Yeltsin полностью

62 The expression is associated with the views of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. Shock therapy in the narrow sense was first applied in Bolivia in 1985 and, in Eastern Europe, in Poland in 1990. Sachs, then at Harvard University and now at Columbia, modeled his approach on Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany’s postwar recovery.

63 Yel’tsin, Marafon, 102. The passage on potato planting is mistranslated in the English version of the memoir as “just as potatoes were introduced under Catherine the Great.” Peter is thought to have brought potatoes back from Holland around 1700 and to have encouraged their cultivation in the greenhouses at his Strelna Palace, outside St. Petersburg.

64 Muzhskoi razgovor. Some leading Russian historians, now free to chastise the past, debunked Peter in the 1990s as a clumsy autocrat, at the same time Yeltsin thought he was imitating him. Ernest A. Zitser, “Post-Soviet Peter: New Histories of the Late Muscovite and Early Imperial Russian Court,” Kritika 6 (Spring 2003), 375–92.

65 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 235. For roughly the first year after the 1991 coup, Yeltsin often referred to a communist return to power as a real and present danger. In May 1992, for example, he spoke in favor of quick changes to the Russian constitution. “Otherwise those forces that are grouping together right now, the former party apparatus, will develop to the point that it would be very difficult to struggle with them.” “Boris Yel’tsin: ya ne skryvayu trudnostei.”

66 Burtin, “Gorbachev prodolzhayetsya,” 60.

67 Ibid.

68 Yurii Afanas’ev, “Proshël god . . . ” (A year has passed), in Burtin and Molchanov, God posle avgusta, 9.

69 Telen’, “Izbiratel’ Boris Yel’tsin.”

70 Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 105.

71 Baturin et al., Epokha, 177. Yeltsin said in the speech that the price reform would take place before the end of December. Gaidar and his team had pushed him not to give a definite date.

72 “Yeltsin Discusses Candidacy, Issues, Rivals,” FBIS-SOV-91-110 (June 7, 1991), 64–65. During the campaign Yeltsin also made crowd-pleasing promises that were sure to complicate any move to the market, such as indexing minimum wages, pensions, and student stipends at 150 percent of the USSR average. These benefits, he assured voters, would be funded by withholding financial transfers to the Soviet government. In June 1990 he stated that he was working with three alternative schemes for price reform, all of which “foresee a mechanism that will rule out a lowering of living standards.” L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 205.

73 “Obrashcheniye Prezidenta Rossii.”

74 Gaidar, first interview with the author (September 14, 2000). Yeltsin said in his October speech that he had promised improvement by late 1992 in his presidential election campaign; I have not found any such statement. Gaidar writes in his memoir that, beginning with Five Hundred Days, the time limits in various reform plans were useful mostly as hooks for getting Yeltsin and the politicians to sign on to radical reform. “By itself, the realism or unrealism of a program had no significance from an economic point of view. But even a false idea, once taken aboard by the masses, becomes a material force.” Gaidar, Dni porazhenii i pobed, 65. Yeltsin had to deal with that force before and after Gaidar’s exit.

75 Nine percent of Russian workers polled by sociologists in 1993 had not received the previous month’s wage in full. This proportion reached 49 percent in 1994 and 66 percent at the beginning of 1996. Eighteen percent of employees in 1994, and 32 percent in 1996, received no wages in the previous month. Hartmut Lehmann and Jonathan Wadsworth, “Wage Arrears and the Distribution of Earnings in Russia,” William Davidson Institute, University of Michigan, Working Paper 421 (December 2001).