Twilight of a Revolutionary

...Having led the way in finishing off the Soviet Union...

...Moreover, he thought a shock was needed to awaken the country, and that Russia was strong and rich enough to take it...

...The former wanted a full-fledged overthrow ??with bloodshed if necessary??while the latter preferred a peaceful transfer of power, and no agreement was reached...

...From this perspective, his fondness for Chernomyrdin and the antidemocratic Skokov is understandable...

...According to his own evidence, Yeltsin deprived Gaidar's reforms of any reasonable chance to succeed...

...He divides the Army into an elite of "highly professional combat units that had served in Afghanistan" and a "gigantic 'kitchen garden' army" used for harvesting crops and repairing roads...

...and Shamil Tarpishchev, his tennis trainer and now officially the presidential sports adviser...

...This book is an attempt to explain myself...

...An assessment of the individual personalities involved adds to our understanding of why none was able to emerge as the leader...

...He writes of sitting alone and staring (though he he does not discuss his medical state or drinking habits...

...Alongside his radicalism, Yeltsin has exhibited a penchant for compromising with those who oppose his aims, and that undermined Gaidar's spring 1992 reforms...

...The second circle is rather frightening...

...Yeltsin suggests the real cause, however, may have been that he, then Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Kazakhstan's President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev had decided to sack the Prime Minister, the Chairman of the KGB and the Minister of Interior just before Gorbachev went on holiday to the Crimea...

...I came to the presidency with the idea of making a clean break with our Soviet heritage, not merely through various reforms but geopolitically, through an alteration of Russia's role as a powerful, enduring, long-suffering nation...

...His most costly error, he believes, is having missed the opportunity to radically restructure the parliamentary system after the '91 coup...

...he communicated with them through his First Deputy Prime Minister, Gennadi E. Burbulis, most of the time...

...but achieved nonetheless...

...It includes two formidable KGB generals, Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin's chief bodyguard, and Mikhail Barzukov, chief of the main security directorate...

...Such sloppiness aside, the book's confessional, highly personal tone will make it a rich lode for psychohistorians...

...In part, this may be due to Yeltsin's growing preoccupation with security...

...Incredibly, Yeltsin also admits that he hardly knew his economic reform ministers...

...Instead, he felt obliged to work with the old bureaucracy to maintain political stability...

...Its length is a measure of the importance he attaches to the internal work of the KGB and the military...

...He considers the growth of independent entrepreneur-ship more significant than increasing crime, because "there is no real human independence without private property...

...Still, some actions remain unexplained, such as his failure to appear on television the night of October 3. Nor does he speak of the disorder at the Kremlin...

...Yeltsin praises him for his modesty...

...When one of them made an unpopular proposal to liberalize energy prices, Yeltsin fired him under pressure from the state managers, for whom he had more respect...

...On the other hand, his passion for the two activities he enjoys most, tennis and sauna baths, seems to approach the fanatic...

...Why has this standing President published a book that may do his own political future more harm than good...

...The book's tone is decidedly anti-imperialist...

...along with Soviet Communism and the Communist economy??he has since tried to bring democracy, a market economy and the rule of law to Russia...

...About his views on democracy there is not a word...

...Discussing the political standoff in March 1993, he sounds like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "If [the Parliament] dumped the President, that would mean there was no authority...

...The seemingly endless gulf between society and the government in Russia has now been bridged...

...He may remain President for some time, but he can never again possess the influence he once had...

...Disappointed as he was by the people's negative response, Yeltsin defends his program: "Gaidar's reform had led to macro-economic improvement, or to be more precise, to the destruction of the old economy...

...His triumph is being able to proclaim, "We live in a normal country...

...In addition, this gold mine of data has no index...

...Now both are outside the President's circle, and he is at a loss in four critical respects: He lacks realistic political aims, a coherent economic approach, organized democratic backing, and, very noticeably, the spirit that drove him for so many years...

...Yeltsin concedes that "the Soviet Union potentially threatened the community of civilized nations...

...Closest to him are his wife Naina, his two daughters and their families, all warmly depicted...

...In the end, Boris Yeltsin's book makes clear to us why he has been an invincible transitional leader??and why he is not at all suited to the post-transition period...

...He failed to inform his chief of staff, Sergei Filatov, that he was disbanding Parliament until after Speaker Ruslan I. Khasbulatov and Vice President Aleksandr V. Rutskoi had heard the news...

...Unfortunately, the hasty preparation of this memoir for publication in English has left it with serious errors...

...Reviewed by Anders Aslund Economic adviser to the Russian government, November 1991 to January 1994...

...He proudly notes what has improved: "The fear, secrecy and gloominess that were always features of Russian society are dissipating...

...Guest Scholar, Brookings Institution BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH YELTSIN is a towering figure in history...

...The two words that make up the title in Russian, given with the publishing notes, are misspelled...

...He offers a simple answer: "In September and October of 1993, events in Russia forced me to sit down" and write...

...Internally, I simply could not accept the possibility that a constitutional dispute could lead to shooting people...

...Few tasks could be more challenging, and Yeltsin has proved himself a true leader, but as he recognizes, "In emergency situations, I'm strong...

...His present intimates are an indication of what is wrong with Yeltsin today...

...to others, he has become a symbol of corruption in the presidential apparatus...

...solid and reliable...

...Pyotr Aven was not the Economics Minister, he was the Minister of Foreign Economic Relations...

...its detail shows him to be a master of apparat intrigues...

...What remains at his disposal are military, security and political tactics of little apparent use...

...Yeltsin dwells at length on the justification for economic shock therapy, and appears more engaged by economic matters generally than I had expected...

...There was probably no other way to do it...

...Lev Sukhanov, his old personal assistant from Sverdlovsk...

...Evidently the many senior Russian officials who have suddenly taken up tennis have their priorities right...

