Yeltsin

by Timothy J. Colton

  Yeltsin sought nomination in his home province and was registered in District No. 74, comprising Sverdlovsk city and the industrial town of Pervoural’sk. His return to Sverdlovsk in the last days of January was front-page news, despite moves by the CPSU obkom, now headed by his old enemy Leonid Bobykin, to hush it up. “He met with electors in halls filled to bursting. Whenever possible, an audio feed onto the street was organized.”3 At one rally, three social scientists from the Urals Polytechnic Institute—Aleksandr Il’in, Gennadii Kharin, and Lyudmila Pikhoya—walked up to Yeltsin and told him his statement had been haphazard and he was too dependent on Q&A repartee. They offered to write a sample speech with greater thematic richness. Yeltsin liked the result and asked them to draft his candidate’s program in February.4

  For half of the campaign, Yeltsin was on the stump for candidates outside of Sverdlovsk oblast. The lion’s share of them subscribed to Democratic Russia, a protoparty formed in January 1990 on the basis of the Interregional caucus, which listed nominees in several hundred urbanized districts. Yeltsin offered his signature on leaflets and posters, “creating a giant coattails effect from Boris Yeltsin on down to the city district level.”5 Russia was the only Soviet republic where the CPSU was without a committee, bureau, and first secretary. Reluctantly, Gorbachev in October 1989 reconstituted the Khrushchev-era Russian Bureau within the Central Committee apparatus. He accepted a Russian Communist Party only in the new year. It did not have its founding congress until June of 1990, three months after the election. So it was that the Communist Party was hit-or-miss in the RSFSR campaign and candidates who were members of it (as 70 percent were) were left to sink or swim. Vitalii Vorotnikov, the Politburo member who answered for the RSFSR, met with yawns when he tried to get Gorbachev to send heavy hitters into the fray. He offered his resignation to Gorbachev in January, and then agreed to stay through the election.6

  The Yeltsin campaign offered a mélange of the familiar and the new. In pushing populism and calling for a blanket prohibition on nomenklatura privilege, he was aided by publication in February of the best-selling Confession on an Assigned Theme, with its purple prose about the lifestyles of the CPSU elite. It was widely quoted in the provincial press.7 The new ingredients had to do mostly with the governance of Russia and its place in a reformed federal system. Here Yeltsin preached making the RSFSR over into a “presidential republic” with an elective president, a full-time parliament, a constitutional court, a state bank, an academy of sciences, a territorial militia, and multiple political parties. A democratic constitution adopted by referendum would enshrine these provisions as well as “the principle of the paramountcy of law” and freedoms of expression, assembly, association, and worship. The Soviet state, de jure federal but de facto unitary, ought to be decentralized, Yeltsin’s program said, “because monopoly and the overcentralization of political and economic power have led our country to its present state.” The heavy hand of Moscow stultified natural communities of interest as surely as dictatorship stultified political freedom and command planning stultified economic enterprise. “We have to give the maximum possible self-reliance [or self-rule—samostoyatel’nost’] to the republics,” beginning with the RSFSR. “We have to see to it that we have strong republics, which should decide themselves what functions to give up to [the center] and which to keep for them.”8 The same held within Russia, where regions had to have more autonomy. Devolution, based on liberal, nonethnic Russian nationalism, augmented democratization and market reform as a third and equal strand in Yeltsin’s de-monopolization project. How the wish would be made reality, or what would happen if the strands came into conflict or were internally inconsistent, was not specified.9

  March 4 brought another electoral landslide. Yeltsin toted up 84 percent of the votes in his Sverdlovsk district against eleven no-name candidates. He told a journalist friend he would now “go only to Golgotha”—to a reckoning in some form with the old regime. The look on his face was both elated and fearful.10

  Gorbachev hurried to prop up his position by carpentering a new institutional framework for governing the Soviet Union. In early February he had the party Central Committee approve a motion to repeal Article 6 of the 1977 Brezhnev constitution, which stipulated that the CPSU was the only legal party—“the leading and guiding force of Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system.” It was an overdue concession to the opposition and to democratic principles. On March 13, 1990, the USSR congress approved the measure. At the same sitting, on March 14, it introduced a Soviet presidency, to which it elected Gorbachev on March 19. The change was an acknowledgment that the Communist Party, whose general secretary he remained, was no longer plausible as the sole basis for political authority. At the Politburo session of March 7, Anatolii Luk’yanov, who was to succeed Gorbachev as USSR parliamentary chairman, asked him why they were acting in such unseemly haste. “So as to put them [the republics and the Russian democrats] in their place,” Gorbachev rejoined. Luk’yanov predicted, accurately, that the republics would counterpunch with presidencies of their own. He then brought up a deadlier point—about legitimacy. Why should Gorbachev be made president by the legislature and not by the whole people? “Why should the people not be the electors? This betokens mistrust of the people. All this will be exaggerated by [the opposition].” Gorbachev was unswayed, a blunder of biblical proportions.11 Until June–July 1990, when Yeltsin streaked past him in the opinion polls, he would have won a general election.12

