Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  The gatecrashing paid off. To the 5,000 conferees, Yeltsin gave a feisty fifteen-minute speech that he had massaged for weeks. Excerpts were broadcast on Soviet television, and it was published in the press. It contained no jabs at Gorbachev and few words about Yegor Ligachëv, with whom he said he had tactical differences only. But his wad of accusations got larger, as he added the need for transparency in the party’s finances and for a downsizing of the apparatus. Yeltsin was more recalcitrant than in 1987 on the issues of mass benefit from reform and the privileges of the well-fed Soviet elite. Perestroika had been configured “under the hypnosis of words” and had “not resolved any of the tangible, real problems of people”; to go on this way was to “risk losing grip on the steering wheel and on political stability.” On elitist patterns, where he had previously limited himself to those counter to party norms, he now hacked away at the norms per se. Communists’ monthly dues, he observed, paid for food packets for “the starving nomenklatura” and for “luxurious residences, dachas, and sanatoriums of such an amplitude that you are ashamed when the representatives of foreign parties visit.” All political initiatives, said Yeltsin, ought to be discussed without preconceptions and put to national referendums. The CPSU general secretary, the Politburo, and party officers down the line should be elected by the rank-and-file, restricted to two terms in office, and retired at sixty-five.28

  About October 1987, Yeltsin was obdurate. He demanded restitution, contrasting that to the posthumous amends being made to people purged by Stalin decades before:

  Comrade delegates, rehabilitation after fifty years has become the norm, and this has a healthy effect on our society. But I am requesting my political rehabilitation while I am alive. I consider this a question of principle. . . . You all know that my speech to the October plenum of the Central Committee was found to be “politically erroneous.” But the questions I brought up at the plenum have since that time been raised repeatedly in the press and by communists. Here virtually all of these questions have sounded in the reports and speeches given from the tribune. I consider the only error in my presentation to have been that I spoke out at an inopportune time, right before the seventieth anniversary of October 1917. . . . We all have to master the rules of political discussion, to tolerate opponents, as Lenin did, and not rush to hang labels on them or to brand them heretics.

  In one swoop, Yeltsin had publicly affiliated himself with diversification of the political system and justice for the ghosts of the Soviet past—and had tarred Gorbachev and those who laid him low in 1987 with intolerance and rigidity. As Vitalii Tret’yakov was to put it, “These two words, ‘political rehabilitation,’ intuitively found by Yeltsin, were a godsend—a wondrous public-relations move, we would say today, one that a thousand first-class political technologists and image makers would never have come up with.”29

  After Yeltsin left the stage, every second speaker roasted him. Most had been put up to it by Lev Zaikov and the Moscow party staff, who assumed that Yeltsin would find a way to get to the microphone. Ligachëv, whom some of Gorbachev’s men tried to dissuade from speaking, was the most vituperative, maximizing their differences and saying he and Yeltsin diverged not only in tactics but in strategy. “Boris, you [ty] are wrong,” he said in a concluding sentence that would be flung back in his face over the next two years. A Sverdlovsk delegate, Vladimir Volkov, the party secretary of the Kalinin missile plant, extolled Yeltsin and won applause for it. Gorbachev had wanted to concentrate on his leaderly agenda, but expended almost half of his conference encore on Yeltsin. “Here he has some kind of a complex,” Anatolii Chernyayev entered in his diary.30

  For the Yeltsin story, the striking thing about the conference was the entrenchment of the political cleavage opened up by his secret speech in October 1987. The party did not rehabilitate its freelancer. Beyond the crenellated Kremlin walls, Lev Sukhanov said, he had achieved “the popular acclaim any politician can only dream about.”31

  Yeltsin did not see it this way at first. He once again felt sorry for himself over the invective by Ligachëv and the conservatives: “A feeling of apathy washed over me. I did not want struggle, not explanations, not anything. All I wanted was to forget it all and be left in peace.” The heartsickness lasted only a few weeks. He was cheered up by the thousands of letters and telegrams that arrived from all over the Soviet Union. The subject matter of most of them was not any particular political line but, says Yeltsin, compassion for him as having been mistreated. Through these communications from afar, people “stretched out their hands to me, and I was able to lean on them and get back on my feet.”32 Yeltsin’s dislike of elite privilege did not keep him from leaving for vacation at a government rest house in Jurmala, Latvia. When he returned, citizens began showing up in droves to see him. Batalin had a reception area installed near the Gosstroi checkpoint where those not admitted to his office could write out questions for him.33

