Before reading think why the authors of the reviewed books have turned to the mentioned personalities. What do the names of Gorbachev and Yeltsin mean to you?

 

There is a vast literature in the fields of American politics and comparative politics on the subject of political leadership, and there is also an extensive literature on political leadership in communist systems. Breslauer drew on some of these writings when he devised an "authority-building" model of political leadership for his book about Khrushchev and Brezhnev. He seeks to use that same framework, with some modifications, in Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders. Breslauer argues that, in addition to the personal characteristics and beliefs that motivated Gorbachev and Yeltsin, six "other factors delimited and shaped their behavior at given points in time" (p. 231): the structure of the political system, the ideological cast of the regime, the prevailing sentiment among high-level officials and influential observers, the jockeying and maneuvering among political elites, pressure from organized social forces, and the influence of foreign actors and international organizations. Breslauer avers that "when Khrushchev and Brezhnev were in power, these factors were relatively limited, stable, and predictable," but that "the influence of [the third, fifth, and sixth] factors grew dramatically as Gorbachev's radical policies took effect" (pp. 231-232).

Breslauer spends most of the book showing how Gorbachev and Yeltsin built, maintained, and eventually lost their authority as political leaders. He defines "authority" not in strictly Weberian terms, but as "legitimized, credible power" (p. 3). Breslauer begins with a brief survey of leadership strategies in Soviet and Russian politics (drawing on his 1982 book) and then discusses the personalities and political beliefs of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He traces the ascent and decline of Gorbachev in three sequential chapters and does the same for Yeltsin in five chapters, including one devoted to Russia's initial war in Chechnya, from December 1994 to August 1996. These descriptive overviews are followed by a chapter that attempts to explain Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's choices and decisions. Breslauer concludes the book with three chapters that evaluate the two men as leaders. He first briefly sets out his criteria for judging transformational leaders and then applies them to Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Breslauer eschews a normative standard of evaluation and focuses instead on each leader's effectiveness in achieving his main goals at an acceptable cost (that is, a cost acceptable to the leader himself.) These final chapters are an expanded and revised version of an essay that Breslauer published in a recent collection edited by Archie Brown and Lilia Shevtsova, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin: Political Leadership in Russia's Transition. Unlike some other contributors to that edited volume, Breslauer wisely refrained from trying to make an instant analysis of Vladimir Putin's leadership qualities.

The sources that Breslauer consulted for his discussion of Gorbachev and Yeltsin include public statements, memoirs by the two leaders, memoirs by many officials who worked for or against them, the concrete actions they took in 1985-1999, and secondary analyses. The range of sources is a good deal wider and richer than the scant evidentiary base available to Breslauer twenty to twenty-five years earlier when he was writing his book about Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Nonetheless, it is unfortunate that he did not make use of declassified documents from archives in Russia, particularly the Fond 89 collection at the Russian State Archive of Recent History (a collection that is also now available on microfilm at numerous U.S. university libraries), the extensive holdings of the Gorbachev Foundation's archive, and the archives in Stavropol and Ekaterinburg. Many declassified items also have appeared over the past decade in Russian journals (such as Istochnik and Istoricheskii arkhiv) and document anthologies.

Despite Breslauer's decision to forgo archival evidence, his analysis is perceptive, and his conclusions are convincing and well-supported. He provides an excellent overview of the way Gorbachev and Yeltsin governed their respective countries. Much of the material will be familiar to those who have followed these events closely, and some scholars no doubt will wish that Breslauer had done more to show how his findings contribute to the recent theoretical literature on political leadership. Overall, however, the book is highly successful. It explains why Gorbachev and Yeltsin acted as they did, how they managed (or failed) to achieve their goals, and how they should be judged as leaders. Breslauer rightly underscores the decisive historical importance of both men, noting that "things would have happened quite differently had different individuals been in charge. [Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's] acts of leadership were crucial" (p. ix). This is, if anything, an understatement. Had an orthodox Brezhnevite official like Viktor Grishin or Grigorii Romanov come to power in March 1985 instead of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union in all likelihood would still exist.

Two small reservations should be noted. First, the evaluation of leadership tends to be static. The criteria that Breslauer uses to evaluate transformational leadership are sound, and he rightly argues that judgments about a leader's effectiveness must take account of the constraints faced by the leader and the feasibility of alternatives to the extent that their feasibility can be deduced from counterfactuals. Nonetheless, a net assessment of each leader's effectiveness in attaining his goals must be dynamic. Goals can change over time, either in response to circumstances or because the leader himself changes. Goals that existed in 1985 may have been considerably different from those of 1989 or 1990. A leader who never adjusts his goals may undermine his own leadership or may prevent much of anything from being achieved. It is not clear in Breslauer's discussion how (or whether) we should take account of this dynamic element.

Second, Breslauer's authority-building framework may need further adjustment. The fact that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were in charge of different countries (both of which had their capital in Moscow) and that Gorbachev never stood for popular election, whereas Yeltsin won two terms through nationwide votes, raises questions about the comparability of their efforts. Surely a leader who was popularly elected by a wide margin has less inherent need to consolidate his power and build authority afterward. Concepts that make sense when discussing unelected Soviet leaders are not necessarily as crucial in analyzing Russian presidents.