  A couple of weeks after the election, Yeltsin, as Gorbachev noted with satisfaction at a Politburo meeting, requested and received a spa ticket from the Soviet parliament; he had notified Luk’yanov that he was worn to the bone and had to get away. The effort to make Yeltsin speaker of the RSFSR congress, which was to open in May, would have to begin without him.13 Once he was back from vacation, however, Yeltsin worked methodically on getting the position and agreed to put off formation of the Russian presidency until 1991. On the question of chairing the legislature, about 40 percent of the deputies were pro-Yeltsin (in the USSR congress, only 10 to 15 percent by this time adhered to the Interregional group) and 40 percent were anti-Yeltsin; the rest were known as the “swamp.” Hopeful of success, the Democratic Russia bloc nominated Yeltsin for the chair.

  In camera, Nikolai Ryzhkov from Sverdlovsk, who was still Gorbachev’s prime minister, had a foreboding at the Politburo meeting of March 22, 1990, of a domino effect if Yeltsin and his allies were to succeed in their quest: “If they take Russia, they need not try hard to destroy the [Soviet] Union and cast off the central leadership: party and legislative and governmental. In my view, once they have taken Russia, everything else, the entire federal superstructure, will very quickly go to pieces.”14 The inhabitants of what had been an impregnable castle were pressing the panic button, this at a time when many analysts still asserted that Russia could never be a threat to Soviet stability. Bootlessly, Ryzhkov pushed the Politburo to nominate and promote a reliable candidate for Russian parliamentary chairman. At the April 20 meeting of the Politburo, Gorbachev expressed incredulity at Yeltsin’s growing standing in Russian society. “What Yeltsin is doing is incomprehensible. . . . Every Monday his face doubles in size [due to his selfimportance]. He speaks inarticulately, he often comes up with the devil knows what, he is like a worn-out record. But the people repeat over and over, ‘He is our man!’”15 Gorbachev could not understand why and could not bring himself to imitate Yeltsin.

  On April 27 Yeltsin flew to London for a foreign diversion, the British book party for the English translation (as Against the Grain) of Confession on an Assigned Theme. Margaret Thatcher received him for forty-five minutes at 10 Downing Street. He tried to draw her out on a channel between the United Kingdom and “the new, free Russia” that would bypass the Soviet government. First, she replied suavely, Russia would need to be new and free in more than words. The Iron Lady had notified Gorbachev “to make it clear that I was receiving Mr Yeltsin in the way I would a Leader
of the Opposition.” She found her guest “far more my idea of the typical Russian than was Mr Gorbachev—tall, burly, square Slavic face and shock of white hair.” He was sure-footed and mannerly, “with a smile full of good humour and a touch of self-mockery.” What most struck her was that Yeltsin “had . . . thought through some of the fundamental problems much more clearly than had Mr Gorbachev” and, “unlike President Gorbachev, had broken out of the communist mindset and language.” Thatcher shared her rave reviews with President Bush, who answered that “the Americans did not share them.”16

  Yeltsin left the next day to give a talk at a symposium in Córdoba, Spain. The six-passenger airplane chartered to take him from there to Barcelona ran into engine and electrical trouble and had to make a rough landing at the Córdoba airport. Yeltsin suffered a slipped disk and numbness in his legs and feet. He had three hours of spinal surgery in Barcelona on April 30. Within two days, he was on his feet; on May 5 he was in Moscow, met at the airport by a crowd chanting “Yeltsin for President!” Never one to baby an injury, he made it on May 7 to a pre-congress meeting of reform-minded deputies in Priozersk, a lakeside resort near Leningrad. He and Lev Sukhanov sat in a pavilion and downed a liter of Armenian brandy, his preferred drink at that time—before repairing to the main party for toasts.17 If Yeltsin had been operated on in a Soviet hospital, he would have been bed-bound for weeks and might well have lost the contest for Russian parliamentary chief on that account.

