Who says you can’t rewind history and play it again, changing the result? At 5 in the afternoon, Moscow time Monday, the original Bolshevik Revolution, a tragedy starring V.I. Lenin, ended the way it should have the first time around-in defeat.
This lesson in statecraft by B.N. Yeltsin came to a close with the now rump Russian parliament adjourning, single file, down the long steps of Moscow’s White House, walking slowly between rows of armed guards. The once-defiant deputies could have been commuters on their way home after a day of pushing papers. Only now and then a soldier would stop one of the more officious types to make certain his briefcase contained nothing more explosive than irrelevant manifestoes.
A few of those surrendering went through the formality of keeping their hands over their heads as they marched into what looked like ordinary red-and-white city buses. It was October but not Red October. This revolution was closing on schedule.
Clio, muse of history and play doctor, was rewriting a grandiose drama that hadn’t worked out the first time around. She was now relying on the oldest rule in showbiz: Give ’em a happy ending every time.
John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” was being downsized to a one-act. Big improvement. History was being turned back to 1917, and Russia and the world given a blessed second chance. As a protagonist, President Yeltsin beats the heck out of Comrade Lenin.
Pity about Alexander Kerensky. He was the boy intellectual and last prime minister of the provisional democracy that the Bolsheviks overthrew in 1917. He is beyond regrets now, but Kerensky spent his middle age, old age and very old age in a library carrel at Stanford’s Hoover Institution rehearsing what he might have done differently. To find the answer, all he would have had to do was watch Boris Yeltsin for a couple of weeks, or just for 24 hours.
Who would have thought that a Siberian roughneck, someone with a mercurial temperament and an allergy to intellectual fashion, would so deftly and repeatedly save his country and his people’s hopes? One might as well have expected somebody born on the Kentucky frontier who grew up splitting logs to save the American Union.
There has been a distinctly Lincolnesque touch to Boris Yeltsin’s tactics these past couple of weeks. Determined not to appear the aggressor, he chose to have the fire-eaters strike the first blow if there had to be one. It came Sunday-in the form of sporadic rioting and a march on what represents the Capitol of any country in this media-mesmerized age: the nearest television station.
The past two weeks in Russia have been a fight not just for a parliament building or the Kremlin, or for some key intersection or television station, but for the support of the Russian people, who above all want peace and stability-a settled environment in which new liberties can take root and grow. Russians have a word for all this: legitimacy.
Legitimacy requires something else. Call it the consent of the governed. To retain public support, Russia’s president knew he had to avoid not just another 1917, but another 1905, when the czarist regime put down one revolution but created enough martyrs to fuel another.
When he wasn’t being criticized by the reactionaries for disbanding the Soviet-style parliament, the Russian president was being badmouthed by his intelligentsia for putting up with the deputies at all. Many of the intellectuals and social reformers wanted to see troops advancing on parliament the day after the president declared it illegal. But then they would have been seen as the destroyers of liberty and order, not as its defenders. And public support would have been lost.
Boris Yeltsin instinctively understood something Abe Lincoln said in his first debate with Stephen A. Douglas: “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”
Boris Yeltsin’s opposition spent its time impeaching him and passing meaningless decrees. Holed up in the middle of Moscow, growing more irrelevant every day, waiting for an attack that didn’t come, being ignored to political death, it resorted in its increasing desperation to violence. That was its fatal mistake, its Fort Sumter. It had accepted the onus of initiating civil war. Which is no way to win over public opinion.
So when the armor and assault troops moved on parliament, they approached as supporters of the civil order, not aggressors. Boris Yeltsin was not only doing his duty but seizing his opportunity. The man needs no advice from this country; he might as well have been raised on a history of our own civil war.
Just as with the War Between the States, all kinds of complicated constitutional arguments and shining shibboleths can be applied to these Russian circumstances: Who really represents law and order-Boris Yeltsin or the duly constituted parliament that he disbanded? An elected president or the constitutional court he ignored?
President Lincoln, lest we forget, ordered blockades, called up troops, declared martial law, closed down newspapers, seized property, and even suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the late unpleasantness.
When questioned, Lincoln would reply that he found it strange to be accused of violating parts of the Constitution by those who would sacrifice the whole, along with the Union it was designed for.
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There can be no doubt who represents this new constitutional democracy in Russia. A constitutional democracy is not a collection of conflicting statutes but an unfolding of still-developing institutions. Lest we forget, our own Constitution has required some forceful defense from time to time.
It was the misfortune of the Ruslan Khasbulatovs and Alexander Rutskois and their motley following that they should have found themselves up against an apolitical military under a clear constitutional authority. Even worse for their miserable cause, they were not matched against a Kerensky but a Yeltsin. And that may have been the decisive factor in their having such a short run in this fickle theater called history.
Cancel one more snap theory about history-that it is made by impersonal forces rather than individual leaders.
At this juncture of the permanent Russian crisis, it is hard to imagine any other Russian who could hold his country together, defend democracy, and keep the wheels turning with ever increasing momentum back toward 1917-and the brighter path that Russia never took. That’s progress. Now, thanks to Boris Yeltsin, it can continue.