YELTSIN THE DANCING BEAR

Timothy J. Colton. Yeltsin. A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.







"The bitter truth is better than the sweet lie."--Boris N. Yeltsin







On April 23, 2007, Boris Yeltsin, first president of the ethnic Russia that was born following international Caesarian midwifery, died. One year later Timothy J. Colton has fathered a 550 page biography, dedicated to the conservative publicist Samuel L. Huntington. It was published by a subsidiary of the Perseus publishing consortium headed by David Steinberg, which had previously purchased the Harvard Business School Press in 2005.



The final two years of Yeltsin's second term were endured in a kind of agony, both political and physical. He underwent nine hospitalizations from November, 1996 to December, 1999. Professor Colton writes, "...he was not dying, was not a shut-in, and had not lost cognitive capacity." Just as clearly, he was not wholly functional. His final presidential years closely mimicked the declining years of Leonid Brezhnev, for his motorcade always included an ambulance. How and when did this one strong physique succumb to the burdens of office, and what was the state of the nation upon his hasty retirement on December 31, 1999?



Raised in the Ural mountain chain, as Colton's impressive collection of family photos illustrates, young Boris Nikolaevich graduated from the Ural State University in 1955 with a reputation as a hooligan and an instigator. But he received immediate employment by the construction department of the Sverdlovsk municipality. He became a Party member in 1961. After meeting Brezhnev in 1976 he became one of the youngest regional First Secretaries, managing Sverdlovsk until 1984. He brought a local quarrel to the attention of Yuri Andropov, then chief of the KGB. The Defense Ministry made him a Colonel in 1978. Colton writes, "Yeltsin's rise was meritocratic, made without the windfall of a well-connected parent, spouse or friend." This assertion may be regarded as questionable, for the author often, although not always, appears to accept sycophantic memoirs at face value. After a subordinate committed suicide and secret documents were lost, Yeltsin was elected to the CPSU Central Committee. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin in 1981, Then, in a sudden concession to free-marketeers, he opposed imposing price controls on selected foodstuffs. In this rising period of his career, he could knock back three tumblers of vodka without visible aftereffects.



Yeltsin's meteoric ascent, in the manner of a typical Party protege, was not unaccompanied by temporary missteps. Yuri Andropov, the KGB leader kept alive on American dialysis machines, nominated Yeltsin to the construction (or reconstruction) department of the CPSU in 1984. Thereafter Gorbachev and Yeltsin operated as a smychka, two hunting dogs linked in tandem by a horizontal harness, unique to rural Russia. Forty years after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, Yeltsin began to specialize in capital investment, and on December 25, 1985, he advanced to the position of First Secretary of the Moscow Central Committee. According to the pious formulation of Colton,"/Moscow/ stood for all that was amiss with Communism and for its potential for redemption through reform." For the next two years Yeltsin conducted an unremitting purge of the Moscow apparatus, acting an an exemplary "udarnik," or "hitter," in a manner consistent with Bolshevik tradition. In 1987 he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer of CBS , achieving thereby a sort of imprimatur from an arm of the American news mechanism. In the summer of 1988 Yeltsin wrangled a mandate from the Karelian Republic, Andropov's former political base, to appear at the 19th CPSU Party Conference. But in October, 1987, he attacked Gorbachev before a television audience, asserting that the Russian nation was losing faith in the Party, and offered to resign his seat in the Politburo. Afterward, he stabbed his stomach with a pair of office scissors. Following subsequent acrimonious controversy, he was voted off the Politburo.



Nevertheless, he rebounded quickly. After a flying visit to London to be welcomed by Margaret Thatcher, Yeltsin spearheaded an ostensibly populist campaign against the ruling Communist Party, and harvested 50% of the ballots to become speaker of the Supreme Soviet. His goals were to withdraw Soviet troops from bases abroad, to decolonize Russia's overland conquest of national minorities, and to foster the marketization of Soviet state assets. His radical program elicited 54% of the ballots cast by an enthusiastic electorate for the presidency. In June, 1989, the Russian Parliament declared Russia's "sovreignty," seceding (on paper) from the all-embracing USSR. Colton suggests a motive for Western support when he writes, "...Russia's mammoth reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals looked increasingly like a pot of gold...", while conceding that Yeltsin's concept of global economics was "sketchy' and "wacky."



