Yeltsin: A Life

CHAPTER FOUR A Boss with a Difference

At forty-five, Yeltsin was one of the youngest provincial first secretaries in the Russian core of the Soviet Union. The seventh of twelve apparatchiks to fill this post in the unofficial capital of the Urals between World War II and 1991, he would reign supreme in Sverdlovsk for eight and a half years, as many as he was to be president of post-communist Russia. Yeltsin’s kingdom was pear-shaped, with its capital city at the middle of the base and his native Butka tucked in its southeast corner. In area it was an amplitudinous 75,000 square miles. That was more than eight of the USSR’s fifteen union republics and about the size of the six New England states in the United States or, in Europe, of Austria, Switzerland, and Ireland combined. Its population of 4,483,000 put the oblast fourth among Soviet Russian provinces in 1979. Eighty-five percent of its people were urban—1,225,000 in Sverdlovsk, 400,000 in Nizhnii Tagil, and 189,000 in Kamensk-Ural’skii—and only 15 percent lived on the land.

The local bosses of the ruling party originally functioned as its “law-and-order prefects,” tasked with projecting the center’s power and maintaining political stability.¹ This function continued to make demands on Boris Yeltsin’s time in the 1970s and 1980s. The territorial subunits of the CPSU paralleled the institutions of local government. Sverdlovsk oblast contained thirty districts (raions), each of which had a party committee; there were districts within the three largest cities; and a mass membership of 221,000 communists (as of 1976) formed a base. The obkom and its leader decided on about 20,000 personnel appointments and supervised all entities that policed, educated, and informed the population and mobilized it for the purposes of the regime. For emergencies, Yeltsin’s duty officer had prolix instructions on liaison with the KGB, the Committee on State Security (the OGPU and the NKVD under Stalin). Yurii Kornilov, the head of the Sverdlovsk KGB and a former raion party secretary, escorted him on his railcar and helicopter incursions into the backcountry.² “I often came by the agency,” Yeltsin writes in Confession on an Assigned Theme. “I asked to be informed about the KGB’s work, studied how it functioned, and acquainted myself with its departments.”³ Yeltsin also sat on the civil-military collegium of the Urals Military District and attended field exercises. Ministry of Defense brass conferred the rank of colonel on him in October 1978, presenting him with a dress uniform and an astrakhan hat.

Not that law-and-order obligations were ever forsworn; the party chiefs with the passage of time defined themselves more as “developmental prefects” for coordinating economic growth and ensuring that some of the benefits trickled down. Administrative intervention for harmony of operation was bound to happen in an economy where market mechanisms had been squashed by the state. In economic indices, Sverdlovsk oblast ranked third among Soviet provinces. The Urals staples of mining and metallurgy continued to expand, slowly. Beloyarsk, the Soviet Union’s first nuclear power station, powered by a sodium-cooled breeder reactor, started up in 1964 at the town of Zarechnyi, north of Sverdlovsk (it was disabled by fires in 1977 and 1978). In the 1981–85 five-year plan, Yeltsin and the oblast were active in the crash campaign to transport natural gas from the middle and lower Ob in west Siberia to customers in Europe; five pipelines and twenty compressor stations were constructed in the taiga.

In Sverdlovsk civilian pursuits paled before the production of armaments. The oblast had 350,000 military-industrial employees, more than any other Soviet province.⁴ Defense plants could not be mentioned by exact name or whereabouts in the media, and the province was off-limits to Westerners throughout the Cold War. The Urals Wagon Works in Nizhnii Tagil was the highest-volume maker of tanks anywhere in the world; its product is still wheeling around the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, India, the Arab world, and North Korea. Two of the ten cloistered “atomic cities” in the USSR lay north of the oblast capital: Sverdlovsk-44, known today as Novoural’sk, home to the Urals Electrochemical Combine, which was the largest factory for enriching uranium in the world; and Sverdlovsk-45, later Lesnoi, whose Electrochemical Instrumentation Combine was the country’s premier facility for serial assembly of nuclear warheads. Yeltsin as first secretary was accountable for the well-being of the atomic towns, whose very existence was a state secret. A number of flagships of military industry were situated in Sverdlovsk city. The Kalinin Machinery Works, for example, was an artillery plant retooled to rockets in the 1950s; it cranked out surface-to-air missiles (such as the one that downed Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk in 1960), medium-range ballistic missiles, and torpedoes. The Urals Turbine Works manufactured tank engines, the Urals Transportation Machinery Works armored vehicles, the Vektor Works missile guidance systems and radars, and Uralmash, the biggest employer in Sverdlovsk, artillery pieces. Military Compound No. 19, built in the Chkalov raion of Sverdlovsk in 1947 with blueprints from Japan’s Unit No. 731 in Manchuria, was the busiest of the USSR’s three centers for producing biological weaponry. An accidental emission of aerosolized anthrax spores from its dryer took nearly a hundred lives in April 1979. Moscow attributed it to tainted meat.⁵

If the early part of the Brezhnev period, when Yeltsin broke into party work, were halcyon days for the nomenklatura, the later years were not. The economy was in the doldrums, and there were signs of creeping social and political crisis. Urals minerals were increasingly expensive to mine, the labor to work its antiquated factories was running low, and agricultural production was stagnant. In no region of the USSR had negligence of consumers for the benefit of heavy and military industry been as bad. Per-capita supply of housing, food, and retail goods was below average. Of the thirty-seven worstpolluted cities in Soviet Russia in the 1980s, eleven were in the Urals and six were in Sverdlovsk oblast (Kamensk-Ural’skii, Kirovgrad, Krasnoural’sk, Nizhnii Tagil, Revda, and Sverdlovsk).⁶

Yeltsin had good reason to depict the first secretary in his autobiography as “god, tsar, and master” of the province, head and shoulders above the lesser mortals around him. “[His] word was law, and barely anyone would dare not to heed a request or assignment from him…. On practically any question, the first secretary’s opinion was final.” Yeltsin wielded his influence in Sverdlovsk, he insisted, only to benefit society. “I made use of this power, but to benefit others and never for myself. I forced the wheels of the economic machine to spin faster. People submitted to me, people obeyed me, and owing to that, it seemed to me, work units performed better.”⁷

Two hundred obkom staffers were at Yeltsin’s beck and call, dishing out guidance, punishment, and favors. He had a finger in every pie of political relevance, although he would stay away from organizational trivia unless procedures broke down or higher-ups wanted a report. He had the selfassurance to be open to his associates’ input. Taking a procedure from the construction industry, on Monday mornings he chaired a planning session (planërka) of members of the bureau of the obkom, where they were invited to raise their concerns casually. The formal convocation of the bureau on Tuesday (every second week, on average) was more crisply run. At several meetings a year, it was time for “personal responsibility”; bureau members did a self-evaluation in front of their colleagues, followed by a Yeltsin report card. As it tended to be in the Soviet Union, the party boss’s word was most conclusive when it was spoken, not written. If the two ever deviated, the verbal held. In countries with rule of law, formal understandings on paper take precedence. In the communist system, the primacy of informal oral commands and handshake agreements reflected the weakness of law, insidious secrecy and mistrust, and the need for authority figures able to cut through the thicket of often conflicting administrative requirements.

