Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from Russia’s Revolution, a collection of essays to be published on Wednesday by AEI Press.

What are we to make of the man who led post-Soviet Russia in its first nine years? Was he the “crude populist,” and “erratic” and hard-drinking “quasi-autocrat” of the lore of many an expert and contemporary report in U.S. newspapers, magazines, and television? Or was he indispensable to a profound and vital transformation of Russia? The answers should start with an examination of choices Yeltsin made in the context of the Soviet legacy and Russian history. 

I wrote the book Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life because of a most rare concurrence of subjects: a fascinating and complicated man, who in his prime could touch, sway, and lead millions; a great nation at one of the most fateful moments in its history; and the twentieth century’s last great revolution. This was a chance to write history while telling an absorbing tale.

Few protagonists are better suited for the man-and-his-times genre than Boris Yeltsin. The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva used to say that her dear friend Boris Pasternak looked at once like an Arabian thoroughbred and its rider, the driven and the driver. Yeltsin was both a bellwether of the gathering Russian storm and part of the storm itself. As the pace of the revolution quickened, Boris Yeltsin’s personal story and his country’s history became tightly intertwined and, in several shining instances, welded together. The revolution was the wind, he the sail. Together they began to turn Russia around.

Like Lincoln or de Gaulle, Yeltsin took over a great nation at the time of a mortal crisis and held it together. In Yeltsin’s case, there were three crises at once—political, economic, and imperial. Not only did the country’s political and economic systems lie in ruins, the country itself had to be reinvented. Against impossible odds, he succeeded, forging, for the first time in a thousand years, a sustainable Russian state that was neither a monarchy nor a dictatorship. 

In the process, Yeltsin did enough to make half a dozen lives memorable. He dissolved the Soviet domestic empire—a stark departure from the national pattern in which state-building (from Ivan the Terrible and Peter, through Catherine the Great, Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev) had invariably included imperial expansion and strengthening of the empire as key components.

Like Lincoln or de Gaulle, Yeltsin took over a great nation at the time of a mortal crisis and held it together.

The territorial and economic concessions that Yeltsin made to Ukraine, whose independence he recognized ahead of all other world leaders on December 3, 1991, after it had been part of the Russian empire for almost three and a half centuries, may be without precedent in the relations between metropoles and their former territories. The very special and tragic case of Chechnya aside, one needs only to recall the massive and systemic violence that accompanied the breakup of other colonies—India and Pakistan, Britain and Ireland, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and, of course, Yugoslavia—to appreciate the magnitude of Yeltsin’s accomplishment. 

Yeltsin also decimated the garrison state by slashing the defense budget to under 5 percent of the GDP. He reduced Russia’s nuclear arsenal by almost one-half.  

Until Yeltsin, the unity of Russia had been achieved only by rigid and ruthless control from Moscow. Whenever the control loosened and the iron hand grew rusty or shaky, the country swiftly fell apart, descended into fratricide and anarchy, and then was reconstituted by a new tyrant. At Yeltsin’s departure, Russia was, for the first time, both radically decentralized and whole.

The first Russian president oversaw the birth of a new Russian politics as well. He institutionalized the vital liberties that Gorbachev had granted only provisionally and often by default. Glasnost became freedom from government censorship of speech and of the press. Gorbachev’s “political pluralism” evolved into freedom of political organization for all, including the regime’s most radical and implacable opponents; free, multicandidate elections, both legislative and presidential; and a parliament, which was dominated by a radical opposition during Yeltsin’s entire tenure, save half a year between his inauguration in July 1991 and the beginning of economic reforms in January 1992. His eight and a half years were by far the freest, most tolerant, and open period Russia had ever known, except for the eight months between February and November 1917.

