THE PHOENIX: Yeltsin and the Future of Russian Leadership
by
GWENDOLYN STEWART
originally published in the
Harvard International
Review, Volume XXI, Issue 1 (Winter 1999)
BORIS YELTSIN VISITS THE DZERZHINSKY DIVISION
In these troubled
times, an ailing Boris Yeltsin seems the almost too-perfect symbol for an
ailing Russia. This is not how the second term of the first Russian president
was supposed to turn out. Back in 1996, when the Communists under Gennady
Zyuganov appeared poised to take over the presidency (they had already won a
plurality in the Duma a half-year before), the ultimate rallying cry was
"Better a sick Yeltsin than a healthy Zyuganov." The Communists, it was
thought, could do positive harm; Yeltsin at least could hold the country
together as the fruits of market democracy ripened. Should worse come to
worst, there were constitutional provisions for choosing a successor now in
place; the Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, would take over for three
months as acting president, and then elections would be called. There was also
already at least one other obvious candidate with a proven track record of
winning elections, Moscow's Mayor Yury Luzhkov. But the hope was that the
reinvigorated Yeltsin, who had toured Russia during the election campaign,
would move the country forward if given four more years.
# # #
GWENDOLYN STEWART is both a
photojournalist and a political scientist specializing in political
leadership in Russia, China, and the U.S.
A former Bunting (Radcliffe) Fellow, she is an Associate (and former
Post-DoctoralFellow) of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
at Harvard, as well as an Associate in Research of the Harvard Fairbank
Center for Chinese Studies. For the Fairbank Center she
co-founded and co-chairs the China Current Events Workshop, a forum for
examining pressing issues in Greater China. Her Harvard
Ph.D. dissertation (SicTransit) dealt with the role of the
leaders of the republics, especially Boris Yeltsin, in the breakup of the
Soviet Union. She is currently writing
RUSSIA REDUX, the story of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, part political
analysis, part travel-memoir: Imagine wandering over the largest
country on earth, not in the train of a railroad, but in the train of one
of the most powerful and contradictory men on earth. Or all by
yourself. COMMENTS?
PLEASE CONTACT:
Photograph by GWENDOLYN STEWART c. 2014. All Rights Reserved.
It seemed that important battles had been won, even if the
victories had been paid for at a bitter price. After the confrontation
with the Supreme Soviet had ended in the shelling of the White House, a
post-Soviet constitution had finally been hammered out and ratified by
popular referendum in December 1993. The main lines of development for
the new political system were clear: Russia was to be not a parliamentary
but a presidential republic too much so, it was almost certain. The war
in Chechnya, fought in the name of saving the Federation, had been brought
to an uneasy cease-fire with the prospect of an ending within sight. The
long-promised economic upturn had still not materialized, at least not in
the officially registered economy, but hyperinflation had been wrung out
of the system. Now it was time to show, in a fully contested election,
that Russians had moved beyond communism, away from their past, and were
still willing to bet on the future.
Then Boris Yeltsin failed to show up at his regular polling place
on July 3, 1996, the day of the crucial second and final round of the
election, but won with fifty-four percent of the votes anyway. Two months
later he made the unprecedented public announcement of his need for heart
surgery and on November 5, 1996, he underwent a quintuple bypass surgery.
The operation was declared a success, but the presidents health and the
political life of Russia have been on a roller coaster ride ever since.
The Making of Yeltsin
As obvious and devastating as the Russian crisis appears today, it
is necessary to place it in context, to reflect on how much has changed in
just a decade.
Ten years ago Boris Yeltsin was a failed Soviet politician,
drummed out of the ruling Politburo and passing the time in a make-work
job as deputy chief of the State Committee on Construction. Ten years ago
the Soviet Union was indisputably the other superpower, and the Reagan
administration had committed vast amounts of American resources in an
effort to close what it saw as a window of vulnerability to the Evil
Empire.
At home, the Soviet Union was entering the heady days of
democratization, centered on a new Congress of Peoples Deputies,
Gorbachevs attempt to give the country a meaningful albeit circumscribed
parliament. For the first time in more than 70 years something resembling
real elections were in prospect, and Boris Yeltsin seized his chance to
make a new, popularly-based political career. Andrei Sakharov, the
physicist turned dissident, made a fateful if somewhat reluctant decision
to ally with this former provincial apparatchik. He and the other liberal
Moscow deputies ran orientation sessions for like-minded incoming
deputies. Yeltsin was open to new opportunities and new programs after
his dismissal from Gorbachevs circle, and some of that orientation has
remained with him.
