13 In 1960 the Kremlin transferred Molotov to Vienna as ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency. It recalled him in 1961 and excluded him from the party. His ally, Georgii Malenkov, another former prime minister, was given internal exile as director of a hydroelectric station near Ust-Kamenogorsk, in northern Kazakhstan. “He and his wife were removed from the train twenty-five miles west of Ust-Kamenogorsk (lest he receive a warm greeting there) and driven directly to the tiny settlement of Albaketka, where they lived in a small dark house until the summer of 1958. At that point . . . Khrushchev dumped him even deeper into exile in the town of Ekibastuz, where police observed every move, shadowed his children when they came to visit, and even stole his party card and then accused him of losing it so as to threaten him with expulsion from the party.” Lazar Kaganovich, a confederate of Molotov and Malenkov, was sent to manage a potash plant in Solikamsk, in Perm oblast just north of Berezniki. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003), 369.
14 Boris Yeltsin, third interview with the author (September 12, 2002).
15 Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy,1:374–75.
16 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 140–41.
17 Georgii Shakhnazarov, interview with the author (January 29, 2001). Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997), 326, also plays up the overconfidence variable.
18 Mikhail Shneider, quoted in Michael E. Urban, “Boris El’tsin, Democratic Russia, and the Campaign for the Russian Presidency,” Soviet Studies 44 (March–April 1992), 190.
19 Assignment of the KGB to monitor Yeltsin is described in the memoir by Gorbachev’s former chief of staff: V. I. Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala: shtrikhi k portretu M. S. Gorbacheva (Smashing the pedestal: strokes of a portrait of M. S. Gorbachev) (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 334. I heard of details in interviews.
20 Aleksandr Muzykantskii, interview with the author (May 30, 2001).
21 The only place I have been able to find this memo is in Aleksandr Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni (Yeltsin, the Kremlin, the history of an illness) (Moscow: OLMA, 2006), 527–58. It was never sent to Ryzhkov.
22 Quotation from “Vstrecha v VKSh, 12 noyabrya 1988 goda s 14 do 18 chasov” (Meeting in the Higher Komsomol School, November 12, 1988, from 2:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M.), in RGANI (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow) (microform in Harvard College Library), fund 89, register 8, file 29, 5.
23 Lev Sukhanov, Tri goda s Yel’tsinym: zapiski pervogo pomoshchnika (Three years with Yeltsin: notes of his first assistant) (Riga: Vaga, 1992), 40.
24 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 143; Boris Yel’tsin, Zapiski prezidenta (Notes of a president) (Moscow: Ogonëk, 1994), 31.
25 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk) (Moscow: Interbuk, 1997), 152.
26 M. S. Solomentsev, Veryu v Rossiyu (I believe in Russia) (Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 2003), 510.
27 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 151–57; “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 27; Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala, 335–36. KGB guards tried unsuccessfully to lure Yeltsin into the vestibule behind the stage, with the aim, one supposes, of cutting off his appeal to the audience and perhaps of preventing him from speaking.
28 Quotations from XIX Vsesoyuznaya konferentsiya Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: stenograficheskii otchët (The 19th conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: stenographic record), 2 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), 2:56–61.
29 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 6, Politicheskii klass, July 2006, 106.
30 Chernyayev, Shest’ let, 218–19. Zaikov’s involvement is described in Yurii Prokof’ev, Do i posle zapreta KPSS: pervyi sekretar’ MGK KPSS vspominayet (Before and after the ban on the CPSU: a first secretary of the Moscow gorkom remembers) (Moscow: Algoritm, 2005), 209–10. Ligachëv’s statement about Yeltsin being wrong was omitted from the official transcript of the conference.
31 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 57.
32 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 166–67. On the letters and telegrams, see also the testimony of a journalist who saw stacks of them in a side office at Gosstroi: Vladimir Polozhentsev, “Privet, pribaltiitsy!” (Greetings, people from the Baltic), http://podolsk-news.ru/stat/elcin.php.
33 Ivan Sukhomlin in Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni, 136–37.
34 Memorial was founded in 1987. The Nineteenth Conference had agreed to the idea of the monument, but Memorial soon broadened its agenda to human rights in general. Yeltsin attended one meeting of the board and communicated with Memorial leaders. Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), 54–67; and personal communication to the author (November 13, 2006).
