Yeltsin
Page 24
Yeltsin was bowled over by the variance between what he saw, communist stereotypes of American life, and the dreariness of Soviet reality. He and his party felt almost like characters in a science fiction novel. “Don’t forget,” Sukhanov wrote about the tour, “that we were travelers from the ‘anti-world’ and in our heads the U.S.A. was the country where universal chaos reigned.”83 They did find some scenes that conformed to their expectations—the filth and overcrowding of the New York subway, for one—but many more that did not.84 Yeltsin was most moved by the cornucopia at a Randalls discount supermarket in a suburb of Houston, which he asked to inspect when he saw it next to the expressway between the space center and Love Field. He went over its shelves—video taken by a member of the group shows him examining onions and potatoes under a sign “You Just Can’t Buy It Better”—and to its bar-coded checkout stand, and was in disbelief when the manager said it inventoried “only” 30,000 products. Yeltsin’s eyes were watery as he reboarded the bus. In the air between Houston and Miami, he remarked to Sukhanov that the grocery market for ordinary Americans, far better stocked than VIP dispensaries in Moscow, pointed up the fatuity of the “fairy tales” fed to his generation by Marxist-Leninist propaganda. “They had to deceive the population. . . . And now it is plain why Soviet citizens were not permitted to go abroad. They [the bosses] were afraid that their eyes would be opened.”85
Sukhanov suspected that the exchange aboard the Miami-bound jet was when “the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness decomposed,” and with it the vestiges of his belief in the Soviet model.86 Asked by a close associate in the 1990s what most turned him against the old system, Yeltsin said it was “America and its supermarkets.”87 Yeltsin records the scales falling off his eyes several weeks after the U.S. trip. Aides, seeing him disconsolate after the press skewered his U.S. tour, tried to lift his spirits by organizing a visit to a public steambath in a Moscow district. There were forty nude men in the sultry room, lathering one another on the back with water-soaked birch branches, to improve the circulation. “Hang in there, Boris Nikolayevich,” they cried, “we are with you!” It was then and there, Yeltsin was to claim in Notes of a President, that “I changed my worldview” and came to the understanding “that I had been a communist by Soviet tradition, by inertia, and by upbringing, but not by conviction.”88
If ever there was a eureka moment when Yeltsin separated himself from the Soviet state of mind, either the flight from Texas to Florida or the scene in the steambath might have been it. It is more cogent to visualize the shift, cognitive and affective, as cumulative and as taking months rather than hours. Rethinking communism and kissing it good-bye was one of those exercises in “innovative uncommon sense” that, as James MacGregor Burns writes, “transcends routine problem solving to address the deep human needs and crises from which it emerges.”89 It happened as the economy of the USSR, beginning in the winter of 1988–89, went from stagnation to recession. Lower production and excessive currency emission disordered consumer markets and made for empty shelves in the stores, longer lines, more squirreling away of consumer staples, barter, and by 1990 spot rationing.90 Millions of citizens puzzled it all out in their own way. Gorbachev did, too, but always with a lag and clinging to the dying embers of the faith.91
Less attached to communism’s ideology and more moved by its failures—more like the members of his children’s generation than like his and Gorbachev’s—Yeltsin passed through the stages of realignment during a liminal period lasting from the summer of 1989 to the summer of 1990. In a few years, he had gone from frowning at Soviet difficulties, to doubts about the system, and onward to assent in a new framework for society and politics.92 He had not “become somebody else,” he said when asked in January 1990 to compare his political position in 1990 with 1985–87. “But there has undoubtedly been a change [in me], a change leftward. . . . I am today disposed toward more radical change than at that time.”93 Reassessment of methods of rule escalated to reassessment of overarching goals and of the paradigm that framed them. In February 1990 Yeltsin would notify British writer Barbara Amiel that he now saw Lenin’s division of world socialism into communist and social-democratic wings in 1919 as a tragedy, and that “in my heart I am really more of a social democrat” than a communist.94 In January he was chosen to join the coordinating committee of the Democratic Platform in the CPSU, a ginger group that favored transmuting the Communist Party into a social-democratic movement—with a family resemblance to Labour in Britain or the German SPD—and institutionalization of jostling factions within it. It was a way station on Yeltsin’s road out of the party. He was transiting from the Gorbachev-in-a-hurry he had been in 1986–87, to the Gorbachev-with-a-difference he was in 1988–89, to the forget-about-Gorbachev of 1990–91.
