CHAPTER 12
Everything's in disarray, and no one's there
To say, as cold sets in, that disarray
Is everywhere, and how sweet becomes the prayer:
Rossia, Lethe, Lorelei.Osip Mandelshtam, "The Decembrists", 1917 (1)
With the death of Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov on 14 December 1989, the Soviet Union may have lost its only personified hope for national reconciliation. Sakharov's disappearance from the Soviet political scene marked the point at which what had been known as the "Soviet crisis" entered the terminal stage: national catastrophe.
History rarely produces figures who can both throw stones and gather them, who can destroy the old order and lay the foundation for a new one, who can trumpet discord and celebrate harmony. George Washington was one. Sakharov might have been another.
Sakharov left no heir, no stone gathered of national stature. There is no one in today's Soviet Union who, like Sakharov, is admitted to and trusted by the three progressively distant and hostile camps that dominate the Soviet political landscape: Gorbachev and the establishment reformers; the pro-capitalist and pro-Western Moscow intelligentsia; (2) and the rapidly radicalising, and increasingly self-conscious and unified populist movements. Instead, in a country rapidly polarising and depleted of trust -- the most essential ingredient of peaceful reform -- Sakharov left behind a slew of vocal, energetic, and wilful stone throwers. Of these, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin -- now president of the Republic of Russia -- is by far the most formidable.
Still, he is enigmatic, perhaps deliberately so. From Yeltsin's past one can form a fairly good idea of how he might go about doing things, but not of what specific things he is likely to do. This puzzle comes from the unique nature of Yeltsin's political base: he is the only Soviet politician who enjoys both the ardent, often fanatical, devotion of the Soviet hoi pol-loi and the solid, albeit guarded and qualified, support of most of the intelligentsia. As we shall see, keeping both constituencies happy is no easy matter.
Soviet totalitarianism can be divided into four stages: the mature, when people were afraid to think (Stalin); the aging, when they could think but were still afraid to talk (Khrushchev); the decaying, when thinking and talking privately were usually safe but acting was not (Brezhnev); and the dying, when, gradually, people have been allowed to act (Gorbachev). Yeltsin himself has been instrumental to the arrival of this last stage; he has also been symbolic of it.
Until the era of Gorbachev, however Yeltsin's reactions to the life around him were not atypical. He did not think under Stalin (and, by his own admission, wept when the tyrant died); he thought but did not talk under Khrushchev; and he talked but did not act under Brezhnev.
In the pitch darkness of 1931, as Stalin celebrated his victory over the Russian village -- starved, arrested, uprooted, and murdered -- two peasant Russian boys were born who would do more than anyone else to undermine the very foundations of the house that Stalin built. Boris Yeltsin arrived on 1 February, in a Ural village. A month later, Misha Gorbachev was born in the southern Russian province of Stavropol. They were to rise fast and in parallel; ultimately their paths would intersect, travel closely together, and then diverge sharply and painfully.
Like Gorbachev's, Yeltsin's career was swift and stellar. A graduate of the Department of Civil Engineering of the Ural Polytechnic Institute, he became chief engineer of the Construction Directorate in his mid-twenties and manager of a huge industrial complex at thirty-two. Five years later, Yeltsin was appointed the construction section chief of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee. He then became a secretary, and a year later, at the tender Soviet political age of forty-five, first secretary. This made him absolute master of the Sverdlovsk province, the Soviet Union's third largest industrial area. In rushing to appoint Yeltsin, the Brezhnev Politburo had violated the rules; not only had Yeltsin leapfrogged the obligatory tenure as the second secretary of the regional committee; he was, in fact, promoted while the current second secretary, who ordinarily would have taken over the province, was still in office.
During his nine years as the Sverdlovsk ruler, Yeltsin gave a foretaste of things to come. He permitted his subordinates to criticise him; he fielded "provocative" questions at meetings with the "labouring masses"; he initiated call-in TV shows in which the leaders of the province were forced to appear. During one such show a caller inquired angrily why Yeltsin's wife was driven to work in her husband's state car -- a practice considered a normal perk of the state and party nachal'niki. Yeltsin promised that his wife would use his car no more. He kept his word.