During August 19-21, self-selected Party and Army elements walked through an ostensible cooup, taking Gorbachev prisoner, but the troops melted away as did Kornilov's attack on Kerensky's Provisional Government in August, 1917. George H.W. Bush ordered secret signal intelligence to be communicated to Boris Nikolaevich. Yeltsin, the Colonel, climbed on a convenient tank to read a ghost-written appeal to the public, a la Lenin, rejecting isolation from the (mythical) "world community." His bold appearance constituted a televised coup de theatre. Subsequently the Ukrainian regime resolved to separate from Russia, and in 1990 he signed a ten-year treaty of cooperation with the now-disgraced Leonid Kravchuk. Following Lenin's precedent of 1922, Russia, Ukraine and Belorus signed a treaty making the three Slavic republis the core group of a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). After declaring that dismemberment was a political error, President Gorbachev retired, as Yeltsin's decolonization drive stalled. With the enthusiastic support of Western financial interests, Yeltsin next pursued the course of "creative destruction" attributed to Joseph Schumpeter, an emigre economist at Harvard, with all the resources of his prodigious energy.


As the former Soviet military forces withdrew from the periphery, trading space for time, Yeltsin began his assault on the regulated economic system. He resisted subsidizing regional economic structures with revenues from the center, thus negating the equivalent of regional equalization payments by which Ottawa subsidizes weaker provincial economies. The result was chaos, scarcely concealed by the impsition of martial law in Chechnya. Consumer prices rose 300%, the GDP fell 96% and inflation attained the unheard-of level of 2,520%. Correspondingly, Yeltsin's popularity fell from 40% in 1991 to 20% in 1992 and 17% in 1993. These figures make manifest the contradiction between claims of "populism" and "democratization" and actual public sendiment. In practice the touted reform process had a greater similiarity to a Hollywood reality show extolling "virtual democracy."


Nevertheless, Colton's terse summary of the Yeltsin style of implementing irregular reforms, fostering a fractious administrative mechanism and leaping to unpredictable decisions must be credited. In desperation Yeltsin turned to a veteran Soviet administrator, Victor Chernomyrdin, the former Soviet Minister for Gas (1985-89), to regularize and rationalize his tempestuous and convulsive assaults on the previous socialist "normalcy." The Consttutional Court prohibited the persecution of former Party members. Motivated by a spontaneous "truth and reconciliation" sentiment, some 4.2 millin Soviet citizens were exonerated, or posthumously rehabilitated, from frudulent accusations. As did the Castro government in Havana, Yeltsin attempted overtures to Russian exile communities, but without offering financial compensation. The KGB was not abolished as the imperial Okhrana had been, but was trimmed down into a leaner, meaner government organ and rechristened the Federal Security Bureau (FSB). Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose. It was, however, significant that on two counts Yeltsin deviated from Western advice. He did not form a mass party around a personality cult, as de Gaulle had done, and he refrained from inundating his bewildered public with a tsunami of electronic propaganda, as the Fuehrer and the Duce had done. It is unquestionable, as Colton writes, that Yeltsin combined ideological eclecticism with a fascination for history. And he was made sufficiently aware of the potential dangers in following European precedents to renounce that path.


Subsequently he abandoned his administrative metier to become an energetic partisan for enforcing a tectonic shift in Russian economic structures. In the ensuing earthquake, to Western applause from financially interested Western investors, state property was sold off at fire-sale prices to speculators who had amassed government-issued purchase vouchers. Petroleum reserves were offered as collatoral for bank loans. This collateral was swiftly auctioned off, and just as swiftly purchased by the auctioneers themselves. In short, the Yeltsin re-structuring (or right perestroika) implemented the counsel of the right Communist Nikolai Bukharin who, imitating the counterrevolutionary French leader Adolphe Thiers, once wrote in Pravda, "Enrichez-vous!" Throughout this convulsive period violent crime doubled, the newly wealthy evaded taxes, and the government was too bankrupt to pay the military rankers.


