You would never know Yeltsin’s dependence on Ryabov from the Yeltsin memoirs, which hardly mention him. Yeltsin was not one to concede indebtedness to another, and this feeling was strengthened in Ryabov’s case by their rupture of relations in 1987, when Ryabov took part in the attack on Yeltsin as Mikhail Gorbachev pushed him out of his high position.
Ryabov made up his mind in April 1968 to recruit Yeltsin into the regional party apparatus. He wanted to turn a page in the obkom’s department for construction, which had been run for years by the ineffective Aleksei Guseletov. When Ryabov raised Yeltsin as a potential head, some functionaries, aware of the belatedness of his admittance into the CPSU and of his past noninvolvement in Komsomol and party activity, were dumbfounded. The least Yeltsin could do, they thought, was earn his party spurs at the factory or district level, as Ryabov had.74 They may not have known that he had paid his dues the past five years on nominally elected “soviets” (legislative councils) and local party committees or that a 1966 review of his work appreciated him as “politically literate” (politicheski gramotnyi), taking part in public service, and “having authority” in the collective.75 In his memoir account, Yeltsin specifically links his 1968 appointment to his political activities: “I was not especially surprised to receive this offer, since I had been engaged constantly in public service.”76 Partocrats consulted by Ryabov objected that Yeltsin was headstrong and abrasive. Ryabov would not leave it at that. “I asked, ‘And how do you assess him from a work perspective?’ They gave it some thought and answered, ‘Here there are no problems. He . . . will carry out what the leadership assigns him to do.’” No powderpuff himself, Ryabov swore he would get the most out of Yeltsin and, “if he were ‘to kick off the traces,’ would put him in his place.”77 He was not the last to think he could domesticate Yeltsin and harness him for his purposes.
Ryabov ran the appointment by Nikolayev and made the overture to Yeltsin. “To be objective about it, he was not dying to have this job,” writes Ryabov, “but after our chat he gave his agreement.”78 Yeltsin says parsimoniously that he consented for no better reason than he “felt like taking a new step.”79 But he did not do it on a lark. He knew full well that it was a wise career move—onward to fresh experiences and upward in the pyramid of power. “I became not merely a boss but a man of power. I threw myself into a party career as I had once thrown myself into hitting the volleyball.”80
Sverdlovsk oblast’s party committee and regional government were in a lowslung building on Lenin Prospect, across the Town Pond from where Vasilii Tatishchev established his ironworks in the eighteenth century. An Orthodox cathedral was demolished to make way for it in the 1930s. The six-man construction department was one of several offices the obkom, as in other provincial capitals, had for palliating the numberless frictions and contradictions built into the Soviet planned economy. It acted as a watchdog on personnel, oversaw the logistics for mundane and showcase projects, and encouraged “socialist competition” among work units to outdo one another in attaining output targets. Yeltsin considered this meddling in line management unexceptionable. By hook or by crook, “with the aid of pumped-up resolutions, reproofs, and whatnot,” the party organs would take care of nuts-and-bolts problems. “This was the gist of the existing system, and it raised no questions.”81
The first half of the 1970s were the last time the economy of the Soviet Union, buoyed by high world oil prices, met its growth norms. The fledgling party worker met his in spades. Yeltsin prided himself, as in SU-13 and the DSK, on an orderly work environment. Making a sales pitch to a young engineer, Oleg Lobov, to sign on as his deputy in 1972, he called the department “a structure in which discipline has been maintained,” not disguising that he viewed it as wilting elsewhere.82 Yeltsin would work nonstop as a troubleshooter, as he did in 1973 during completion of a cold-rolling mill (a mill for reprocessing plate and sheet metal to make it thinner and harder) at the Upper Iset Works. For this exploit, which involved 15,000 workers and intercessions with head offices in Moscow, he won an Order of the Red Banner of Labor, his second. Yeltsin “worked conscientiously and responsibly,” Ryabov was to relate—no mean encomium in a book written a decade after the two fell out.83
Yeltsin also had a nose for publicity. In 1970 he had builders retread his earlier experiment of putting up an apartment house in five days, and went one better by organizing a national conference on “the scientific organization of labor” around the project.84 He butted into projects to be commissioned and was at Nikolayev’s or Ryabov’s side when the ribbon was cut. Yeltsin even listened to advice from Ryabov on softening his manner. “He changed tactics in his bearing and started to foster sociable ties with his colleagues in the obkom [staff] and to put out feelers to the members of the bureau, the obkom secretaries, the oblast executive panel, and other well-placed cadres.”85 Yeltsin was not on a particularly fast track. He occupied the same departmental position in the obkom apparatus for seven years, which was as long as it took him to progress from foreman to chief of SU-13.
