Against the Grain
Yeltsin, Boris
B Yeltsin, the Huey Long of ..1- 3 Russia, is impulsive, egomaniacal, and paranoid (also persecuted). He refers to himself, correctly, as "prickly, sharp-tongued, the scourge of the...
...Everything the Supreme Soviet does is undertaken too late...
...He could at least have explained how he happened to become a member of the Communist party, what ideas of Marx and Lenin he found attractive, where he got his notions of democracy and capitalism, and so on...
...He's a rabble-rousing popFred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Nevertheless, the major improvements, especially in the American economy, were there for all to see...
...Still, any Russian who attacks Gorby can't be all bad...
...At times he sounds like a wooly-minded liberal...
...But what, specifically, does this mean...
...ulist with enormous national appeal...
...He's also for "elimination of all structural and financial limitations to the enterprises and labor collectives...
...He says the socialist ideal—I`From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'!—applies to party leaders...
...After inspecting the spacious country house, Yeltsin and his family were asked what they thought of it...
...I will not even bother to discuss such notions as social justice, the stratification of society, and the huge differences in standards of living...
...Not many can keep up with him, he insists, but he doesn't hold that against them...
...My guess is that Yeltsin drives Gorbachev nuts...
...If somebody says something to him that does not fit into his picture, he doesn't hear it...
...The folks who actually get to question Gorbachev "have been carefully screened and selected, and are brought to the spot in special buses...
...I always stood out from the other students—especially because of my energy and drive...
...There Gorbachev's chief weakness—his fear of taking the decisive but difficult steps that are needed—has been fully revealed...
...Yeltsin's most withering attack is on the system of privileges—limousines, plush housing, gourmet food, fancy vacations, expensive clothes, dachas—for the Communist party's upper crust...
...The seat is from Moscow, where Yeltsin is a carpetbagger, not Sverdlovsk, where he lived until 1985...
...Yeltsin says he doesn't want to "theorize," but I wish he had...
...Why...
...Like our chairman, it is constantly lagging behind the march of events...
...Even as a boy, Yeltsin says, he was an attention-grabber...
...He refers to himself, correctly, as "prickly, sharp-tongued, the scourge of the over-bureaucratized party apparat...
...The best example of Gorbachev's failure is the "catastrophic" economy...
...He has prevented the state-run Soviet press from running interviews with Yeltsin, while encouraging or at least allowing publications to trash Yeltsin on the flimsiest of grounds...
...I don't think so...
...Yeltsin is the one radical reformer whom Gorbachev cannot isolate or otherwise dismiss lightly...
...Or maybe he's a demagogue using the issue against the people standing between him and the top...
...If that sort of criticism infuriates Gorby, wait until he hears of Yeltsin's unfavorable comparison of him with President Reagan...
...Yeltsin thinks Gorbachev is addicted to "half-measures and marking time...
...He doesn't say...
...Yeltsin says Gorbachev's political antennae should have told him the time was ripe for such a move...
...He admits to being obstinate...
...There's a reason for this: Yeltsin has got Gorbachev pegged and Gorby knows it...
...But their needs...
...The answer to this, I suppose, is that Yeltsin is not an organized, deep, or reflective person...
...I'm inclined to believe the latter...
...He's for private property and explains this by saying that "only when the land is worked by the people who own it will the country be fed...
...Yeltsin, who ought to know, is cynical about Gorbachev's man-in-thestreet encounters...
...Their needs are so great that so far it has only been possible to create real communism for a couple of dozen people...
...Eat your heart out, Gorby...
...all that goes without saying...
...You can't ride two horses at once...
...erestroika, argues Yeltsin, has "efi- fectively skidded to a halt...
...I don't follow his logic, and Yeltsin doesn't explain except to note that Gorby had a new house built for himself in Moscow and a new dacha outside Moscow...
...Yeltsin says he likes to work 16- .to 20-hour days...
...And that is why so many urgently needed measures have not been passed into law...
...Against the Grain needs some ideological ballast...
...Yeltsin contends that Gorbachev's failure to curb privileges for the party bosses doomed perestroika...
...As you can see, Yeltsin is self-righteous, thin-skinned, overbearing, and full of himself...
...Yeltsin is not an intellectual with a narrow elitist following in Moscow...
...Gorbachev is unwilling to "tackle the bureaucracy head-on...
...He boasts that he sleeps no more than three or four hours a night...
...He sought to block his nomination as a candidate for congress in 1989, then tried to defeat him in the election...
...Worse, it's unclear what Yeltsin's agenda is now, other than to be elected to higher offices...
...We were shattered by the senselessness of it all," he says...
...If nothing else, it would make the book longer and perhaps give us some confidence that this is a guy we can do business with...
...Yeltsin says he worked weekends and nights on it, and the book reads that way...
...The Gip-per "turned out not to be such a simpleton as we had been led to believe —although several sore spots remained, which he was unable to cure in eight years...
...It's a quickie in the worst sense...
...Rather than the Man of the Decade, Gorbachev is a clever trimmer who's neither decisive nor visionary...
...Gorbachev has tried repeatedly to discredit or destroy Yeltsin...
...On the contrary, "it is `Gorbachevian,' faithfully reflecting our chairman's inconsistency and timidity, his love of half-measures and semidecisions," says Yeltsin...
...Other times, he sounds like an official with an edifice complex...
...He got 89.6 percent of the vote in winning a contested seat in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies last year...
...He ousted Yeltsin from the Politburo in 1987...
...AGAINST THE GRAIN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Boris Yeltsin/Summit Books/265 pp...
...Maybe Yeltsin means that you can't change the system for the better while exploiting it systematically...
...Yeltsin rejects the charge of fellow reformer Yuri Afanasyev that the Supreme Soviet, the inner council of the congress of deputies, is "StalinistBrezhnevite" in its makeup...
...His biggest achievement as party leader in Sverdlovsk, he writes, was building a 312-mile highway...
...When he became a party bigwig in 1985, Yeltsin inherited the dacha that belonged to Gorbachev...
...It is my belief that if Gorbachev didn't have a Yeltsin he would have had to invent one," he writes...
...It's disorganized, shallow, and extremely unreflective...
...Nothing but a masquerade," he says...
...He also had another dacha renovated and still another ultramodern one built for his use in the Crimea...
...That's not good enough...
...19.95 Fred Barnes 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990...
...And it is always a monologue...
...He says Soviet leaders should, first and foremost, "be concerned about people...
...He's not even programmatic...
...They were non-plussed...
...A few people stand talking to Gorbachev, while all around them is a solid ring of bodyguards...
...T here's another problem with this book...
...He is too busy putting across what he wants to say...
...But Gorbachev is trying to please "both sides simultaneously—the party establishment and the people...
...But what was the point of the whole thing...
...Andrei Sakharov was another...
...The abilities of these "obsequious, obedient, and unchanging" men, as he calls them, are non-existent...
...And there wasn't much to it to begin with, he adds, except for "a selection of new, fine-sounding slogans and appeals...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