This reviewer must dissent from Colton's regret that a new security architecture for Europe and Asia did not suck Russia into an elephantine NATO bureaucracy extending from the English Channel to the Yellow Sea. It is illogical to celebrate the disintegration of a traditional overland empire in Chapter 8, if it be Turkish, only to advocated a grossly expanded empire of the same genre, if it be controlled by Anglo-Saxons. In this regard the author's objectivity and sense of proportion may justly be challenged.


After two yers of economic maladministration and administrative muddle, 617 deputies in the Supreme Soviet voted to impeach the President, but fell short of a two-thirds majority. En revanche, Yeltsin abolished the Supreme Soviet on September 21, 1993, and replaced it with a two-house legislature, following the American model. Colton pussyfoots around this executive coup, characterizing it as merely of "debatable legality" and partaking of "extraconstiitutionality." Early in October the "superpresident" ordered 1300 soldiers to attack the Parliament skyscraper ( or so-called "White House") in a dramatic televised Putsch. He then introduced a cumersome constitution of 137 articles. Colton approvingly salutes this political solution achieved through "partially democratic means." Yeltin himself, in rhetoric resembling Mussolini's, thundered to the quailing public, "...Do you want to bet only or mostly on a parliament? If you did, within a half-year, if not sooner, people would demand a dictator." One could only imagine how history would have changed, if King Charles I had had the benefit of Yeltsin's speechwriters! But despite the frightening rhetoric , the elected deputies voted amnesty for their former leaders, and Yeltsin, perhaps responding to undocumented hints from former Party apparatchiki, did not venture to counter their defiance. As a "legitimized" democratic despot he proceeded to rule by decree, issuing above twenty decrees per month, while the impotent parliamentary body adopted only 6 laws throughout all of 1994.

Although the "hitter" (udarnik) with the bullyingmicrophone had hoped to retire after one term because of health considerations,he was impelled by the pressures of incumbancy to reconsider, despite his near total lack of public approval. In February, 1996, he betook himself and an entourage of 70 to the World Economc Forum in Davos, Switzerland. On March 19 he launched a new publicity campaign, appealing to three separate privileged castes: the military, the clergy, and the corporate elite, in a Third World pattern more familiarly exemplified in Latin America. Through his campaign, guided by an American advertising firm, Yeltsin overcame the handicap of his single-digit popularity. His ambitions were furthered by a windfall investment of $10 billion from the IMF, and the World Bank gilded his lily with another $500 million. Inhis campaign swings, Yeltsin distributed bouquets and benefits like a Canadian prime minister campaigning through French Quebec, even allocating a generous contribution to a Muslim cultural center. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, offered him political asyllum if he lost. Through foreign gold and advertising guile he raised his vote total to 35% in the first round of balloting, and strenuously levered himself up to 54% to defeat the Communist candidate, who had increased his own popularity from 32% to 41%. This rebound, however, was to be short-lived. As Colton writes, "Yeltsin had rejuvenated himself politically just as he was failing corporeally."

He endured a fourth heart attack in August, and in September had his heart function improved by an operation to attach five grafts to his weakened heart muscle. The Russian surgical procedure was observed by a celebrated American heart specialist from Houston, Texas, the homeland of America's oil elite. IBy May he had recuperated sufficiently to journey to Paris, where he signed a diplomatic capitulation agreeing to NATO's long-planned Drang nach Osten. As his health failed, so did his intermittent administrative hammer blows. Because the treasury had been scraped clean (perhaps to increase his vote total), the total arrears of unpaid wages and old age pensions rose to $8 billion in 1998. In May, 1997, he was compelled par la force des choses to sign a treaty with Chechen authorities, promising to withdraw Russian troops from te Caucasian Muslim republic. And in the same tempestuous month he fired both the Defense Minister and the Chief of the General Staff, ostensibly because they demurred from his public commitment to end conscription. (It still exists.) Finally, having triumphed with Western financial assistance over the vanquished state ideology (vae victis!) he commenced to lament the want of a unifying "national idea" or "national ideology." (The latter appears still to represent a condition sine qua non for state ideological specialists.)

