” that the tree of power in Russia has two roots, authoritarianism and democracy, and that this is true of Yeltsin himself.
“It’s as if he has two hearts, two motors, two ideas inside him. And so if he is a democrat, it is situational. With Yeltsin there is always the possibility of ruling with an authoritarian hand, of skipping the difficult processes of analysis, of bargaining for consensus,” Burbulis said.
“It’s that war of urges, or roots, that describes us in transition, and Yeltsin personifies it all.”
Yeltsin’s last decision as president was suitably, grandly unpredictable. Many Russians regard it as one of Yeltsin’s best.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin announced he had resigned and handed over the presidency to Putin, whom he had named prime minister only five months earlier.
“I want to ask your forgiveness,” Yeltsin said in a taped address to the Russian people. “I want to ask your forgiveness because many of our dreams have not come true, because some things that seemed simple to us have turned out to be tortuously difficult.
“I ask your forgiveness for not living up to some of the hopes of the people who believed that we would be able _ at one fell swoop, in one leap _ to jump from a dreary, stagnant totalitarian past into a bright, affluent and civilized future.
“I myself believed in this,” Yeltsin said. “But it didn’t work out.”
The Kremlin declared Wednesday a day of national mourning for Yeltsin’s funeral. He will be buried at Moscow’s famed Novodevichy Cemetery.
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