Some people are concerned about how long I will have the strength to work on so killing a schedule. I can reassure the comrades my health is fine, I have nothing to snivel about. If it gives out, I will grab several extra hours of rest. Meanwhile, we need to work full bore, otherwise we will not turn things around.
And then another note: “We hope that a year from now you will, in the Bolshevik way, tell us what you have not managed to get done.” Sure, agreed, one year from now I will tell you.78
What Yeltsin was presenting was the complex that Erik Erikson labels personal and occupational “overobedience.” Erikson’s thumbnail description of the overobedient Martin Luther is evocative of Yeltsin at this crossroads—“a certain zest in the production of problems, a rebellious mocking in dramatic helplessness, and a curious honesty (and honest curiosity) in the insistence on getting to the point, the fatal point, the true point.”79 Overobedience, as the Luther of Wittenberg shows, can be the antechamber to mutiny if the excitable concentration on means coincides with the setting in of incertitude about ends. And that is how it was with Yeltsin in Moscow.
CHAPTER SIX
The Mutineer
He was never at ease on the Soviet Olympus. The starchy protocol grated on Yeltsin. Unlike in Sverdlovsk, his coworkers’ homes were not close by, and they rarely socialized or played games together. “It was almost impossible,” to quote from the autobiographical Confession on an Assigned Theme, “to meet with or contact anyone,” such was the security bubble. “If you went out in public to the movies, the theater, or a museum, a whole advance guard would be sent. First they would check out and encircle the place, and only then could you make your appearance.”1
If his memoirs are any guide, Yeltsin was unsure what to make of the accoutrements provided him. His housing was middling and noisy, he said, and he implied that it was discrimination when he was not given quarters in the leafy neighborhood of Kuntsevo, in Moscow’s west end. Yet the “yellow brick building” on Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street in which the Yeltsins were accommodated—to Muscovites, the bricks and their hue bespoke a nomenklatura dwelling—was no hovel, and the family had as many square feet as on Working Youth Embankment in Sverdlovsk. As Yeltsin did not then understand, most apparatchiks assigned to Kuntsevo were lower in station than he and did not qualify for dachas. Yeltsin was supplied with one gratis in April 1985, a cottage shared with Anatolii Luk’yanov, the party department head who had just vetted him for the transfer to Moscow. If he at first thought his living conditions were too modest, they soon seemed Lucullan. Once in the Secretariat in July, he took Moskva-reka-5, the “state dacha” at the village of Usovo that had been occupied for several years by Gorbachev. He was “dismayed” at its ostentation. Set behind a stone wall, it was several times larger than Dacha No. 1 at Baltym, floored in marble, luxuriously furnished, and surrounded by a garden and playing courts. Yeltsin also professes to have been troubled by the dacha staff—three cooks, three waitresses, a chambermaid, and a groundskeeper, all of them on the roster of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate—who were his as soon as he was raised to the status of candidate member of the Politburo.2
Introduction to the innermost circle of power nudged Boris Yeltsin to think more globally about the regime’s raison d’être and its stance toward society. Naina Yeltsina was to use an intriguing culinary metaphor to explain how improbable mutiny would have been if her husband had not decamped from the Urals and gained the metropolitan perspective. “Chances are, if he had not come to Moscow he would not have carried out that act [his speech to the October 1987 plenum of the Central Committee]. That is because you learn more about the layer cake of life in Moscow than on the periphery. Out there, life is simpler. There is no layer cake there, by job and by level of life. There, although he had his high post, I don’t think we lived all that much better than other people.”3 Like many ex-provincials adjusting to the capital, he began the process a tad starry-eyed about those who had admitted him to the club. Some recruits over the years had set about conforming to it and finding a way to benefit. For Yeltsin, though, as Vitalii Tret’yakov puts it, naïveté curdled into aggressiveness. “At first it was a positive, constructive aggressiveness, the wish to do what it seemed to him Gorbachev expected, and to do it better and faster than the others. . . . But when it came to light that the general secretary did not view Yeltsin’s zeal and udarnichestvo [shockworkerness] with gratitude . . . [Yeltsin] took a turn toward an aggressiveness that was destructive of the power of the leader of perestroika.”4