Here a providential event interceded. In the spring of 1975 Eduard Shevardnadze, the party boss in the Caucasus republic of Georgia, asked for and received the Politburo’s permission to hire away Gennadii Kolbin, the second secretary in Sverdlovsk and heir presumptive to Ryabov, as his second-ranking secretary in Tbilisi. Ryabov’s preferred candidate for second secretary, Vyacheslav Bayev, the head of the obkom’s machine-building department, was happy where he was and not tempted by the offer. Ryabov then approached Yevgenii Korovin, the secretary for industry, a diffident and sickly official from Kamensk-Ural’skii, who recommended Yeltsin—a mere department head—for the position. “He told me he could not handle it, it would be hard on him, but Boris Nikolayevich was high-powered and assertive, and I would be good in a secondary role.” Ryabov thought Yeltsin lacked the experience, and accepted a compromise recommended by Kolbin: that Korovin be made second secretary and Yeltsin be made one of the five obkom secretaries. Yeltsin may have expected more, but accepted. His new portfolio took in the forest and pulp-and-paper industries as well as construction, and he was given a seat on the bureau, the obkom board comprising ten to twelve party and state officials.86
Speculation was rampant that Ryabov himself was going to graduate to other duties. Yeltsin smelled an opportunity for the taking. Ryabov shuddered when he described the situation twenty-five years later:
So the step was taken and Boris Nikolayevich became the obkom’s secretary for construction. This gave him more independence and scope in dealing with the issues he was responsible for, and as a member of the obkom bureau he could be bolder in addressing them. There was gossip galore that I was going to be moved up or transferred, and people even drew up various scenarios. Boris came to understand the subtleties and knew how to conduct himself, in view of the fact that . . . Korovin was not a competitor for him and was not spoiling for power. Boris understood he had to position himself closer to me, as he had already been doing in recent years, which is what earned him the promotion to secretary. He kept his head down. As before, we went together to important construction sites. He could still not do without me, because for [the projects] to be completed he needed additional construction manpower and the use of workers from the factories. Many of the oblast’s problems had to be taken care of in Moscow, and for that you couldn’t manage without the first secretary of the obkom. As I figured out only later, Boris, in trying so hard to carry out all my wishes, was behaving like a sycophant and careerist. But I was impressed and did not suspect that for him this was a tactic to achieve a breakthrough in his career. On the contrary, I considered that this fine fellow Boris had at long last come to understand the oblast’s needs and was doing everything he could to satisfy them. We and our families continued to be on amiable terms.87
There is something disingenuous to Ryabov’s imputation of malevolence. In a hierarchical political order, the only way to gain traction was to carry out one’s superior’s wishes, as officials
at all levels in the USSR strove to do and as Ryabov himself was no stranger to. Had Yeltsin held fast to the illiberal path Ryabov favored, Ryabov would not have characterized his behavior with such odium.
