Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich

I

Introduction

Yeltsin, Boris Nikolayevich (1931-2007), President of Russia (1991-1999). He was a central figure in the transition away from Communism in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and dominated Russia’s politics in its early years as an independent state.

II

Early Life

Yeltsin was born in Butko, a village in Sverdlovsk Oblast, the most populous province in Russia’s Ural Mountains area. His grandparents and parents were prosperous peasants who lost their land and livestock during the collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s, when peasants’ small farms were forcibly absorbed into large state-run farms. Yeltsin grew up in Butko and in Berezniki, an industrial town in the neighbouring Perm Oblast. His family suffered from Stalin’s terror—his father, Ignaty, served a three-year sentence at a labour camp on charges of sabotaging state property—and the Yeltsins lived in poverty during and after World War II. Yeltsin finished secondary school in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1950 and graduated from the civil engineering division of the Urals Polytechnic Institute in 1955. He then worked for 13 years in the Urals as a foreman and manager in the building industry.

III

Early Career

Yeltsin joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1961. He was appointed to the construction department of the party’s Sverdlovsk Oblast committee in 1968 and was made a secretary of the committee, effectively its leader, in 1975. In November 1976 the Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev made Yeltsin first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Oblast committee, a position that entitled him to a seat on the party’s Central Committee in 1981.

After Mikhail Gorbachev became the new general secretary in 1985, Yeltsin was one of the first provincial officials to be brought to Moscow as part of Gorbachev’s drive to revitalize the Soviet system. The two had known each other only slightly before then. On the recommendation of Gorbachev’s lieutenant, Yegor Ligachev, Yeltsin was made secretary of the Central Committee for Construction in July 1985. Five months later he was handed the sensitive assignment of first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the Communist Party. The post, which had long been headed by the staunch conservative Viktor Grishin, was roughly equivalent to mayor. Yeltsin was also made a candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, the party’s top decision-making body, in February 1986. He was in some respects a conventional Moscow boss, working hard to purge supporters of Grishin and to force compliance with centrally set planning targets. However, Yeltsin also displayed an unconventional interest in improving the housing supply, promoting candid discussion of the city’s problems, and establishing contact with emerging grassroots political groups.

A turning point in Yeltsin’s career came when he became frustrated with the gradual pace of perestroika, Gorbachev’s programme of political and economic reforms. Taking the floor at a Central Committee meeting in October 1987 to criticize Gorbachev, Ligachev, and other party leaders for being content with “half measures”, Yeltsin said he wished to resign in protest. For this affront he was not only dismissed from the Moscow first secretaryship shortly afterwards (and from the Politburo in February 1988) but was publicly humiliated and obliged to acknowledge his “error”. Yeltsin was ill for some months after the episode. Gorbachev offered him a senior job in the construction industry but told him his political career was over. Yeltsin’s apology for his outspokenness was soon forgotten, but his dramatic confrontation with Gorbachev was not. It made him a natural pole of attraction for people’s growing anger at the failings of Soviet Communism and the slow progress towards remedying them.

Yeltsin found a key opportunity to return to politics in Gorbachev’s overhaul of the Soviet electoral system, which fostered competition among numerous candidates for political office. In March 1989 he waged a populist campaign to represent Moscow in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the revamped Soviet parliament. Fierce attacks in the official media actually improved Yeltsin’s image, and he took 90 per cent of the votes in the election. In the halls of the congress he got to know Andrei Sakharov and other liberal intellectuals who were hoping to turn the USSR into a Western-type democracy. In March 1990 Yeltsin ran in Sverdlovsk for a seat in the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the USSR’s 15 republics. He won easily, and on May 29, 1990, he was selected by a narrow margin to be chairman of the congress. In July 1990 he announced that membership in the Communist Party was incompatible with his position as the head of the Russian republic and resigned from the party.

