Two hundred obkom staffers were at Yeltsin’s beck and call, dishing out guidance, punishment, and favors. He had a finger in every pie of political relevance, although he would stay away from organizational trivia unless procedures broke down or higher-ups wanted a report. He had the selfassurance to be open to his associates’ input. Taking a procedure from the construction industry, on Monday mornings he chaired a planning session (planërka) of members of the bureau of the obkom, where they were invited to raise their concerns casually. The formal convocation of the bureau on Tuesday (every second week, on average) was more crisply run. At several meetings a year, it was time for “personal responsibility”; bureau members did a self-evaluation in front of their colleagues, followed by a Yeltsin report card. As it tended to be in the Soviet Union, the party boss’s word was most conclusive when it was spoken, not written. If the two ever deviated, the verbal held. In countries with rule of law, formal understandings on paper take precedence. In the communist system, the primacy of informal oral commands and handshake agreements reflected the weakness of law, insidious secrecy and mistrust, and the need for authority figures able to cut through the thicket of often conflicting administrative requirements.
Yeltsin made short work of the ineffectual Yevgenii Korovin, sending him to the trade unions; Leonid Ponomarëv soon found himself an academic dean in Moscow; it took several more years to get rid of Leonid Bobykin.8 For the circle of obkom secretaries, Viktor Manyukhin, an apparatchik who worked with Yeltsin for fifteen years, notes in a vinegary memoir about him, “The principles of selection were cut-and-dried: good training, knowledge of the work, and, the main criterion, devotion [predannost’] to the first [secretary].” 9 The two party officials on the best terms with Yeltsin, Oleg Lobov and Yurii Petrov, both construction specialists, were each to make it to obkom second secretary, and Petrov would succeed him as number one in 1985 after several years in Moscow. But Yeltsin did not reward fawning praise, and for most appointments he was results-oriented. To head the oblast government, he picked the distinguished director of the Kalinin Works, Anatolii Mekhrentsev, in 1977. Yeltsin had an affinity for technocrats like him and for eager younger candidates whom he could promote—if they played second fiddle. With Mekhrentsev, although Yeltsin respected him, he fretted when Mekhrentsev was introduced that his awards and production medals would be listed. At an early meeting, Yeltsin cut off the introducer: “Don’t announce any awards; there should be no heroes among us.”10 There were interpersonal rivalries, and an intercity competition between Sverdlovsk and Nizhnii Tagil, but in the main the political elite of the oblast was tight-knit. Most obkom officials were alumni of either UPI or Urals State University; they communicated on a first-name-and-patronymic basis; they partied on one another’s birthdays and attended the last rites of family members. If there was a disagreement, the first secretary resolved it. When Manyukhin, as first secretary of the city of Sverdlovsk, criticized Petrov, a Nizhnii Tagil native, for bias toward the second city, Yeltsin sided with Manyukhin and had Petrov right the balance. 11
Force of personality amplified administrative levers. A strapping six foot two, 220 pounds by the 1970s, his hair parted on the right into a formidable cowlick, First Secretary Yeltsin oozed vlast’, that untranslatable Russian epithet for power and rule. He enunciated laconically and emphatically in a husky baritone. He elongated his syllables—as his classmates in Berezniki had noticed—flattened his vowels, and thrummed his r’s in the Urals manner. Interest was added by either picking up the pace or pausing for dramatic effect. When riled at windy speeches or untoward news, he would raise an eyebrow—as teacher Antonina Khonina saw in the 1940s—poke a pencil through the forefinger and little finger of his right hand, and rat-a-tat-tat it; should they persist, he whammed his hand on the desk or lectern and snapped the pencil into thirds.
A ward in Sverdlovsk’s Hospital No. 2 was put on standby before plenums of the obkom, as insurance against an acerbic report from the rostrum—one that “really made the malachite ashtrays quiver”—putting any members in need of therapy.12 A spit-and-polish dress code prevailed. The chief wore a two-piece suit, with necktie and tie clip, and had his shoes burnished to a glint. Heaven help the clerk or factory manager who did not wear a tie, even on the muggiest summer day, or who stood before Yeltsin with hands in his pockets: He would be sent home without ado.
