This book is about two men – Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin – who presided from 1985–1999 over the tumultuous transition from Soviet to post- Soviet politics. The speed of change during the first half of that period was remarkable. In 1985, the Soviet Union appeared to be an entrenched entity, capable of defending itself against all challenges to the Communist Party's right to rule at home and in Eastern Europe, and determinedly pursuing a policy of great-power competition abroad. By the end of 1987, glasnost’ had broken out, the public media were increasingly challenging old doctrines, and the Soviet leadership was starting to make one-sided concessions to the United States on fundamental issues of national security. By the end of 1989, relatively free elections had taken place, Party officials were being voted out of office, communism had collapsed in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army had retreated in defeat from Afghanistan, and the Cold War was coming to an end. By the end of 1991, an oppositional figure had been elected president of Russia, both communism and the Soviet Union had collapsed, and independent Russia had emerged as a seemingly helpless supplicant of the West. By the end of 1993, independent Russia had experienced two wrenching years of political and economic turmoil at home and was coming to realize the limits of Western willingness to assist its transition from communism. If one had gone to sleep in Moscow in 1985–1986 and woken up in 1992–1993, the change would have been unfathomable.

The collapse of Gorbachev's efforts to steer a middle course toward a mixed system at home and abroad was in large measure a product of the social forces his policies had unleashed in the USSR and Eastern Europe. But if there was one individual who acted as an independent causal force in the unfolding of this process, it was Boris Yeltsin. Initially, during 1986–1988, Yeltsin merely complicated Gorbachev's authority-building efforts. During 1989–1991, however, he effectively scuttled Gorbachev's attempts to recoup lost credibility. When Gorbachev first tapped Yeltsin for a leadership position in Moscow in 1985, raising him from the ranks of first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Party organization, he had little idea of the trouble he was buying. Gorbachev's authority-building strategy at that point was still fairly conservative, and in 1986–1987 it would come to combine radicalization with a controlled and evolutionary pace of change. It sought to expand the arenas of politics and transform the language of politics, but at a pace to be dictated by the general secretary. Yeltsin, it turned out, found the pace in each realm to be intolerably slow.

YELTSIN, GORBACHEV, AND THE STAGE OF POLITICAL SUCCESSION, 1985–1986

The Politburo brought Yeltsin to Moscow in April 1985, appointing him first as head of the Central Committee construction department and then as Central Committee secretary for construction. By his own admission, he hated the experience, for the central Party apparatus left him much less leeway to run things as he saw fit.

In December 1993, Yeltsin should have been riding high. He had eliminated the old Supreme Soviet and imprisoned his nemeses, Ruslan Khasbulatov and his former vice-president, Aleksandr Rutskoi. He had secured passage of his Constitution, which accorded him extraordinary powers vis-à-vis all other political institutions, made him virtually unimpeachable, and enshrined the approach to center-periphery relations and nation building for which he had been pushing. But that is not quite how Yeltsin saw it. Although he celebrated passage of the Constitution, he was apparently surprised by the results of the elections to the Duma: the anti-regime nationalists and communists won a substantial plurality. Yeltsin did not comment on the December 12 election results until ten days later. Then he criticized the “democrats” for their disunity, the opposition for their extremism, the government for the way in which it had implemented policy, and himself for having lost touch with the people.

The memoir literature gives us a fuller understanding of Yeltsin's reaction to this frustration. The Russian president was very pleased with his accretion of formal powers and with the adoption – at long last! – of his preferred Constitution. But he was distressed by the dramatic deflation of his popularity with the mass public. He had exerted great energy to gain military support for subduing the Supreme Soviet by force – and even then it was a close call. He knew that he might not be able to count on such support in the future. Moreover, public opinion polls revealed a backlash against him for having used military force in October 1993.

The formal context of Soviet politics had not changed significantly by the time Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. He was chosen general secretary by a secret vote of the Politburo with consultative input from some of the most influential regional Party leaders in the Central Committee. The reigning ideology remained Marxism–Leninism, and the audiences for authority-building strategies remained the elite representatives of the institutional pillars of the system. The short-term material interests and political identities of patrons and clients within those institutions remained essentially as they had been for decades. For these reasons, quite a few observers – while intrigued by the prospect of a young and articulate general secretary – did not harbor very high hopes that he would be inclined or able to transform the system. He was, after all, a product of that system and a man who had been chosen for advancement by the aged guardians of the Leninist system. If Suslov, Brezhnev, and Andropov could all endorse his meteoric rise into the highest reaches of power, how much of a free thinker could he possibly be?

What had changed, however, was the climate of opinion within the Soviet political establishment. That climate was quite different from the one that prevailed at the time of Khrushchev's ouster and was, in many ways, analogous to the one that had prevailed at the time of Stalin's death. Both 1953 and 1985 were marked by a widespread sense within the Politburo and Central Committee that something had to give, that things could not continue in the old way.