That such transgressions were tolerated by Moscow is a testimony to the apathy, emaciation, and rot of the waning years of Brezhnev's reign. It helped that the "human face" of Yeltsin's rule lurked safely behind the Ural Mountains, thirteen hundred kilometers from Moscow: nothing of the sort would have been allowed in Central Russia.
Then, too, Yeltsin knew when to put limits on his mild iconoclasm. When Brezhnev's seventieth anniversary came around, Yeltsin obediently lent his voice to the chorus of tributes to the now much-vilified "architect of stagnation". The missive from the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee, signed by Yeltsin, extolled Brezhnev's "wisdom, a giant organising talent, bubbling energy, [devoted to] the construction of communism". Yeltsin's message to Brezhnev went on to say:
We who live in the Urals thank you ardently and from the bottom of our soul, Leonid Ilyich, for your constant care for the strengthening of the economic and military might of our Motherland, the raising of material and cultural level of people's life, for your titanic activity aimed at the establishment of solid peace in the whole world.
Again, following the Politburo's secret decision to demolish the Ipatiev House, in the basement of which Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and children were executed in 1918, Yeltsin sent in the bulldozers in the middle of the night. By morning, only a patch of fresh asphalt marked the spot.
But undoubtedly the greater leniency accorded Yeltsin was also Moscow's tribute to his leadership. He was bright, hard working, well-liked by the people, and did not take bribes -- a Soviet wonder. These qualities prompted a new general secretary, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, five days after his election, to summon Yeltsin to Moscow to join the Central Committee apparatus. Nine months later, Yeltsin became the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee, the most prestigious of all the local party posts and one traditionally given to the general secretary's most trusted ally.
Ryba portitsia s golovy, a Russian proverb claims -- "a fish begins to rot head first". As Yeltsin took over in December 1985, Moscow was a thoroughly rotten head of the country. From eight till two in the morning, Yeltsin fired and harangued, thundered and cajoled -- and still, as he put it, "could not get to the bottom of the filthy well". One wholesale purge of the party bosses and trade officials followed another. But still the Soviet capital -- whose worn-out transportation and theft-ridden stores could not cope with daily invasions of visitors (two million a month in winter, three million in summer) looking for something, indeed anything, to buy -- showed no sign of improvement.
As Yeltsin correctly claimed later, the only thing to improve during his short Moscow tenure was the "atmosphere". After eighteen years of Victor Grishin -- Brezhnev's distant, corrupt, servile, and high-handed crony -- the new master, who began riding buses and metros instead of zooming down a special lane in a black limo, became an instant star. Voluble and gregarious, he liberally dispensed his opinions on a multitude of subjects. One of Yeltsin's cracks, which delighted Muscovites, traced marital discord in the Soviet capital to the size of Moscow kitchens -- kitchens totally incapable, according to Yeltsin, of accommodating mightily proportioned Russian women, and thus progenitors of ugly family feuds.
Yeltsin authorised the mass media in his domain to begin publishing and broadcasting the truth. Thanks to a new line of publications of Moskovskaya pravda and Moskovskiy komsomoletz, Muscovites were the first Russian readers in the country to behold, astonished, words like prostitutka, narkoman (drug addict), and mafia -- used to describe Soviet, not "bourgeois" reality.
The new first secretary initiated a spate of entertainments, from dog shows to wind orchestra competitions. But his most popular brain child was open-air trade fairs -- yarmarki. Unable to break the trade mafia, Yeltsin decided to bypass it by having agricultural produce sold by farmers directly to Muscovites. Yet exercises in free marketing yarmarki were not: unlike the several "farmers' markets" in the city, the prices at yarmarki were kept lower by fiat. Every now and then Yeltsin made surprise visits to fairs. On one such visit, he harangued Azerbaijani farmers: "Aren't you ashamed of yourself to squeeze the Muscovites like this? They send you machinery, refrigerators. ... Come, come, you can take a ruble off your fruit, half a ruble off the vegies". Such reproofs by a nonvoting member of the Politburo were not to be taken lightly; the prices dropped as prescribed. That night, recalls a witness, as the boss's words were repeated in Moscow kitchens, Yeltsin "became a legend".
