Yeltsin's "finest hours"

Posted by Jonathan Weiler at 11:30 AM on April 24, 2007.

The first comment I read about Boris Yeltsin's death yesterday was from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. Marshall wrote:

Yeltsin dies.

Certainly a contradictory figure. But it's hard for me to see where he won't be one of those figures whose positive moments, even if brief and episodic, were profound enough in their importance to outweigh the longer periods of lassitude, corruption and drift.

A variant of this sentiment is, it appears, already a common reaction among more casual observers and among mainstream commentators in general - that, despite significant flaws, Yeltsin's positive contributions to history clearly ought to carry the day. Yeltsin was the man who brought about the final downfall of the Soviet Union, our sworn enemy. He was, according to the Washington Post, the man who "engineered the final collapse of the Soviet Union and pushed Russia to embrace democracy, market economy."

Does Yeltsin deserve to be remembered, on balance, as a positive force in Russian history? Most commentary says yes. I disagree.

The New York Times, in Marilyn Berger's ten-screen obituary that originally appeared yesterday, remarked that:

In office less than nine years and plagued by severe health problems, Mr. Yeltsin added a final chapter to his historical record when, in a stunning coup at the close of the 20th century, he announced his resignation, and became the first Russian leader to relinquish power on his own in accordance with constitutional processes. He then turned over the reins of office to his handpicked successor, Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Yeltsin left a giant, if flawed, legacy. He started to establish a democratic state and then pulled back, lurching from one prime minister to another in an effort to control the levers of power. But where his predecessor, Mikhail S. Gorbachev sought to perpetuate the Communist Party even as he tried to reform the Soviet Union, Mr. Yeltsin helped break the party and the state's hold over the Russian people.

Of course, many more will weigh in with more fine-grained analyses in the days ahead, but the basic narrative is already clear: though flawed, Yeltsin played a historically necessary and positive purpose, lifting Russia out of the misery of its Communist past and setting it on an uncertain but possibility-filled future course. This is true even for the initiatives that brought Russians social chaos and great economic misfortune, at least in the near-term, such as Russia's shock therapy privatization efforts.

I won't go point-by-point with Berger's obituary. But, it's filled with the kind of faulty assumptions about the relationship between democracy, free markets and the rule of law that have plagued thinking on Russia and US Democracy Promotion efforts more generally over the past fifteen years or so. A decade ago, Fareed Zakaria wrote an article for Foreign Policy in which he systematically outlined the features of "Illiberal Democracy," a new regime type predicated on competitive elections, but otherwise deeply flawed by compromised judicial structures, a fatal tendency to excessive concentration of executive authority, a lack of respect for constitutionalism and, ultimately, indifference if not outright contempt for people's basic well-being and physical security. The features Zakaria sketched typified many new democracies including Russia, but were largely missed by mainstream commentary because mainstream commentary was still shackled by cold war thinking.

And, according to the teleology of cold war thinking, any country transitioning out of communism and into democratic capitalism must, by definition, better serve its citizens. Given such a teleological bias, it became almost unnecessary to scrutinize the particularities of the experiences of citizens in these new democracies. Yes, there might be some short term pain, but there could be no doubt that, in the long run, everyone was better off in democracy than under communism. Such thinking led American commentators to rationalize and justify monstrous missteps and enormous suffering including in areas such as human rights. This was especially ironic because the human rights legacies of the old authoritarian and communist regimes were undoubtedly their blackest marks. That citizens in such societies could be suffering, from a human rights standpoint, even more grievously under so-called democracy than they did under communism should have been cause for great concern. Instead, given the above-noted teleology embedded in analysis of post-Communist reform, it was beyond the imagination of mainstream commentary. Zakaria exposed the structural flaws in such thinking generally, and I wrote about these issues in detail in my book, Human Rights in Russia: A Darker Side of Reform.

And, needless to say, elements of such teleological bias remain on full display in commentary about Yeltsin's legacy.

I'm picking on the Times' obituary because the Times is the paper of record and because much of what Berger wrote has and will continue to appear in similar form in almost all commentary on Yeltsin. In lieu of a point-by-point dissection, let me highlight a couple of illustrative chunks from Berger's piece, starting with her perspective on Russia's shock therapy economic reforms: "The rapid privatization of Russian industry led to a form of buccaneer capitalism, and a new class of oligarchs usurped political power as they plundered the country's resources. But Mr. Yeltsin's actions assured that there would be no turning back to the centralized Soviet command economy that had strangled growth and reduced a country populated by talented and cultured people and rich in natural resources to a beggar among nations."