Originally from Sverdlovsk in the Urals, where Europe meets Asia,
the young Boris Yeltsin was athletic and smart. His peasant parents had
managed to finish only four years of school and some after-work literacy
classes between them; he did well to be graduated from the Ural
Polytechnic Institute as a civil engineer. Though Boris Yeltsin was a
beneficiary of the Soviet drive for industrialization, he made his career
not in the dominant military-industrial complex, but in a
consumer-oriented field. He ran a large city trust putting up pre-fab
housing blocks before switching over in his late thirties to straight
Party work. By the time he was 45, he was boss of his native province. He
was such a hard-charging type that he had already had an attack of heart
trouble severe enough to send him crashing to the floor a full decade
earlier. What a different career he might have had if there had been a
Rhodes scholarships for Russians!
The same dedication and aggressive commitment to work had brought
him to the attention of the Center when Mikhail Gorbachev was looking for
perestroika-worthy leaders. In December 1985, Yeltsin was appointed First
Secretary of Moscow. After less than two years in this high visibility
post in the capital, he made the first of several outsized gambles that
were to mark the rest of his career. At the Central Committee Plenum
called to prepare for the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the
October Revolution, Yeltsin rose to complain about the slow pace of
perestroika, and offered his own resignation. In response, the Party
fired him. By volunteering to give up power in the name of reform, Yeltsin
became a martyr for many. He became first the peoples tribune and then the
president of Russia. But he paid an enormous price for this break with
his past, physically and psychologically.
In May 1990, Yeltsin was elected to the highest post in Russia,
Chair of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist
Republic. Until the end of the Soviet Union barely more than a year and a
half later, Boris Yeltsin was engaged in a strangely interdependent dance
of statesmanship and gamesmanship with Mikhail Gorbachev, at times
antagonistically competitive and at times cooperative. The result was an
outcome that surprised nearly everyone: Russia peacefully let the empire
go. One major theme of the liberals with whom Yeltsin had allied himself
was the need to encourage real sovereignty for the constituent republics
of the USSR; Yeltsin made this his platform, engaging in bilateral
negotiations with the leaders of the other republics. In the end, with a
Russian taking the lead, the USSR was divided up without conflict.
Russia and Reform
If reforming the Soviet Union was never going to be easy,
reforming a rump Russia posed its own perils. Throughout the last seven
years, Russia has most often been in a state of what Aleksandr Lebed has
called shaky stability, punctuated by periodic upheavals. With economic
liberalization as their centerpiece, the Yeltsin reforms began immediately
after the breakup, but without the expected major stabilization fund from
the International Monetary Fund. The resultant hardships gave Speaker
Ruslan Khasbulatov and Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi an incentive to
oppose Yeltsin - a struggle which ended in the bloody October Events of
1993. A serious effort to contain hyperinflation was not made until after
the shock of Black Tuesday one year later. The stability hard won in the
economic sphere was undone in the war in Chechnya, which began in December
1994 and was not brought to a negotiated end until after the elections of
1996. Parliamentary elections in December 1993 and December 1995 afforded
opportunities for protest votes, bringing first the ultranationalist
Vladimir Zhirinovsky and then the Communists to prominence. The president
tacked in response to these outcomes, shedding deputy prime ministers and
ministers, even the foreign minister, as seemed necessary, but kept to his
own central course and balancing act. Throughout it all, he remained open
to criticism. His enemies were never silenced.
Yeltsin's domestic and foreign policies were linked. If political
liberalism had been the program of the reformers out of power in the USSR,
economic neoliberalism was the doctrine of choice in the West as Yeltsin
was coming to power. After watching Gorbachev flounder so long, unable to
make a clear choice for fundamental economic reform, Yeltsin boldly pinned
his hopes on the dominant wisdom of the day. Until the default and
devaluation of August 17, 1998, the Washington consensus maintained its
hold on his administrations approach to the economy, despite its zigzags
and corruption. Ironically, it was to be the Russian crisis, compounding
the Asian ones, which began to open cracks in the global monetarist
consensus.
