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  • Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition
  • Peter Rutland
Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, eds., Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin: Political Leadership in Russia’s Transition. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002. 163 pp. $16.95 paper.

This volume originated with papers presented at the World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies held in Finland in August 2000. The papers were updated through May 2001. The book is a thoughtful comparison of the leadership styles of the three most recent leaders in Moscow.

According to Buddhist teaching, God has three faces: the creator, the destroyer, and the preserver. In a sense, this schema fits the Soviet transition. Mikhail Gorbachev created the opening for a new way of organizing society, Boris Yeltsin smashed the old system, and Vladimir Putin is hard at work trying to piece together a working structure.

Archie Brown makes the case for Gorbachev as a transformational leader in chapter 2. Gorbachev's embrace of competitive elections in 1988 undermined the Soviet system, and he played a crucial part in ending the Cold War, as the Soviet Union relinquished its control over Eastern Europe. Gorbachev also allowed the Soviet Union to break up peacefully, although Brown attributes primary responsibility for this outcome to Boris Yeltsin's aggressive pursuit of sovereignty for the Russian Federation (p. 25). But Gorbachev bequeathed to Yeltsin the daunting task of finding something to replace the now-collapsed command economy.

Brown's picture of an idealistic Gorbachev versus a power-hungry Yeltsin goes against the grain of most reportage in the 1990s, both inside and outside Russia, which portrayed Yeltsin as the triumphant founder of post-Soviet Russia and Gorbachev as a tragic figure, a president without a country. But with the passage of time Yeltsin indeed starts to look more like a transitional figure, sandwiched between the transformational leadership of Gorbachev and the rebuilding of state power under Putin.

In chapter 4 George Breslauer ponders the limits of counterfactual history. Clearly, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin had a tremendous impact on the course of Russian history. The two men were more successful at tearing down than building up, and both of them produced problems on a scale to match their achievements. An overall assessment of their rule hinges on a subjective evaluation of what the feasible alternatives were if these leaders had behaved differently.

Eugene Huskey's chapter provides a detailed case study of the most innovative of Vladimir Putin's centralizing reforms, the introduction of seven new federal districts, each headed by a representative reporting directly to the president. The main purpose of this reform was to intimidate regional governors into obeying federal laws and paying federal taxes. Having accomplished that purpose, the presidential representatives [End Page 177] have faded in importance. The powerful regional bosses are still in place and now seem well integrated into Putin's apparatus of rule.

Lilia Shevtsova contributes a long chapter and a short conclusion, in which she presents a systematic comparison of the three men that is bold in scope but also studded with intriguing asides. She finds points of similarity and points of difference. All three leaders were products of the Soviet elite, and they shared a focus on gaining and preserving power. All of them had to improvise in the face of a chaotic and rapidly evolving environment in which institutions proved unreliable. Shevtsova argues that they were intuitive and reactive leaders, rather than being driven by some grand conceptual vision. None of them proved to be genuinely democratic, in the sense that they did not seem comfortable dealing with different points of view through public debate. (Brown, however, argues on p. 27 that Gorbachev was prepared to listen in private.) Each leader, upon coming to power, was greeted with hope by Russian society, but in the case of the first two these hopes were quickly dashed. (The jury is still out on Putin.) However, the three also differ in important ways. They have strikingly different personalities, and each faced a different set of external challenges and opportunities.

Among the interesting insights that Shevtsova scatters into the text is the tart observation that Yeltsin changed...

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