Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  Even pushing on Gorbachev to change policy was dicey, given past Soviet practice. Nor was Yeltsin adhering to a well-defined program or set of ideas. His perception that Gorbachev was acting timidly, and that he as a result should recalibrate his position, was grounded more in an almost feline instinct for the moment than in ideology. Gorbachev’s feet were still firmly planted in Marxism-Leninism. Now and over the next four years, inasmuch as he resonated to instincts at all, they were, in a manner of speaking, canine—trained, trainable, tied to the known and to the previously rewarded.52

  Once the hunch took with Yeltsin, he acted as he had at times in the past, going beyond survival, duty, success, and testing to revisit the dormant rebellion script. In Confession, he explicitly drew the parallel to a simple act of defiance back in his adolescence—at his commencement from elementary school. In the school hall, he had piped up, “almost as at the October plenum of the Central Committee,”53 and announced to horrified parents and staff that his homeroom teacher was not fit for her job. But Sverdlov Hall in the Moscow Kremlin was, to say the least, a more consequential stage for rebellion than Railway School No. 95 in inconspicuous Berezniki. And, although Yeltsin concentrated in 1987 on his immediate superior, Ligachëv, as he said it had been on his teacher in 1945 or 1946, this time he also went after the headmaster. The Khrushchev secret speech was about the Stalinist past and attempted to absolve the current leadership of responsibility for that past. The Yeltsin secret speech was about the Gorbachevian present and attempted to make the person and the group in charge responsible for the malpractice of reform.

  When Yeltsin was back in his seat, Gorbachev took control from Ligachëv. He was, noticed Valerii Boldin, his chief of staff, “livid with rage” at the monkey wrench Yeltsin had thrown and at the claim about kowtowing to Gorbachev as general secretary.54 Still, Gorbachev did have options. He could have voiced receptivity and asked Yeltsin to explicate his points. He could have picked some of them apart. Yeltsin had cast aspersions on Gorbachev for exalting palaver over action; the same could have been shown to apply to some degree to Yeltsin’s speech. Or Gorbachev could have finagled the matter by undertaking to review it with Yeltsin or to refer it to the Politburo. That he did not do so is proof that by the time Yeltsin’s speech was over Gorbachev had shifted to giving his uppity associate a dose of his own medicine.

  In high dudgeon, Gorbachev rejected Yeltsin’s position that the Moscow party organization should be left to decide on his standing there: “We seem to be talking here about the separation of the Moscow party organization [from the party as a whole] . . . about a desire to fight with the Central Committee.” Under the “democratic centralism” bolted in place by Lenin and Stalin, local and regional leaders served for the good of the whole and bowed to the will of higher-ups. It was anathema for the Moscow committee, and not the Politburo and the Central Committee apparatus, to choose the city’s party boss.55 Gorbachev then solicited opinions, signaling that he had made willingness to berate Yeltsin a badge of loyalty to him.56

  Nine Politburo members—Ligachëv, Prime Minister Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia (Gorbachev’s foreign minister), and Viktor Chebrikov (the chairman of the KGB), inter alia—spoke against Yeltsin. All were willing and even happy to oblige, although later Ryzhkov and some others would hold it against Gorbachev that he had not let them in on Yeltsin’s September letter.57 A parade of fifteen officials and two blue-collar workers then had at Yeltsin. It was four hours’ worth of imprecations, with time off for a recess in which Yeltsin stood alone. Some committee members approached Gorbachev at the break to demand that Yeltsin be expelled from the Central Committee; Gorbachev refused.58 Several members long affiliated with Yeltsin, such as Yurii Petrov, his successor in the Sverdlovsk obkom, and Arkadii Vol’skii, who had tried to bring him to Moscow in the Andropov years, did not respond to Gorbachev’s invitation to attack him verbally. Several others, notably Mayor Saikin, Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, the Sverdlovsker Gennadii Kolbin (now party first secretary in Kazakhstan), and academician Georgii Arbatov, showed some fellow feeling for him even as they got in their digs. Saikin truly stuck his neck out. He was opposed to Yeltsin’s speech and underlined that he had no forewarning of it (he was right off a plane from Beijing), but said there had been some achievements in Moscow since 1985 that Yeltsin had “worked around the clock” to bring about.59 The rest ranged from the admonitory to the abusive. These rejoinders were as new as Yeltsin’s almost unrehearsed piece. Since Stalin’s time, would-be speakers at Central Committee plenums had requested a place on the docket weeks ahead, written out their remarks, and filed them with the Secretariat before meeting day.

