Yeltsin
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For the most part, Yeltsin’s concerns were more bread-and-butter than philosophical or historical. He was moved not by some metaphysical thirst for reform, democracy, or the market but by a visceral sense that the autocratic methodology of the Soviet order was losing effectiveness and rot was setting in little by little. “I began to feel,” he noted in Confession on an Assigned Theme, “that quite good and proper decisions . . . were turning out more often not to be implemented. . . . It was obvious that the system was beginning to malfunction.”70 This would have been more obvious when the book came out in 1990, but the harbingers were there in 1980—before Ronald Reagan entered the White House and escalated the arms race and before Mikhail Gorbachev started perestroika. Yeltsin caviled to friends that there was no limit to the time he sank into his work: The people around him shared a mystical belief in the power of ranking officials to fix problems by command. He begged off a get-together with UPI friends on the azure Lake Baikal in east Siberia because agricultural bureaucrats feared that without him there would be delays with the harvest. “They tell me,” he said acidly to a friend, “that after I speak [to farm workers] the cows give more milk and the milk is creamier.”71 Yeltsin, needless to say, saw the problem as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As Oleg Lobov said, “He was thinking about how to utilize the capacities of the system that was. He expressed great dissatisfaction not with the system in general but on concrete issues.”72 The bacillus was there, gnawing away at Yeltsin before he left for Moscow in 1985. Asked in 1988 about his acceptance of an Order of Lenin in 1981, he said he valued that kind of recognition at the time, but, “The Brezhnev system was always a mental irritant, and I felt a sense of inner reproach.”73 The next year, while a deputy in the Soviet parliament, he was challenged to explain how his opinions had changed in a reformist direction. They had, he stated, “gradually transformed” over the past six to eight years—a gestation starting in the early 1980s in Sverdlovsk.74
In this connection, Yeltsin was in step with parts of his constituency. A critical spirit was afoot in the middle Urals. Sverdlovsk had larger communities of academics, researchers, students, and artists than any city in Soviet Russia except Moscow and Leningrad. Despite Yeltsin’s imperiousness toward Luk’yanin and the censoriousness of the obkom culture department, the authorities purposely overlooked unregistered amateur (samodeyatel’nyye) organizations dedicated to reading poetry and discussing movies. The Sverdlovsk Komsomol committee not only tolerated mass songfests and bohemian clubs for jazz, rock, and film but allocated rooms and equipment to them. Experimental discussion circles were found in several Sverdlovsk universities and institutes. One, in the philosophy department of UPI, was organized by Gennadii Burbulis, who later would be a high-level official in Yeltsin’s Russia. The youth housing complexes were wired for cable television, which was not subject to official censorship. In short, “In Sverdlovsk and Sverdlovsk oblast, changes in the atmosphere of public life began to take place before the advent of perestroika.”75 Yeltsin was mindful and did not fight them. He exhorted CPSU and Komsomol organizations to make their activities more relevant to impressionable young people by offering programs that matched their tastes and the values sainted in Soviet propaganda: “When there is a gap between word and deed . . . this has an especially baleful influence on our youth.”76
