Yeltsin: Russia's agent of change

By ANNE APPLEBAUM
WASHINGTON POST
It was October 1987, three weeks before the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet elite had gathered in Moscow to mark the occasion. After the customarily lengthy speech by Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the chairman asked whether anyone wanted to respond.
Unexpectedly, Boris Yeltsin, then the Moscow party boss, went up to the rostrum. He spoke for a mere 10 minutes -- and in that 10 minutes changed Russian history.
Reading that speech now, it's hard to see what the fuss was all about. Yeltsin complained that the party lacked "revolutionary spirit" and that the Soviet people suffered from "disillusionment." The language was that of a party functionary, which is, of course, what Yeltsin was.
But then, unexpectedly, he resigned. And with that extraordinarily canny decision, he won instant notoriety: Never had a communist leader set himself up as a popular alternative to the Communist Party. Within days, half a dozen versions of Yeltsin's speech were being sold on the streets of Moscow, their authors variously speculating that Yeltsin had condemned communism, had supported democracy, had attacked the privileges of the Communist Party leadership. Every person who felt dissatisfied -- and there were many -- believed that Yeltsin shared his views. Two decades later, in a far more cynical Russia, this mood is hard to remember. But in the late 1980s, Yeltsin was wildly popular. When the first presidential election was held in Russia in 1991, it was inevitable that he would win.
Manic-depressive
That euphoria launched an extraordinary period in Russian history, and a presidential career best described as manic-depressive. Over the next eight years, Yeltsin had enormous bursts of creative energy, alternating with long periods of illness, alcoholism and retreat. He could rouse himself to rally the country and would then vanish, leaving the government in the hands of his corrupt cronies. He was capable of speaking eloquently about freedom, yet he had an autocratic streak and brooked no criticism. He talked about economic reform but transferred his country's industry to a small group of oligarchs. He ended the Cold War but started a new and terrible war in Chechnya.
During that time, Western perceptions of Yeltsin fluctuated no less schizophrenically. In the beginning, he was considered a dangerous upstart: The elder President George Bush openly refused to meet him. Then he stood on a tank in the center of Moscow, told cheering crowds to resist an attempted putsch -- and the West turned 180 degrees, called him a hero and embraced him, sometimes literally. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl exchanged bear hugs with Yeltsin. Bill Clinton campaigned for Yeltsin's re-election. The International Monetary Fund created new types of loans for Russia, just to be able to give Yeltsin money with no strings attached.
Yet even while he and Clinton were enjoying those long, heavily televised walks through the woods, it was clear that Yeltsin was planting some of the seeds of the retrenchment we see in Russia today. During his administration, that IMF money vanished into secret bank accounts. Yeltsin first abolished the KGB, then quietly revived it to keep tabs on his enemies. Despite the rhetoric of the Yeltsin era, Russia still does not have what most of us would recognize as a free-market economy. Though we hailed him as a democrat, Yeltsin did not leave behind anything resembling a functional democracy. And he knew, at some level, that he had failed: When he resigned from the presidency, on New Year's Eve of the millennium -- the second momentous resignation speech of his career -- he wiped away a tear and apologized to the Russian people for "your dreams that never came true."
Man of transition
It has become fashionable to turn another 180 degrees and to condemn Yeltsin for corruption and autocracy just as thoroughly as the West once supported him. This is tempting, especially for those who disliked the lionization of Yeltsin as much as I did. But now that he is dead, perhaps it makes more sense not to classify him as a liberal or an autocrat, as friend or foe. For in the longer historical perspective, it is clear that Yeltsin, unlike his predecessor Gorbachev, was a genuine man of transition. He knew things had to change, but he had neither the ideas nor the tools to change them. He had some of the instincts of a populist democrat but all the habits of a lifetime Communist Party apparatchik. He admired Western abundance but never understood how Western societies actually work.
In truth, he belonged neither to the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev had hoped to revive, nor to the West, which Putin now rejects. Had we ever been realistic about him, we would have understood his limitations from the beginning -- and appreciated his strengths.