  The new Yeltsin was sought after by other agents of change. In August 1988, for example, he agreed to join the supervisory board of the Memorial Society, the new nongovernmental organization for promoting construction of a monument in Moscow to the millions imprisoned and murdered under Stalin. He was chosen for this honor on write-in ballots by readers of the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta and the magazine Ogonëk. These publications were favorites of the Russian intelligentsia, with whom Yeltsin had few connections.34 Yeltsin was also seeing how reporters and editors could be allies. Jonathan Sanders, a Moscow producer for CBS News, arranged several Yeltsin interviews and decided to buy him a red-striped Brooks Brothers necktie while on home leave in New York. He spotted Yeltsin walking down the Gosstroi steps, explained that he had to be punctilious about giving a politician a present, but handed him the tie anyway. Yeltsin put it on admiringly and wrapped his own tie around Sanders’s neck, turning the scene into an exchange of tokens of respect.35 An invitation by students to answer questions at the Higher Komsomol School on November 12, 1988, gave him further scope. Shortly after the session, Sukhanov found a counterfeit transcript of Yeltsin’s remarks for sale on Arbat Street. “I showed him this ‘commercial copy’ and he asked, ‘Why have we not made our own transcript ?’ A very good question. So he put his daughters Tanya and Lena to work and they typed up a tape of the session that Sasha Korzhakov had made.” Twelve carbon copies were distributed through informal networks. Cooperative journalists used every trick in the book to get the text published. In the Perm youth paper, they got the editor to agree by giving it the title “Politician or Roughneck?”36

  Yeltsin was increasingly willing to moor his critique in unblinking views of the Soviet past. Russians, he said to the Komsomol students, were submissive because they learned to be that way from “parasitic” party and state structures that monopolized power, hid behind a veil of secrecy, and taught individuals to make “a ritual of the bearing of sacrifices” at every turn. It all went back to a history in which one cannot help see the experience of the Urals and of the Yeltsin family: “First the people were forced to put on the altar an inhuman agricultural policy [collectivization], then they were required to give up such timeless values as spirituality and culture, and finally they were divested of the ability to define their goals self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no] and to go about attaining them self-reliantly.”37

  When the talk turned to remedies, Yeltsin was not a flaming militant. Besides his now faddish populism, the pillars of his approach were outspokenness, the need for reform to show results, and support for political competition and inclusiveness. His forté was not the clairvoyant pronouncement but the folksy verbalization of what many others were already thinking and had been subdued from saying in public. Yeltsin, as a Moscow academic was to say after one of his more plain-spoken statements, was giving voice to “what the people have freely talked about for ages” in their kitchens or at their dachas.38 To put it in the more formal language of anthropology, he was a leader in the “discursive deconstruction” of the late Soviet system, taking ap
art meanings that were increasingly disconnected from reality.39 On the economic and social front, he was for a cooling of the polemics and for brass-tacks improvements in living standards. Although he mentioned a few action steps, such as a hike in the output of consumer goods and building supplies to be funded by cuts to the construction and space budgets, he laid out no general conception of reform. At the Komsomol academy, he held his thoughts on it for his edification alone: “I have stuffed them far down in the archives, in a safe, so that no one sees them.”40 It was a subterfuge his enraptured listeners let him get away with. In a New Year’s interview with newspaperman Pavel Voshchanov, who would be his press secretary in 1991–92, Yeltsin said he wanted to annul the “double privileges” built into the Soviet system, so that a ruble earned by a government minister would buy the same goods and services as a ruble earned by the janitor in the ministry’s headquarters.41 But this was more a design for redressing past abuses than for building a productive and equitable economy.

