Democracy may die

A few months ago I asked a Kremlin grandee, who worked with both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, which president of Russia he preferred. I expected him to favour the warm but shambolic Yeltsin rather than the competent but icy Putin. I was wrong. ‘The difference,’ he explained, ‘is that Yeltsin was a capricious Tsar; Putin’s a practical politician.’ But who, I asked was the more lovable? ‘Putin,’ he replied, ‘because he’s always direct and he keeps his word.’ His words returned to me when I heard on Monday that Yeltsin had died. Yeltsin’s style of tsardom — impulsive, bombastic, secretive, drunken — meant inconsistency and insecurity for even his closest aides, never mind his own people.

Yet for all his flamboyance and recklessness, and for all the colossal mistakes, Yeltsin was a giant. He was a contradictory caricature of the Russian peasant, a sort of proletarian populist Peter the Great who also veered between impulsive reform and alcoholic buffoonery, but with this difference: Yeltsin, a decent man raised and promoted by communism, truly believed in liberal democracy. The tragedy is that he undermined his own beliefs.

The West is pathetically naive about Russian reformers. We long to believe they are real liberals, but no liberal will ever rule Russia. Peter the Great was a reformer — but a brutish tyrant too. So-called ‘experts’ in the West even believed Stalin was a prisoner of Politburo hardliners. We embraced the hardline Leninist Khrushchev (whose crude clownery and decent instincts sometimes resembled Yeltsin’s). When the KGB chief Andropov became leader, his love of jazz made him a ‘liberal’ in our eyes. Gorbachev remains the West’s favourite brand-name, but even he was not a liberal. His reforms aimed to make communism efficient, but he failed because he lost control. Historians will judge that Yeltsin was of a similar stature to Gorbachev.