Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  Yeltsin admitted that he might be inciting unrealistic hopes. He had received, he said in December 1982, a squall of letters from Sverdlovskers begging him to advance them in the waiting line for government-built apartments. This was impossible, since the function had to be done by the book. He would check the correspondence and right any wrongs done. Other than that, he counseled honesty about the problem and forbearance until the housing supply could be increased: “I am not a magician. Neither are the central organs of government magicians. . . . It is hard to take when your request is refused, but I believe that the bitter truth is better than the sweet lie.”96 That aphorism was to take Yeltsin a long way.

  Still captive to the communist paradigm, Yeltsin was declaring that the performance of the regime left something to be desired and he was simultaneously putting himself forward as the agent of change. This was the jumping-off point for role aggrandizement in the future.

  Not everyone was taken by an approach that threw other local leaders into shadow. Gennadii Bogomyakov, the CPSU first secretary in Tyumen, the adjacent, oil-rich oblast in west Siberia, carped to party officials that Yeltsin was pandering and acting like a clown, not a proper Soviet solon.97 Ryabov was to write in hindsight that Yeltsin had begun “to play a phony game,” although he had to concede that his antics hoodwinked “simple people.” “‘Look what sort of leader we have,’ they said.”98 No alarm bells jangled where it counted—in the inner sanctum of the party in Moscow. Pavel Simonov in the Central Committee apparatus had admonished Yeltsin soon after his appointment to keep his photograph off the front page of Ural’skii rabochii.99 No one seemed unhappy with his playing to the crowd or at seeing his face splashed on the television screen hour after hour. Either official awareness was lagging or, more likely, there was an opinion at the center that the party would be better off if all local leaders were as popular as its man in Sverdlovsk.

  Boris Yeltsin’s flight to prominence in a communist framework was by dint of his intelligence, drive, ability to communicate and call attention to himself, and “iron grip.” And it owed much to an instinct for timely decisions. The portrait in Confession of his log hopping on the Zyryanka River as a teenager may serve as an allegory for how he made his way in an uncharitable environment. “If you figured everything just right” and had “incredible dexterity,” he says, “you had a chance to cross over to the far bank.” Leap soon or late, or misconstrue another boy’s motion, and you would plop into the water, gasping for air, and have to clamber onto a new log to resume your quest, “not sure if you would save yourself.”100 In the work world, Yeltsin chose well when to spring and when to stand pat. If not—if, say, he had been unadventurous about trying out party work or had committed political hara-kiri by disobeying the Politburo on Ipat’ev House—he would occupy history’s footnotes and not its central narrative. Minus Yeltsin as a driving force, the narrative itself would be considerably different.

  There were times when the self-interested actions of others, like Ryabov in pushing him for first secretary, propelled Yeltsin forward. Still other times, it was dumb luck and contingency. He might have come to a different end if Eduard Shevardnadze had not lured away Gennadii Kolbin in 1975, if Vyacheslav Bayev had taken the second secretaryship, if Moscow had listened to Leonid Ponomarëv in 1976, or if Dmitrii Ustinov or someone else had settled scores for his toying with General Ageyev, his witticisms with the workers, or his affiliation with the fallen Ryabov. If his patrons had known ex ante what they were to know ex post, it would have ended poorly for him. Ryabov, for one, believes the Yeltsin of the 1990s to be a turncoat, and says it all started in Sverdlovsk. These are the pangs of a Victor Frankenstein beholding his monster. Ryabov is not the only old-school communist who feels them today.

  The sachem of Sverdlovsk no longer needed to be a survivalist; his testing was routinized; his rebellious urges were in abeyance. The primary script in his mature life was success—being first—constrained by duty to the vertical structures hegemonic in Soviet society. Although the regime was dictatorial, agents could implement its will only if they could recruit and promote on merit and if they were given some leeway and some space to advocate for themselves and their organizations. Yeltsin was an effective regional prefect, a hard-boiled boss with a difference, because he used to his advantage the liberties granted. Doing so made him less convinced than when he started of the soundness and perfectability of the system. Serious policy questions could only be settled in a “supercentralized” fashion, he was to recall. But the center’s attention span was short and its strategic sense vitiated by aged leaders and the opaqueness of decision making. Get away from its priorities, and the problems were yours to handle: “All you could place your trust in was yourself and the oblast. . . . The center did little to help. . . . We decided the other questions by ourselves, self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no].”101 What was more, the reflexive “self” was becoming an elastic category for comrade B. N. Yeltsin. Populism and a nonethnic Russianism were working their way into his thinking. And he was beginning to realize there were means—politically rewarding means—to deal in the populace on the conversation about government and change. That realization would bring about an activism that was not compliant.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Megalopolis

