He has turned the party’s attacks on him to his advantage, using them to underline his underdog status and his bond with the common man. That is now part of Mr. Yeltsin’s standard speech, along with populist demands that the bigshots give up their privileges, that the people be allowed to decide issues by referendum, and that the Communist Party be brought under the control of an elected government.55
All appearances concluded with Yeltsin clapping his hands, then clasping them in front of his forehead and wagging them in the direction of the audience.
Yeltsin’s one opponent was the old-line director of the ZIL auto plant, Yevgenii Brakov; more than twenty potential candidates, including Politburo member Vitalii Vorotnikov, withdrew. Brakov made an ideal personal foil, but Yeltsin sanctimoniously refused to stoop to unsportsmanlike “American” methods. Planted questions—asking him to explain, for instance, the Ipat’ev House demolition in Sverdlovsk or how his daughter Yelena had been issued a nomenklatura apartment in 1987—caused him heartburn but were lost in the shuffle.56 And the party’s dirty tricks—defacing Yeltsin signs, cooking up pro-Brakov letters to Moskovskaya pravda, sending claques to Brakov rallies—backfired and played into his David-versus-Goliath image. In early March, the long-delayed publication in a CPSU journal of the record of the October 1987 plenum was manna from heaven. Vitalii Tret’yakov, who would eventually repent of his support, gushed that the transcript showed Yeltsin to be prescient (“he alone said yesterday what everyone is discussing now”), an information democrat (“the destroyer of secrets always ingratiates people”), and civic-minded (he “is not fighting for power for his own sake”).57 Ten days before the election, the Central Committee took the misguided decision to impanel a commission, chaired by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev, to see if Yeltsin had deviated from the Communist Party line. The three largest rallies of the race—and the largest public gatherings in Moscow since the 1917 revolution—were called to protest the commission, which was to be quietly dropped in May. Yeltsin gauged it and the ersatz letters to the editor (Lantseva showed many were counterfeit) to have fattened his vote total by 15 to 20 percentage points.
Other candidates hopped on the bandwagon. The thirty-five-year-old Sergei Stankevich, a historian specializing in the U.S. Congress who was in a neck-and-neck race in the Cherëmushkii area of Moscow, sent Yeltsin a telegram of endorsement and then photocopied it and used it as an advertisement for himself. Twenty-six other liberal candidates, mostly professors, scientists, and literati, did the same. Some distributed pictures of themselves shaking hands with Yeltsin. Stankevich, who had organized a pro-Yeltsin demonstration at a Moscow subway stop in November 1987, could not because he had never met him.58 Across the city, “The main orienting points . . . were opposition to all the bosses and support for everyone who was for Yeltsin. All candidates with a lower rank than their main opponents did everything they could to emphasize their ordinariness, almost as if it were a nobleman’s title, and all who had the slightest basis for doing so played up their nearness to Yeltsin.”59
Yeltsin glided home in District No. 1 with 89 percent of the popular vote on March 26—5,117,745 out of 5,736,470 votes cast, with little variation across districts. Since Moscow had 1.1 million CPSU members and Brakov’s take was less than 400,000, Yeltsin netted the ballots of most of Moscow’s communists, to say nothing of noncommunists. Even in neighborhoods peopled by high-ranking party workers and bureaucrats, Brakov did not rise above 30 percent.60 Intimates of Gorbachev told the American ambassador, Jack Matlock, they had been sure Yeltsin would win but were “astonished by how much.”61 Yeltsin’s personal absolution and his drubbing of the nomenklatura candidate stole headlines from the change in institutions and political process represented by the holding of a semifree election. Candidates who had put their names on the Stankevich telegram polled 20 percentage points more on average than candidates who did not. First Secretary Lev Zaikov, like Gorbachev, took election as part of the Central Committee hundred rather than try his chances in a Moscow district. Second Secretary Yurii Prokof’ev ran in a district and was trounced, with 13 percent of the votes; Valerii Saikin, the mayor, got 42 percent in his district and pulled out of the runoff that was required when no one had secured a majority in the first lap.
In a lucid election postmortem, Tret’yakov reported how Yeltsin’s win made explicit every one of the implicit lessons of October–November 1987. People were connecting the dots:
Many people identify with Yeltsin. He is a victim of the higher-ups. Who of us has not been in the same position? And he is being slighted for refusing to seek their approval. Who has not dreamt of doing this? The main thing is that he speaks with everyone, with those below and those above, in the same way and as an equal, breaking the hierarchical barriers that everyone, especially below, is sick of.
