28 OCTOBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL dead, enterprising street vendors set up a brisk business selling photos to passersby taken against the backdrop of the blackened tower of the now grotesquely misnamed White House. b Two days after the attack on the White House, I accompanied Ambassador Pickering to a meeting with Yeltsin, whose face was puffy and eyes were swollen into slits. He moved briskly through his agenda, but his speech was slow and slurred. I had been observing Yeltsin closely for two years and never before seen him this way in any private meeting. After half an hour, a bell rang and Yeltsin stood up abruptly, saying the meeting was over. Yeltsin hung on as Russian president for seven more years but the impetus for democratic reform vanished. In my view, Yeltsin never recovered either personally or politically from the trauma of having to send tanks into the street to fire on Russians. Bouts of alcohol abuse and manic public behavior became more common. Two months after the October tragedy, Yeltsin rammed through a new constitution; it was much needed but seemed to sideline democratic change in favor of enhancing presidential power. Perhaps most tellingly, Boris Yeltsin, who had won elections convincingly every time he put his name before the Russian people, this time had to resort to chicanery in order to get the tally approved, as he did again in the 1996 Russian presidential election. By 1999, when Yeltsin turned over the reins of power to Vladimir Putin, most Russians had come to associate his legacy and democratic reform more broadly with crime, corruption, poverty, and the collapse of Russian state authority at home and abroad. n Unfolding in the streets of Moscow was an armed struggle for the future of Russia—one that Boris Yeltsin came within a whisker of losing.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=