76 Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), the most adulatory of the Western studies, is no exception. Some of the most positive reviews of Yeltsin’s policies have been made by liberal economists. See especially Anders Åslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), and Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Andrei Shleifer, A Normal Country: Russia after Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Cf. for diametrically opposed analyses Stefan Hedlund, Russia’s “Market” Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (London: UCL, 1999); Jerry F. Hough, The Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2001); Marshall I. Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (London: Routledge, 2003); and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
77 Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New York: Norton, 2000), 41, 49, 58. See also Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15 (January–March 1999), 37–55.
78 Reddaway and Glinski, Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 306, 629, 627. Less frequently, and not any more helpfully, Yeltsin has been gibbeted for the opposite vice, of infinite flexibility and unprincipledness. “Like many successful politicians,” writes Michael Specter, a Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times in the 1990s, “he is a human mood ring, a man whose ideology changes with the seasons, with the country he is visiting, with the phases of the moon. Such tactics work in Russia, which has never really decided whether it belongs in Europe or Asia.” Michael Specter, “My Boris,” New York Times Magazine, July 26, 1998. Another analyst, who met Yeltsin several times in the company of Richard Nixon, writes of him as selfobsessed and “devoid of any meaningful purpose beyond his own political fortunes.” Dmitri K. Simes, After the Collapse: Russia Seeks Its Place as a Great Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 137.
79 Main indicators are conveniently summarized in Åslund, Building Capitalism ; Shleifer, Normal Country; and Peter T. Leeson and William N. Trumbull, “Comparing Apples: Normalcy, Russia, and the Remaining Post-Socialist World,” Post-Soviet Affairs 22 (July–September 2006), 225–48.
80 The military-industrial complex, currency question, and oil pricing were largely out of Moscow’s hands. Not so the London Club (commercial) and Paris Club (sovereign) debts of the Soviet Union. Moscow assumed these $100 billion worth of obligations in exchange for Russia having the agreed-upon status of legal heir to the USSR. It was forced to restructure the sovereign debt twice in the Yeltsin years, in 1996 and 1999, and retired it in 2006.
81 This point is well made in M. Steven Fish, “Russian Studies Without Studying,” Post-Soviet Affairs 17 (October–December 2001), 332–74, which is a reply to Cohen’s “Russian Studies Without Russia.” See more generally Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
82 As argued in William Tompson, “Was Gaidar Really Necessary? Russian ‘Shock Therapy’ Reconsidered,” Problems of Post-Communism 49 (July–August 2002), 1–10.
83 Andrei Grachëv, Dal’she bez menya: ukhod prezidenta (Go ahead without me: the exit of a president) (Moscow: Progress, 1994), 82.
84 Gorbachev arrived in Beijing for a state visit on May 15, 1989, just as the Tienanmen student protest began. The demonstrators were admirers of his and timed their action to coincide with his arrival, so as to deter the police from reprisal. They displayed banners praising Gorbachev, which he would have seen from his motorcade that day. The government declared martial law on May 20, after his departure, and cracked down on the protesters on June 3–4.