The original Gaidar government had started out smartly trying to
break the stranglehold of the military-industrial-complex on the economy,
and the quest for partnership with the United States in particular
dictated an initial foreign policy that made Russian nationalists accuse
Yeltsin of taking orders from the Americans. President George Bush,
however, saw his country as having more will than wallet in 1992 and, in
an election year, not even much will to truly embrace the fledgling
Russian democracy as an ally. Nevertheless, he was keen to lock in
nuclear arms cuts, and did achieve the signing of SALT II just before he
left office. As the global political order changed to Russia's
disadvantage, the parliament saw the mandated reductions as a threat to
what remained of their country's military might, and balked.
This reluctance was part of a larger change, as the early earnest
openness and idealism about the possibilities of a post-Soviet Russia
faded, and the realities of the decline in Russias international position
set in. Arms sales abroad increased in importance as they proved to be
among the few industrial goods exportable to the global economy. Russia
came to be regarded as little more than a regional power.
The post-Soviet space itself was a source of knotty problems. Much
of the territory in what were now independent states had been part of
Russia's national identity for decades or even centuries. Yeltsin had
been in the vanguard in granting recognition to the other republics,
especially the Baltics, but the practicalities of working out the soft
divorce were perplexing. Russia was seen as a useful milk cow providing
subsidies, especially in energy supplies, but an arrogant Big Brother when
it expected special consideration in return. Russian forces did intervene
in the Commonwealth of Independent States in Tajikistan, Abkhazia and
elsewhere, but Russian troops withdrew from the Baltics as well as Eastern
Europe.
The End of a Presidency
How will the first Russian presidency end, short of the
president's death? The Constitutional Court has determined that Yeltsin
will not have a third term. But will he manage to hold on to his office
for the rest of his term, scheduled to end in mid-2000? With the
cooperation or connivance of some, most, or all of the Russian political
elite, he might just manage it. Or he could instead resign ahead of time,
more or less voluntarily; he could be impeached; or he could be forced out
on medical grounds. But then how will his successor be chosen? By
popular elections, as ordered by the Constitution? Or by a Constitutional
Assembly or some other elite electoral college mechanism, presumably
heavily weighted with parliamentarians? Not surprisingly, the speakers of
both houses of the Federal Assembly and the leader of the largest fraction
in the parliament, the Communists, find this latter approach very
attractive. Elections cost too much money, they say, and just happen to
be less likely to favor them. Finally there are the darker scenarios,
mostly centered on coups of one sort or another. There seem to be four
possibilities: soft resignation, resignation, removal for medical
disability, and impeachment.
The situation in Russia today can more or less be described as
soft resignation. The president is openly portrayed as a figurehead by
Russia media. In this scenario, Boris Yeltsin stays in office and shows up
for summits, even if they sometimes have to be held in the hospital.
Officially, the president is still even planning for further summits
abroad. This has some merit as long as there is a chance of recovery:
Yeltsin's past track record as the other Comeback Kid has some nervously
looking over their shoulders even now to see if he can pull it off yet
again. On December 7, 1998, he suddenly came out of the hospital and into
the Kremlin long enough to sack several of his own top aides, including
his chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev. Nominally designed to energize the
fight against corruption and political extremism(anti-Semitism and
communist restoration), this dramatic gesture aimed to demonstrate that
the president was still in charge. He did manage to get himself discharged
from the hospital after this bout of pneumonia, but as recurrent illnesses
succeed one another so closely as to qualify as chronic and apparently
debilitating, the option of hanging on for eighteen more months becomes
progressively harder to sustain. The question becomes whether having this
president in place, in this condition, is less destabilizing than an overt
vacancy and concomitant struggle for power.
In Yevgeny Primakov, the Foreign Minister turned Prime Minister,
the system has at least thrown up a plausible placeholder, and one with
whom other world leaders are already familiar. There are potential
drawbacks to the present situation, however, especially when authoritative
decisions are called for. Although several of the presidents subordinates
have announced that many of the presidents powers are being ceded to the
prime minister, and the presidents occasional appearances on television
subliminally convey the message of his removal from hands-on work, there
is still an air of impermanence to the arrangement. It is not the same as
maintaining General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev at the top of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and trusting that no one would dare to question
his authority.
Foreign affairs, which were the presidents special province and
enthusiasm, have become especially tricky. Yeltsin recently failed to
attend a banquet given in the honor of a visiting Japanese delegation, one
of whose members announced that their missing host looked like a robot.