A concrete problem that increasingly distressed was the top-heaviness of Soviet government. In late communist times, decisions responsive to local interests awaited years of special pleading with Moscow. Sverdlovsk planners first petitioned the center to approve a subway in 1963; a preliminary edict was issued in 1970; to get shovels in the ground in 1980, it took entreaties via Andrei Kirilenko and a Yeltsin pilgrimage to Brezhnev’s office, where Brezhnev asked him to handwrite a Politburo resolution; the first stations did not come into service until 1994.77 To get things done took pluckiness and ingenuity. The Serov highway was built on the fly over twenty years without any central largesse. Yeltsin badgered factory directors and district personnel for the materials, equipment, and labor. The first secretary, who was god and tsar on some scores, had to be a nagger and a supplicant on others. Through the obkom, he had at his disposal thousands of personnel; thousands more were out of his reach, among them all the holders of top positions in the military-industrial complex. The state industrialists in the factories could not be obliged to contribute, only persuaded. And when they did chip in, Moscow might suddenly reverse direction and take away local gains. In 1980 Yeltsin and Yurii Petrov inveigled twenty Sverdlovsk factories, mostly in the defense sector, to jointly manufacture for use in the oblast heavy-duty harrows, which are toothed steel tools for tilling, aerating, and weeding fields. They were beside themselves when mandarins in Gosplan appropriated the harrows and carted them off to farms in Ukraine, with the statement that Sverdlovsk land was fit only for pasturage. Yeltsin’s telephone calls to Gosplan, the minister of agriculture, and Mikhail Gorbachev, by then the Central Committee’s secretary for agrarian affairs, were in vain.78
These machinations brought Yeltsin up against a question pregnant for the future: the place of “Russia” in the Soviet federation. A reason Sverdlovsk fared so badly in the byplay with Moscow was that the regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, RSFSR, lacked the mediating structures available to the non-Russian republics. The RSFSR had a toothless government and no CPSU machinery at all. In the party, provinces like Sverdlovsk reported to USSR-level officials; in places like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, there was a republic-level party committee, bureau, and first secretary. An inconsequential Bureau of the Central Committee for RSFSR Affairs had existed in 1936–37, under Stalin, and was resuscitated by Khrushchev in 1958, only to have Brezhnev terminate it in 1965. The Russians “were always the Soviet Union’s awkward nationality, too large either to ignore or to give the same institutional status as the Soviet Union’s other major nationalities.”79
What Yeltsin digested on the job in the Urals—again, well before his move to Moscow—was that Russia was an “accessory” or “appendage” of the imperial Soviet center, an unsung “donor” to the rest. “In Sverdlovsk I thought about this and began to talk about it . . . not loudly but, you would say, under my breath.”80 Naina Yeltsina and the engineering institute where she worked preferred contracts with clients in Kazakhstan, where she had lived as a girl, to work with RSFSR organizations: The Kazakhs, unlike the Russians, could make decisions expeditiously.81 At the beginning of the 1980s, Yeltsin and Petrov jotted down a tripartite scheme for change: decentralizing the USSR’s federal system; making Russia institutionally whole by strengthening its government and giving it a CPSU central committee or some such structure; and carving the RSFSR into seven or eight regional republics, one of them a Urals republic, strong enough to make a go of it. They kept the sketch to themselves. Petrov summarized it two decades afterward in that Urals nostrum samostoyatel’nost’, self-reliance. Smacking of autonomist ideas that have long swirled in the Urals, the scheme points toward the position Yeltsin was to take on Soviet federalism in 1990–91.82
The other area of probing that was a bellwether of the politics of perestroika dealt with relations between the leader and the mass of the population. Soviet partocrats rarely rubbed shoulders with ordinary people. When they did, it was at perfunctory affairs before docile viewers, pegged to state holidays or single-candidate elections, and more ritualized after about 1960 than before.83 As first secretary, Yeltsin did all in his power to spice up these rituals.