35 Jonathan Sanders, interview with the author (January 21, 2004).
36 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 71–73.
37 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 66–67.
38 Aleksei Yemel’yanov in L. N. Dobrokhotov, ed., Gorbachev–Yel’tsin: 1,500 dnei politicheskogo protivostoyaniya (Gorbachev–Yeltsin: 1,500 days of political conflict) (Moscow: TERRA, 1992), 338.
39 See on this process Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 291–96.
40 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 56.
41 Pavel Voshchanov, “Ne zabudem o cheloveke” (Let us not forget about the person), Komsomol’skaya pravda, December 31, 1988.
42 Naina Yeltsina, first interview with the author (February 9, 2002).
43 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 56.
44 See the perceptive discussion in Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 5, Politicheskii klass, June 2006, 104–5. So as not to provoke Gorbachev, Yeltsin avoided using the Russian word for oppositionist, oppozitsioner. At dinner with the American ambassador as late as June of 1989, “there was not the slightest hint that Yeltsin thought of himself in competition with Gorbachev.” Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 223.
45 Georgii Shakhnazarov, S vozhdyami i bez nikh (With leaders and without them) (Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2001), 365.
46 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 68.
47 “Vstrecha v VKSh,” 28–29.
48 The archival transcript of the January plenum duly records Yeltsin’s historic abstention. In March dozens of negative votes were cast as Gorbachev led the members through the list of official nominees, one at a time. The number but not the identities of the nays was noted in each case. Yeltsin said in public that he was one of the seventy-eight in March to vote against sending Ligachëv to the congress, which was by far the largest number of nay votes. Since Yeltsin’s disgrace in October 1987, the Central Committee had convened in February, May, July, and November of 1988, and on each occasion he added his vote to the unanimous support for motions from the leadership.
49 Boldin, Krusheniye p’edestala, 339.
50 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 16–17. Valentin Yumashev, then a young journalist who had made the acquaintance of Yeltsin and his family, recalls that Yeltsin in the autumn of 1988 never displayed any doubt that he would run for the congress. Yumashev, first interview with the author (February 4, 2002).
51 Muzykantskii interview.
52 David Remnick, “Boris Yeltsin, Adding Punch to Soviet Politics,” The Washington Post, February 18, 1989.
53 Author’s interviews with Valerii Bortsov (June 11, 2001) and Valentina Lantseva (July 9, 2001).
54 On this important group, see Marc Garcelon, “The Estate of Change: The Specialist Rebellion and the Democratic Movement in Moscow, 1989–1991,” Theory and Society 26 (February 1997), 55–56.
55 Bill Keller, “Soviet Maverick Is Charging Dirty Tricks in Election Drive,” New York Times, March 19, 1989.
56 Yeltsin had addressed Ipat’ev House, and admitted to his role in the destruction of the landmark, at the Higher Komsomol School in November 1988. He said more in the f
irst volume of his memoirs, published in 1990.
57 Vitalii Tret’yakov, “Fenomen Yel’tsina” (The Yeltsin phenomenon), Moskovskiye novosti, April 16, 1989.
58 Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 70–71; Brendan Kiernan and Joseph Aistrup, “The 1989 Elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow,” Soviet Studies 43 (November–December 1991), 1051–52; Sergei Stankevich, interview with the author (May 29, 2001).
59 V. A. Kolosov, N. V. Petrov, and L. V. Smirnyagin, Vesna 89: geografiya i anatomiya parlamentskikh vyborov (Spring of 1989: the geography and anatomy of the parliamentary elections) (Moscow: Progress, 1990), 225.
60 Ibid., 218–20.
61 Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 210.
62 All quotations from Tret’yakov, “Fenomen Yel’tsina” (italics added).
63 Muzykantskii interview. In Yeltsin’s absence, reformist candidates distributed materials playing up their links with him.
64 Yel’tsin, Ispoved’, 170; V Politbyuro TsK KPSS . . . (In the Politburo of the CPSU) (Moscow: Gorbachev-Fond, 2006), 482. Ligachëv told the Politburo he would be happy to speak out against Yeltsin at the party plenum or the congress, but other members counseled against it. Gorbachev sounded nervous about a confrontation.
