Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 9 – Fifteen years
ago, Boris Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin as his successor, a choice that by its
very nature reflected something the two men had in common: a lack of desire to
serve as presidents of Russia and the inability and unwillingness of Russian
society to force them to do so, according to Vitaly Portnikov.
Yeltsin’s choice of Putin, the
Russian commentator says, and the willingness of Russians to go alone happened
because the first Russian president “simply could not choose anyone other than
an individual capable of giving him personal guarantees – and such people never
were reformers” but instead reflected “the most negative aspects of the heritage
of [their] predecessor” (grani.ru/opinion/portnikov/m.231885.html).
Fifteen years ago on this date,
President Yeltsin named Putin his prime minister and declared that he wanted to
see him as his successor. Many observers
at the time found it hard to believe that Yeltsin would and could choose a
virtual unknown for this job. But it turned out, Portnikov says, that he could
and did.
Yeltsin in reality had not such a
large choice, the Russian analyst continues, because he had lost faith in the
nomenklatura and very much feared that he and his family could become figures
in corruption trials.
Given that, Portnikov says, “the new
president could become only an individual personally devoted to him,” whose
origins were in the Russian security services, and who could become “a real
power after the beginning of the wars in the Caucasus.”
“All three of the last prime ministers
of Boris Yeltsin were from the special services,” but Putin enjoyed an
advantage over the other two: “he was weaker than Primakov and less notable
than Stepashin. Namely such a successor was the one Yeltsin needed.”
At a time when decisions needed to
be made not only about the future of the country “but about its very existence,
Piontkovsky continues, there was no one in the Kremlin thinking about Russia”
but only about saving their own skins or making money, although it is true that
Putin preserved and developed much that Yeltsin had already begun.
Yeltsin had fewer resources than
Putin, and Putin took “almost a decade for the final conversion of the Russian
Federation into an authoritarian dictatorship of the Latin American type, with
the qualities of an aggressor who is ready to fight with arms in his hands
against those who do not subordinate themselves to his rules of the game.”
But something even deeper united
Yeltsin and Putin and even Medvedev, Portnikov argues, and that is “the lack of
desire to work as president of Russia.” Instead, all were animated by a sense
that Russia was only a tiny part of “the real empire” that they wanted to
reclaim. While Yeltsin didn’t invade Crimea, he did support separatists across
the region so that Moldova and Georgia could not build their own statehoods,
and he kept the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict going.
Russian society accepted this, the
commentator says, and that allowed these leaders to “conduct two bloody wars in
Chechnya, which practically destroyed Russian democracy and gave Putin the
possibility in literally a few weeks to put Russia on a military track after
the collapse of the Yanukovich regime.”
Many still think that in 1999, “Russian
history could have gone alone another path if Yeltsin had chosen another heir.
But in fact, Portnikov argues, the phrase, ‘Yeltsin’s choice,’” shows there was
no “historic choice.” Instead, the collapse of Russian statehood was
pre-ordained by failure of Russian society to take responsibility “for the future
of its own country.”
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