...democrats scarcely figure at all...

...Despite its candor, it had the aroma of an active politician's self-promotion...

...The largest parts of The Struggle for Russia, though, concern the abortive coup of August 1991 and the constitutional crisis and uprising of September and October 1993...

...His main concern with the former Soviet republics is their freedom and peacefulness...

...During the most trying moments of Yeltsin's career??his ouster as Party boss in November 1987, the August 1991 putsch, the October 1993 uprising??a tendency toward depression is discernible...

...The inaccuracies are too frequent and too important to leave a reader at ease...

...Yeltsin acknowledges that he learned a great deal from his chief economic adviser, Yegor T. Gaidar, yet he rather quickly seems to have forgotten a lot...

...everything would be permissible...

...The chief goal of this restless President," he declares, "is Russia's tranquility...

...Later in the book his references to the economy are brief and confused...

...During the August coup the Soviet Council of Ministers was chaired by Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov, not by General Grachev...

...Privatization is one area the President could have pointed to as a great success??not least because he has firmly supported the privatization efforts of Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais??but strangely this goes virtually unmentioned...

...He reckons that the large-scale bloodshed could have been avoided if the police had been allowed to carry weapons and use them early on...

...He says little else about foreign policy beyond making it clear that the West is a highly respected moral authority within Russia, and that Western public statements carry far more weight there than most outsiders realize...

...Far more so than is usual even in memoirs by politicians long out of office, here he is reflective, humble and strikingly frank...

...Although he denies having any intention of retiring, Yeltsin implies that the turmoil in October 1993 spelled the actual end to his rule...

...Yeltsin does not judge colleagues now by their political and economic philosophies, but by their administrative effectiveness and their loyalty...

...In ordinary situations, I'm sometimes too passive...

...There was no battle plan," Yeltsin confesses...

...None of the reformers??not even Gaidar??was informed of the move in advance...

...Yet his general political strategy is vague and confused, verging on nonexistent...

...He should have realized, he says, that his opponents were not interested in compromising...

...The first three appear to be alien to democratic politics...

...Of this last group, only Kozyrev is an unequivocal democrat...

...Yeltsin goes on to blame himself for the way the crisis was handled...

...Tarpishchev, for his part, has made a fortune through special trading and tax privileges he has extracted from his star pupil...

...Then he adds, "Now there is no Soviet Union and Russia does not threaten anyone...

...In Against the Grain, democratic politics and politicians predominate...

...In 1991 he published an autobiography, Against the Grain...

...He tells, for instance, how he sought to bring certain state managers into the government, notably his old friends Yuri V Skokov and Oleg Lobov??disregarding the fact that both were openly hostile to a market economy...

...He thus provides an extraordinary picture of current Russian politics, and one that frequently is not flattering to him...

...Filled with specific information yet highly readable, it records Yeltsin's thoughts and actions during much of the past five years...

...Viktor Ilyushin, Yeltsin's top aide and a feared former Party bureaucrat from Sverdlovsk...

...His new book, The Strugglefor Russia, is of quite another caliber...

...Director, Stockholm Institute of East European Economics...

...Chernomyrdin seems to be his favorite for less than convincing reasons: He "showed himself to be...

...One of the great revolutionaries of our time, Yeltsin saw himself reshaping the former Soviet Union: "The USSR ended the moment the first hammer pounded the Berlin Wall...

...By choosing Pavel Grachev, aparatroop commander, as Minister of Defense, Yeltsin opted to throw in his lot with the small elite...

...Aware of the depth of his country's economic crisis, he believed shock therapy was necessary to attain self-sufficiency and make fundamental reforms irreversible...

...The book gives us a revealing rundown of the figures surrounding the President...

...Yeltsin attributes the coup's unraveling to a clash of interests between the military-industrial complex and the KGB...

...He no longer identifies himself with any democratic movement, only with his office...

...The general assumption has been that the' 91 putsch was sparked by the planned signing of a new union treaty on August 20...

...just a country with a slightly complicated heritage and a difficult fate...

...It was achieved with terrible pain...

...The book does not contain much that was previously unknown, but it presents perhaps the most sophisticated analyses of the two cataclysmic events...

...Troublesome nationality issues are barely raised...

...If The Struggle for Russia inspires a sympathetic view of Yeltsin the man, it leaves us with a worrisome impression of Yeltsin the President...

...Clearly Yeltsin has been badly shaken by the confrontation of September and October 1993...

...A third circle consists of the men in key government positions who are close to Yeltsin: Prime Minister Victor N. Chernomyrdin, Minister of Defense Grachev, Minister of Interior Viktor Yerin, Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev, and Minister of Economics Lobov...

...He further asserts: "When I say "we,' I mean the President's team...

...In The Struggle for Russia, generals and apparatchiks have returned to the fore...

...Indeed, it is the product of agonizing sleepless nights??the work of a man who feels the truth must be faced, who seeks catharsis regardless of the personal cost...

...He returns again and again to his long hesitation before deciding to dissolve the Supreme Soviet, insisting that he did not wish to break the law or violate democracy??he wanted genuine compromise...

...It was Burbulis who gave Yeltsin a political strategy, and it was Gaidar who developed his economic strategy...

...Chernomyrdin was appointed prime minister in December 1992, not in the spring of that year...

...The values of private family life are moving to the forefront in Russia as elsewhere...

...Yeltsin's account of August '91 tells us a great deal about him as well...

...He did not let me down in a single critical or tough situation...

...The President's side was therefore totally unprepared for an occupation of the White House...

...He reports that Grachev repeatedly lied to him about troop arrivals in Moscow, yet he does not justify retaining him as Minister of Defense...

...I was impressed by his taciturnity and reserve, his very sober thinking, and his tough masculinity...