15 Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy (Life and reforms), 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), 1:281.
16 Dmitry Mikheyev, Russia Transformed (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1996), 48.
17 Boris Nikol’skii, Kremlëvskiye mirazhi (Kremlin mirages) (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2001), 124.
18 Stephen Hanson, “The Dilemmas of Russia’s Anti-Revolutionary Revolution,” Current History 100 (October 2001), 331.
19 Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 285. Clinton made the remark to U.S. officials traveling with him to meet Yeltsin in Moscow in the summer of 1998.
20 Sergei Filatov, Sovershenno nesekretno (Top nonsecret) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2000), 418–19.
21 Aleksandr Yakovlev, Sumerki (Dusk) (Moscow: Materik, 2003), 644 (italics added).
22 Talbott, Russia Hand, 185. Foreigners were not the only ones to spy these incongruities. A presidential press secretary was led to conclude Yeltsin was “warring against himself” (Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom: zapiski press-sekretarya [Romance with a president: notes of a press secretary] [Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997], 313). See also the general discussion in Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).
23 Here I follow Clayton Roberts, who defines a historical interpretation as “an abbreviation of a complete explanation” and “an assertion that some variable or number of variables are the most important causal agencies in a particular historical development.” Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 242, 245.
24 I have the dubious honor of being one of the first to do so, in Timothy J. Colton, “Moscow Politics and the Yeltsin Affair,” Harriman Institute Forum 1 (June 1988), 1–8.
25 Indicative of the latter is the claim by Solovyov and Klepikova, written in the last months of 1991 (Boris Yeltsin, 23): “Boris Yeltsin’s historical mission has been completed. The titanic role he played was a destructive one; we are not sure he has enough strength for constructive activity.”
26 As characterized, critically, by Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country,” Foreign Affairs 83 (March–April 2004), 20.
27 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 349.
28 Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 32. For a forceful summary, see Dusko Doder, “Russia’s Potemkin Leader,” The Nation, January 29, 2001. A noxious specimen of what can only be called hate journalism, published after Yeltsin’s death in 2007, is Matt Taibbi, “The Low Post: Death of a Drunk,” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/14272792.
29 I speak of a positive assessment beyond the empathy that usually goes with the writing of a life: “No honest biographer—as opposed to the propagandist or the avowed debunker—can long remain in company and consort with a subject and avoid at least a touch of empathy. Empathy . . . is the biographer’s spark of creation.” Frank E. Vandiver, “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” in James F. Veninga, ed., The Biographer’s Gift: Life Histories and Humanism (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983), 16–17.
30 Viktor Shenderovich, Kukly (Puppets) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1996), 35–36.
31 Frank Vandiver’s term, from “Biography as an Agent of Humanism,” 16.
CHAPTER ONE
1 A. K. Matveyev, Geograficheskiye nazvaniya Urala (Geographic names of the Urals) (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-Ural’skoye knizhnoye izdatel’stvo, 1980), 49–50. It has also been suggested that the name comes from budka, the term for a sentry box such as European settlers in the area would have set up, and slang for toilet stall. There is an eponymous Butka Lake southeast of the village of Butka and a Butka River (a creek, really) that flows into the Belyakovka from the right. But the lake is not connected to either river, and the conflux of the Butka and Belyakovka rivers is about twelve miles downstream of the village on the Belyakovka.
2 I. Butakov, “Butke—300 let” (Butka is 300 years old), Ural’skii rabochii, November 3, 1976.
