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the new york times magazine
my boris
july 26, 1998
As one of the few remaining people with frequent access to
the increasingly volcanic President of Russia, Valentin Yumashev
knows when to step lightly. So it was with careful planning--and
a slightly queasy stomach--that the Kremlin chief of staff decided
to present an important document to Boris Yeltsin one day this
spring.
It happened to be a thick budget plan, chock-full of graphs,
income statistics and other data that would have sent Bill Clinton,
Al Gore and the rest of the C-Span crowd into spasms of geeky
delight. But Boris Yeltsin is not that kind of guy. He sees himself
as a man of history. Budgets bore him. So do spreadsheets, meetings
and three-point plans. Yumashev knew all that, and so he wasn't
terribly surprised the next day when he saw the packet sitting,
unread, in Yeltsin's outbox. He was, however, taken aback when
he found out why.
Silver paper clips,'' Yumashev later muttered to a friend in
Moscow's financial community. "The President won't read any
document unless it is held together with a gold paper clip. I
used silver.''
As Russia's economy once again veers desperately toward the
precipice, you have to wonder what on earth happened to this man.
How did the father of Russian democracy become an autocrat who
refuses even to glance at essential documents unless they are
fastened together with the right color metal? The parallels to
capricious czars and senile Soviets are too obvious to ignore.
Yeltsin has dismissed more than 30 senior officials in the past
five years; often, he fires them, denounces them, hires them back
into better jobs and then fires them again (with even greater
gusto). The 67-year-old President has been largely absent--addled
repeatedly by mysterious respiratory infections--while a small
group of predatory capitalists have done their best to plunder
his nation. Yet in March, just days before his country's economy
entered its most recent crisis, Yeltsin found time to assure an
Internet chat group that he was taking care'' of his thick white
hair.
Boris Yeltsin has always thrived on his ability to confound
his enemies and keep his allies off balance. But lately his behavior
comes across simply as bizarre. As a result, the man who destroyed
Communism in Russia, helped vanquish the Soviet Union and pushed
the century's great totalitarian monolith toward the free market
has become a joke, abroad and at home. Recently on the Russian
television satire Kukly--which is a cross between ''60 Minutes''
and ''Saturday Night Live''--he was depicted as a senile and incontinent
hospital patient, begging the nurses to give him a second chance
to remain on the ward.
Still, he remains a hard man to ignore. Yeltsin rules through
contradiction, confusion, subversion. As a leader, he has two
great desires, and you can watch them at war with each other nearly
every day. First, he wants to bring Russia into the league of
Western nations, to be taken seriously, to be embraced by the
organizations--NATO, the European Union, the G7 (which he alone
refers to as the Big 8)--that were largely invented to keep his
country out. So his speeches are laden with cliches about his
love of democracy and his lack of patience for fools who don't
love it too. Yeltsin's second desire often cancels out the first.
Clinging to the notion of Russia as a great power, he wants somehow
to rescue his nation from its well-deserved place in the third
world and to restore its imperial greatness. But that requires
him to pander to a different crowd completely: the many powerful
nationalists at home. Like the Soviet leaders he so defiantly
replaced, Boris Yeltsin believes in carrying a very big stick.
Most world leaders are besieged by contradictions. But as Russia
flirts yet again with social chaos and economic disaster, it is
reasonable to ask some pointed questions about the country's first
freely elected President. Is the man who led Russia away from
Communism now dragging it toward the abyss? Has Boris Yeltsin
become so reckless that he is destined to bankrupt the country
he saved? Perhaps most important of all, does he now represent
any cause but his own?
I arrived in the Moscow bureau of the Times in 1994, not long
after Yeltsin resolved an impasse with the petulant and reactionary
Russian Parliament by pounding it for days with machine-gun and
mortar fire--and then locking up the leaders of the revolt and
trying to close the opposition press. He then forced through a
Constitution that allocated real power almost solely to himself.
I also lived in Russia while the President waged a useless war
in Chechnya that killed tens of thousands of his own citizens,
savaged a beautiful region, humiliated his once-great army and
resolved nothing. Having witnessed all that--and then watched
in 1996 as he won re-election through lies, payoffs and the sheer
luck of running against a doctrinaire Communist who was tone deaf
to the changing mood of the Russian people--I may not be the most
objective judge of Boris Yeltsin.
To me he will always be a selfish, arrogant bully who believes
the only good advice is advice he gives. I once watched him lecture
the bosses at a metal plant in southern Russia--in front of about
1,000 of their employees. Times were tough, so he told them to
raise wages and provide better pensions. And to do it today. His
economic advisers cowered hopelessly in the background. It hardly
mattered that this cheap promise--and many others like it--would
help drive Russia into its current financial black hole. Nor did
it matter to Yeltsin that every one of his advisers told him that.
He did not always seem so arrogant. An earlier generation of
correspondents compared Yeltsin favorably with the repugnant and
brutal leaders of the Soviet Union. He was different, of course,
and better. People often stood in awe of his genuine courage.
Many will always remember Boris Yeltsin as the man who climbed
to the top of a tank in 1991--truly one of the most powerful political
gestures of recent times--to banish the Communist past with a
wave of his meaty arms.