  Only on May 16 did Gorbachev nominate Aleksandr Vlasov, a lackluster apparatchik recently promoted to Vorotnikov’s place as head of the RSFSR government, as congress chairman. Gorbachev spoke on Vlasov’s behalf on May 23 and dropped the ball, packing his bags for a visit to Canada and the United States. He and the Central Committee men sent to twist the deputies’ arms could not conceive of losing—“as Nicholas II might have thought on the eve of the revolution,” to quote Georgii Shakhnazarov.18 But, straw polls showing his support to be soft, Vlasov backed out and left Yeltsin to face Ivan Polozkov, a regional secretary from Krasnodar in the North Caucasus similar in mentality to Ligachëv—but to Gorbachev more appetizing than Yeltsin.

  A lot was riding on Yeltsin’s May 25 opening speech to the deputies. He and his team put the finishing touches on it past midnight. Discovering at daybreak that the ribbon from the office typewriter on which they had worked was missing, they were anxious that one of his opponents might read it and steal a march on Yeltsin, “and then there would be nothing for him to do on the podium.”19 It was a false alarm. Deputies made their way from the Rossiya Hotel to the Kremlin gates through lines of picketers bearing Yeltsin signs. In his self-introduction, Yeltsin conceded that attitudes toward him among the representatives ran the full gamut, and pledged “dialogue with various political forces” and give-and-take with Gorbachev. In the first round of voting, tabulated the morning of May 26, he polled 497 votes to Polozkov’s 473. On May 27 he tiptoed up to 503 votes, Polozkov drooping to 458. On Tuesday, May 29, with Vlasov back in the game, Yeltsin sat breathless through a third round. He squeaked through with 535 votes, outpolling Vlasov by sixty-eight and landing exactly four more than the compulsory 50-percent-plus-one.20 Gorbachev heard the ill tidings midway across the Atlantic to Ottawa. He said in retirement that he might have been better off egging the deputies on to vote for Yeltsin, which would have motivated contrarians to vote against him: “They wanted to show their independence.”21 Independence from established authority was indeed the zeitgeist in 1990, and Yeltsin was channeling it.

  In the afterglow of his cliff-hanger victory, Yeltsin moved into the Russian White House, the spanking new granite-and-marble skyscraper for the RSFSR’s legislature and executive on the Moskva River embankment, down a hill from the U.S. embassy. His cavernous office was on the fifth floor, with a private elevator, and had been occupied until then by Vitalii Vorotnikov. As parliamentary speaker, he got to form a small secretariat and to put on the payroll Aleksandr Korzhakov and irregulars from the provinces such as Valerii Bortsov, Valentina Lantseva, and the UPI speech writers, some of whom had lived out of suitcases and put themselves up in hotels, suburban hostels, and even railway stations.22 He asked Viktor Ilyushin, an apparatchik from Sverdlovsk oblast who had also worked with him in the Moscow party committee, to head the group. Under the revised RSFSR constitution, Yeltsin was to nominate candidates for head of government. On June 15, 1990, Ivan Silayev, formerly one of Ryzhkov’s deputy premiers and before that the head of the Soviet aviation industry, was confirmed as the first of his prime ministers. He and Yeltsin nominated ministers for the cabinet and secured parliamentary confirmation for them. Mikhail Bocharov, Yeltsin’s deputy in the USSR legislative committee and the point man for his election as chairman of the Russian parliament, had been led to believe the job would be his. Bocharov had been an active member of the Interregional group and finished sixth in the contest to elect its five co-chairmen. He was the principal liaison between Democratic Russia and the first session of the Russian congress, applying himself to this work while Yeltsin was out of Moscow on vacation. He says Yeltsin at first invited him to be prime minister, but was miffed when he drew up a list of cabinet members. Bocharov adds that at one point Yeltsin suggested that he himself become prime minister and Bocharov chair the parliament. Bocharov turned into a caustic critic, the first of many office seekers to become embittered.23

  The triumph, and the conservative drift within the party, also affected Yeltsin’s withdrawal from the communist fraternity. The Russian Communist Party elected Polozkov—the paleo-communist out of central casting—its first secretary on June 19. Yeltsin’s man Oleg Lobov, a political centrist, finished second in the balloting. Lobov, who had moved from Sverdlovsk to Moscow in 1987, had been sent to Armenia in 1989 as CPSU second secretary and was not an official delegate to the Russian party congress. Had he been better prepared and won, Yeltsin might have tried to work out an accommodation. 24 Yeltsin had indicated that if chosen as leader of the Russian congress he would ensure evenhandedness by quitting the party or putting his membership in abeyance. At the Twenty-Eighth CPSU Congress in early July, he called for the party’s conversion into a Party of Democratic Socialism or Union of Democratic Forces that would take its place in a multiparty democracy. Yeltsin wagged a finger at those unable to part with the “apparatus party” of yesteryear: “Let those who would think of any other variant look at the fate of the communist parties of the countries of Eastern Europe. They cut themselves off from the people, misunderstood their role, and found themselves left behind.”25

