Yeltsin: A Life (review)

Timothy J. Colton’s authoritative biography, based on extensive research including three interviews with Boris Yeltsin himself, is the first published since Leon Aron’s Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and Herbert Ellison’s Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s Democratic Transformation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). Yeltsin is a polarizing figure who draws both admiration and contempt. For Aron and Ellison, Yeltsin is the gravedigger of Soviet socialism and the “first president” of a sovereign, democratic Russia. For others, he was a power-hungry politician who destroyed one country in order to rule another and who built a Russia that was scarcely more democratic than the system it replaced. Academics are equally divided over whether Yeltsin was a maker of history or merely its hapless instrument.

Colton goes a long way toward reconciling these conflicting images by focusing on the man himself, warts and all, and tracking Yeltsin’s reactions to events beyond his—and anyone else’s—control. Neither hagiography nor debunking, Colton sees both strengths and flaws in Yeltsin’s complex character. The central paradox is that of an insider dismantling the very system of power that had elevated him to a privileged position.

Colton provides a vivid portrayal of Yeltsin’s family background and his upbringing in the Urals, amid the grim chemical factories of Bereniki. It is curious that Yeltsin later denied, or mentally suppressed, the fact that both sets of grandparents had been deported to labor colonies. Even though Boris was beaten by his father, his family—despite their privations—insisted that he come back from school with perfect scores. Colton steers clear of a Freudian reading, though chapter 12 makes clear that depression was part of Yeltsin’s complex psychology. Yeltsin established a pattern of getting himself into a tight corner and then making a heroic escape, only to retreat from public view just days later.

One consistent theme is Yeltsin the outsider: making a speech in elementary school in which he challenged the competence of his teacher (p. 47), and avoiding joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) until the age of 30 (nine years later than his contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachev). Still, Yeltsin learned to play by the rules of the game and prospered within the Communist Party’s bureaucratic structures.

Yeltsin was brought to Moscow in April 1985 and appointed head of the CPSU Construction Department. By December he was head of the Moscow municipal party committee. Gorbachev used him “to knock down” the corrupt team of the long-time Moscow party chief Viktor Grishin (p. 117). Yeltsin was not Gorbachev’s man, and he also soon came to be seen as a rival by the newly appointed prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, who had formerly been head of the giant Uralmash factory in Yeltsin’s hometown of Sverdlovsk, and by Egor Ligachev, second secretary of the Communist Party. Yeltsin clashed repeatedly with these colleagues and chafed at Gorbachev’s complacency (p. 136). By September 1987 Yeltsin was threatening to resign, and the next month he was forced to step down after delivering a seven-minute speech in which he condemned the “adulation of the General Secretary.” Contrary to published reports at the time, the speech did not include any personal attacks on Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa (p. 499 n. 7).

Yeltsin was able to use the broader opportunities of Gorbachev’s perestroika to mount a remarkable political comeback. This began in party venues with a speech at the 19th CPSU Conference in mid-1988 followed by a November 1988 speech to the Higher Komsomol School, which was circulated to sympathetic journalists (pp. 157, 161). Only with Gorbachev’s introduction of competitive elections in March 1989 did Yeltsin see a possibility for political advancement outside the CPSU. Yeltsin’s career trajectory as an insider-turned-outsider made him uniquely qualified as someone who could serve, in Vitalii Tret’yakov’s words, as a “boss for the bosses” (p. 167). Once elected to the newly established Congress of People’s...