Yeltsin went up to the microphone, Gorbachev holding him by the elbow. As he spoke, communists in the first three rows stamped their feet and hissed “Doloi!”—“Down with him!” Gorbachev motioned them down and said, “That’s enough, stop it.”82 Yeltsin recanted more abjectly than he had at the Central Committee plenum or the Politburo—before the party, before his Moscow comrades, and “before Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose authority is so high in our organization, in our country, and in the entire world.” “The ambition talked about today” had been his siren song. “I tried to struggle with it, without success.” Were he to transgress in the future, he said, he ought to be expelled from the party.
When the meeting was over and Gorbachev and the audience were gone, Yeltsin, overwrought, put his head down on the presidium table.83 Back at the hospital, Naina exploded that the guards were no better than Nazis—the worst abuse that could be hurtled by a Soviet citizen of her generation—and asked them to tell Gorbachev, whose orders they had carried out, that he was a criminal.84
The resolution of the city committee gave Yeltsin’s position to Lev Zaikov, the blimpish Central Committee secretary for the military-industrial complex, the same job Yakov Ryabov had held in the 1970s. Zaikov, a former mayor of Leningrad, had been appointed a CPSU secretary in July 1985, the same day as Yeltsin, and to the Politburo in February 1986. The morning of November 13, Pravda led with an abridged transcript of the November 11 meeting. On February 18, 1988, two years to the day after the Central Committee elevated him to candidate member of the Politburo, it voted him out. Zaikov crowed to editor Mikhail Poltoranin that “the Yeltsin epoch is over.”85
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Yeltsin Phenomenon
Yeltsin was moved in early December 1987 from the principal Kremlin hospital in the city to the forest calm of the Soviet government’s sanitarium in Barvikha, west of Moscow. He was there through February 1988. His mother visited from Sverdlovsk. Student friends from Urals Polytechnic sent flowers, get-well cards, and one caller a week. Yeltsin depicts the stay in Confession on an Assigned Theme as a fugue of obsessional self-analysis and indifference to normal temporal rhythms:
It is hard to describe the state I was in. . . . I was analyzing every step I had ever taken, every word I had spoken, my principles, my views of the past, present, and future . . . day and night, day and night. . . . I summoned up the images of hundreds of people, friends, comrades, neighbors, and workmates. I reviewed my relationships with my wife, children, and grandchildren. I reviewed my beliefs. All that was left where my heart had been was a burnt-out cinder. Everything around me and within me was incinerated. Yes, it was a time of fierce struggle with myself. I knew that if I lost that fight, everything I had worked for in my life would be lost. . . . It was like the torments of hell. . . . I later heard gossip that I had contemplated suicide. . . . Although the position in which I found myself might drive someone to that simple way out, it was not in my character to give up.1
Confession was thrown together as a book in the fall of 1989, when Yeltsin was aiming for a political effect, and contains a certain amount of self-mythologization. There is some of that in this passage. From what I have heard from family members, however, Yeltsin’s torments were not feigned. His dissociation from reality was a kind of “moratorium,” as some psychoanalysts term it: a time away for cleansing and reorientation that in many cultures is reserved for the young.2 It was necessary to Yeltsin’s recovery, personal and political.
As Boris Yeltsin exorcized his private demons, his Central Committee gambit was having far-reaching reverberations in the public square. That a ranking politico had summarily fallen from grace was standard stuff for those who knew their Soviet history. But the synergy with reforming communism gave a new twist to this Icarus crash. In the game of transitional politics, the short-term loser had seized what a game theorist would categorize as a “first-mover” advantage. Just as the Soviet Union steamed off into the uncharted waters of democratization, Yeltsin had established a strategic edge that would outbalance the penalties levied on him.3
A Russian who read between the lines in Pravda on November 13, 1987, could have extracted six claims about the political situation:
Obstructed reforms. Change in Soviet communism was being thwarted by know-nothings in the nomenklatura. Real as opposed to rhetorical change was going at a snail’s pace.
An impatient nation. Ordinary people’s hopes had been raised and their patience was wearing thin. They were a constituency for a different course.
