Stunning victories, grievous failures

Leon Aron is a 45-year-old Muscovite who lived the first half of his life in Russia and the second half in the US. His massive work contains almost 200 pages of notes, bibliography and indexing. The book's publication is also uncannily timely, coming as it does in the immediate aftermath of Yeltsin's resignation and the ascent to power of acting-president Vladimir Putin.

It should be stated at the outset that this is by no means a disinterested biography. It is written from a very strong pro-Yeltsin position by a scholar whose views largely coincide with those of a group of pro-market zealots known as the "young reformers". This group made a comeback to national politics in the Duma elections of last month, when the Union of Right-Wing Forces under former prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko gained more than 8 per cent of the vote. Among their number are Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, whose advocacy of shock-therapy to the economy had earlier brought down upon them the wrath of the electorate.

Throughout the biography we are given a portrait of Boris Yeltsin which verges on hero-worship. The book is described on its dust cover as detailing Yeltsin's "stunning victories and grievous failures in transforming every aspect of the Soviet system he inherited". In reality, the grievous failures are glossed over in what amounts to little less than an encomium. The chapter titled "The Nadir", on the worst periods of Yeltsin's reign in the Kremlin is, apart from the short introductory chapter, the smallest in the book - and to it should have been assigned some of the episodes judged by Aron to have been "stunning victories".

For example, Yeltsin is shown as a decisive actor in the Kremlin on October 3rd, 1993 after hardline communist and neo-fascist demonstrators had broken through security cordons to reach the Russian White House, where the rebel parliament was holed up. He is shown as urging his ministers and his generals into action. "Yeltsin's heart began to pound. Was this the beginning of something so unspeakably frightening to the Russian ear? Of something he had been afraid to say even to himself? Yet it had come to pass. This was civil war."

This description of the events of October 1993 as "civil war" goes beyond melodramatic exaggeration. The deaths of about 150 people in two days in two extremely circumscribed areas of Moscow - the White House and Ostankino TV station - were highly regrettable. To describe them as civil war, however, is arrant nonsense.

As for Yeltsin's bringing the reality of the situation to bear on the minds of his paralysed officials and soldiers, there exists a different version of the story. Sergei Parkhomenko, a respected correspondent of the liberal daily Segodnya, put it this way at the time: "the President appeared to me not to be very lucid. He did not seem capable of pressing the control buttons. Everything remained chaotic". Parkhomenko was actually there: his account is first hand. Aron's heroic tale comes from a source which had a vested interest. It is based on the Zapiski (notes) of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.

Yeltsin's liaisons with some of the more disreputable characters in Russian business, including the oleaginous billionaire Boris Berezovsky, are brushed aside as follows: "There is little doubt that the secrecy in which Russian robber barons cloaked their dealings resulted in a vast exaggeration of their wealth and power both by the Moscow rumour mill and by the resident correspondents of Western newspapers and television networks, who dutifully package and ship the endless stream of that mill's products."

There is an echo here of claims by the current Kremlin administration that reports of money-laundering and corruption close to Yeltsin and his entourage have been invented by the "western media" as part of a co-ordinated campaign against Russia.

It should be noted too that some members of that western media, including Rory Peck from Derry, lost their lives in those October days in Moscow in 1993, while Aron was sitting on his exceedingly smart ass far from the carnage at the Ostankino TV centre.

Seamus Martin is an Irish Times staff journalist who specialises in Russian affairs.