Rid of its traditional cruelty and revenge, the new Russian political system, started by Gorbachev and decisively shaped by Yeltsin, granted losers not only their physical lives but their political lives as well. Not a hair fell from the heads of the leaders of the August 1991 putsch. They were never even brought to trial. In February 1994, Yeltsin signed into law the amnesty voted by the Duma for them and for the leaders of the armed rebellion in Moscow of October 3–4, 1993. Remarkable in any revolution, in the bloodstained Russian history this act was nothing short of astounding—the victorious head of state releasing, unmolested, his violent and unrepentant foes, who would almost certainly have killed him had they prevailed.

Although woefully underfunded and plagued by corruption, Russian courts under Yeltsin were nevertheless home to a judiciary that was immeasurably more powerful and independent than in Soviet times. Russian citizens by the thousands sued federal and local authorities and won. The courts also repeatedly overruled local authorities who banned “nonnative” religious groups following the restrictive 1997 law initiated by the Duma. Even the traditionally most sacrosanct Russian institutions—the military and the secret police—were no longer entirely immune from due process. Even before the Constitutional Court in effect declared capital punishment unconstitutional, Yeltsin (acting against the dominant sentiment in the Duma and in the country’s public opinion) had commuted all death sentences—this in a country that traditionally executed prisoners savagely and, until a few years before, together with China and the United States had led the world in number of executions.

And yet, and yet, if amid all these epochal leaps and breakthroughs, notoriously parsimonious History were to settle on one theme, the leitmotif of Yeltsin’s political life—what Yeats called the “great melody” (and Conor Cruise O’Brien made the title of his first-rate political biography of Burke)—what would it be? What is the place where a search for a historic Yeltsin should begin? I think that theme and that place, that “great melody,” is likely to be the furtherance of liberty.

Such a verdict does not necessarily bode Yeltsin well.

On the pediment of the portico of the Paris Panthéon, where, among others, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Zola are buried, there is a bas-relief of France between Liberty and History, bestowing laurels on famous men. If the two—Liberty and History—agree, then good and well. But do they, invariably?

I think rather no than yes. Of all heroes, liberators fare the worst. Among the components of progress, liberty, like greatness, is perhaps the most suspect to social scientists (at least those of my generation), who were taught in graduate school that that which cannot be quantified is not worth dealing with. The elusiveness and misperception of the criteria by which liberators are judged bear much of the blame as well.

In keeping with his central conviction of the multiplicity and occasional incompatibility of even the most noble of human wishes and values, Sir Isaiah Berlin greatly clarified the matter when he wrote, “Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.” (To which, in the Russian case, one can easily add honest and competent bureaucracy, universal sobriety, enlightened and generous captains of industry, pensioners paid on time, peace in Chechnya, a 5 percent annual growth of GDP, foreign investments, improvement in corporate governance, and decreasing male mortality.)

Yet Berlin’s injunction remains largely ignored. Sublime though it is, liberty, can, of course, also be terrifying and often cruel. Economic freedom, for one, is the foe of equality, especially equality in poverty. “In much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,” says Ecclesiastes (1:18). There is much vexation in much freedom as well, and those who increase it—the liberators—may increase sorrow for millions, at least in the short run.

Much of what passed for reporting on Yeltsin fell within the genre of political entomology: like insects, political leaders are watched through a magnifying glass within the tiny confines of their personal foibles.

But the short run, the first ten to fifteen years of wrenching post-Communist transition, is all that matters in politics—and not just in Russia. The darling of the Western intelligentsia and the one-time model post-Communist leader, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, is serving out his second term in office, abandoned and often depressed in Prague Castle, irrelevant, even a bit of a joke for his people, who are angry at the cronyism and corruption that they blame on the new economic order. “All the Communists who stole were allowed to keep their wealth, and today they are captains of industry,” a Prague worker complained to an American reporter in 1999. Havel “should have left at the height of his career,” the worker added. “He gave people hope but did not fulfill it.” Last year, 49 percent of Czechs polled thought Havel should resign, and only slightly over half approved of the fall of Communism. A third explicitly regretted the demise of the Communist regime.