Yeltsin made short work of the ineffectual Yevgenii Korovin, sending him to the trade unions; Leonid Ponomarëv soon found himself an academic dean in Moscow; it took several more years to get rid of Leonid Bobykin.⁸ For the circle of obkom secretaries, Viktor Manyukhin, an apparatchik who worked with Yeltsin for fifteen years, notes in a vinegary memoir about him, “The principles of selection were cut-and-dried: good training, knowledge of the work, and, the main criterion, devotion [predannost’] to the first [secretary].”⁹ The two party officials on the best terms with Yeltsin, Oleg Lobov and Yurii Petrov, both construction specialists, were each to make it to obkom second secretary, and Petrov would succeed him as number one in 1985 after several years in Moscow. But Yeltsin did not reward fawning praise, and for most appointments he was results-oriented. To head the oblast government, he picked the distinguished director of the Kalinin Works, Anatolii Mekhrentsev, in 1977. Yeltsin had an affinity for technocrats like him and for eager younger candidates whom he could promote—if they played second fiddle. With Mekhrentsev, although Yeltsin respected him, he fretted when Mekhrentsev was introduced that his awards and production medals would be listed. At an early meeting, Yeltsin cut off the introducer: “Don’t announce any awards; there should be no heroes among us.”¹⁰ There were interpersonal rivalries, and an intercity competition between Sverdlovsk and Nizhnii Tagil, but in the main the political elite of the oblast was tight-knit. Most obkom officials were alumni of either UPI or Urals State University; they communicated on a first-name-and-patronymic basis; they partied on one another’s birthdays and attended the last rites of family members. If there was a disagreement, the first secretary resolved it. When Manyukhin, as first secretary of the city of Sverdlovsk, criticized Petrov, a Nizhnii Tagil native, for bias toward the second city, Yeltsin sided with Manyukhin and had Petrov right the balance.¹¹

Force of personality amplified administrative levers. A strapping six foot two, 220 pounds by the 1970s, his hair parted on the right into a formidable cowlick, First Secretary Yeltsin oozed vlast’, that untranslatable Russian epithet for power and rule. He enunciated laconically and emphatically in a husky baritone. He elongated his syllables—as his classmates in Berezniki had noticed—flattened his vowels, and thrummed his r’s in the Urals manner. Interest was added by either picking up the pace or pausing for dramatic effect. When riled at windy speeches or untoward news, he would raise an eyebrow—as teacher Antonina Khonina saw in the 1940s—poke a pencil through the forefinger and little finger of his right hand, and rat-a-tat-tat it; should they persist, he whammed his hand on the desk or lectern and snapped the pencil into thirds.

A ward in Sverdlovsk’s Hospital No. 2 was put on standby before plenums of the obkom, as insurance against an acerbic report from the rostrum—one that “really made the malachite ashtrays quiver”—putting any members in need of therapy.¹² A spit-and-polish dress code prevailed. The chief wore a two-piece suit, with necktie and tie clip, and had his shoes burnished to a glint. Heaven help the clerk or factory manager who did not wear a tie, even on the muggiest summer day, or who stood before Yeltsin with hands in his pockets: He would be sent home without ado.

It was not wise to cross the boss on substance. Ural’skii rabochii, the Sverdlovsk daily newspaper, ran a story about a Yeltsin visit to a local factory that rubbed the first secretary the wrong way. “We gave it [the newspaper] to you,” Yeltsin threw at editor-in-chief Grigorii Kaëta, “and we can take it away.” Yeltsin’s smoldering glare cut into Kaëta “like a knife.”¹³ Engineer Eduard Rossel was chief of the Nizhnii Tagil construction combine in 1978 and was asked by Yeltsin to take on the job of mayor of that city. Rossel said he preferred to stay put. Yeltsin was tight-lipped for a full sixty seconds—an eon to Rossel, who was only six years younger but very much the junior player—splintered his pencil, and blurted out ill-naturedly, “Very well, Eduard Ergartovich, I won’t forget your refusal.”¹⁴ Both Kaëta and Rossel found, though, that if they patiently accepted the talking to and did their work well, it was possible to get out of the doghouse. Kaëta remained as editor until after Yeltsin’s departure for Moscow. Rossel got several promotions from him and after communism was to be elected governor of Sverdlovsk oblast.

Ex officio, Yeltsin was his bailiwick’s spokesman in USSR-wide politics. As its unwritten rules prescribed, he was elected without opposition to the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s rubber-stamp parliament, in 1978. (Andrei Kirilenko continued to occupy another seat from Sverdlovsk oblast.) In February 1981 Yeltsin made his first speech to a quinquennial party convention in Moscow, the Twenty-Fifth CPSU Congress. He was on pins and needles, as the KGB was looking into the suicide of Vladimir Titov, a key operative on his staff, several days before. Titov, the head of the obkom’s “general department,” which answered for confidential records and correspondence, shot himself with a pistol he kept in his office safe, and some secret materials were missing. Yeltsin had to return to Sverdlovsk midway through the congress to meet with officers.¹⁵ On the congress’s last day, Yeltsin was selected to the CPSU Central Committee, whose plenums he had been attending and speaking at since 1976 as a guest (and which Mikhail Gorbachev had joined in 1971). He met on a regular basis with members of the “Sverdlovsk diaspora,” officials from the province who had been transferred to Moscow. In bureaucratic encounters, he had the reputation of someone who was as good as his word and was a bulldog guardian of his home turf. Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was to be Russian prime minister in the 1990s, met up with him on gas pipeline projects in the early 1980s and was struck by his addiction to speaking first, assertively, at meetings with central officials.¹⁶

Yeltsin and Yakov Ryabov, his predecessor and booster, were at first in frequent contact. “He often phoned me,” Ryabov said, “and sought my advice on all serious questions.” When Yeltsin was in Moscow, he visited Ryabov at his Central Committee office and dacha. “We had a friendship that was not only official but informal, family.”¹⁷ In February 1979 Ryabov tripped up politically over unguarded comments on Brezhnev’s medical condition. He made them in Yeltsin’s presence at a semipublic meeting in Nizhnii Tagil and, says Ryabov, someone passed them on to Brezhnev—he believed it was Yurii Kornilov, the general in charge of the Sverdlovsk oblast KGB. His words were then used by the defense minister of the USSR, Dmitrii Ustinov, to turn Brezhnev against Ryabov. Ustinov had earlier held Ryabov’s slot in the Central Committee Secretariat, where he had several disputes with him about tank production; he had wanted the position for one of his clients in 1976 and saw Ryabov as a threat. Within a week, Brezhnev informed Ryabov he was being bumped to a position in Gosplan, the state planning committee. Ryabov was officially removed from the Secretariat at the Central Committee plenum of April 17, 1979.¹⁸ He served as first deputy chairman of Gosplan until 1983 and subsequently as minister of foreign trade, deputy premier, and Soviet ambassador to Paris—significant posts all, but mediocre compared to the appointment he held from 1976 to 1979.

Yeltsin, his ties to Ryabov common knowledge, feared for his own seat. “Boris Nikolayevich took Ryabov’s failure badly” and had “long conversations in the evenings” at his dacha with Sverdlovsk colleagues. Yeltsin appreciated that the fall of Ryabov “would for some time close off the road… out of Sverdlovsk,” and was on his guard.¹⁹ Two months after the firing of Ryabov came the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, in which Marshal Ustinov was also a player. Yeltsin “was so enraged by the lack of cooperation he received [from the military] that he stormed over to Compound [No.] 19 and demanded entry.” He was excluded on the personal order of Ustinov. As a Politburo member who had known Stalin, Ustinov “far outranked a provincial party boss.”²⁰ Yeltsin was to contend in a press interview in 1992 that the matter did not stop there. He went to see Yurii Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, in his office on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. According to Yeltsin, Andropov “phoned Ustinov and ordered him to take this facility down.” Andropov could not literally have given an order to Ustinov, his political equal, but could have pressed him to make the decision—or the scene could have been flimflam put on for Yeltsin’s benefit. In any event, it was Yeltsin’s understanding that Andropov had interceded and the program was discontinued. He found out in the 1980s that it was only moved elsewhere.²¹ The germ-processing plant was evacuated to the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan and Compound No. 19 was continued as a proving range and storage dump. Yeltsin as leader of post-Soviet Russia was to inform U.S. President George H. W. Bush in February 1992 of the full story.

