The Washington Post
December 24, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition

Is It All Yeltsin’s Fault?;
15 Years Later, the Legacy of a Russian Reformer

by Stephen Sestanovich

"Great historical transformations are always bought dearly, often
after one has already thought that one got them at a bargain price,"
wrote the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt. Tomorrow marks the
15th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the
occasion will surely revive debate about how high the price really
was.

Many commentators will say this event and the hardships that followed
permanently colored the ordinary Russian’s view of democracy and gave
Vladimir Putin his chance to build an authoritarian alternative. A
few will even argue that the whole effort was a mistake — that
"reform communism" would have been better than the mess we’ve ended
up with.

Was Boris Yeltsin the gravedigger of Russian democracy? The
indictment against him looks strong. If you give people reason to
link democracy with economic privation, political corruption and the
trauma of national dismemberment, lots of them will miss the
stability of the old order. (Some will miss Joseph Stalin!) And it
isn’t much of a response to say that this wasn’t what you intended.

Yet, before we throw Yeltsin to the historical wolves, it’s important
to remember that the terrible conditions Russians associate with him
were not just the result of his policies but also their cause. The
Soviet Union collapsed because ethnic separatism, economic decline
and political paralysis were severe problems before Yeltsin came to
power. Moderate Communist reformers — even as they eased repression
and censorship — couldn’t do a thing about them.

In the summer of 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was at the end of his rope
trying to manage the Soviet Union’s contentious ethnic politics. To
suppress movements seeking independence for the Baltic states, he had
ordered tanks into the streets. There had been ethnic pogroms against
Armenians in Azerbaijan, and a lunatic nationalist professor of
literature had become president of Georgia. Gorbachev had patched
together a new "union treaty" to redistribute power between Moscow
and the non-Russian republics, but the most important of them,
Ukraine, was having none of it. In December Ukrainians voted to leave
the Soviet Union. The Chechen parliament had already done the same
thing.

Gorbachev’s efforts at economic reform were also failing. Long before
the curtain came down on the Soviet Union, the ruble had begun a
steady slide toward worthlessness, selling at several times the
official exchange rate on the black market. Food disappeared from the
shops and foreign exchange from the treasury. Gorbachev’s own
policies tacitly authorized theft of state property; enterprises were
told to balance their books even if it meant selling off their assets
at a discount. The first "millionaires" appeared at this time: They
took advantage of "gradual economic reform" by setting up "exchanges"
to trade in stolen goods.

There was no political consensus on how to handle any of this. Some
of the Communist old guard still believed in ideas that Yuri Andropov
had espoused early in the 1980s as he rose from running the KGB to
running the Kremlin. Discipline, he insisted, would solve everything.
But in the course of the decade, the elite lost confidence in this
answer, and many joined the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators
calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on political
power. Gorbachev became an increasingly lonely figure and "reform
communism" an irrelevant idea.

At the end of 1991, Yeltsin was the only Soviet politician with a
popular mandate to act. He was the democratically elected president
of Russia. No one else was in a position to deal with the three
crises that had broken his predecessor — ethnic division, economic
chaos and a failed political system. But did his response end up
weakening Russia’s democratic prospects?

His first and most dramatic step — agreeing with the president of
Ukraine and leaders of other Soviet republics to dissolve the Union
— still gives Russians nostalgic pangs. Even so, history’s verdict
is likely to be that it was Yeltsin’s most important achievement and
a piece of simple good fortune for his country. By disbanding the
empire, Russia freed itself from a gigantic burden on its national
energies. It shed responsibility for countless problems that it could
not possibly have managed well, and it reduced the risk that popular
politics would turn into a Milosevic-style dictatorship.

By not trying to prevent Baltic or Ukrainian independence, by not
being the arbiter of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, by staying
on the sidelines of other conflicts, Yeltsin greatly reduced Russia’s
involvement in post-Soviet violence. His success can be measured in
part by looking at those cases in which Russia did not fully turn its
back on empire. It propped up separatist enclaves inside Georgia and
Moldova and sought to crush radical separatism in Chechnya. The
results were predictable: quasi-criminal satrapies, military
brutality, deeper ethnic hostility. Had the Soviet Union been kept
intact, we’d have seen this pattern everywhere.

Yeltsin’s second step — the economic program known as "shock
therapy" — will be judged less favorably. But the verdict may say
little about his own responsibility for the fate of Russian
democracy. The elements of Yeltsin’s program that look most unwise
today — above all the privatization policies that left a large part
of the state’s most valuable industrial assets in the hands of a very
small number of owners — were not the main source of popular
unhappiness with him or with Russian democracy. What embittered
people was the squeeze on their living standards and the acute
anxiety created by years of high inflation. Given the situation
Yeltsin and his team faced when they took over, there may have been
no way to make the transition to a modern economy anything but
painful.

History’s harshest judgment about how Yeltsin handled the Soviet
collapse may be reserved for the way he dealt with the question of
political power. At a moment when he was still the towering figure of
Russian politics, he was not bold enough to insist on creating new
democratic institutions. He left the Soviet-era constitution in place
as well as the Soviet-era parliament, while he handled other
problems. The KGB was renamed but barely reformed.

It is hard to overstate the impact of these choices. By 1993 Yeltsin
was back to fighting with parliamentary leaders about changing the
constitution and holding new elections, not to speak of salvaging
something of his economic reforms. He was, ironically, almost
completely in the right, but by then his victory had to be purchased
by force.

As for the KGB and the other coercive institutions of the Soviet
state, reforming them was a project to which Yeltsin never returned.
The consequences are with us still.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University. He was
U.S. ambassador at large for the former Soviet Union from 1997 to
2001.