The most painful, most personal disappointment to Havel must be the emergence—ten years after he led the anti-Communist “velvet revolution”—of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia as the most popular party in the Czech Republic. The party’s leaders—gray, mediocre apparatchiks, very much like Gennady Zyuganov’s colleagues in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation—represent everything that Havel detested on aesthetic and moral as well as political grounds all his life.

A great deal in Yeltsin’s sorry public image at the time of his resignation is traceable to these genetic handicaps of liberators. Yet for much, perhaps most, he had only himself to blame. That as millions suffered, millions of others gained enormously from political and economic freedom does not absolve Yeltsin of responsibility for blunders in the strategy of economic reforms and for abetting corruption and a brief but pernicious reign of the so-called oligarchs, the Russian robber-barons, whose presence became synonymous with crooked deals, rigged markets, fraudulent “auctions,” and the incestuous relationship between political power and the privatized economy.

There seemed to be two Yeltsins coexisting in the public eye—occasionally overlapping, sometimes clashing and retreating, but always remaining distinct and resilient. One was Yeltsin the leader and the visionary. The other was Yeltsin the politician—an avid and very competent greasy-pole climber, obsessed with power and its many gaudy trappings, petty, and jealous of competitors’ popularity. In many ways he ran the Kremlin like a Byzantine court (or like the obkom, a provincial party committee, where he spent seventeen years). It was rife with intrigue, backstabbing, favorites and outcasts, sudden firings and hirings, demotions and promotions.

Yet in addition to the “built-in” features of a historic Yeltsin, as always in the social sciences, observers’ biases were at work as well. As he readied his old-fashioned camera to photograph the remnants of the Casa Bertini, Shelley’s house in the wooded hills near Lucca, Richard Holmes, who is likely the best literary biographer in the English language today, set the field of focus and aperture to “ten foot to infinity.” He wrote later that this was precisely the range for a conscientious biographer: “ten foot to infinity.” In the case of Yeltsin, the depth of vision was a few inches at best.

Much of what passed for reporting on Yeltsin fell within the genre of political entomology: like insects, political leaders are watched through a magnifying glass within the tiny confines of their personal foibles, petty passions, and daily stupidities, in almost total isolation from their policies, ideologies, agendas—and from their countries at large.

This was history as practiced by those whom Isaiah Berlin called “the glass and plastic” historians, who “regard all facts as equally interesting” and whose product is contaminated by “craven pedantry and blindness.” In an essay about Chaim Weizmann, Berlin supplied an antidote:

Greatness is not a specifically moral attribute. It is not one of the private virtues . . . A great man need not be morally good, or upright, or kind, or sensitive, or delightful, or possess artistic or scientific talent. To call someone a great man is to claim that he has intentionally taken . . . a large step, one far beyond the normal capacities of men, in satisfying, or materially affecting, central human interests.

As with Berlin’s definition of liberty, this formula remains, for the most part, unheeded.

No matter what happens in the short run, ultimately History appears to recognize only choice, not luck or accident. The great French socialist and prime minister Leon Blum noted that “life does not lend itself to the simultaneous retention of all possible benefits, and I have often thought that morality consists uniquely perhaps in having the courage to choose.” This might be one of those rare cases where, pace Machiavelli, private morality and statesmanship intersect. Making critical choices may not be a sufficient condition for greatness, but it is most certainly a necessary one.

Sooner or later, therefore, a search for a historic Yeltsin must confront the matter of choice. Did Yeltsin, not to put too fine a point on it, know what he was doing? Or did he, as the currently fashionable Russian and Washington lore directs us to believe, wake up with a hangover after nonstop drinking in Belavezhskaya Pushcha on December 8, 1991, and decide to dissolve the Soviet Union? And did he introduce capitalism by freeing the prices on January 2, 1992, in much the same manner: impulsively, even capriciously, concerned only with petty political gain and unaware of the gravity of the consequences?

In the end, it was one man’s ability to make a choice and to take the responsibility that tipped the scale. The market economy happened in Russia because Yeltsin wished it to happen.