  In the political realm, Yeltsin was for the liberalization of electoral laws enacted after the Nineteenth Conference and fought measures, such as Gorbachev’s provision to have party secretaries chair local councils, that might adulterate the reform. What about the Communist Party and its “leading role”? At the conference in July, Yeltsin favored “socialist pluralism,” Gorbachev’s shorthand for heterogeneity within the ruling party, and came out against a system containing two socialist parties. By late 1988, he was telling his wife over the dinner table that multiparty democracy, without limitations, was inescapable. Naina was quizzical: “I told him, ‘Borya, what are you talking about? It is too early. Why say such a thing?’ And he said, ‘Well, you see, all this will come about, it will all come to this.’”42 But at the Komsomol school Yeltsin dodged questions about the supremacy of the CPSU and made seven well-behaved references to Lenin. He was asked, since “your popularity with the people is not less” than Gorbachev’s, “could you be head of the party and state?” Once there was full-fledged competition, Yeltsin answered demurely, “I may participate a little, as they say.”43 He was still denying advocacy of multipartism in mid-March 1989, right before the Soviet parliamentary elections, while calling for a discussion of its advisability.

  Coyness about an overt challenge to Gorbachev fooled no one. Yeltsin had by this time traversed the threshold dividing dissidence, or criticism of those in power, from opposition, or activity aimed at gaining power.44 And the general secretary could hear his footfall. “Indubitably,” recalled Georgii Shakhnazarov, “Gorbachev saw in Yeltsin his principal rival for the future. Possessing a low opinion of [Yeltsin’s] intellect and his other qualities, he feared not the person-to-person competition but the very fact of the appearance of a leader of the opposition.”45 Shakhnazarov did not share Gorbachev’s complacency about Yeltsin and repeated the advice to send him to a cushy, faraway embassy and so keep him out of the 1989 national elections. Gorbachev turned a deaf ear.

  One of the reasons Yeltsin accepted speaking engagements, and stood on the stage for hours, was to prove that he was out of his sickbed. Of the encounter at the Komsomol school, Sukhanov writes: “In speaking without a gap, he was able to exhibit that he was in good shape physically. He was rumored to be seriously ill, and he did not want to look impotent and pitiable.”46 The students asked how he had handled the slings and arrows of the past year. He answered in high testing mode and educed Russia’s revolutionary past:

  In theory, after shocks like this I should be six feet under. But, the way it turned out, I slowly got over this moral blow, thanks to my athletic past, my good physical health, et cetera. Is this all too much for me? No, categorically no. So what is it with me? I am not the type to take the easier or more pleasing course, to go by the satiny paved road rather than the rough footpath. I believe, and this is no empty phrase, that public activity or any other work counts for immeasurably more than personal considerations. . . . Look at people like the revolutionaries who died or the Decembrists [organizers of a revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825] who were exiled to Siberia. What about us? Have we lost the moral capacity for selfsacrifice? [When I was Moscow first secretary] I worked from eight A.M. to midnight. . . . At a time of reconstruction, for three years or so everyone should work to the limit and make sacrifices. Then we will pull together and perestroika will have been given a push.47

  Under terms of the political reforms agreed to in 1987–88, Soviet parliamentary bodies were to be reshaped. A new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, with 2,250 members, was to be instituted. Two-thirds of its members were to be elected in territorial districts. One-third were to be chosen by the cartel of officially recognized and controlled associations. The CPSU filled its quota of 100 seats in a retrograde procedure: The Politburo nominated Gorbachev and ninety-nine others in a plenum of the party Central Committee on January 10, 1989, and a second plenum on March 16 approved all 100. As was barely noticed at the time, Boris Yeltsin in the January plenum cast the very first dissenting vote in the Central Committee, on any issue, since the 1920s by abstaining on support for the nomination of Yegor Ligachëv. In the vote on the nominations in March, he was one of seventy-eight committee members to vote against Ligachëv, and may have voted against other nominees of the in-group.48