There were off-key notes as Yeltsin’s political reputation grew. About one of them—purported to be a fatal car accident with him behind the wheel—we know only a claim made many years later by a far from neutral observer. Aleksandr Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s former KGB bodyguard, had continued to see the family after November 1987 and after his discharge from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate in February 1989.95 He writes in the second edition of his memoirs, published in 2004, eight years after he became Yeltsin’s mortal enemy, that at some point between May 1989 and the spring of 1990 Yeltsin drove his Moskvich into a two-seat motorcycle idling at sunrise on a country road near Korzhakov’s dacha at the village of Molokovo, close by Moscow. Korzhakov had given him driving lessons and found him a slow learner. In the Molokovo accident, the motorbike passenger, Korzhakov claims, was injured and died a half year later without the authorities knowing about the accident and perhaps without Yeltsin himself knowing the man had died. Yeltsin, Korzhakov, and a companion, says Korzhakov, had been drinking at Korzhakov’s dacha the previous evening.96 Although a biographer is obliged to note the report, it is an unconvincing one, since Yeltsin was being tailed and wiretapped by KGB officers, and Gorbachev would have pounced on the mere suspicion of such an incident to crucify him politically. Korzhakov did not mention the event in the first edition of his memoirs, published in 1997, or in my interview with him in 2002, and it has been left out of other accounts written in the spirit of his book.97 The presumption of innocence must remain with Yeltsin.
The U.S. junket caused Yeltsin more immediate pain. In Miami Beach, Dwayne Andreas of the food-industry conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, one of the large companies to which Yeltsin was introduced, loaned him the waterfront property at the Sea View Hotel normally occupied by his two daughters. Yeltsin did not know this detail and threw a fit when he found women’s lingerie in the bedroom drawers. Scared that American intelligence was trying to set him up with a call girl and blackmail him, he placed irate calls to his hosts. Robert S. Strauss, the Washington lawyer and political broker, had to spend an hour calming him by telephone.98
The greater blight was that Yeltsin attracted unpropitious publicity at several of his ports of call. The tour was originally scheduled for two weeks, but CPSU officials refused to give him an exit visa for more than eight days, since he needed to attend a Central Committee plenum on agricultural policy. James Garrison of Esalen compressed the program into the eight days, saying Yeltsin “would have to sleep less.”99 At Johns Hopkins University on September 12, jet lag, sleeping pills, and perhaps the aftereffects of evening-before libations left him the worse for wear. Sukhanov had to admit it was “not his most successful meeting.”100 The Washington Post’s Paul Hendrickson chronicled “Yeltsin’s Smashing Day” and identified bourbon as the main source of the grief, which was an overstatement if not a falsehood. Hendrickson was a prize-winning feature writer; the Post did not think the Yeltsin story important enough to fly its Moscow bureau chief, David Remnick, in for it. Hendrickson would later be contrite about the piece, but the damage was done. On September 18, the day after Yeltsin landed back in Moscow, Pravda reprinted a five-day-old story by Vittorio Zucconi, the Washington correspondent of the Ital
ian newspaper la Repubblica, portraying the voyage as one long orgy of shopping and drinking. It was a mishmash of a few facts and much fiction and innuendo. Videotape of the Johns Hopkins appearance shown on Soviet television appears to have been doctored to garble Yeltsin’s words. His son-in-law Valerii Okulov delivered a letter from Yeltsin to Pravda denouncing the article as libelous. An outcry in Italy and Russia forced the paper to publish a retraction.101 At the Central Committee plenum shortly afterward, Yeltsin accosted Pravda editor Viktor Afanas’ev for publishing the article. It was too bad, he said about their conversation, “that the time of duels has passed.”102
