Yeltsin Legacy Impressive but Clouded

MOSCOW —  Boris N. Yeltsin was Russia’s first democratically elected president. That much is indisputable. Under his leadership, communism was dismantled and the country set out to build a new economic and political system. That is also indisputable.

But Russia’s future remains cloudy, and so does Yeltsin’s legacy. Since earning reelection in 1996, Yeltsin has been obsessed with how he will go down in history. He has repeatedly drawn attention to his achievements--to the fact that he presided over the bloodless collapse of a feared superpower, that he built a market economy, and that he would be the first elected Russian president to voluntarily transfer power to a successor.

However, none of those achievements is unblemished.

Eight years after the Soviet collapse, Russia does indeed have a nominal democracy. Elections have by and large taken place on time, and voting violations have largely been minor enough not to affect the outcome.

But it’s a democracy in which a few national media outlets, operated by no more than a handful of oligarchs, can manipulate public opinion to determine the outcome of the vote. Parliamentary elections just two weeks ago, which were swung by smear campaigns on state television, illustrated how malleable Russia’s fledgling democracy can be.

It’s also a democracy in which political elites form and re-form blocs and alliances that have more to do with their personal allegiances than ideology, political principles or policies. And it is a democracy in which Russians dutifully go to the polls but don’t believe their vote matters.

In March, Yeltsin’s chosen successor--former KGB agent Vladimir V. Putin--is widely expected to be elected by popular vote. If that happens, it will confirm that in just five months, a small coterie of Kremlin power brokers can make an unknown former spy into a president by the sheer force of television.

To be sure, Russia has many of the trappings of democracy. And, for the most part, Yeltsin ruled constitutionally.

But his constitution was one he wrote for himself and rammed through a national referendum widely believed to have been rigged. It was tailored to give the president near-authoritarian powers, reducing parliament to a nay-saying body that more often than not has debated much and legislated little.

Yeltsin succeeded in convincing the West that his rule was synonymous with “democracy”--an image burned into the public eye when he climbed on a tank to face down coup plotters in 1991.

But little that followed lived up to that moment. In 1993, when a group of deputies refused to kowtow to the president’s authority, he reimposed it by sending out tanks to shell parliament. And then he rewrote the constitution to ensure he would never face such a challenge again.

Eight years after the Soviet collapse, Russia does indeed have a rudimentary market economy. Most industry has been privatized, consumer prices are largely fixed by the market, and most currency controls have been lifted.

But it is an economy that has suffered two major banking crises that have wiped out the savings of ordinary Russians. It is an economy in which the most profitable state industries were sold for kopecks to a handful of insiders, who made astronomical fortunes by stripping their assets. Most of that money was shipped to foreign bank accounts, leaving Russia with fewer jobs, little cash, and about one-half of its former GDP.

It’s also an economy presided over by a government that for most of Yeltsin’s tenure was unable to perform basic state functions--collecting taxes, paying pensions, and supporting public services such as schools and hospitals.

The government also has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to give real power to a court system. As a result, many contracts are unenforceable, shareholders have no guarantee that their stock certificates have real value, and many foreign investors stay far, far away. Protection rackets have thrived in the vacuum, creating a culture of get-rich-quick lawlessness.

Yeltsin was an astute politician, and managed to shed blame for the errors of his reign, passing most of it on to a succession of prime ministers--six in all.

He even once acknowledged that his biggest mistake may have been to launch a war against the separatist republic of Chechnya in 1994, a decision that cost thousands of lives and nearly got him impeached last spring. But just a few months after the near-impeachment, his administration went to war against the rebels again. This time, however, it was to great public approval.

Historians may be more discerning. In the last six months, allegations of corruption have lapped at the Kremlin, tainting some of Yeltsin’s closest aides and his two daughters. The Russian political rumor mill has repeatedly speculated that Yeltsin would have resigned long ago if he could be assured that the sins of his tenure and his inner circle would not come back to haunt him.

In this light, his early retirement is likely to be seen as a kind of preemptive strike, installing a loyal and powerful successor before demand increases for a full public accounting of Yeltsin’s past, and before the successor’s shine dims.

Nonetheless, the question that is likely to perplex the future is different: Was all of this avoidable? Could things have been better if Yeltsin had been more deeply committed to democracy, if his aides had been more forthright?

Perhaps, in the end, future historians will conclude that the transition Russia faced was so enormous and so complex that this was, in fact, the best possible outcome. After all, unlike much of Eastern Europe, Russia barely had a market system before it had Bolshevism. It never had a tradition of democracy before it had one-party rule.

Even so, Yeltsin’s legacy will be tarnished. To most Russians, Yeltsin has given “reform” a bad name. The country still longs for order, and politicians and analysts warn that Russia could still fall prey to authoritarianism.

Perhaps, in the end, Yeltsin’s greatest legacy will be that, despite eight years of hardship and humiliation, Russia did not slip back into full-fledged authoritarianism. If nothing else, while he was in charge, hope for democracy and freedom may not have thrived, but it did not perish.