Gorbachev in the middle. The originator of perestroika was a gradualist who knew about the impediments to reform but was unwilling to dislodge them.
A radical alternative. A maverick, Yeltsin, had championed a speedier course. This marked him for payback by vested interests.
Not just talk. The bellwether of change was not a chatterer but a doer. He had street smarts. He knew from the inside how the wheels turned, in the provinces and in the Kremlin. Forgoing an influential post demonstrated his willingness to give something up for the common good.
Something to hide. The authorities had persecuted Yeltsin for puncturing the verities of the regime. Now they were muzzling him and were not putting out a complete account.
For Mikhail Gorbachev, the short-term victor, some of these claims were more easily countered than others. When students in the capital city passed around pro-Yeltsin petitions and marched in the streets, the uniformed and secret police kept watch on them. Several hundred demonstrators gathered on November 14 in downtown Sverdlovsk; on November 15 Yurii Petrov, Yeltsin’s friend and the first secretary of the obkom, received a delegation and accepted a protest letter addressed to the Politburo. Afraid of rallies “in the guise of preparations for the New Year’s holiday,” the obkom would in December cordon off 1905 Square.4
The censors decreed a media blackout on these events, and Kremlin agitprop was able to circulate an airbrushed account of the affair. But word of the petitions and demonstrations, and rumors of what Yeltsin had said to the Central Committee, spread like wildfire through the Moscow political underground and the foreign media. One of the more cockeyed simulations of the speech was prepared by Mikhail Poltoranin of Moskovskaya pravda. He was about to be dismissed as editor, but before he was, the Secretariat directed him to speak to 700 personnel from the Soviet local press gathered in a Central Committee academy in Moscow. The newspapermen wanted to know what Yeltsin had actually said to the October plenum, which Poltoranin was not of the rank to have attended. In his apartment that night, he pecked out on his typewriter an apocryphal speech—the one he would have wanted Yeltsin to make. Knowing how unloved Raisa Gorbacheva was, he put into Yeltsin’s mouth words about how she had telephoned him with peremptory instructions on party business. Poltoranin ran off several hundred copies and distributed them the next day without anyone stopping him.5
Gorbachev would have done well to release the transcript of the plenum. His more enlightened advisers held that declassification would confute the untruths being told about it and that news about Yeltsin’s disjointed performance would be unflattering to him. To stonewall, they said, would put the nimbus of “a martyr for justice” around his head.6 The original secret speech by Khrushchev, circulated in redacted form to party members in 1956, was not published in full in the USSR until 1989. Gorbachev moved more quickly than that, but not quickly enough. It took until March of 1989 for the plenum transcript to appear on the page.
Draconian measures against Yeltsin were not feasible at a time when Gorbachev was liberalizing the Soviet system. Criminal proceedings were out of the question. Yeltsin had parliamentary immunity as a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. This never stopped Stalin’s OGPU or NKVD, but for a deputy to be arrested in 1987, the Soviet would have had to vote to lift the exemption and spark a national and international furor.7 And glasnost would have been no panacea. The unvarnished truth would only verify that in-house foes of reform existed, that Gorbachev was hugging the p
olitical center, and that Yeltsin had a more forward posture and was waylaid for it. And full disclosure of the context would have shown that Yeltsin’s diagnosis of perestroika was onto something—that the Soviet economy and society were deteriorating. Petroleum production of the USSR had gone into decline in 1985, petrodollars from exports were sharply down (mostly due to a dropoff in world oil prices), and the finances of the government were under strain more than since the 1940s.8 In the teeth of this, the firing of Yeltsin and even his penance, which most would have assumed was offered under duress, made him a magnet for popular discontent. “In the Russian tradition,” as one former Soviet publicist was to write of him, “the aggrieved mutineer earns the sympathy and benevolence of the common people.”9
The great Cossack mutineers of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, Stenka Razin and Yemel’yan Pugachëv, paid for their impudence with their heads.10 This twentieth-century mutineer kept his. The executioner’s axe and the Gulag being unavailable, what was Gorbachev going to do with him?