Yeltsin's decllining health required hospitalization on eight separate occasions between November, 1996 and December, 1999. As he became progressively separated from administrative responsibilities, cabined discipline disintegrated as ever more caustic press criticism echoed an earlier characterization of Yeltsin's family association withthe emergent business elite as constituting a "collective Rasputin." In August, 1996, Chernomyrdin was confirmed again by the Duma, only to be dumped by the following year. His replacement lasted from April to August, before he was replaced by Evgenii Primakov, the former KGB chief , professional diplomat, and fluent Arab speaker. Another KGB veteran was embedded as chief of the Kremlin administration. A former director of the new FSB was nmed as first deputy prime minister in a chess player's move to conceal the forthcoming nomination of Vladimir Putin as prime minister. The actor-president, Boris Yeltsin, executed a carefully scripted retirement on December 31, 1999. It coud be argued that while Yeltsin menaced or enthralled the inexperienced voting public like a dancing bear at the Moscow Circus, the responsibilities for actual executive implementation remained firmly in the hands of experienced Soviet apparatchiki like Chernomyrdin and Primakov, with the ostensibly disgraced Mikhail Gorbachev arguably active behind the scenes.

The catastrophic financial collapse of 1997 brought with it yet another request from the Parliament for Yeltsin to resign. The exchange value of the ruble-to-dollar ratio fell from 6:1 to 21:1, and inflation rose 40% throughout his last year in office. An unpredictable rise in oil prices rescued corporate Russia, but not the ordinary Russian family. "And this all was accomplished," Colton enthuses," in the new, post-communist economy."
Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin projected a larger-than-life image. Permitting neither smoking nor swearing, he presented nearly as abstemious a private image as Adolf Hitler. But his immoderate inebriation before 1996 attractd freqent criticism. Further, it was observed that he exhibited suicidal behabior, and one one occasion opened his veins to share his blood with that of a bodyguard in an ancient pagan gesture. (Colton does not remind his readers that the Russian word for the numeral "one" is "odin".) Colton describes Yeltsin's administrative style as "arrythmic," oscillating between aggressive activism and somnolent acquiescence, more or less like a bicycle racer after testosterone injections. Gorbachev commented that Yeltsin fitted better into a Sturm und Drang atmosphere than seated behind a bureacratic desk. Indeed, the irregularity of his manner finally stimulated some of his emboldened underlings to write an acidulous rebuke, known to their initimates as the "Letter of the Aides to the Sutan." As in previous epochs, the Russian intelligentsia fell back to deploy Russia's most powerful civic weapon--satire. One television network prominently featured a puppet show in which the obese and unstable presidential figure was known as "Boriska," or "Dirty Little Boris." Verbal orders were given priority over written procedures. Colton attributes this practice to Soviet tradition, but the practice of oral "guidance" to interpret (or frustrate) written orders exists throughout the American military, and was even adopted by Japanese banks during the American Occupation ("window guidance"). The charisma of the "superpresident" was so pronouonced that persons in his immediate vicinity felt themselves ensnared in a personal electronic field.
But this phenomenon, however magnified, is typical of the leadership cult of traditional Russian male culture. Further, the President's Club of political insiders, influence peddlers, business elites and family members meeting at an expanded sportsmen's club might legitimately be viewed as a twentieth century derivative of Peter the Great's "All-Russian Congregation of Fools, Rogues and Drunkards," with its ritual catechism commencing with the query, "Do you drink?" If Professor Colton had imbibed a sympthetic appreciation of Russian cultural patterns, he might have commented on the similarity.
In sum, Colton's biography displays both large merits and, regrettably, significent blemishes. The Harvard professor deserves applause for undertaking so swiftly to complete so daunting a task. He is to be commended for recommending that Russian academics follow his lead in cultivating the plants in their biographical gardens. Colton's garden is very generously manured with documentation, indeed.