My colleagues and I, however, tend to remember the man who
appeared on TV one grim morning in December 1994 to announce that
his Air Force had stopped bombing the citizens of Grozny for good--the
first of many times he lied openly to the world about wanting
to end the carnage. Later that day, I saw the results when a squadron
of unchallenged Su-27 bombers destroyed Chechnya's biggest orphanage.
I remember the leader who took one quick trip to Chechnya during
a 21-month war. He spent three hours on a highly protected air
base and told the dazed, starved and defeated soldiers there that
they ''had won the war'' that they knew they had lost. Then he
got on his plane and flew back to Moscow.
''Boris Yeltsin is so obsessed with being one of the Western
leaders it's pathetic,'' said Aleksandr Prokhanov, the philosopher
of the extreme anti-Western old guard. ''But you know what? He
acts like a Soviet. He always has. He knows what people want to
hear, but he couldn't care less about democracy.''
Americans can't accept that simple fact. We love to see Yeltsin
as the savior of a savage land. Hey, if he's a little rough around
the edges--as a senior White House official once suggested to
me--then George Washington was, too. American leaders are so invested
in believing in the good Boris that they are willing to say anything
to support him, as long as Yeltsin continues to believe in the
stock market and to refer to Clinton as my friend Bill.''
That is why Clinton could put on his most earnest expression
in 1996, appear at a news conference in Moscow and say with a
straight face that the brutal slaughter in Chechnya was similar
to ''a civil war in our own country'' and that Yeltsin's merciless
assault on the Chechen people reminded him of Abraham Lincoln's
efforts to keep the United States from falling apart in the 19th
century. If a Soviet leader had acted with such clear aggression,
any American President would have led an international call for
sanctions.
But Boris Yeltsin is our guy. And people like Clinton are so
relieved about it that they let him get away with almost anything.
And he clearly knows that. Recently Yeltsin met with Michel Camdessus,
the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which
is trying to help Russia cure itself of its fiscal ills. The I.M.F.
is seen--with some justification--as a Western control agency,
and nobody in Russia gets much pleasure in remembering that their
country is weak and the West is not. Yeltsin's aides and those
of Camdessus dreaded what might have come from this encounter:
the rectitude of the I.M.F. chief in direct conflict with the
raging ego of a Russian ruler who needs the support of the West.
The possibility for confrontation was enormous.
As usual, Yeltsin was crafty and surprising. He started off
by admitting his sins: Russia hadn't always tightened the belt
when it should have, Yeltsin said. And he was now going to take
an interest in the details, not just the landscape. Then he grew
conspiratorial. ''They even say I'm too sick to run this country,''
one of the meeting's participants recalls a grinning Yeltsin telling
an astonished Camdessus. ''Maybe it's not such a bad idea if people
think I am too sick to do my job sometimes. Maybe it keeps people
guessing.''
In the end, that's what Boris Yeltsin--so desperate to retain
power--cares about more than anything: keeping people guessing.
Like many successful politicians, he is a human mood ring, a man
whose ideology changes with the seasons, with the country he is
visiting, with the phases of the moon. Such tactics work in Russia,
which has never really decided whether it belongs in Europe or
Asia. The debate has lasted for more than 200 years--Dostoyevsky
railed against what he considered the false pull toward the West--and
nobody milks that ambivalence like Yeltsin. Who else could sell
nuclear technology to Iran, seek to moderate world opinion about
Serbian war criminals and lecture his own Parliament about the
need for currency reforms and open markets?
Yeltsin resembles no one more than Nikita Khrushchev, who also
wanted to make Russia more acceptable to the West--and didn't
mind resorting to some earthy theatrics to get the job done. In
late March--acting after a few words placed in his ear by his
daughter Tanya, who has become singularly powerful within the
cloistered walls of the Kremlin--Yeltsin decided to dismiss his
Government. He did it mostly so he could get rid of its slavishly
loyal leader, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who after five years of dedicated
service was starting to look a bit too much like a leader to suit
the first freely elected President of Russia. So one morning,
Yeltsin went on TV and told an astonished nation that his Prime
Minister would have to go.
At first, he tried to appoint himself as acting Prime Minister.
When his lawyers sheepishly told him that such an action was against
the law that Yeltsin himself had created, he turned reluctantly
to an untested young reform politician who had only spoken with
the President once and who heard about his new job while eating
breakfast that morning. By creating a political crisis, Yeltsin
was back where he loves to be: unquestionably and single-handedly
in charge of his country.
''It now seems pretty clear that the most primitive and vulgar
explanation for all that was true,'' says Tanya Malkina, a well-known
political journalist in Moscow who has followed Yeltsin's career
through nearly every one of its many tortuous turnings. "Boris
Yeltsin cannot stand for anyone to share power or even think about
sharing power. He must have all the limelight.''
Even so, Yeltsin's most recent explosion with Chernomyrdin
may turn out to have made more sense than most people think. Sure,
firing Chernomydin was the work of a disloyal, selfish egomaniac.