In real time, Ryabov, enjoining Yeltsin to be more collegial,88 groomed him to be his successor. Ryabov got his big promotion out of Sverdlovsk in October 1976, when he was selected for the post of secretary supervising the Soviet defense industry in the Central Committee Secretariat in Moscow. To fill the vacancy, Ryabov saw Korovin and Yeltsin as the main alternatives and did not doubt which one he preferred. “Korovin,” he said, “was very diligent and finicky, and he had a lot of knowledge, but he did not have an iron grip, and the leader of such an organization has to have an iron grip and has to be strong of will. I consulted with my comrades and with the other secretaries, and with people from other provinces, and decided to recommend Yeltsin.”89 There was some opposition at home. The obkom secretary for ideological questions, Leonid Ponomarëv, had had it with Yeltsin’s two-fisted approach and convoked the obkom bureau off-the-record. Ryabov was in Moscow for the plenum of the Central Committee (which confirmed him in the Secretariat position on October 25) and Yeltsin, by chance, was there for a month-long training course at the party’s Academy of Social Sciences. Ponomarëv moved that the bureau speak out against Yeltsin and endorse Leonid Bobykin, the first secretary of the city party committee. It reached no consensus and would have had a hard time of it had it voiced an opinion different from the outgoing first secretary’s, especially once it was clear that Yeltsin had support in the Kremlin.90
Ryabov won General Secretary Brezhnev over to the candidacy, subject to vetting by party elders and forty minutes of chin-wagging between Brezhnev and Yeltsin. The central secretary for personnel questions, Ivan Kapitonov, had wanted Korovin as first secretary, and Brezhnev at first protested that “we in the Central Committee do not know [Yeltsin].” Brezhnev gave his seal of approval in their interview on October 31. “Even though I had always felt deep down that such a conversation might take place,” Yeltsin says, “I had tried not to dwell on it.” Brezhnev warned him that he would carry “additional responsibility” before the party because he had leapfrogged over Korovin.91
On November 2, 1976, a plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom was convened to discuss “the organizational question.” “Everything went as planned,” Yeltsin remembered. Yevgenii Razumov, the apparatchik sent by Moscow to represent the Central Committee, moved on its behalf that Yeltsin be chosen first secretary. “As always, the vote was unanimous.” Yeltsin had written out a short speech, “feeling that it was necessary to do this,” and read it out to the obkom, which listened and adjourned.92
CHAPTER FOUR
A Boss with a Difference
At forty-five, Yeltsin was one of the youngest provincial first secretaries in the Russian core of the Soviet Union. The seventh of twelve apparatchiks to fill this post in the unofficial capital of the Urals between World War II and 1991, he would reign supreme in Sverdlovsk for eight and a half years, as many as he was to be president of post-communist Russia. Yeltsin’s kingdom was pear-shaped, with its capital city at the middle of the base and his native Butka tucked in its southeast corner. In area it was an amplitudinous 75,000 square miles. That was more than eight of the USSR’s fifteen union republics and about the size of the six New England states in the United States or, in Europe, of Austria, Switzerland, and Ireland combined. Its population of 4,483,000 put the oblast fourth among Soviet Russian provinces in 1979. Eighty-five percent of its people were urban—1,225,000 in Sverdlovsk, 400,000 in Nizhnii Tagil, and 189,000 in Kamensk-Ural’skii—and only 15 percent lived on the land.
The local bosses of the ruling party originally functioned as its “law-and-order prefects,” tasked with projecting the center’s power and maintaining political stability.1 This function continued to make demands on Boris Yeltsin’s time in the 1970s and 1980s. The territorial subunits of the CPSU paralleled the institutions of local government. Sverdlovsk oblast contained thirty districts (raions), each of which had a party committee; there were districts within the three largest cities; and a mass membership of 221,000 communists (as of 1976) formed a base. The obkom and its leader decided on about 20,000 personnel appointments and supervised all entities that policed, educated, and informed the population and mobilized it for the purposes of the regime. For emergencies, Yeltsin’s duty officer had prolix instructions on liaison with the KGB, the Committee on State Security (the OGPU and the NKVD under Stalin). Yurii Kornilov, the head of the Sverdlovsk KGB and a former raion party secretary, escorted him on his railcar and helicopter incursions into the backcountry.2 “I often came by the agency,” Yeltsin writes in Confession on an Assigned Theme. “I asked to be informed about the KGB’s work, studied how it functioned, and acquainted myself with its departments.”3 Yeltsin also sat on the civil-military collegium of the Urals Military District and attended field exercises. Ministry of Defense brass conferred the rank of colonel on him in October 1978, presenting him with a dress uniform and an astrakhan hat.