Let's start with the claim that Yeltsin's actions ensured that there was no turning back to the Soviet command economy. The Gorbachev reforms of the late 1980s were haphazard in important respects. Among the former Soviet leader's key failings, many critics argue, was his decision to begin dismantling the oversight functions of the old command system before he had put in place the structures of a functioning market-based economy. Yeltsin defenders have long noted this point in arguing that when Yeltsin launched radical shock therapy in 1992, he was only formalizing what had been happening "spontaneously" for at least two years. That's a plausible defense of a set of reforms that, at least in the early years, yielded catastrophic consequences for the Russian people. But, Berger's analysis here merely recapitulates the cold war categories that have made it so difficult for Americans to get a grasp on the real dynamics of Russian political change after 1990. In fact, the notion that Yeltsin's moves ensured that there would be no turning back to Soviet command communism is historically obtuse because, by 1992, when Yeltsin launched his reforms, there was no possibility of going back to that system. The Union had already been dismantled and, besides, the oversight functions of the old system had ceased to function long before the Union formally dissolved.

In other words, Berger ascribes to Yeltsin's motives purposes that were simply no longer relevant except as a rhetorically useful cover for other political goals. In fact, it is more plausible to assert that Yeltsin's "buccaneer privatization" was an extraordinary political gift to a newly emergent political elite that would, in turn, ensure Yeltsin's hold over power long after he had become miserably unpopular with the Russian public. In other words, shock therapy was a staggeringly ambitious and corrupt arrangement ensuring the extraordinary enrichment of a politically favored ex-Communist elite at the expense of the vast majority of the population and for the benefit of an increasingly unpopular political leader. Three of the best books on Russia to come out in the 1990s, David Kotz and Fred Weir's Revolution from Above, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Gilinski's The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms and Anatol Lieven's Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power have argued for variants on this perspective. Each tried to debunk the cold war categories that had obscured the actual correlation of political forces in Russia under Yeltsin. But, for ideological reasons again having to do with the legacy of the cold war thinking on post cold war analysis of Russia, their perspective has never gained traction among mainstream analysts.

It should also be noted that the Soviet economy, which never performed as well as its official data suggested, and sputtered notably after 1975 or so, never reached the depths of the post-Soviet 1990s. One economist, UNC Chapel Hill's Steve Rosefielde (who, by the way, was a critic of the Soviet economy for decades), estimated that the reforms and displacement of the 1990s led to as many as three million excess deaths in Russia, a figure not rivaled in Soviet annals since the end of the Stalin era. In fact, Russia in the 1990s experienced what many observers regarded as the worst industrial depression in the world in the 20th century. Though Russia has experienced strong growth since 1999 (after having defaulted on its loans and after it started ignoring the advice of the IMF), the country is, in many ways, still licking the wounds inflicted upon it during the hellish 1990s.

The Leninist thinking of Western observers, like Berger, should not be missed here. That millions suffered a grievous fate because of a combination of brazen political calculation and fealty to the most simple-minded nostrums of a utopian ideology was, for decades, the great grievance against Leninist ideology. That such similar things could be said about the regime that vanquished Leninism ought to have been an opportunity for profound and sober reflection on Western and American arrogance about how readily the superficial structures of western democratic capitalism could be exported to other parts of the world. Instead, swept up by the unexamined assumptions of their own ideology - that democratic capitalism in whatever guise must always be better than the alternative, mainstream commentary and political leaders, like President Clinton, missed this historical irony.

But, in fact, it's silly to describe Gorbachev as trying to hold onto the Communist system because, by 1991, this was true in name only. Gorbachev had, as I mentioned earlier, already allowed to shrivel up and die the oversight structures of central planning. He had already introduced competitive elections into the system - flawed and limited competition, but, by the standards of Yeltsin's hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, a golden age of open debate and meaningful choice. Gorbachev was clearly not a communist in the Soviet sense by 1991 - but instead a western European social democrat, whose commitment to the rule of law - and personal integrity - frankly puts Yeltsin to shame. In other words, there was no Soviet Communist threat to be vanquished by the time Yeltsin scrambled atop the tank in Moscow in August 1991, not in anything like the sense that such a threat had existed in previous decades.

Failing to note these realities, Berger described Yeltsin's "finest hours" thusly:

The Yeltsin era effectively began in August, 1991, when Mr. Yeltsin clambered atop a tank to rally Muscovites to put down a right-wing coup against Mr. Gorbachev, a heroic moment etched in the minds of the Russian people and television viewers all over the world. It ended with his electrifying resignation speech on New Years Eve, 1999.

It's true that Yeltsin's actions in August 1991 bespoke a kind of courage and sense of the moment that are the mark of instinctively great political leaders. But, there has long been an improper conflating of the vodka-soaked coup plotters of that August with Gorbachev's presumptively misguided efforts to hold the union together. In fact, in the months before the failed three-day coup of that August, the Soviet people had embarked on a profoundly democratic exercise to determine their future in a newly constituted voluntary federation. And, in overwhelming numbers, including seventy percent of voters in the Russian Republic, Soviet citizens in the majority of the Republics had voted to maintain a joint federation (some, like the Baltic States, opted out, and were going to be free to leave under Gorbachev's plan). And, the coup itself was an inert affair from the outset. It's true that it cast a pall over Gorbachev's plans and illegitimized his efforts to hold onto the institutional bulk head of the Soviet ship. But, it's not true that Soviet citizens or even, more specifically, Russians, were clamoring to leave the Union.