I believe that the preponderance of evidence demonstrates consistent and considered choices for liberty in Yeltsin’s three central decisions about the Russian domestic empire, democracy, and the market economy. Of these three choices, which laid the foundation of post-Communist Russia, that of economic freedom is generally treated as something almost accidental. Yet it was precisely here that personal choice was both absolutely central and hardest to make. Democratization and the dissolution of the empire had been set in train by Gorbachev (the former more or less consciously, the latter inadvertently). Not so changes in the economy; by the end of 1991, after four years of tinkering, the market and private property were still a taboo, dealt with by articles in the criminal code.

The choice of economic liberty was unique also because Yeltsin had to abandon the strategy that had served him so well before. Until then, he had sensed the direction of Russian public opinion and followed, as well as guided and molded, it. Yet if democracy were clearly in tune with the sense of the majority, and if the abandonment of the Soviet Union, at least for the moment, seemed a fair price to pay for Russian liberty and prosperity, neither the freeing of prices nor the privatization of the economy was being clamored for by tens of millions. With the market revolution, Yeltsin was, so to speak, on his own.

In the end—after years of debates, recommendations, commissions, and resolutions—it was one man’s ability to make a choice and to take the responsibility that tipped the scale. The market economy happened in Russia because Yeltsin wished it to happen (as it did not happen in neighboring Ukraine because its president, Leonid Kravchuk, decided to have a peaceful and uncomplicated presidency).

As Yegor Gaidar remarked to me years later, the freeing of prices, which would turn millions of Russians into paupers overnight (no matter how impoverished they already were because of shortages and inflation that made worthless most of their savings), was something that Yeltsin knew Russia “needed” but, he was equally certain, “could not support”—at least not by the majorities to which he was accustomed. For the first time, as an astute Russian journalist noted at the time, Yeltsin the “populist” and Yeltsin the revolutionary became adversaries.

This was, literally, Yeltsin’s first major “unpopular” decision. He would confess later that for “two whole months” he and his advisers had searched for “more acceptable,” “less onerous” ways to begin the reforms without freeing the prices—but could not find any. No politician makes such choices lightly, least of all someone who until then had been close in status to the nation’s savior, basking in the adoration of millions.

On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin went to the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia to seek a mandate for the price liberalization and privatization plan (which, as many in Russia and the West would soon so conveniently forget, was granted by an 876 to 16 vote). In one of the best speeches he ever made, Yeltsin declared that the time of “small steps” was past. We must in deeds, he went on, not words, begin extricating ourselves from “the swamp that pulls us deeper and deeper.” Only a “large-scale reformist breakthrough” could save Russia’s economy from disintegration, her people from poverty, and her state from collapse.

He called the “unfreezing” of prices the “hardest” measure; but the entire experience of “world civilization,” Yeltsin said, had proved that fair prices could not be set by the bureaucrat, only by the market. He counted on the “support and understanding” of the people of Russia, support that they had so generously given him in the past. Together, the previous August, they had defended “political freedom”; now it was time for economic freedom, freedom for enterprises and entrepreneurs, for people to work as much as they wanted and to get as much for their labor as they earned. “Today, we must make a decisive choice,” Yeltsin concluded.

To do so requires the will and wisdom of the people, the courage of political leaders, the knowledge of experts. Your president has made this choice. This is the most important decision of my life. I have never looked for easy roads in life, but I understand very clearly that the next months will be the most difficult. If I have your support and your trust, I am ready to travel this road with you to the end. The time has come for practical actions in the name and for the benefit of every Russian family, in the name and for the benefit of the Russian state.

