This tempest in a teapot rings true in context. In the estimation of Yeltsin, the supreme leaders had been exposed as poor judges of talent and tepid agents of change. He left for Moscow with a two-ton chip on his shoulder.
On Friday, April 12, 1985, Yeltsin reported for work at the Central Committee enclosure on Old Square, down the block from the Spasskii Gate of the Kremlin. The party center’s construction department had ten sections and about a hundred staff, a comedown from twice that many in the Sverdlovsk obkom. Yeltsin’s attention as head went to a housecleaning of personnel and to flagging projects to lay pipelines and build housing for workers in the west Siberian oil patch. Gorbachev was content. The pickings in the CPSU apparatus were slim: “We were looking everywhere to ‘spy out’ people who were active, unhesitating, and responsive to new things. Not too many of them were nearby, in the upper stratum. Yeltsin impressed me.”25
Boris and Naina were issued a nomenklatura apartment at 54 Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, in a congested quarter of the downtown near the Belorussia Station. Its windows looked out at Transformation of the Savior, a long-closed Old Believers monastery. There the Yeltsins opened their doors to Tatyana, grandson Boris, and Tatyana’s second husband, Leonid Dyachenko. Since graduating from the university, Tatyana had been working at Salyut, a closed military institute where her job was to track space vehicles in orbit. Yelena and her family lived with the rest for a year or two and then went to party-supplied housing a short distance away.26
Before three months had lapsed, Gorbachev was happy enough with Yeltsin’s labors to put him up for the title Yeltsin had coveted in April: secretary of the Central Committee for construction and capital investment. Questions came up at the Politburo on June 29 from Nikolai Tikhonov, Brezhnev’s comrade from pre–World War II Ukraine whom he had made prime minister of the Soviet Union in 1980. The octogenarian Tikhonov, born one year before Yeltsin’s father, demanded to know his qualifications for a secretaryship. Gorbachev rattled off the Yeltsin résumé and emphasized his energy, experience, and inside-out knowledge of the construction industry. “Somehow,” sniffed Tikhonov, “I don’t have a feel for him.” Ligachëv rushed to Yeltsin’s aid, explaining that he had gotten off to a fast start in Moscow and had been doing the rounds of the ministries, where “people have reached out to him.” Vladimir Dolgikh, the Central Committee secretary for the whole heavy-industrial sector and Yeltsin’s supervisor since April, said Yeltsin had shown he could work satisfactorily with central bureaucrats and regional party officials: “Having gotten to know him better, I have not noticed any weak spots.” Mikhail Solomentsev, the head of the party’s disciplinary arm, the Control Commission of the Central Committee, added a flaccid endorsement: “Comrade Yeltsin . . . is going to grow. He has all the right attributes: a good education and tempering as a civil engineer. This is a person with a future.” Another elderly member, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, expressed support. Tikhonov pulled in his horns and the Politburo consented to the designation, which was approved by Central Committee plenum on July 1, 1985.27
Yeltsin took the secretaryship as his due. Still running the construction department, he was relieved that he no longer communicated with the administrative and political summit through a go-between, which had been for him “a severe trial.” All spring he had fidgeted at meetings of department heads where he was meant to write down every pearl Dolgikh dropped. Other than a tour of the oil boomtowns of Tyumen province with Gorbachev in September 1985 and the odd meeting, his only communication with number one was by the Kremlin’s high-frequency telephone line.28
It was the third promotion that lofted Yeltsin into the political stratosphere. On Tuesday, December 24, 1985, the Moscow gorkom (city committee) of the CPSU, the relative of the Sverdlovsk obkom, installed him as its first secretary. Gorbachev, who moved the resolution on behalf of the Politburo, had been weighing the move since July, when he had Yeltsin promoted to Central Committee secretary: “I was ‘trying him out for size’ for Moscow.”29
In Confession, Yeltsin writes that the first he heard about the Moscow opening was at the Politburo meeting that discussed it and that he was reluctant to take it, offered the names of alternative candidates, and agreed only out of regard for party discipline. Gorbachev, Yeltsin recounts, said he wanted him to take the job. “For me, this was a bolt from the blue. I stood up and spoke out about the inappropriateness of such a decision.” He was a builder, an unassuming construction engineer, and would contribute more as a Central Committee secretary. “And also I did not know cadres so well in Moscow, so it would be difficult for me to work in the position.” But, Yeltsin says chastely, Gorbachev pressed the case. “The conversation in the Politburo was not simple . . . for me. Again [as in April], they said to me that party discipline applied and they knew better where I would be of most use to the party. In general, once again puzzling over it, understanding full well that the Moscow party organization could not be left in such a state, and throwing out suggestions as I went about whom it would be better to send there, I agreed.”30
Most of this is to be taken with a grain of salt. We know that Yeltsin and a Sverdlovsk confrère compared notes on the Moscow job a few days before the Politburo meeting. On that occasion, Yeltsin was champing at the bit and agreed with the suggestion that “for the second time only the Urals can save Moscow”—the first being in World War II, when munitions factories were evacuated there and it became an arsenal for the country.31 The transcript in the archives for the Politburo session of December 23 shows unequivocally that Yeltsin took the change in stride and said nothing about other likely appointees. Gorbachev was quoted, in the tradition of the spoken word taking precedence over the written, as having talked the position over with him. The only other members who spoke on the motion, all briefly and all in favor, were Gromyko, now head of the executive board of the Soviet parliament; Solomentsev of the control commission; Vitalii Vorotnikov, the prime minister of the RSFSR and its representative on the Politburo; and Viktor Grishin, the incumbent Moscow leader.