It was not wise to cross the boss on substance. Ural’skii rabochii, the Sverdlovsk daily newspaper, ran a story about a Yeltsin visit to a local factory that rubbed the first secretary the wrong way. “We gave it [the newspaper] to you,” Yeltsin threw at editor-in-chief Grigorii Kaëta, “and we can take it away.” Yeltsin’s smoldering glare cut into Kaëta “like a knife.”13 Engineer Eduard Rossel was chief of the Nizhnii Tagil construction combine in 1978 and was asked by Yeltsin to take on the job of mayor of that city. Rossel said he preferred to stay put. Yeltsin was tight-lipped for a full sixty seconds—an eon to Rossel, who was only six years younger but very much the junior player—splintered his pencil, and blurted out ill-naturedly, “Very well, Eduard Ergartovich, I won’t forget your refusal.”14 Both Kaëta and Rossel found, though, that if they patiently accepted the talking to and did their work well, it was possible to get out of the doghouse. Kaëta remained as editor until after Yeltsin’s departure for Moscow. Rossel got several promotions from him and after communism was to be elected governor of Sverdlovsk oblast.
Ex officio, Yeltsin was his bailiwick’s spokesman in USSR-wide politics. As its unwritten rules prescribed, he was elected without opposition to the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s rubber-stamp parliament, in 1978. (Andrei Kirilenko continued to occupy another seat from Sverdlovsk oblast.) In February 1981 Yeltsin made his first speech to a quinquennial party convention in Moscow, the Twenty-Fifth CPSU Congress. He was on pins and needles, as the KGB was looking into the suicide of Vladimir Titov, a key operative on his staff, several days before. Titov, the head of the obkom’s “general department,” which answered for confidential records and correspondence, shot himself with a pistol he kept in his office safe, and some secret materials were missing. Yeltsin had to return to Sverdlovsk midway through the congress to meet with officers.15 On the congress’s last day, Yeltsin was selected to the CPSU Central Committee, whose plenums he had been attending and speaking at since 1976 as a guest (and which Mikhail Gorbachev had joined in 1971). He met on a regular basis with members of the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” officials from the province who had been transferred to Moscow. In bureaucratic encounters, he had the reputation of someone who was as good as his word and was a bulldog guardian of his home turf. Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was to be Russian prime minister in the 1990s, met up with him on gas pipeline projects in the early 1980s and was struck by his addiction to speaking first, assertively, at meetings with central officials.16
Yeltsin and Yakov Ryabov, his predecessor and booster, were at first in frequent contact. “He often phoned me,” Ryabov said, “and sought my advice on all serious questions.” When Yeltsin was in Moscow, he visited Ryabov at his Central Committee office and dacha. “We had a friendship that was not only official but informal, family.”17 In February 1979 Ryabov tripped up politically over unguarded comments on Brezhnev’s medical condition. He made them in Yeltsin’s presence at a semipublic meeting in Nizhnii Tagil and, says Ryabov, someone passed them on to Brezhnev—he believed it was Yurii Kornilov, the general in charge of the Sverdlovsk oblast KGB. His words were then used by the defense minister of the USSR, Dmitrii Ustinov, to turn Brezhnev against Ryabov. Ustinov had earlier held Ryabov’s slot in the Central Committee Secretariat, where he had several disputes with him about tank production; he had wanted the position for one of his clients in 1976 and saw Ryabov as a threat. Within a week, Brezhnev informed Ryabov he was being bumped to a position in Gosplan, the state planning committee. Ryabov was officially removed from the Secretariat at the Central Committee plenum of April 17, 1979.18 He served as first deputy chairman of Gosplan until 1
983 and subsequently as minister of foreign trade, deputy premier, and Soviet ambassador to Paris—significant posts all, but mediocre compared to the appointment he held from 1976 to 1979.
Yeltsin, his ties to Ryabov common knowledge, feared for his own seat. “Boris Nikolayevich took Ryabov’s failure badly” and had “long conversations in the evenings” at his dacha with Sverdlovsk colleagues. Yeltsin appreciated that the fall of Ryabov “would for some time close off the road . . . out of Sverdlovsk,” and was on his guard.19 Two months after the firing of Ryabov came the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, in which Marshal Ustinov was also a player. Yeltsin “was so enraged by the lack of cooperation he received [from the military] that he stormed over to Compound [No.] 19 and demanded entry.” He was excluded on the personal order of Ustinov. As a Politburo member who had known Stalin, Ustinov “far outranked a provincial party boss.”20 Yeltsin was to contend in a press interview in 1992 that the matter did not stop there. He went to see Yurii Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, in his office on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. According to Yeltsin, Andropov “phoned Ustinov and ordered him to take this facility down.” Andropov could not literally have given an order to Ustinov, his political equal, but could have pressed him to make the decision—or the scene could have been flimflam put on for Yeltsin’s benefit. In any event, it was Yeltsin’s understanding that Andropov had interceded and the program was discontinued. He found out in the 1980s that it was only moved elsewhere. 21 The germ-processing plant was evacuated to the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan and Compound No. 19 was continued as a proving range and storage dump. Yeltsin as leader of post-Soviet Russia was to inform U.S. President George H. W. Bush in February 1992 of the full story.