In the meantime, the Moscow party apparat, whose undying hatred Yeltsin earned almost instantaneously, ran for cover under the wings of the guardian angel of party professionals, Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev, at that time the "second" secretary of the party and Gorbachev's deputy. A fellow Siberian and a former party boss of the Tomsk province, Ligachev -- ironically, in light of his future relationship with Yeltsin -- was the Politburo member who pushed the hardest for Yeltsin's transfer to Moscow.
A series of clashes between the two men followed. Yeltsin saw his initiatives stifled, his designs overruled, his proposals dismissed. Frustrated in his efforts to bring what he considered a true perestroika to the capital, Yeltsin sent Gorbachev a letter of resignation. Gorbachev pocketed the letter and kept postponing the decision. Yeltsin grew more and more anxious. His rendezvous with Russian history was set.
There is a verse in Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, one of the greatest novels about communist totalitarianism:
"What's your shell made of, my dear?"
Once I asked a turtle. And was told:
"It's of fear. Stored and hardened fear.
There is nothing stronger in the world."
Yeltsin's decision to crack his own shell of fear -- a very personal and painful step, the agony of which nearly cost him his life -- turned out to be more than one man's liberation. It ushered in a new, terminal era of Soviet communism. What happened on 21 October 1987 remains the pinnacle of Yeltsin's political life. Regardless of what follows, the events of that morning alone assure his place in history.
At the closing of a largely ritualistic Central Committee meeting on that day, Yeltsin requested the floor and delivered a speech in which he deplored the absence of "revolutionary change" in the party appparat; warned about popular disappointment with perestroika because of the lack of results; noted Gorbachev's budding cult of personality, and, finally, complaining of the lack of support from the Politburo, asked to be released from the post of the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee.
As he walked back through a stunned silence ("heart pounding and ready to burst through the rib cage", he wrote in his memoirs) Yeltsin prepared himself for an "organised" and "methodical" slaughter. (3) And that is precisely what happened. Following Gorbachev's cue, one Central Committee member after another got up to denounce Yeltsin. Three weeks later, the ritual slaughter was repeated at a plenum of the Moscow City Committee, to which Yeltsin, in hospital with a nervous and physical breakdown and pumped with tranquilisers, was summoned by Gorbachev.
Three months later, Gorbachev called again, this time offering Yeltsin a Council-of-Ministers-rank position in charge of construction. The offer was a curious one. Why did Gorbachev not deliver a coup de grace, by making Yeltsin ambassador to Mongolia, as Khrushchev did with Molotov? The answer is most likely to be found in the role that Gorbachev, the master tactician, must have assigned to Yeltsin from the beginning. Yeltsin is to Gorbachev what Medusa's head was to Perseus: when Gorbachev reaches inside the bag and produces Yeltsin, the "conservatives" freeze in fear. By comparison, Gorbachev looks supremely moderate, reasonable, and well worthy of support. Gorbachev needed Yeltsin in Moscow, handy, within reach. As Yeltsin perceptively commented on numerous occasions: "If I did not exist, Gorbachev would have to invent me".
At the same time, the destination of Yeltsin's institutional exile was not, as the Soviet papers in the pre-glasnost days used to say, accidental. Alongside food, medical care, finance, and crime, housing is the most explosive issue in grass roots politics: over one hundred million Soviet citizens (every third one!) have less living space per person than even the miserable Soviet "sanitary norm" allows -- nine square metres per person. In Moscow, as Izvestia has acknowledged, 344,800 families are on the waiting list for housing (12 per cent of all families in the Soviet capital); 282,900 families in Leningrad (20 per cent); 208,000 in Kiev (26 per cent).
Gorbachev knew Yeltsin better than Yeltsin knew himself. The general secretary was convinced that Yeltsin would re-emerge, no matter how crushing the blow was, and Perseus would recover Medusa's head. And Gorbachev was right: only a few months after his political demise, Yeltsin began campaigning for a seat at the 1988 Extraordinary Party Conference. Thus, at the age of fifty-six, Yeltsin became the first politician in sixty-four years (since the time of Lenin's death), who openly took on the Big Boss, lost, and rose again. A new era of Soviet political history began. A year later, in the elections to the Congress of People's Deputies, Yeltsin triumphed over his apparat-supported opponent, polling close to 90 per cent of the Moscow vote.