Even his detractors, Tret’yakov continued, “never tire of reiterating his positive features,” and Yeltsin came across as “contradictory but likeable in a human way even in his gaffes and inconsistencies.” Most important were the mass perceptions of the gravitas that accrued to Yeltsin from his background in the governing elite:
A hallmark of the Yeltsin phenomenon is his relations with the apparatus. This phenomenon could have sprung up only inside the apparatus because until now the apparatus has been the real and stable part of power, and people need stability. But the stability and strength of officialdom annoy people and restrict their freedom. Therefore, their sympathies go to the one who shakes up this apparatus. However, so far any serious revamping of the apparatus will be feasible only if it comes from someone who himself constitutes part of it and is thence a credible force. The circle closes and the Yeltsin phenomenon moves in this circle. I am sure that, had Yeltsin run for the post of director of some research institute or factory, his success could not have been guaranteed. On March 26, 1989, Yeltsin was voted in by a lopsided majority not as “boss for the people” but as “boss for the bosses.” The oneness in voting for Yeltsin is the people’s retort to the apparatus for its high-handed omnipotence.
Tret’yakov prognosticated that the groundswell would persist as long as the regime showed itself incapable of making improvements. “Even Yeltsin’s failures will be blamed not on him but on the [Soviet] administrative-command system and on his critics.”62
Three days after gaining his seat, Yeltsin set out for a month-long vacation in Kislovodsk, in the North Caucasus. The decision removed him from the runoff stage, where some pro-reform nominees needed help. It struck some as eccentric. Aleksandr Muzykantskii also detected that Yeltsin wanted other players to make do without him for a time, and so to feel the need to approach him with offers of cooperation on his, the winner’s, terms.63 Back from Kislovodsk, Yeltsin orated at rallies in the Moscow suburb of Zelenograd and in front of the Luzhniki stadium.
From the first day of operations of the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, May 25, 1989, it was to be a little more than two years until the life-and-death crisis of the Soviet regime. Most of this caesura Yeltsin spent either in unproductive legislative activity or in campaigning for office. Time and initiative were on his side because he had the ace in the hole—people power—that other contestants did not have.
The congress’s organizing parley, televised live, showed the difficulty of translating charisma into institutional influence. High on the docket was selection of a chairman of the Supreme Soviet. It would be the cardinal office in the Soviet state, and Gorbachev meant to have it. In a conversation with Yeltsin in mid-May about their plans, Gorbachev offered him a ministerial post; Yeltsin refused and said, “Everything will be decided by the congress.” At a Politburo meeting days after that, Gorbachev instructed aides to offer Yeltsin the position of first deputy premier of the RSFSR and to craft an “intermediate response” to questions about Yeltsin’s dependability.64 The offer seems not to have been made. Yeltsin abstained on the motion at the May Central Committee plenum to nominate Gorbachev for the chairmanship—the only member to do so�
�and then declared he would vote for it in the congress because he was bound by party discipline. The Soviet Union, he said, was in a “revolutionary situation” which the party did not seem capable of facing.65 At the congress, he behaved coquettishly. He said in his maiden speech on May 26 that he was jobless as of the day before and might possibly agree to “some kind of nomination.” That night a Yeltsin representative consented to the urging of deputies from Sverdlovsk that his name be offered from the floor. Aleksandr Obolenskii, a little-known engineer from Leningrad, said he would do it—only to flipflop and nominate himself. Yeltsin distanced himself from the attempt, and 96 percent of the deputies voted on May 27 to elect Gorbachev.66
After this comedy of errors came a more pressing problem: Yeltsin having given up his Gosstroi post, unfriendly deputies blocked him from so much as a seat in the Supreme Soviet. Of the twelve deputies nominated for the RSFSR’s eleven seats in the Council of Nationalities (the section of the Supreme Soviet for which Yeltsin was eligible), he finished dead last in the congressional voting, his 5 million popular votes notwithstanding. The day was saved by Gavriil Popov, the Moscow economic thinker whom Yeltsin had cold-shouldered in 1987. He sold Gorbachev on a resolution. Aleksei Kazannik, a jurist from Omsk, Siberia, freed up a seat for him, and the congress on May 29 approved. Gorbachev wanted a vote on whether Yeltsin would fill the vacancy. Kazannik would not budge on the package deal and received more than 100,000 congratulatory telegrams.67 In his first speech to the congress on May 31, Yeltsin called for a yearly country-wide referendum on confidence in the chairman of parliament and for conversion of the Kremlin medical directorate into a service for mothers and children.
