Developments signify that Russians treasure their personal independence but place a lower premium on political openness and accountability. In 1999, pulling off an extrication from peril worthy of Houdini and designating as his heir a KGB man through and through, Yeltsin’s vaunted intuition let him down, so far as political if not economic and social variables go. Putin has exploited the superpresidential constitution Yeltsin made and the base in public opinion Yeltsin taught him how to cultivate.18 Yeltsin unquestionably would have reversed the decision later if given the chance, sending Putin the way of Silayev, Gaidar, Chernomyrdin, Kiriyenko, Primakov, and Stepashin. But pensioned-off leaders do not get second chances on such matters, as he was aware. Putin’s political system, a dispassionate British scholar notes, retains “the potential for renewed democratic advance.”19 Assuming that is so, it will be up people other than Yeltsin to realize that potential.
It is vital, again, to keep in mind the full range of counterfactual alternatives to what has happened. Neo-Soviet impulses in Russia and the post-Soviet space would have been much harder to contain if Yeltsin had not dissolved the CPSU and the Soviet Union in 1991. Thanks to him, the barrier to re-monopolization is high, and tens of millions of others are lucky that it is.
I conclude that Boris Yeltsin, although he managed to do much more with the cards dealt him than the ho-hum eventful man, impinged rather less and in a less linear manner than Hook’s event-making man. To talk of the agent purposefully sculpting events is to cast the role in more architectonic terms than suit Yeltsin. Revising Hook somewhat, I envisage him as an event-shaping man, an intuitivist planted in intermediate ground between event making and eventfulness. The event-shaping man recognizes the fork in the historical road, shakes up the status quo, and bumps things off their familiar track. His inbuilt qualities magnify his influence, as do ambient tendencies and ripple effects. Concurrently, these same factors limit his ability to direct and to consolidate the changes he touches off, so that he comes up short of fulfilling promises and short of making his solutions stick. The event-shaping man kicks history’s wheels into motion, yes, but not invariably as he intends or as the situation requires.
In August 2007, Art4.ru, a private art gallery in the Moscow business district, organized an unofficial competition to design a monument to commemorate Boris Yeltsin. Nothing like the contest would have been conceivable in Soviet days. It received more than a hundred submissions from professional and amateur sculptors and graphic artists. Several dozen mockups were put on display at the gallery and on its website. The public was allowed to vote in person or electronically on five finalists selected by an expert jury. According to the coordinator, the entries fell into three categories. There were figural likenesses in the old socialist realist style. These were quickly discarded, as were “the bitter, sarcastic parodies, mostly from people who had fallen on bad luck in the 1990s and wanted to blame Yeltsin. . . . Then there were some really interesting pieces—very different from each other—that show a complicated picture of Yeltsin’s legacy.”20 The best of them captured significant and not always harmonious aspects of the historical Yeltsin.
The winner announced in October, by Dmitrii Kavarga, was a chaotic mass of dark metal with white figurines hanging upside-down from flat surfaces within it. One figure, Yeltsin, stands upright on top, which “emphasizes the force Yeltsin’s person had in a period of instability.”21 Another highly plastic scheme, by Yuliya Gukova, portrayed a rough-surfaced wall with a large crack, and out of the wall Yeltsin’s face, hands, and feet protrude. Its message was that Yeltsin was an inalienable part of the social reality he was trying to change. “With incredible, ox-like stubbornness, Yeltsin is turning the wall out of which he has grown and into which he has implanted himself. The wall turns just as the country’s history turned, and the crack is not only a yawning break in the wall but in him, too.”22 The runnerup, by Rostan Tavasiyev, was a fanciful image of Yeltsin as a toy rabbit at the foot of a wobbling stele, at the top of which sits a porcelain vase—all set against the backdrop of the Lubyanka, the KGB/FSB’s headquarters. Yeltsin here is a balancer instead of a dominator or sufferer. “Why the bunny?” the artist asked in his description. “Because there was no one else to do it. Maybe it was he who tipped it over or maybe he just happened to be near when the column started to fall.”23