These minor caveats aside, Breslauer's book offers a first-rate account of the crucial roles that Gorbachev and Yeltsin played in the tumultuous final years of the Soviet regime and the initial years of the new Russian Federation. The book deserves to be widely adopted in classes on Russian politics, the demise of authoritarian regimes, and post-communist transformations.

Even before the Soviet Union was dissolved at the end of 1991, the new Russian government headed by Boris Yeltsin had established ties with Western governments. Those ties, however, were not always harmonious. Most Western leaders viewed Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU), as their main partner in Moscow, and they were wary of the political challenge that Yeltsin posed to Gorbachev. Some Western officials openly described Yeltsin as a demagogue and urged him to tone down his criticisms of Gorbachev. In retrospect, this situation seems rather ironic. Unlike Gorbachev, who was never willing to seek popular election, Yeltsin stood twice for popular election in the Soviet Russian republic and won handily both times. In March 1989, he received nearly 90 percent of the vote for a seat in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, and in June 1991 he easily won a nationwide election for the Russian presidency. Moreover, unlike Gorbachev, who sided with hardliners in the Soviet Union from September 1990 through April 1991, Yeltsin consistently voiced support during that period for Western-style democracy and free-market reform. Nonetheless, until the attempted coup d'etat in Moscow in August 1991 (when Yeltsin played a crucial role in rebuffing the conspirators), Western governments tended to have much warmer relations with Gorbachev than with Yeltsin.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Yeltsin sought close links with the West after the Soviet Union broke apart. Over the next eight years, until Yeltsin's abrupt resignation at the end of 1999, Russia remained broadly cooperative with the West, despite numerous events that caused severe strains in the relationship. Although Yeltsin never achieved the full-fledged strategic partnership that he sought with the United States, and although he was wont to engage in bombastic rhetoric when Western governments displeased him, the orientation of Russian foreign policy after 1991 was a striking contrast to the decades of intense Soviet hostility toward the West.

Until the publication of Andrew Felkay's new monograph, no book-length survey of Russia's ties with the West during the Yeltsin era had appeared. Felkay writes that his "primary intent" is to examine "the impact of Boris Yeltsin on the evolving relationship between the Western democracies and Russia" (p. 5), but he also spends a considerable amount of time providing background on Yeltsin and discussing Yeltsin's domestic policies. Felkay claims, justifiably, that it would be "folly" to "separate the process of formulating foreign policy from domestic political developments" (p. 5), but he does not integrate the two spheres as well as one might hope. In such a brief book, the chapters about Yeltsin's upbringing, early career, and initial experiences during the Gorbachev era seem extraneous. Almost all of this material is likely to be familiar to those who have read Yeltsin's memoirs and other works about the Gorbachev-Yeltsin confrontation. A greatly abridged discussion of these matters would have sufficed in an overview of Russia's relations with the West.

Throughout the book, Felkay cites Western and Russian press coverage and a scattering of other published materials, and he relies extensively-some would say excessively-on Yeltsin's three volumes of memoirs which, like almost all memoirs, offer a pronounced spin on the events they discuss. Although Felkay also adduces the memoirs of a few of Yeltsin's advisers (Aleksandr Korzhakov and Andrei Kozyrev), he does not refer to the memoirs of many other key figures who worked for or against Yeltsin, including Evgenii Primakov (who served successively as foreign intelligence director, foreign minister, and prime minister), Egor Gaidar (who served as prime minister in 1992 and in other high-level posts after that), Vyacheslav Kostikov (Yeltsin's press secretary and aide), Lev Sukhanov (one of Yeltsin's top aides), and Ruslan Khasbulatov (who was speaker of the parliament during the standoff with Yeltsin that led to the bombardment of the parliamentary building in October 1993). Nor does Felkay draw on the memoirs of Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislaus Shushkevich, the Ukrainian and Belarusian leaders who joined with Yeltsin in December 1991 to sign the agreements that brought an end to the Soviet Union. More important still, Felkay fails to consult Gorbachev's memoirs and the memoirs of other Soviet Politburo members who served alongside Yeltsin such as Egor Ligachev, Vitalii Vorotnikov, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vadim Medvedev, Aleksandr Yakovlev, Dmitrii Yazov, and Vladimir Kryuchkov. The omission of any references to Gorbachev's memoirs is especially peculiar. Surely a balanced understanding of the Yeltsin-Gorbachev confrontation requires at least some consideration of Gorbachev's perspective.