  Ligachëv led off by demanding to know why Yeltsin had been unengaged at many Politburo meetings; the answer must be that all along Yeltsin had knavishly been collecting materials for use in his speech to the plenum.60 If Ligachëv’s venom was predictable, some blows smarted more—they were acts of “betrayal,” Yeltsin later said.61 They came from several provincial party bosses, from Yakov Ryabov, and from Politburo members Ryzhkov and Yakovlev. Boris Konoplëv, the first secretary in Perm oblast, where Yeltsin grew up, wrote Yeltsin’s presentation off to “either cluelessness about life or an effort to shove us aside and distort reality.” Ryabov, sponsor to Yeltsin in Sverdlovsk in the 1960s and 1970s and now ambassador to France, said he should never have drafted him into the party apparatus and promoted him, and ought to have been awake to his “delusions of grandeur.”62 Ryzhkov parroted Ligachëv’s charges and added ones of his own about “political nihilism” and a desire to split the Politburo. Yakovlev found that Yeltsin had displayed panic, “petit-bourgeois attitudes,” and an infatuation with “pseudo-revolutionary phrases.” Mikhail Solomentsev, a backer in 1985, faulted him for a tendency to accumulate hostilities the way a snowball does bits of gravel. Vorotnikov, also an early supporter, saw it differently: “At Politburo sessions, Boris Nikolayevich, you mostly keep to yourself. There is some kind of mask on your face the whole time. It was not that way when you were in Sverdlovsk. . . . You seem to feel malcontent with everyone and everything.” Chebrikov of the KGB reproved the sinner for never having “loved the people of Moscow” and for blabbing to foreign journalists.63

  Shooting through the proceedings was paternalistic and pedagogical imagery. When Yeltsin toward the end tried a hangdog rebuttal, Gorbachev interrupted midsentence: “Boris Nikolayevich, are you so politically illiterate [bezgramotnyi] that we should be organizing a reading and writing class for you right here?” No, Yeltsin gulped. Gorbachev then pontificated on Yeltsin’s “hypertrophied self-love” and puerile need to have the country “revolve around your persona,” as the city had since 1985. Several accusers said Yeltsin would do well to think of the plenum and similar conclaves as a rectifying “school” for his “political immaturity [nezrelost’].” Shevardnadze, after Yakovlev the most liberal member of the Politburo, inveighed against his “irresponsibility” and “primitivism.” Stepan Shalayev, the chairman of the Soviet trade unions, said Yeltsin should have been heedful of Ligachëv, whose apparatus was “a great school for each communist who takes part in its work,” a point also taken up by Ryzhkov. Yeltsin dawdled in enlisting in the party in the 1960s, stated Sergei Manyakin, and never was tempered as a communist and citizen; Ligachëv had erred in coddling Yeltsin and not “thumping the table with his fist” at Yeltsin’s roguery.64

  Yeltsin got with the spirit in his closing by describing the plenary as “a severe school . . . that will do me for my whole life.” He tried gamely to recycle several of his propositions in conciliatory form, saying, for instance, that his barb about hosannas to Gorbachev applied to only “two or three comrades.” And he allowed that he generally agreed with the assessment of him: “In speaking out today and letting down the Central Committee and the Moscow city organization, I made a mistake.” Gorbachev then asked if Yeltsin was capable of continuing with his work—a giveaway that he was open to a rapprocheme
nt, provided Yeltsin ate his words. Yeltsin would not and said again he wanted to be discharged. In his wrap-up, Gorbachev retracted the lifeline and moved that Yeltsin be censured for his “politically erroneous” outburst and that the Politburo and the Moscow committee meet to examine his status.65 Yeltsin, like everyone else, voted for the resolution.