65 V Politbyuro TsK KPSS, 489.
66 On the agreement by Yeltsin’s unnamed representative, see Sukhanov, Tri goda, 84. Vitalii Tret’yakov, who has excellent sources of information, is convinced Yeltsin all the while hoped to challenge Gorbachev for the position. Tret’yakov, “Sverdlovskii vyskochka,” part 7, 106–9.
67 Popov describes his intervention, without mentioning Gorbachev’s waffling, in Snova v oppozitsii (In opposition again) (Moscow: Galaktika, 1994), 66. The other details are in Alexei Kazannik, “Boris Yeltsin: From Triumph to Fall,” Moscow News, June 2, 2004.
68 As an alternative, Gorbachev offered him the chair of the People’s Control Committee of the USSR, a monitoring organization most reformers considered superfluous. It would have required Yeltsin to give up his parliamentary seat. He declined, preferring, Gorbachev says, “to take upon himself the functions of leader of the opposition in the parliament” (Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 1:458). The job went to Yeltsin’s former Sverdlovsk colleague, Gennadii Kolbin.
69 Andrei Karaulov, Vokrug Kremlya: kniga politicheskikh dialogov (Around the Kremlin: a book of political dialogues), 114–15. Another mark of the committee’s low status was that until December 1989 its offices were in the Moskva Hotel, not in a government building.
70 Vladimir Mezentsev, “Okruzhentsy” (Entourage), part 3, Rabochaya tribuna, March 28, 1995.
71 “Yeltsin Discusses Candidacy, Issues, Rivals,” FBIS-SOV-91-110 (June 7, 1991), 61.
72 Andrei Sakharov, Gor’kii, Moskva, daleye vezde (Gorky, Moscow, after that everywhere) (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1990), 169. Sakharov (170–71) writes of Yeltsin hogging the microphone at a rally organized by the dissident group Moscow Tribune.
73 Edward Kline, interview with the author (February 15, 2007). Sakharov told Kline he only had one serious conversation with Yeltsin.
74 Shapovalenko in August 1991 was to be designated presidential representative to Orenburg oblast. He was one of only three presidential representatives in the provinces to survive Yeltsin’s two terms. Pëtr Akonov, “Sud’ba komissarov” (Fate of the commissars), Izvestiya, August 23, 2001.
75 Viktor Sheinis, Vzlët i padeniye parlamenta: perelomnyye gody v rossiiskoi politike, 1985–1993 (The rise and fall of parliament: years of change in Russian politics, 1985–93) (Moscow: Moskovskii Tsentr Karnegi, Fond INDEM, 2005), 229–31. Yeltsin’s cause was also strongly supported by the environmentalist Aleksei Yablokov and by Il’ya Zaslavskii, an advocate for the disabled.
76 Yevgenii Savast’yanov, a Sakharov camp follower who attended the Interregional meetings, interview with the author (June 9, 2000). Also Bortsov and Lantseva interviews and interviews with Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s widow (March 13, 2001), Mikhail Poltoranin (July 11, 2001), and Gavriil Popov (June 1, 2001).
77 Arkadii Murashov, interview with the author (September 13, 2000). Yeltsin complained openly about the group’s disorganization and “endless meetings and consultations.” “Yeltsin Interviewed by Sovetskaya molodëzh’,” FBIS-SOV-90-021 (January 31, 1990), 73).
78 In addition to those mentioned in the text, Stankevich interview and interviews with Yurii Ryzhov (June 7, 2000) and Mark Zakharov (June 4, 2002).
79 Popov interview.
80 Yeltsin expressed approval of foreign investment in the USSR but, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, also gave a favorable assessment of economic change in East Germany. To a young Harvard economist at the meeting, Yeltsin showed “all the dissatisfaction with the sclerotic Soviet system but no clue about any market anything.” Lawrence H. Summers, interview with the author (November 25, 2005).
81 Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 170.
82 Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 104–5. See also George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 142–43.
83 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 99.
84 Yeltsin and his party did not always see American reality for what it was. For example, he came to the conclusion that homelessness was not a major problem in New York, and one member of the Russian group declared that the homeless were on the streets not because they had nowhere to sleep but because they wanted the authorities to give them plots of land on which they could build houses. Ibid., 100–101.