It is also very strange that Felkay does not make any use of the numerous memoirs by Western officials who dealt with Yeltsin. Although the recent book by Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy, appeared too late for Felkay to consult, there is no reason that he could not have drawn on memoirs by James Baker, George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Jack Matlock, Robert Gates, Helmut Kohl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, and Margaret Thatcher. These glaring omissions are compounded by Felkay's failure to make any use of declassified archival materials, including the transcripts of CPSU Central Committee plenums and other documents in Russia that could have supplemented the accounts provided in Yeltsin's memoirs as well as materials in the United States that could have been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The meagerness of the sources that underlie Felkay's analysis is mirrored in the often superficial nature of his narrative. This is not to say that the book is wholly without merit. Felkay makes a number of good points and observations. But almost all of the major events and issues in Russian-Western relations in the 1990s receive much too cursory treatment here. The clipped nature of Felkay's discussion might have been excusable if he had been seeking to focus on a specific theoretical proposition or to test hypotheses derived from recent debates in the field of international relations, but this definitely was not his intent. His book is a straightforward recitation of events, bereft of any attempt to draw theoretical implications. In addition, the book contains a sizable number of factual mistakes (for example, the wrong dates for the dissolution of various East-bloc organizations) and misspelled names (Sacks instead of Sachs, Skubishevski instead of Skubiszewski, Walensa instead of Walesa), and the text in many places needs more extensive editing.

Yeltsin's tenure in Moscow inspired strong views in both Russia and the West. Some Western analysts, such as Leon Aron in his important biographical study, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, have offered a highly favorable (indeed at times almost uncritical) assessment of Yeltsin. Others, such as Peter Reddaway in The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy, have portrayed the former Russian leader in an extremely negative (almost demonic) light. Views of Yeltsin among analysts in Russia initially were positive but grew increasingly negative amid the political and economic turmoil of the 1990s. In Russia today, experts' views of Yeltsin are still mostly unfavorable, ranging from the unremittingly hostile opinions expressed by Dmitri Glinski-Vassiliev and Lilia Shevtsova to the more restrained, though by no means uncritical, assessments in a recent collection edited by Yurii Baturin. Now that the Yeltsin era is receding into the past, sentiment in Russia about the former president is slowly becoming less passionate, but the general view of Yeltsin is likely to remain more negative in Russia than in the West for some time to come.

Felkay is among those who see Yeltsin in a decidedly positive light. He writes that Yeltsin "changed the course of Russian history, leading the country out of almost three-quarters of a century of communist rule and a thousand years of tyranny" (p. 246), a description that gives short shrift to Gorbachev's contribution. Felkay argues that "Yeltsin did democratize Russia" and placed it "well on its way toward real democracy and [a] free-market economy," and he assures us that "history will definitely be kinder to [Yeltsin] than his contemporaries" are (p. 246). These judgments are sensible, if perhaps a bit excessive, but it is doubtful that Felkay's book will be enough to convince skeptical readers like Reddaway (not to mention Russians like Glinski-Vassiliev) that they should rethink their jaundiced views. Not until far more time has passed and scholars are able to reexamine the Yeltsin era with greater dispassion will it be possible to determine how much of a break Yeltsin's rule truly was with the Tsarist and Soviet autocracies.

 

1. to draw on some writings (materials, etc.) – использовать труды (материалы и т.п.)

2. to delimit behaviour – определять границы поведения

3. prevailing sentiment – преобладающее, широко распространенное мнение

4. to take effect – оказывать воздействие

The measures took effect. – Меры подействовали.

вступить в силу, возыметь действие

The law goes into effect soon. – Закон скоро вступит в силу.

5. to trace the ascent and decline of smth. – прослеживать периоды расцвета и упадка чего-л.

6. to eschew smth. (зд: a normative standard of evaluation) – воздерживаться, избегать, остерегаться (стандартных оценок)

syn: to avoid

7. declassified documents – рассекреченные документы

8. to forgo (зд: archival evidence) – отказываться, воздерживаться от чего-л.

9. to underscore importance of smth. – подчеркивать важность чего-л.

10. to be wary of smb./smth. - осторожно относиться, опасаться

11. to tone down one's criticisms of smb. – смягчить, ослабить критические замечания в адрес кого-л.

12. to side with hardliners – быть на стороне бескомпромиссных, придерживающихся жесткой линии

13. to rebuff (зд: conspirators)– дать отпор, противостоять

14. an inauspicious beginning – неблагоприятный начальный период

15. to cause severe strains in the relationship – послужить причиной напряженности во взаимоотношениях

16. a full-fledged strategic partnership – полноценное (широкомасштабное) стратегическое партнерство

17. to be wont to do smth. – иметь обыкновение, привычку делать что-л.

18. to be folly – быть недальновидным,неосмотрительным, глупым

Ex: It was filly to persist. – Было глупо/бесполезно настаивать.

19. to suffice – быть достаточным, удовлетворять

Ex: - suffice for a purpose – отвечать какой-л. цели

suffice it to say – достаточно сказать

your word will suffice – вашего слова будет достаточно

20. the standoff with smb. – противостояние, конфронтация с кем-л.

21. to underlie analysis – лежать в основе анализа

22. to be bereft of smth. – лишаться чего-л.

Ex: I am bereft of all hope. – Я лишен всякой надежды.

23. to give short shrift to smb./smth. – Быстро расправиться с кем-л./чем-л.

Ex: to give short shrift to an opponent’s arguments – разбить аргументы противника

24. to take a jaundiced view of smth. – смотреть на что-л. предвзято, пристрастно

25. with greater dispassion – с большей объективностью, беспристрастием