Not without guile, the vulnerable Yeltsin protected himself by turning to Andrei Kirilenko, the crony of Brezhnev’s who had been Sverdlovsk first secretary before Konstantin Nikolayev and Ryabov. Ryabov had looked up Kirilenko when Brezhnev gave him the bad news; Kirilenko was shocked and seemed to fear that he, too, would feel the effects.²² But Kirilenko’s high offices and long links to Brezhnev—they first worked together in Ukraine in the 1940s—kept him in the game until Brezhnev’s death in 1982. Kirilenko advocated as a priority continued investment in heavy industry and was not popular in the Sverdlovsk elite. Neither those problems nor the encroaching senility of Uncle Andrei, the obkom staffers’ moniker for him, deterred Yeltsin from paying recurring visits and tracking him down every year for a telephone call on his birthday, September 8.²³

General Secretary Brezhnev, who had worked as an agricultural functionary in the Sverdlovsk region from 1929 to 1931, at the time of collectivization and dekulakization, took no particular interest in Sverdlovsk or the Urals. The one time he scheduled a visit to the city when Yeltsin was first secretary was the night of March 29–30, 1978, en route to Siberia. The local leadership, waiting with bouquets in hand at the main railroad station, looked like dolts when his train whizzed through the junction with the blinds drawn, no excuses offered. Behind closed doors, Yeltsin was contemptuous of Brezhnev’s vanity and sloth, and he professes to have foiled a suggestion from Moscow to create a Brezhnev museum in Sverdlovsk premises where he once had an office.²⁴ For public consumption, he played along with the Brezhnev personality cult, although he was less rhapsodic than some of the provincial potentates and toadied less over time.²⁵ But as Brezhnev’s seventy-fifth birthday, in December 1981, neared, Yeltsin ordered that words about Brezhnev as a leader “of genius” (genial’nyi) be folded into the obkom salutation. He later agreed to suggestions from the scribes to tone down the language, aware that blarney could be overdone. Sverdlovsk’s gift for the birthday was a kitschy likeness of Brezhnev in full regalia, done in semiprecious Urals stones. Craftsmen had to be flown to Moscow to update it when the Politburo padded out his chestful of medals before the mosaic could be presented.²⁶

It has been intimated that Yeltsin’s attitude to the perks of office at the start of his career was one of indifference.²⁷ Perhaps this was so, but that attitude was soon inoperative. He was permitted what corresponding members of the nomenklatura had in other parts of the USSR. Soon after he went to the obkom apparatus in 1968, the Yeltsins were allotted a four-room apartment, their largest yet, in a shiny new building on downtown Mamin-Sibiryak Street. Yelena and Tatyana studied at the close-by School No. 9, the best in Sverdlovsk, where the program was heavy in mathematics and science. For summers and weekends, they had use of a two-family dacha, their first, in Istok, east of Sverdlovsk.

As oblast party secretary, Yeltsin in 1975 was given four rooms in the House of Old Bolsheviks at 2 Eighth of March Street, built for revolutionaries from the Urals and Siberia, many of whom during Stalin’s purges were led off from their apartments to the Gulag or death. Better-appointed digs in the building were assigned in 1977. In 1979 the family moved into a highceilinged, five-room apartment (living room, dining room, study, and two bedrooms) in a sepulchral new VIP edifice at 1 Working Youth Embankment—palatial for the Soviet Union. The house gave out onto the Town Pond and 1905 Square, the promenade where the Sverdlovsk leadership reviewed the May 1, May 9, and November 7 parades.²⁸ The household had no domestic help: Naina Yeltsina cooked, took out the trash to a bin in the courtyard, and ironed Boris’s shirts and pants. The shabbily built House of Soviets, the twenty-four-story party and government tower on Ninth of January Street, begun by Ryabov and opened in 1982, was a stroll away. Here was Yeltsin’s first office with air conditioning, which was exotica in the Urals.²⁹ Without leaving the building he could place orders for foods unavailable in local stores or have himself fitted for clothing chargeable to his personal allowance. A stone’s throw from Yeltsin’s front door, the secluded Hospital No. 2, infested with KGB bugs, ministered to several thousand elite clients.³⁰

A twenty-minute ride north of Ninth of January Street would take Yeltsin to the obkom bureau’s dacha hideout at Baltym, to which he was admitted in 1975. Dacha No. 1, just inside the gatehouse, was booked for him in 1976. In earshot of a growling highway, its charms again were not lush: three sleeping rooms, a parlor, a kitchen and eating area with a fireplace, and a billiards hall. Other families were put up two to a dacha, sharing latrines and kitchens. Outside lay a swimming pool, a volleyball court, and a canteen. In the temperate months, Yeltsin had the cottagers and their wives don gym togs for Wednesday evening and Sunday volleyball matches. Volleyball facilities figured large in obkom resolutions about mass athletics and fitness.³¹ In winter, there were cross-country ski runs and volleyball in a Sverdlovsk gym. Indoors at Dacha No. 1, there was billiards, with the first secretary showing off behind-the-back and left-handed shots. Yeltsin was a crabby loser in these contests. After his side was outpointed in several hard-fought volleyball matches, he sulked and made ready to depart. Oleg Lobov, captain of the opposing team, defused the situation by inviting Yeltsin to join him as a twosome against a full six. They won the rematch—with some help from their opponents—and Yeltsin went to the showers with his dignity unharmed.³²

Over time, Yeltsin indulged in a more baronial taste—for hunting. As deputy chairman of the oblast government, his former guardian angel in the party apparatus, Fëdor Morshchakov, an avid marksman, organized the shooting of ducks in the spring and fall and wild elk in the winter. Yeltsin had a collection of guns, preferring a Czechoslovak-made Ceská Zbrojovka carbine—bought for him as a gift by obkom staff in Prague in 1977—and gave chase in a UAZ all-terrain vehicle fitted out with racks and heaters.³³ He went over the guest list name by name, saw to the bird limit of five per person, and began the pleasantries at mealtime. It is not small-minded to agree with Viktor Manyukhin that the bonhomie likely had an ulterior political motive as well: “The tactic of keeping all under vigil… helped Boris Nikolayevich know everything about his colleagues [and]… see for himself that there were no groupings against him.”³⁴

Liquor flowed at these events, especially when a session in the steambath was part of it for the males in the company. It was imbibed in the dressing room before and after and in the cooling-off intervals during the bath. The effects of alcohol are felt quickly in such heat. Yeltsin’s temperance had given way to drinking at or above the average level within the party elite. Thursday and Friday evenings were often taken up with banquets for “delegations” from Moscow or other provinces. It not infrequently fell to Yeltsin to act as tamada, toastmaster. He had high tolerance and a formidable capacity. The cosmonaut Vitalii Sevast’yanov, a native of Sverdlovsk oblast, once told of Yeltsin, on a stressful trip to Moscow in this period, knocking back three water tumblers of vodka, which might have held a cup of fluid each, to start off a repast at Sevast’yanov’s apartment.³⁵ But Manyukhin, no yes-man for Yeltsin, portrays his conduct as unimpeachable:

There were exceptions. Ryabov noted in his diary in February 1976, when Yeltsin was still obkom secretary for construction, that he had been flat on his back in bed for a couple of days after “a tempestuous celebration of his [forty-fifth] birthday.”³⁷ A deputy chairman of KGB central, Gelii Ageyev, was apoplectic when Yeltsin diverted him to interminable receptions and dinners after he landed at Sverdlovsk’s Kol’tsovo airport during the 1979 anthrax crisis. Local notables hypothesized this was his way to prevent Ageyev from obstructing and from holding Yeltsin accountable for the outbreak. The general considered a written report to Brezhnev on Yeltsin’s conduct but backed off the idea.³⁸ To larger questions, the drinking was tangential. Yeltsin had no pity for office drunks, as Manyukhin points out, and fired several factory directors for inebriation.

