Yeltsin, knee-high in other concerns, did not weigh in and ignored his one-year target date. It is unlikely he could have salvaged much from the process, since it flew in the face of his own efforts to debunk Marxism-Leninism and of the very concept of “propaganda for the new life.” Intellectual critics of the idea of a national idea sounded like no one more than Boris Yeltsin. “It is intolerable to cultivate and instill in public consciousness something that has not formed spontaneously,” one of them wrote. “The banefulness of such experiments was evidenced by the socialist system,” which had a moral that reminded him of an alcohol-free wedding “where mineral water sits on the table and under the table they are pouring liquor.” Were post-communist Russia to be capable of working out a unifying idea at all, it could not possibly be done in one year or in several, and the hardships of daily life put no one in the mood for trying: “Ideologies come and go, but people always want to eat.”53 Yeltsin’s silence in the face of these strictures tells me that he came to realize he quite agreed with them.
If he felt free to orphan his national-idea initiative, Yeltsin did not wash his hands of myth making and the reckoning with the past. In his first official act after reclaiming statutory powers on November 6, 1996, he signed a decree renaming November 7, the celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the Day of Reconciliation and Accord, and unveiling a Year of Reconciliation to last until the following November. The edict was composed by Kremlin staff under Anatolii Chubais, who was of the belief that the vehement anti-communism of the re-election campaign had to be muzzled and that it was more important to get the KPRF-controlled Duma to approve progressive economic legislation than to refight 1917 or 1991 ad infinitum. Yeltsin supporters who were more interested in political change, like Satarov, were against the renaming but lost the argument.54 The pronouncement might be interpreted as an enhancement of pluralism or, alternatively, “as profoundly uncritical, in the sense that it embraced all perspectives on the past without acknowledging the contradictions inherent in different views.”55 It was, as a matter of fact, a smidgen of both, and Yeltsin’s ambivalence on historical questions continued throughout his second term.
One piece of the past where his views evolved only slowly concerned Mikhail Gorbachev, the last head of the Soviet state. Yeltsin stroked Gorbachev’s name off the guest list for his second inauguration and made it hard for associates to maintain friendly relations with him. The president of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, Askar Akayev, bid welcome to Gorbachev in his capital, Bishkek, and honored him at a public event in July 1997. Yeltsin, a friend since they were deputies in the Soviet congress in 1989–90, refused to shake Akayev’s hand for the next year, asking him at one point, “Askar, how could you?” He did not apologize to Akayev until 2004.56 Yeltsin did relax the hostility some by inviting Gorbachev to attend a number of state functions in 1997, 1998, and 1999, but Gorbachev never accepted.57 When Raisa Gorbacheva took ill and died of leukemia in a German clinic in September 1999, Yeltsin sent condolences and had a government airplane return her body to Moscow for burial. Naina Yeltsina consoled Gorbachev at the graveside service. Boris Yeltsin did not attend.
The second-term Yeltsin did continue to rehabilitate visual markers of pre-Soviet Russia. The biggest architectural project was the restoration of the Grand Kremlin Palace, a building to which few Russians ever gain entry. It was reopened in June 1999. Several blocks away, workmen constructed a carbon copy of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, designed by Konstantin Ton as the largest church in Russia, which Stalin had dynamited in 1931. Yeltsin gave it his approval and laid the keystone, but the moving spirit, and the one to profit politically, was Yurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow.