As it turned out, the breakup of the union threw many of its former republics into chaos. Living standards collapsed even more dramatically in places like Ukraine and Central Asia than they did in Russia. The decision to break up the union was, as Newsweek's headline noted last night, heralded among American officials. And, why not? It signaled the final defeat of the Soviet Union, however toothless that former giant had become. But, the political benefit to Yeltsin was even more direct. As long as Russia was part of a larger confederation, Yeltsin would continue to be second banana, at least in recognized international political prestige, to Gorbachev. But, eliminate Soviet political structures and make Russia the successor state in international law to the Soviet Union and the benefit to Yeltsin was clear. He would become the leader of an internationally recognized nuclear superpower.

To be clear, what was at stake in the coup attempt of August 1991 was not a return to the cold war status quo ante. Instead, it was a pathetic last ditch effort to forestall a then inexorable process to reconfigure the Soviet Union along voluntary lines. Yeltsin's historical contribution was to use the coup's defeat to short circuit that process, and to ensure that Russia, with Yeltsin would emerge as the inheritor of the Soviet Union's formal status in international life.

That Berger could see in Yeltsin's decision to relinquish power in 1999 as his other finest hour is an even more egregious confusion. By the time Yeltsin quit, Russia's democratic institutions had already been hopelessly compromised. Leaving aside the highly suspicious and disturbing circumstances leading to the second invasion Chechnya in 1999, the political event on which then prime minister Putin cut his teeth, the elections for parliament that Fall were an unrelievedly dismal affair (the immediate justification for the re-invasion of Chechnya was a series of apartment bombings that claimed three hundred lives, was blamed on Chechen terrorists and which, many suspect, were concocted by the authorities themselves). The Kremlin created a political vehicle, the so-called Unity party, out of whole cloth, didn't even bother to give it a political platform, and then used its then semi indirect control of the media to launch a campaign so dishonest, so bereft of ideas and so desultory that to call it an exercise in democracy is to discredit the very rationale for democracy itself. Though Putin was not directly associated with that party, it was understood to be the vehicle by which he would eventually gain a decisive foothold in the Russian parliament which had, up to that time, been the one political institution in Russia to show some defiance of the so-called Russian super-presidency. So, by New Year's eve 1999, when Yeltsin handed over power to Putin, he had presided over a political system that no longer took seriously the idea of substantive political debate and in which the grossest manipulations of the public's fear and loathing would be fashioned into political support for a man whose contempt for competitive democracy has become all too clear.

In short, Yeltsin's supposed second finest hour was his passing of the torch of a political system that had not only created an unmanageably one-sided constitutional structure in favor of the executive branch, but had also robbed parliament of the last vestiges of its role as a meaningfully independent actor and given the Kremlin keys to an obvious authoritarian. This is one reason, incidentally, why subsequent Western and American hand-wringing about the authoritarian Putin is so disingenuous. Putin is the monster to Yeltsin's Dr. Frankenstein. ( at some length for Foreign Policy in Focus in 2005).

Is the above an entirely fair reading of the Yeltsin era? Frankly, no. The circumstances he confronted were enormously complex and, of course, historic figures don't act with the benefit of hindsight. When it comes to politics, there are invariably complex, mixed motives and multiple, competing interests. But, there is a combination of naivete and brazen disregard for what Russians actually suffered through under Yeltsin that has characterized much of the commentary on Yeltsin, both while he was in office and now, at the moment of his passing. And, too much of what Yeltsin does get credit for is not due to how well he actually served his own people. In many ways, his time in power was enormously destructive, not only the first war in Chechnya (which Berger discusses) but the significant drop in life expectancy, especially among Russian men and the explosion in poverty and inequality. It's easy for Western observers to overlook that destructiveness because we did not bear the brunt of it. Instead, America and the West reaped the benefits of a newly defanged and pliant post Soviet Russia. But, even this "contribution," as I have already suggested, is vastly overstated. Gorbachev's Soviet Union was already pliant and defanged by 1991. Gorbachev had significantly reduced the size of the Soviet armed forces, was an obvious and willing partner in major arms reductions agreements, had backed the US invasion of Iraq in 1991 and was presiding over the voluntary reduction and reconfiguration of the Soviet Union itself. So, taking into account what the Soviet Union had already become by the time Yeltsin climbed onto that tank in Moscow in August 1991, and the depths to which Russia had fallen, politically, economically and militarily, by the time he resigned on December 31, 1999, forgive me for being less enthusiastic about his two "finest hours" and less grateful for his "contribution" to history.

Tagged as: shock therapy, illiberal democracy, soviet union, russia, mikhail gorbachev, boris yeltsin

Jonathan Weiler teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and has written a book on Human Rights in Russia. He's currently co-writing a book on authoritarianism in America and contributes to the sports blog - The Starting Five.