The new German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, disinclined to imitate his
predecessors concentration on his relationship with his Russian summit
partner, allowed himself to sneer at sauna politics. Jiang Zemin was not
so publicly gauche, but the Chinese were said to be studiously attempting
to divine which leader would rule in the post-Yeltsin era. In the end, a
visibly ailing president just makes Russia look weak and diminished in the
eyes of the other powers, almost the last thing the country needs at the
moment.
Given the severity of the current situation, it is possible that
Yeltsin will be induced to resign by a combination of threats(impeachment)
and inducements (his own golden parachute). The Russians call the latter
providing social guarantees, and the possibility of such being offered has
been bruited about for some time now. Most likely such a package would
include a pension, a dacha, bodyguards, and a promise of no prosecution,
including immunity for his family. One variation has Yeltsin, like
Pinochet, being made a Senator for life to insure the freedom from
prosecution, a promise perhaps somewhat devalued now.
Yeltsin's health may yet provide a pretext for forcing him from
office. Article 92, Section 2 of the Russian Constitution declares that
the president ceases the exercise of his powers early in the event of his
resignation, persistent inability to exercise his powers for health
reasons, or removal from office. What qualifies as medical grounds for
removal, and who makes the judgment, are questions as yet undetermined,
but now moving toward a possible resolution. The Constitutional Court has
agreed to meet on January 15, 1999, to take up these issues. To increase
the pressure in the meantime, the Duma on December 2, 1998, passed
anon-binding resolution demanding a report on Yeltsins health. The
attempt to counter accusations of persistent medical disability by putting
the president on television in the condition in which he has been seen
recently seems rather more likely to convince the public of the opposite.
But an exit on medical grounds would probably not suit the dignity of the
president and his family.
Finally, it is possible that Yeltsin will simply be impeached.
Duma impeachment commission hearings have been underway for some time and
are scheduled to be completed by years end. Five counts have been under
consideration and three have already been approved by the commission:
signing the Soviet Union away in Belovezhskaya Pushcha in December 1991,
firing on the parliament in October 1993, and launching war in Chechnya in
December 1994. The other two charges, the deliberate destruction of the
Russian military and genocide against the Russian people, are not so
likely to be carried forward to the Duma itself. Impeachment itself is
difficult, designedly so. The president is supposed to be removed from
office on charges only of treason or other grave crimes, and two thirds of
both houses of parliament and both the Supreme Court and the
Constitutional Court must concur in the verdict. Impeachment may not
actually be necessary to drive the president from office. The threat of
it may suffice, especially when combined with positive inducements.
If these are the main means available, the other part of the
puzzle is the timing. Officially, the presidents term is to last until
mid-2000; any early departure triggers a three-month acting presidency for
the prime minister, with a requirement for elections to be held at the end
of the period. There seems to be a palpable disinclination to rush the
date, with motives ranging from waiting for better weather or economic
conditions to a wish to push through some means of picking the president
that avoid a popular vote. Intertwined with the question in the minds of
some politicians is the upcoming election of the Duma in December 1999.
One option that has been put on the table by Aleksandr Shokhin, the head
of the generally pro-government Our Home Is Russia faction in the Duma, is
simultaneous early elections in September 1999 for both the president and
the parliament. So far, this option does not seem to have been met with
widespread enthusiasm. With no discernible consensus having yet
coalesced, and with Yeltsins reputation for obstinacy acting as a residual
deterrent, the presidential side has floated its own counter-offers,
including talk that the president will now concentrate on constitutional
reforms, including even the re-institution of the vice-presidency.
Primakov as vice-president could presumably guarantee the remainder of the
allotted term, and not just three months. One way or another, change is
coming.
Russia after Yeltsin
Trying to predict the next president of Russia a year and a half
out is at least as problematic as trying to do the same for the United
States. But there is now something of a stable of presidential hopefuls,
and, as we have seen, the election may come sooner than mid-2000.
Yevgeny Primakov, the Prime Minister and frequent stand-in for the
president, is still enjoying something of a honeymoon, often topping
political trust-and-popularity polls. But he disclaims any interest in
running for president, using his advancing age as an excuse. Keeping any
such ambitions hidden is also useful in diverting the wrath of the
incumbent as well as would-be competitors onto himself. He has yet to
announce a real economic plan, contenting himself with platitudes about
building a socially-oriented market economy with the participation of the
state. After such a prolonged depression in Russian industrial
production, perhaps he is danger of presiding over another bout of
hyperinflation.