When the Supreme Soviet met in June, Yeltsin, with Gorbachev again in acquiescence, was made chairman of its committee on construction and architecture.68 It was a dead end, Gorbachev seemed to think, and it tied Yeltsin to housekeeping matters more than to politics. Yeltsin did not disagree and invested little in the position. Its real utility was visibility and the midtown workspace and telephones put at the disposal of Lev Sukhanov, now his paid parliamentary assistant, and volunteers. Yeltsin said in October 1989 he was thinking of giving up the committee because it had no staff and pulled him into citizen petitions and bureaucratic red tape.69 As lawmaker, he was listless. He introduced no bills and did not affect policy. He built his everyman image by signing himself out of the Kremlin health clinic and into City Polyclinic No. 5. Naina Yeltsina did her part by shopping in neighborhood grocery stores not reserved for the elite. Vladimir Mezentsev, a press aide to Yeltsin in 1989–90 and a critic ever since, had the sense that she did all her shopping in such places. “I was a bachelor at the time, and Naina Iosifovna constantly gave me advice on the shops where sausages would be available.”70 During his campaign for Russian president in 1991, Yeltsin was able to advertise that she “spends three to four hours a day chasing around shops, like all the other unfortunate Moscow women.”71
What should not be missed in all this is that Yeltsin’s year in the last Soviet parliament extended his horizons in more ways than one. The catalyst was the Interregional Deputies Group (MDG), the pioneering democratic caucus, with about 250 members, formed against Gorbachev’s wishes on July 29–30, 1989. The conscience of the group was Andrei Sakharov, the erudite atomic physicist, advocate of human rights, and Nobel laureate who had been freed from house arrest in 1986; its arranger was Gavriil Popov.
During the spring campaign, Sakharov acceded to Yeltsin’s request to stay out of District No. 1, but considered him to be “of a completely different [lesser] caliber than Gorbachev,” and bumptious at that.72 His attitude eased after the election, as he came to know Yeltsin and to see how much he had changed. “I don’t understand how Yeltsin arrives at his decisions,” Sakharov said to an American friend in the autumn, “but he usually arrives at the right answer.”73
As formation of the Interregional group was being discussed, some of the founders wanted Yeltsin excluded as an ex-partocrat and a rabble rouser. Yeltsin wanted not just to join but to be sole leader. That was fine with Popov. At the organizing meeting, in the Moscow Cinema House, he and a petroleum engineer from Orenburg named Vladislav Shapovalenko put forward Yeltsin as chairman. Sergei Stankevich said he could support Yeltsin if his position were open to review after one year. Yurii Boldyrev, an engineer elected in a district in Leningrad, led a countercharge: “If you want to create a centralized party, go right ahead and create one. I will not participate. We will not fall in behind a leader.” Viktor Pal’m, an Estonian natural scientist, said choosing Yeltsin or anyone else as boss would be “a fatal mistake.” Effective leaders “are not appointed or elected” but “come into being” in the course of solving collective problems. Pal’m proposed the designation of equal co-chairmen. Popov agreed, and five were elected: Yeltsin (first, with 144 votes), historian Yurii Afanas’ev (143 votes), Popov (132 votes), Pal’m (73 votes), and Sakharov (69 votes). Popov and Shapovalenko then tried to have one among the quintet made the “main” chairman, or to have the position rotate.74 It was a fool’s errand. Yeltsin, Afanas’ev stated, was “the second figure after Gorbachev on the country’s political stage,” but the Interregional group could not be a one-man band. The result was not pleasing to Yeltsin. “A USSR-wide opposition party or movement could at that time only have been a leader-centered one, and the only leader capable of heading it was Yeltsin. But the role the Interregionals were willing to assign, which was not even first among equals but equal to four other leaders, could not have been attractive to him. The MDG showed it was not prepared to be building material for a political organization that would smooth Yeltsin’s road to power.”75