Gorbachev opened with word that he had received a letter of resignation from Grishin and wanted him to be given an honorific post as adviser to Gromyko:
GROMYKO: It should say in the text of the resolution that comrade Grishin will be assigned to the group of advisers.
SOLOMENTSEV: That’s right.
VOROTNIKOV: Yes, it has to be written up like that.
GORBACHEV: If the comrades have no objections, I am available to take part in the plenum of the Moscow gorkom of the CPSU. Now, let us talk about who should be the candidate for the post of gorkom first secretary. The question is about the party organization of our capital. This makes it appropriate to recommend for this post someone from the Central Committee who has work experience in a major party organization and knows about the economy, science, and culture. There is a suggestion that we recommend comrade B. N. Yeltsin.
VOROTNIKOV: Good idea.
SOLOMENTSEV: Sure.
GORBACHEV: I have had a conversation with comrade Yeltsin. He understands the place and significance of the Moscow party organization, how thorny and complex work as first secretary of the Moscow city committee would be. The capital, after all, is the capital. It is our administrative, economic, scientific, and cultural center.
GROMYKO: In population size alone, Moscow is like a real country. VOROTNIKOV: Yes, a country like Czechoslovakia.
GORBACHEV: Do the comrades have any other suggestion?
MEMBERS OF THE POLITBURO: No.
GORBACHEV: In that case, comrade Yeltsin, we will be recommending you as first secretary of the Moscow party committee.
The retirement of Grishin from the Politburo and Yeltsin’s shedding of his duties in the Secretariat were to be straightened out at the next plenum of the Central Committee. Grishin was given a minute to offer unctuous thanks to Gorbachev, and then all eyes turned to Yeltsin:
YELTSIN: Five and a half months ago, I was elected a secretary of the Central Com
mittee. I exerted every effort to master my new duties. Now I am being given an extraordinary assignment. I shall do all I can in order to participate actively in every innovation taking place in the party and the country, in dealing with the problems Mikhail Sergeyevich has been speaking about. I will try to justify your confidence.
GORBACHEV: We certainly hope so, or else we would not be making such a decision. Do we all approve of this motion?
MEMBERS OF THE POLITBURO: We approve. The motion was adopted.32
At 8.7 million people, Yeltsin’s new domain was the megalopolis of the USSR. Moscow was, as Gorbachev said, the hub of government, business, education, science, and culture—in the Soviet constellation of things, it was Washington, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles rolled into one. Unlike other Soviet cities, it answered to the central authorities and not to the province around it. Its party boss was the senior local politico in the power structure and sat on the highest councils of the CPSU. Among the major figures who had held its first secretaryship in the past were Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Nikita Khrushchev. The office building of the Moscow party committee was 6 Old Square, cheek by jowl with the Central Committee reception at 4 Old Square; the two had been built around 1910 as matching luxury apartment houses for the Moscow bourgeoisie. Yeltsin was to make it onto the second tier of the Politburo as a candidate (nonvoting) member on February 18, 1986, which was when he officially left the Central Committee Secretariat so as to concentrate on Moscow. Moving up from a Volga sedan to a ZIL-115 limousine, he was now one of the fifteen or twenty most powerful people in the second most powerful country in the world.33 Under Brezhnev-era understandings on continuity in office, he would have occupied it carefree for two decades.