Most of all, then, it was the fraying of his bond with Mikhail Gorbachev that disaffected Yeltsin. In his early months as Moscow chief, they spoke regularly. This tapered off over the course of 1986. A nitpicking point was the place of the Soviet first lady, Raisa Gorbacheva. Yeltsin felt she put on airs, and he was convinced that her husband told her more than was appropriate about political issues (often on long walks upon Gorbachev’s return from the Kremlin) and that she had more say on them from behind the curtains than was appropriate. In the summer of 1987, she hatched a project to convert the gigantic GUM department store on Red Square into an art museum. Yeltsin and Mayor Saikin were aghast and intervened with central planners to kill the idea.5 In one of his interviews with me, Yeltsin said he did not refer to Raisa in his letter or his October disquisition to the Central Committee (see below), but he had talked about her with Gorbachev face to face.6 Others confirmed this and said Gorbachev was furious that the question was raised in any form.7 When the U.S. ambassador asked Yeltsin in 1989 if he would bring Naina Yeltsina with him on his forthcoming visit to the United States, he said, “No. Absolutely not! I’ll not have her acting like Raisa Maximovna.”8 Yeltsin’s grousing about Mrs. Gorbachev was not only about her personally; it also indicates a certain sexism, one that was and is shared by many Russians.
More apropos were the two leaders’ styles and policy positions. To Yeltsin, after their political honeymoon in 1985–86, Gorbachev was vacillating, long-winded, and conceited: “You could not talk of any democracy in the Politburo. After the general secretary’s preamble, everybody was supposed to get up and read out from a little card, ‘Hooray, I agree with everything.’”9 Yeltsin had little experience in a collegial decision-making organ he did not head. In Sverdlovsk he was a member of the obkom bureau for only eighteen months before becoming first secretary, and in the Moscow city committee he was in the chair from the start. For his part, Gorbachev thought Yeltsin was playing the prima donna, and in mid-1986 he instructed the editor-in-chief of Pravda, Viktor Afanas’ev, to mute coverage of him in the paper.10 Gorbachev also thought Yeltsin was overstrung and that he was running scared when his intense tactics in Moscow did not bring results. It was generally believed when Yeltsin was made capital-city boss, and it was his expectation, too, that he would be a full member of the CPSU Politburo, with voting rights, as Viktor Grishin had been from 1971 to 1986.11 He was hurt when Gorbachev refused to make it happen. Gorbachev was to concede in his memoirs that Yeltsin had reason to feel affronted, as there were still “mastodons and dinosaurs” from the Brezhnev era on the bureau. 12 And there were those who passed Yeltsin by. Of the three individuals promoted to full member of the Politburo in June 1987, one had been a candidate member for the same amount of time as Yeltsin, the second had spent less time than he as a candidate, and the third overleaped the candidate stage altogether. Ligachëv, whom Yeltsin more and more saw as a mastodon, has maintained that Yeltsin at some point in 1987 expressed anger directly to the voting members of the Politburo that the Grishin precedent had not been applied. Yeltsin retired from the room, and Ligachëv said he was categorically against such a promotion and would resign if Gorbachev made it. Gorbachev did not make it.13
On the nitty-gritty of within-system reform and its prospects, the perceptions of Yeltsin and Gorbachev came to vary. In retrospect, Yeltsin made it sound like a neat breach, where he questioned Gorbachev’s scheme for turning the country and the regime around and Gorbachev stayed w
ith the tried and true: “Despite what seemed to be changes for the better, despite the upsurge of emotion that was roiling the whole country, I sensed that we were running up against a brick wall. The thing was, this time we could not get away with pretty new phrases about perestroika and renewal. We needed concrete actions, new steps forward, but Gorbachev did not want to take such steps.”14 At the time, the break was messier and more tentative than this passage implies, and more discomfiting to those on the ground. Yeltsin was to tell the Politburo in October 1987 that he first grew disconcerted in the summer of 1986. However, there were few public or semipublic clues of it until 1987, and it took most of 1987 for his mood to work itself out.
