I have a personal story to tell about the late Boris Yeltsin, who would have been 80 this week. He had a chance to change my life for the worse, but did not use it.
In 1993 he abruptly cancelled an important official visit to Japan, the first one he had to pay as the head of the newly established Russian Federation. As a young diplomatic correspondent for Izvestia, then Russia’s most respected and widely read newspaper, I had written an ironic piece, trying to imagine how the visit would have gone.
I thought I had written a great piece. On the day it was published, Izvestia’s editor-in-chief, the late and much lamented Igor Golembiovsky, had an unusual phone call. Russia’s president was on the line and complained to him, “I have nothing against this fellow criticizing me. What I thought wrong was this sarcasm and cheap irony. Not what I’d expect Izvestia to publish”.
Having spent most of his life under the yoke of communist ideologists, Mr Golembiovsky thought Yeltsin would ask him to fire me or at least punish in some other way. He was prepared to stand his ground. “Well, he is young, this Eggert. He will grow up”, was the only thing Yeltsin said before hanging up. Boris Nikolayevich could be difficult but he was never petty.
As Russia celebrates his 80th birthday, subtly but decently, I am reminded of a conversation I had a few years ago with an English friend, a reporter, who has spent many years in Russia. When I told him of my belief that both Gorbachev and Yeltsin will eventually be hailed by future generations of Russians as great statesmen, he retorted: “Gorbachev – yes, but Yeltsin –never!” I hope to see him in a few days to ask whether he has changed his mind. More and more people in Russia, with different, sometimes diametrically opposing political views concede – Yeltsin’s 1990s were far from a kind of dark age of chaos, but a complex epoch which changed Russia forever – and, for the most part, made it a better place.
Significantly, this is what Dmitry Medvedev talked about while opening a monument to the late president. Yeltsin defeated the Communists and prevented them from staging a comeback. He also decisively broke with the planned economy and threw Russia into the tumult of the marketplace. He launched the biggest privatization project in the history of humanity. He became the first freely elected head of state in Russian history. It was on Yeltsin’s watch and due to him that Russia adopted a new, democratic constitution and conducted its first real parliamentary elections. Russia’s first president was a staunch guarantor of the freedom of the speech and put Russia on a track to major cooperation with the West, the Russia-NATO charter being just one, but by no means only example. If this is not what makes a politician great, than I do not know what does.
Boris Yeltsin’s failures were also numerous, but two stand out. One, as he himself admitted, was the war in Chechnya. It corrupted the army, undermined Russia’s nascent democracy and led to the less than glorious twilight of his presidency. The consequences are still with us, in many a sphere of public and private life.
Another failure is less perceptible, but nevertheless acute: all through the 1990s Yeltsin struggled to give Russia a new identity, something to signify a clear break with the Soviet past. He ordered the remains of Emperor Nicholas II and his family to be buried in St Petersburg in 1998, thus symbolically ending Russia’s civil war – and awarding posthumous victory to the anti-Communist “whites”. However, Yeltsin did not succeed in vaccinating the Russians from the delusions of dated Soviet-style grandeur, besieged fortress mentality and the habit of shifting their blame on the others. This is the task that remains to be tackled.
Yeltsin was a likeable man. I remember Alexander Rutskoi speaking to the BBC a few minutes after hearing about Yeltsin’s death. He was briefly his vice-president, but ended up as a leader of an armed rebellion in autumn 1993, which was ruthlessly put down by the army on Yeltsin’s orders. Yet he said, “Our disagreements are irrelevant today. Personally, he was never vicious or vindictive towards me”.
As opposed to most politicians, Yeltsin was capable of magnanimity, generosity of spirit and frank admission of his own mistakes. While resigning on December 31st 1999, he asked those who lost their loved ones in the North Caucasus for forgiveness. Few Russian rulers, if any at all, ever did anything like that. This is what was striking about Boris Nikolayevich – he was larger than life, yet he was in many respects a typical Russian. At the same time he could be cunning and sincere, impulsive and scheming, suspicious of intellectualism but deeply respectful of other people’s knowledge and experience, not very religious – but also capable of spontaneous and sincere belief.
Derided and disliked, Boris Yeltsin carried his historical burden until the very end, just as another great Russian - Mikhail Gorbachev - still does. However, as opposed to Gorbachev, with his endless stream of self-apologies, Yeltsin never picked a fight with his critics. Early on, he knew: he had forever become an icon of Russian history - and behaved accordingly. He gave the Russian people an opportunity to find a sense of civic dignity and self-respect, which only free men possess. When they eventually use this chance, it will be the final vindication of Boris Yeltsin’s revolutionary life.
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What is Russia's place in this world? Unashamed and unreconstructed Atlanticist, Konstantin von Eggert believes his country to be part and parcel of the "global West." And while this is a minority view in Russia, the author is prepared to fight from his corner.
Konstantin Eggert is an independent Russian journalist and political analyst. In the 1990s he was Diplomatic Correspondent for “Izvestia” and later the BBC Russian Service Moscow Bureau Editor. Konstantin has also spent some time working as ExxonMobil Vice-President in Russia. He was made Honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