Another barrage of flak was fairer to link to Yeltsin’s behavior. About ten P.M. on September 28, 1989, he showed up drenched and bruised at the guardhouse of the Uspenskoye dacha compound for VIPs, on the Moskva River west of Moscow. He informed police that he had been forced to swim for his life after a carful of thugs waylaid him and dumped him off a bridge with a sack over his head. Yeltsin had been driven from a political rally in Ramenki, the Moscow neighborhood he represented in the city council, bearing two bouquets he took from the meeting, to the dacha of Sergei Bashilov, another construction bureaucrat from Sverdlovsk, with whom he was social. (He had known Bashilov, Yurii Batalin’s predecessor as chairman of Gosstroi, since the 1960s.) Aleksandr Korzhakov, called in by the family, went to the guardhouse, gave Yeltsin a shot of vodka, and took him home. Yeltsin’s purpose in going to Uspenskoye is unclear, as the Bashilovs were not home and their steambath room was locked. Press speculation centered on a tryst, although there is no proof of that and womanizing is a charge his enemies have almost never aimed at him. Speaking the day after to the Soviet interior minister, Vadim Bakatin, he retracted his statement about a plot to drown him. Today Bakatin, in retirement, says Yeltsin was doused in a pond near the dacha (by whom or for what he will not say) and what ensued was a KGB caper to embarrass him. 103
If that was the plan, it misfired. Bakatin and Gorbachev reported to the Supreme Soviet that the reasons for the incident were not known and that there had been no attempt to murder Yeltsin, and Yeltsin issued a statement fulminating at infringement on his “private life.” Yeltsin called off several public appearances, and some of his amateur helpers, fearing he was losing his touch, had “nervous eruptions verging on frenzy.”104 But nerves calmed, and the uproar blew over. Korzhakov offered to be his full-time security man and chaperone, to prevent further misadventures. Yeltsin soon perked up and was back on track.105 Greener pastures beckoned.
The house Yeltsin’s paternal grandfather, Ignatii, built in the village of Basmanovo around 1900. The home of his uncle Ivan is in the rear. His father, Nikolai’s, house was across the lane but no longer stands.
The small cottage in Butka in which Yeltsin was born in 1931.
The workers’ barracks in Berezniki where Yeltsin and his immediate family occupied a single room from 1938 to 1944. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Vasilii and Afanasiya Starygin, Yeltsin’s maternal grandparents, in a 1950s photo. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Boris with parents Klavdiya and Nikolai and brother Mikhail in Berezniki, 1939. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Railway School No. 95, where Yeltsin was a pupil from 1939 to 1945. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
The Pushkin School, which Yeltsin attended from 1945 to 1949. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Yeltsin as a ninth grader, 1948. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Creatively eating buckwheat porridge with a friend at the Urals Polytechnic Institute in the early 1950s. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Airborne (on the left) on the volleyball court at UPI, 1953. (SERGEI SKROBOV.)
Yeltsin (fourth row, third from left) in his student group at UPI, 1953. (SERGEI SKROBOV.)
Boris and Naina Yeltsin, early 1960s. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
The Yeltsin daughters in 1965; Yelena (left) was about seven, Tatyana five. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Reviewing a document as one of the secretaries of the Sverdlovsk obkom (regional committee of the Communist Party), 1975 or 1976. Yakov Ryabov, Yeltsin’s mentor, is second from left. Vladimir Dolgikh, a Central Committee secretary, is third from left. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Taking charge at a construction site as obkom first secretary, around 1980. Yurii Petrov, who later headed Yeltsin’s presidential office, is third from left. Oleg Lobov, who also served in high positions in the 1990s, is second from right, foreground. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Tending to the harvest, around 1980. Anatolii Mekhrentsev, chairman of the provincial government, is third from left. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
Discussing city planning issues in Sverdlovsk, around 1980. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
At an exercise of the Urals Military District, around 1980. (YELTSIN FAMILY ARCHIVE.)