The bad blood between Yeltsin and Gorbachev showed in the weekly meetings of the Politburo in the autumn of 1986. It was unmistakable there, though not yet on the outside, when the Politburo sat on January 19, 1987, to deliberate Gorbachev’s report to the Central Committee plenum on political change, just around the corner.15 Yeltsin heard out Gorbachev on the draft report and then recited a litany of twenty suggestions for improvement. Several were bellicosely worded. The manuscript, he said, oversold the accomplishments of reform, and bureaucratic foot-dragging made it unwise “to succumb to optimism.” Comparisons of perestroika with the 1917 revolution, such as Gorbachev was given to, were “worthless,” since the Soviet social structure was not being transfigured. “It would be better to say simply that perestroika has something of a revolutionary character.” Even as moderate reform, Yeltsin continued, perestroika, or “restructuring,” had been more buzzword than reality. “Certain people are disinclined toward revolutionary changes. It is best to appraise the current period as one of new forms of work leading toward perestroika.” Yeltsin detoured to belittle a paragraph in the Gorbachev document claiming that the fundamentals of the regime guaranteed success: “The guarantees enumerated—the socialist system, the Soviet people, the party—have been around for lo these seventy years! So none of them is a guarantee against a return to the past.” The only insurance policy would be “democratization of all spheres of life,” and that had been barely put in motion, especially in spheres, such as local government, that dealt directly with people. Yeltsin ended with demands for identification by name of the authors of wrongful decisions in the present and past Soviet governments, for term limits for leaders, and for a discussion of ethnic relations in the USSR. Gorbachev said that Yeltsin’s time was up and stormed out of the room.16
When he resumed the chair a half hour later, Gorbachev made a scathing attack on the Moscow dynamo. “Boris Nikolayevich,” he observed, “deviates from our common assessment” by throwing out “loud and vacuous” reproofs. Personalized judgments had their place, but Yeltsin often lost sight of more general points and in Moscow was overseeing endless staff turnover and reorganization. “We cannot break the knees of the party and society. We need to speak respectfully about the party members who have been carrying and will carry the load and who are experiencing losses. They may have weaknesses but they have strengths, too.”17 The two swapped comments about Yeltsin’s overheated style, in which Yeltsin accepted Gorbachev’s rebuke only to hear Gorbachev restate it:
GORBACHEV: Let us not overdramatize, but this kind of conversation has been good for Boris Nikolayevich’s practical work. He cannot be immune to the criticism that he calls on all of us to make. . . .
YELTSIN: I am a novice on the Politburo. For me this has been a lesson. I don’t think it came too late.
GORBACHEV: You and I have already had words on this subject. By all means, take the lesson to heart. This conversation has been necessary. But you are an emotional person. I don’t think your observations will change our attitude toward you. We have a high opinion of your work. Just remember that we have to work together. You are not to set yourself [apart from us] or to show off in front of your comrades.
“I was beside myself,” Yeltsin recounts, at Gorbachev’s “almost hysterical” reaction to his well-intentioned statement.18 In a birthday call to Vitalii Vorotnikov, the head of the Russian government, on January 20, Gorbachev confided that the Politburo skirmish had left him with a “sour aftertaste.” Yeltsin was getting too big for his britches, pinning the blame for every snafu on predecessors and superiors, and “playing around with the masses.”19 Yeltsin paid his respects to Vorotnikov and asked if he had been too abrupt at the meeting. You have every right to take part, Vorotnikov answered, but you should do it more calmly and self-effacingly. “You are forever the accuser, the exposer. You speak acerbically, categorically. You can’t get away with that.”20
And so it went until October 1987. At some gatherings of the leadership, the archives reveal, Yeltsin and Gorbachev butted heads; at others, Yeltsin kept silent or limited himself to needling. He was, he says, the odd man out or a queer fish (chudak) in the collective.21 In the Politburo on March 24, he sniped at the foreign-language “special schools” for the offspring of Moscow VIPs, which drew an answering fusillade from Gorbachev and Ligachëv. On April 23 Gorbachev denounced press articles on limousines, clinics, and other nomenklatura privileges, such as had been printed in the pages of Moskovskaya pravda; Yeltsin replied that reasonable explanations of the privileges, if justified by higher need, had to be given to the media and the people. In Politburo discussions in April and May, Yeltsin gave an equivocal signal in favor of