Yeltsin argued loudly for acceleration of economic and social reforms, accusing Gorbachev and more orthodox elements within the Communist Party of obstructing them. In March 1991 a referendum in the Russian republic authorized the creation of a directly elected Russian presidency within the framework of the USSR. Yeltsin comfortably won the first election for this post on June 12, 1991, beating five other candidates and receiving nearly 60 per cent of the 76 million valid votes cast.

As president of Russia, Yeltsin played a pivotal role in the dissolution of the USSR. When hardliners in the Soviet government attempted a coup against Gorbachev on August 19, 1991, Yeltsin rallied resistance on the streets of Moscow and helped ensure the plotters’ defeat. Gorbachev’s authority never recovered, and Yeltsin stepped quickly into the power vacuum. While still bargaining with Gorbachev and the leaders of the other Soviet republics about the formation of some kind of successor state to the USSR, he used presidential decrees to increase his influence over government agencies and thereby undermine Gorbachev’s efforts. On December 8, Yeltsin along with Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislau Shushkevich, the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus, hammered the final nail in the USSR’s coffin. The three presidents announced that the USSR had ceased to function and that they would establish a voluntary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in its place. With Gorbachev’s resignation as Soviet president on December 25, the USSR was effectively over. The CIS has never been more than a negotiating forum, with real power residing in the 12 separate successor states that became its members. The strongest of these, and the heir to the USSR’s nuclear arsenal and seat in the United Nations, was the Russian Federation—as the Russian republic was retitled in December 1991—and Boris Yeltsin was its unchallenged leader.

IV

Yeltsin’s Domestic Policies

Yeltsin’s top priority was now to transform Russia into a market economy. In January 1992 a new Cabinet under the de facto chairmanship of Yegor Gaydar, a youthful Moscow economist, reversed decades of Soviet policy by releasing retail and most wholesale prices from state control and allowing individuals and firms to engage in trade without interference. Prices shot up at first, but the rate of increase eventually declined as the market forces of supply and demand kicked in. Later in 1992 Yeltsin’s government took steps to encourage the creation of new private businesses and launched a far-reaching programme of privatization of existing economic entities. Most state firms were reorganized as joint-stock companies, and vouchers entitling holders to purchase stock were distributed free to all Russian citizens. To trim its budget deficit, the government slashed military spending, social assistance, and subsidies to producers. Collaborating with international financial organizations and Western countries, it established some of the institutional underpinnings of a capitalist economy, including a stock exchange, a central reserve bank, and a civil law code. Control over newly privatized firms gravitated to managers from the Soviet economic establishment, a trend Yeltsin did not resist. Their interests were well represented by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who supplanted Gaydar as prime minister at the end of 1992. Despite assurances from Yeltsin that reform would yield dividends within a year, the economy contracted steadily from 1992 to 1997, dwindling to less than half its previous size. Millions of ordinary people suffered great privation because of declining output, reduced and often delayed wage and pension payments, and unemployment.

Yeltsin acted almost entirely by executive edict, trying to stay above the political fray and declining to form a party or movement. The result was bitter conflict with the government’s legislative branch, headed by Yeltsin’s successor as chairman of the legislature, Ruslan Khasbulatov. Frictions were worsened by the inability to agree on the terms of a democratic constitution to replace the much-amended Russian republic charter of 1978. A majority of voters expressed confidence in Yeltsin in a referendum held on April 23, 1993, but they rejected a proposal for early parliamentary elections.

Yeltsin took matters into his own hands in September 1993 when he dissolved the parliament and called for the election of a new legislature. Khasbulatov and his allies refused to step down, holing up with hundreds of armed supporters in the parliament building. Riots ensued in central Moscow, and on October 4 Yeltsin used army troops to shell and occupy the parliament building and restore calm. After 170 people had died, according to official sources, Khasbulatov finally surrendered. A new bicameral federal assembly was elected on December 12. In a constitutional referendum associated with the December election, Russians ratified Yeltsin’s draft constitution, which granted vast powers to the president and the executive organs—powers that, some pointed out, could potentially be abused by a future tyrant. At the same time, they voted heavily in the parliamentary poll for nationalistic and socialistic opposition parties. Executive-legislative relations thus remained frosty after 1993, and the president relied mainly on decrees to govern.

