Abstract
Although Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the R ussian S oviet F ederated S ocialist R epublic in June 1991, he took office under the shadow of another presidency barely older than his own. L ittle more than a year earlier, the S oviet C ongress of P eople’s deputies had elected M ikhail G orbachev the first “president of the USSR ,” a new office that represented the first independent executive post in S oviet history. A lthough it may have seemed another step on the road to a changed, democratic S oviet U nion— a newly formed legislature had chosen the nation’s first independent president—it was in fact an act of desperation. U ntil 1990, the theory and practice of governing the S oviet U nion had been predicated on the explicit rejection of the very idea of separated powers, or even of classical models of parliamentarism.1 B ut that was before perestroika had gone awry, and S oviet society had descended into chaos and violence. G orbachev’s post was created as a reaction to this turmoil and growing fear, conditions that would be bequeathed to the R ussian presidency (and its counterparts elsewhere in the C ommonwealth of I ndependent S tates) when the S oviet government finally imploded. T he S oviet president was the first, but not the last, in this region, and the lessons of G orbachev’s doomed experiment would not be lost on Yeltsin or the Russians as the Union crumbled about them and power made its inexorable way from the president of the USSR to the presidents of the republics.
Either we create presidential power or chaos triumphs. This is our choice.
—an unnamed “government source” in Pravda, 1990
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Notes
See, for example, I. M. Stepanov, “Parlamentskaia demokratiia i vybor formy pravleniia” in Konstitutsionnyi stroi rossii, 2nd. ed. (Moscow: Institute of State and Law, 1995), and V. N. Suvorov, “Institut prezidentsva: rossiiskaia konstitutsionnaia model’ i zarubezhnyi opyt” in Ispolnitel’naia vlast: sravnitel’no-pravovoe issledovanie (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 1995).
Among the best documentary accounts of the final days of the USSR in English are a trio ofworks by journalists: David Renmick, Lenin’s Tomb (New York:Vintage, 1994), David Satter, Age of Delirium (NewYork: Knopf, 1996), and Michael Dobbs, Down with Big Brother:The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Knopf, 1997).
V. N. Grigor’iev and Iu. Rogov, Fenomen “perestroiki:” Cherezvychainoe polozhenie (Moscow:Verdikt, 1994), p. 8.
Dmitrii Volkogonov, Sem’ vozhdei: galareia liderov SSSR (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), pp. 317–318.
See Stephen White, Gorbachev and After (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 241–244.
As Vera Tolz pointed out in 1990, despite the growth of autonomous social “circles” and hidden discussion clubs in the 1970s, “the creation of unsanctioned groups with specific sociopolitical goals ... almost inevitably continued to provoke persecution” until at least 1988. See Vera Tolz, The USSR’s Emerging Multiparty System (Munich: Radio Liberty, 1990), p. 5.
Robert Sharlet notes that the legal and constitutional changes enacted between 1988 and 1990 were nothing less than an attempt at “fundamentally redrafting the ‘social contract’ governing relations between the citizen and the party-state.” Robert Sharlet, Soviet Constitutional Crisis (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 92.
John D unlop, TheRise ofRussia and theFall of theSovietUnion ( P rinceton, N J: P rinceton U niversity P ress, 1993), p. 72
V. Boldin, Krushenie p’edestala (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), pp. 189–190.
Leon Onikov, KPSS: anatomiia raspada (Moscow: Respublika, 1996), pp. 66–67.
Arbatov andYakovlev, in consultation with each other, each tried to stop Gorbachev’s panicked rightward turn in early 1991. See A. N.Yakovlev, Gor’leaia chasha: Bol’shevizm i Reformatsiia Rossii (Yaroslavl’:Verkhne-Volzhskoe, 1994), p. 263, and Georgii Arbatov, The System (NewYork: Random House, 1993), p. 332.
Andrei Grachev, Dal’she bez menia: ukhod prezidenta (Moscow: “ProgressKultura,” 1994); Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (NewYork: Doubleday, 1996), p. 255.
Several reviewers have noted the disappointingly evasive nature of the Gorbachev memoirs. See Jack Matlock, “Gorbachev: Lingering Mysteries,” The New York Review of Books, December 19, 1996, especially pp. 38–39, for a pointed dissection of the memoirs, including Matlock’s charge that an incident involving Matlock himself is “breathtakingly inaccurate, and Gorbachev certainly knows that it is:”
As one ditty of the time ran, “‘Acceleration’, it’s a complex factor; next thing you know, they blew up a reactor; submarines sank, airplanes crashed; Russia’s been dirtied with AIDS, the junkies brought it ... There’s no cheese, there’s no sausage, there’s no vodka, there’s no wine, there’s only radiation.” See V. Pechenev, Vslet i padenie Gorbacheva (Moscow: Respublika, 1996). p. 267. Other jokes that used the buzzwords of perestroika such as uskorenie (“acceleration”) and chelovecheskii faktor (“the human factor”) were in common Soviet usage in the late 1980s—and which due to their rather frank content are unprintable here.
Institute for Social-Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Reformirovanie Rossii: mify i real’nost’ (Moscow: Academia, 1994), p. 27.
Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York: Pantheon, 1993) pp. 345–346.
See Andrei Melville, “An Emerging Civic Culture? Ideology, Public Attitudes, and Political Culture in the Early 1990s,” in A. Miller et al., eds., Public Opinion and Regime Change (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993). Although the 1995 Kaiser-Harvard- Washington Post study in the United States found only 35 percent agreeing that most people can be trusted, the only other option on the Kaiser study was a tepid “you can’t be too careful,” and at least half of those surveyed also believed that most people try to be “fair” and “helpful.” See “Americans Losing Trust in Each Other and Institutions,” The Washington Post, January 28, 1996, p. A1; When broken down by educational levels, Robert Putnam found 40–45 percent positive responses to the question of whether “others can be trusted” among Americans with at least a high school education. Robert Putnam, “Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America,” PS: Political Science and Politics, December 1995, p. 668.
See Gordon B. Smith, Reforming the Russian Legal System (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chapter 5.
See Richard Rose, “Russia As an Hour-Glass Society: A Constitution without Citizens,” East European Constitutional Review, Summer 1995.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika i novoe myshlenie dlia nashego strana i dlia vsego mira (Moscow: Politizdat, 1987), pp. 31–32.
See Thane Gustafson and Dawn Mann, “Gorbachev’s First Year: Building Power and Authority,” Problems of Communism, May-June 1986, pp. 2–3.
Cameron Ross, “Party-State Relations,” in Eugene Huskey, ed., Executive Power and Soviet Politics (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), p. 75.
Nicolai Petro, “Perestroika from Below:Voluntary Sociopolitical Associations in the RSFSR” in Alfred Richer and Alvin Rubenstein, eds., Perestroika at the Crossroads (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), p. 124.
S. Kondrashov, “Mnogopartiinost’—fundament demokratii,” Izvestiia, March 9, 1990, p. 3.
Eugene Huskey, “Legislative-Executive Relations,” in Huskey, ed., p. 83.
T. Samolis, “Net, ne s demokratiei my proshchaemsiia,” Pravda, February 21, 1991, p. 1.
E. Mal’kova, “Terpimost’ i otvetstvennost’,” Trud, February 25, 1990, p. 1.
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© 1999 Thomas M. Nichols
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Nichols, T.M. (1999). The Creation of the Soviet Presidency: Social Chaos and Executive Power, 1989–1991. In: The Russian Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299088_2
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