  Boris Yeltsin was not going to count in the main game of Soviet politics unless he relocated from the fringes of the system to the metropole. Did he want to? He denies it in his memoirs: “I never had the dream or so much as the wish to work in Moscow.” He had received a series of proposals to resettle there, “some of them” as minister in the central government, and turned them all down. A son of Sverdlovsk and the Urals, he wanted to stay with his friends and colleagues and loathed how Muscovites created prettified façades, Potemkin villages, and looked down their noses at country cousins.1 His Sverdlovsk patron, Yakov Ryabov, spins it differently. Sverdlovskers frequently moved to Moscow and to other regions, and thought it “a normal part of the selection and assignment of cadres.” Yeltsin studied with interest several offers in the provinces and the capital before he was lifted to obkom secretary in 1975, and used them to importune Ryabov to advance his career locally.2 He also, Ryabov claims, felt envious of some of the promotions given to others—for example, Nikolai Ryzhkov, the director of Uralmash, who moved to a high ministerial position in 1975.3 Information is lacking on the jobs Yeltsin may have turned down after 1975. If he did so, it was not out of a refusal to leave Sverdlovsk.

  As a reputable regional administrator, Yeltsin was a surefire candidate for inclusion in any effort to revivify the Soviet leadership. Generational kinetics bolstered the case for him. In November 1976 only three of seventy-two first secretaries in RSFSR regions were younger than he, and he was ten years younger than the average fifty-five-year-old provincial leader. By January 1985 he was at the median in seniority—thirty-six officials had been chosen earlier than he and thirty-five later—but still five years more youthful than the average first secretary, whose age was now up to fifty-nine.4 In that way, he offered an attractive combination of combat-hardened experience and energy.

  Yeltsin’s rise out of Sverdlovsk came in three steps in 1985. All were questioned by Muscovites with political clout. Personalities and niggling jealousies, not grand visions of reform, were behind it. There were to be consequences, however.

  The change to change in the USSR started in the abbreviated Kremlin reign of Yurii Andropov, the onetime KGB chairman who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982 and died of kidney failure in February 1984. Andropov sounded the alarm about the regime’s problems and tried to inculcate “order and discipline” in the bureaucracy and the workforce. His disciplinarian line was in those days very much to the liking of Yeltsin, who was to voice “the highest and the best opinion” of him.5 One may conjecture also that Yeltsin’s grizzled supporter in the Politburo, Andrei Kirilenko, expounded his qualities to Andropov before Kirilenko’s retirement in late 1982.

  In December 1983 A
ndropov, bedridden in the hospital, had a conversation about Yeltsin with Yegor Ligachëv, the new organizational secretary of the Central Committee. Andropov had selected Ligachëv, a straitlaced Siberian partocrat who had been on the outs with Brezhnev, on the advice of his lieutenant, Mikhail Gorbachev. By Ligachëv’s testimony, Andropov instructed him to go to Sverdlovsk and “have a look at” the local strongman. Ligachëv visited on January 17–21, 1984, inspecting farms and factories and attending the oblast party conference. He was smitten: “I will not conceal it: The liveliness of Yeltsin’s relations with people, his vigor, and his decisiveness appealed to me. It was obvious that many had heartfelt respect for him.”6 Andropov’s assistant for economic policy, Arkadii Vol’skii, remembered Ligachëv proposing to Andropov that they hand Yeltsin the construction department of the CPSU Secretariat, the Soviet-wide equivalent of what he oversaw in Sverdlovsk from 1968 to 1975. Andropov was for it, with the sidelong compliment that Yeltsin was “a good builder”—even though he had been a multifunctional party prefect since 1976. Andropov probably saw Yeltsin as fit for no more than the departmental slot, but Ligachëv saw it as probationary and leading to bigger things.7

  Yeltsin’s appointment to the Central Committee apparatus was on hold during the interregnum of the Brezhnev epigone Konstantin Chernenko. Kremlin workhorses like Dmitrii Ustinov, the defense minister who forced out Yakov Ryabov in 1979, may have had it in for Yeltsin. If so, Marshal Ustinov’s death in December 1984 was well-timed. Chernenko died of emphysema three months later, and Yeltsin participated in the Central Committee plenum of March 11, 1985, which made Gorbachev general secretary of the party.