  Gorbachev would not take the bait. Expecting deadlock, Yeltsin had bargained with Gavriil Popov and the Moscow liberals over a collective goingaway letter—in the woods outside Popov’s dacha, to block KGB snooping.26 But as usual he did things his way. He “wore out his speech writers” in drafting and redrafting his remarks and went over “all the details of the definitive moment—how he would mount the rostrum, how he would leave the hall after his statement, which doorway he would use.”27 On July 12 he asked Gorbachev to let him speak and then said to the hall that he was leaving the party. The umbilical cord was snipped after twenty-nine years. “Taking into account our transition to a multiparty society,” he said, “I cannot carry out only the decisions of the CPSU.”28 He then stalked up the center aisle of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, guffaws and whistles resounding in his ears. Soviet television broadcast the congress with a delay. When his statement began to play, Yeltsin came out of his White Office study into the corridor to watch the only large-screen set in the building. “His face was strained. He noticed no thing or person. . . . All that was important to him was to see himself from the side. As soon as the picture changed, he walked noiselessly to his desk—looking at no one, greeting no one, saying good-bye to no one. No doubt about it, this was one of the turning points of his life.”29 Yeltsin seems to have left his party card at the meeting hall. Family members did not see it again, and, unlike his Soviet-period medals, which he kept, it wa
s not found with his personal effects in 2007.30

  That evening Gorbachev’s guru, Anatolii Chernyayev, wrote a note to Gorbachev about Yeltsin’s “musical moment.” “You pulled teeth so as to keep the position of general secretary of the party. Yeltsin spit in its [the party’s] face and went to do what it was up to you to do.”31 Later in the congress, those leaders most at odds with Yeltsin—Yegor Ligachëv, Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vitalii Vorotnikov, and Lev Zaikov, who in 1988 had proclaimed the Yeltsin epoch to be over—were taken off the Politburo. The party as such would linger another thirteen months.

  The Gorbachev group’s take on Yeltsin’s Russianism was that it was a smoke screen for his power-seeking. “All at once,” party secretary Vadim Medvedev said acridly to the Politburo in May, “he has become a Russian patriot, although he never gave a thought to Russia until now. This . . . is a dishonorable political game.” “Why is Yeltsin picking up this question?” Gorbachev inquired at the same session. “He is picking it up in order to play games. [He wants] to use it to make his way to power in Russia, and through Russia to blow up the CPSU and the country.”32

  Although expediency was a factor, it did not make Yeltsin a political mad bomber and it was not nearly the whole story. Yeltsin was no neophyte to Russia-firstism. In Sverdlovsk he had discoursed on Russia as ugly stepchild of the Soviet Union and dreamed up paper schemes for giving it status and devolving some powers to its regions. While Russian rights had not been his priority before the 1990 election, in his first speech to the USSR congress in May 1989 he had advocated “territorial sovereignty” and “economic and financial self-reliance” for all Soviet republics, specifically endorsing a proposal from the Baltic republic of Latvia.33 By now, although the potshots from Medvedev and Gorbachev tried to obfuscate it, Russianist sentiment was quite widespread in the RSFSR elite. Partly it was contagion from nationalist movements in the Baltic and elsewhere and partly it pushed back against the Soviet congress’s decision on April 26, 1990, to put on a legal par with the fifteen “union” republics of the USSR the thirty-odd “autonomous” republics, the ethnic homelands implanted within the union republics, most of which were within Russia. “No other action could have so dramatized Yeltsin’s claim that the center ignored and repressed Russia and that Russia needed a strong leader and the right to abrogate USSR laws on Russian territory.”34 The clarion statement on the part of the RSFSR was its congress’s declaration on June 12, 1990, of Russia’s “sovereignty” (suverenitet), meaning national self-determination, territorial integrity, and, once a new Soviet constitution or federative agreement was in place, the primacy of its laws over federal legislation. 35 Indicative of the breadth of feeling, the motion was first made by Vorotnikov and the communists and went through in a one-sided roll call (907 yeas, thirteen nays, nine abstentions). Yeltsin remembered the vote and the ear-splitting ovation as the acme of all his years in Moscow. “For me and for everyone . . . in the hall, this was a moment of rejoicing.”36 The genie was out of the bottle. Six union republics, starting with Estonia in November 1988, had adopted such a manifesto, and the remainder were to do so later in 1990 (Kirgiziya or Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia was the last, in December).