On the other hand, the reviewer must note several large debits. To rely on pop social psychology to define Yeltsin as an "event-shaping man" is superficial at best--not the conclusion, which is correct, but the pop author from whom this categorization is derived. Comparing Yeltsin the expansive Slavic drunk with the constipated German cleric Martin Luther is staggering in its chutzpah. Moreover, the cognoscenti will note several significant lacunae. It is inexcusable to ignore the fate of Marshal Sergei Akhromayev, close to Western military leaders such as Admiral William Crowe, Jr. Akhromayev allegedly committed suicide in his Kremlin office after the dramatic failure of the televised coup of August, 1991. The second is the downing of Korean Air Line Flight 007, resulting in the death of Congresman Larry McDonald (R-VA), a founder of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society , and a critic of the Rockefeller family, whom he accused of participating in secret negotiations with the Russians behind the back of the Washington authorities. Similarly ignored in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, authored by Richard Perle, that linked American trade concessions to Jewish emigration. Colton similarly ignores the the Harvard connection to Moscow, evidenced by the repeated participation of West-oriented Russian politicians such as Gregorii Yavlinskii and Yegor Gaidar at the Russian Center 's public seminars, often chaired by Professor Marshall Goldman, his predecessor as director. Nor does he cite any of Professor Goldman's broadcasts from Russia on National Public Radio for some twenty years. Neither does he refer to any of the rich European journalistic commentary or the memoirs of non-English-speaking eyewitnesses. To a bemused public raised on tales of unremitting hostility between the KGB and FBI, it may come as a surprise to learn that throughout the Cold War, the call-sign for the FBI short-wave station in Washington was KGB 793. It is hard to pass this off as an accidental oversight. Finally, Colton demonstrates insufficient familiarity with the permanence of Muslim civilization throughout the Central Asian successor republics, symbolized in the career of the Cechen leader Imam Shamil' (1797-1877) who died in Mecca.
Although Colton half-heartedly criticizes Yeltsin's "borderline demagogy," he appears oblivious to the impression created by his own practice of rejoicing in an extended concatenation of pejorative asides directed at individuals who did not, to his taste, demonstrate sufficient subservience to the personality and policies of the putative "superpresident." These individuals, numbered among a "piebald field" of the unfortunate defeated, are portrayed variously as indulging in "finger-pointing," acting "brazenly," mouthing "claptrap," manifestly "featherbrained," whose activities "fizzle" in the pursuit of "faddish populism" espoused by "eggheads" who "generate hoopla" from thir position in the "spongy middle" typically inhabited by "queasy intellectuals" who sometimes dispense "socialistic proclivities" among "refactory subordinates" whose oppositional activities are doomed to "crash and burn" after "a kick in the groin." The acidity of an academic martinet does little to reinforce any confidence in the writer's ability to reach a balanced judgment. A more sophisticated conclusion regarding the relationship between the "superpresident" and the "superparty" of professional apparatchiki will recall the image of the smychka, for such a constellation of political forces is reminiscent of a now-forgotten political formula describing the contrasting roles of Marshal Petain and General de Gaulle during the Vichy period, when one theory alleged that Petain was the shield and de Gaulle the sword of the French nation under Nazi occupation. Les bouts se touchent.
In conclusion, Colton's assiduous perseverance has produced a very big volume that would achieve wider circulation if it were, like the baby in front of King Solomon, divided in two. For while the Cambridge academic may well proclaim with the poet, "I have erected a monument higher than Alexander's spire," the mountainous documentation relating to narrow political manoeuvering within the fluctuating inner circle would better be separated out for a series of articles in specialized journals. The life of Yeltsin as an individual would better be sundered from the existing text and presented to a general readership in stripped-down chronological order. Surgical deconstruction is necessary because the paragraphs of sperrogatory political detail obscure the development and Lebensweg of the chief subject.
Of Professor Colton's devotion to his sweet mythos there can be no question, for he may be trusted, like faithful Ruslan of the novel, to guide future scholars to a golden horde of documentation that should be employed in a less partisan manner to anchor Yeltsin more firmly in the course of broader historical processes, and to depict Russia not as a mere component elements in Harvard's Weltanschauung of wealth but to resore it to its actual role in the European association of nations.
Commissioned by the Christian Science Monitor for publication in May, 2008.
Rejected by the Christian Science Monitor because the review significantly exceeded the Monitor's 800 word limit.
The writer received a "kill fee."