Reinventing Tsar Boris

In January 1996, expressing his disgust at the brutal assault on the Dagestani village of Pervomaiskoye and appalled by Boris Yeltsin's schoolboy depiction of the "38 snipers," Yegor Gaidar announced that his split from the Russian president was "final and irrevocable." "Final and irrevocable?" queried Yevgeny Kiselyov, who was interviewing him live on television. "Final and irrevocable," repeated Gaidar.


A few months later, when Yeltsin was miraculously reinvented on the campaign trail, Gaidar took his words back and declared his support for Yeltsin as president. Somewhat embarrassingly for a politician, he decided to revoke the irrevocable. The question then arises: If someone who knew the president as well as Gaidar, Yeltsin's one-time prime minister, could change his mind so radically and then change it again, where does that leave the rest of us?


The moral weight of this question -- of what Yeltsin really stands for -- is judged in the balance by the Chechen war; for the father of modern Russian democracy was also the brute who unleashed the carnage in Chechnya. And the question is even starker now that evidence has emerged showing how clear and direct was Yeltsin's responsibility in starting the conflict. Yes, he was surrounded by a coterie of hawkish advisers, but he was also a politician of famous intuition, and in November 1994, he had access to a range of different sources of information. Nonetheless he ordered the defense minister, Pavel Grachev, to press ahead and plan an invasion. This was a decision of an altogether different kind from the messy little crackdowns of the Gorbachev years, where culpability is shared around. This time the president made a cold and deliberate decision to go to war.


Witnesses tell how on Nov. 29, 1994, three days after the failed assault by the Chechen opposition on Grozny, Yeltsin forthrightly and gruffly told everyone at the Security Council to vote in favor of the use of force in Chechnya. Yury Kalmykov, the justice minister, who tried to object and say "that is not how you behave in the Caucasus," was brushed aside. As in the Politburo, they had to vote first and discuss it later. Later in the meeting when Kalmykov again voiced his objections, Yeltsin shut him up and to told him his views were his own and his own alone. The president's mind was made up, and the rules of Soviet politics meant that once the boss had decided, there was no dissension.


By opting bearishly for the military route in Chechnya, Yeltsin deliberately reinvented himself and cut himself off from the generation of reformers who had supported him from 1989 to 1991 -- people like Otto Latsis, the Izvestia commentator who backed Yeltsin as the leader of the democratic movement and who then became the most prominent press critic of the Chechen war. In 1996 after the Pervomaiskoye debacle, Latsis publicly resigned from the "presidential council," the group of intellectuals who occasionally offered advice to Yeltsin. As late as the spring of 1996, Yeltsin was publicly brusque with another critic of the war, the governor of Nizhny Novgorod, Boris Nemtsov, who had collected 1 million signatures to protest against the bloodshed.


Now consider this: In January this year, Kalmykov, the man who stood up to Yeltsin at the Security Council and who then resigned in protest, died of a heart attack at the age of 64. The first man to sign his public obituary was Yeltsin. Last month, the president handed out a "Golden Pen" award in the Kremlin for distinguished achievement in journalism. The recipient was Latsis. And of course that other outspoken critic of the war, Nemtsov, has now been made first deputy prime minister and all but Yeltsin's heir apparent.


Should we laugh or cry or both? Yeltsin has become anti-Yeltsin, has negated himself. In the most indirect way possible, without once uttering the word "Chechnya," he has admitted that his critics were right and rewarded them. That will not restore the wasted lives of the dead Chechen pensioners and children. The mea culpa is half-hearted and politically expedient. But it shows that Yeltsin is not Leonid Brezhnev. He had acknowledged very obliquely that the mass bloodshed was a mistake.


If a pattern emerges from this, it is that Russia is an elected monarchy more than it is a democracy. There is only one politician in the country and everyone else is an appendage. The monarch makes his mistakes and the monarch corrects them, while the people are supposed to watch impassively and pretend that nothing has happened.


Yeltsin is an extraordinary modern politician in that his career has not headed in one direction but gone in circles. Last year, degradation was followed by regeneration, then by debilitating illness when he seemed to be finished again and then by renaissance once more this year. Yeltsin the Butcher of Grozny has again become Yeltsin the Democrat (revisited).


It would be too simplistic to ascribe these shifts just to Yeltsin's masterly instinct for hanging on to power. His political intuition leads him to the most ruthless acts, but the pattern has always been for him to swing back again with even more reformist zeal. But my optimism is stayed by two disturbing thoughts. The first is that Yeltsin's character is ruthless enough that, if need be, he will swing back once more to defend his throne, even if that means bloodshed. The second is that although history may rate him overall as a good tsar, he will hand on the legacy of a tsar, not a president, to his successor in the Kremlin.





Thomas de Waal is co-author, with Carlotta Gall, of "Chechnya: A Small Victorious War," which will be published by Macmillan this September. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.