"There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling," Robert Graves advised budding poets. Yeltsin the budding politician did discover his own story, and it has proved remarkably well worth his telling. It is a story of extramonetary remuneration of the Soviet bureaucrats -- the "social justice" issue, to use the currently accepted euphemism. No feeling is more widely and more passionately shared in today's Soviet Union than hatred of the political elite's privileges: all those special drug, book, and department stores, special box offices, special hospitals, special food rations, special food processing plants, even special farms where this food is produced. (4)
Setting an example, and earning enormous political capital, Yeltsin gave up all his ministerial-rank privileges -- including, in May of last year, the holy of holies of the Russian perks, a dacha. After thirty years of apparat privileges, he told Moscow News, it is not easy to cope: "It is hard when your wife queues for hours to buy food", Yeltsin complained, "or when something is not available in the store, or when drugstores have no medicine and your grandson's temperature is over 40 Centigrade".
Yeltsin's constituency of the reform-oriented democratic "progressives" and hoi polloi -- united by hatred of the stupidity, rapacity, and privileges of the party and government bureaucrats -- may prove only temporary. And small surprise if it does: progress and populism are rarely compatible: "Our political life", writes Nikolai Shmeliov, perhaps the most authoritative of the Soviet radical economists, "has one sad feature: the most pronounced are levelling trends, born out of the ideology of equality of all in poverty". Along with meat, clean towels, 800 grams of soap a month, refrigerators, and shoes, the closing of kooperativy (small private enterprises) was at the top of the list of demands of striking miners last July. A huge segment of Yeltsin's constituency are social Luddites -- scared of the havoc, the uncertainty, the need for initiative and self-reliance that radical economic reform will bring. Undoubtedly there are Yeltsin supporters among those who burn private farms and vandalise cooperative shops and restaurants.
Most important of all, Yeltsin's populism appeals to those who hate the neighbour who does better than they, no matter how hard he or she works. Yet earnings-based inequality is both the key condition and the assured outcome of any radical economic reform. As Gavriil Popov, a leading Soviet economist who in April was elected the mayor of Moscow, has put it in Literaturnaya gazeta: "The increase in wealth for some will become the basis for raising the standard of living for all." Yet it is precisely the increased "social layering based on property" that bothers Yeltsin the leveller. What Popov rightly sees as the "key problem" of perestroika -- "the contradiction between the democracy that we need and the growth of economic inequality" -- is bound, sooner or later, to split the Yeltsin constituency. And contributing to the rift between the pro-reform progressives and the populists is the age-long bitter mistrust between the liberal Russian intelligentsia and the narod, the people, on whose behalf the intelligentsia is supposedly labouring.
Because of his constituency, Yeltsin is uncharacteristically reticent on the key subject of property. Philosopher Igor Kliamkin, who is among the most perceptive observers of Soviet politics today, notes that Yeltsin talks about the market "through clenched teeth". Thus Yeltsin tells the New York Times that he is for "something close to" private ownership of farmland. In his memoirs, he states that the issue of property divides "the so-called left and right" but does not indicate where he stands on the issue. The Financial Times reports Yeltsin supporting "private ownership of the production means and land" -- but only in general and with a proviso that "positive aspects of socialism" are incorporated.
The other pillar of Yeltsin's political strategy, meanwhile, is safe from cracks and grows stronger by the day. These days, to attack Gorbachev is almost as advantageous as attacking the party itself. And as Gorbachev's popularity declines, Yeltsin's critique of the general secretary grows progressively sharper and more personal. Perestroika has "failed", Yeltsin told the Financial Times, because "the leadership" failed. Moreover, "five years should be enough for a president to prove his worth. He hasn't fulfilled his obligation to the pledges to the people". Yeltsin's memoirs cast Gorbachev as "inconsistent" and "timid", a man who "loves" half-measures and "semi-decisions".