If history were the touchstone, Gorbachev had little to worry about. As far back as the 1920s, the also-rans in personality and factional quarrels within the party had never recouped their losses. The renunciation of violence after Stalin left general secretaries with ample means for sidelining an opponent. Gorbachev made it plain to Yeltsin that he was ostracized from upper-level political activity. How the ban was expressed depends on whose memoir one reads. Yeltsin says it was permanent and general: “I will no longer let you take part in politics [politika].” Gorbachev writes in his Life and Reforms of saying to Yeltsin that he “could not return to the sphere of big-time politics [sfera bol’shoi politiki] any time soon,” which connotes a door ajar.11 Gorbachev might have wielded a much heavier truncheon than this. He could have pensioned Yeltsin off, a possibility that surfaced in irritable conversations between them in November 1987. Gorbachev did not want this solution. He wisecracked to Yeltsin that he was against retirement since, they being the same age, it might be thought appropriate for him as well.12 Yeltsin was still a member of the CPSU Central Committee. Under the rulebook, only a congress of the party could expel him against his will, but Gorbachev was capable of forcing him to resign. In fact he did that to ninety-eight longin-the-tooth members of the committee in April 1989, but not to Yeltsin. Another device forsworn was to make Yeltsin ambassador to a distant capital—as Nikita Khrushchev did in 1957 when he made Vyacheslav Molotov, who had been prime minister under Stalin, Soviet envoy to Outer Mongolia.13 Yeltsin believed Gorbachev preferred to keep him in Moscow and in his sights: “He thought I was less of a risk nearby. It is always best to keep a freethinker close at hand, so you can keep him under observation. And what would an ambassador be up to? Who knew?”14
So why the lenience? In his memoirs, Gorbachev credits it to his chivalry (“It is not in me to make short work of people”) and collectivism (“the strong belief that with us everything had to be done on the basis of comradeship”).15 But it was not all about the kindliness of the general secretary. Yeltsin points to a more political theory, that Gorbachev wanted him to survive as a balance against conservatives and fence-sitters: “It seems to me that if Gorbachev had not had a Yeltsin he would have had to invent one.”16 Gorbachev’s desire to use Yeltsin as a counterweight dovetailed with his reading of the past record, which was that no one in Yeltsin’s unenviable predicament could pose a threat. To these, there needs to be added an attitudinal factor: cocksureness. Georgii Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev’s main political aide, several times implored him to expatriate Yeltsin, to an ambassadorship, and absent him from the upcoming USSR elections. Gorbachev would not countenance it. “He regarded Yeltsin as semiliterate, as understanding nothing, as a drunkard.” He sorely misjudged Yeltsin and, says the cerebral Shakhnazarov, refused to see that Yeltsin’s personality, the festering grudge Yeltsin bore, and the pentup appetite for change might commix into “an explosive force.”17
Had the Soviet rules of the game still applied, Yeltsin’s political career would have been well and truly over. But the game was in kaleidoscopic motion, and soon was to provide undreamt-of opportunities outside the iron cage of the bureaucracy. His intuition in 1987 about which way the wind was blowing, the action of speaking out before the Central Committee, and Gorbachev’s overkill reaction to it constituted an inflection point in the breakup of the communist system. The juncture set up a robust alignment of political forces on the macro issue of how fast the system should change: Yeltsin in the van as the apotheosis of change, party conservatives in the rear, Gorbachev in the spongy middle. Successive crises and feedback loops were to fortify it even as the political spectrum was displaced in a more revolutionary direction. Originally limited to the elite, the fatal alignment would reproduce itself in the population when electoral freedom made it relevant to them, which in turn widened the fissures at the elite plateau. As one of the directors of Yeltsin’s eventual campaign for president of Russia was to remark in 1991, “This campaign began in 1987.”18
On November 19, 1987, a bulletin from the TASS news agency said Yeltsin had been appointed first deputy chairman of Gosstroi, the State Construction Committee of the Soviet Union. His blackest fears had gone unrealized. He was not to be banished to Ulan Bator or Addis Ababa, or to a muddy Soviet construction site, or to a cottage in Moscow oblast. The new position was a sinecure, on a rank with minister in the USSR government, and was at the summit of an industry Yeltsin had known since his twenties.
