The best one can hope for

John Lloyd

• Soviet Politics, 1917-1991 by Mary McAuley
  Oxford, 132 pp, £20.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 19 876066 3
• What went wrong with perestroika? by Marshall Goldman
  Norton, 282 pp, £12.95, January 1992, ISBN 0 393 03071 7
• Boris Yeltsin: A Political Biography by Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova
  Weidenfeld, 320 pp, £18.99, April 1992, ISBN 0 297 81252 1

It is a little over a year since the attempted coup of August 1991, which was designed – if such a word can be used of the most botched affair in the annals of power-grabbing – to stop the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and instead accelerated it. It is perhaps worth trying now to assess both the freedom which was said to have resulted from the collapse of the Evil Empire and the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin himself. Individuals have always had a more than usually decisive influence on Russian politics: throughout its history the country has had a centralised, pyramidic system of rule, enabling the character, concerns and whims of the supreme leader to determine the style of government. Marshall Goldman, in What went wrong with perestroika?, quotes Gorbachev as saying, in December 1991: ‘A General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a dictator who knew no equal in the world at that time. No one possessed more power, no one, do you understand?’ It is too soon for the system to have changed: after the Coup and Gorbachev’s final fading away, Yeltsin simply stepped onto the top of the pyramid.