Yeltsin seems to regard the political mileage to be gotten out of the "social justice" issue as far from exhausted. The single longest topical passage in his book is eleven pages devoted to the privileges of the top party leadership. Toward the end of the passage, Yeltsin lurches for Gorbachev's political jugular: "Why has Gorbachev been unable to change this? "I believe the fault lies in the basic cast of his character. He likes to live well, in comfort and luxury." And -- a twist of the knife -- "what about [Raisa Gorbachev's] ZIL limo? My daughter, at her workplace, is given one small cake of soap per month. My wife ... has to spend two or three hours a day in shopping lines. ..." Was the entire book written for this paragraph? If so, it is probably worth it: when Yeltsin's autobiography is published in the Soviet Union, the paragraph will do more to boost his popularity and sink that of Gorbachev than anything else in the book.
In the meantime, Gorbachev continued his cat-and-mouse game: now letting Yeltsin roam loose and even protecting him, now throwing him high in the air. When the "conservative" majority of the First Congress of People's Deputies last May failed to elect Yeltsin to the permanent legislature (the Supreme Soviet), Gorbachev acceded to -- possibly arranged -- a resignation of one of the elected deputies in order that Yeltsin take his seat. That summer Gorbachev authorised a televised address by Yeltsin to striking miners. When last fall Pravda reprinted an Italian newspaper article that accused Yeltsin of drinking non-stop during his US tour and spending honoraria on jeans and VCRs instead of charities, Gorbachev sacked Editor-in-Chief Viktor Afanasiev.
Yet on October 16, just a few weeks later, Gorbachev, in his capacity as the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, humiliated Yeltsin during a nationally televised session. He had the minister for internal affairs report on a bizarre incident: Yeltsin, the minister alleged, appeared late at night and soaking wet at a police station in the exclusive country house retreat of the Moscow elite, stating that he had been kidnapped and thrown off the bridge by unknown assassins.
Yeltsin said later that he himself had concealed the episode for fear of provoking protest strikes and riots by his supporters. At the time, though, his response in the Supreme Soviet was suspiciously confused: he said that nobody had tried to harm him and that the whole episode was "his private life". (A rumour began circulating in Moscow, meanwhile, that he was visiting his mistress who threw a bucketful of water over him.)
Yeltsin's detractors are not confined solely to the apparat. Some in the Moscow intelligentsia are sceptical, even alarmed. According to Novy mir, they see in Yeltsin a "neo-Bolshevik", the "central point" of whose program -- redistribution of goods and services accumulated by the ruling class -- was "the leitmotif of all Bolsheviks, both before and after the [1917] revolution". His program, the article reports, is seen by some as a "collection of primitive quasi-solutions".
The Moscow intelligentsia is heavily overrepresented among the sources of Western correspondents in the Soviet Union, so its weariness of Yeltsin permeates Western media. Nonetheless, the intelligentsia's attitudes are themselves somewhat suspect.
Perhaps nowhere in the world does there exist a more snobbish intelligentsia than in Moscow. A wrong accent, a gesture that is not comme il faut, or (God forbid) grammatic deficiency are all valid reasons for excommunication. (Although Gorbachev speaks better Russian than any Soviet leader since Lenin, without the heavy Georgian accent of Stalin or the Ukrainian of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, he too has taken his lumps. His fall from grace began at the televised proceedings of the First Congress of People's Deputies last summer, when he several times used the incorrect third person plural form of the verb klast', to put down, saying lozhut, instead of kladut.)
A son of a Siberian peasant, Yeltsin can hardly count on acceptance by Moscow intellectuals. In his book, Yeltsin notes that Muscovites "make no attempt" to hide their "snobbery and arrogance" towards provincials and that, prior to his move to Moscow, his rare encounters with the inhabitants of the capital left "a nasty taste" in his mouth.
Another, more powerful, source of the intelligentsia's resentment is deeper and perhaps subconscious. For generations, it cast itself as fighters and martyrs for the narod. But, with a few notable exceptions, the intellectuals know nothing of the narod. They do not know how "the people" live, do not share their habits, and (except in books) do not speak "the people's" language. Yeltsin, on the other hand, is a voice of the tired, hungry, huddled masses of that second-rate Third World nation called the Soviet Union. To the intelligentsia, Yeltsin is the epitome of mass democracy -- something for which the intellectuals ostensibly struggle, but whose arrival threatens their exalted status. At stake for the intelligentsia is its place behind the throne, its right and duty to advise the state on matters of culture, its ruling the arts by virtue of government's mandate -- all privileges that many of their Western counterparts can, and do, only dream about.
