Archie Brown

No one can ever take away from Boris Yeltsin the fact that he was the first Russian leader to be elected by the people. Equally, no one should forget that he would have remained a little known regional party boss had not Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a vast range of new freedoms and then competitive elections, making the Soviet political system different in kind.

Yeltsin had his merits and some major achievements. He was courageous. His finest hour was when he led the opposition to the 1991 coup by those who wished to turn the clock back to pre-perestroika times.

A vast amount of nonsense has, however, been talked in recent days about Yeltsin introducing

freedom and democracy to Russia. He did neither. A gradual liberalisation was initiated by Gorbachev from the time he became party leader in 1985; this turned to serious democratisation in 1988.

Yeltsin was never part of Gorbachev’s inner circle. After his removal from candidate membership of the Politburo in 1988, he was sidelined until competitive elections were held in 1989. It was, however, in the intervening period that crucial decisions were taken by Gorbachev to transform the Soviet system. In 1988-89, glasnost developed into a freedom of speech and publication unknown for 70 years.

Even more important was the decision to move to contested elections, sprung by Gorbachev on the 1988 party conference. With those elections in 1989, the Soviet Union ceased to be a communist system.

Yeltsin played a far smaller part in democratisation than in the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was odd for the leader of the Russian republic, which Yeltsin became with his election to the chairmanship of the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1990 and to the presidency in 1991, to support Russian “independence”. It made sense in terms of his desire to usurp Gorbachev, but did nothing to promote democratisation in many of the successor states.

Popular support for democracy was further undermined by the sell-off of Russia’s natural resources to pre-selected buyers at knock-down prices. The level of corruption was such that his main concern, when picking a successor, was to find someone who would safeguard him from prosecution.

Yeltsin’s main merit as president of post-Soviet Russia was that he preserved many of the freedoms introduced by Gorbachev. His principal fault was that he helped discredit the very ideas of democracy which had evoked real enthusiasm in the last three years of the Soviet Union. This was partly a result of his lack of interest in democratic institution-building. He was disdainful of political parties. He was scarcely less dismissive of legislatures, most literally in 1993 when he ordered the bombardment of the parliament building. He had little understanding of the significance of the rule of law. Yeltsin came close to cancelling the 1996 presidential contest and only allowed it to go ahead when he knew that, with TV on his side and huge sums of money from the oligarchs, he could win. Although he launched a bloody and unnecessary war in Chechnya, he gave substantial leeway to regional governors and the presidents of the republics. He believed Russia was too large to be governed exclusively from the centre. Devolution, though, was at the expense of freedom and democracy.