Yeltsin, a Life (review)

Timothy Colton’s biography begins with an apology—Yeltsin’s to the Russian people during his televised valedictory of 31 December 1999. It ends on a somewhat diffident note—a description of an unofficial competition to design a commemorative monument to Russia’s first post-Soviet president, who died in April 2007. In between, the reader is treated to illuminating discussions of the goals Yeltsin set himself, his sources of inspiration, comparisons to other leaders both living and deceased, detailed accounts of political and emotional ups and downs, and apologetics. “My net assessment of Yeltsin,” Colton writes in the introduction, “is as a hero in history—enigmatic and flawed, to be sure, yet worthy of our respect and sympathy” (9). For those of “us” who followed Yeltsin’s career mostly from a distance, the tone and balance of the biography may seem appropriate, its “textured scrutiny” (9) less adulatory and considerably shorter than Leon Aron’s breathless effort of 2000.¹ But for millions of Russians who personally experienced his “anti-revolutionary revolution,” no apology could suffice.

Colton, a professor of government and Russian Studies at Harvard and the author of a lengthy history of Moscow as well as several books on the post-Soviet Russian state, rescues Yeltsin from the obloquy largely provoked by his last bumbling years in office. He devotes considerable attention to Yeltsin’s forebears and early life, having traveled to Sverdlovsk oblast, where he poked around the settlements in which Yeltsin grew up, interviewed his relatives, and discovered among other things that all four of his grandparents had been subjected to dekulakization and internal exile under Stalin. Yeltsin’s father, too, ran afoul of the authorities and spent two years in a labor camp before rejoining the family. But Mikhail Gorbachev—almost exactly the same age—hailed from similarly unpropitious circumstances. The revenge of kulak descendants doesn’t get us very far as an explanation for the end of the USSR. What strikes Colton as most significant about Yeltsin’s youth are what he calls the “personal scripts” or imaginary futures for himself that Boris was already formulating during World War II and its immediate aftermath. References to them recur—as do invocations of the samostoiatel′nost′ that lay at their core—because, in Colton’s view, the scripts remained a constant force, determining Yeltsin’s actions throughout his life.

Like many Soviet leaders, Yeltsin received training as an engineer. Rising within the construction industry, he entered the Party at age 30 (ten years after Gorbachev). In his memoirs, which Colton cites extensively but not uncritically, Yeltsin claimed he joined because he believed in the ideals of social justice the Party espoused, but in an interview with the author in 2002 he spoke about his decision in terms of wanting to advance his career.² Whatever the motivation, party work consumed an increasing amount of his time, especially after his elevation to the Sverdlovsk regional party committee in 1968. Promotions to secretary and first secretary followed in 1975 and 1976. Yeltsin served as party prefect for the next eight years, until Gorbachev’s Politburo called him to Moscow, initially to head the Central Committee’s construction department and then as first secretary of the Moscow city party committee. Up to this point, he had worked through three personal scripts—survival, duty, and success—and had a distinguished though hardly brilliant career. But trying to run Moscow in the face of the political and cultural ferment brought about by Gorbachev would test his powers to the utmost. Operating on four hours of sleep a night, sacking uncooperative and under-performing underlings, and tilting against “mastodons” like Egor Ligachev (who ironically had tapped him for promotion from Sverdlovsk), Yeltsin affected a gruffness that appealed to a public hungering for action from above. He also increasingly offered a contrast to Gorbachev’s long-windedness and inclination to vacillate.

For nearly a year they sparred, until Yeltsin had had enough. In September 1987, he wrote an angry letter to Gorbachev offering...