At the groundbreaking for the Sverdlovsk subway in August 1980, he invited Young Pioneers to attend, play the bugle and drum, and distribute flowers to the mud-splattered construction workers—and to the members of the obkom bureau, who lined up long-faced behind the first secretary.84 To mark the 1984 campaign for the USSR Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin organized a rail tour of remote districts of the oblast, in the dead of winter. The locomotive pulled two cars: a political coach full of obkom officials and an artistic coach containing tw
enty-two singers and musicians shanghaied for the journey from Sverdlovsk theaters:
Every day of the agitation outing, from February 20 to 25, 1984, through the soiled and almost uninhabitable towns of the north, followed the same program. In the morning, the travelers from the political coach went off to the next kolkhoz or sovkhoz, where Yeltsin would summon the peasants to keep their cattle stalls as spotless as their own homes. In the afternoon, he would give a report on political and economic themes to the local communists. But in the evenings, like balsam on the soul after wearisome speeches, reproval, and criticism from the first secretary, the long-awaited concert would begin. . . . [The performers] were surprised at Yeltsin’s abilities. As it happened, he not only knew by heart ditties from the operettas of Offenbach but reeled off the names of the workers at the enterprises that those on the agitation train had visited.85
In various appearances, Yeltsin departed by inches from the ceremonial. One way for which he had a fancy was spur-of-the moment gift giving. The gift of choice was a watch—remember the high value he and his Berezniki teammates placed on the watches they received as city volleyball champions—often unfastened from his own or an aide’s wrist. The first occasion of which I am aware occurred in 1977. Yeltsin had implored the director of the Nizhnii Tagil construction organization, Eduard Rossel, to help him win a “socialist competition” with the Severstal iron-and-steel plant in Cherepovets, Vologda province. Severstal had signed up to complete a large mill for making steel plate by December 25, six days before the end of the year. Yeltsin and Rossel assigned 25,000 workers in three shifts to the Nizhnii Tagil Metallurgical Works in order to commission their mill by a week before and qualify it as the largest industrial construction project to be finished in the year of the sixtieth jubilee of the Bolshevik Revolution. On December 18 the job was done, and Yeltsin spoke before a rally of the entire workforce. At the microphone, he took the gold watch off his left wrist and put it on Rossel’s. He told the crowd the day could have never have been won without them and Rossel, and explained that the watch had been given to him as a birthday present earlier that year by none other than General Secretary Brezhnev. The workers clapped madly.86
Yeltsin took to handing out watches and other keepsakes to rank-and-file employees. Naina Yeltsina gave him a wristwatch for many of his birthdays, only to find that the latest timepiece had disappeared a week or two later.87 The presents, and wry oratorical throwaways, were the public equal of the surprises he loved to spring on his wife at home. As an example of the latter, he concluded his report to a party conference at Uralkhimmash by opening up the floor. Employees hollered that housing was impossibly short. Not skipping a beat, Yeltsin redirected the plea to the USSR government minister responsible for the plant, seated beside him, with the dig that “surely you cannot refuse” it. The minister said meekly he would boost housing quotas for the factory, and did.88 Yeltsin’s replies to questions dripped with sarcasm about “those in Moscow who, so he said, understood little yet consumed much.”89
By 1980 Yeltsin also had a knack for appearing unannounced in factories, shops, and public transit. “Maybe it was partly for show, but he could on any day of the week sit down on a streetcar or bus, go around the route, and listen to what the passengers were saying, see for himself how well transportation was organized, how the city looked. . . . When he was at a workplace, he would think nothing of taking a cage down a mine shaft, or going over to a smelting furnace, talking with people, visiting the workers’ cafeteria.” In one eatery, he grabbed a spoon and asked a worker if he could taste his lunch; when he found it to be slop, he ordered an aide to ride herd on the place’s food service.90 Some visits took the form of raids on sites where Yeltsin thought there had been malfeasance. To these live forms was added television—“the blue screen,” as Russians call it—the electronic medium now piped into virtually every Soviet home.
A pair of events took the unmediated and mediated modes of contact to a higher plane: a question-and-answer session with college students in the Sverdlovsk Youth Palace on May 19, 1981, and a television broadcast to the region on December 18, 1982. There were several similar encounters before April 1985. The in-person and mass-media variants served several purposes at once. They relayed party policy, allowed the people to let off steam, hyped Yeltsin’s image, and gave him leverage vis-à-vis third parties.