There was some political dissent in Sverdlovsk in the Brezhnev years, by individuals and, rarely, by very small organizations. A memo sent to the Central Committee Secretariat by Yurii Andropov on June 12, 1970, detailed the arrests in Sverdlovsk of seven members of a Party of Free Russia, later renamed the Revolutionary Workers Party. In 1969 they had run off 700 anti-Soviet pamphlets, stuck some to walls, and pelted 200 of them, from a viaduct over Cosmonauts Prospect, onto the official parade during the November 7 festivities. Student A. V. Avakov was jailed in 1975 for distributing 300 leaflets at Urals State University and reading out a speech made by Leon Trotsky in the 1920s. Around the same time, a League for the Liberation of the Urals put out flyers calling for a popular referendum on “autonomy of the Urals.” No culprits were found. In February 1979, during the election campaign for the USSR Supreme Soviet, an unnamed Sverdlovsk group called on citizens to vote against the official nominees: “Comrades, let us cross out the names of the sellout candidates. They will forget about us right after the election. It doesn’t bother them that the party has put itself above the people and above the law, that prices are rising and the stores are empty.” This, too, went into the cold-case file.³⁹

Yeltsin would have been within eyeshot of the 1969 protest and would have heard about some of these incidents through party channels. After November 1976, as first secretary, he was more fully informed and had to invest in the cultural domination and ideological hygiene that engross all authoritarian regimes. As came with the job description, his reports to CPSU meetings were now flecked with paeans to political conformity and harangues against Western imperialism. In September 1977 he carried out a Politburo directive to raze the building on Karl Liebknecht Street in whose cellar Tsar Nicholas II, his family, and four of their retainers were killed after the Bolshevik Revolution by a firing squad. Ipat’ev House was the two-story mansion of Nikolai Ipat’ev, a Urals merchant; the Romanovs lived in it as captives from April 1918, when they were brought there by horse and carriage from Tobol’sk, until the execution the night of July 17–18.⁴⁰ It was in connection with this place that Yeltsin came to the attention of Andropov, the leading Kremlin hawk on demolition. An Andropov letter to the Politburo is dated July 26, 1975; the bureau’s resolution assigning the Sverdlovsk obkom to tear the house down, and present it as part of “the planned reconstruction of the city,” is dated August 4. Since 1918 the building had been variously an anti-religious museum, dormitory, and storehouse. Andropov noted that it had attracted unwanted curiosity from Soviets and foreigners. Other sources say there was fear it would become an anti-communist shrine or a cause célèbre abroad, and that there might be trouble in 1976, the eightieth anniversary of Nicholas’s coronation.⁴¹ Why the act waited two years, and waited until Yeltsin replaced Ryabov, is uncertain, but scholars of the city and region told me in 2004 that local conservationists prevailed upon Ryabov to temporize. Brezhnev, says Viktor Manyukhin, sent a note to Yeltsin in 1977 telling him to go ahead, as a United Nations committee was planning to discuss conservation of the home. Yeltsin was away on vacation when the destruction occurred.⁴² The foundation was filled with gravel and asphalted over.

The fifteen months Andropov was Soviet leader in 1982–84 were to bring out greater verbal rigor in Yeltsin. He huffed and puffed about imported films and pop music and about “duplicitous Januses” who debauched Urals youth with foreign culture and ideas. Yeltsin had subordinates detain in conversation party members who in the past wrote recommendations for Jewish acquaintances who later tried to emigrate to Israel. The hard-shell culture department of the obkom prevented one theater from staging a Russian play and banned six non-Soviet movies from local cinemas, while the department of propaganda and agitation stiffened controls over photocopiers.⁴³ In May 1983 a hue and cry in the Central Committee apparatus led Yeltsin to haul on the carpet the editor of Ural magazine, Valentin Luk’yanin, whose infraction had been to publish “Old Man’s Mountain,” a novella by Sverdlovsk writer Nikolai Nikonov about social decay in the Russian countryside. The work was already bowdlerized, having been worked over by the Sverdlovsk branch of Glavlit, the Soviet censorship agency, but even in that form it was too close to the bone for the apparat. Yeltsin forced Luk’yanin to own up to wrongdoing before the obkom bureau but left him in the editorship. At the July 1983 plenum of the oblast party committee, Yeltsin also denounced Valerian Morozov, an engineer from Nizhnii Tagil committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1982 for writing political letters to officials (in one to the Soviet procurator general he called the CPSU “a careerist mafia that has usurped power”) and for trying to send a manifesto abroad. Morozov, Yeltsin pointed out sternly, composed “a plump revisionist manuscript” and went to the city of Gorky to try to meet with “the not unknown anti-Soviet element [antisovetchik] Sakharov.”⁴⁴ Andrei Sakharov, the father of the USSR’s hydrogen bomb, human rights advocate, and 1975 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, had been exiled to Gorky in 1980 for protesting the invasion of Afghanistan. Luk’yanin later painted Yeltsin’s doublespeak at conclaves such as these as typical of the man: “He always knew in advance what decision needed to be taken and moved toward it like a tractor or tank…. He spoke very authoritatively and unconditionally…. This was the essence of the party’s policy. He was a glorious executor of it.”⁴⁵

A quarter-century after graduating from Urals Polytechnic, Yeltsin had achieved levels of status and prosperity in excess of what he could have envisaged. And he had experienced the personal passages, sweet and sour, that midlife brings. Vasilii Starygin passed away in Butka in 1968. Yeltsin’s last surviving grandparent, Afanasiya Starygina, lost her bearings and tried several times to make her way back to her birthplace, Basmanovo. She died after wandering off in 1970; the body was never found.⁴⁶ In 1973 Nikolai Yeltsin suffered a stroke. He and Klavdiya moved from the Butka house to Sverdlovsk to live with their divorced and childless son, Mikhail, in his apartment on Zhukov Street. Nikolai died in May 1977. Between Boris and Mikhail, a construction foreman, there were hard feelings about parental care and other family business, and Boris averted the appearance of favoritism. He is said to have commented to a colleague, “I earned everything in life on my own, so let him do the same.”⁴⁷ Their sister completed her studies at UPI in the late 1960s, moved home to Berezniki, and, as Valentina Golovacheva, worked as an engineer and raised two children. She was to divorce her husband and migrate to Moscow in 1995 to work in a low-level Kremlin position, when Boris was president of Russia,⁴⁸ but Mikhail took early retirement and did not leave Sverdlovsk. Naina Yeltsina’s widowed mother, Mariya Girina, was also in Sverdlovsk, having moved from Orenburg. After the deaths of her father, Iosif, and two of her five siblings in road accidents, Naina developed a claustrophobic fear of cars and airplanes.⁴⁹