Not without guile, the vulnerable Yeltsin protected himself by turning to Andrei Kirilenko, the crony of Brezhnev’s who had been Sverdlovsk first secretary before Konstantin Nikolayev and Ryabov. Ryabov had looked up Kirilenko when Brezhnev gave him the bad news; Kirilenko was shocked and seemed to fear that he, too, would feel the effects.22 But Kirilenko’s high offices and long links to Brezhnev—they first worked together in Ukraine in the 1940s—kept him in the game until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Kirilenko advocated as a priority continued investment in heavy industry and was not popular in the Sverdlovsk elite. Neither those problems nor the encroaching senility of Uncle Andrei, the obkom staffers’ moniker for him, deterred Yeltsin from paying recurring visits and tracking him down every year for a telephone call on his birthday, September 8.23
General Secretary Brezhnev, who had worked as an agricultural functionary in the Sverdlovsk region from 1929 to 1931, at the time of collectivization and dekulakization, took no particular interest in Sverdlovsk or the Urals. The one time he scheduled a visit to the city when Yeltsin was first secretary was the night of March 29–30, 1978, en route to Siberia. The local leadership, waiting with bouquets in hand at the main railroad station, looked like dolts when his train whizzed through the junction with the blinds drawn, no excuses offered. Behind closed doors, Yeltsin was contemptuous of Brezhnev’s vanity and sloth, and he professes to have foiled a suggestion from Moscow to create a Brezhnev museum in Sverdlovsk premises where he once had an office.24 For public consumption, he played along with the Brezhnev personality cult, although he was less rhapsodic than some of the provincial potentates and toadied less over time.25 But as Brezhnev’s seventy-fifth birthday, in December 1981, neared, Yeltsin ordered that words about Brezhnev as a leader “of genius” (genial’nyi) be folded into the obkom salutation. He later agreed to suggestions from the scribes to tone down the language, aware that blarney could be overdone. Sverdlovsk’s gift for the birthday was a kitschy likeness of Brezhnev in full regalia, done in semiprecious Urals stones. Craftsmen had to be flown to Moscow to update it when the Politburo padded out his chestful of medals before the mosaic could be presented.26
It has been intimated that Yeltsin’s attitude to the perks of office at the start of his career was one of indifference.27 Perhaps this was so, but that attitude was soon inoperative. He was permitted what corresponding members of the nomenklatura had in other parts of the USSR. Soon after he went to the obkom apparatus in 1968, the Yeltsins were allotted a four-room apartment, their largest yet, in a shiny new building on downtown Mamin-Sibiryak Street. Yelena and Tatyana studied at the close-by School No. 9, the best in Sverdlovsk, where the program was heavy in mathematics and science. For summers and weekends, they had use of a two-family dacha, their first, in Istok, east of Sverdlovsk.