Licking his wounds, Yeltsin started work at Gosstroi on February 8, 1988. Once ejected from the Politburo, he kept the VIP flat on Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya but lost his bodyguards and was downgraded to a mid-sized Chaika limousine and a cramped dacha. Gosstroi was in a modern building on Pushkin Street, later to house the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. Not what he was used to in space or conveniences, the office there was all he had.
The pressure on Yeltsin did not abate. The chief of Gosstroi, Yurii Batalin, a pipeline specialist and a Sverdlovsker with a UPI diploma, was under orders to report any wayward activity. The KGB eavesdropped on Yeltsin’s phone calls; plainclothes officers lurked in the foyer to see who was visiting. 19 As he settled in, Yeltsin took lynx-eyed note of the surveillance: He would turn on the radio or pour water in the washbasin to muffle sensitive conversations. His first ever desk job bored him no end. He gave one visitor the impression that he was permanently stifling a scream.20 He was to write a memorandum to Prime Minister Ryzhkov proposing that Gosstroi be done away with as a fifth wheel and its significant functions transferred to other agencies.21 “My work with real, live people has been replaced by the office,” was his plaint later that year. “I shuffle papers.”22
Yeltsin was at sea psychologically for months. He took it hard when the February plenum of the Central Committee confirmed his demotion from the Politburo. His Gosstroi assistant, Lev Sukhanov, was stunned at his condition the next day: “When he got to work that morning, his face was vacant. It looked to me like the finale of a burial service staged by his Politburo colleagues. He suffered from all of this, but somehow found strength within himself and worked the entire day.”23 Yeltsin’s memoirs painted his Gosstroi entr’acte as “a nightmarish year-and-a-half” and “perhaps the most difficult days of my life.” All was “dead silence and emptiness” in the office. It was “torture” to watch his cream-colored Kremlin telephone in the hope of an expiatory call from Gorbachev. He felt like tearing it out of the wall, lest the appliance “spout new miseries” for him.24 Dejected at work, and with time on his hands, Yeltsin took up the game of tennis in 1988 and bought with cash savings his first automobile, a tiny, silver-colored Moskvich. Aleksandr Korzhakov, a KGB bodyguard to Yeltsin when he was Moscow party boss, helped teach him how to drive the vehicle. Yeltsin was a poor pupil who often mistook brake for gas pedal. “It was after this that my hair began to go gray,” Korzhakov says.25
Politically, until the elections for the Soviet parliament in the spr
ing of 1989, Yeltsin was in a netherworld. He was banned from the Moscow media, and the only interviews he granted were to reporters from abroad and from the Baltic republics of the USSR. The chairman of the Party Control Commission, Mikhail Solomentsev, hauled him on the carpet in the spring of 1988 for contact with the foreign press. “He rudely cut me off,” says Solomentsev, “and asserted that he had no need to ask anyone’s permission, that he was a free man and had the right to give his opinion wherever he liked and to whomever he liked.”26 The interviews did subside for a spell. In May Yeltsin spoke with two Russian publications; the party Secretariat blocked publication. He then resumed interviews with the foreign media, going on the BBC in May and on the three American television networks in June.
The Nineteenth CPSU Conference in June–July 1988 was convened to showcase Gorbachevian political reform. Yeltsin, who could have sat in by right as a Central Committee member, held out for nomination by a territorial subunit of the party. Stymied in Moscow and in Sverdlovsk (where Gorbachev and Ligachëv had just made Leonid Bobykin, a competitor of Yeltsin’s, the first secretary), he snagged a ticket from Kareliya, a minority republic of the RSFSR located on the Finnish border. As in October, he had to exert himself at the conference to speak. Two notes to Gorbachev, in the chair, did not do the trick. On the fifth and last morning of the conference, July 1, Yeltsin announced to the Karelian delegation, seated to the back of the mezzanine, that he was taking the floor by storm, “like the Winter Palace” falling to the Bolsheviks and the workers in 1917. He trooped to the foot of the dais and stood there, staring at the presidium and brandishing his red card. Looking daggers, Gorbachev had a staffer tell him he would be recognized if he sat down and waited his turn. Yeltsin did so and was given the floor.27
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