Yeltsin, as workaholics will do, suffered from health issues of his own. Only expert medical intervention, some sources say, was to help him overcome symptoms of rheumatic valvular heart disease and acute angina in the mid-1960s.⁵⁰ Before Moscow he had fainting spells from hypertension and from labored breathing in airless rooms. He was deaf on the right side, the result of a middle-ear infection that grew out of an untreated head cold. The arches in his feet had fallen and he had lower back pain from volleyball and other insults. And he had been operated on for an intestinal ailment. In 1977 Yeltsin visited Hospital No. 2 for a bad infection of the second toe in his right foot. The swollen foot would not fit into his shoe—but Ivan Kapitonov of the Central Committee Secretariat was arriving at Kol’tsovo for an inspection tour. Yeltsin took a scalpel from the surgeon, made two slits in the leather, and limped off to his limousine.⁵¹ With his selection to the Central Committee in 1981, Yeltsin’s health was in the charge of the “Kremlin hospitals” of the Fourth Chief Directorate of the Ministry of Health. He told friends that a Gypsy fortune-teller predicted he would die at age fifty-three. In 1984, the year he was fifty-three, he lost weight and muscle tone; a medical exam in Moscow came up dry, and he put it out of his mind.⁵² He would go to outlandish lengths, and not always successful ones, to cloak infirmities. One time, an otolaryngologist performed a small surgical procedure on him and he was groggy from the anesthetic. Rather than appear unsteady, Yeltsin had the orderlies roll him through the waiting room on a gurney, shrouded head to toe in a white sheet. The ruse backfired, and for days, it was rumored in Sverdlovsk that he had died.⁵³

The vicissitudes of the younger generation ensured that Boris and Naina Yeltsin would rarely be alone in their spacious apartment. Their daughter Yelena enrolled in civil engineering at UPI after high school. Early in the course, and against her parents’ wishes, she married a school friend, Aleksei Fefelov. They parted and divorced shortly after the birth of daughter Yekaterina in 1979, and she and Yekaterina moved back in with Boris and Naina. Her father, nervous that Yelena’s problems might sully his reputation, sought the advice of Pavel Simonov, the subdepartment head for the Urals in the Central Committee Secretariat. Simonov calmed him down: For his CPSU superiors in Moscow, such things were personal, but, just in case, Simonov would brief them. “If Boris Nikolayevich had known at the time about the murky relationships within many other leadership families, he would not have worried. [He] never mentioned the topic again.”⁵⁴ Several years later, Yelena married an Aeroflot pilot, Valerii Okulov; their daughter Mariya was born in 1983.

Then there was Tatyana Yeltsina, who was to be a political player after communism. As a girl, she was “a dreamer” who wanted to become a sea captain, and learned Morse code in preparation, but girls were not taken into the Nakhimov schools (for naval cadets). She then, like her father in the 1940s, longed to be a shipbuilder, and she figure skated and inherited his love for volleyball. Teachers and schoolmates have testified that she was weighed down by high expectations and illness. Graduating from School No. 9 in 1977, she announced to her parents that she planned to study in faroff Moscow. She did not want to repeat the experience of her sister, whose 5s at UPI, she said, were unjustly devalued as having been awarded po blatu—as part of the Soviet web of reciprocal favors: “I wanted to go away, to where no one knew my father.” He overruled Naina, and Tatyana went off to study computer science and cybernetics at Moscow State University. There she married fellow student Vilen Khairullin, an ethnic Tatar, in 1980 and had a son, Boris, in 1981. This union, too, failed, and she spent the year after the birth with her parents in Sverdlovsk before returning to Moscow to finish her diploma.⁵⁵ Boris Nikolayevich at last had a male offspring. He was exhilarated that his grandson bore the legal name Boris Yeltsin.⁵⁶

Professionally, Yeltsin was every inch the boss he had told his mother he would become. He savored the chief apparatchik’s role. His time as Sverdlovsk first secretary, he was to say in 1989, brought him “the best years of my life” up to then.⁵⁷ Receipt of the Order of Lenin upon his fiftieth birthday in 1981, with a crimson flag, crimson star, and hammer-and-sickle surrounding a disc portrait of Lenin in platinum, rounded out his set of official awards. It came with an ode to “services rendered to the Communist Party and the Soviet state” and was presented in the Moscow Kremlin. Yeltsin’s personal records in the Sverdlovsk archive of the CPSU show him receiving one award while in the construction industry—his Badge of Honor in 1966—and nine as a party official. These included medals honoring the Lenin centenary in 1970, the thirtieth anniversary of victory over Germany in 1975, the centenary of Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder of the Soviet secret police) in 1977, and the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Army in 1978; Orders of the Red Banner of Labor in 1971 and 1974; the Order of Lenin in 1981; a gold medal for his contribution to the Soviet economy in 1981; and a certificate of thanks from the obkom upon his departure in April 1985. Yeltsin held onto these medals after 1991, still proud of having earned them. They were stored in his home study and put on display at his wake in 2007.⁵⁸

The boss Yeltsin of the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s must be evaluated in the context of the political and social order of the day. Roving far from the approved path was not in the choice set for the proconsul of the Soviet empire in a strategic province. The Ipat’ev House decision underlines the point. Yeltsin “could not imagine” balking at the Kremlin’s order. Had he, he “would have been fired” and whoever replaced him would have knocked down the building.⁵⁹

A picture that incorporated nothing but orthodoxy, however, would overlook traits that differentiated Yeltsin from the typical CPSU secretary of his generation. There were signs of him holding back from the tedium of rites and routines. In television footage, he never wears his gold stars and medallions or busses dignitaries Brezhnev-style, although he does give out backslapping bear hugs. He seems more attentive than most to his wardrobe. His hair is suspiciously long for a member in good standing of the nomenklatura, and every few minutes he brushes a hank of it from his forehead. Ennui plays on his face as he drones on at conferences and sits through commemorations.

Substantively, Yeltsin nibbled at the edges of what was admissible in late Soviet conditions and presaged what he was to do in the reform era. He was a compliant activist—accepting of the system and ready to put body and soul into making it work, and yet able to make judicious intrasystemic innovations and accommodations.⁶⁰

As the Soviet economy went downhill after 1975, Yeltsin repulsed calls to strangle what little Stalin had left of free markets in the USSR. When irate Sverdlovskers agitated in 1982 for caps on the prices of meat and fruit in the farmers’ bazaars, he branded them economic nonsense and lauded competition and self-sufficiency. “Prices in the marketplaces,” he said, “depend on supply and demand. In order to lower them, we mostly have to move more farm products to the bazaars and to develop the personal gardens of the province’s residents. Then… prices will fall.”⁶¹ In the state sector, Yeltsin adopted a device called the “complex brigade,” which decentralized some economic operations to small labor collectives and let them qualify for wage premiums. The formula, found here and there in the provinces since the 1960s, was “the closest approximation to entrepreneurial initiative the official Soviet economy ever tolerated.”⁶²