Control of Moscow was as sensitive an issue as any in Soviet politics in 1985–86. Viktor Grishin, a phlegmatic, half-educated mainstay of the Brezhnev Politburo now in his seventies, had been its first secretary since 1967 and had promoted the capital under his hand as the “model communist city.” His authority had been sapped by a string of scandals, exposed by Ligachëv and others, alleging falsification and thievery in Moscow’s trade and housing networks. Grishin sealed his fate in 1984–85 with an inapt play to present himself as the deathbed pick of Chernenko for general secretary.34
The selection of Yeltsin to dislodge the antediluvian Grishin was, once again, contested. The disapproval came this time not from a relic of the past like Tikhonov but from the likes of Nikolai Ryzhkov, the youngish technocrat who, with Gorbachev behind him, had supplanted Tikhonov as Soviet prime minister in September 1985. Ryzhkov, born in 1929 in Ukraine, was well acquainted with Boris Yeltsin. A UPI alumnus who made his career in Sverdlovsk, he had been director of Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, and sat on the oblast party committee from 1971 to 1975, when Yeltsin was head of the obkom construction department. Although Yeltsin had personal respect for him and the two talked civilly until 1990, Ryzhkov thought Yeltsin was egocentric and quarrelsome and that, as head of department, he had improperly “commanded” Uralmash to carry out tasks the party apparatus wanted done.35 Not being on the Politburo until some weeks after Yeltsin was brought to Moscow, Ryzhkov was out of the loop on that decision. Now that he was chairman of the government and a full member of the Politburo, he could not be circumnavigated. In a colloquy at Old Square before the December 23 meeting, Gorbachev and Ligachëv asked him if he approved of Yeltsin being made the Moscow party chief. Ryzhkov did not mince words. Yeltsin, he warned, while well and good for a party department or one of the construction ministries, could not be entrusted with a more sensitive, political mission. Yeltsin was by nature cut out for brawls. “He will chop wood,” said Ryzhkov, using a rural maxim as warning, “and it will be your elbows that will smart.” Not wanting a fight, he agreed to keep mum in the Politburo unless a fellow member asked his opinion, which none was to do. Some years later, Gorbachev would admit to him that he rued the day he snubbed Ryzhkov’s advice about Yeltsin.36
Ryzhkov’s doubts were about Yeltsin’s character and style, not about policy or obeisance to the regime. No one, not even Yeltsin, saw him as a prospective apostate and leader of the opposition. In December 1985, like Ryabov in his day, Gorbachev considered Yeltsin a force he could tame. Yeltsin knew the terms of the bargain: “I understood perfectly that I was being used to knock down the Grishin team.”37
But Ryzhkov was not the only queasy one. Yevgenii Razumov, the deputy head of the Secretariat’s personnel department, had known Yeltsin since 1976, when he was the Politburo’s representative at the plenum of the Sverdlovsk obkom that confirmed Yeltsin as first secretary. He is said to have spoken out against all three of Yeltsin’s 1985 promotions.38 Anatolii Luk’yanov, the then head of the Central Committee’s general department, says that when Moscow for Yeltsin was under review, he received many letters from Sverdlovsk lambasting Yeltsin and saying “you will weep” if he were to be given a lofty position.39
One issue that did not harm Yeltsin’s chances was his physical condition. Ligachëv in early 1985 had Yevgenii Chazov, the chief of the Kremlin medical service, do a briefing on it, saying he had heard that it was poor (Dolgikh said the same to Chazov). Chazov gave him a clean bill of health.40 Alcohol would have been one of the subjects covered. Luk’yanov has noted that “in Russia nobody is ever hired or fired exclusively on the basis of his attitude toward alcohol,”41 but there were limits to this leniency. Ligachëv, Yeltsin’s protector in 1985, was a teetotaler and, with Solomentsev, conceived the “dry law” of May 1985, the short-lived attempt to curb drunkenness and alcoholism among the citizenry. Ligachëv said to friends in the 1990s that Yeltsin did not touch a drop on his trip to Sverdlovsk in 1984 and no excess was ever in evidence.42 Had Yeltsin been a problem drinker, there would have been no invitation to Moscow or its party committee.