Yeltsin had won the power struggle. He would now enter his own stage of ascendancy, when he would be expected to take political responsibility for solving the problems facing Russia – in particular, a collapsing state and an economy on the verge of collapse. The expectations of him were shaped in large part by the public image he had forged in the course of outflanking Gorbachev. Yeltsin had built his authority and seized the political initiative on the basis of an expanding but largely negative program: anti-corruption, antiprivilege, anti-Party apparatus, anti-communist, anti-Gorbachev, and, finally, anti- “the center” (i.e., the Kremlin's Soviet authority). The apogee of this accumulation of authority came in August 1991 when, in the eyes of many citizens, he assumed almost legendary heroic status by mounting a tank in front of the White House and facing down the coup plotters, seemingly through the sheer force of his will. The positive features of Yeltsin's program were real, but they were neither elaborated nor implemented at the time. Throughout 1991 and especially during his presidential election campaign of Spring 1991, Yeltsin promised Russia that he would build a market economy on the Western model, integrate the country into the global capitalist economy, and see Russia take its place among the “normal” and “civilized” liberal democracies of the world. But he did not have to specify a strategy for accomplishing all this, since Russia was not yet autonomous of the Kremlin's dictates.

Most of the time they were in power, both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were less constrained by formal political structures than Khrushchev and Brezhnev had been. We must therefore understand the personalities and beliefs of Gorbachev and Yeltsin if we hope to specify the determinants of many of their policy choices.

GORBACHEV AS A POLITICAL PERSONALITY

There is nothing in Gorbachev's biography to suggest the personality of a rebel. Rather, Gorbachev comes across as an organization man, one who joined the Communist Party at a younger age than did Yeltsin and who found his greatest honors and satisfactions in life within that organization. Gorbachev came to Moscow as a young man from the provinces who was eager to “make it” in the capital and to rise within the political hierarchy. One of the first things he did after matriculation at Moscow State University was to become a Young Communist League (Komsomol) activist. He applied for candidate membership of the CPSU at the youngest age allowable. Gorbachev's career took him through the law faculty at Moscow State University, during which time he became head of his class's Komsomol, followed by a conventional career climbing the ladder of the political hierarchy – first in the Young Communist League, then in the Party apparatus. Once in the Party apparatus, he never left it. Whereas some analysts treat this career path as predicting the mentality of a “conservative” apparatchik, it is more accurate to treat it as predicting faith in the “leading role of the Party” within Soviet “socialist” society, and belief in proper organization and Party-led mobilization as the guarantor of progress toward “realizing the full potential of socialism.”

Yeltsin invaded Chechnya in part to recoup political authority. It proved instead to be an unmitigated disaster. One year later, the parliamentary elections of December 1995 yielded a Duma that was even more dominated by radical nationalists and communists than the earlier one had been. Yeltsin's popularity plummeted to unprecedented lows: the percentage of respondents (in a public opinion poll of January 1996) who would have chosen him that day for president was in the low single digits. Presidential elections loomed in June 1996, and it remained unclear whether Yeltsin could recoup his authority with the electorate sufficiently to prevail in that election.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS OF 1996

Yeltsin had to decide what posture to strike in the presidential election campaign. Should he try to co-opt the constituents of his opponents by running on a patriotic, hardline platform? Or should he try to differentiate himself from his opponents by mobilizing moderate and anti-communist constituencies? Initially, Yeltsin was inclined to run on a nationalistic platform as defender of the integrity of the Russian state and nation. In March 1996, however, new advisors persuaded him to switch course. He replaced his old advisory team and decided to present himself as the candidate of peace, order, stability, and progress. He decided to depict his main opponent in the election, Gennadii Ziuganov, as a totalitarian restorationist and himself as the savior of the nation from a return to Stalinism.

Yeltsin, like Gorbachev, was both a system destroyer and a system builder. During the years that Gorbachev was endeavoring to transform the Marxist- Leninist system into a socialist democracy, Yeltsin evolved into a committed anti-communist revolutionary. His goal became to destroy the communist system along with all those features that Gorbachev hoped to preserve in the name of “socialism” and “Soviet civilization.” Then, on the ruins of that system, Yeltsin promised to build on the territory of Russia a new system, which he depicted as a “market democracy.” As in the case of Gorbachev, Yeltsin's effectiveness as a system destroyer can be evaluated separately from his effectiveness as a system builder.

