Boris Yeltsin

Boris Yeltsin: The Man Who Climbed the Tank

On 19 August 1991, with tanks in the streets of Moscow and Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea, a large, white-haired Russian in a suit walked out of the parliament building, climbed onto the armour of a T-72 and read a denunciation of the coup to whoever would listen. The plotters had guns, the state and the KGB. Boris Yeltsin had a piece of paper and an instinct for the theatrical moment. Within seventy-two hours the coup collapsed, and within four months so did the Soviet Union.

Gulag Son

Yeltsin was born on 1 February 1931 in Butka, in Sverdlovsk Oblast, into a family the Soviet state had already broken. His father, Nikolay, served hard labour in a gulag for "anti-Soviet agitation"; his mother worked as a seamstress. It is a formative fact usually skipped in accounts of his later career: the man who dissolved the USSR grew up in a household the USSR had punished.

He attended Pushkin High School in Berezniki and graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in 1955 with a degree in construction. For more than a decade he was a builder — genuinely a builder, working his way up through construction management in Sverdlovsk, a hard industrial region where results were measurable and excuses were not. He did not join the Communist Party apparatus until 1968, at thirty-seven, comparatively late for a man who would reach the Politburo.

The Provincial Boss

The party machine rewarded competence, and Yeltsin had it. In 1976 he became first secretary of Sverdlovsk Oblast, running one of the Soviet Union's most critical industrial territories. That job was the making of him. It also taught him something most Politburo members never learned — what the system actually delivered to ordinary people, as opposed to what the plan said it delivered.

In December 1985 Gorbachev brought him to Moscow as party chief of the capital, a post he held until 1987, and he joined the Politburo in 1986. In Moscow he cultivated a deliberately reformist, deliberately populist image: riding public transport, attacking privilege, making himself the face of perestroika's impatient wing.

Cast Out, and Back

It ended in 1987 in a spectacular collision with Gorbachev and the conservative Yegor Ligachev over the pace of reform. Yeltsin was accused of "political immaturity" and "absolute irresponsibility" and thrown out. In the ordinary logic of Soviet politics that was the end — disgraced Politburo members did not return.

Yeltsin did something no Soviet politician had done: he went around the party and appealed directly to voters. He won election to the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, became chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990, and in June 1991 won Russia's first genuine presidential election with 57 per cent of the vote — becoming, as Britannica notes, the first popularly elected leader in the country's history. Two months later came the tank.

Dismantling an Empire

In December 1991 Yeltsin met the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus and signed the Belovezha Accords, declaring the Soviet Union dissolved and founding the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place. A superpower of nearly three hundred million people was legislated out of existence by three men in a forest lodge, essentially without bloodshed. Whatever else is said about Yeltsin, that is not a small thing.

What followed was harder. From January 1992 his government applied "shock therapy" — prices liberalised at a stroke, state spending slashed — under the young economist Yegor Gaidar. The theory was that a fast transition would hurt less than a slow one. In practice Russian living standards collapsed and GDP fell by roughly half across the decade. Voucher privatisation and the later auctions of state assets handed the industrial spine of the country to a small group of men — Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich among them — who became some of the wealthiest people on earth.

Shelling the Parliament

By 1993 the legislature elected under Soviet rules was in open revolt against him. In October Yeltsin resolved the deadlock by ordering tanks to shell the parliament building — the same White House he had defended from a tank turret two years earlier. He won. A new constitution, approved by referendum, gave the president sweeping powers to appoint officials and dissolve the Duma.

In December 1994 he sent the army into Chechnya to crush separatism, a war that ground on until Russian forces withdrew in 1996 under a peace deal negotiated by his security chief Alexander Lebed.

By the 1996 election his approval rating was close to zero and his health was visibly failing. The oligarchs whose fortunes he had enabled bankrolled his campaign, and he beat the communist Gennady Zyuganov in a run-off with 53.8 per cent, then underwent heart bypass surgery. Reports of alcoholism shadowed the whole presidency, though a Dutch neurosurgeon later disclosed that Yeltsin suffered from a neurological disorder affecting balance which may explain part of his unsteadiness.

The 1998 crisis brought sovereign default and the collapse of the rouble. In August 1999 he made Vladimir Putin prime minister and named him his successor.

Why Boris Is Called a Genius

Yeltsin's intelligence was almost purely political, and within that narrow band it was extraordinary. He had an instinct for the single decisive gesture — the tank, the direct appeal to voters over the head of the party, the forest lodge — and an ability to read the mood of a crowd or a nation faster than any of the credentialled apparatchiks around him. He destroyed the Soviet Union using the Soviet system's own institutions, from inside, having twice been left for dead by it. Nobody else in Soviet history managed a comeback like his, because nobody else grasped that the source of legitimacy had shifted from the Central Committee to the electorate.

Robert Gates called him an important figure in Russia's evolution toward democracy, and the 1991 sequence is genuinely without parallel: an empire dissolved without a civil war.

The counter-case is devastating and must be stated. Yeltsin was not an intellectual and had no serious grasp of economics; he outsourced the most consequential decisions of the transition to Gaidar and then presided over a halving of national output and the impoverishment of tens of millions. He shelled his own parliament, launched a brutal war in Chechnya, allowed a handful of insiders to strip the state's assets, and won re-election on their money. Above all, he built the super-presidency — the constitution of 1993, with its power to appoint and dissolve — and then handed it to Putin. If genius means foresight, Yeltsin fails: almost nothing he built survived him in the form he intended. What he had was nerve and timing, the tactical brilliance of a man who could win any given afternoon and lose the decade.

Legacy

He resigned without warning on 31 December 1999, asking Russians for "forgiveness for your dreams that never came true" — an apology no Kremlin leader had offered before or has offered since. Putin took the presidency that day.

Yeltsin died of congestive heart failure on 23 April 2007, aged seventy-six, and was given a church funeral, the first Russian statesman so honoured in 113 years. Britannica's summary is fair: he guided Russia through a stormy decade of political and economic retrenching. He gave Russians free elections, a free press and private property, and also inflation, oligarchy and a presidency strong enough to take all three back. The argument about which half of that ledger is the real Yeltsin has not been settled, and probably will not be.

Achievements

• Sverdlovsk regional committee of CPSU
• member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR
• Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party (1985–1987)
• Order of Lenin — 1981
• Order of the Red Banner of Labour — 1974
• Order of the Badge of Honour — 1966
• Medal "In Commemoration of the 1000th Anniversary of Kazan" — 2006
• Educated at Ural State Technical University and Ural Federal University