For better or worse, however, these detractors of Yeltsin cannot stop him, not now. He began this year as one of the five chairmen of the Inter-regional Group of Deputies, an increasingly disloyal and numerically growing "left" opposition to Gorbachev in the Congress of People's Deputies. In May he won a narrow victory to become president of the Russian republic, thus securing a powerful political base. This year may be the one he has prepared for all his life.
The central, most fateful aspect of Soviet political life today is a desperate race between two parallel processes: the disintegration of the Soviet economy (and the concomitant delegitimation and demise of the current political regime); and the emergence of new political structures enjoying popular support and consent. If the former outpaces the latter -- if the economy collapses before a legitimate central government is installed -- then this giant land, this military "superpower" in possession of over 12,000 nuclear charges, is likely to plunge into violent political chaos, a Lebanon-like war of all against all.
It is no longer possible to talk about the Soviet "national" economy. Shortages and inflation make the ruble less and less fit to serve as a medium of exchange. Moscow now leaves local party and state leaders to fend for themselves if -- or, rather, when -- food riots break out. Regions more and more often refuse to surrender their produce to central ministries; they export goods only when barter offerings of other regions look attractive -- or when hard currency is paid. In March, for the first time in my memory, a Soviet economist writing in Kommunist, an official Soviet publication (and a theoretical journal of the Central Committee at that), used the term "dollarisation" to describe the process. (5)
Perhaps the most troubling consequence of economic Lebanisation of the Soviet Union is a steady decline of grain deliveries for all-Union distribution. Thus, while last year's overall grain harvest was 16 million tons higher than in 1988, the amount of grain sold to the state was lower than in 1988. And this in a country where every third loaf of bread, as A. Sizov acknowledged in Kommunist, is already made from imported grain.
In a country which is already seventy-seventh in the world in terms of personal consumption, these economic abstractions have translated into another turn of a downward spiral -- this time perilously close to the bottom. Of 211 essential food products, Vassily Selunin reports in Glasnost, only 23 were available at state stores as of last summer -- and perhaps even fewer now. In order to buy children's soap in a department store in the ancient city of Kostroma, one must show a stamp in one's internal passport to prove that one has children under three years old.
The Soviet Union's only chance to win the deadly race against total economic collapse and violent political anarchy is a government vested with authority and having enough legitimacy to administer the very bitter pill of radical economic reform. The creation of such a government is the central and most urgent issue of Soviet politics today. Gorbachev's much touted "grab" for the "emergency powers" of the presidency is thus irrelevant. Back in March 1985, as the newly elected chief of the country's sole and dictatorial political party, Gorbachev had immeasurably more real power than any presidency could procure him. Today, his "emergency" power may best be compared to that of the captain of the Titanic.
Neither the Congress of People's Deputies -- a third of whose delegates were appointed by the party-controlled "social organisations" -- nor Gorbachev himself has the required legitimacy. The pace of economic disintegration is such that it may be too late now even for "roundtable" negotiations of the Polish type. The only means of creating a legitimate government is for Gorbachev to dissolve the Congress, resign the presidency, and proceed with direct multi-party national elections of a new parliament and a new president. And Gorbachev may well be reasonably assured of gaining the presidency -- if Yeltsin, already installed as the president of the Republic of Russia, decides not to challenge him. In that case, Yeltsin could savour the exquisite revenge of watching his nemesis struggling as the head of a disintegrating Soviet Union.
If such elections do not materialise by the end of 1990, three other scenarios suggest themselves. The first is a democratic, pro-capitalist revolution that would finish what Gorbachev started but took too long to complete. The second is an authoritarian, anticapitalist, anti-Western, "neo-Bolshevik" revolution. And third: a KGB-military junta of "national salvation". While Yeltsin's role in the third case is hard to imagine, except as that of a victim, he is well-positioned to occupy a prominent, perhaps even central, place in the other two.