  As the party’s bogeyman, Yeltsin had no chance at a protected spot. He could get into the congress only by standing in one of the 1,500 geographic districts. Gorbachev chewed over entering a district race but did not, out of fear that Yeltsin would run against him and beat him.49 Gorbachev’s selfdoubt did not make the electoral Rubicon one that Yeltsin could cross lightly. Government ministers, unlike party workers, were barred from the congress. To take up a seat if elected, Yeltsin would have to leave the Gosstroi position. The congress would name a new, compact standing parliament from among its members—the old name, Supreme Soviet, stayed—and only those on the Soviet would draw salaries as legislators. If Yeltsin got into the 2,250-member congress and was not one of the 542 chosen for the Supreme Soviet, he would be without a livelihood. It did not stop him. Sentient that the decision had “ripened long ago,” in mid-December 1988 he threw his hat in the ring.50

  Scouting out nomination possibilities took Yeltsin two months. Papers were filed on his behalf in fifty localities, and on February 11 he was nominated as a native son in Berezniki, traveling there by a circuitous air route through Leningrad to throw CPSU monitors off. He related his embarrassment of riches to Anatolii Luk’yanov, the Central Committee secretary with whom he had shared a dacha in 1985. Yeltsin was duty-bound, Luk’yanov said, to leave the decision to the Politburo—to which Yeltsin snorted that this was “a conversation right out of the 1930s” that he would sooner forget. 51 His competitive juices raised, he took his chances by gunning for a seat in Moscow and not in the Urals. During the prescribed winnowingdown period, as the party organs tried to keep him off the ballot or shunt him to the boondocks, he pounded home his core message. “In Boris Yeltsin there is certainly more than an ounce of Huey Long,” David Remnick of The Washington Post noted; he half-expected Yeltsin to break out in song on the Louisianan’s motto, “Every Man a King.” Remnick also saw a parallel with another American icon. “When [Yeltsin] stands in front of a television camera, he will sometimes stop in midsentence, comb his thick mane of white hair, smile ironically into the lens, and then continue. Muhammad Ali used to pull the same cocky move after an easy fight.”52 On February 22, 1989, following a twelve-hour nomination meeting, the local electoral commission registered Yeltsin in National-Territorial District No. 1, Moscow’s at-large district—the most populous and the most visible in the country. He took his name off the Berezniki ballot.

  A ragged troupe headed by Aleksandr Muzykantskii, a Gosstroi engineer and friend of Lev Sukhanov, ran the campaign. Several were to stick with Yeltsin afterward. Valerii Bortsov, a junior apparatchik in the south Russian city of Rostov, took the train to Moscow in January to offer his services. He got a meeting with Yeltsin, who
decided to make him an unpaid assistant. At a rally in February, Yeltsin teasingly asked Valentina Lantseva, a Pravda correspondent from Kazakhstan who was carrying a basket of flowers she had bought for her husband’s birthday, if they were for him. They struck up a conversation and exchanged telephone numbers. Three days later, she agreed to be his press spokesperson, also without pay.53

  Yeltsin’s campaign brochure, “Perestroika Will Bring Changes,” came out on March 21, only five days before the vote. Yeltsin posters were pasted in apartment stairwells, on lampposts, and at public-transit stops. A committee of activists in nineteen factories and institutes spread the word at the workplace level.54 Digging for the public-speaking skills honed in Sverdlovsk and the Moscow gorkom, Yeltsin darted across the city, giving several talks daily and answering reams of questions, town meeting–style. The crowds in parks, hockey arenas, and stadiums reached into the tens of thousands by the last week. Many fans wore sandwich-boards, had “Fight, Boris!” (Boris’, Boris!) buttons on their lapels, or carried hand-lettered signs blaring “Hands Off of Yeltsin,” “Boris Is Right,” “We Are with You, Comrade Yeltsin,” “Not the People for Socialism but Socialism for the People.” Yeltsin lapped up the attention. His war cry was the “struggle for justice” and against moribund practices and privilege. Bill Keller of the New York Times caught the flavor of an open-air rally in front of 7,000 shivering urbanites:

  Mr. Yeltsin has a rapport with an audience that is rarely seen in Soviet politics and is a bit frightening even to some of his supporters. Today the crowd greeted him with an outpouring of protective emotion, warning him not to risk trouble by answering “provocative” questions passed up to him from the crowd, and at one point ordering him to put on his fur cap so he would not catch cold in the rising breeze. He did.