deep economic reform. He supported retention of central planning but composition of the plan “from below,” with slack targets whereby efficient firms, once they had met their output quotas, would hold back surplus production for reuse or sale at unregulated prices. It was a branching out from the “complex brigade” model he had favored in Sverdlovsk. On September 28 Yeltsin proclaimed at a Politburo session that the party had been caught with its head in the sand by the emergence of the neformaly, the extra-governmental, informal organizations, and that the Komsomol was ossified and was proving incapable of offering Soviet youth alternatives to them. “It does nothing itself and only interferes with others.” Mobilization of old-style party propagandists into the youth league, as had been advised, “will bring no results.” And the sputtering economy was turning the population away from perestroika: “We said that in two years there would be an improvement. But there have not been any discernible changes. So questions arise. ‘There was one period when it got better [people say], but once again . . . ’”22
At the marathon Politburo meeting of October 15, by which time their relations were on the rocks, Gorbachev refuted commentary Yeltsin made on the 120-page draft of his address marking the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution on November 7. In Life and Reforms, Gorbachev characterizes Yeltsin’s comments as “saturated by a spirit of great caution and conservatism,” in contrast to his own latitudinarian views.23 So black-and-white an interpretation is hard to sustain from the archival record.
Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were unsure about how far to go in revising the Soviet past. In the October 15 discussion, Gorbachev differed from the communist catechism on many issues.24 Yet he defended Stalin’s crushing of Trotskyism and other intraparty opposition groups, his wartime leadership of the fatherland, and “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class” during collectivization, reminiscing here about the organizing efforts of his grandfather in their birthplace of Privol’noye. Yeltsin—from a family of dispossessed kulaks—avoided collectivization and Stalin’s attacks on the opposition and wartime leadership, but spoke on a host of other historical issues. One unifying point for him was the need to recognize the past contribution of rank-and-file citizens and communists. In 1917 the party found out “how to win over the majority of the population and of the soviets [elected councils]” to its side; Germany would not have been defeated in 1945 without the unselfishness of anonymous workers and foot soldiers. Yeltsin asked for elucidation of the role of Lenin and—shades of his adolescent inquiries in Berezniki—for inclusion in the jubilee report of some evaluations of Lenin’s revolutionary contemporaries. Toward the end, he telegraphe
d irritation at the effort being spent on the past, since what mattered most to society was a decent life in the present. His plea was for a stock taking, a summary in Gorbachev’s speech about the Soviet experiment and the path ahead.
The declassified transcript shows Gorbachev taking to heart the question about the velocity of reform, though not quite as Yeltsin did. On other items, he tut-tutted Yeltsin for artlessness with reference to Lenin and, in Aesopian language, for his self-centeredness:
YELTSIN: I think that besides Lenin we need to name [in the report] his closest comrades-in-arms.
GORBACHEV: Whom do you have in mind?
YELTSIN: I have in mind [Yakov] Sverdlov, [Felix] Dzerzhinsky, [Mikhail] Kalinin, [Mikhail] Frunze.
GORBACHEV: Look, don’t be so simplistic. Here in my briefcase I have a list of members of the Politburo under Lenin. Wouldn’t those be his closest comrades-in-arms? Yes, that is right. And you wish to give names from today’s point of view, whom you like and whom you do not. That would be incorrect. . . . [Gorbachev speaks of some personalities from the 1920s and 1930s and reviews their policy positions.] The question being settled here was where the country was headed. . . . But personal needs were folded into these struggles. . . . When it comes to subjective aspects at the level of high politics, and when it touches on big-time politicians, then frequently these personal ambitions, pretensions, the inability to work in the collective, and so on and so forth are capable of warping the person’s political position. All of this, you have to understand, is not a simple thing, it is a delicate interaction. . . .
YELTSIN: A very important theme is . . . the time frame in which perestroika, now that it has begun, is to occur. People are looking for a very stringent formulation. But we are still writing out that perestroika is going to take fifteen to twenty years, that is, it is a long-range policy. We have to solve our most crying problems in two, three, five years, that’s all there is to it. We must say this.
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