Commentators were shocked when Yeltsin essentially offered to
buy off Parliament with better cars and apartments if they would
confirm Sergei Kiryenko, his new Prime Minister. Yeltsin offered
to ''solve the outstanding problems'' of parliamentary officials
who needed nice summer places. They know what it's all about,''
Yeltsin said just before Kiriyenko was confirmed. Do what I want,
and I'll give you a nice big car and a pretty little dacha.
So Yeltsin is corrupt, venal and has little regard for Robert's
Rules of Order. That's no surprise. But by getting rid of his
stolid old retainer, Boris Yeltsin actually made the most decisive
step he has ever taken toward the road of reform.
Nothing got done when Viktor Chernomyrdin ran the Government.
He had a magical ability to seek consensus in a Parliament whose
most famous members have been known to pull one another's hair
or fling orange juice in one another's faces during debate. He
made the Communists feel comfortable, and he made the reformers
feel as if he was at least on their side. The result was an endless
stalemate. The vast machine of Soviet industry lumbered automatically
on--like a phantom limb. Factories produced nothing worth buying,
yet they never closed. Chernomyrdin was too much a creature of
the past to pull out the padlocks and tell his industrialist friends
that the era of tanks and tractors was over.
For all its boorishness, then, Yeltsin's decision was ultimately
good for his country. And yet is that why he fired Chernomyrdin?
Or was it because--as Kremlin insiders whispered--he was upset
as he watched him at a meeting with Vice President Gore? He looked
like he was enjoying it,'' says one former Yeltsin aide about
Chernomyrdin's brief moment in the sun. And that was really the
end of him.''
At a tense point during the 1996 Presidential campaign--the
election in which Boris Yeltsin, half dead and often incoherent,
finally put a stake through the heart of Russian Communism--I
was summoned to the office of Igor Malashenko, Yeltsin's chief
public-relations adviser. Malashenko began to describe his boss
as a man who was desperately trying to figure out what to do with
his life--and with Russia. ''He is from the old world,'' Malashenko
said. He has many friends who want to go back to the old ways.
And sometimes even he doesn't know what side he is on. It is hard
to know whether democracy matters to him sometimes. The battle
that is going on now for Russia is really a battle for one man.
And it is never clear how it will all come out.''
At the time, I thought Malashenko was breathing a little too
hard to be believed. But he turned out to be right. As I would
later learn, the President's friend--the brutish ex-bodyguard
Aleksandr Korzhakov--was trying hard to get him to call off future
elections. I think he will have the elections,'' Malashenko said
with more hope than certainty, because he wants to be the man
who changed Russia for good.''
That, in the end, may be all that motivates Boris Yeltsin now.
Yeltsin appointed Kiriyenko because he wants to rule unchallenged
and because he wants to move Russia toward markets and the West.
After all, if he doesn't succeed, how will history remember him?
Getting rid of Communism is not a bad line on a resume. Turning
your country over to a bunch of greedy thugs, however, is.
There is supposed to be an election in the year 2000--an election
without Boris Yeltsin. It will be the President's ultimate test.
If he manufactures some reason to run again (nobody else is ready;
he alone can lead Russia through these troubling times), he will
have thrown away his last weak claim to greatness. He will become
the man who took Russia from Communism to autocracy. If Boris
Yeltsin becomes the first Russian leader to walk away from the
Kremlin without a push or a gun at his head, it will say a lot
about what kind of country he wants to see emerge in the 21st
century.
A few months ago, he announced that he would not run for a
third term. But he has said that before only to dance back into
the ring. Don't hold your breath this time, either. Giving up
power has never been one of Boris Yeltsin's strong suits. And
every time some prominent official notes that his current term
will have to be his last, a Kremlin spokesman races out of his
office to remind people that the Constitutional Court--the judicial
arm of Boris Yeltsin--has not decided that question yet. Presumably
it will decide when he does.
Until then, the President will have his hands full. He just
used his political wiles, the desperation of the people and the
eternal Western fear of what Russia might become without him to
wrangle another $17 billion from the I.M.F. But Russia doesn't
just need a loan--it needs a leader with the will to carry out
the toughest possible reforms. Before too long, Yeltsin will be
forced back in the dock, begging for salvation. That will make
the folks at home even more bitter about their status in the world.
So he will tell them not to worry, that he can handle the weak
leaders in the West and that eventually, Russia will prevail.
I never hung out with Boris Yeltsin. By the time I got to Moscow,
Western reporters had gone from being good props in his campaign
for exposure to political poison. But I once watched him bound
out of his black Zil and wade into an angry Moscow crowd. Boris
Nikolayevich, we live worse than we did under Brezhnev! they screamed.
It was the most savage possible insult. ''It's a Western plot,
an old woman screamed. ''They are driving us to ruin.
Yeltsin took it all in. His eyes said, I feel your pain. Then
he responded with a quick, vulgar joke. I must admit I hardly
caught a word he said--and no one would repeat it. But when I
sidled up to the old lady who attacked him and asked what she
thought of the President now, she broke into a smile as big as
Siberia. He's a muzhik, she said, using a term that describes
a tough peasant, a man of the people. I don't think you have those
where you're from."
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