As oblast party secretary, Yeltsin in 1975 was given four rooms in the House of Old Bolsheviks at 2 Eighth of March Street, built for revolutionaries from the Urals and Siberia, many of whom during Stalin’s purges were led off from their apartments to the Gulag or death. Better-appointed digs in the building were assigned in 1977. In 1979 the family moved into a highceilinged, five-room apartment (living room, dining room, study, and two bedrooms) in a sepulchral new VIP edifice at 1 Working Youth Embankment—palatial for the Soviet Union. The house gave out onto the Town Pond and 1905 Square, the promenade where the Sverdlovsk leadership reviewed the May 1, May 9, and November 7 parades.28 The household had no domestic help: Naina Yeltsina cooked, took out the trash to a bin in the courtyard, and ironed Boris’s shirts and pants. The shabbily built House of Soviets, the twenty-four-story party and government tower on Ninth of January Street, begun by Ryabov and opened in 1982, was a stroll away. Here was Yeltsin’s first office with air conditioning, which was exotica in the Urals.29 Without leaving the building he could place orders for foods unavailable in local stores or have himself fitted for clothing chargeable to his personal allowance. A stone’s throw from Yeltsin’s front door, the secluded Hospital No. 2, infested with KGB bugs, ministered to several thousand elite clients.30
A twenty-minute ride north of Ninth of January Street would take Yeltsin to the obkom bureau’s dacha hideout at Baltym, to which he was admitted in 1975. Dacha No. 1, just inside the gatehouse, was booked for him in 1976. In earshot of a growling highway, its charms again were not lush: three sleeping rooms, a parlor, a kitchen and eating area with a fireplace, and a billiards hall. Other families were put up two to a dacha, sharing latrines and kitchens. Outside lay a swimming pool, a volleyball court, and a canteen. In the temperate months, Yeltsin had the cottagers and their wives don gym togs for Wednesday evening and Sunday volleyball matches. Volleyball facilities figured large in obkom resolutions about mass athletics and fitness.31 In winter, there were cross-country ski runs and volleyball in a Sverdlovsk gym. Indoors at Dacha No. 1, there was billiards, with the first secretary showing off behind-the-back and left-handed shots. Yeltsin was a crabby loser in these contests. After his side was outpointed in several hard-fought volleyball matches, he sulked and made ready to depart. Oleg Lobov, captain of the opposing team, defused the situation by inviting Yeltsin to join him as a twosome against a full six. They won the rematch—with some help from their opponents—and Yeltsin went to the showers with his dignity unharmed. 32
Over time, Yeltsin indulged in a more baronial taste—for hunting. As deputy chairman of the oblast government, his former guardian angel in the party apparatus, Fëdor Morshchakov, an avid marksman, organized the shooting of ducks in the spring and fall and wild elk in the winter. Yeltsin had a collection of guns, preferring a Czechoslovak-made Ceská Zbrojovka carbine—bought for him as a gift by obkom staff in Prague in 1977—and gave chase in a UAZ all-terrain vehicle fitted out with racks and heaters.33 He went over the guest list name by name, saw to the bird limit of five per person, and began the pleasantries at mealtime. It is not small-minded to agree with Viktor Manyukhin that the bonhomie likely had an ulterior political motive as well: “The tactic of keeping all under vigil . . . helped Boris Nikolayevich know everything about his colleagues [and] . . . see for himself that there were no groupings against him.”34
Liquor flowed at these events, especially when a session in the steambath was part of it for the males in the company. It was im
bibed in the dressing room before and after and in the cooling-off intervals during the bath. The effects of alcohol are felt quickly in such heat. Yeltsin’s temperance had given way to drinking at or above the average level within the party elite. Thursday and Friday evenings were often taken up with banquets for “delegations” from Moscow or other provinces. It not infrequently fell to Yeltsin to act as tamada, toastmaster. He had high tolerance and a formidable capacity. The cosmonaut Vitalii Sevast’yanov, a native of Sverdlovsk oblast, once told of Yeltsin, on a stressful trip to Moscow in this period, knocking back three water tumblers of vodka, which might have held a cup of fluid each, to start off a repast at Sevast’yanov’s apartment.35 But Manyukhin, no yes-man for Yeltsin, portrays his conduct as unimpeachable:
Did Yeltsin drink when he worked in the Urals? Yes, he drank, like all normal people, and perhaps a mite more. With his expansive nature and character, on festive occasions Boris Nikolayevich loved to sit down to a good table with friends and comrades. Sometimes this would happen when he was out hunting, as is the practice with hunters. Yet, even after a “blowout,” Boris Nikolayevich, healthy and youthful as he was, was fresh and cheerful the next morning and made it to work on time.36
There were exceptions. Ryabov noted in his diary in February 1976, when Yeltsin was still obkom secretary for construction, that he had been flat on his back in bed for a couple of days after “a tempestuous celebration of his [forty-fifth] birthday.”37 A deputy chairman of KGB central, Gelii Ageyev, was apoplectic when Yeltsin diverted him to interminable receptions and dinners after he landed at Sverdlovsk’s Kol’tsovo airport during the 1979 anthrax crisis. Local notables hypothesized this was his way to prevent Ageyev from obstructing and from holding Yeltsin accountable for the outbreak. The general considered a written report to Brezhnev on Yeltsin’s conduct but backed off the idea.38 To larger questions, the drinking was tangential. Yeltsin had no pity for office drunks, as Manyukhin points out, and fired several factory directors for inebriation.
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