Not that law-and-order obligations were ever forsworn; the party chiefs with the passage of time defined themselves more as “developmental prefects” for coordinating economic growth and ensuring that some of the benefits trickled down. Administrative intervention for harmony of operation was bound to happen in an economy where market mechanisms had been squashed by the state. In economic indices, Sverdlovsk oblast ranked third among Soviet provinces. The Urals staples of mining and metallurgy continued to expand, slowly. Beloyarsk, the Soviet Union’s first nuclear power station, powered by a sodium-cooled breeder reactor, started up in 1964 at the town of Zarechnyi, north of Sverdlovsk (it was disabled by fires in 1977 and 1978). In the 1981–85 five-year plan, Yeltsin and the oblast were active in the crash campaign to transport natural gas from the middle and lower Ob in west Siberia to customers in Europe; five pipelines and twenty compressor stations were constructed in the taiga.
In Sverdlovsk civilian pursuits paled before the production of armaments. The oblast had 350,000 military-industrial employees, more than any other Soviet province.4 Defense plants could not be mentioned by exact name or whereabouts in the media, and the province was off-limits to Westerners throughout the Cold War. The Urals Wagon Works in Nizhnii Tagil was the highest-volume maker of tanks anywhere in the world; its product is still wheeling around the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, India, the Arab world, and North Korea. Two of the ten cloistered “atomic cities” in the USSR lay north of the oblast capital: Sverdlovsk-44, known today as Novoural’sk, home to the Urals Electrochemical Combine, which was the largest factory for enriching uranium in the world; and Sverdlovsk-45, later Lesnoi, whose Electrochemical Instrumentation Combine was the country’s premier facility for serial assembly of nuclear warheads. Yeltsin as first secretary was accountable for the well-being of the atomic towns, whose very existence was a state secret. A number of flagships of military industry were situated in Sverdlovsk city. The Kalinin Machinery Works, for example, was an artillery plant retooled to rockets in the 1950s; it cranked out surface-to-air missiles (such as the one that downed Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk in 1960), medium-range ballistic missiles, and torpedoes. The Urals Turbine Works manufactured tank engines, the Urals Transportation Machinery Works armored vehicles, the Vektor Works missile guidance systems and radars, and Uralmash, the biggest employer in Sverdlovsk, artillery pieces. Military Compound No. 19, built in the Chkalov raion of Sverdlovsk in 1947 with blueprints from Japan’s Unit No. 731 in Manchuria, was the busiest of the USSR’s three centers for producing biological weaponry. An accidental emission of aerosolized anthrax spores from its dryer took nearly a hundred lives in April 1979. Moscow attributed it to tainted meat.5
If the early part of the Brezhnev period, when Yeltsin broke into party work, were halcyon days for the nomenklatura, the later years were not. The economy was in the doldrums, and there were signs of creeping social and politic
al crisis. Urals minerals were increasingly expensive to mine, the labor to work its antiquated factories was running low, and agricultural production was stagnant. In no region of the USSR had negligence of consumers for the benefit of heavy and military industry been as bad. Per-capita supply of housing, food, and retail goods was below average. Of the thirty-seven worstpolluted cities in Soviet Russia in the 1980s, eleven were in the Urals and six were in Sverdlovsk oblast (Kamensk-Ural’skii, Kirovgrad, Krasnoural’sk, Nizhnii Tagil, Revda, and Sverdlovsk).6
Yeltsin had good reason to depict the first secretary in his autobiography as “god, tsar, and master” of the province, head and shoulders above the lesser mortals around him. “[His] word was law, and barely anyone would dare not to heed a request or assignment from him. . . . On practically any question, the first secretary’s opinion was final.” Yeltsin wielded his influence in Sverdlovsk, he insisted, only to benefit society. “I made use of this power, but to benefit others and never for myself. I forced the wheels of the economic machine to spin faster. People submitted to me, people obeyed me, and owing to that, it seemed to me, work units performed better.”7
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