Yeltsin полностью

The new head of state treated Yeltsin with respect, if not affection or deference. On June 12, 2001, the tenth anniversary of his election as president, Putin made Yeltsin the first Russian recipient of the Order for Services to the Fatherland, First Grade (established by Yeltsin in 1994), and pinned the badge on his lapel at a Kremlin reception. In Yeltsin’s first year out of office, the two met, usually at his residence, an average of once a month. The meetings were sometimes arranged at his initiative and sometimes at Putin’s. “A new president,” Yeltsin professed, “is obliged to periodically hear out the opinions of his predecessor.” He was content on the whole with Putin, but “I tell him frankly about his mistakes and . . . that he has to live up to people’s hopes.”¹⁴

Yeltsin let loose with some of his opinions in the open. In August 2000, when Putin was slow to interrupt a vacation and respond to the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, Yeltsin made it known that Putin had been insensitive. That December he took Putin to task for siding with parliamentarians who wanted to bring back the musical score of the pre-1991 Soviet anthem, with updated lyrics. “For me, the old hymn has only one association—the [Communist Party] congresses and party conferences at which the power of the party bureaucrats was confirmed and strengthened.” Yeltsin scoffed at Putin’s report that Russian athletes at the Summer Olympics in Sydney were not inspired by the nineteenth-century Glinka melody that Yeltsin instituted as the national anthem in 1993, and to which words had not yet been set. The athletes would adapt to whatever music the country required, Yeltsin said, and in any case they were young people who looked “to the future and not to the past.” On symbolic matters, he continued, “The president should not blindly follow the people’s mood; on the contrary, it is up to him to actively influence it.”¹⁵ Three weeks after Yeltsin spoke out, Putin signed the anthem bill into law.¹⁶

Putin in power at first combined economic liberalism with vigorous and often brutal prosecution of the second Chechen war and a moderate tightening of political controls. Yeltsin was in full agreement with the economic changes, which were mostly designed and implemented by younger technocrats whom he had promoted in his second term, and were pushed through the Duma by Putin’s coalition there.¹⁷ For the first wave of political changes, he expressed “restrained support.” They included new central levers over the regions and a squeeze on the more forward of the oligarchs, prompting both Vladimir Gusinskii and Boris Berezovskii to flee the country in 2001.¹⁸ Yeltsin was fully behind the drive for a military solution in Chechnya. Most of the surviving warlords from 1994 to 1996 were killed in the Russian operation, and he came to believe he had erred when he ended that first conflict on the separatists’ terms.¹⁹

With the passage of time, though, the authoritarian flavor of many of Putin’s choices in the political arena, made and executed in concert with fellow products of the security services, was increasingly at odds with Yeltsin’s more liberal outlook.²⁰ A tender point was the curbing of media autonomy, starting with Gusinskii’s NTV network and ORT, which had been in Berezovskii’s orbit. Gusinskii and Berezovskii defended their assets more out of financial interests and power concerns than out of democratic principle, ²¹ but the net effect was the narrowing of the sphere in which officialdom’s behavior could be held up to scrutiny. In March 2002 Yeltsin gave his consent to a suggestion by Boris Nemtsov that he chair a new supervisory board for TV-6, a small for-profit channel, previously owned by Berezovskii, that had begun to carry news programming and to which some of the journalists from NTV migrated when Gusinskii and Igor Malashenko were ousted there. Putin heard of it and insisted that Yeltsin pull out of the arrangement before it could be announced.²²