Yeltsin - Boris Yeltsin - column

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by D. Keith Mano

Yeltsin

TO LOW LIBRARY at Columbia, where once leftist students defecated in fine refutation of capitalism, came Yeltsin. Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin: Ural born, 58, robust, handsome, blunt--with great comic timing and Oriental eyes that remember, no doubt, a rape done by some foot soldier of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. Who will tell us: "I've been here only two days and the first thing that I've seen--is that capitalism is flourishing." Outside meanwhile: several Spartacist youth hold up a placard saying, RETURN TO THE ROAD OF LENIN AND MARX. That road never got paved: some commissar sold the asphalt for fifty packs of Dentine gum. "I think," said Yeltsin, elected Supreme Soviet member, "that we should throw off false pride and, in general, take much from American experience in all areas." I don't know, Boris. You should've been at Columbia in 1968.

I was. And, to me, this is an epiphany. The payback for 1,500 hours of sour confrontation and ad hominem abuse. It is enough to hear Yeltsin say--before however many thousand appreciative leftist academics--"All this time we've been completing the irreversible construction of socialism. In fact, out of the five components of socialism, only one has been implemented--the nationalization of property. And that was done very badly." Or, "Power should be transferred from the Party to the local soviets. We have to give enterprises the right to sever their relationship with the ministries. Every social question should be decided locally." Russians have said that in public before. But never, I think, a Russian who was returning to Moscow.

It is time, said Yeltsin, that we discuss some kind of multi-party system. Official privilege has been a scandal since Lenin. (Yeltsin renounced all perks.) An American slum tenement would be "decent" housing in Russia. (Yeltsin headed the Central Committee's construction department under Gorbachev.) Forty-eight million (of 280 million) Soviet people live below a seventy-ruble-per-month poverty line. The Russian space program is fraudulent. Military budgets suffocate. Decentralization is critical. Baltic republics should have the right to secede. Most of all: the USSR is run by "odious" and "incompetent" men. "We have to catapult them out. The way they do it with ejection seats in airplanes. We need someone who will push the button."

Which button Yeltsin himself had few qualms about poking when, by force, Gorbachev made him Moscow Party head. From December 1985 through November 1987 Yeltsin purged more than 80 per cent of the Moscow leadership--as well as, for instance, no fewer than eight hundred store managers. And his modus operandi had all the grace of a pistol whipping: public disgrace, innuendo, intimidation. Timothy J. Colton, writing in the Harriman Institute Forum, said, "Yeltsin's approach to human management at times smacked of Stalinism." Worse, his Moscow program was more impulsive and dramatic than particularly effective. One appointee quit after waiting ten months for an audience to discuss his new position. Yeltsin compensated with style: populist, high strung, visible, a borscht-circuit tummler. (He has recently published his phone number, 292-7273, if you're heading for Moscow.) Average Russians were (and still are) enchanted by Yeltsin. But, in October 1987, he gave an emotional speech before the Central Committee plenum criticizing Gorbachev. Who, bitten by his own borzoi, was livid. The several thousand Yeltsin had fired stood on line to volunteer as negative character witnesses. In February of 1988 Yeltsin fell.

Russia and the democratic West, I suspect, are profiting from an enormous and seductive ego here. Boris Yeltsin, like most men who have influenced civilization, may not be quite stable. By itself this appearance of public eccentricity and individualism in homogeneous, totalitarian Soviet culture is intriguing. Yeltsin's return to prominence, through the democratic Supreme Soviet election, was unforeseen. Colton, for one, dismissed him as an epiphenomenon after February 1988. Yeltsin is now the most popular man in Russia. And he has become more, not less, disruptive. It works, apparently. Yeltsin got to see Fifth Avenue.

As did another Soviet official, Nikita Khrushchev, with whom interesting comparisons can be made. Colton has written, "Yeltsin is the son of a Russian working class only a generation removed from the village, and no small partof what [Fyodor] Burlatsky writes of Khrushchev's mentality applies to him: 'paternalism, a tendency to interfere in all kinds of business and relations . . . an intolerance of other opinions.'" Yes, you could see Yeltsin with one shoe off. But, instead of burying us, Yeltsin put to rest whatever credibility Communism may have had left. On the question, "Do you still consider yourself a Communist?" Yeltsin had just one word--"Mmmpfff." Slow double-take: laughter. Then, "I don't know what's going to happen to me when I come home from the United States."