85 Ibid., 149, 153. I learned of Yeltsin’s upset on the bus from Wesley Neff of the Leigh Bureau, who witnessed it. Excerpts from the Randall’s video are in Prezident vseya Rusi, part 2.
86 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 150.
87 Boris Nemtsov, first interview with the author (October 17, 2000). Yeltsin was “shocked” when he described the Houston store to Naina upon his return. She underwent a similar shock a few months later during a private visit to the Netherlands. In November 1991, when she accompanied Yeltsin on his first foreign visit as Russian president to Germany, the wife of the mayor of Cologne took her shopping for shoes and on a walk through the city market. Thinking of Moscow’s bare shelves, “I was ashamed. I had worked my whole life, we had wanted to make life better, and we had not done anything. I wanted to hide somewhere.” Naina Yeltsina, second interview with the author (September 18, 2007).
88 Yel’tsin, Zapiski, 181.
89 James MacGregor Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 166.
90 Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii.
91 See especially Archie Brown, “Gorbachev, Lenin, and the Break with Leninism,” Demokratizatsiya/Democratization 15 (Spring 2007), 230–44.
92 I owe the sequence frown-doubt-assent to Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York: Scribner, 2004), 38. On the ambiguous attitudes of younger Soviets, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.
93 “Yeltsin Airs Plans for Deputies Elections,” FBIS-SOV-9-021 (January 31, 1990), 69. In this context, Yeltsin meant “leftward” to connote openness to change, and not to a greater state role in the economy, as the word tends to mean in the West. In the 1990s Russian understandings of left-right terminology came into better conformity with foreign ones.
94 In John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 49–50. Yeltsin first indicated he thought of himself as a social democrat on a visit to Greece the month before. John Morrison, Boris Yeltsin: From Bolshevik to Democrat (New York: Dutton, 1991), 108.
95 The decision was made a few days after Korzhakov celebrated Yeltsin’s fifty-eighth birthday with him. “The bosses especially did not like the toasts I raised to Boris Nikolayevich. Falle
n leaders of the Communist Party, it turns out, are not supposed to have any prospects for the future.” Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin, 69. Viktor Suzdalev, another of Yeltsin’s three guards from 1985 to 1987, was removed for the same offense. Yurii Kozhukhov, the head bodyguard, was demoted by the KGB after November 1987 but dropped contact with Yeltsin.
96 Aleksandr Korzhakov, Boris Yel’tsin: ot rassveta do zakata; poslesloviye (Boris Yeltsin: from dawn to dusk; epilogue) (Moscow: Detektiv-press, 2004), 517–18. He relates that the machine was at idle as the driver talked to the driver of a Zhiguli car through the car window. “It became clear later” that the passenger had a damaged spinal disk and bruised kidneys, “after which he was very ill for a long time.” Korzhakov says he and a neighbor, businessman Vladimir Vinogradov, helped with medical expenses and paid for the funeral, since the unnamed victim “had no close relatives.” Korzhakov writes that Yeltsin never inquired about the man’s condition, and does not mention having volunteered information about it to his boss. Yeltsin family members say the Korzhakov volume was the first they had heard of the matter.
97 A lurid book written with Korzhakov’s cooperation replays many of his stories about Yeltsin, but not this one. The book also makes extensive use of KGB files. See Khinshtein, Yel’tsin, Kreml’, istoriya bolezni.
98 Robert S. Strauss, interview with the author (January 9, 2006).
99 Viktor Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin: ya otvechu za vsë (Yeltsin: I will answer for everything) (Moscow: Vokrug sveta, 1997), 20.
100 Sukhanov, Tri goda, 174.
101 See on the coverage Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 341–50; and Yaroshenko, Yel’tsin, 29–61.Wesley Neff, who accompanied Yeltsin on the trip, says he most nights had no more than one or two drinks and was never inebriated. Yaroshenko, a USSR deputy who accompanied him, recalls (Yel’tsin, 21) that Yeltsin was insulted when he found his New York hotel room stocked with many bottles of liquor, saying this showed how some Americans extended “hospitality to a ‘Russian peasant.’”
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