None of this establishes that Yeltsin governed as a CPSU secretary reborn, pure and simple. Regional party bosses until the 1980s, while all-powerful in their fiefdoms, reported to the general secretary, and that was a party role Yeltsin had never filled. Yeltsin as president took orders from no one and owed his post to the electorate. His refusal to be over-absorbed in detail was a character trait over and above what he learned in his party career. Some of the administrative levers associated with the Soviet partocracy, such as the personnel weapon and administration of perks, have been found in other times and places—for example, in the heyday of machine politics in big American cities. The Soviet formula was an alloy of machine techniques with the police state, the planned economy, and communist ideology, and those combinatory variables were absent after 1991. Yeltsin either would not or could not lock up dissidents, censor the press, or take 99.99 percent of the votes in a single-candidate election, and he had no hard-and-fast ideology and no propaganda mechanism at his fingertips. In the privileges area, he stayed aloof from the dross of Pavel Borodin’s decisions.30 The operation was constrained by a body of legislation on official benefits and by muckraking journalism, neither of them operative under the communist regime. Only when a good was in very short stock and the queue was long—state dachas are the best example—did Borodin and his office have much of an ability to play favorites.31 Once out of government service in the 1990s, most at the level of government minister, presidential adviser, or provincial governor were left to their own devices, without a helping or a hindering hand from Building No. 1.
The historicist, monarchial, and apparatchik paradigms all underplay the gnarly complexity of Yeltsin’s part in governing the state. Of the three, the first, with its sense of mission, is closest to his self-conception. But how effective was the Yeltsin recipe of governance in practice? As an oppositionist, he had presented himself as an improvement on Gorbachev, whose means of rule were rusting out. In power, he rammed through a constitution vesting him with the prerogatives he had lacked until then. The optimist would have forecast that state behavior in the new Russia would be more proactive and coherent than in the old, and it was some of the time but not consistently so. Presidential leadership was constrained by the disorganization of Yeltsin’s surroundings and by institutional counterweights. It was further influenced by his
The results were there to see inside his organizational home, the executive branch in Moscow. Yeltsin was as well-spoken as anybody on the pathologies of government after communism. He titled his maiden state-of-the-country address to parliament in 1994 “On Strengthening the Russian State.” It began with “the gap between constitutional principles and the real practice” of rule. Russia had repudiated autocracy but not found a workable replacement, and this was undermining the whole course of reform:
Having relinquished the command principle of governing, the state has not fully assimilated the law-based principle. This has brought forth such menacing phenomena as . . . an efflorescence of bureaucratism, which stifles the growth of new economic relations, ... the inclusion of part of the bureaucracy on various levels in the political struggle, which leads to the sabotage of state decisions . . . the imbuing of the state and municipal apparatus with corruption . . . a low level of discipline in implementation . . . lack of coordination in the work of the ministries and departments. . . . Here we must confess openly that democratic principles and the organizations of government are more and more being discredited. A negative image of democracy is being formed, as a lethargic and amorphous system of power that gives little to the majority of people and defends above all its own corporate interests. Russian society has attained freedom, but does not yet feel democracy as a system of state power that is both strong and accountable before the nation.32