With Politburo colleagues at a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet, November 1986. First row, left to right: Yegor Ligachëv, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Andrei Gromyko, Mikhail Gorbachev. Second row: Vitalii Vorotnikov, Lev Zaikov, Mikhail Solomentsev. Third row: Vladimir Dolgikh, Yeltsin, Eduard Shevardnadze. (RIA-NOVOSTI/S. GUNEYEVA.)
As Moscow Communist Party leader, with constituents from the district he represented in the city council, June 1987. (RIA-NOVOSTI/ A. PETRUSHCHENKO.)
Orating at Luzhniki stadium, May 21, 1989. Gavriil Popov is first from left; Andrei Sakharov is second from right. (RIA-NOVOSTI/ I. MIKHALEVA.)
Speaking to the Interregional Deputies Group, December 1989, with co-chairmen (left to right) Andrei Sakharov, Yurii Afanas’ev, Gavriil Popov, Viktor Pal’m. (RIA-NOVOSTI/ V. CHISTYAKOVA.)
Leaving the hall after announcing his resignation from the Communist Party to the party congress, July 12, 1990. (RIA-NOVOSTI/V. BABANOVA.
Before a large gathering in Novokuznetsk, May 1, 1991. (RIA-NOVOSTI/D. KOROBEINIKOVA.)
Yeltsin’s first prime minister, Ivan Silayev, 1991. (AP IMAGES/CARL DUYCK.)
Atop Tank No. 110 during the attempted coup, August 19, 1991. Aleksandr Korzhakov is next to Yeltsin on the machine. (AP IMAGES/ BORIS YURCHENKO.)
Deflating Gorbachev’s authority before the Russian Supreme Soviet, August 23, 1991. (AP IMAGES/ BORIS YURCHENKO.)
Signing the Belovezh’e Forest accord, December 8, 1991. Gennadii Burbulis (far right) co-signs for Russia. Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine (second from left) and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus (third from left) are also signatories. (RIA-NOVOSTI.)
CHAPTER EIGHT
Birth of a Nation
Gorbachev’s decision to begin political reform with his central government had a prodigious effect on the course of change. Because the society beneath was ever more restive—“moving to the left,” as Yeltsin put it, using “left” to mean hunger for change rather than in the socialist-capitalist dimension—and because curbs on contestation were breaking down, the next wave of change, in the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union and their provincial and local governments, was predestined to be more radical. Boris Yeltsin was checkmated at the USSR level. The Interregional Deputies Group was a minority in the Soviet congress, and he was not its unchallenged leader. With good reason, he felt he was in better sync than his adversaries, and even than his allies, with the times and with a popular constituency. Power and principle conjoined on a strategy of outflanking the general secretary and away from the moderation that had characterized Yeltsin’s views when he first took up the reform banner. It was “a classic polarizing game” intended to box Gorbachev in “and to create the conditions for a decisive break with the old order.”1
Several members of the 1989 campaign team wanted Yeltsin to catch the coming political wave in Moscow. There he would have taken control of city hall and revenge on the local party machine. Yeltsin decided to train his sights on Russia. It was against Soviet law to sit in more than two elected legislatures. Yeltsin thus had to choose between Moscow and the RSFSR, unless he wanted first to resign his seat in the USSR Supreme Soviet. It was not a hard choice. “This maximal program” of going
for Russia, wrote Lev Sukhanov, “was more to Yeltsin’s taste. He does not like to take the same track twice: monotony nauseates him.”2 The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was a much grander prize than Moscow. It accounted for half of the Soviet Union’s population, two-thirds of its economy, and three-quarters of its landmass. The RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies was to be elected on March 4, 1990, under rules eased up from the USSR election: The filters for candidates were simplified, and there were no seats earmarked for the CPSU or other organizations.