The third test to pose of a potentially great leader is to see if he demonstrates a talent for identifying and tapping into new sources of political power. For example, Robert Caro in his epic study of Lyndon Johnson finds that as majority leader of the U.S. Senate in the 1950s he “looked for power in places where no previous [holder of that office] had thought to look for it—and he found it. And he created new powers, employing a startling ingenuity and imagination to transform parliamentary techniques . . . transforming them so completely that they became in effect new techniques and mechanisms.”12 Johnson on Capitol Hill leveraged, adjusted, and manipulated procedural rules. Other effective leaders have acted as entrepreneurs in markets wider than the institutions in which they are based.
By this yardstick, Yeltsin fares no less well. Unlike Gorbachev, he had the ingenuity and imagination in the perestroika period to realize that people power, as channeled in competitive elections, would trump administrative power and build legitimacy. He used symbolic acts, such as his demand for rehabilitation at the Nineteenth CPSU Conference in 1988 and his magical moment on Tank No. 110 in 1991, to craft and project an image that towered over all others. Enough remained of his legitimacy and his image to save him in 1996 and, combined with the powers of the presidency, as ratified in the 1993 constitutional referendum, to tide him over the recurrent crises of the late 1990s.
A fourth and related criterion is about the short-term impact of the leader’s decisions during his time in the driver’s seat. Were his decisions while in a position of authority consequential or not? The easiest event for which to give an unqualified yes would be Yeltsin’s rallying of opposition to the attempted coup d’état of August 1991. Sergei Stankevich, the historian who was a democratic legislator and Yeltsin adviser until the mid-1990s, believes Yeltsin’s charisma counted for more than all other proximate causes combined. The Yeltsin factor, by Stankevich’s estimate, had 60 percent of the causal power in August. Guesswork the number may be, but it is suggestive guesswork. If it were 50 percent or 40 percent or 30 percent, it would still have been an awe-inspiring effect.13 The 1987 secret speech and the 1991 theater on the tank had powerful multiplier effects and reverberated in the system for years.
Countless other well-placed observers bear witness to the same for Yeltsin’s two terms as president. To quote but one of them, Anatolii Kulikov, who commanded Russian forces in Chechnya and headed the Interior Ministry for three years, and who finds fault with much of Yeltsin’s behavior:
There is one thing you cannot deny him, and that is that over the course of an entire decade he remained the central figure in the country’s political life. Let’s not kid ourselves. Boris Yeltsin—whether you are talking about the late Yeltsin or the early Yeltsin, good or bad, take your pick—not only loved to dominate but knew how to dominate the people around him. His character, his political calculations, and his energy and initiative were
Many of Yeltsin’s key decisions, in areas as diverse as shock therapy, rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims, and the interment of the Romanovs, were affirmative, about making something desirable happen. But some of his most important choices and impacts were preventive, about keeping something undesirable from happening.15 His anti-putsch actions in August 1991 are one obvious example. A no less telling one is his multifaceted management of center-periphery and majority-minority relations and his efforts to avert what could have been a vortex of territorial and ethnic hatreds on an order of magnitude ghastlier than in Yugoslavia.