Where he had wiggle room, Yeltsin made extensive use of the tool kit of the communist state to improve physical and social infrastructure and consumer welfare. He addressed these issues because of a desire to do the right thing, because he liked playing sugar daddy, and because, in a flip of his dictum in the construction industry (“Whoever worked better would live better”), he felt that employees who lived better would put out more in their work for the state. A partial list of Yeltsin’s projects would take in: a start on a subway for the city of Sverdlovsk; eradication of its squalid barracks housing; near-completion of a south-north road artery through Nizhnii Tagil to Serov (this project began under Nikolayev in the 1960s, and Ryabov had been unable to complete it); “youth housing complexes” which gave younger families first crack at apartments and down payments, on condition of putting in two years of labor on the construction; pressure on heavy and defense industry to manufacture scarce household goods;⁶³ new theaters and a circus in Sverdlovsk and refurbishment of the 1912 opera house; a line for the province in the agricultural program for the Non–Black Soil Zone of European Russia (an acrobatic feat, since Sverdlovsk oblast is not in European Russia); and a City Day festival in Sverdlovsk, instituted in 1978, and neighborhood fairs to distribute food and consumer wares before winter. Yeltsin borrowed good ideas from others. The youth housing complexes had been pioneered in Moscow oblast; he tweaked the model by reserving spots for blue-collar workers, invalids, and army officers. The first City Day had been organized in Nizhnii Tagil in 1976 by Yurii Petrov. Compared to the world-shaking decisions Yeltsin was to be privy to after 1985, this may seem like small potatoes; to those affected, it was not.

Ventures like these would make headway only if clearances and means not written into the binding economic plan could be procured. For getting to the Soviet pork barrel, Yeltsin’s intensity and connections were irreplaceable. “For our industrial province I hauled in from the center freight cars full of meat, butter, and other foods,” he says. “I telephoned, demanded, strongarmed.” He did the same for housing.⁶⁴ His critics do not deny his deftness. Manyukhin pays homage to him for “beating out resources from the center” for local initiatives and extra goods and medicines. When push came to shove, “Boris Nikolayevich went all the way up to the general secretary.”⁶⁵

Yeltsin’s worldview did evolve in the late Soviet period. To a degree, the evolution was intellectually based. He and Naina subscribed to five or six of the monthly “thick journals.” He had begun signing up for series of literary books while still a student at UPI, and the family continued this practice. The home library they kept on handmade shelves in his apartment study was to number some 6,000 volumes when they shipped it to Moscow in 1985. He often initiated discussions at the office about those social questions that could be debated in the Soviet media.⁶⁶ Yeltsin even familiarized himself with a few dissident works. He told me that in the late 1970s he read The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s unmasking of Stalinist cruelties (published in the West in 1973 but not in Russia until 1989), in a samizdat (underground) typescript that he got through his wife, who obtained it at work. When I asked him whether the KGB was aware of his reading, he replied, “Of course not. How would they know? They weren’t looking in my direction.”⁶⁷ Yeltsin began to open up at reunions of old UPI classmates and with others about the misfortunes of his family in the Stalin period. The travel to foreign shores for which his position qualified him also helped widen his horizons. Andrei Goryun reports that as long ago as the late 1960s, having arrived back from his first Western trip, to France, Yeltsin told associates in the Sverdlovsk House-Building Combine about how the capitalist economy was humming along there, and that he was “very strictly warned” to watch his tongue.⁶⁸ Naina Yeltsina’s opinions contained seeds of doubt similar to his. “We are all children of the system,” she said to an American television correspondent after her husband’s retirement. “But I was not a good one, to be honest. I was outraged by many things.”⁶⁹

For the most part, Yeltsin’s concerns were more bread-and-butter than philosophical or historical. He was moved not by some metaphysical thirst for reform, democracy, or the market but by a visceral sense that the autocratic methodology of the Soviet order was losing effectiveness and rot was setting in little by little. “I began to feel,” he noted in Confession on an Assigned Theme, “that quite good and proper decisions… were turning out more often not to be implemented…. It was obvious that the system was beginning to malfunction.”⁷⁰ This would have been more obvious when the book came out in 1990, but the harbingers were there in 1980—before Ronald Reagan entered the White House and escalated the arms race and before Mikhail Gorbachev started perestroika. Yeltsin caviled to friends that there was no limit to the time he sank into his work: The people around him shared a mystical belief in the power of ranking officials to fix problems by command. He begged off a get-together with UPI friends on the azure Lake Baikal in east Siberia because agricultural bureaucrats feared that without him there would be delays with the harvest. “They tell me,” he said acidly to a friend, “that after I speak [to farm workers] the cows give more milk and the milk is creamier.”⁷¹ Yeltsin, needless to say, saw the problem as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. As Oleg Lobov said, “He was thinking about how to utilize the capacities of the system that was. He expressed great dissatisfaction not with the system in general but on concrete issues.”⁷² The bacillus was there, gnawing away at Yeltsin before he left for Moscow in 1985. Asked in 1988 about his acceptance of an Order of Lenin in 1981, he said he valued that kind of recognition at the time, but, “The Brezhnev system was always a mental irritant, and I felt a sense of inner reproach.”⁷³ The next year, while a deputy in the Soviet parliament, he was challenged to explain how his opinions had changed in a reformist direction. They had, he stated, “gradually transformed” over the past six to eight years—a gestation starting in the early 1980s in Sverdlovsk.⁷⁴

In this connection, Yeltsin was in step with parts of his constituency. A critical spirit was afoot in the middle Urals. Sverdlovsk had larger communities of academics, researchers, students, and artists than any city in Soviet Russia except Moscow and Leningrad. Despite Yeltsin’s imperiousness toward Luk’yanin and the censoriousness of the obkom culture department, the authorities purposely overlooked unregistered amateur (samodeyatel’nyye) organizations dedicated to reading poetry and discussing movies. The Sverdlovsk Komsomol committee not only tolerated mass songfests and bohemian clubs for jazz, rock, and film but allocated rooms and equipment to them. Experimental discussion circles were found in several Sverdlovsk universities and institutes. One, in the philosophy department of UPI, was organized by Gennadii Burbulis, who later would be a high-level official in Yeltsin’s Russia. The youth housing complexes were wired for cable television, which was not subject to official censorship. In short, “In Sverdlovsk and Sverdlovsk oblast, changes in the atmosphere of public life began to take place before the advent of perestroika.”⁷⁵ Yeltsin was mindful and did not fight them. He exhorted CPSU and Komsomol organizations to make their activities more relevant to impressionable young people by offering programs that matched their tastes and the values sainted in Soviet propaganda: “When there is a gap between word and deed… this has an especially baleful influence on our youth.”⁷⁶

A concrete problem that increasingly distressed was the top-heaviness of Soviet government. In late communist times, decisions responsive to local interests awaited years of special pleading with Moscow. Sverdlovsk planners first petitioned the center to approve a subway in 1963; a preliminary edict was issued in 1970; to get shovels in the ground in 1980, it took entreaties via Andrei Kirilenko and a Yeltsin pilgrimage to Brezhnev’s office, where Brezhnev asked him to handwrite a Politburo resolution; the first stations did not come into service until 1994.⁷⁷ To get things done took pluckiness and ingenuity. The Serov highway was built on the fly over twenty years without any central largesse. Yeltsin badgered factory directors and district personnel for the materials, equipment, and labor. The first secretary, who was god and tsar on some scores, had to be a nagger and a supplicant on others. Through the obkom, he had at his disposal thousands of personnel; thousands more were out of his reach, among them all the holders of top positions in the military-industrial complex. The state industrialists in the factories could not be obliged to contribute, only persuaded. And when they did chip in, Moscow might suddenly reverse direction and take away local gains. In 1980 Yeltsin and Yurii Petrov inveigled twenty Sverdlovsk factories, mostly in the defense sector, to jointly manufacture for use in the oblast heavy-duty harrows, which are toothed steel tools for tilling, aerating, and weeding fields. They were beside themselves when mandarins in Gosplan appropriated the harrows and carted them off to farms in Ukraine, with the statement that Sverdlovsk land was fit only for pasturage. Yeltsin’s telephone calls to Gosplan, the minister of agriculture, and Mikhail Gorbachev, by then the Central Committee’s secretary for agrarian affairs, were in vain.⁷⁸