In public opinion polls, Yeltsin is second only to Gorbachev in popularity, while his "negatives" are even slightly lower than those of the president. He has little-advertised but strong and growing ties to the military -- another source of the intelligentsia's concern. During his campaign for nomination to the Congress of People's Deputies, Yeltsin was ferreted about the country in military planes. He is a key organiser of the Democratic Front, one of whose institutional members is Shchit (Shield), a union of radical "left" officers. A Russian "Red Carnations" revolution led by the junior military, à la the 25 April 1975 revolution in Portugal, is a very plausible subscenario of a democratic revolution.
But would Yeltsin lead a populist revolt? His critics say he very well might. They point out, for example, his flirtation with Pamyat, the nationalist, neo-Bolshevik organisation whose representative he met during his tenure in Moscow. (Yeltsin claims that he met with the Pamyat demonstrators, who occupied Red Square, only because he wished to defuse a tense situation and prevent police crackdown.) A more serious, and persuasive, argument in favour of Yeltsin-the-authoritarian stems from the ill-defined nature of his objectives. What does he want beyond the elimination of privileges, the dissolution of the apparat, and the effective abolition ol the party monopoly on power? The character of his constituency and its mood give rise to gloomy predictions, like those of Andronik Migranian in Novy mir:
The past is shameful, the present is monstrous, and the future cannot be defined, cannot be predicted. In such a psychological state the masses are ready to accept any leader who will say: "I know what to do and how to do it". And ... the Yeltsin phenomenon ... is explained by this psychological condition of the people. ... The popular mood that has made Yeltsin the populist leader is very dangerous. ... Further deterioration of the general situation in the country will further widen the circle of the "decisive" people ready to support any leader offering simple, quick and effective decision in the name of social justice. [But] the course on redistribution of the present goods is a course into the blind alley of a new slavery. Soon there will be nothing left to redistribute. And terror will follow.
But whichever of the two scenarios Yeltsin would prefer, he is ready for battle. The strapping six-footer, a former national champsionship volleyball player, was at the time of writing fully recovered from his post-plenum breakdown. He gets up at five, reads till seven, does his calisthenics, takes a cold shower, and works until one in the morning. (On his US tour in the autumn of 1989, Yeltsin challenged President Bush to a tennis match.)
In speeches and interviews in the United States in September 1989, Yeltsin repeated over and over again that Gorbachev had at most a year to improve the economic situation -- or vacate the space at the top for a more successful politician. "If not, then what happens?" asked Jim Lehrer. "A revolution from below will begin", answered Yeltsin.
Half a year later, Yeltsin told the Associated Press:
The time of compromises and half-measures is past. We are sitting on top of a volcano, and very soon neither Gorbachev, nor anyone else will be able to control the events. The people will take their fate in their own hands, as it happened in Eastern Europe. If we are lucky, everything will happen orderly, as in GDR, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. But what happens if the situation develops in the Rumanian pattern? Bloodshed? Tragedy?
"Would you like to be President of the Soviet Union some day?" Jim Lehrer pressed him. "It's a possibility", Yeltsin answered, "if I am not too old and have strength."
Dr Johnson is said to have remarked about Lord Chesterfield: "This man, I thought, had been a Lord among wits, but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords". Only time will tell whether Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin is a democrat among the populists or only an authoritarian populist among the democrats. Now we may not have to wait long to find out.
ENDNOTES
1. All Russian translations in the text are the author's own.
2. In the confusing Soviet political parlance, to be precapitalist and pro-Western is to be thought of as one of "the Left*. The proponents of hard-line communist orthodoxy are labelled "the Right" and "the conservatives". For authenticity's sake, these denominations are preserved in the text, but for clarity's sake, they are enclosed in quotation marks.
3. Against the Grain (New York: Summit Books, 1990), page 102.
4. A "commission on privileges", created by the Supreme Soviet, confirmed the existence of privileges in the following areas: "health care, leisure, trade, transportation, housing, culture, pensions and services" (Izvestia, 29 September 1989).
5. Egor Gaidar, "Trudny vibor" ("The hard choice"), Kommunist (January 1990), page 25.
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