Yeltsin’s health deteriorated after the crisis of 1993, as he developed serious heart disease and other ailments. He directed much of his energy toward Chechnya, a mostly Muslim republic in the North Caucasus whose government had been trying to secede from Russia since 1991 (see Chechen Conflict). In December 1994 Yeltsin ordered the army to intervene and assert Moscow’s control. Despite months of savage fighting, in which thousands perished, Russia was unable to quell the resistance. Yeltsin in 1996 authorized his national security adviser, General Aleksandr Lebed, to work out an interim settlement with the rebels. A cease-fire and a Russian troop withdrawal were negotiated in August 1996, with final resolution of the conflict deferred for five years.

In the parliamentary election of December 1995, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the heir to the Soviet Communist Party, capitalized on economic discontent to top the polls. The Our Home Is Russia movement, led by Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, gained a mere 10 per cent of the popular vote, and Yeltsin’s popularity skidded to new lows. In early 1996, in spite of his health problems, Yeltsin decided to seek a second presidential term. In a brilliant campaign managed by Anatoly Chubais, Yeltsin polarized the electorate, claiming that a vote against him would send the country into renewed crisis and restore authoritarian rule. In the first round of the presidential election, on June 16, 1996, Yeltsin led the field of ten candidates, with 35.3 per cent of the valid votes. In the runoff on July 3 against the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, he triumphed with 53.8 per cent of the vote. General Lebed, who had finished third in June, campaigned on Yeltsin’s behalf and was rewarded with a senior position in his administration; however, the president deposed him several months later after a series of disagreements.

In November 1996 Yeltsin underwent successful arterial bypass surgery on his heart. During his lengthy recovery, there were calls from Communists and other foes to impeach him for incapacity to govern. In March 1998, in his last burst of initiative as president, Yeltsin dismissed Chernomyrdin as prime minister and replaced him with Sergei Kiriyenko, a young official with experience in the banking and petroleum industries. A financial crisis in August 1998 led Kiriyenko to resign. Yeltsin tried to reinstate Chernomyrdin as prime minister, but had to settle on Yevgeny Primakov, his conservative foreign minister. Beginning in October 1998 Yeltsin suffered a series of illnesses that left him unable to perform many of his duties. Consequently, many of his presidential responsibilities fell to Primakov. In May 1999 Yeltsin, fearful that the popular prime minister might replace him, dismissed Primakov, criticizing him for failing to improve Russia's ailing economy. Yeltsin appointed a loyal ally, interior minister Sergei Stepashin, to replace Primakov.

Stepashin did not last long. In August, Yeltsin dismissed him along with the rest of the Cabinet and named Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia's domestic intelligence service, as Stepashin's replacement. Yeltsin stated that he wanted Putin to succeed him as president when Yeltsin’s term ended in July 2000. To some observers the selection and endorsement of Putin, a loyal Yeltsin ally, signalled an attempt by Yeltsin to ensure his succession by a friendly replacement.

Putin's appointment as prime minister coincided with renewed conflict with Chechen separatists. On August 7, 1999, hundreds of Islamic guerrillas crossed into Dagestan from Chechnya and occupied several villages, triggering Russian air and artillery attacks. Then a deadly wave of terrorist bombings struck Moscow and two other Russian cities in August and September 1999, killing nearly 300 people and injuring hundreds of others. Putin and other Russian leaders accused Islamic terrorists from Chechnya of organizing the attacks. In response to the bombings, Yeltsin announced that security forces would attempt to seal off the border with Chechnya, cutting all transportation links to the breakaway region.

In late September Russian warplanes began a campaign of air strikes against targets in Chechnya. This campaign escalated in October into a full-scale invasion of Chechnya by Russian troops, who over the next several months succeeded in occupying most of the republic and driving the Chechen guerrillas into the mountains.