These machinations brought Yeltsin up against a question pregnant for the future: the place of “Russia” in the Soviet federation. A reason Sverdlovsk fared so badly in the byplay with Moscow was that the regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, RSFSR, lacked the mediating structures available to the non-Russian republics. The RSFSR had a toothless government and no CPSU machinery at all. In the party, provinces like Sverdlovsk reported to USSR-level officials; in places like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, there was a republic-level party committee, bureau, and first secretary. An inconsequential Bureau of the Central Committee for RSFSR Affairs had existed in 1936–37, under Stalin, and was resuscitated by Khrushchev in 1958, only to have Brezhnev terminate it in 1965. The Russians “were always the Soviet Union’s awkward nationality, too large either to ignore or to give the same institutional status as the Soviet Union’s other major nationalities.”⁷⁹

What Yeltsin digested on the job in the Urals—again, well before his move to Moscow—was that Russia was an “accessory” or “appendage” of the imperial Soviet center, an unsung “donor” to the rest. “In Sverdlovsk I thought about this and began to talk about it… not loudly but, you would say, under my breath.”⁸⁰ Naina Yeltsina and the engineering institute where she worked preferred contracts with clients in Kazakhstan, where she had lived as a girl, to work with RSFSR organizations: The Kazakhs, unlike the Russians, could make decisions expeditiously.⁸¹ At the beginning of the 1980s, Yeltsin and Petrov jotted down a tripartite scheme for change: decentralizing the USSR’s federal system; making Russia institutionally whole by strengthening its government and giving it a CPSU central committee or some such structure; and carving the RSFSR into seven or eight regional republics, one of them a Urals republic, strong enough to make a go of it. They kept the sketch to themselves. Petrov summarized it two decades afterward in that Urals nostrum samostoyatel’nost’, self-reliance. Smacking of autonomist ideas that have long swirled in the Urals, the scheme points toward the position Yeltsin was to take on Soviet federalism in 1990–91.⁸²

The other area of probing that was a bellwether of the politics of perestroika dealt with relations between the leader and the mass of the population. Soviet partocrats rarely rubbed shoulders with ordinary people. When they did, it was at perfunctory affairs before docile viewers, pegged to state holidays or single-candidate elections, and more ritualized after about 1960 than before.⁸³ As first secretary, Yeltsin did all in his power to spice up these rituals.

At the groundbreaking for the Sverdlovsk subway in August 1980, he invited Young Pioneers to attend, play the bugle and drum, and distribute flowers to the mud-splattered construction workers—and to the members of the obkom bureau, who lined up long-faced behind the first secretary.⁸⁴ To mark the 1984 campaign for the USSR Supreme Soviet, Yeltsin organized a rail tour of remote districts of the oblast, in the dead of winter. The locomotive pulled two cars: a political coach full of obkom officials and an artistic coach containing twenty-two singers and musicians shanghaied for the journey from Sverdlovsk theaters:

In various appearances, Yeltsin departed by inches from the ceremonial. One way for which he had a fancy was spur-of-the moment gift giving. The gift of choice was a watch—remember the high value he and his Berezniki teammates placed on the watches they received as city volleyball champions—often unfastened from his own or an aide’s wrist. The first occasion of which I am aware occurred in 1977. Yeltsin had implored the director of the Nizhnii Tagil construction organization, Eduard Rossel, to help him win a “socialist competition” with the Severstal iron-and-steel plant in Cherepovets, Vologda province. Severstal had signed up to complete a large mill for making steel plate by December 25, six days before the end of the year. Yeltsin and Rossel assigned 25,000 workers in three shifts to the Nizhnii Tagil Metallurgical Works in order to commission their mill by a week before and qualify it as the largest industrial construction project to be finished in the year of the sixtieth jubilee of the Bolshevik Revolution. On December 18 the job was done, and Yeltsin spoke before a rally of the entire workforce. At the microphone, he took the gold watch off his left wrist and put it on Rossel’s. He told the crowd the day could have never have been won without them and Rossel, and explained that the watch had been given to him as a birthday present earlier that year by none other than General Secretary Brezhnev. The workers clapped madly.⁸⁶

Yeltsin took to handing out watches and other keepsakes to rank-and-file employees. Naina Yeltsina gave him a wristwatch for many of his birthdays, only to find that the latest timepiece had disappeared a week or two later.⁸⁷ The presents, and wry oratorical throwaways, were the public equal of the surprises he loved to spring on his wife at home. As an example of the latter, he concluded his report to a party conference at Uralkhimmash by opening up the floor. Employees hollered that housing was impossibly short. Not skipping a beat, Yeltsin redirected the plea to the USSR government minister responsible for the plant, seated beside him, with the dig that “surely you cannot refuse” it. The minister said meekly he would boost housing quotas for the factory, and did.⁸⁸ Yeltsin’s replies to questions dripped with sarcasm about “those in Moscow who, so he said, understood little yet consumed much.”⁸⁹

By 1980 Yeltsin also had a knack for appearing unannounced in factories, shops, and public transit. “Maybe it was partly for show, but he could on any day of the week sit down on a streetcar or bus, go around the route, and listen to what the passengers were saying, see for himself how well transportation was organized, how the city looked…. When he was at a workplace, he would think nothing of taking a cage down a mine shaft, or going over to a smelting furnace, talking with people, visiting the workers’ cafeteria.” In one eatery, he grabbed a spoon and asked a worker if he could taste his lunch; when he found it to be slop, he ordered an aide to ride herd on the place’s food service.⁹⁰ Some visits took the form of raids on sites where Yeltsin thought there had been malfeasance. To these live forms was added television—“the blue screen,” as Russians call it—the electronic medium now piped into virtually every Soviet home.

A pair of events took the unmediated and mediated modes of contact to a higher plane: a question-and-answer session with college students in the Sverdlovsk Youth Palace on May 19, 1981, and a television broadcast to the region on December 18, 1982. There were several similar encounters before April 1985. The in-person and mass-media variants served several purposes at once. They relayed party policy, allowed the people to let off steam, hyped Yeltsin’s image, and gave him leverage vis-à-vis third parties.

