Yeltsin полностью

It is helpful in summing up Yeltsin’s record to revisit a thought-provoking treatise about “the hero in history” penned in the 1940s by the philosopher Sidney Hook. Hook discriminated between two types of hero, the “eventful man,” the pale imitation, and the “event-making man,” the hero deserving of the name. Both come along at “forking points of history” that are admissive of alternative solutions to human problems. The eventful man happens to be in the right spot at the right time and commits a trite act that pushes the players down one avenue and not another. The event-making man—Hook adduced as examples Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin—encounters a fork in the road and “also helps, so to speak, to create it.” The event maker goes beyond choosing the one tine of the fork; his qualities of intelligence, will, and temperament boost its odds of success.⁸

From his entry into the Soviet industrial establishment in the 1950s through to his appointment as Communist Party prefect of the city of Moscow in the 1980s, Yeltsin was either a historically irrelevant man or at very most an eventful man, confined by structures and routines that gave room for innovation only at the margin. The case for him as a hero in history, therefore, is going to be proved or disproved with reference to the event-packed years 1985 to 1999.

How would we know an event-making man if we saw one? Five tests are applicable to Yeltsin or any other candidate.

The first asks whether the leader in question has what Erik Erikson in Gandhi’s Truth called the capacity “to step out of line” and to address the central issues of the day in a fresh way. This happens, as Erikson wrote, only when there is “a confluence [between] a deeply personal need and a national trend,” the product of which, in a certain period of the person’s life, is a “locomotor drivenness” to effect change.⁹

Yeltsin stayed in line well into middle age. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, stirred by inner testing and rebellion scripts and by changes in the social environment, he broke stride and linked his personal journey to larger trends. In so doing, Yeltsin turned political disgrace into vindication and parlayed vindication into political realignment and victory. His gift was not originality or profundity of thought but the ability to translate abstractions into the idiom of ordinary people. From knee-jerk populism he moved to adopt a program for de-monopolization through democratization, market reform, and territorial devolution that addressed main issues of the day, and in such a way as to stay a half-step ahead of his rivals.¹⁰ It earned him the opportunity to preside over the birth of a nation and an attempt to construct a bold new future for it.

A second criterion for identifying an event-making man is the faculty of “political judgment,” as Isaiah Berlin succinctly labeled it. Political judgment has to do with grasping a political situation in its totality, synthesizing the whole out of discrete facts and imponderables, and discriminating “what matters from the rest.” Berlin drew an analogy with the motorist coming up to a rickety-looking bridge. The driver with road judgment, without ever learning about how to engineer piers, struts, or ties, senses through a “semi-instinctive skill” whether or not the bridge will bear the weight of his vehicle. ¹¹ In public affairs, it takes a leader of political judgment to see Hook’s fork in the road for what it is, and not to overlook or misconstrue it.

Yeltsin incontrovertibly possessed political judgment. It was based primarily on the instinctive aptitude that Berlin put accent on. Intuition, not grand theory, whispered in his ear in 1986–87 that Gorbachev’s gradualist program was falling short. We saw in Chapter 8 that Gorbachev concluded about Yeltsin’s feel for the situation and for his commanding role in it that “A tsar must conduct himself like a tsar.” Gorbachev could not take charge with that kind of force; Yeltsin could and did. An inner voice led him to conclude in 1991–92 that a Great Leap Outward was indispensable to compel the new Russia into step with a rapidly evolving world. It convinced him to go for the brass ring in the constitutional conflict of 1992–93 and to throw himself into the presidential race of 1996. After re-election and medical intervention, it led him to try to reform the reforms and, when that did not work, to try to salvage them. While nothing like infallible, Yeltsin’s political judgment repeatedly showed itself to be superior to that of his adversaries, from Gorbachev through Ruslan Khasbulatov, Gennadii Zyuganov, and Yurii Luzhkov.