Yury Luzhkov is the Moscow boss Boris Yeltsin would have liked to
have been. He made the capital into a showcase investment magnet; that is
both his glory and his burden. The rest of the country has a love-hate
relationship with Moscow, and his middle-class base suffered badly in the
August crash. But his good boss image resonates in the populace, and he
has attempted to build up a nationalist base outside the capital. He even
flirted briefly with an alliance with the Communists. Asserting Russian
rights in Crimea, now part of Ukraine, may win votes at home, but risks
destabilizing the neighborhood. An air of uncertainty also surrounds his
criticism of the privatization deals made under the Yeltsin administration
but outside of his aegis; might he try to undo some of them? Still, there
is a noticeable bandwagon effect in his favor. Even former prime minister
Viktor Chernomyrdin, whose own standing has declined so sharply, has
spoken of joining forces with him.
Aleksandr Lebed promises a firm hand with a vengeance. The former
general positions himself as the anti-corruption outsider, but seems to
have no stable political orientation. His brief stint as national
security adviser was his only civilian government post. He is finally
getting political executive experience, having been elected governor of
Krasnoyarsk Krai this past spring; whether he will make a success of the
endeavor is still an open question. He prides himself on his
independence, and his unpredictability worries the Russian political
establishment. But there are rumors that famed oligarch Boris Berezovsky
helped fund his campaign. And sometimes he is suspected by Russians of
being the American candidate, or at least, the American favorite.
Even though he has already lost once in a head-to-head race with
Boris Yeltsin, Gennady Zyuganov has to be counted among the contenders.
Somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the populace identify with the
communists: the organizational base Zyuganov commands (the
half-million-strong Communist Party of the Russian Federation) is easily
the largest in the country, and he leads the largest fraction in the Duma.
However, he is not without challenges from within his own party, and not
just from the more radical, less electable extremists. The Communist
Speaker of the Duma, Gennady Seleznov, is talking about running for
president himself. Having the Duma vote to reinstall the statue of Iron
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka-KGB, is either a gamble that
the crisis will ultimately radicalize the population, or a response to the
party base, or both. The impeachment process is in their hands.
Grigory Yavlinsky is trying to capitalize on an anti-corruption
crusade as well, but from the side of the clean democrat. He has never
met an offer from the Yeltsin administration that he thought worthy of
bringing him from opposition to active participation in running the
country. He did come in fourth in the last presidential election, and his
Yabloko party is one of only four to break the five percent barrier and
win a place in the Duma. The party is said to be increasing its
organizational base in the country, and Yavlinsky himself is the
top-ranking democrat/reformer in the polls, former Nizhny-Novgorod
governor Boris Nemtsov having dropped precipitously after his service in
the national government.
Coming in fifth in 1996 visibly deflated the clown prince of
ultranationalism, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and he seems to be casting about
for other possibilities. He has talked of offering himself as somebody
else's prime minister, and even of running for a governors seat. But he
still commands one of the four parties in the Duma, and occupies his
special niche on the Russian political scene, even after wholesale
poaching on the nationalist front by other contenders.
So far, in spite of trial balloons about presidential selection by
other than popular ballot, the main focus of the political class does seem
to be fixed firmly on the forthcoming elections to both the parliament and
the presidency. Ten years ago, any sort of real elections was barely more
than a glimmer in Mikhail Gorbachevs plans for democratization. Now, a
set of distinctly post-Soviet political institutions, however imperfect or
warped, is in place. It remains to be seen whether the present economic
crisis can finally break the legendary patience and the spectacular coping
mechanisms of the Russian people.
"THE PHOENIX" in HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW, Volume XXI, Issue 1 ("PERSPECTIVES")
* * * *
An exhibition of a quarter-century of the photography
of Gwendolyn Stewart entitled "HERE BE GIANTS" was held at
Harvard.
Coming: HERE BE GIANTS the book.
* * * *
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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THOMAS P. O'NEILL, JR. (TIP O'NEILL)
FREDERICK SALVUCCI & THE BIG DIG
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© Copyright 2014 Gwendolyn Stewart. All rights reserved.