Nothing was left to chance in the Youth Palace. A call for written questions for the first secretary went out six weeks beforehand. Nine hundred and thirty of them, deposited in receptacles at Sverdlovsk’s universities and institutes, were compiled and given to city and oblast administrators, who drafted answers. Obkom staff and then the first secretary pored over the draft responses. The 1,700 attendees received printed invitations, embossed with an effigy of Lenin, and were assigned seats in the banked hall. The meeting was five hours long. Yeltsin read out canned responses that were riffs upon the official line. But there were fresh ingredients that made the meeting an anomalous event for the Soviet Union of the day. With verve—in a verveless time—Yeltsin provided information about when this or that local improvement was going to be finished and promised to expedite overdue projects. He varied many of the prearranged responses ad lib and had the students pass 144 supplementary questions to the front of the hall. He let slip remarks about his disputatious nature. Asked why the Soviet Union was technologically inferior to the United States, he brashly gave as one of the reasons that “capitalist competition greatly stimulates labor efficiency, that is, only the strongest survive.” Most of all, he encouraged the students to speak their minds and communicated that he was on their side. They touched on everything from the paucity of tablecloths and schoolbooks to price gouging in the Shuvakish flea market and the losses of the Uralmash soccer club. They gave Yeltsin a standing ovation when he finished.⁹¹

The blue screen had transfixed Yeltsin since his early months as first secretary. In September 1978 he used it to urge city dwellers to help bring in the fall harvest, which was wasting away in the fields because of bucketing rains. Some 85,000 Sverdlovskers are said to have responded to his plea to enlist in “the battle for grain.”⁹² If this was Soviet mobilizational propaganda with a human touch, the television programs of the early 1980s, which were the brainchild of Igor Brodskii, the director of the Sverdlovsk television studio, had a different slant. They were organized around letters, which gave scope for startlingly frank appraisals. Some older apparatchiks who feared television had to be placated. They need not have worried, for the broadcasts could be minutely planned and prerecorded. The bevy of officials assigned to the December 1982 event spelled out in exquisite detail the camera angles, the topics to be discussed (in thirteen categories), and the towns and villages to be named (forty-five of them). But there was something new about the broadcast. Unlike anonymous agitprop, this was an acutely personalized dialogue. Brodskii’s “scenario plan”:

In July 1984, when the obkom did a second big telecast, staff did alternate draft scenarios—every one of them devised to place Yeltsin in the limelight. In one, he would be shot watching film of interviews with 1982 letter writers. “Watching these interviews together with the television audience, B. N. Yeltsin could use them by way of illustration in the course of his conversation.” In another, he would stand on a factory floor and field questions from workers; the catch there was that the participants in the meeting might “upstage” Yeltsin. Then there was the scenario they adopted:

On television, the first secretary was more argumentative than at the in-person meetings. The programs were notable for the passel of gripes vented, now taking in insufficiencies of a catalogue of everyday articles (matches, dry cell batteries, bed linen, tea kettles, caramels), bribe taking, inflation, miserly pensions, pollution, and sore points of every description. Replying to questions about the unauthorized use of limousines and about bureaucrats who constructed houses with misappropriated materials, Yeltsin cautiously brought up the issue of the privileges of officialdom. The follow-up was a set of unobtrusive countermeasures to curb the use of official cars for driving children to school and wives to shop; family members of the leaders of the oblast party committee and government were now taken to their dachas in a minivan.⁹⁵ In Moscow several years later, the response was to be more up-front.

Yeltsin admitted that he might be inciting unrealistic hopes. He had received, he said in December 1982, a squall of letters from Sverdlovskers begging him to advance them in the waiting line for government-built apartments. This was impossible, since the function had to be done by the book. He would check the correspondence and right any wrongs done. Other than that, he counseled honesty about the problem and forbearance until the housing supply could be increased: “I am not a magician. Neither are the central organs of government magicians…. It is hard to take when your request is refused, but I believe that the bitter truth is better than the sweet lie.”⁹⁶ That aphorism was to take Yeltsin a long way.

Still captive to the communist paradigm, Yeltsin was declaring that the performance of the regime left something to be desired and he was simultaneously putting himself forward as the agent of change. This was the jumping-off point for role aggrandizement in the future.

Not everyone was taken by an approach that threw other local leaders into shadow. Gennadii Bogomyakov, the CPSU first secretary in Tyumen, the adjacent, oil-rich oblast in west Siberia, carped to party officials that Yeltsin was pandering and acting like a clown, not a proper Soviet solon.⁹⁷ Ryabov was to write in hindsight that Yeltsin had begun “to play a phony game,” although he had to concede that his antics hoodwinked “simple people.” “‘Look what sort of leader we have,’ they said.”⁹⁸ No alarm bells jangled where it counted—in the inner sanctum of the party in Moscow. Pavel Simonov in the Central Committee apparatus had admonished Yeltsin soon after his appointment to keep his photograph off the front page of Ural’skii rabochii.⁹⁹ No one seemed unhappy with his playing to the crowd or at seeing his face splashed on the television screen hour after hour. Either official awareness was lagging or, more likely, there was an opinion at the center that the party would be better off if all local leaders were as popular as its man in Sverdlovsk.

Boris Yeltsin’s flight to prominence in a communist framework was by dint of his intelligence, drive, ability to communicate and call attention to himself, and “iron grip.” And it owed much to an instinct for timely decisions. The portrait in Confession of his log hopping on the Zyryanka River as a teenager may serve as an allegory for how he made his way in an uncharitable environment. “If you figured everything just right” and had “incredible dexterity,” he says, “you had a chance to cross over to the far bank.” Leap soon or late, or misconstrue another boy’s motion, and you would plop into the water, gasping for air, and have to clamber onto a new log to resume your quest, “not sure if you would save yourself.”¹⁰⁰ In the work world, Yeltsin chose well when to spring and when to stand pat. If not—if, say, he had been unadventurous about trying out party work or had committed political hara-kiri by disobeying the Politburo on Ipat’ev House—he would occupy history’s footnotes and not its central narrative. Minus Yeltsin as a driving force, the narrative itself would be considerably different.

There were times when the self-interested actions of others, like Ryabov in pushing him for first secretary, propelled Yeltsin forward. Still other times, it was dumb luck and contingency. He might have come to a different end if Eduard Shevardnadze had not lured away Gennadii Kolbin in 1975, if Vyacheslav Bayev had taken the second secretaryship, if Moscow had listened to Leonid Ponomarëv in 1976, or if Dmitrii Ustinov or someone else had settled scores for his toying with General Ageyev, his witticisms with the workers, or his affiliation with the fallen Ryabov. If his patrons had known ex ante what they were to know ex post, it would have ended poorly for him. Ryabov, for one, believes the Yeltsin of the 1990s to be a turncoat, and says it all started in Sverdlovsk. These are the pangs of a Victor Frankenstein beholding his monster. Ryabov is not the only old-school communist who feels them today.

The sachem of Sverdlovsk no longer needed to be a survivalist; his testing was routinized; his rebellious urges were in abeyance. The primary script in his mature life was success—being first—constrained by duty to the vertical structures hegemonic in Soviet society. Although the regime was dictatorial, agents could implement its will only if they could recruit and promote on merit and if they were given some leeway and some space to advocate for themselves and their organizations. Yeltsin was an effective regional prefect, a hard-boiled boss with a difference, because he used to his advantage the liberties granted. Doing so made him less convinced than when he started of the soundness and perfectability of the system. Serious policy questions could only be settled in a “supercentralized” fashion, he was to recall. But the center’s attention span was short and its strategic sense vitiated by aged leaders and the opaqueness of decision making. Get away from its priorities, and the problems were yours to handle: “All you could place your trust in was yourself and the oblast…. The center did little to help…. We decided the other questions by ourselves, self-reliantly [samostoyatel’no].”¹⁰¹ What was more, the reflexive “self” was becoming an elastic category for comrade B. N. Yeltsin. Populism and a nonethnic Russianism were working their way into his thinking. And he was beginning to realize there were means—politically rewarding means—to deal in the populace on the conversation about government and change. That realization would bring about an activism that was not compliant.