  There was still time to salvage something from the debacle. The Moscow party bureau met several days later, excoriated Yeltsin for putting them on the spot by speaking out without consultation, but passed a resolution that he should be permitted to stay as gorkom first secretary. They delegated the estimable Saikin to press this position with Gorbachev, yet the general secretary considered the case closed and would not meet with him. Yeltsin attended the Politburo meeting of October 31 and again asked pardon for his conduct ten days before. He informed members he would agree to the Moscow bureau’s proposal that he remain in his local position—an initiative that went unmentioned in his memoirs:

  I am suffering keenly from the criticism of my presentation to the [Central Committee] plenum. The reason for my statement was my worry that perestroika had gained momentum and now we are losing that momentum. I am prepared to continue to work. We need to hold course on perestroika. I confess that I took too much upon myself, that I am guilty [in this regard]. I had still not seen or really felt what I was guilty of. Since the middle of 1986, I have felt a powerful psychological overload. I should have gone openly with this to my comrades on the gorkom and Politburo. But my self-love interposed, and that was my main mistake. I am now ready to speak with Yegor Kuz’mich [Ligachëv], Aleksandr Nikolayevich [Yakovlev], and Georgii Petrovich [Razumovskii, a deputy of Ligachëv’s]. My gorkom comrades have not turned away from me. They are asking me to stay, although they also condemn my speech.

  Gorbachev listened impassively.66

  On November 3 Yeltsin sent the general secretary a letter repeating his request. Gorbachev consulted with several Politburo members and called him at work to turn it down summarily. He was fed up with indulging Yeltsin and now had a new plaint: Yeltsin had not disavowed bastard versions of his October 21 speech that were popping up in Moscow and in the world press. “He [Yeltsin] ostensibly perceives himself a ‘popular hero,’” the general secretary exclaimed to staff.67 The underlying worry was that Yeltsin’s conceit was shared by the crowd.

  It is mind-boggling how close the two gladiators came to a compromise. On October 21, even after Yeltsin refused to withdraw his resignation request, Gorbachev said to the plenum that the position of Moscow party chief might not be “beyond his powers” in the long term, if Yeltsin were “able to draw the correct conclusions” and work well.68 Yeltsin did eat humble pie on October 31 and November 3. As late as November 10, Anatolii Chernyayev was recommending to Gorbachev in a letter that he conserve Yeltsin as an ally, in a manifestation of magnanimity and reformism, and not drive him into the ranks of the outcast.69 Yeltsin could have been left in the Moscow position with a slap on the wrist—not a kick in the groin. And he could have been wheedled into signing a nonaggression pact that would take him out of the Politburo, something he had wanted since September, with eligibility for a return. Had this been done, as Yeltsin theorized in an interview in 2002, “History might have veered in a different direction.”70

  On November 7, the anniversary of the revolution, Yeltsin was on the Lenin Mausoleum reviewing stand with the other Soviet leaders, waving at the tanks and rockets in the military parade. Fidel Castro of Cuba, who admired his spunk (and later was to despise his policies), came up and gave him a rib-crunching hug. At the Kremlin reception for the diplomatic corps, Yeltsin, U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock wrote, stood apart from his Politburo colleagues, “bore a rather sheepish smile, and periodically shifted his stance from one foot to the other, rather like a schoolboy who had been scolded by the teacher.”71

  During the holiday—reading by now off of a primordial script for survival—Yeltsin got the family together to ponder his plight. Would he get work in industry, be rusticated to Sverdlovsk, or worse? His distress took a morbid turn on November 9. He was found dripping in blood in the dressing room off of his Old Square office and whisked by ambulance to the TsKB (Central Clinical Hospital, the main Kremlin hospital) on Michurin Prospect. He had slashed the left side of his rib cage and stomach with office scissors. The weapon chosen and the injury, too superficial to require stitches, indicate it was a howl of anger, frustration, and perhaps self-hate rather than an act of suicide. Of his hospitalization, Yeltsin has said no more than that he had “a breakdown” (sryv), headaches, chest pains, and heart palpitations: “My organism could not stand the nervous strain.”72 Naina Yeltsina cared sufficiently about her husband’s mental state to have his head bodyguard, Yurii Kozhukhov, remove hunting knives, guns, and glass objects from their home and dacha before his return, and to tell a friend later she had taken precautions against an overdose with prescription drugs.73

