Yeltsin полностью

In the minority homelands, Yeltsin catered to the anti-Moscow mood. If he were a Tatar, he told writers in Kazan, he would be going after “the self-sufficiency of the Tatar republic.” At Kazan State University on August 5, where he was met with pickets who bore signs reading Azatlyk (Freedom, in the Tatar language), he put forth his famous summons to the Tatars to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” In Ufa, the capital of Bashkiriya, he rephrased the call: “We say to the Bashkir people: ‘You take the share of power which you yourselves can swallow!’”⁴⁰ The catchy phrase was minted by his new adviser on nationality questions, the ethnographer and sociologist Galina Starovoitova. It corresponded with Yeltsin’s take on the issue, and he unsheathed it to great effect. On the same expedition, he deplored the cost to Russians of the USSR as a superpower. “Charity begins at home,” he declared, “and Russia will not help other states” or keep up the Soviet Union’s defense, space, and foreign-aid budgets.⁴¹

Russia-USSR tensions were taken to the boiling point in 1990–91 not by this or that issue but by the intertwining of all the main issues dividing them. For the insurgent Yeltsin, devolution of power was a precondition of pursuing political and economic reform. He meant to become Russia’s first elected head of state and up the pace of economic change, toward a terminus he now would not put in the Marxist compartments: “I think you find in the real world neither the capitalism about which the classics spoke nor the socialism about which they spoke. . . . I am not for socialism for the sake of socialism. I am for the people living better.”⁴² The prelude to market reform would be an anti-crisis package to counter shortages and hoarding. And Russia would need to be paid a fair price by Soviet and foreign purchasers for its fuels and raw materials. Only self-direction would permit his government to take this route.

Gorbachev was more emphatic than Yeltsin in commingling devolution, politics, and economics. The play for sovereignty, he charged in May 1990, was a design for killing state socialism (communism) as an ideology and social model. “It contains an attempt to excommunicate Russia from socialism. . . . The program’s author . . . wants to invite us with one stroke of the pen to say farewell to the socialist choice we made in 1917.”⁴³ In defending the central power, Gorbachev saw himself as carrying on sacrosanct Soviet beliefs as much as constitutional stability.

Did this all make for an ineluctable collision between the two? High-level actors feared it did and tried to talk Gorbachev into co-opting Yeltsin by offering him a plum political position. Aleksandr Yakovlev and Georgii Shakhnazarov—who had earlier begged Gorbachev to send Yeltsin abroad—lobbied him after the Russian election to make Yeltsin vice president of the USSR. Gorbachev demurred, saying Yeltsin’s ambitiousness was too insatiable for him ever to accept.⁴⁴ In December 1990 he handed the post to Gennadii Yanayev, a former Komsomol official whom he said he could trust; Yanayev would be one of the leaders of the plot to depose him in August 1991. While Yeltsin would have turned down the vice presidency—it would lower him to “personal assistant to Gorbachev,” he said in an interview—he would have considered the meatier job of prime minister if it had been offered in 1989. Once he was RSFSR leader, it was out of the question.⁴⁵