  Gorbachev was initially not a Yeltsin fan. He knew little of him, and “What I did know made me leery.” They made their acquaintance in the two years after Yeltsin became Sverdlovsk first secretary in late 1976. Gorbachev had been first secretary in the breadbox province of Stavropol since 1970, and they swapped Stavropol foodstuffs for metals and lumber from the Urals. As Central Committee secretary for the Soviet farm sector from 1978 to 1985, Gorbachev crossed swords with Yeltsin two or three times over Yeltsin’s surliness with emissaries of Moscow. At a plenum of the obkom to discuss a Central Committee memorandum that took a swipe at the Sverdlovsk livestock industry, Yeltsin exchanged words with Gorbachev’s representative, Ivan Kapustyan. “I noted for myself,” writes Gorbachev in his memoirs, Life and Reforms, “that the Sverdlovsk secretary reacted inadequately toward remarks directed at him.” Besides, Gorbachev had seen Yeltsin wobbly on his feet in the Soviet parliament; from hearsay, he ascribed it to a drinking spree.8 To hear Gorbachev tell it, Ligachëv did not need to be asked by Andropov to go for the look-see in Sverdlovsk. He volunteered to do it and phoned Gorbachev late at night to tell him, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, this is our kind of person, we have to pick him!”9

  When Gorbachev and Ligachëv did summon Yeltsin to Moscow in the first week of April 1985, their prize enlistee gummed up the works by playing hard to get. As Yeltsin says in Confession on an Assigned Theme, he spurned the offer relayed by Vladimir Dolgikh, a junior member of the Kremlin leadership. He relented only when Ligachëv stepped in the morning after and invoked party discipline.10 Yeltsin’s liking for Sverdlovsk and dislike of Moscow, where he had never lived and had almost no friends, argued against the move. He was assuaged some by his younger daughter, Tatyana, and his grandson, Boris, being in Moscow and by the willingness of elder daughter Yelena to move with them. As Tatyana said in a 2001 interview, her mother was to be homesick but not her father: “For him, the principal thing is work. Where he works is where he makes his home.”11 The issue was what Yeltsin would work at in Moscow. He had ruled the roost in Sverdlovsk for most of a decade, and two of his three predecessors in the obkom, Kirilenko in 1962 and Ryabov in 1976, had been appointed a Central Committee secretary out of Sverdlovsk. (Nikolai Ryzhkov was made a secretary in November 1982, seven years after leaving Sverdlovsk, taking Kirilenko’s slot.) To Yeltsin, that, or at the lower limit, a position as deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union, was his due, and one of the CPSU’s economic departments, further down the pecking order, was not.

  It was unhelpful, as historians have not appreciated, that Yeltsin already had doubts about Gorbachev. Stylistically, the two were oil and water. Gorbachev, from the sun-drenched plains bordering the Caucasus Mountains, had become a communist in his early twenties, received a law degree at Moscow State University (the oldest and most prestigious university in Russia), made his career in the Komsomol and in general party leadership, and was married to a Marxist philosopher. Yeltsin, from the frigid and rock-ribbed Urals, entered the CPSU late, studied at a provincial polytechnic, was a production specialist, and married another engineer. Gorbachev was sedentary and balding; Yeltsin was a half-foot taller, athletic, and had a full head of hair. Gorbachev was garrulous and even-tempered; Yeltsin was spare with words and irascible. Gorbachev’s favorite authors were the Romantic writer and poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the Futurist bard of the Bolshevik Revolution who died a suicide; Yeltsin preferred Chekhov, Pushkin, and Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925), a poet who wrote of love and village life, married five times (including once to Isadora Duncan), and who also died by his own hand. In music, Gorbachev’s taste ran to symphonies and Italian opera; for Yeltsin, it was folk songs and pop tunes.12

