The Rise of Boris the Younger

Boris Nemtsov, the latest best hope for Russian reform, hardly resembled a national leader when he first moved into the cavernous governor's office in the kremlin of Russia's third-largest city, Nizhny Novgorod, 5 1/2 years ago. His hair long and tangled, his tall frame slouching, he seemed more bemused than triumphant behind his pool-table desk with its dozen beige phones. He seemed, in fact, like what he was: a young (31 at the time) and extremely smart physicist, anti-nuclear campaigner and anti-Soviet democrat to whom Boris Yeltsin had almost casually handed the levers of local power.

In those days, of course, idealistic democrats who looked like they didn't belong were taking over Communists' desks everywhere. Most of them soon proved that they didn't, in fact, belong -- they were too inexperienced, too greedy or too concerned with their own moral purity to get much of anything done. They soon gave way, often to the very Communists (now relabeled) whom they had displaced.

Nemtsov, from the start, was different. He liked using power, and he knew how to hang onto it. When the local mayor (also a reformer) emerged as a potential rival, Nemtsov had Boris the Elder throw the man out of city hall. But Nemtsov also stayed true, within reason, to reform principles. Now he will need both wiliness and idealism as he steps onto the national stage as first deputy prime minister, a post he accepted only reluctantly, after Yeltsin's own daughter traveled to Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow, to twist his arm.

"I understand perfectly well that my post is one for a kamikaze pilot," Nemtsov said after Yeltsin announced his appointment. "But fortunately, kamikaze pilots were not always killed instantly."

Don't take the self-deprecation too seriously. Six years ago, Nemtsov was saying he was prepared to be booted out at any instant; he just wanted to get reform started. In those days, as the Soviet Union collapsed, his first preoccupation was staving off starvation and disorder. He bartered cars from the giant auto plant in his Volga River district for food from other provinces. He dealt out thousands of tiny plots of land so people could grow their own potatoes.

But then he did more. Nizhny Novgorod -- the former Gorky, home of Andrei Sakharov's internal exile, onetime heartland of the Soviet military-industrial complex -- became the first Russian region to privatize shops, the first to privatize trucks and transport, the first to start breaking up collective farms, to float local bonds, to reform the social safety net. Nemtsov created a laboratory for reform.

He wasn't shy about it, either. At a time when Russia was desperate to show the world progress, Nemtsov was cagey enough to let competing politicians from Moscow share credit for his achievements -- always in return for something, like a decree giving him a larger share of local tax revenues. He played the same game with foreign aid-givers, pitting the World Bank's International Finance Corp. against Great Britain's Know How Fund, letting each feel grateful for the privilege of helping Nemtsov. In December, 1995 he won election to a second term with 60 percent of the vote, bucking a national sweep for the Communists and ultranationalists.

Now Yeltsin has called him to "the center" to kickstart reforms that took off in January 1992 but then languished in the face of fierce opposition and Yeltsin's disengagement. Why might he go down in flames, like a kamikaze? Nemtsov is charged with breaking up or regulating monopolies that have grabbed tremendous power in Russia's wild-west capitalism, and with bringing the rule of law to a byzantine system whose very opaqueness enriches a powerful new oligarchy. It's no wonder that Grigory Yavlinsky, a better-known liberal much favored in the West, has once again refused to enter government, preferring to stand to the side and carp.

But there are also reasons to hope that Nemtsov might really accomplish something in the two years he has set for himself -- and thereby emerge, incidentally, as a credible presidential candidate. In a nation long ruled despotically from the center, Nemtsov is a new phenomenon -- a politician who built his base in the provinces, who comes to Moscow unsullied. Despite all the disappointments of recent years, despite the organized crime and corruption and the backlog of unpaid wages, "people still so much want to believe in something and somebody," notes Masha Lipman, deputy editor of Russia's Itogi magazine. "In this, Nemtsov does have an opportunity. He has a reservoir of trust."

Will he also retain Yeltsin's backing, without which little will be possible? In the past, to preserve his own power, Yeltsin played one adviser off against another, like a czar keeping his boyars off balance, and he has given himself the same opportunity in his new cabinet. Nemtsov will share power, after all, with Vice Premier Anatoly Chubais, an equally strong-willed reformer, and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, a bureaucrat of less certain conviction.

But Yeltsin, 66, in his second and final term, is playing to history now. He knows that if protege Boris and his colleagues fail this time, years could pass before a similar opportunity comes along, and Yeltsin will bear the blame. "The country is now facing a choice," Nemtsov told the newspaper Izvestia, "between mafia capitalism and a normal market in a democratic society, without a giant gulf between rich and poor." It's a choice no less fateful than the one Russians made last year of capitalism over communism. We should all wish Young Boris luck.

The writer is a member of The Post editorial page staff.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company