Nothing was left to chance in the Youth Palace. A call for written questions for the first secretary went out six weeks beforehand. Nine hundred and thirty of them, deposited in receptacles at Sverdlovsk’s universities and institutes, were compiled and given to city and oblast administrators, who drafted answers. Obkom staff and then the first secretary pored over the draft responses. The 1,700 attendees received printed invitations, embossed with an effigy of Lenin, and were assigned seats in the banked hall. The meeting was five hours long. Yeltsin read out canned responses that were riffs upon the official line. But there were fresh ingredients that made the meeting an anomalous event for the Soviet Union of the day. With verve—in a verveless time—Yeltsin provided information about when this or that local improvement was going to be finished and promised to expedite overdue projects. He varied many of the prearranged responses ad lib and had the students pass 144 supplementary questions to the front of the hall. He let slip remarks about his disputatious nature. Asked why the Soviet Union was technologically inferior to the United States, he brashly gave as one of the reasons that “capitalist competition greatly stimulates labor efficiency, that is, only the strongest survive.” Most of all, he encouraged the students to speak their minds and communicated that he was on their side. They touched on everything from the paucity of tablecloths and schoolbooks to price gouging in the Shuvakish flea market and the losses of the Uralmash soccer club. They gave Yeltsin a standing ovation when he finished.91
The blue screen had transfixed Yeltsin since his early months as first secretary. In September 1978 he used it to urge city dwellers to help bring in the fall harvest, which was wasting away in the fields because of bucketing rains. Some 85,000 Sverdlovskers are said to have responded to his plea to enlist in “the battle for grain.”92 If this was Soviet mobilizational propaganda with a human touch, the television programs of the early 1980s, which were the brainchild of Igor Brodskii, the director of the Sverdlovsk television studio, had a different slant. They were organized around letters, which gave scope for startlingly frank appraisals. Some older apparatchiks who feared television had to be placated. They need not have worried, for the broadcasts could be minutely planned and prerecorded. The bevy of officials assigned to the December 1982 event spelled out in exquisite detail the camera angles, the topics to be discussed (in thirteen categories), and the towns and villages to be named (forty-five of them). But there was something new about the broadcast. Unlike anonymous agitprop, this was an acutely personalized dialogue. Brodskii’s “scenario plan”:
The video will be taped from the working office of B. N. Yeltsin.
Once the title of the broadcast has been flashed, the camera pans over envelopes spread out on the desk. We see that B. N. Yeltsin has been going through his mail. At this point, a crawler along the bottom of the screen reminds viewers about who is participating in the broadcast [First Secretary Yeltsin] and commenting on their letters.
The magnification changes from medium to high. In the picture is B. N. Yeltsin. He speaks directly to us:
“Good evening, comrades. The letters now on my desk are only part of the large amount of mail I will be commenting on. . . .” 93
In July 1984, when the obkom did a second big telecast, staff did alternate draft scenarios—every one of them devised to place Yeltsin in the limelight. In one, he would be shot watching film of interviews with 1982 letter writers. “Watching these interviews together with the television audience, B. N. Yeltsin could use them by way of illustration in the course of his conversation.” In another, he would stand on a factory floor and field questions from workers; the catch there was tha
t the participants in the meeting might “upstage” Yeltsin. Then there was the scenario they adopted:
A monologue. The broadcast comes from the office of the first secretary of the obkom of the CPSU, comrade B. N. Yeltsin.
The kinks have been worked out of this form. It allows us to show comrade B. N. Yeltsin as a party and state figure in his usual working surroundings.
The reactions received by [Sverdlovsk] TV after the December [1982] broadcast show that people watched with great interest and listened intently to the direct appeal to them on the part of B. N. Yeltsin. The meeting was a 100 percent success.94
On television, the first secretary was more argumentative than at the in-person meetings. The programs were notable for the passel of gripes vented, now taking in insufficiencies of a catalogue of everyday articles (matches, dry cell batteries, bed linen, tea kettles, caramels), bribe taking, inflation, miserly pensions, pollution, and sore points of every description. Replying to questions about the unauthorized use of limousines and about bureaucrats who constructed houses with misappropriated materials, Yeltsin cautiously brought up the issue of the privileges of officialdom. The follow-up was a set of unobtrusive countermeasures to curb the use of official cars for driving children to school and wives to shop; family members of the leaders of the oblast party committee and government were now taken to their dachas in a minivan.95 In Moscow several years later, the response was to be more up-front.