  After Gorbachev moved to Moscow as Central Committee secretary, Yeltsin found him controlling and patronizing, although he kept lines of communication open. Gorbachev hailed workmates in the Russian language’s familiar second person singular, ty; Yeltsin winced at this liberty and always used the more correct plural, vy.13 As we saw in the last chapter, Gorbachev for Yeltsin connoted overcentralization on questions such as locally manufactured farm machinery. At a deeper level, Yeltsin had qualms about Gorbachev’s grasp of the issues and his ability to lead the country. “Notes of disesteem for Gorbachev” wafted through his patter at meetings of the Sverdlovsk party bureau.14 Stoking Yeltsin’s unhappiness was his belief that Gorbachev, his exact contemporary, had overachieved. Stavropol was known for its wheat farms and its mineral-waters spas, at the ritziest of which, in Kislovodsk and Pyatigorsk, Gorbachev had been innkeeper to the holidaying Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Stavropol had half of Sverdlovsk’s population and, as Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, was “significantly inferior” to it economically.15 But Gorbachev had come to Moscow as a secretary in 1978 and by 1985 was general secretary—and Gorbachev had not deigned to phone in April 1985 to recruit Yeltsin.

  Nor was there any love lost with Ligachëv. Eleven years older than Yeltsin and a party member since 1944, he had a dossier replete in propaganda and personnel work; his service in the party apparatus dated from 1949, nineteen years before Yeltsin’s and four years before the end of the Stalin era. So many of Ligachëv’s choices as CPSU director of personnel, Yeltsin groaned to Ryabov, were from backwaters, “provinces not comparable to ours.”16 With 900,000 people, Tomsk, where Ligachëv was first secretary for seventeen years, was the fifty-eighth most populous Russian region; Sverdlovsk was fourth and even Stavropol was fourteenth.17 The January 1984 reconnaissance trip to Sverdlovsk that so gratified Ligachëv only got Yeltsin’s dander up. The one thing he had heard, Yeltsin informed the obkom secretaries before Ligachëv flew in, was that Ligachëv fancied buckwheat porridge for breakfast; they were to feed him well, show him around the oblast, and not darken Yeltsin’s door until the oblast’s scheduled party conference later in the week.18 True to his word, Yeltsin met Ligachëv at the airport and told him he would be too busy to squire him on his rounds, but looked forward to some conversations and to seeing Ligachëv at the conference. Several days later, informed that Ligachëv had shared tips on sowing and harvesting at a local kolkhoz, Yeltsin chortled that everyone should take the Trans-Siberian to Tomsk to “see how great things are there.”19 He at one point compelled the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk gorkom, Sergei Kadochnikov, to take “this idiot” off his
hands, as Ligachëv had demanded to know why the city’s storefronts were not painted as nicely as in Tomsk.20 The day of the oblast party conference, Ligachëv, a saturnine Yeltsin at his side, queried Sverdlovskers in front of the opera house about what they made of their first secretary.21 Not disheartened by Yeltsin’s petulance—possibly even heartened by it, since here was a man who put business before public relations—Ligachëv led him to believe he would soon be reassigned to Moscow at an appropriate grade.22

  Yeltsin was crestfallen when it sank in that he was to be a department head, a subaltern. He arrived untypically late at the Sverdlovsk House of Soviets for the Monday planning session of the obkom bureau on April 8. He had been detained by a red-eye flight from Moscow, where he got the details and the most fugitive of audiences with Gorbachev.23 He had an aide fetch a pencil and cracked it in three, as was his habit when peeved. He squinted at the group. “Yeltsin said, ‘Do you know who is sitting there [in Moscow]? They are doddering half-wits [staryye nedoumki]. . . . We have to chase them away.’ We all froze and blanched. . . . We could see what it was about: the first secretary of such an oblast was being given the position of head of a department. . . . He said it right out.”24 Everyone in those chairs understood that his contempt encompassed not only the geriatric Brezhnevites but Gorbachev, Ligachëv, and the arriviste group. All it would have taken to derail his career was one telephone call to Moscow from the local KGB chairman, Yurii Kornilov—the person Yakov Ryabov thought tattled on him in 1979—or any other person on the bureau. That none was made is testament to Yeltsin’s hold on the grandees of Sverdlovsk.