YELTSIN AS SYSTEM-DESTROYER

During 1988–1991, Boris Yeltsin evolved into a hero of the anti-communist opposition to Soviet rule. After his overwhelming electoral victories of March 1989 and June 1991, followed by his facing down of the coup plotters in August 1991, his authority at home and abroad had become legendary. He had evolved into a charismatic leader of almost mythic proportions, especially among those who had assumed that the Soviet and communist control structures were unassailable. Thus, as an oppositional leader, Yeltsin is likely to go down in history as a uniquely courageous and effective figure who managed to prevail against seemingly overwhelming odds. His “resurrection” after being purged by the Communist Party apparatus in 1987 was a product of extraordinary political will, intuition, and an uncanny ability to sense and shape the mood of the masses.

The main purpose of this book has been to identify Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's evolving strategies for building, maintaining, and recouping their authority as leaders. In the present chapter, I turn from description and analysis to explanation. Why did Gorbachev and Yeltsin choose these strategies at each stage of their administrations? That these two men occupy center stage in the book should not lead us to assume that their personalities and personal beliefs were always the primary – much less, sole – determinants of their choices. Other factors delimited and shaped their behavior at given points in time: (1) the political organization of the regime and the interests that dominated within it; (2) the regime's ideological traditions and legitimizing credos; (3) the prevailing climate of opinion within the political establishment; (4) the process of political competition for power and authority among elite actors; (5) mobilized social forces within the country; and (6) direct and indirect pressures from abroad.

When Khrushchev and Brezhnev were in power, these factors were relatively limited, stable, and predictable. Politics was a private affair and was dominated by the political and organizational interests of the Party-State apparatus and the budgetary interests of the military–industrial complex. Marxism–Leninism's hostility to liberalism defined the limits of winnable political advocacy. Political competition for power and authority took place within the narrow confines dictated by the political organization and ideological anti-liberalism. Social forces within the country were dominated by the Party-State apparatus; they could affect indirectly the climate of opinion within the political elite but could not mobilize autonomously against that elite.

The radicalization of Gorbachev's program and political strategy began in late 1986, with a signal going out that an expanded definition of glasnost’ was now the “Party line.” This indicated to editors of journals that censorship was to be relaxed and that they would be much freer to criticize. This was also the point at which Gorbachev started to extol the virtues of voluntary associations (“informals”). To dramatize, both at home and abroad, this expansion of the right of social forces to mobilize themselves autonomously, in December 1986 Gorbachev personally saw to the release from house arrest of the heroic symbol of dissidence, Andrei Sakharov. The following month he introduced to a plenary session of the Central Committee a wide-ranging program of “democratization,” which included proposals for multicandidate, secret elections of Party, soviet, and managerial officials. In the same month, he announced that the Soviet Union would open up to the world economy by allowing joint ventures with foreign enterprises on Soviet soil.

In short order there followed new laws on cooperatives and “individual labor activity,” which presaged new opportunities for legal entrepreneurial activity, and, in June 1987, a “Law on the State Enterprise” that signaled a push to dismantle the command economy. Almost all these initiatives in domestic policy were only first steps, a “foot in the door” approach, steps that delegitimized old values and justified in principle entirely new approaches to economic organization and the world economy. Almost all of them would be radicalized still further in the course of 1987–1988.

I have devoted most of this book to analysis of the political strategies of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Chapters 9 and 11, however, were devoted to the challenge of explaining their choices. There remains an additional exercise of core relevance to the study of leadership: evaluation. How should we evaluate Gorbachev and Yeltsin as leaders? This is by far the most difficult task, for it subsumes the other two. We must determine what those men were trying to do and specify how much latitude they had to pursue those goals before we can evaluate the effectiveness of their leadership. And we must employ counterfactual reasoning (“what might have been”) to ask whether their actions led to outcomes that would not have happened in the absence of their leadership. The exercise is made even more challenging by the normative component of any evaluation. I begin the exercise with a short chapter that specifies criteria for the evaluation of transformational leaders. I then devote the last two chapters of the book to evaluations of Gorbachev and Yeltsin as transformational leaders.

REQUISITES OF EFFECTIVE TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP

Transformational leadership is a process of what Schumpeter called “creative destruction”: dismantling of the old system in a way that simultaneously creates the foundations for a new system. This is a tall order for the most talented of leaders.

The twelve months between mid-1989 and mid-1990 were one of those turning points in a leader's administration when suddenly things start to go very wrong. Khrushchev experienced this from mid-1960 to mid-1961. For Brezhnev, the tide did not turn so suddenly; his domestic program faltered in 1972, his foreign policy only during 1974–1976. For Gorbachev, as for Khrushchev, one year highlighted the contradictions within both his domestic and foreign policy programs. This also meant that both men suddenly experienced a crisis of credibility. Both of them had promised a great deal and had pushed themselves to the fore as sponsors of a transformative vision. Hence, they could not credibly diffuse responsibility for failure onto the leadership collective. Their authority was on the line. In Gorbachev's case, he found himself at the mercy of domestic and international forces he himself had unleashed as he introduced an autonomous public arena into Soviet politics and as he pursued a conciliatory foreign policy. This chapter analyzes the vulnerabilities of Gorbachev's domestic and foreign policies and his efforts to retain and recoup his political authority as those vulnerabilities became obvious.

