This claim about causal impact must, of course, be qualified in sundry ways. As we have seen, Yeltsin was never the only mover, only the most potent one. His anti-revolutionary revolution was inadequately conceptualized and inadequately explained to the population. The economic changes that were its focus were too slow to bear fruit, partly because they were compromised by the voracity of the winners and governmental appeasement of the losers. Some of the mechanisms devised, such as loans-for-shares, were seriously flawed. In his first term, Yeltsin neglected his allies, caroused too much and had psychological ups and downs, made strategic decisions arrhythmically, and overdid divide-and-rule. In his second term, these proclivities were in check. But, with his health impaired and his liabilities on the increase, his grip on the system he had forged slackened. The boss for the bosses now took evasive action as often as forward thrusts. His influence, though, was always far greater than anyone else’s, as his imposition of Putin in 1999 showed.
There is a fifth test to apply to the would-be hero in history. It concerns the forward projection of influence,
If we disentangle change in Russia’s mixed, post-Soviet economy from political change, it is striking how indicators have reversed in the second decade after communism. Ten years ago, the Yeltsin presidency was limping to its end and Russia was bankrupt. Today the country prospers, in “a remarkable trajectory no less exceptional than that of post–World War II Germany or Japan.”16 Output has surged by 7 percent a year, disposable income is up by 11 percent a year, foreign currency reserves stand at $450 billion, and the RTS stock index has topped 2,000 points, or fifty to sixty times the all-time low in 1998. The lines for matches, kettles, and caramels that Yeltsin had to act contrite for in Sverdlovsk in the 1980s are as quaintly remote from present-day experience as the early five-year plans.
Politically, on the other hand, we see a different picture. Russia under Yeltsin could be classified as “feckless pluralism,” less than a fully articulated democracy. The regime was characterized by the presence of considerable political freedoms and of electoral contestation, although democratic practices were shallowly rooted and there was widespread mistrust of the government. Yeltsin in his valedictory speech on December 31, 1999, proclaimed that, as he had hoped in the early 1990s, change was irreversible and Russia would “proceed only forward” from now on. If the forecast holds up reasonably well in the economy, it does not in politics, where the nation has in many regards gone backward. Russia now has a “dominant-power politics” in which there is “a limited but still real political space” and some electoral competition, and yet a single power grouping, the one hinged on Putin, “dominates the system in such a way that there seems to be little possibility of alternation of power in the foreseeable future.”17
This does not mean all hope for democracy is lost. At the social base, the modernization of Russia proceeds apace. The unshackling of the individual, begun under Gorbachev and intensified under Yeltsin, has positioned its citizens well to partake in innovations in communications that give them more autonomous access to information. At the end of 2007, some 29 million Russians, or one-fifth of the population, used the Internet with some frequency, as compared to 5.7 million in 1999, and Russia had the fastestgrowing Internet community in Europe. There were 3.1 million blogs in Russia in 2007. In a country of 142 million people, cell phones numbered more than 100 million. About 3 million Russians traveled abroad that year, with passports available for the asking and the costs affordable to more and more members of the new middle class.