  The nadir for Yeltsin was the city party plenum called by Gorbachev and Ligachëv for the evening of Wednesday, November 11. Gorbachev phoned him in his TsKB room that morning to tell him KGB officers would come for him. He cut short Yeltsin’s protestations that he was too ill even to walk unassisted to the toilet; the doctors would help, Gorbachev retorted. Only at this stage did the general secretary canvass Yevgenii Chazov, by this time the Soviet minister of health, who warned him that participation in any public meeting would be a danger to Yeltsin’s health; Gorbachev replied that the matter was settled and Yeltsin had given his agreement.74 Naina was in her husband’s room when the guards arrived at Michurin Prospect, and she wanted him to refuse to cooperate. He disagreed because he still hoped against hope that some would side with him, and even that he might win a vote of confidence, and because he was afraid that not to go would be taken as cowardice and would leave pro-Yeltsin members of the Moscow bureau in the lurch. Yeltsin feared a replay of the post–World War II Leningrad affair, when the leadership of the USSR’s second city was decapitated on Stalin’s orders. Until he mentioned this to Naina, she had urged him to stay in the hospital, “And then there was nothing I could do.”75 In light of later events, it is of note that one of Stalin’s accusations against the Leningraders in 1949–50 was that they were scheming to set the Russian republic against the central government.76

  Yeltsin arrived at Old Square bandaged, his face and lips of a violet color, and dazed by the medication. Aleksandr Korzhakov and Chazov both write in their books that he had received a potent shot of baralgin, an analgesic and antispasm agent. He felt so poorly, Yeltsin was to say in 2000, “that it seemed like I would die right there, in the meeting hall.”77 KGB officers had roped off the first three rows of the gorkom’s auditorium. Pre-selected speakers filed in and filled up the seats—“flushed, quaking, like borzois [Russian wolfhounds] before the hunt.”78 In his introduction to the meeting, Gorbachev said his erstwhile protégé had taken “an exclusive position” on political issues and “put his personal ambitions above the interests of the party.” Yeltsin’s October speech “did not contain a single constructive suggestion” and showed he had forfeited the party’s trust.79

  Twenty-three borzois then subjected Yeltsin to yet another round-robin hazing. No one from the bureau or the parent city committee, not Mayor Saikin or any of the party secretaries, emitted a benevolent peep, which cut Yeltsin to the quick. A select few were temperate. Alla Nizovtseva, a secretary of the gorkom, said she had met many times with the first secretary and never heard him say anything unfaithful. But he had swerved off the rails, and they had not seen it coming: “We really deluded ourselves, we . . . overestimated his savvy and knowledge.”80 One brave soul, cosmonaut Aleksei Yeliseyev, now the rector of the Bauman Technical University, flayed committee members for coming out against Yeltsin only when it was politically convenient and for denying responsibility for his errors. Most of the other speakers would not take any of the blame.

  Some of the vitriol came from officials whom Yeltsin had demoted
or dressed down since December 1985. “You have ground everything into dust and ashes,” Vladimir Protopopov, a professor of economics, formerly a raion first secretary, declared, “but when it was time for something creative all you did, Boris Nikolayevich, was stumble around.” Yurii Prokof’ev, a party apparatchik banished to city hall, reminded Yeltsin of his comments to the Twenty-Seventh CPSU Congress in 1986, when he said he had lacked the courage and political experience to speak out before then. “So far as courage goes, you have it, but you have never had political maturity and you do not have it now. The only way to explain that is by reference to your character.” A. N. Nikolayev of Bauman raion stated that Yeltsin had committed “a party crime” and “blasphemy” and “qualified for the same bossman syndrome against which he spoke so angrily at the [1986] party congress.” As an example of the syndrome, A. I. Zemskov from Voroshilov district cited Yeltsin’s inattentiveness to the courtesies Viktor Grishin had been master of: “It is repugnant when not a single raikom [district party committee] secretary . . . has been able to phone the city secretary direct. Over the course of two years, we have had to report to an assistant why the first secretary of a raikom wants to have a word with the first secretary of the gorkom.” Consecutive orators bandied about invidious comparisons: to Napoleon again (“elements of Bonapartism”); to a prancing general on horseback (“on your steed in front of the man on the street”); to Julius Caesar (“‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ is not the motto for us”); even, with a snicker, to Christ (anti-communists “are trying to make out of Boris Nikolayevich a Jesus Christ who has been tortured for his frightfully revolutionary love of social renewal and democracy”). Some of these speakers were later to ask Yeltsin’s pardon,81 but that evening the schadenfreude hung over the hall.