VULNERABILITIES OF PEHESTROIKA

During 1988–1989, the contradictions within Gorbachev's program for perestroika started to become obvious. His strategy of giving the official class a stake in the new order by only gradually shifting authority from Party executive organs to soviet legislative organs, while a boon for democracy, created a situation in which officials of the Party and the state had both the incentive and the opportunity to instead “steal the state”: privatizing and stealing the assets of their agencies and contributing thereby to a collapse of public administration that was becoming increasingly evident in 1990

Yeltsin's political defensiveness and his search for means to recoup lost authority were decisive determinants of the fact and timing of his decision to invade Chechnya. By late 1994 – with his personal approval ratings plummeting, the economy in a precarious state after the crash of the ruble on October 11,1994, a hostile (albeit less powerful) Duma, charges of corruption swirling around his government, powerful centrifugal forces still asserting themselves in the regions of Russia, Western assistance and investment at a small fraction of earlier expectations, integration into Western institutions proceeding at a snail's pace, and NATO expansion on the table – Yeltsin found himself severely challenged to justify the quality of his leadership. He was very much on the defensive politically, even though he had secured popular ratification of a Constitution that, formally at least, largely shielded him from threats of impeachment or legislative vetoes of his decrees. Moreover, already in 1995, “election season” would begin in anticipation of parliamentary elections scheduled for December 1995 and presidential elections scheduled for June 1996.

It was in this context that Yeltsin tackled the Chechnya problem. His first State of the Federation address, in February 1994, was significantly entitled “The Strengthening of the Russian State.” A treaty relationship was struck with Tatarstan in February 1994 that gave that region within Russia an exceptional level of autonomy, far more than that accorded regions within Switzerland, Spain's Catalonia, or states within the United States. But the president of Chechnya would not accept the same terms; he insisted on independence from Russia and on pursuing policies that threatened Russia's internal security.

In order to accomplish what they did, Gorbachev and Yeltsin had to overcome many obstacles to change. Doing so required them to exercise leadership, which I define as a process of stretching social constraints in the pursuit of social goals. Those constraints are of several kinds: (1) organizations, institutions, and processes that structure politics and administration; (2) the material interests of individuals and groups; and (3) the identities, ideologies, and cultures of individuals and groups. Typically, in an established or entrenched system, these constraints reinforce each other. Ideologies and cultures come to justify the institutions and processes that structure both political life and the distribution of tangible rewards across the population. Those institutions and processes ensure the continuation of policies that cater to prevailing identities and that reproduce existing patterns of social and political inequality.

The Stalinist system came to be such an entrenched system, but certain features of that system did not survive for long after the death of its founder. Stalin's successors rejected a continuation of mass terror and economic austerity, rule by a despot, and perpetual confrontation with the capitalist world. Beyond that, they grappled with the challenge of reforming (Khrushchev, 1953-1964), adapting (Brezhnev, 1964–1982), or transforming (Gorbachev, 1985–1991) the Soviet system of monopolistic rule by the Communist Party- State and “anti-imperialist struggle” abroad, whereas Yeltsin (1989–1999) sought to destroy the system completely and to replace it with a workable alternative.

Among observers who shared his goal of transforming the communist system, those who most approve of Gorbachev's record as leader emphasize the extent to which he broke down the ancien regime. Among the same set of observers, those who most disparage Gorbachev's record focus instead on the extent to which he fell short of building the new system he envisaged. Neither of these approaches is wholly satisfying; nor is a combination of the two. They are both linear and rote comparisons of outcomes with baselines. But they are useful starting points toward a more complex analysis.

If the past is our baseline, and if we postpone the problem of determining Gorbachev's distinctive contribution to the outcome, it is easy to sum up what changed under Gorbachev. We witnessed:

• desacralization of the Brezhnevite political–economic order in the eyes of the mass public, including the official principles and mind-set that underpinned it – the leading role of the Party, the “community of peoples,” the planned economy, pride in the system's achievements, optimism about state socialism's potential, commitment to “class struggle” abroad, and a national-security phobia that justified a repressive, militarized regime;

• a sharp reduction in the power of constituencies that were pillars of the Brezhnevite political order – in particular, Party officials, ministers, and the military;

• legitimation in principle of movement in the direction of a market-driven economic order, a multiparty system, and the transformation of a unitary state into a democratic federal state;

• […]