No one spoke of hatred for the Russians. The feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures that the desire to exterminate them—like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves—was as natural an instinct as that of self preservation.

Today, Chechnya is regarded as the Sicily of Russia, with mafiosi “families” engaging in broad, black-market criminal activities centered there. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, President Dudayev in Chechnya seized the opportunity to fight for total independence from Russia and, while Yeltsin and others were focused on the post-coup dramas in Moscow, Dudayev issued radical policy edicts that ignored Russian suzerainty in the region and allowed Chechnya to be used as a vast staging ground for illegal smuggling operations.

Spooked by the sharp rise in popularity of Russian nationalists and imperialists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin needed to show that he would not allow the non-Russian peoples of his country (twenty percent of the overall population) to secede. When Yeltsin started his war in 1994, he was told by his military advisors that a lightning-fast victory could be concluded “in a matter of hours.” Yeltsin gave the go-ahead. Russian forces struck at the Chechens with startling ferocity in 1994 and did not let up for over two years. Grozny, the capital city, was leveled on a scale matched only in Berlin and Stalingrad during World War II. The Russian air force dropped bombs on the city at a rate of over four thousand an hour at the attack’s peak. By 1996, 80,000 people had died in Chechnya, but the Russians still could not claim a victory. As the presidential elections approached in the spring of l996, Yeltsin called a halt to the unpopular and disorganized war and abruptly withdrew from the embittered territory.

After a series of bombings by unknown terrorists killed hundreds of apartment dwellers in Moscow in September 1999, Yeltsin and his new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, decided the time was right to resume the war in Chechnya. This time, Moscow was more methodical and organized in its prosecution of the war, and public support for the action has been strong. The attack has been handled with astonishing disregard for civilians and refugees, many of whom were turned back by Russian troops at the borders and forced to remain in the Chechen war zone while warplanes flew overhead. Reports of unarmed refugee convoys being attacked directly by Russian troops were frequent, and a vicious attack on Grozny was underway by the time Yeltsin resigned. (ln sad irony, those left living in Grozny when the city fighting broke out were mostly poor and elderly ethnic Russians who had nowhere to go; most of those in the line of the heaviest Russian fire in the capital city were themselves Russians.)

By quickly vilifying the Chechens as extremists and terrorists, the newly-appointed prime minister watched his popularity ratings quadruple in a matter of weeks. With Yeltsin’s strong support, Putin talked of the importance of wiping out the “vermin” in Chechnya and Russian commanders talked of “flattening the region.” With parliamentary elections coming in December 1999 and the presidential election now set for March 2000, the Kremlin-controlled media bombarded Russians with jingoistic and xenophobic spin that strengthened Putin’s political hand still more. Suddenly, by year’s end, a forty-seven-year old former deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and KGB bureaucrat—whose name was virtually unknown in Russia before last summer—was the acting president of the country and the leading contender in this spring’s presidential contest.

In its own way, Yeltsin’s resignation on New Year’s Eve may have been his way of dealing with Putin’s meteoric political rise. Easily threatened by his own deputies, Yeltsin had all but made a parlor game of the constant reshuffling of his ministers; during one eighteen-month stretch, Yeltsin hired and fired four prime ministers. His desire to control politics in Russia meant that it was important to topple any would-be successors before his own role was challenged. Yeltsin has always seen himself as bigger than any party or government: in 1993, he launched a full-scale military assault against the Russian parliament building in Moscow—killing hundreds—to dislodge rebelling members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, whose political existence he had outlawed without any clear constitutional right to do so. He threatened to dismiss the Duma when the members voted against his nominee for prime minister. Within months of this constitutional showdown, Yeltsin fired the minister himself. ln his last years, all access to him, including by ministers, was tightly monitored by his bodyguard and his daughter. Yeltsin would disappear from Moscow for weeks at a time with various serious health problems.

For several months in 1998, Yeltsin had even hinted that, as Russia’s first elected president, he was not restricted to the two-term constitutional Iimit that his own administration had proposed. More recently, he had acknowledged that his term would legally end in 2000 and he had begun to talk about Putin as his hand-picked successor. By resigning just as Putin’s popularity peaked, Yeltsin insured that he would not have to compete politically with his own protégé, and he may well have assured that his pick would in fact win the presidency.
 

Yeltsin’s culpability in the post-Soviet chaos should not be underestimated. By refusing to create a party structure with definable goals and platforms, by changing prime ministers and governments so often that most people lost track of who was in and who was out, and by launching two military attacks on the separatist Chechens, Yeltsin left his country perpetually off balance and unorganized. Rather than working to establish a rock bed of stability upon which future Russian politicians could build democratic rule and economic success, Yeltsin intentionally undermined stability and relied extensively on his own political persona for survival. History will be kind to Boris Yeltsin for his dramatic and heroic moments as the Soviet Union sputtered to its final destiny, but it will also evaluate him harshly for failing to build in Russia the infrastructure and rule of law it so desperately needs. He has certainly earned the right to be hailed as the man who ended communist rule in Russia, but clearly the title “Father of Russian Democracy” must await another man.  

Mr. Moon, who teaches Russian studies and language at Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, earned an M. A. in Russian Studies at Harvard University. He has visited Russia eight times since 1983.