What Yeltsin did

Posted by Marc Hodak on April 23, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs | Comments are off for this article

The passing of Boris Yeltsin is being greeted with generally favorable obits, and some residual criticism for his toleration for corruption, initiation of the Chechnyan conflict, and other questionable calls during his time at the helm, to say nothing of his sometimes embarrassing personal behavior. Such criticisms suggest an unstated belief that his perceived shortcomings could have been avoided without other, possibly worse, consequences. For example, maybe he could have accomplished what he did without the corruption that plagued his tenure. But it’s also possible that corruption might have been the grease that enabled him to begin turning the rusty wheel of capitalism by quickly divesting the state of its control over the economy. Many things he might have done to significantly prevent corruption might have also stalled the whole effort. I’m not saying this would have necessarily been the case, or that it wouldn’t possibly have been a better tack anyway. I’m just saying that nobody knows how much better events overall could have turned out with a different package of policies.

How did overall events turn out? Better than most anyone could have expected at the height of the cold war. Well into the 1980s, most people could hardly see an endgame to Soviet communism without a hot, possibly uncontained conflict. The peaceful, almost banal disintegration of the Evil Empire is, I think, among the most underrated achievements in human history.

What Gorbachev wrought by simply stepping back when the Wall began to crumble, Yeltsin consolidated by boldly going forward when the communists were ready to be swept away. I know I would have greatly benefitted from being stinking drunk when standing atop a tank to face down the last, deperate masters of the Red Army. But that’s what Yeltsin did in one of his soberest moments.

All these little critiques of the parts of the package we don’t like are a symptom of a utopianism not unlike the one Yeltsin killed off. The downsides of his decisions are visible–a corrupt relationship with a mafia-like oligarchy, a war in Chechnya, centralized power under Putin, stumbling onto a stage and swatting at an obstruction before recognizing it was a microphone. But what would we have gotten with a sober, uncompromising master of realpolitik who could stand up to the Oligarchs? We could have gotten Putin, ten years earlier.