For all his eagerness to lead them, Yeltsin’s initial reaction to the Interregional luminaries as people had been one of culture shock. At the summer meetings, he “looked on them as something alien” and did not want to be photographed in their company.76 The secretary of the group, the same Arkadii Murashov who cast the objecting vote in the Moscow council in 1987, says Yeltsin kept a sphinx-like silence in caucus and almost never spoke in the steering committee.77 Nevertheless, as the only co-chairman to sit in the Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin represented the group’s views in that body. More vitally, he metabolized heretical ideas—by osmosis and in exchanges brokered by Popov, Mikhail Poltoranin, and Murashov, all of whom stressed that interlocutors were never to take a professorial attitude toward him. Yurii Afanas’ev, the economist Nikolai Shmelëv, the aeronautics specialist Yurii Ryzhov, and the theater director Mark Zakharov were among those who found a common language with Yeltsin. Excited to be in out of the cold, Yeltsin awakened to the need to have a modicum of system and coherence in his thoughts.78 He was playing with the kind of ideas it had once been his duty as a Communist Party boss to suffocate. What Popov and the Interregionals were now saying about the regime, and Yeltsin with them, was scarcely less damning of Soviet ways than what Yeltsin had execrated the political prisoner Valerian Morozov for saying in Sverdlovsk in 1983. One of Morozov’s misdemeanors had been to go to Gorky in search of the castaway Sakharov, who now, a few years later, was in harness with deputy Yeltsin.
For Popov, the man from Sverdlovsk, warts and all, was the answer to a prayer. He personified the longing for change and had the reassuring quality of hailing from the ranks of the establishment. “We reconnoitered for a very long time, we picked them over. But here in fact was life throwing Yeltsin into our hands. They themselves kicked him out, they themselves made him a renegade.”79 Popov was sure Yeltsin would find a way around the queasiness of the intellectuals in the MDG. Any possibility of the saintly Sakharov becoming Russia’s Václav Havel was extinguished when he died of a heart attack on December 14, 1989, at the age of sixty-eight. Yeltsin garnered respect by walking behind the bier in a sleet storm, speaking briefly at Luzhniki, and then going to the graveyard and to the funeral repast. The entente with Russia’s Westernizers was contemporaneous with the fall of the Berlin Wall and of satellite regimes in Eastern
Europe in the autumn of 1989. For the first time, Yeltsin’s statements were emphasizing democracy and some species of market economy as facets of “de-monopolization.”
The learning process was accelerated by a whirlwind tour of the United States from September 9 to 17, 1989, sponsored by the Esalen Foundation of California. In New York, Yeltsin did a walkabout in Manhattan, went to the top of the Empire State Building, helicoptered twice around the Statue of Liberty (he was “doubly free,” he told Sukhanov), gave lectures at Columbia University and the Council on Foreign Relations and to Wall Street investors (wowing some and offending others),80 and was interviewed on Good Morning, America. He spoke at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the World Affairs Council of Dallas, and the University of Miami, met corporate executives at several stops, wore a white ten-gallon hat in Texas, and stopped in on an Indiana hog farm, the Johnson Space Center, Ronald Reagan’s hospital room at the Mayo Clinic, and a Florida beach house. Yeltsin had been to Western Europe as a representative of the CPSU; this was his first encounter with the United States and his first with any capitalist country as a private citizen.
Itching to establish international credentials, Yeltsin wangled an invitation to the White House office of President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, with the promise of a “drop by” from the president. He had to enter by the West Basement entrance and was waspish with Scowcroft and Scowcroft’s assistant, Condoleezza Rice. Yeltsin lightened up when Bush came by for fifteen minutes of small talk. Vice President Dan Quayle followed and liked him. “He may not have had Gorbachev’s polish, but I could immediately see how confident he was.” Quayle was taken that Yeltsin was well enough briefed to poke fun at the bad press the two of them had been receiving. “My feeling was mixed with a whit of annoyance : Was my press so bad that it made its way to everyone’s attention?”81 The Russian “emerged from the West Wing to tell the press corps that he had presented Bush and Quayle with a ‘ten-point plan’ to ‘rescue perestroika .’ Inside, Scowcroft complained that Yeltsin was ‘devious’ and a ‘twobit headline-grabber.’” James A. Baker formed a similar appraisal at the State Department.82 For Yeltsin, it had been gainful exposure: Much to Gorbachev’s chagrin, he had his foot in the door of official Washington.
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