Yeltsin полностью

Itching to establish international credentials, Yeltsin wangled an invitation to the White House office of President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, with the promise of a “drop by” from the president. He had to enter by the West Basement entrance and was waspish with Scowcroft and Scowcroft’s assistant, Condoleezza Rice. Yeltsin lightened up when Bush came by for fifteen minutes of small talk. Vice President Dan Quayle followed and liked him. “He may not have had Gorbachev’s polish, but I could immediately see how confident he was.” Quayle was taken that Yeltsin was well enough briefed to poke fun at the bad press the two of them had been receiving. “My feeling was mixed with a whit of annoyance : Was my press so bad that it made its way to everyone’s attention?”⁸¹ The Russian “emerged from the West Wing to tell the press corps that he had presented Bush and Quayle with a ‘ten-point plan’ to ‘rescue perestroika .’ Inside, Scowcroft complained that Yeltsin was ‘devious’ and a ‘twobit headline-grabber.’” James A. Baker formed a similar appraisal at the State Department.⁸² For Yeltsin, it had been gainful exposure: Much to Gorbachev’s chagrin, he had his foot in the door of official Washington.

Yeltsin was bowled over by the variance between what he saw, communist stereotypes of American life, and the dreariness of Soviet reality. He and his party felt almost like characters in a science fiction novel. “Don’t forget,” Sukhanov wrote about the tour, “that we were travelers from the ‘anti-world’ and in our heads the U.S.A. was the country where universal chaos reigned.”⁸³ They did find some scenes that conformed to their expectations—the filth and overcrowding of the New York subway, for one—but many more that did not.⁸⁴ Yeltsin was most moved by the cornucopia at a Randalls discount supermarket in a suburb of Houston, which he asked to inspect when he saw it next to the expressway between the space center and Love Field. He went over its shelves—video taken by a member of the group shows him examining onions and potatoes under a sign “You Just Can’t Buy It Better”—and to its bar-coded checkout stand, and was in disbelief when the manager said it inventoried “only” 30,000 products. Yeltsin’s eyes were watery as he reboarded the bus. In the air between Houston and Miami, he remarked to Sukhanov that the grocery market for ordinary Americans, far better stocked than VIP dispensaries in Moscow, pointed up the fatuity of the “fairy tales” fed to his generation by Marxist-Leninist propaganda. “They had to deceive the population. . . . And now it is plain why Soviet citizens were not permitted to go abroad. They [the bosses] were afraid that their eyes would be opened.”⁸⁵

Sukhanov suspected that the exchange aboard the Miami-bound jet was when “the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness decomposed,” and with it the vestiges of his belief in the Soviet model.⁸⁶ Asked by a close associate in the 1990s what most turned him against the old system, Yeltsin said it was “America and its supermarkets.”⁸⁷ Yeltsin records the scales falling off his eyes several weeks after the U.S. trip. Aides, seeing him disconsolate after the press skewered his U.S. tour, tried to lift his spirits by organizing a visit to a public steambath in a Moscow district. There were forty nude men in the sultry room, lathering one another on the back with water-soaked birch branches, to improve the circulation. “Hang in there, Boris Nikolayevich,” they cried, “we are with you!” It was then and there, Yeltsin was to claim in Notes of a President, that “I changed my worldview” and came to the understanding “that I had been a communist by Soviet tradition, by inertia, and by upbringing, but not by conviction.”⁸⁸

If ever there was a eureka moment when Yeltsin separated himself from the Soviet state of mind, either the flight from Texas to Florida or the scene in the steambath might have been it. It is more cogent to visualize the shift, cognitive and affective, as cumulative and as taking months rather than hours. Rethinking communism and kissing it good-bye was one of those exercises in “innovative uncommon sense” that, as James MacGregor Burns writes, “transcends routine problem solving to address the deep human needs and crises from which it emerges.”⁸⁹ It happened as the economy of the USSR, beginning in the winter of 1988–89, went from stagnation to recession. Lower production and excessive currency emission disordered consumer markets and made for empty shelves in the stores, longer lines, more squirreling away of consumer staples, barter, and by 1990 spot rationing.⁹⁰ Millions of citizens puzzled it all out in their own way. Gorbachev did, too, but always with a lag and clinging to the dying embers of the faith.⁹¹