BORIS YEL'tsin and the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION of 1991 The

22 DONALD W. TREADGOLD (Seattle, WA, USA) BORIS YEL'TSIN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1991 The Historical Context: How do current events in Russia relate to the upheavals of the past? The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution of this century were attempts to uproot long-existing systems, not to undo any particular event or series of events from their countries' history. But the chief characteristic of the Russian Revolution of 1991 was its aim to reverse the events of October 1917 and the system that emerged from it, without having a clear positive goal in mind. Many outsiders believed that either the intent of the leaders or the natural outcome would be democracy and a market economy. Such an intent was unambiguously held only by a small coterie; what is t.o be the "natural" outcome remains obscure. Both optimists, who hail the overcoming of difficulties, and pessimists, who regard them as insuperable, may maintain that Russia never had any democracy in its past. That is a dubious assertion. Full-blown democracy anywhere is a product of only the last century or so. Partial self-government, of the sort found in ancient Athens and medieval Switzerland, had its coun- terparts in medieval Novgorod and Pskov and the early modern Cossacks, and the pre-revolutionary Russian Duma was not radically unlike the Prus- sian parliament. Neither nature nor nurture rules out the possibility of democracy in Russia. It depends on how individuals and groups react to the reali- ties. Presiding over the events of August 1991 and after has been Boris Yel'tsin. Let us not tarry on his apparent tendency to drink too much on oc- casion or his not fully explained absences from the capital in which both physical and mental health may play a part. He is not the klutz that Nikita Khrushchev was, not the moribund figurehead that Leonid Brezhnev became. Neither is he quite the easy cosmopolitan that a startled world found in Mikhail Gorbachev. Yel'tsin's Rise to Prominence: Bom in the Sverdlovsk region, having lost his father to the Stalinist system when he was six, Yel'tsin moved from his student days into building 23 construction. Success led him into Party membership, and he became First Secretary for Sverdlovsk. In April 1985, soon after Gorbachev became Gen- eral Secretary, he was called to Moscow - by none other than Egor Ligachev, former First Secretary in not too distant Tomsk, who had come to know and admire Yel'tsin as a hard worker who was not corrupt. Within a few months he replaced Viktor Grishin as Party chief of Moscow city. Up till then he had done his job without fuss or flourish; now he turned into a charismatic fig- ure, as he visited streets and shops and attacked abuse of power by the time- servers in the bureaucracy. At that stage, recognizing the depth of the crisis in the Soviet Union, he believed the problem was simply bad appointments. However, he began to ask himself whether the system itself was at fault. Butting his head against what was still a quite solid wall, he was forced out of the Moscow first secre- taryship and candidate membership of the Politburo in November 1987, after being brutally routed out of a hospital bed to attend a Central Committee meeting. It looked as if he was finished. He was not. In June 1988 he chal- lenged Ligachev at the nineteenth Party Conference. The reformers whose . spokesman he became gained mcmentum sufficient to lead Gorbachev to re- organize the leadership, transferring Ligachev and retiring Gromyko and other elders. In March 1989 Yel'tsin, standing in Moscow rather-than his home base of Sverdlovsk, won election to the new USSR Congress of People's Deputies with nearly 90 percent of the vote. The CPD elected him to the Supreme So- viet, where he led a new reformist faction called the Interregional Group. In September he made a private lecture tour of the United States. He had been outside the Communist orbit only twice, to West Germany, and he was daz- zled by his American trip - above all by a ten-minute visit to a supermarket, an experience certain to dazzle almost any Soviet or ex-Soviet cilizen. In March 1990 he ran for a seat in the RSFSR Congress of Peoples' Deputies and won more than 80 percent of the vote. He soon was elected Chairman of the Presidium ("President") of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, against Gorbachev's and others' opposition. The reformers now controlled the White House (Belyi Dom), the headquarters of the RSFSR government built under Brezhnev. The reformers were riding high, and the USSR CPD repealed Article 6 of the Brezhnev Constitution, thereby abolishing the Communist Party's monopoly of power. When the 28th Congress met in July, Yel'tsin demon- stratively resigned from the Party altogether. As President, Yel'tsin both benefited by pressure for increasing autonomy and led assumption of greater initiative for Russia. This process in turn was initiated by the other republics, and also by local, subrepublican, authorities. Gorbachev made the mistake - he subsequently recognized it as one of his most serious errors - of resisting the centrifugal forces that had sprung up. In .

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