On December 29, four days before price controls were to be lifted, Yeltsin addressed the nation in a televised speech, in which he placed the economic revolution at the center of the general “decommunization” of Russia. Along with prices set by the state, “we are abandoning mirages and illusions,” Yeltsin said. It was clear that the Communist utopia “could not be built.” It was not Russia that had been defeated; it was Communism. Along with the state-owned economy, Russia was “ridding” itself of “the militarization of our life,” of the “antihuman economy” devoted almost entirely to military production. Russia had stopped “constant preparation” for war “with the whole world.” The “iron curtain” that had been there “between us and almost the whole world” was no more.

We have inherited “a devastated land,” a “gravely ill Russia,” Yeltsin concluded, but “we must not despair.” No matter how difficult things are at the time, “we have a chance to climb out of this pit.” Our people are “no worse, no lazier than any other. It is necessary only to help people find themselves in this new life.”

Of course, liberty, even if consciously chosen, is not democracy (although it is a necessary condition for democracy)—and a liberator is not a democrat. What label, what shorthand will History settle on in the case of Yeltsin? Here was the man who ordered troops into Chechnya in December 1994 and for a year and a half prosecuted a war there—incompetently, cruelly, and with complete disregard for the country’s public opinion. (Five years later, this time with public opinion on his side, he allowed his handpicked successor to unleash another savage attack on Chechnya.) Yeltsin weakened the nascent constitutional order and cheapened free political discourse with his cynical palace games. He was responsible for a great deal of the alienation of the people from power in the new Russia.

Perhaps most important of all, Yeltsin freed Russia from what the great English poet Robert Graves called “the never changing circuit of its fate.” He gave Russia a “peredyshka,” a time to catch its breath.

He was also someone who allowed complete freedom of speech and political organization for his most outrageous and crudest critics; who, except for three days in August 1991 and two weeks in October 1993, never closed down a single opposition newspaper; who sought popular mandates for his policies and his office in a referendum and free elections open to those same critics. In the 1996 presidential race, he quite literally risked his life for victory—ignoring the doctors’ warnings, suffering a heart attack a few days before the final vote, and undergoing quintuple bypass heart surgery four months later.

He was rife with authoritarian habits and urges—and bound by self-imposed and self-enforced constraints. He thirsted for power and was zealous to acquire and hold it. Yet both the mode of acquisition of that power (by two free elections) and at least some of the uses to which he put it—greatly weakening the state’s stranglehold over society and the economy, and Moscow’s over Russia—were utterly novel for that country.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites’ competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled. Yeltsin’s legacy is a collection of necessary, although far from sufficient, conditions for a modern capitalist democracy: free elections; freedom of political opposition; demilitarization of state and society; decentralization of the traditionally unitary state; a largely privatized economy; and a still small and weak but increasingly assertive civil society, sustained by civil liberties, freedom of the press from government censorship, and an increasingly independent and assertive judiciary. The political organism that he forged is full of severe defects, both genetic and acquired, yet capable of development and of peacefully thwarting Communist restoration without succumbing to authoritarianism.

Perhaps most important of all, Yeltsin freed Russia from what the great English poet Robert Graves (in an entirely different context) called “the never changing circuit of its fate”—the history that after four centuries appeared to have become destiny: imperialism, militarism, and rigid centralization interrupted by episodes of horrifyingly brutal anarchy. He gave Russia a “peredyshka,” a time to catch its breath. The traditional attributes of the Russian state—authoritarianism, imperialism, militarism, xenophobia—are far from extinguished. Yet more and higher hedges have been erected against their recurrence under Yeltsin’s peredyshka than at any other time in Russian history.

Brutalized—the rulers and the ruled alike—by terror and lies, gnarled by fear and poverty, paralyzed by total dependence on the state, the Russians’ journey from subjects to a free people will be neither easy nor fast. Yet, like a convalescing invalid, Russia under Yeltsin began to hobble away from the prison hospital that the czars and commissars built, with its awful food, stern nurses, short visiting hours, and ugly uniforms.

She is not out of the hospital yard yet. But if she can no longer be stopped, Yeltsin’s name, next to Gorbachev’s, will be inscribed by History among those of the greatest liberators.

Leon Aron is Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.