The Moscow position was an opportune outlet for Yeltsin’s urban and regional expertise, hankering for recognition, and love of a good fight. As citadel of the Soviet regime, the city stood for all that was amiss with communism and for its potential for redemption through reform. For a month after December 24, Yeltsin galloped through its factories, architectural monuments, and housing projects. His slow-ripening disaffection was giving way to political wanderlust and an itch to speak “the bitter truth” instead of “the sweet lie,” as he had put it on Sverdlovsk television in 1982. He committed wholeheartedly to the reform project and was determined to make his mark on it, repressing any reservations he had about Gorbachev as an individual. As Aleksandr Korzhakov, a former attendant to Brezhnev and Andropov assigned to Yeltsin by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB as one of his three bodyguards, recollected, Yeltsin was “the sincerest member of the party” in cleaving to the general course of perestroika. He “tried harder than the other party bosses to change life for the better.”43
On January 24, 1986, Yeltsin surveyed Moscow’s woes in a stentorian two-hour report to its party conference, held in the glittering convention hall of the Soviet trade unions—the place where Soviet leaders from Lenin to Chernenko had lain in state and Stalin’s show trials were held in the 1930s. Yeltsin wove his points into a parable of broader import. Under Grishin and Brezhnev, the city had been “infected by window dressing, an overemphasis on successes, and a hushing up of shortcomings [through] cooking the books . . . [and] fakery.” So inveterate was the illness, he said, that even calls for improvement “have been to a great extent perceived formulaically . . . lamely, at times cravenly.” “There may be some who think these judgments sound indelicate,” Yeltsin added, but “they had to come out.”44 Grishin, still a member of the Politburo, sat with a poker face on the podium, within spitting distance of Yeltsin. He did not ask to speak in selfdefense : “This is how we were raised, not to contradict the opinion of the [leadership], which was where the assertions of the keynote speaker [Yeltsin] were coming from.”45 He never grasped that the Yeltsin and Gorbachev messages might be appreciably different. Grishin was to lose his advisory post in 19
87 and died in 1992.
The words from the Moscow soapbox were the talk of the town. Yeltsin’s speech was a “strong fresh wind” for the party, Gorbachev told him. The general secretary, Yeltsin adds, said this “without an approving smile and with a blank look on his face.”46 “From that moment,” says Anatolii Chernyayev, the perspicacious foreign-policy aide to Gorbachev from 1985 to 1991, “dates [Yeltsin’s] glory.” He wrote in his diary that “in spirit, in vocabulary, and in approaches” the speech was putting forth “new norms of life and activity” for the regime. Chernyayev noticed lines at newsstands for that day’s Moskovskaya pravda, the Moscow newspaper that carried the text.47
Yeltsin on February 26, 1986, regaled the delegates to the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the whole CPSU. Orthodox in some ways, heterodox in others, his missionary speechifying broadened the discourse about Soviet reform by flogging “the infallibility of officialdom,” its “special blessings” (material privileges), and the smothering of innovation by an “inert stratum of time servers with party cards.” Yeltsin was the first spokesman at this level to propose some revision to political structures (“periodic accountability” of leaders from the general secretary on down) and to say that the regime’s very continuance depended on disinfecting changes taking hold. In his best line, he also gave the national audience a taste of the theatricality so well known in Sverdlovsk. Why had he not been as forthright at the last party congress in 1981? “I can answer and answer sincerely. I did not then have enough courage and political experience.”48 By inference, he now had both.
The priority in Moscow was a cadres shakeup. “Conservatism has gone way too far among us,” Yeltsin fumed before several thousand agitprop workers, officials who propagated the party line in the media and the education system, at the House of Political Enlightenment on April 11, 1986. “The city authorities have been playing make-believe [zanimalis’ pokazukhoi]: ‘We know what we are doing, everything is A-plus here, we are the tops in the world, there is no need to wash Moscow’s dirty laundry in public.’ Those who keep on thinking this way should vacate their places and clear out.”49 Many did. His first week as viceroy, Yeltsin gave Vladimir Promyslov, who had been mayor since Khrushchev’s day and was politically independent of Grishin, until noon the day after to leave. When Promyslov stalled for time, Yeltsin telephoned him and “suggested that he depart the easy way and not the hard way”; twenty minutes later, Promyslov had quit. To succeed him, Yeltsin tapped Valerii Saikin, the director of the ZIL Works, the biggest auto plant in the USSR; he had to talk Gorbachev out of appointing Saikin Soviet minister of the automobile industry.50 In twenty-two months, Yeltsin retired all of the Grishin-appointed secretaries of the gorkom, two-thirds of the raion first secretaries, and, with Saikin, about 90 percent of the leaders in the Promyslov municipal machine. The replacements, better trained technically and up to twenty-five years younger, were often plucked from nonstandard channels, particularly, as in Sverdlovsk, from the ranks of factory management. Yeltsin, an interloper in the capital, had to rely on locals for personnel advice, but he did not always take it: “Like a wild animal, he had a feel for any imprecision, for any falseness in tonality, and was always on his guard. . . . If he asked you whom to appoint to some post and you gave a name right away, before you knew it that person would be appointed. If you said you needed to think about it, he would set to thinking himself whether to make the appointment or not.”51
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